Dearest friends,

I cantered on over to the Crimson Crustacean, a chain cafeteria which is common ‘cross this continent, to chow on cooked clawed creatures and cows. Some of you may be saying, Monsieur, that’s not classy. To you, I say, those who put class over cash in the long run find themselves parted of both. Over many centuries, money talks and bullshit walks. Although, if someone had pointed a butter knife in my direction, I would have found myself short cash, class, and clothing.

It’s enough to make someone support a knife ban, isn’t it?

But you’re not here to listen to me talk about what I eat, even if sometimes I eat that wonder of the post-post-post-post-Modern post-scarcity age, the Eleventy Layer Quasispace Chalupa, the pride and joy of Taco Town (may the maior and the magister chililitarum live forever). So then, the main course.

It is often said, especially by old people, that an armed society is a polite society. And this was remarked by that venerable scholar, Thorstein “50 Cent” Veblen, that barbarians tend to be quite well mannered. “The barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage of industry is more notoriously a more high-bred gentleman, in all that concerns decorum, than any but the very exquisite among the men of a later age, bitch nigga.” And it’s true that even I, of the genteel castes, am a rather rude fellow compared to even the Victorians, my nigga. It is only because the fucking shitty manners of the lower orders are even dogbothering worse that I pass for mannered. And it is true that I am hopelessly confused by cutlery, that I find the notion of restaurant dress codes outrageously outdated (though it was only a few decades ago), and many other things. A quick survey of the early Middle Ages confirms Veblen’s notion that ages of industry and learning and ages of war and politeness are inversely related. And why wouldn’t they be? Besides displaying leisure, politeness serves an important purpose in regulating the tendency of the warlike towards feud and random violence. What keeps people prim and proper is the threat of physical violence. In the World War International Netweb, there is no way to hit a bitch, so everyone’s asshole grows three sizes that day, threatening to consume human decency like a giant yawning goatse.

Hell, it seems like the malpractice of modern mastication alone would drive Miss Manners mad. Motherfucking monkey testicles. Gadzooks. So what does this matter? Politeness is the keeping of behavioral codes. Well, functionally, so is morality for most people. While I find ethical arguments and theology fascinating, most people do not. For most people, morality is a set of things they shouldn’t do because reasons. Even those who get off the Christianity train usually end up on the crypto-Christianity train, where they do all the things that Christians do except they justify it by some vague appeals to a fuzzy universal morality. They’re still essentially keeping the Christian codes. It’s like Western Buddhists. They’re just funny Christians who worship Buddha like he’s Christ. Truly alien moralities are just that, alien.

Here’s some Slate Star Codex. Uno Dos.

Creating conlangs is hard not because creating language is fundamentally hard but because we are bad at top down modelling of processes that are the result of a bunch of tiny modifications over time.

Human brain can’t into catallaxic effects arising from networks. That’s why proles perceive world politics as a vast conspiracy by the Illuminati, because world politics is the emergent order from an incredibly wide and ancient network that makes me, the nobody Monsieur le Baron, a second degree connection to multiple heads of state, and means almost every upper middle class person knows a centimillionaire or billionaire. The vast, byzantine Illuminati plans that span centuries are more the product of investments by people with a certain level of FTO. If normal humans have low FTO, and the conscientious, child-delaying or childfree middle class person has high FTO, then this level of FTO is stratospheric. Comparatively low FTO aristocrats like fatty fat fatty no self-control Lena Dunham live lives like high FTO prole city people, except the latter are convinced they’re exemplars of self-control, and Lena Dunham is a sister-molesting cow who lives by the spur of the moment (this moment is defined as one whole human lifetime). The idea that Lena Dunham isn’t planning for generations down the line is appalling to me. The idea that *anyone* could be investing for generations down the line is deeply alien to the prole. So, world conspiracy. I could go on, but I digress. Another time.

Adhering to ancient traditions when the context is rapidly changing is a recipe for disaster. No point in mastering seal-hunting if there ain’t no more seals. No point in mastering the manners of being a courtier if there ain’t no more royal court. Etc.

