This is a follow-up to my previous article on social hierarchy and the poor.

It has puzzled me for years as to why the American leadership class prefers telescopic philanthropy to the domestic variety. The typical excuse that you will hear in person is that the government already takes care of the domestic poor, so their social betters have no further obligations to them.

Another excuse is that the relative ‘need’ overseas is that much greater. In Ivy League admissions, it has been known for at least a generation that a stint overseas performing charity work is well-regarded as a sign that you are not a grubby striver only gunning for a seat to grease your career.

Caring deeply about impoverished foreigners is actively selected for at the highest levels. And it is repeatedly impressed upon the young ‘leaders of tomorrow’ how important it is for them to internalize this belief and to signal their faith early and often to their fellows. The nature of this social custom tends to be opaque to American populists lower down the class ladder.

This habit, exemplified by Bill Gates’ foundation, takes the education and care of the foreign poor as its prime mission. The domestic poor are perceived to be primarily a governmental concern.

Tomorrow’s neocameralism today

Davos man already lives in an anarcho-capitalist utopia. It is just expensive to get in. Once you are in, however, governments become increasingly irrelevant. The middle lives in the bureaucratic ‘third solution’ — they must settled for ‘magnet schools’ or ‘charter schools.’ The dregs live under Communism. The above-dregs live under Glastnost-type Communism.

Working in the American government is déclassé — nearly unthinkable to anyone with better prospects. The only people who think that government officials are respectable sorts are unqualified to be government officials. Consultancies and investment perform much of real government work. These institutions hand officials and civil service bureaucracies completed plans for projects to be implemented by favored contractors.

If you want to look for neocameralism in the real world, it is already here. To the extent that the American government does much of anything, its job is to manage the American masses and prevent them from becoming too unruly. It is not clear where the government ends and where the financial institutions that manage it begin. We do, in some sense, already have a private government: it’s just that the corporations with the most influence are willing to use socialism as a strategic tool to suit their ends.

They are still private — after all, the mass majority of the country opposed TARP and other TA** programs, but they were still passed — handily displaying their immunity to democracy in that area.

They do not realize their errors in thinking because they are rewarded financially for their intellectual errors — and the more flagrant their intellectual errors, the greater financial rewards that they gain (unless the wrong Treasury Secretary is in office when your firm needs to be bailed out).

The American leadership class has forgotten its obligations to its inferiors, which is why those inferiors are continually conspiring against it. They are rather blind to the danger that they are in, believing incorrectly that the state keeps them safe, and that by paying lip service to the ‘historically oppressed,’ they will be kept safe as they seek greater opportunities abroad in ’emerging markets.’

The superpower: not so super no more

As the international trade system enters chaos (the Americans just kicked Russia out of the G8), the EU begins to collapse, and national self-interest and security problems overwhelms the Anglo-American system of global trade, communication, and finance, we are entering a new stage of history that is catching most of the American leadership flat-footed. This is not something that the current or previous generation was trained or raised to expect, and few have the experience and education to adapt to a more local politics.

The Cathedral has trained entire cohorts of American leaders to believe that the world of the future is ‘global,’ and that they must learn to leverage ‘diversity’ (because they will be administrating international corporations that must make use of diverse teams of experts to succeed) and comparative advantage for a higher social mission that coincides with profit maximization as their legal and personal duty.

The Clintonian melding of Marxist dreaming and global fiat capitalism is the dog-vomit admixture of ideology that passes for elite thought in America. Its leaders are in barely-concealed panic.

And it’s becoming more obvious that there are probably more conspiracies than any one person can track to set various parties up in as plum positions as can be mustered when the former Pax Americana ceases to be neither Pax-ful nor American. What Taleb calls the ‘Soviet-Harvard delusion’ is proving to have been just that.

Will historians look at the recent Crimean affair as comparable to the Suez crisis? As the US policy establishment backs down from armed conflict, Putin achieves one objective after another at minimal expense at the cost of the State Department’s flailing improvisational programs for ‘freedom’ promotion that involve sending billions of dollars to Al Qaeda and various low-rent eastern European fascist LARPers.

Conditions are shifting faster than the majority of the American nonklematura are capable of reacting to. But many will react. And it is difficult to tell what the coalitions will look like and where exactly the splits will be.

