I have been remiss in my reading. While I’ve been boning up on our society’s Founding Fathers with The Founders Constitution and other works, I’ve still missed a lot in my catch-as-catch-can autodidacticism over the years. Jerry Pournelle points to Jose Ortega y Gasset’s 1930, The Revolt of the Masses and includes this among the material he excerpts:
It is illusory to imagine that the mass-man of to-day will be able to control, by himself, the process of civilization. I say process, and not progress. The simple process of preserving our present civilization is supremely complex, and demands incalculably subtle powers. Ill-fitted to direct it is this average man who has learned to use much of the machinery of civilization, but who is characterized by root-ignorance of the very principles of that civilization.
The command over the public life exercised today by the intellectually vulgar is perhaps the factor of the present situation which is most novel, least assimilable to anything in the past. At least in European history up to the present, the vulgar had never believed itself to have “ideas” on things. It had beliefs, traditions, experiences, proverbs, mental habits, but it never imagine itself in possession of theoretical opinions on what things are or ought to be. To-day, on the other hand, the average man has the most mathematical “ideas” on all that happens or ought to happen in the universe. Hence he has lost the use of his hearing. Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary? There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding. There is no question concerning public life, in which he does not intervene, blind and deaf as he is, imposing his “opinions.”
Well… yes. Of course. And is it not even more true today than in 1930?
Gotta get it!
DENNIS:Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well, but you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up, will you. Shut up!
DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help! I’m being repressed!
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That’s what I’m on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn’t you?
Oh and sounds like a good book too…
Yeh, the socialist/communist view of aristocracy. But then, the Founders were elitists, designing a republican system of government that minimized the deleterious effects of excessive democracy Ortega y Gasset also noted.
The coasening of society overall is due largely to the Jacobinian assumptions of an utopian view of democracy?and assumption that the common man has an unique wisdom to contribute, when in fact, the commoner the man, the less he is likely to know and the poorer his reasoning capabilities must be.
I know, I know: it flies in the face of the modern/postmodern and post-postmodern ethos, but it makes it no less true, despite the idiocy of so many Academia Nuts and greedy, stupid wealthy folk today. (Indeed, most of the Academia nuts are seriously subliterate and the greedy wealthy are in many cases people with small talents and abilities who have been enriched by a foolish, debased common public.)
I submit it is a direct effect of the excessive wealth of our society compounded by man’s natural greed and laziness and exacerbated by a quasi-liberal instinct that seeks to eliminate the consequences of the individual’s own acts of stupidity, laziness or cupidity.
It’s a kind of reverse darwinism: the selection of the least fit.
*sigh*