So why does politeness decline as we leave the age of warriors? Politeness is the keeping of a bunch of arbitrary behavior codes. In a rapidly changing industrial society, this presents a comparative disadvantage. To the innovative go the spoils. So having good manners, being socially conservative, makes you a weaker in the status battle. Or, as previously discussed, leftism is the language of power, rightism the language of losers. A tradition is not valid outside its context, industrial societies rapidly invalidate contexts.

So what? Monsieur, isn’t this all obvious. My apologies, but I was dropped on my head a lot, so I have to slowly spell things out. Furthermore, the obvious does not go stated often enough. There are too many contrarians and not enough metacontrarians. An armed society is a polite society is a quaint aphorism, and it doesn’t come with a justification because it’s held to be self-evident. So people throw it aside because they don’t have a good rational story for it.

So let’s get to something new. Why is neo-reaction, a predominately middle class movement, so attracted to the idea of the Kshatriya? We’ll throw out a lot of stated reasons right away. The high FTO, caring, responsible ruler, to the extent he exists, is a scholar-aristocrat, not a warrior-aristocrat. Unlike these lowborns, I have the advantage of witnessing military bloodlines myself. A knight, like any other jughead, loves Camaros and lives a reckless lifestyle. Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse to ghostride your bitchin’ Camaro. The reign of warriors is not the reign of Fnargl, it’s the reign of turning your national GDP into lots of Camaros and Dependapotami. So what are some real reasons to support the Kshatriya meme? Well, for one, it allows this band of usurpers and oathbreakers concerned citizens to seize power, since, obviously, a bunch of internet bloggers are the *true* warrior aristocracy we’ve been waiting for, which legitimates their claim to overthrow the existing elite. But, to be quite frank, I don’t think many people are fooled by this.

The second reason is more deep rooted. I’ve said before that the middle class is the keeper of morality. In Victorian times, they were the paragons of respectability. They called it bourgeois norms and respectability. Today, they are the most strident globohomos, the ones that walk their talk. Now, if a clever bourgeois notices something is up with globohomo morality, they are naturally disgusted. They would want a return to a polite society. And who offers the polite society? The armed society.

The warrior aristocracy.

The Kshatriya.

Alles in Butter, not just my lobster tail.

Every dog has its day, even celebrities, though Hollywood types are all sons of bitches. And one day, the Kshatriya will ride atop their steel horses, and there will be much weeping and revving of Camaros.

Next time maybe, I fill in for the Sad One and explain the essential similarities between Ayn Rand and Karl Marx. It’s Economics for Dummies with Monsieur.

Eats to fill the void in his head,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

Witness the city of steel and silicon. Prostrate yourself before the throne of code.

Do you see the many petitioners? Do you see the glories which have been wrought?

To land in SJC is to land in another world. The air is thick with the scent of hierarchy.

The Second Estate lives. It reigns. All fall beneath it.

The machine men drink deep of globohomo and commune with the spirit of transcendent aristocracy.

It is strong.

It is confident.

It is hateful.

And it will not be denied.

In order to successfully reach the elite, a group needs strong asabiya. It must have the unity to form a meaningful organization. It must have the unity to assert one shared narrative of gentility, lest it be relegated to the category of mere “labor”. And ultimately, it must have unity of purpose, to be able to assert the necessity of its mission to the existing elite, and if need be, the unity to wage a war against it, just as the doctors defeated the old families of France and their ancient fortunes, subsuming them into their group. At long last, engineering has done so.

But a group with the asabiya to do all of this has the asabiya to go further. Just as border people do not stay at their border, so too do prospective elites not stay within their niche. The border men soon turn their sights on new conquests and back towards the center. So too did the men of machines.

In 1968, there was a crisis, a crisis that needed to be solved for the glory of the empire. Talented men flocked to the field to solve the crisis. They developed their own group identity. It had its own culture, a sort of nerd culture, which was in some ways traditionally elitist and aristocratic, loving board games, learning, and disdaining the masses, but also in many ways new. It was excluded from power. But economic necessity grew its strength, year by year. It yearned to be accepted. Bill Gates made electronics popular, then Steve Jobs made them cool. It became acceptable for a young Harvard grad to go into tech.

