Dearest friends,

Monads! Monads are a mere secularization of the idea of self. And the Phenomenology of Geist is, of course, a long discussion of what the self is, culminating in the answer that the self is Geist, and we are all Geist, as we finally shed our false consciousness of otherness, this thing which first allowed us to recognize the concept of our self vis-a-vis our life and death struggle with the other.

Unfortunately, as a haver of false consciousness, I still perceive you as an Other, and therefore I believe you do yet possess all of my thoughts on this matter. Last time, I left you with the statement that the debate of priests is the cycle of civilization. Let’s get right back into that.

What is leftism? Leftism is the process by which elites gain power by signaling certain things. But what determines the nature of these signals? It’s simple. The purpose of Leftism may be power, but the content of Leftism is the natural extension of society’s founding ideas. Thus, the descent of the West into Bioleninism is merely the natural extension of the idea of equality. If all people are truly equal, then the most worthy among us are those who have suffered the most undue harm (being equal, the only way inferiors end up behind is because of the harm inflicted on them by the universe). Therefore, we should praise most the least among us. Communism is also a child of equality. When we look at the excesses of states founded on personality cults, like the infamous Mangoes for Mao, we find that people are simply taking Mao worship to extremes. Leftism merely takes the ideas of a civilization to their logical conclusion.

It is too bad that the logical conclusion of any civilization is ruins.

But it also means that Leftists are justified in ignoring anyone outside the walls. The indifferent operate on facts alone, but FACTS are not what sets the spirit of a civilization. Spirits are ultimately creatures which exist before the world of facts. Values like equality are not facts, they are put forward as axiomatic. They are the premises upon which we build Western Civilization. And in a way, Leftists are right to despise those who reject Leftism, because they are rejecting the ROOTS, the FOUNDATION of the civilization in which they live. If they accept them, they are merely another kind of Leftist with a different idea of what the implications of societal axioms *should* be… or they are a Conservative. And in this case, a Conservative is nothing more than a lapsed Catholic. They’re a believer, but not a very strong one. They, like the lapsed Catholic, have put the needs of this world above those of the Church. A Conservative, ultimately, is not a heretic. He does not reject society’s founding principles.

How can Monsieur espouse Dissident Right ideas in the Lion’s Den? It’s simple. I just have to make Right Left. It is very easy to express these notions in a way that is derived from the West’s founding principles of equality. You just need a little verbal twisting, but verbal twisting is what elites are bred for.

Unfortunately, even if my arguments won, there is ruin in them too. Every society bears the seeds of its own ruin. Ultimately, the principles of any society are stupid when taken far enough, because principles are creatures of the ideal, not the real. And the ideal is inhuman. It does not tolerate life in its sterile perfection.

So what is to be done? Do we have to accept the death of all things? Or is there a path towards long term stability?

Well, if Leftism works by pushing forward societal principles, then the answer is simple. You just have to have a society without any principles. Enter China. China did not have great ideologies. Rather, it had a color cycle. You pass from the Era of Red to Green to Yellow to Blue, etc, etc, etc. And so, the Chinese idea was not extended over and over until it collapsed because there was no Chinese idea. There was only a Chinese system could and would re-form, time and time again. The only problem?

This is stagnation. In death, there is life. In collapse, there is rebirth. Every explication of ideas teaches us something, even if that lesson is not to do that.

Mortality cannot be overcome except in the spiritual realm.

But maybe I just think so because I’m an unhealthy bastard.

Mortified by the metaphysics of McDoubles,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

I was reading a blog by a very smart person, and it occurred to me that if I aped his style, others would also find me to be cool, smart, and attractive.

Prodigy Prodigal: Isn’t it peculiar that priests wear those black robes? And those churches, they have bells.
Mentor The Old Jew: What are you blathering about now?
Prodigy Prodigal: Bells are like… bell curves. They’re got the same shape. That’s math.

Unfortunately, I must confess, Reader, that I am an idiot, and to my chagrin, the clothes of a wise man are ill-fitting on a fool. Like all confessions, this one is best heard by a priest. And that does set me to thinking about them. The Priestly caste is a distinct feature of Indo-European societies.

