Wrong From the Start

a history of our educated class

Yesterday I wrote about the desperation of our ruling class, how crazed it has been made by the growing rebellion of the ordinary middle class.

But then a year ago I wrote in a similar vein about how our liberal friends have grabbed the wrong end of the stick. They think that politics is the royal road to justice. But they are wrong, politics is the road to the abattoir, as proved to us by Joe Stalin and Mao. I said that most everything with respect to humans, the social animals, can be resolved by discussion and negotiation.

Our liberal friends like to talk about the arc of history. They got it through Martin Luther King Jr. from abolitionist Theodore Parker, who said

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one... But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Of course, it is one thing to believe, with religious faith, that God will prevail, and all good people will go to Heaven. It is another thing to use government to enforce God’s Will.

Pondering all this, I note the following comments from some Brit websites. In Britland they recently had three by-elections. Two were won easily by Labour; but one, in Uxbridge, was won by the Tories. Why? Because voters there are mad as hell at

the ULEZ scheme charging those who can’t afford to buy a newer car a £12.50-a-day penance [and] the so-called Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) that are choking off local businesses on once-buzzing high streets.

Writes Brendan O’Neill:

I’ve got some breaking news for you. The war on cars is a myth. Yes, the chattering classes, having previously proclaimed that cancel culture, debanking and gender ideology were also big fat nothing burgers, are now saying that the top-down attempt to price people off the roads, to ban old gas guzzlers, to close roads entirely, all to the ends of ‘greening’ cities and getting to ‘Net Zero’, is also a figment of mine and yours and the Daily Mail comment desk’s fetid imaginations.

In educated-class London they are all down on the Greening of the Planet — and also here in North Seattle where it now seems that half the cars driving proudly around are “EVs.” Yes, that’s what their proud owners call their battery fire hazards.

Here is more of the same, from Richard Eldred, speaking about the educated class and its climate craziness.

The intellectual conformity is stultifying, and has been reinforced by the emergence of an all-powerful Blob, the nexus of mandarins, policy advisers, quangocrats and other government agents, a class of “public servants” who don’t really like the public and are increasingly convinced that they have a constitutional duty to constrain and contain elected politicians. They are experts at delay, prevarication and lawfare, and are cheered on by the Left-wing activists who have taken over the legal profession, our cultural institutions, academia, charities and even many big companies.

And when the Tories try to respond to the voters

the system does its best to block any change, empowered by quasi-constitutional legislation such as the Equality Act, the Climate Change Act and our membership of the ECHR.

I am coming to think that this conceit, this notion that the educated class is guiding the human race towards justice, goes all the way back to the Enlightenment. Thus the whole game of the Enlightenment was to replace the old doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings with the Absolute Right of Education Credentials.

The truth comes through in the definition of liberal democracy from ChatGPT. Liberalism “emphasizes individual rights, freedom and equality.” Democracy “allows citizens to particulate in the decision-making process through voting and electing representatives to represent their interests.”

Allow me to translate. Liberal democracy is the rule by a brotherhood of the educated class who reserve freedom and equality for themselves, and who pose as representatives of the people that were duly elected in free and fair elections.

You think? The more I think of it the more I believe that the enumeration of human and individual rights was naturally thought of by the Enlightenment thinkers as rights that they themselves needed for protection against the power of the monarch and his courtiers.

But you can see the grift emerging in Rousseau’s General Will, where the citizen is obliged to obey the laws because the laws are founded on the general will of the citizens. Get it?

In fact, as we saw above with the development of climate policy, the ordinary citizens have nothing to do with the case. The educated class decides that climate change is a crisis, then decides that CO2 is the cause, and that ordinary people will have to stop driving CO2-emitting cars, because Net Zero.

Back in the day, the ruler was nothing more and nothing less than the guy protecting the border. So he was a warrior. Only trouble was that the location of the border was always at issue, and the warrior rulers were always at fisticuffs over the adjustment of the border. Because they were warriors and what’s a warrior to do except go to war?And anyway, what’s the problem with a little raid into enemy territory to gather up a spot of loot to hand out to the supporters?

And what do we see in the Age of the Educated Class? Why, we still see conflicts over borders, and we still see governments looting the enemy and distributing loot among their supporters. Only now we don’t see a little argument over the question of Silesia, between the Prussian chappie and the Austrian chapette, but massive World Wars with millions of dead. Hey, Oppenheimer: how yer doin’, pal?

And when the educated class conducts an election, we still see the stigmatization of the Other Party as the enemy and a threat to “our democracy” or to “our country,” and we always see the promise of loot for the supporters. So nothing has changed.

You tell me, you educated class. What exactly was that arc of history all about?