The men of machines went further, just like the men of medicine before them. In the end, the men of medicine sought to remake society in their own image. They changed the societal narrative to a biological one. So too did the men of machines go and take other industries. What is the difference between Uber and a taxi service? What is the difference between AirBnB and traditional hospitality? The difference lies in the narrative. The former are “tech companies”. That means they embody the tech company ethos, not the ethos of taxis or hotels. Tech went off the reservation. Bankers became quants, half-math and half-man. Trades went higher and higher frequency. Everything was and is to be technocratized. The words of the machine men went back to the center, to the Establishment. Everything would become agile. Everything needed management metrics. Everything would be technological, rational, data-driven. The Cloud had come, and Big Data was its prophet.

This is another turning of the elite cycle. Big whoop. It happens all the time. Why is it significant now?

Because of *why* Anglo society rejected the message of the machine men. Machines are things to be manipulated and changed to suit one’s purposes. Inputs and outputs. But in a land of sacred individuality and liberty, men could never be reduced to mere numbers.

This isn’t just a turning of the elite cycle. It is also a turning of our color cycle. The sacred ideology of liberty has been overturned. And so, the machine men reign. The machine men, the engineers, will most likely be the elites leading us through the final days of this stage of the color cycle, the final secular cycle of Anglo liberty, and into the brave new world that comes afterwards. In between, there will be conflict, and possibly even civil war. The empire long united…

The years will pass, and there will be cycles past that. Who will succeed the engineers? Nobody knows. But nerd culture is fascinated with Megacorporations and a marketized world. Everything for sale. No rights but property rights. What a world that would be. Such would be the work of Mad Men.

Writes articles just to make shitty puns,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

Urist was punched in the head, bruising the brain and severing his nerves. I’m afraid I shall have to be your host today, shabby though I am.

Let’s get to it.

One of Turchin’s cycles is the asabiya cycle. Groups have asabiya – a sense of identity and cohesion. Asabiya forms along borders, where two groups are in conflict for long periods. Asabiya, the identity, is thus most strong near the edges of the territory it encompasses. Of course this is so, for without the other, there is no meaningful distinction to the self. Identities define their self, *who we are*, in opposition to the other, *who we are not*. Therefore on the borders, we see the most cultural conditioning.

It is the borders which are the seeds of great empires. It is ultimately the borderlands that unite the whole and make great conquests. China is periodically invaded by steppe nomads and marcher lords. Germany was united by the Prussians, half-Slav, half-German mongrels. Rome was a city on seven hills, but also a city on the border. America was a frontier state before it was the USG world empire.

But there is more than inter-group conflict. There is also intra-group conflict. Class conflict. Classes are also identities, just as national identities are identities. When they come into sustained conflict, this identity will grow stronger. Where do we see the most cultural conditioning today? Where are the borders of our classes?

On one side of the divide, we have the last of the prestige firms fighting for their survival in otherwise middle class fields. I speak of Accounting and Marketing. At places like EY and PwC, there is more cultural conditioning and orientation than I’ve seen anywhere else. That’s it means to be a marcher – it means fighting for your soul at every turn. Below you, the oblivion of the middle class. The Age of Mad Men never got off the ground. While they began to gather their strength, ultimately, society would reject its message. Yes to consumerism, but no to marketizing everything. The age of SEC-regulated kidtax and kid derivatives markets is yet to come. The Mad Men sleep, let them sleep a while longer.

And who lies on the other side of the divide? We shall see soon.

The beginnings of an aristocratic group are driven by economic need. A new field is born as a result of economic or cultural shifts. But there are many jobs out there, not all prestigious. Which drives the difference? When a job forms, it ideally would like to be as prestigious as possible. If it can do that, it maximizes the earnings of its members while minimizing their work. But how can it do that? First, it must make a stake to skill, to differentiate it from the unskilled masses. But many prolish occupations are highly skilled. To raise its status further, a job ought to make a claim to gentility, to claim that it is not just mere labor. This is something that accounting and marketing definitely do. But it is clearly not enough. To become aristocratic, a group must be accepted by the aristocracy. This requires more than just an economic need. It requires high society to accept its mission, its reason to be. It must impress upon high society the urgency of its spirit and the necessity of changing to accommodate it.