The great plan of the American leadership class is coming unraveled at the center, and on the edges. The great temptation for many is to ride the waves of popular rage to destroy certain narrow elements of the existing elite class.

You can see this in the react-o-sphere with half-earnest, half-joke calls to ‘burn Harvard.’ Perhaps it is not so much of a joke, as the Weathermen and their fellow-travelers, who did bomb universities all over the country, have since gained hold of many important American spiritual institutions (namely the educational establishment).

Once the American foreign policy establishment completely loses the capability to project force internationally, we should expect different factions of elites to begin fighting for control over the remnants of the United States. Without a credible external enemy, infighting is the usual result.

The Right should resist the temptation to cannibalize the country by giving in to the easy populist pandering and quick fortunes to be earned through looting. Instead, the project must be one of social and economic construction. There will be a pressing need to re-sort the former United States into separate nations that are both stable and productive. If not all of them can be made stable and productive, then buffer states must be established around the geographic sections that are not.

When the globalist ideology fails in an undeniable and dramatic manner, there will be an immediate political need to transition formal power from the previous state to the new ones.

I strongly doubt that it will be terribly easy for the current generation of Davos Man to continue flitting about across borders as they have been. The return of nationalism and international distrust will force those of us who have most internalized the characteristic North-European ethos of universalism will need to recover our sense of civic obligation — or we will fall to civil war and barbarism.

The message that we must get across to the current elite is that there is a way to abdicate, to back down from their un-salvageable situation, that permits them to preserve some of their face and some part of their capital. The tendency of people out of power in democratic and democratizing states who would like to be in power is to attempt to use the masses as a weapon against their rivals. As the French revolution should teach any student of history, this strategy is too dangerous to be worth using.

Contemporary reminders of this folly can be seen in Egypt, the Ukraine, Syria, and Venezuela. Once unleashed, ‘the people’ are a deadly force that do not stop killing until killing is no longer possible.

The West is in a crisis surrounding a general collapse in social trust. Rather than focusing too much on the macro political situation, I would rather explore the consequences of this at the personal level.

Unlike when my grandfathers were working, or when my father worked, it is common for employees to distrust their bosses and their co-workers. There is no sense that the company exists for the long term benefits of its stake-holders. At a far lower level of technology and gross profitability, employees even at the lower level could expect to advance their careers within the same corporation for their entire lives. My grandfather was not an executive — he was a simple accountant at General Electric — but his retirement package ultimately made him a multimillionaire. He lived modestly for most of his life, did not work long hours, and raised two children.

Before the 1970s and after the collapse of the New Deal, it appeared for a brief time that norms supporting property rights had returned to the fore within American culture. The public culture was anti-Communist until the 1960s ran their course. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover suppressed domestic left-wing factions until completely collapsing in the late 1960s. By the 1970s and Nixon’s resignation, the organized subversive left had achieved complete control over American institutions of cultural influence.

The 1945-1972 era was a brief interlude during which the left regrouped as public cooperation with the Soviet Union became illegal. In 1971, Nixon severed the last link with the gold standard, and the great inflation of the 1970s combined with the collapse in public order demolished general social trust.

This was the time when many of today’s baby boomers came of age — during a time of cultural confusion and economic chaos. The inflation destroyed many poorer families, and created a new class of hyper-corporate ‘yuppies’ that took their place. While apologists will tend to say that the yuppies were just ‘better’ than the people who came before them, in reality they were just better at getting the freshly-printed greenbacks than their more sluggish brothers and sisters.

The post-1970s showed that hard work does not pay, because property rights are not secure. What does pay is to be a corrupt oligarch, to divorce using lawyers to loot your family, or to be a canny speculator.

Due to continual inflation, workers lose out in a systematic way to capital, who have superior social and financial connection to the apparatus that creates new money. Merit in actual market production becomes socially déclassé, because, in nominal terms, it is much less valuable than finagling access to unlimited credit or speculating based on superior access to information and superior execution speed on the markets.

America is not a good place to build a factory because property rights for factory owners are insecure. If you build a factory, dozens of investigators will descend upon your operation, guided by a domestic intelligence agency called a newspaper, to impede your ability to run your business.