Here are some quotes from Razib Khan:
“The Western Christian priesthood and the Dharmic religious class exhibit a degree of detachment from normal society due to their celibacy.” “I think the difference seems entirely reflected in the character of their philosophies. Christianity and the Dharmic religions have had large numbers of religious-intellectual professionals detached from worries of family life as monks across their history. In contrast, Jewish rabbis, Muslim ulema, and Confucian scholars have all had to concern themselves with family life.” “But, a minority are devoted to causes. To society.”

Now, it is popular among a certain set to proclaim their determination to be childfree. On one level, it’s a statement that the world is overpopulated. But that is part of the new civic religion in which Gaia must be appeased – anti-natalism is secular celibacy. The Bobos are the priests of a modern secular religion. And the Priestly Caste was not just morality police. They were the thinkers! They were the scientists and the intellectuals! While the Kshatriya were kings in early modern India, the Brahmin were its haughty mandarins.

They are priests, but also priest-lords, priest-scientists, priest-intellectuals. The distinctiveness of this idea and its consequences can be seen by contrasting Christians with Jews. I am not a believer in Sapir-Whorf. It gets the causal chain precisely backwards. Words do not shape our thinking. Rather, when we think about and attempt to grasp a concept, we find ourselves inventing words to capture the idea. And the more prominent the idea in our way of being, the more prominent it becomes in our language. Jews did not invent a metaphysics. YHVH is the verb to be. Ehiyeh asher ehiyeh, I am that I am. There are only two tenses, the mortal tense, and the Godly tense – the future perfect. God exists in a state of timelessness, while mortals do not focus at all on their existence. Jews go to their house. But Aryans *are* going to their house. They, in the verbiage, are constantly in a conscious state of existing and existence. The language necessitates a concept of self and in turn enables an obsession with self. Because the name of God is forbidden, Jews cannot easily discuss being, which precludes this deep exploration of the self.

When we arrive at Christianity, this develops further, because the universe is then supposed to be mechanistic, ordered by God-as-Logos. The self is an orderly thing which is then conceptualized within a universe of orderly things. The self-question thus extends into the general question of the Logos question. What is the order of the universe, its Logos, which serves as the divine principle, the Arche of being? Removing God from the equation does not kill the question, it merely secularizes it. Metaphysics is thus the secular version of two interrelated questions. Who am I? And what is existence, especially in relation to me? Do I exist and does existence exist? Can I truly know that which is Other to me?

The priest, therefore, becomes a figure that knows the secrets of the world of Logos and the true order of the universe, which of course is the truth of reality. He is a liminal figure which can step between the perceived earthly world and the world which is true. But, of course, he is also a moral creature. Because God is not just Logos, he is Goodness, he is Love. He provides not only the structure of the universe, but its morality. When we engage in the rites of the Church, the priest symbolically stands in the place of God. He acts on God’s behalf. In turn, when man demands it, the priest, being one who can walk in the other realm, can intercede on behalf of man. He is man’s intercessionary. Pagans do not need intercessionaries in this sense because the spiritual world is not made distinct from the physical world. There is no truth of the Logos lying behind reality. Gods are tangible things – bigger people, Sky Daddies, the Sun.

When you remove the religion, these norms still persist. Society only has so many narratives, and people naturally fit their roles to their narratives. The workplace is the court reborn, and its politics merely the continuation of Patrimonial Bureaucracy. So too are the Bobos merely the priests of yesteryear. Why is this significant? Because it means it’s futile to discuss the truths of ideologies (secular religions) with those who are not of the Priestly Caste. Outsiders may muster up all the facts they want, but that doesn’t matter. Facts are of the physical, untrue world, and not of the spiritual world. And the spiritual world, the other world, is the true world.

Okay, so it’s just a roundabout way of saying cultists don’t consider anything outside the walls. So what? We already knew that. Sure. But it ties into my next point…

The debate of the priests is the cycle of civilizations.