In the beginning, there were the warriors. Long ago, even before the beginning, there were scientists too, but the chaos had sent them away. The warriors battled and left carnage in their wake. At its basest level, government is the monopoly of force, and power the only law. But such a state of existence is a brutish one. As the kings grew in power, they desired to bring an end to the fighting and to bring the warlords to heel. For that, they needed centralized. Bureaucracy. Laws.

When you need law, you need men of law. But need the men of law be important? They must be if you are to be ruled by laws, and not men. And so rose the lawyers. The curtains closed on the Medieval Era. There was peace, of a sort. But with internal peace came external war. The states grew strong, and in their strength, they grew greedier. The crowns of Europe went to war, again and again. And the sinews of war were golden coins.

Governments needed money. Lots of money. The cry was answered, and so were born the money men. But, it turned out, money could be used for more than war. It could be used for development projects and long-term planning. Bigger, better, and more prosperous. The banking clans grew fat and happy. In the background, innovation continued its steady clip. And soon, a new thing was available to be financed. Wondrous machines that could save labor and multiply manpower like nothing ever seen before. One by one, the estates of Europe were mortgaged and smokestacks filled the sky. The machine men took the reins.

Except in Merry Old England. The Anglos accepted the Industrial Revolution, but not its implications. The Anglo economy changed, but Anglo society carried on. Stiff upper lip. The engineers of Britain formed a professional organization, changed the economy, and lobbied hard for recognition. But ultimately, their mission was not found to be compelling. The societal revolution of the machine men was denied, because of some mysterious X factor. Britain carried on much as it was. Among the British, engineer came to mean something similar to “mechanic”, a mere technical specialist.

The doctors had slumbered. While they had made their own colleges, their remedies had always been ineffective. No longer. As Europe prospered, it grew wise. And the secrets of life made themselves clear. Wondrous tonics and remedies multiplied. The machine men made men wealthy, but the medicine men would make them whole. And wasn’t society itself the body politic? Couldn’t it, too, be cured of what ailed it? New cities must be built, healthier cities. New works will be made, to protect the public health. But still, there lurked a cancer. Some of the denizens did not belong in this pure society. They were unclean. They had to be excised. It was time for chemotherapy.

Europe burned.

Across the sea, the ad men attempted to usher in their ad age. They failed.

But in the hidden war rooms of the new USG world empire, NATO, a problem was being discussed. They called it the crisis of software engineering.

The year was 1968.

The X factor was Anglo liberty.

We are now ready to see who sits on the other side of the divide.

Looking for the hidden fun stuff,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

It is early, it is late. There is coffee, there is melatonin. It is in these twilight hours just after waking and just before morning where the mind wanders free and light, past the boundaries of convention. It is at transition points that interesting effects occur. Fussell once said that America would be interested in class if someone made a work telling the stories of the boundaries, where the ghetto person becomes bougie, and where the struggling aspirant claws their way towards the upper middle class. If only there was someone to explicate the boundaries.

Ah well.

Why does old money disdain new money anyways? Is there a reason for it?

For that matter, why are those media types so disgustingly crass and prolish?

Well, the main goal of old money is to perpetuate itself indefinitely. As they say, three generations makes a gentleman. Why would you want to insulate yourself from new money? In the conventional view, there’s no reason to. They’ve got all the talent and the energy. But evolution doesn’t end at the neck, does it? Someone who has the talent to make it to the top doesn’t necessarily have the *genetic* talent to make it to the top. That is, there is regression to the mean. Some of that talent is going to be from environmental factors. And some of that success was just plain luck.

When you marry into the glitterati, you’re marrying someone that’s basically just a prole, but an extremely lucky prole. Luck is not heritable. The force of regression is going to carry you right back into the trailer park. Media types should rightly be shunned as perpetual new money. What they touch, they corrupt. The Met Gala was once respectable. Just look at it. Look at them. I mean, come on. Come the fuck on. I believe that’s proof enough of my point.

But what about the talented outsiders? That’s where the most danger lies. That handsome young lawyer may seem like a great bet, but *you have no idea how much of that talent is genetic*. A lawyer who makes more than a million a year sits at the top of their field. But if that’s an upwardly mobile lawyer and not a hereditary lawyer, then their kid might be fucking garbage. Selecting for old money means eliminating the noise. If a family sticks around for grandfather, father, and finally your new son-in-law, then you can be assured that their skill has genetics underlying it. Reasonably assured, anyways.

But a separation of middle and upper middle also has a secondary purpose. There are cultural boundaries between the two.

The middle class is “crass” and “boorish”. They shop at Target. They mistreat the staff. They buy Margaritaville mixers and wild, showy things. They flaunt their alleged wealth at every opportunity. In short, fuck ’em.

The upper middle is “snobby” and “dishonest”. They shop at Costco – a warehouse, really? It’s so not nice! And it’s full of that Kirkland store brand instead of real brands. In fact, how do your stuff won’t wear out if it’s not branded? And they lie. They lie through their teeth. Look at their universities – full of cheating and corruption. They’re clannish. They lack Hajnal values good character. In short, fuck ’em.

Who polices these norms? They’re policed by moralizers. Moralizers take shared cultural norms and moralize them, such that matters of taste become matters of right and wrong. It’s not just wrong to shop at Target, it’s EVIL. When moralizers from two different groups meet, it ends in conflict. While matters of taste can be dismissed, the same cannot be said for matters of good and evil. The proximity of the classes will lead to class warfare. With the end of the formal nobility, the classes are closer than ever. Before, the elites could be checked by intra-elite warfare. But with the introduction of the middle class, they are able to find a common enemy.

How can the two classes come to interact peacefully? For that matter, how do two sides ever come to agreement? There are equilibriums of compromise and equilibriums of conflict. 2/3rds of pro-life and pro-choice people have the same view – abortion, but restricted abortion. But the conflict between pro-life and pro-choice is deep and polarizing. It’s not because of false consciousness, it’s because the markers of pro-life and pro-choice constitute tribal boundaries. Having become a tribal issue, it behooves one to fight for the tribe’s identity, and to assert a more extreme version of the stance in order to distinguish one’s self from the enemy. The settling point of abortion DOES tend to be near the natural compromise point. But it settles there through conflict and cyclical movement. As you approach an extreme, less of your tribe fights and more of the enemy tribe fights. The momentum of one tribe stalls out as it approaches its ideal (its members don’t actually happen to want that ideal). If views change, conflict consensus will naturally adjust the settling point. It’s an organic settlement. Compromise equilibriums are ant farm equilibriums. They minimize short-run microconflicts at the cost of a bigger conflict erupting much later. In Taleb terms, conflict is antifragile and compromise is fragile.

Ironically, compromises are more foundational to a culture, not less. Compromises on heavily disputed issues simply won’t take. So a compromise that survives must exist on or create ground which is in common. It must either be in or form a low dispute environment. Its assumptions must be largely shared. And those assumptions being shared creates a feedback loop causing those assumptions to become more and more shared.

What is the core compromise at the heart of American culture? An agreement, loved by no one, for the classes to come to peace. We call this compromise Anglo liberty.

And it is dying.

Don’t panic, no, not yet,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

I prefer condos to conventional forms of housing. It is far more convenient to delegate certain tasks to an association. The hiring of certain kinds of help simply does not scale down well to one home. But, of course, the Homeowner’s Association comes at a cost. I don’t just mean the fee for services. I mean conformity. Your neighbors are the same as you, your neighbors are a little different. There is comfort to that, but it straitjackets true creativity and individuality.

Anyways…

When it comes to classes, there are ways in which neighboring classes resemble each other. I will name a few examples, but this is key in successfully identifying which social class a given person is from. Some values are shared by neighboring classes, and some values exist in a candy cane fashion and are shared by classes two apart. By combining your observations, you can reliably tell how poor someone is.

That’s my superpower. I’m the Incredible Classist Man. Read exciting testimonials from people you don’t know!