In China, by contrast, property rights may be contingent upon approval by the state, but it is a clearer binary. If you cease to be protected by a political master, you will be executed. It is a more clear cut and honest tyranny. There is the Party and the military, and perhaps some informal crime, but it is at least a little more predictable.

In the United States, you can be looted by a panoply of government agencies, ‘nonprofits,’ legal firms, angry business associates, employees, and wives. The ever expanding legal code provides infinite pretexts for depriving you of your property.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that social trust has declined as each of the new (still-living) generations has come of age:

To maintain large institutions of any kind, social trust is crucial. It’s common to read comments and blog posts by dissatisfied employees who no longer trust their bosses, and by bosses who do not believe that their employees are trustworthy.

A large part of this owes to diversity of gender, race, and religion: it is not even really possible for people from foreign cultures to partake in social trust building rituals that are culture-bound properly.

Asians and Europeans don’t drink the same kinds of alcohol and have wildly differing tolerance levels. They do not have the same mannerisms even after a generation of Westernization. Indians have a complex set of relations to one another that are completely opaque to Europeans who aren’t steeped in their culture. A competent manager at handling Indian teams going to struggle in leading Europeans, even if he’s de-racinated.

This is something openly acknowledged even in publications like the Harvard Business Review: there is no human resources department on the planet that will not say that ‘diversity is a challenge.’ They will not acknowledge, however, that it is a cost that tends to have questionable benefits, and usually results in increased risks of project failures. The biggest diversity problem of all is the mixture of men and women within companies: women simply do not have the same social incentive structure as men do. Attempting to integrate the genders has resulted in an unprecedented drop in the male labor force participation rate.

While the statistics are undisputed by the ‘responsible’ experts, there is almost no acknowledgment in the respectable press of the obvious solution to this social problem. This makes the educated consensus a brittle one. America’s elite class can either accept Soviet-level stagnation and the humiliation that comes with that, or they can capitulate to reality. It is clear that, at present, they prefer to maintain the lies at enormous cost to the general public.

Pew attempts to spin the declining trust in saying that Millenials are also far more ‘optimistic’ about the future. However, without trust, there is no future worth living in.

Modern democratic culture is continually self-referential in a short time frame. Each work refers to something that came immediately before it, taking care to avoid alluding to something that the audience might not be familiar with.

It is this way because the writers and production staff, even those that certainly had some required courses in the classics and the canon, know that their characters are speaking to an audience that isn’t familiar with those or the bible.

Christopher Hitchens hoped that organized atheism could replace religion as a source of morality with literature. But literature, as even the dead Hitchens brother admitted, is rooted in religious practice. It makes sense to conflate literature with religion, but it makes no sense at all to pretend that one can exist without another.

As religious practice has become illegal in the West through the back door of anti-discrimination law, and pressures that are political, financial, and social have come to bear, literature too has become a ‘gritty’ husk that does little but revel in depravity and place hope in imaginary supercreatures to rescue a hopelessly degenerate civilization from a obfuscated existential threat.

The libertarian in me wants to make a point about how interest rates are really important and that this is just the sort of thing that happens when you suppress them through state policy. This is true. But the culture that wants to do those things is the prime mover in this.

Culture continues to become shallower and shallower over time as it becomes more impossible to build social walls that exclude, that permit quiet, and prevent interference from political commissars (which is what professors and journalists have become).

Without a meaningful cultural and artistic tradition, the democratic West is killing itself: indeed, most modern literature consists of extended odes to suicide and self-annihilation, especially those of the 20th century. Let no one say that writers have no influence! They have had a baleful one!

Modern movies cost more to make in nominal terms than ever before, but are remembered for shorter and shorter periods of time. They are shown in more movie theaters to more people in more countries than ever before, but are more forgettable than ever. Will historians even be able to pick out which ‘Spider-Man’ reboot was which? It’s not likely.

We have constructed a rapidly perishable culture of spoiled, unhealthy people that use advanced technology to avoid understanding their own weakness and depravity. It is impossible to speak about the most dire issues in public using honest terms without provoking the shrill rage of the ‘disabled’ masses, each of whom has a special list of ‘illnesses’ and traits for which xe is oppressed.

It is a culture that is sliding happily into Soviet-level mediocrity, too terrified to make any changes that might offend a sacred group, at a time when the academy invents a new sacred group every other week.