But perhaps I’m just trying to get the old Jew off my back.

Makes overlong excuses for being bad at math,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest Friends,

I am convinced that a clergyman ought to be three things. Well-read, well-bred, and well-breaded.

Why?

Because he’s a friar.

And such men are creatures of the church!

Speaking of church, let’s talk about Church. No, not the concept of the Church. That’ll have to wait for another time. I mean Michael Church, or more specifically, Michael Church’s musings on class.

To be honest, for the longest time, I didn’t really like it. I thought that his division of gentry and elite was mostly a way for him to divide the world into good folk (‘gentry’) and bad folk (‘elite’), and that he arbitrarily divided the professional class between the gentry and the elite so as to put himself on the right side.

But as I got older, I realized that such distortions are informationally valuable in-and-of-themselves, since they reveal the thought patterns and preferences of their holders. A lie reveals more truths than a fact. The Chinese learned this a long, long time ago, and that’s why they play poker with their cards face up. A submarine can be detected by the absence of sound. A mystery can be solved by the dog not barking in the nighttime.

And Church’s choices are informative indeed. They illustrate an important point – differences in perception. When you come up from the bottom, coming up hard, your viewpoints are far different from someone born into the upper middle class. Now, he claims to be a native G2, but he certainly has quite a lot of vitriol towards bluebloods. So if he is, that’s quite a lot of loathing towards himself. Probably a majority of his peers are bluebloods in the truest sense – descent from historical reigning aristocracies. The values of his profession can be traced directly back to Ancien Regime and its values. That someone like this would have more in common with a teacher than an investment banker is *absurd*. Both the investment banker and presumably Church went to elite colleges. Teachers do not, in any meaningful sense, ever work up to or promote into being professionals. They’re teachers. They teach until they become admins or get pensioned out. It’s a stable enough life, but it’s no meaningful sense on the same ladder as a professional. He is of a social rank roughly equivalent to the Oscar Meyer heir. Yeah, the hot dog guy. By no means is this top, but to suggest this is the realm of mere mortals like schoolteachers is absurd.

Let’s look at another group that often comes up hard: conservative talking heads. Or, as they are often called, Cuckservatives. One reaction to one’s new environs is hatred and distancing, as Church does. And we’ll return to that later. But another is to hate one’s origins in order to ingratiate one’s self with one new peers. To do that, one slanders the working and middle classes as brutish, unsophisticated, disgusting flyovers. One places all sorts of follies and ills at their feet. This also serves an important psychic purpose for the class migrant. By making the origin the image of evil, he can convince himself of his worthiness to join his new class, since he’s good and not evil like the rest of the unwashed. And then, having made his new home class the font of goodness, he can adopt its norms to an extent unnatural for any native. Speaking of many of these NGO people… their ties are far, far too straight. Or, to use a conservative example, Buckley is the very image of the platonic WASP precisely because he is not one. Of course, their new peers never truly accept them. To the native elite, the newcomer is gauche, a perpetual outsider. His oddities become emblematic of his crude origins. That exaggerated pose of eliteness? It’s the exaggeration of a clown. They’re considered nothing more than talking apes. Orwell despised these people, and for good reason. They sell out their kin, their honesty, and ultimately even their dignity… for the scraps off their master’s table. Cuckservative indeed.

Anyways, back to Church. The idea that teachers and him are both gentry is ridiculous. But I will admit a similarity. And the similarity lies in where Church places his gentry. In the middle. It is his middle class. And the fracture between his gentry and his elite is real. His self-identification with the middle is driven by another phenomena I’ve noted on this blog. The screeching masses of the middle are society’s conscience. And so too is Mr. Church.

Who does Church put atop his gentry? The media. And that’s because the media are the high priests of the Cathedral, our modern civic religion. And Church, as an ideological professional, is one of its priests, spreading the mores of what some may call good taste, but what I call closed-minded dogma. Teachers are the little lay pastors.