“He cured the AIDS in my butt! It turned out to be tiny poor people!” – A Degenerate Homophiliac
“100% nonsensical ENTP blather nigger. What are you talking about?” – The Old Jew
“Really finds all the poors, even the ones that claim to be upper middle class!” – That angry wasp living by your storm gutter
“And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for you meddling kid and your damn Doge!” – A Poor, Rightfully Put In His Divine Place Farming Mud

Let’s start with brand names and status signaling through material goods. Proles love status signaling by buying expensive brand name stuff. Even if it’s not a terribly good idea, buying something like a fancy shirt, some nice kicks, or a BMW allows them to feel bougie. Why is this a valuable status signal? In Proleland, resources are relatively scarce. Accordingly, the ability to not only acquire lots of resources but to spend them on useless luxury goods raises their status in society. It shows they can make and dispose of great sums, which makes them great. The ceremonial feast and other such ritualized destructions of wealth are some of the earliest rites of showing status in primitive societies. To say that shiny rims don’t result in lasting social mobility is to miss the point. The point is to impress others *within* one’s milieu.

Material signaling continues in the middle class, but it has a slightly different character. Everything shared between two classes is manifested a little differently in each. In the middle class, the emphasis is no longer about big, flashy, one-time purchases, but about maintaining a lifestyle expensive enough that the proles cannot imitate it. As such, the wasteful spending is no longer about bling. Both the upper class and middle class buy organic, Whole Foods food… but only one can afford it. The middle class is always collecting stuff and cluttering up their homes with it. Not tasteful, intelligence signaling stuff like African masks (where are the masks babs show me the masks) and golden Maltese Crosses, but stuff like Margaritaville machines and CD collections. The middle class is trying to maintain the highest lifestyle they can, keeping up with the proverbial Joneses. When the middle class sees a brand, it sees a marker of quality that shows a product is going to last a long time while simultaneously advertising their lifestyle. The middle class loves Target because it’s like Walmart but everything is *slightly* more expensive, thus keeping out the proles, and because the poor retail drones are forced to worship the customer. The middle class believes, erroneously, that the higher castes love to run their servants and ritually humiliate them, and Target gives them a place where they can ritually humiliate poorly paid shelf stockers. Because of the slightly higher price point, proles avoid the store, reasoning that it doesn’t make much sense to pay more for literally the same crap. This comforts the middle class person, for the sight of proles reminds them of where they came from and where they could return if not careful, and it is this atavistic fear that really drives their extreme disdain for “trashy” people. It is the fear of death. Better to bury the past and cut off all the crabs that could drag one back into the bucket.

Now, if you’ve got inherited money, it doesn’t prove anything to be able to spend it at Target. So that’s not going to be a successful status signal anymore. When resources are no longer scarce, spending them doesn’t mean anything.

What bridges the middle and upper middle classes? Ideas. Ideas are the bridge.

Proles distrust authority and establishment ideas. They think, not unfairly, that experts spew lots and lots of crap ideas that make no sense. The middle class is different. The middle class is the class of expert worship. If a doctor tells you to do something, you do it. Expert worship is partly a product of social distance. You really can’t worship experts once you see them close up – they are too human, too mortal. And it’s partly because of the transformative power of ideas. The middle class is able to rise above the masses because it is skilled labor, not unskilled labor. It is able to do things through the special things it has learned. And furthermore, they acquire values which allow them to structure their lives. By living in accordance with bourgeois values, they are able to escape the chaotic mess of prole life. How can they not worship experts when experts are the ones that create these wonderful and powerful ideas? Science says! The middle class uses this new concept of ideas to look down upon the proles. The middle class knows all the right ideas, and the proles are so ignorant to them! In the middle class mind, every question has a right answer, and it is only a matter of being told what the right answer is. When they see someone with the wrong answer, they scoff, imagining that person never learned the right answer or that they are too stupid to absorb it.

Such an attitude makes a person very smug.

The upper middle class doesn’t need bourgeois ideas to structure their lives. Their lives are naturally quite disciplined and orderly. They have the money to protect them from proledom. What matters here? Épater le bourgeois! Only novel ideas can keep you ahead in the Baron’s Race! I have written extensively on this subject already, but suffice to say, novelty dominates conventionality. The Left always wins in the end. But… the Left can also be Right.

