Revolt of the Mass Minded Elites

Hard-working winners of a Darwinian global meritocracy, an atomized world ruled by The Triumph of the Individual

https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/our-revolting-elites

For Gabriel Marcel, Hernandez argues, the death of God "is not an abstract difficulty, but is a concrete historical and sociological fact of our moral evolution" that is produced by the materialistic functionalism of the problematic man's stance toward being. Accordingly, whether or not one is participating in the death of God is not a matter of one's belief. In fact, Hernandez suggests that theists who construe God as an object of knowledge have a special culpability for God's death since they not only promote an idea of God that plays directly into atheism but also "contribute to the problems facing humanity . . . by undermining the mystery that Marcel thinks underlies the relationship between God and humans" Further, Hernandez argues that, for Marcel, the way in which one responds to the death of God is the defining existential issue for all individuals. "Marcel's position," she writes,

is that for any given individual, regardless of their belief, the death of God presents an unavoidable moral obstacle that must be wrestled with in order for freedom (and then, moral responsibility and virtue) to be able to take hold. The obstacle of the death of God is not something that can be overcome; it is an existential dilemma that can only be struggled over and grappled with until, ultimately, one's life is defined by it. (p. 48)

The first step in the Marcelian ethical life, then, is to recognize one's own participation in the destruction of meaning and value embodied in the death of God. This participation is rooted in one's functional, materialist, and rationalist stance toward existence. Even if this destruction of meaning and value cannot be finally and definitively overcome, Hernandez argues, the lived struggle against it can form the basis for the creation of existential meaning.

Prescient social critic Christopher Lasch's 1996 book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, laid out a blueprint of social decay that continues to inform our descent into social disorder. Lasch excoriated our revolting elites for abandoning the foundations of social stability, upward mobility, the middle class and democracy in their race to enrich and insulate themselves in protected enclaves--neighborhoods, corporate suites, foundations and institutions--of fellow elites.

In Lasch's analysis, America's elites are revolting against the obligations imposed on traditional elites to nurture the foundational values that support democracy, national purpose, civic pride and a moral order that restrains narcissism and greed as a means of protecting opportunities for advancement from the pillage of the wealthy.

Lasch identified the ways in which globalization fosters elite pathologies. In his view, America's technocratic elites are a new class of symbolic analysts whose financial means "rest not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise."

Serving trans-national corporations, foundations and agencies, they have "more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications."

America's elite defines itself as the hard-working winners of a Darwinian global meritocracy, an atomized world ruled by The Triumph of the Individual: "the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts."

From this lofty perch, America's elite is disconnected from those still mired in the real-world economy they've left behind: in Lasch's words, the elite "betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence... Simultaneously arrogant and insecure, the new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension."

In Lasch's view, this revolt of the elites has reversed the source of social disorder from the masses to the elite: "Once it was the 'revolt of masses' that was held to threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western culture...Today it is the elites--those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate--that have lost faith in the values" that underpin a fair and vibrant social and economic order.

Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity

The Journal of Lingering Sanity is a reader-supported publication. We are beholden to truth not party.  “The time has come," the Journal said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings."