Radical Humility: a Case for Reinvigorated Elitism
Emancipate your soul from the tyranny of the mediocre majority and embrace your own God-given excellence
Be nice, be kind, if you don't have anything to say don't say it at all, share, be a team player, do your best, teamwork makes the dream work... blah blah blah. If
you received a public education at all in the last thirty-odd years you were no doubt inundated with such platitudes designed to socialize you away from any displays of individuality and to align yourself with group cohesion. Notwithstanding the necessary socialization required of children to iron out the legitimate expressions of pointless and antisocial selfishness, this collective serum of niceties has only served to be a wet blanket for the development of the highest calling any individual can pursue in life: the pursuit of fulfilling one's true potential.
At first blush, this may sound like a more erudite version of the platitudes I seem to be taking aim at: 'Just be yourself', 'follow your dreams', 'Reach for the stars,' and other milk toast sentiments of that ilk. It is, however, very different. Statements of that kind are couched within a set of prescribed outcomes, variably differing depending on one's socioeconomic status, but generally within a range of predetermined criteria for what success will look like. One may be allowed to dream of being a basketball player, a singer, an author, etc. but the adults that the youth is reporting these dreams to will unconsciously shape just exactly what kind of 'dream' one is allowed to achieve.
So even in the cases where our society purportedly allows for the pursuit of individual excellence, it is actually quite a constrained, generic vision of that excellence. In fact, it is contained within the greater sphere of corporate and bureaucratic auspices that dominate society today and have over the last fifty odd years.
What I have been describing, in rough sketch, is the enculturation process of the tyranny of the mediocre majority. This term comes, as far as I'm aware, from Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, but has no doubt been described in myriad other places and ways by other authors. It is not the phenomena of a tyrannical majority oppressing the flowering of individual of excellence that is new or worth writing about. Anyone from Socrates to Nietzsche would be a better place to look to for the most fulsome accounts of such travesties. No, instead it is the degree to which our society has pathologized the pursuit of individual expression and commodified all the horrendous outcomes from such pathologization in the guise of the very terms that one would expect to be trotted out in wholesale encouragement of such endeavors.
We are at a point now in Western history where the vast majority of our institutions, from the K-12, university, corporate, media and global NGO apparatuses, serve primarily to sever the connection between the individual and their soul (the thing that is God-given and pulls them forward on the grand adventure to become their full selves) in service of hyper-consumer capitalism. All, as previously mentioned in the guise of 'positivity', 'affirmation', and 'mental health'; thereby promulgating a mass gaslight of the entire society, especially the university-bound.
This is a particularly clever set of moves crafted and executed by the malicious and resentful intellectuals who laid the groundwork for the society we now find ourselves in. By charging the unoccupied hill of Academia post World War 2, they have poisoned the fountain by which our society nourishes itself through Orwellian inversions of genuinely vital language and values. They did this subtly and over time, in the manner of the proverbial boiling frog.
We now find ourselves, those who somehow have persevered through the soul-crushing indoctrination of the reeducation apparatus, drastically outmaneuvered by a multi-lateral front of institutions that have a well-entrenched defense system manned by legions of bureaucrats or bureaucrat-like petite-bourgeois. They occupy the cultural high ground. They are not great at the actual jobs they purport to do, most often they're not even good at them. They are great at Byzantine politicking and corporate rhetorical theatre of the real. It's not a good situation.
Doubly so, and doubly clever on behalf of the malignant sophists, is the inescapable fact that we, Western society, need our institutions desperately in a world populated with communist, authoritarian, and draconian regimes. It is gravely risky to fight an internal civil war of such a degree required to right the ship whilst the enemies are at the gates.
