Luxury Malice

As an obvious follow-on from the Luxury Mendacity post, we also have luxury malice. It is not easy to explain Net Zero by technical ignorance, money and fashionable mendacity. Social malice is in there too. If ruling elites attract our contempt, it would be foolish to think it isn’t reciprocated.

We have a governing elite which defines itself by absurd luxury beliefs, but an important factor within those beliefs is fashionable malice one social class exhibits towards another. The word ‘exhibits’ is not chosen lightly, the glinting threads of malice within our UK ruling elites are not hidden.

As in the earlier post, it is worth remembering those well-educated, ambitious people streaming through a university education. There is social ambition in there, and for the amoral among them, the advantages of quietly fashionable, unobtrusive social malice may have its attractions. People do raise themselves from a bed of envy and ambition towards the vastly more nourishing culture of superior social malice. Always have.


The drab street was everywhere; and at the street-corners mean-faced men preached lies, envy and malice.
Arthur Morrison – Fiddle O’Dreams (1913)


Until the glittering possibility of social promotion beckons and –


I am filled by the holy malice of chastisement.
Victor Hugo - The Man Who Laughs (1869)


Now we have career paths for well educated, ambitious but untalented and remarkably unpleasant people. People with the social skills to join a governing elite under the shelter of a fat thumb on the scales of justice plus that little extra - luxury malice.