We can this moralizing in what he calls the oppression of engineers. Namely, that they are subject to micromanagement and having to report to bosses and that they paper this over by imagining themselves little owners of capital. But… they are little owners of capital. A millionaire is a little owner of capital. It’s by no means false consciousness. And the business with reports and annoying obligations to bosses and others is nothing more than my great-great-grandfather and uncle had to deal with, and millions lived and died by the word (for a very brief amount of time). That is about as high as you can go, and you’re still saddled with the bullshit. Similarly, when he discusses fascism, he calls it freedom from competition. In fascism, the ruling elite free themselves from competition and force the masses to fight. This has the advantage of being a neat explanation, and thus pleasing to the typical autistic mind of an elite. The problem is that this consistent definition defines out what most people consider actual fascism. Nazi Germany was many things, and it is a regime that I have very few fond feelings for, but it was certainly not a great place to be elite. Many an old family was ruined in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. And those who held on were subjected to Hitler’s ridiculous parallel org charts where duplicated responsibilities led to constant infighting and competition. Now, one could say that Der Fuhrer himself was free from competition. The problem with that is that the remnants of the old aristocracy tried to assassinate him. Constantly. They even made a movie about one attempt. And the far-right of Old China as they transitioned into Taiwan? No, that was a terrible place, full of purges and terror and replacement. The place where my ancestors were free of competition and could live stably and peacefully? America. The America of the working class settlement and class truce. The America of socialist democracy. So yeah, I guess that would be fascism. Right.

Here’s the issue. The things he points out as problems are nothing more than the demands of reality. Sure, being jerked around sucks. But everyone is jerked around, even CEOs. Being both a worker and a capital-holding business owner, I can assure you that both involve lots of micromanagement and bullshittery. That’s just how life is. And competition? EVERYONE wants to be free of competition, not just corrupt elites. Perfect competition is hell. It’s great for consumers – except every consumer is also a producer. And all those producers want some power to determine their own prices and fight their own wars. The corruption of the elite in seeking to end their competition is nothing more than what everyone wants. Workers want to end their competition too. Everyone does. Everyone wants everyone else to compete. But we can’t have that, so life is a constant struggle for monopoly power. Nobody wins forever. The positive is also the negative. There is no utopian state that combines the upside of both. Most work is boring not because of the greed of employers, but because life is honestly kinda boring and not some aspirational, self-actualizing funtime joyride for smiling aristocrats. Socialists like him? What they seek to overthrow is not the government regime but the regime of reality. It is doomed to fail.

These ideologies are nothing more than civic religions. What they seek is not reform, but salvation.

He calls it an issue that corporations would prefer to keep their employees politically bland! As they say, that’s not a bug – that’s a feature! Cuius regio, eius religio. What protects the corporation from his liberal proselytizing is also what keeps out the acolytes of what he considers a detestable little fascist, Donald Trump. The four century truce, as fragile and torn as it is now, is the only thing saving corporate from constant bloodbaths and bickering over civic religions. Sure, he thinks that the masses are tricked into following a false idol… all of the evangelists think that! And allowing that in corporate turns the infrastructure of our world into tools to punish unbelievers. Down that road is either theocracy or civil war. The Thirty Years War was one of the most destructive, in relative terms, in human history. When true believers are fighting for their religion, they tend not to back down. The result is villages reduced to ashes and bones, mothers eating their children, and sons slaying their fathers.

The crux of the Church issue is that his name is fitting indeed. He’s not a baron… he’s a bishop. And while I’m sure he’s a competent, caring man who wants only the best – the intertwining of temporal and spiritual authority makes for a sick society.

But who knows? Maybe I’m just one of the bullies.