But the upper class is no longer the class of ideas. It was, once upon a time. But its members are now stagnant, and they are aware of this. To be nimble of mind when there are no dangers is a difficult thing. There is no selection pressure to stay sharp. To compensate, and to prove their domination over their nerdy minions (actual peasants are too lowly to even figure in upper class minds), they become more physically adept. The established WASPs could out-muscle the new Jews, but the fact that they resorted to this was a mark of insecurity – the new blood was stronger than them. Again, the fear of death reigns.

What bridges the upper middle and the upper? Pedigree. Prestige. For the middle class, just going to college is enough to be proud. But for the upper middle, it is not enough to get into college (a trivial task) – one must also get into a professional career. To do that, one needs prestige, as much prestige as can be gotten. It’s not what you know, it’s where you learned it, and who you learned it with. Seniority is out, names are in. The golden sheepskin serves as legitimation for one’s place in the world. And this legitimacy is necessary because one’s family name and ancestral legacy is no longer enough to carry a man. People first become aware of the great wheel of history at this strata. It is filled with the ruined legacies of great noble houses. Memory is long and history is short. Below is oblivion, above is a return to glory. But to move up requires one to turn the great wheel. The projects that might accomplish this increasingly become world historical and multi-generational. Alliances are made, plans are planned and then forgotten, and all the while, centuries slip by. Many families are extincted before they ever seize the grass crown, while others are destroyed by their attempts to grab it.

Yet people keep trying. Man is a creature whose appetites are never sated.

How can a man rise?

Revolution.

As above, so below,
Monsieur le Baron

(With thanks to my pal Babs)

Dearest friends,

When you look at a cake, you have frosting on top, but also little squiggles of chocolate and fruit and stuff. People always focus on the frosting, so much so that the top part is basically just called frosting, not “frosting and fruit and stuff”, but the other stuff has distinct properties as well, properties very different from frosting.

I don’t really like cake.

Anyways. Enough talking about dessert. Let’s have our main course.

As far as most of society is concerned, the UMC is the upper class. When people think of the upper class, they think of the 1%, and they create a sort of phantom chimera of UC and UMC traits mashed into one group. But the two are distinct in a number of ways.

To know why, we must consider the Slate Star Codex idea of classes as cells. I call this the Candy Cane Hypothesis. To wit, classes resemble each other when they are two cells apart. Because the UC has no fear of being confused with the MC, they are able to adopt behaviors which resemble MC behaviors without any possibility of confusion. Indeed, the UC is not even really aware of the MC’s existence. When prompted, their conception of MC careers is that they are the lumpen, the poor, out-of-sight underclass. Thus, we see a circling around.

Where I buy Costco shirts, they buy from Brooks Brothers. The idea is here is signaling quality, but the MC focus is on the signal, that they can buy such wonderful clothing (that they really can’t afford), while what the UC focuses on is the *quality*, because their goal is to minimize the hassle in their lives. My shirts may last me somewhat over a decade, but their goal is to have shirts as old as houses.

The MC has expert worship because they’re midwits. They are just smart enough to learn the answer by rote and repeat it. This becomes the sign of intelligence, the ability to repeat the “correct” answer. When they see someone with a “wrong” answer, they scoff, assuming it is a prole too stupid to know the right answer. The UC has expert worship because they know they are no longer the class of ideas and that their minds have atrophied with disuse. They are insecure regarding their intellectual superiority because they do not have to go through intellectual trials and the gauntlet is that is the academic-corporate-industrial complex. Instead they rely on their “idea guy” servitors, who pitch them at social clubs and venture capital events and golf greens.

The MC doesn’t know the value of a dollar because it is disconnected from the standard mechanisms of the means of production. The teacher and the bureaucrat are not paid by profit-making private entities, but by a gargantuan government bureaucracy. They do not eat what they kill. The UC is disconnected from the work chain and the value of a dollar in a similar way. All their kills are done by their men, and the money flows up to them like a bubbling spring. Accordingly, the MC and UC both do not support their kin in times of need, as they feel the need to teach the value of a dollar through actual jobs and work.