The entrenched mandarins of the mediocre majority know and leverage this against individuals who would call them out. This is why their calls for 'unity' and to 'FolLoW tHe ScIenCe" are so effective with the sheeple. It also explains their mock incredulity at the massive drop in trust in institutions. It leverages the herd instinct inherent to patriotism against itself, weaponizing the virtue of loyalty to one's nation, community, family, etc. because they are just the good shepherds tending to their flock. They are outward-facing globalists, dealing with the realpolitik on the international stage - unruly peons expressing opinions counter to their aims merely serve to undermine their credibility with their sleek Davos crowd friends. They are deeply hurt that the animals they're charged caring for with would bite the hand that feeds them. But, in their unending generosity, they are willing to forgive if one simply gets back in line, shuts up, and forgets about their abuses. Play your part - teamwork, remember?
Another clever piece of strategy is that there is a grain of truth in their whining. Nationalist, reactionary chauvinism can be deeply destructive and can turtle down to the worst cases of bigotry and evil capable of the human species. But they cry wolf and muddle the waters, labeling all expressions of pushback against their technocapitalist dystopian nightmare with the slew of 'isms' were now all sick to death of. Thankfully, like the childhood fable, the crying wolf technique does eventually render itself ineffective.
These dynamics are the cultural mainstream that everyone is either swimming with or against. You either go along with the global technocapitalist hellscape (hey, maybe you win it big and become a CEO or at least lay claim to your comfortable, rounded, homogenous urbane existence) or you become an 'other'. An adherent of a heinous 'ism' or a genus of some distinct 'phobe' or a conspiracy theorist, etc. We all know the playbook by now.
However, we are now at an impasse. The foundations of the perverse meta-culture are now being laid bare. Many of the highest sitting mandarins can no longer disguise their ineptitude. Reality is catching up to them. For example:
The strategic imbecility of the withdrawal from Afghanistan (it had to be done, but maybe, maybe, just maybe could have been done better and not like Vietnam?).
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/US-Withdrawal-from-Afghanistan.pdf
The thorough undermining of the discipline of academic psychology.
Joanna Moncrieff
Edward Diener
Jacob Stern
(^TLDR is that the replication crisis and fallacy of the Serotonin hypothesis are two massive failures of institutional psychology that will go unpunished and big pharma will still make billions of dollars from medicalized, commercialized trauma.)
Pornographic content being passed as 'queer affirmation' and 'civil rights' by library associations is being seen for what it is, despite the intellectualized sophistry being trotted out to shame those who would dare question the emperor's lack of clothes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBhy_vlgKS4
Inflation has increased 2.35% on average over the last 10 years, rising 4.7% last year alone. CPI rose 3.7% over the past year, 10.6% of which was due to energy cost increase. This decrease in dollar purchasing power and increase in prices is a direct result of Biden policy - domestic energy and foreign policy. These decisions are natural choices of the decision tree propagated by the institutional Borg.
Contributors to The Borg Collective, Star Trek Wiki
The obvious draconian and irrational policies enacted federally and in many states by the US government and most of the world are hardly worth explicating here because they are so patently removed from reality and clearly technocratic power grabs. Their chief mascot, exemplar champion of the institutional Borg - Tony Fauci, said it all when he said this:
When one truly grasps the breadth and depth of institutional failure to allow such disasters and blatant lies to be openly spread and acted upon without consequences, it can lead to profound despair.
I have certainly wrestled with such feelings that have led to many dark days and long walks. However, in my search for fortitude and direction, I have found some solace and invigoration from those of the past. Particularly in practitioners of the empirical process of experimentation, otherwise known as Science, that the previously mentioned regime puppet claims to represent.
The book The Dream of the Enlightenment, by Anthony Gottlieb, offers readers a whirlwind tour of the lives and summary of the philosophies of the great men commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, etc.
In reading about these great men, and the profound ideas they set into motion that forever and drastically changed the world, it is quite clear that they NEVER acted from inside institutions. That is to say, their methods of making ends meet whilst promulgating revolutionary ideas that upset the status quo did not come from the contemporary organs of sense-making. The closest affiliation some of these men had to mainstream power were relationships of patronage - Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz and Spinoza for example. The rest were independently wealthy.