Cruelly yours,
Monsieur le Baron

P.S. Parasitic bluebloods? A neoliberal future where the poor are forced to cycle to create power to serve themselves ads and prolefeed? Look, I will readily admit many evil things about Hillary Clinton, but she doesn’t want to strap you into exercise bikes Matrix-style so you can watch MORE YOUTUBE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE NOW. To my readers, please do read Haidt. Ordinary people understand fanatics, but fanatics cannot comprehend ordinary people. To borrow one of Z Man’s images, everyone outside the walls is evil. They do evil things for evil reasons because they’re evil. Come the fuck on. Everyone in the top level elite is evil? Most of them believe the same things he does! They’re just even more psychopathic, autistic, and bubbled off than even regular elites. Zuck isn’t a lizard or Satan, he’s just a megasperg.

yo its me dog

https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2018/12/18/guest-post-ethnography-of-the-swpl-pt-2/

My sincerest thanks to EvoX.

https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/guest-post-ethnography-of-the-swpl/

Go here. Read this.

Dearest friends,

The cold season is upon me, and snowflakes descend like falling ash from distant burning woods. When I look up, I half-expect the skies to be a murky black, filled with dark, churning clouds spreading like goopy oil slicks, the air rich with a stench half-way between a Vegas gambling den and a gaping incinerator.

But… it’s not.

The bugs are gone, for now. Fly away, little bugs. Perhaps I ought to decamp to warmer climes myself? Maikäfer flieg!

But I won’t.

Instead, like rather less majestic insects, I will hunker down in my little hole, digging deep for warmth. And once ensconced, I will sup on defrosted lamb and all this Brisk Iced Tea (Brisk, goes down smooth and fast! A real thirst quencher!) I got for real fire sale prices.

It is a certain kind of bliss, I suppose.

Speaking of groceries, it reminds of that strange little box, Whole Foods. I don’t shop there, and I never have. Too rich for my blood. Well, I suppose that’s not completely true. When I was in school, I had a friend who liked to buy a particular brand of yogurt from Whole Foods. These trips were always brief, lest the Eye of Mackey gaze deep into our wallets and dispatch his legion of crustwraiths after our shekels. Would we, one day, be white enough to shop their hallowed halls without shame? Probably not, though he now is getting close. The day we graduated, we went and bought bottles of VOSS water and drank them. To be honest… it didn’t really taste that great. But that didn’t matter – it was the excess of it, the conspicuous consumption, the sheer audacious whiteness – it might as well been, no, indeed it was… the nectar of the gods. The culmination of years of effort, struggle, and pain. It was over, it was done. At long last, a deathly silence had settled over our lives, for the guns had stopped. And all was stillness on the Western Front.

We had won. We had won and we were drinking fucking VOSS water and we were reveling in it because, goddamnit, we deserved it. We were the fucking Masters of the Universe. Born to be kings! Princes of the Universe! That water was the ecstasy of gold in pure, bottled form. It was JUST. FUCKING. WATER. And that was the beauty of it, that was what we exulted in, that pinnacle of white-being. Water, this thing which was free, we had just bought and drank at great expense.

VOSS wasn’t water, it was liquid status.

After that, I didn’t give Whole Foods any more mind.

Until now.

A friend of mine showed me ad for Brandless, which appears to be a store selling organic generics. Its claim to fame is that it’s cheaper than Whole Foods.

Yeah, no fucking shit. Having fresh fish flown to me from goddamn Alaska and pairing with caviar was literally cheaper than Whole Foods. It doesn’t make it cheap! What the hell!

Under my feet, seemingly overnight, had grown an entire class of people buying and doing lots of fancy shit. There were a few possibilities. One was that, while I was looking at the lint gathering in my navel, the rest of the country had become astoundingly rich and left me behind. Now, a trip to the national income percentile statistics strongly suggests this was indeed not the case, but there was always the chance that everyone but me is evading, like, a shit-ton of taxes.

The other possibility, which I strongly believe is true, is that the modern middle class spends lots and lots of money on ostentatious luxury goods. Literally speaking, groceries purchased from Whole Foods are food. But the price tag is not because of the specialness of the food you buy. Rather, fancy organic SWPL food exists as a *positional* good that elevates your status above others. When I wear my crappy suits, they serve as a visual statement that I am inferior to The Management in their crisp new Brooks Brothers. Similarly, when my peers at college shopped at Whole Foods, it was a statement of power and prestige – they were so king dick that they could eat shopping carts full of quinoa harvested by weeping Chilean babies in mist-shrouded mystic highlands, and treat it like no big deal. “Why yes, my father does happen to be close to the Philippine Department of Agriculture, now that you mention it,” as they take another bite of oven-roasted kale.

