Does America Need an Aristocracy?

[Metamorph]

Welp, if you hold OP opinion, all the major reasons not to be a nietz fanboi are virtually obliterated.


On average I'd think the number of people who have to fear being totally obsolesced by machines or beaten into lifelong despair and alienation by a starving job market and toxic corporate culture far outweigh the minority of cancer scientists who get...rocks thrown at them or whatever......for some reason.....

squark never expressly agreed, disagreed, or said she had an opinion at all though. She just expressed some degree of sympathy to the viewpoint, since she's probably pretty close to a cancer scientist who got a rock thrown at her since she actually works as an environmental scientist and Americans like metaphorically and occasionally literally throwing rocks.

[Grendel]

squark never expressly agreed, disagreed, or said she had an opinion at all though. She just expressed some degree of sympathy to the viewpoint, since she's probably pretty close to a cancer scientist who got a rock thrown at her since she actually works as an environmental scientist and Americans like metaphorically and occasionally literally throwing rocks.

No, I mean the idea you're suggesting is freaky. I don't see how you could think any overt aristocracy could possibly be "good" if you already have a problem with the middle-class, who themselves still have some but less exploitative power than an elite class would.


I mean, the Horse Metaphor is good for debunking a few things.....but it doesn't account for the behavior of the de facto corporate aristocrats. Because there's solid evidence out there that corporate culture is designed to make people more miserable to profit, and keep them economically insecure and exploitable even when providing for them might be mutually beneficial.

[Metamorph]

No, I mean the idea you're suggesting is freaky. I don't see how you could think any overt aristocracy could possibly be "good" if you already have a problem with the middle-class, who themselves still have some but less exploitative power than an elite class would.


I mean, the Horse Metaphor is good for debunking a few things.....but it doesn't account for the behavior of the de facto corporate aristocrats. Because there's solid evidence out there that corporate culture is designed to make people more miserable to profit, and keep them economically insecure and exploitable even when providing for them might be mutually beneficial.

I think competing standards of elitism would cancel out the negative aspects of either individually, and I think it's intellectual cowardice that, when Americans give a list of better countries than ours on various metrics, they're willing to adopt foreign education systems and foreign economic systems even when they associate them with suicide and genocide, but not consider foreign systems of social ranking even while acknowledging we do have a system of social ranking already and while thinking inequality of outcome is desirable based on their impressions of human nature.

While handing out titles might not be the answer and might even be a catastrophe in practice, I can't help but be reminded of the situation in American literature. Most of the world doesn't take American literature seriously and Americans don't take most of the rest of the world's literature seriously and the conflict shows itself exactly in Americans judging literature based on market value and ignoring literary prizes while other countries follow various prizes rather than book sales. People also refer to political movements around the world as "populism," especially if they're problematic. We clearly need an adrenaline shot of elitism to the heart even if aristocracy is as ridiculous as it sounds, which I don't think it is since entitled aristocrats don't all seem like a bunch of horrible people to me.

The "middle class" is not actually a middle class. It's an upper class with bourgeoisie values, which has existed since the bourgeoisie was recognized as a group. I don't relate to bourgeoisie values that threaten to consume everything else like some kind of metastatic tumor and only value things according to what they cost and sell for on a commodity market. I don't want to live in a world controlled solely by merchants and laborers, yet I'm given no other option. Even if my education, connections, and skills wouldn't give me a title, I'd still rather live in a world that recognizes better and worse and strives for the good rather than one that sweats like a horse and runs like a horse but only produces horseshit.

Here’s Why Almost Everyone Thinks They Are Part of the Middle Class

[Grendel]

I think competing standards of elitism would cancel out the negative aspects of either individually, and I think it's intellectual cowardice that, when Americans give a list of better countries than ours on various metrics, they're willing to adopt foreign education systems and foreign economic systems even when they associate them with suicide and genocide, but not consider foreign systems of social ranking even while acknowledging we do have a system of social ranking already and while thinking inequality of outcome is desirable based on their impressions of human nature.

While handing out titles might not be the answer and might even be a catastrophe in practice, I can't help but be reminded of the situation in American literature. Most of the world doesn't take American literature seriously and Americans don't take most of the rest of the world's literature seriously and the conflict shows itself exactly in Americans judging literature based on market value and ignoring literary prizes while other countries follow various prizes rather than book sales. People also refer to political movements around the world as "populism," especially if they're problematic. We clearly need an adrenaline shot of elitism to the heart even if aristocracy is as ridiculous as it sounds, which I don't think it is since entitled aristocrats don't all seem like a bunch of horrible people to me.

Foreign social rankings are going digital in a way civilization has never really been able to deal with before. We've never had a revolt against something like Zhima Credit before; we don't know that it'll even be possible to back out from once we've dipped in its waters.
I'd argue the computational dimension of a system like that means that humanity will never have a semblance of freedom again once the entire world has accepted such a system.


If you value true biodiversity of thought, and you don't want an overt, institutionally-sponsored digital credit system like that (NOT an implicit one like facefuckbook or all the other crap from Silicon Valley, I'm talking the perfected, full-metal Legalist versions from the East) squelching out all other systems the world over with its monolithy, then I'd think our first priority should be preventing things like Zhima Credit from taking root over here, not paying attention to the number of annoying europeans who hate Catcher in the Rye for whatever reason.