It is greatly edifying to note as well, that these men lived in a time when the Catholic Church and the various monarchies were the preeminent forces that actively and violently pursued censorship of ideas that undermined their orthodoxy and power. Not necessarily against the big names above, but more often against those less famous and more willing to enact various forms of enlightenment ideas in direct temporal conflict with contemporary power structures. These men had inquisitions and similar campaigns of cultural terror within living memory and even experience in some cases. Yet they still pursued their genius to it's own end.
They did not do so willy-nilly, come what may. On the contrary, they often did so in sober, subtle, or roundabout manners - careful to avoid too much backlash from authorities who would make them a public example. But they did, without a doubt, publish many works that drastically destabilized the entrenched, irrational status quo.
Their ideas would run their course over the ensuing couple of centuries in the pell-mell of history, manifesting in myriad revolutions successful or otherwise. The English, American, French, Napoleonic wars, Revolutions of 1848 and Russian. All various sires of enlightenment ideas wedded to popular political will.
What I take from all this history, and the lives of those men whose examples we most admire, is that it is a sobering and potentially harrowing life one may lead if one heeds this call. But it is eminently possible to be led well; with courage, faith, and success.
So in turn, we may take heart in looking around at our own times, and not despair about the mire we find ourselves in, but instead look around for branches to grasp and avenues to climb out of the muck.
What specifically may some of those means of escape be, on a tactical and strategic level?
On an individual strategic level, you can probably guess my take, but I'll spell it out. One must accept, philosophically, that we are in a time of dramatic societal stagnation. In turn, you also must accept the antidote to this is pursuing your own personal excellence. Once you've achieved this to a sufficient degree you must join forces with others doing the same thing. This is radical humility by definition. Acknowledging the immense social pressure to conform to the commodified status quo that would use you as a human battery, and working consistently against it to achieve independence through your own faculties.
On a collective strategic level, we must egress from institutions - starve them of brain power & capital. In turn, we need to build our own answers. E.G. :
, and Adam Popescu , and Peter Savodnik
Substack
On an individual tactical level, one must accept and learn the rules of the new games being played. Language, writ large, in the mainstream culture has been co-opted away from original and common meanings and weaponized to further the agenda of the technobureaucracy. Debating those who do not adhere to norms of good faith is highly fraught. One must study how to go about this effectively. Think of winning at your local school board or in a corporate HR hearing. Good resources:
James Lindsay
Further personal lindy tactics for sustained effort and the good life are getting physically stronger, improving your diet, getting offline, building local community, improving your relationship with family and spiritual connection, reading great books, and starting principled businesses to give you social freedom. Most of all, create beautiful, great things you deem necessary to the world.
If you find this advice at all worthy of heeding, be prepared, you will face pushback & your life will change. Yet, there is absolutely no need to become some kind of resentful Nietzschean Uber-mensch, glorying in one's lonely superiority. This is in fact a dreadful cul-de-sac that plays right into the technocrats hands, further atomizing you and everyone else who indulges in this trope. Neither is it inevitable that one becomes a ludicrous, though sometimes hilarious, crank like Alex Jones.
You can be a decent, kind, loving, joyful human being and yes, still be excellent. But you will be bombarded with myriad enforcers of the prescribed mediocrity. Prepare to do battle, but do so with justice and humility. Do not become reactive, do not take things personally. Simply go about your business speaking and acting out the truth with love, as your sacred task, gifted to you as often as circumstances present themselves. The cumulative effect of many walking this path will get us to where we need to be.
In short; joyfully exercise self-dignity.
We are at a societal inflection point, the cusp of some kind of world-historical revolution that will be written about in future textbooks. It is time to gird yourself and go about becoming an agent for good by pursuing the full manifestation of your soul in the world. Become a true revolutionary; emancipate yourself from the mediocre majority and radically commit to being excellent in the way God intended you to be.