Meanwhile, I take another swig of tea-flavored high fructose corn syrup, that marvelous beverage, Brisk, a perfectly frugal choice for the modern shopper.

I call these creatures SWProles. That the SWProles so often live so luxuriously often places me in the unfortunate position of envying their lifestyle. With the ordinary proles, while I may shake my head when they buy a massive TV, ultimately, I don’t need or want such a thing. Not so with the SWProles, who often live lives that make me blush with furious envy. Casual Eurotrips, degrees in subjects so outrageously useless and expensive that they almost approach the platonic ideal of Veblen good, the kind of thing you’d be shocked to see outside of Lynndegarden, funny jobs making artisanal pottery and hipstercraft cereal, and the nicest not-nice clothing a thrift store can offer.

These days, I am more likely to identify one of my peers by their relative lack of ornamentation and luxury. So what has brought about such a state of affairs? The SWProle has come to believe that the luxury goods purchased by the overclass are not a signal of their prosperity, but instead are the cause. In short, a cargo cult. I’m not sure how this started precisely, but many SWProles blame their parents or society or their parents AND society. Apparently, there was a widespread narrative that these things were the road to wealth. Go to college and get an English degree and you’ll get a good job, probably. Did you know there are around four thousand 4-year schools in the US? I didn’t, and the figure horrifies me. As far as I knew, the USNews top 200 was *it*, all the schools in the US. It’s like finding out your map of the world only covers California. Or better yet, art school! Go to the city and slum around the fashionable parts of town, because that’s where the work is. A gap year is a great resume builder! It is a Frankensteinian pastiche of luxury status signalling and middle class earnest conscientiousness. People who go on vacation to Europe because… that’s just what is done. A too small apartment in Manhattan with a Studies Studies degree and a barista job (or some menial white collar position they cheerfully dub “professional”), that’s the way to do it. It’s like the industry that’s sprung up selling canned answers to prestige firm interviews – the point of the interview is to demonstrate your authentic UMC habitus, not to recite certain correct answers like this is a goddamn exam at a two-bit school.

Just as yesteryear saw the emergence of Class X, that fusion of bohemian tastes and bourgeois wealth, and that new creature of “BoBo” came to dominate the UMC, so too do we see conspicuous consumption wedded to MC conscientiousness, SWPL tastes and prole incomes. Behold, the New Soviet Coastal Man, the SWProle, rising from the sea foam.

BUY BRISK. BUY IT NOW FUCKERS.

My life doesn’t go smoothly because I have the right taste in burlap (I don’t, which is why I have a Kinkade on my wall). It goes smoothly because I can collect some six thousand dollars of passive income from my investments every month, despite being in my early 20s. They pay me a reasonable amount precisely because it’s *not* an aspirational, fulfilling job. As my coworkers say, if we were having fun, we’d have to pay them. The professional work of the “creative class” may be more like fun, but it’s still WORK. It’s sitting in a cube and bathing your face in the eerie midmire blue light, day in and day out. I do this not because I love it, but because I have needs and wants that my passive income alone cannot satisfy. Like my Camry, which, foolishly, I bought at sticker price. Meanwhile, on various comment threads, I repeatedly see the insistence that more expensive Tesla’s Model 3 is a mass market car. Wha… what? What? No, it’s not!

When I buy my fucking VOSS water for $TOO MUCH, it’s not because it’s helping me be a good worker bee in the modern gig/information/UberEATS (gig-a-bite?) economy or whatever the fuck. I’M BEING AN ASSHOLE!

Good golly, my blood pressure is rising. Better take a crisp and refreshing gulp of Brisk, as sweet and airy as a summer day.

