Who Will Hit the Kill Switch

on liberal follies

Right now our ruling class is falling over itself worrying that shutting down the gay party scene because of monkeypox would make gays feel bad. As Steve Sailer writes:

The Establishment have been misleading the public about monkeypox for the same reasons it misled the public about AIDS in the 1980s and still does today: because gay men tend to be a powerful, privileged, and selfishly hedonistic group who are risky to offend.

The question is, of course, whether gays are better served by being treated as helpless victims, or being treated as responsible individuals that ought to get a grip.

Actually, this applies to just about all of the Mascots of the ruling class, as in this fantastical research about race inequity produced by the RAND Corporation — again discussed by Steve Sailer. The idea is that if you look at the life of a black kid and the white kid next to him in school, the differences in their treatment over time compound into a monstrous injustice. Even though they are about the same in ability, the black kid keeps falling behind, because of his disciplinary record, because the white kid’s family is richer, and the differing advice he gets from counsellors.

Unless, of course, the whole story is a ruling class fantasy in which blacks are ruling class Mascots and are being cruelly treated by society, and therefore cannot be held to account like ordinary non-Mascot citizens.

The question is, of course, whether blacks are better served by being treated as helpless victims, or being treated as responsible individuals that ought to get a grip.

The other way of looking at this is to regard gays and blacks as intransigent small minorities that use their cultural unity to bully the rest of society.

The interesting question to me is what it takes for the intransigent small minority tactic to work. Does it work in all societies, or does it need our modern ruling class and its over-under political formula that treats all alleged oppressed minorities as Mascots — in the words of Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed? And thus, is the over-under political formula really a good idea for anyone but the Anointed?

And that raises the broader question about how any minority gets into a position where the ruling class hesitates about doing the right thing.

Because it seems to me that the very essense of the over-under political formula sets up all kinds of political situations where the ruling class cannot bring itself to do the right thing, as in:

• keeping the power of labor unions down to a dull roar

• keeping teacher unions from wrecking the K-12 school system

• keeping welfare from wrecking the low-income family

• keeping the medical system of insurance companies, government regulators, and professional associations from creating an expensive monstrosity

• endlessly using inflation to get the government out of a jam

• using any excuse to implement a new tax-and-spend program to pay off supporters

• letting its political supporters bully the rest of society

And so on.

Well, we know the answer. The current system will continue, and spiral down the drain. Until the Benighted rise up and stop it.

And that is hard because the Benighted, like the Mascots, are easily tempted by a bit of free stuff.

So we are still a long way from someone hitting the Kill Switch on the current emergency.