The MC focuses on culture and right ideas to signal its own intelligence and worthiness, and thus distinction from the tasteless proles. The UC focuses on culture and right ideas because in a world without work or struggle, that’s all that matters.

And most of all, both the MC and the UC stand atop their respective worlds. For the MC, American meritocracy means poor people can work hard, save money, and go to college just like them, receiving a “good job” that pays “good money” with stability. They do not perceive anything above them, and when they have to deal with the UMC, they scoff at them as boorish and beneath them. Much to my chagrin. And the UC stand atop their laboring servants, their whims law over the world, their every desire fulfilled. What they see as the story of American meritocracy is one of the Stuy people being able to, after decades of cube service, being able to golf with the beautiful people as a VP. For both classes, what this creates is a sense of narcissistic benevolence. For the MC, the emphasis is on the narcissism, the sense they are more deserving and more worthy of special treatment, the “Can I speak to the Manager????” mentality. For the UC, the emphasis is on the benevolence… because they actually get all the special treatment they want from their servants (but not wider society, even if your name is on the building. Being out of sight of the proles means nobody gets why you matter. A cruel irony.)

Both the proles and UMC gravitate to common sense ideas. The proles because they disdain the education that gives the MC the “right answers”, while the UMC is forced to continually confront what is taught with what works – their genteel survival is on the line. Pragmatism often ends up trumping what is fashionable, and so UMC society is defined by doublethink, where people praise diversity while living in gated communities, talk about intelligence being taught while searching out high IQ mates, etc etc.

Both the proles and the UMC are forced to be generous and supportive of their kin. For the proles, kin constitutes their primary support network, because they lack the capital and educational assets of the MC. For the UMC, the value of House and name, the game of Namm und Stamen, is often their last link to high society, and their position is so precarious that they take every competitive advantage they can get. That means paying their kids through college, buying or paying for a home in Manhattan, and funding their first deal. The big Christmas present of the proles doesn’t spoil because it is contrasted with rather meager living the rest of the time. And the pampering of the UMC doesn’t spoil because parent and child both know survival is at stake. To be returned to the peasant dust is a fate worse than death.

Both the proles and the UMC know intimately the value of a dollar and of work. The prole is the worker, the UMC owns the means of production. The UMC person has to take stock of their stocks, bond with their bonds, and do the business of running their businesses. A doctor is no doctor if he doesn’t understand his craft, regardless of how many honors he may have. One owns the means of production, the other is subjugated under them, but both know the score. And so there is a kind of respect between owner and worker that classic Marxists can’t really understand.

Despite actually having the guns and doing the labor, when it comes to class conflict between a working man and a government regulator or a meddlesome social worker, the latter always comes out on top. And despite holding the reins of corporate power, when the TOOS coming knocking at a corporate vice president’s door, it is clear who holds the whip hand.

Ultimately, despite making their worlds tick, both the proles and the UMC have a deep sense of being on the bottom. The proles recognize that they don’t have the means of production (it is very easy for union leaders to get them to read and understand Marx because it is so very real), while the UMC also lacks the means of production – the means of political production. As the class truly producing the ideas, they are resentful that their plans have to be mediated through the filter of people who play tennis and have good cocktail parties. When a man like Bill Gates or the Zuck or Vladimir Lenin rises from the UMC to the UC, they finally have the chance to make real their ideas. And when those ideas are of the ant farm variety, terror ensues.

The UC is like a chicken, and I am the Chinasaur. What is functional in me as striver-killer instincts becomes vestigial in the UC, as the selection pressures of constant competition are replaced with the selection pressures of being charming and fun at parties.

Two little worlds, both unaware of each other. Scholars of class almost always hail from the UMC because they’re the ones best positioned to see the whole spectrum.

I have an affinity for the proles. Does that mean the UC has an affinity for the MC?

No. Everybody hates the MC.

Resentful he can’t go to the Slavic titty bar,
Monsieur le Baron

P.S. To be continued in Sausage Links, or the Shared Values of Neighboring Classes