You can’t get rich through conspicuous consumption. You can’t! You just can’t! It doesn’t make any goddamn sense and it makes wonder if the whole fucking world has gone crazy. You get rich by refraining from spending. When I suggest such a thing, I am scoffed out. “You think I can afford a house by not buying avocado toast?” Har har har. That is EXACTLY how you can afford a house. That is EXACTLY how you get rich. You act like a SWPL to flaunt your affluence and social status. These SWProles have everything precisely backwards!

Of course, all that goes up must come down. Because these people are not, in fact, spectacularly rich, and they don’t actually know the COO of Kraftwerkgill, the Food/Electronica conglomerate, they must fund such a lifestyle through debt. Lots and lots and lots of consumer debt. Run up those student loans to go to a crappy state school (Yet another case of apparent conventional MC wisdom being totally bass-ackwards, since they often say more prestigious schools would be too expensive. 96% of Harvard students graduate debt-free. Even at my comparatively shitty tier 2 consolation school, the median student graduates without taking a single penny of student loans.). Get a payday loan to go on vacation (that this concept exists appalls). Work as a cabbie to chase your dreams (the Uber ads also appall me).

So we reach the next inevitable step in our downward spiral. White trash goods rebranded to have hipster/SWPL cred. We return to Brandless. Or, as my friend put it, store generics “but for hipsters.” Is Brandless actually that cheap? Their shtick is meant to suggest such – everything only $3! But I went ahead and compared their prices to Kirkland and Walmart generics. Kirkland generic products are actually of quite high quality. For instance, Kirkland wine is pretty much the same wine as the high class stuff, just put through less quality control and refinement. And I have been assured that, if you take the effort to properly age it in your own wine cellar, it really turns out top notch. Much like brewing your own booze, this seems to be a lot of effort to me, but if you already have the setup, might as well. The Brandless stuff was almost always significantly more expensive, except for chips, naturally. The SWProle is still a prole at heart.

Shorn of his wealth, with no income potential, and teetering towards bankruptcy, the SWProle must abandon Whole Foods for generics. But even there, his generics have to signal SWPL status with their elegant unbranded branding and design. And he will have to pay extra for that status.

Similarly, with no hope of affording a house on their own the proper way, the SWProle turns to a small movable abode placed on land, bought or rented, and makes do. They call them Tiny Houses. They’re trailers with hipster cred. The idea isn’t new at all, it’s just a rebranding of something poor people already do.

And we revisit Fishtown, Murray’s byword for poor America. Only now, it is being hailed as a symbol of revitalization, as artsy young white people flood in to provide artisanal services in a quirky, homey environment. Gentrification! Affluence! The only problem is that the median income isn’t budging. Brandless isn’t unbranding, despite its name. Brandless itself constitutes a brand, and thus, the act is an act of *rebranding*, not unbranding. So too, the new Fishtown isn’t an end to poverty.

Merely a rebranding.

Ḅ̴̡̙͓̼̩̈͒̌́́͑̓̇̾̅̓͌̕͠͠R̸͚͔̝̗̺͔̹͕̪̭̼̞͇̆̐̈͒̽̆͆͑̾̂̾̀͒́̑Í̵̡͇̮͔̝̹̋̎̏̒̔̚S̴̢̺̈́̋̇͐̄͆̓̃̂̄̈͋̾́K̷͉̫̪̤̰̦̖͋͜

And so, we arrive at the curious case of the DINK in the nighttime. Much as the life script dictated, they went to college, a sensible state school which would minimize their student loans, got professional white collar jobs, and waited until getting financial stability to have kids.

Only their school didn’t give them a leg up, their jobs were professional in MC minds only and didn’t pay worth a damn, and by the time they were financially secure, a truly grueling ordeal, they found out that the Obamas had to get IVF. Which they can’t afford.

DINK, but not by choice.

Even with all their decadence, I cannot truly envy the SWProle. It ends in tragedy.

Perhaps I can comfort myself with the idea that it was always so. There are some letters from the reign of Louis XIV where a lady of the court ventured to see the humble villagers, only to find a village woman in a dress that would cost about $40,000 in today’s money, and herself in rags by comparison.

In the end, will it all end by guillotine?

Dramatic in my thirst,
Monsieur le Baron