Tuesday 17 September 2024
Luxury Mendacity
As so many of us know, a problem of our time is a governing elite which defines itself by absurd luxury beliefs. Absurd because they make no practical or economic sense or even because they make no sense whatever, because they are simply false. Yet still we create career pathways for the luxury mendacity of our governing elites.
For a number of decades we have created a stream of intelligent, well educated, ambitious, socially competent but untalented people by expanding university education. How does this stream of people fulfil their ambitions without taxing the talents they don’t have? For the amoral among them, a career in mendacity may beckon.
For a number of decades we have also created a complex network of taxpayer-dependent semi-sinecures within an equally complex network of taxpayer dependent organisations. Quangos, NGOs, regulatory bodies, think tanks, charitable foundations, research institutes and pressure groups are just some of them. How do they find people to fill their executive positions? By attracting well-qualified, socially adroit people looking for a congenial career in taxpayer dependent bodies. If mendacity is part of the culture – no problem.
These two broad features of modern life have left us with career pathways we would never have planned. Pathways for a governing class based on mendacity, but not accidental or planned mendacity. A chicken and egg mendacity where people attracted to elite career paths are temperamentally suited to the useless organisations which hatched those same career paths.
Career paths for intelligent, well educated, ambitious but untalented people. Not careers promising enormous wealth, but easily enough to be secure, unaffected by the wider consequences of mendacious incompetence. People with the social skills to join a governing elite under the shelter and congenial protection of luxury mendacity.
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7 comments:
So true... and yet it is not always mendacity but often 'spin'. Spin by presenting only the 'good' or by providing a distraction.
It's an easy trap to fall into when telling people of failures. You avoid confrontation by minimising the difficulties and your audience often wishes to avoid confrontation too and will let the 'spin' slide by as a matter of social or business etiquette. Been there, done that.
Quite how we as a society break out off this compulsion to be 'nice' I don't know, and yet being 'nice' encourages the attacks on free speech and the reluctance to criticise foolish or nasty people.
In my youth (Old Gaffer pontificating) I was told not to use the word 'nice' as it had no meaning. Just goes to show... something.
I think the issues have become sharper and more urgent, as new luxury beliefs have emerged. One of the important points Rob Henderson makes is how luxury beliefs are not just about virtue-signalling and belonging - they are actually malign, harmful to those in the lower orders. A knowledge of the classics or high culture, or knowing how to dress in a certain way was pretty harmless other than excluding those of equal talent but lesser social capital. But "defunding the police", although a good idea if you live on a liberal campus or in a middle class area, is insanely dangerous for poorer people. The same applies to BLM, if the only black people you know are genial doctors and fellow professionals. And Net Zero will kill off the poor long before it affects those who are its shrill advocates. Our rich elite are generally more in favour of liberal drug laws, being soft on criminals, supporting Muslim politics, open borders, community care for mentally ill people, and banning cars.
Once you have paid them the crookgeld you'll never be rid of the crooks.
DJ - I remember advice about not using the word 'nice', but it has retained its uses pretty well, including sarcasm.
"yet being 'nice' encourages the attacks on free speech"
Yes, that seems to be a major problem, especially when those attacks are backed by powerful interests and it becomes 'nice' to submit. It also encourages attacks on our culture and even our economic interests. The pandemic should have been a warning and Net Zero another. Eventually nice people may stop being so nice when they finally see where it has taken them.
Sam - yes luxury beliefs are malign and harmful to those in the lower orders and that does seem to leave a problem with referring to them as "beliefs", as if they are somehow respectable but misguided.
The idea of luxury beliefs does capture the idea that not everyone can afford them, but not the malign or even downright wicked aspect which seems to have become more and more significant.
dearieme - I like "crookgeld". It is crooked, as well as everything else.
"a stream of intelligent, well educated, ambitious, socially competent but untalented people". Compare David Cameron (to whom I never warmed.)
(i) intelligent? Yes, I'd think so. (ii) Well educated? No, I think not - well credentialed though. But his time at Oxford wasn't spent mastering the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or reflecting on Shakespeare's insights into humans and their societies, or wrestling with Greek or Sanskrit; it was spent on that dilettante's degree, PPE. (iii) Ambitious? Evidently. (iv) Socially competent? Presumably. (v) Talented: no - the only talent I've ever heard attributed to him is a good memory.
Dreadful bloody oik, in fact.
dearieme - yes, as soon as he made it to PM, Cameron came across as someone who shouldn't have made it to the top, but merely confirmed that the rot had set in.
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