Protecting the Elites: The Belief Barrier
Mixing Peter Turchin's Cliodynamics with Rob Henderson's Luxury Beliefs
I was recently watching a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Rob Henderson, in which they discussed Rob Henderson’s ideas about luxury beliefs. His idea is, briefly summarized, is that elites can no longer distinguish themselves from the masses by their material goods. Instead they distinguish themselves by adopting beliefs that run counter to the masses. Some of these woke beliefs are so ridiculous that they threaten the integrity of society and cause misery among the lower classes. An example would be removing and demoralizing law enforcement officers via defund the police.
When thinking about this I was struck by a convergence between ideas about elites. Rob Henderson comes from psychology, but there is another person who has been predicting chaos in 2020, and that would be Peter Turchin. Turchin is an interesting fellow, trying to use his insights from data science, population dynamics and entomology to create a more mathematical way of interpreting history that he calls Clionomics. His explanation of this current troubled time is that we are currently suffering from an overpopulation of elites, linked to a decrease in living standards and overextended governmental finances. For those concerned about the national debt and the massive expansion of it since Covid-19 hit, you might find his books interesting. If you want to read more of his theories and data, the book Ages of Discord is a good start.
During the conversation between Jordan Peterson and Rob Henderson, I noticed something that I want to explore further here. In Peter Turchin’s work, elites are described as extractive. In other words, they survive off of excess production from the laboring classes, and consume that while either adding value or managing the production in some way. Examples of this would include investment bankers, lawyers, politicians, and so on. So what happens when too many elites are running around society? They start to fight over the production, because there is only so much that they can extract. As societies grow more productive in the modern age, there is more room for elites, but there is still a point where there are too many, especially among the top level. There are only so many bank CEOs, owners of huge corporations like Twitter and Google, and only so many seats in the House, Senate, and White House that one can have. Only so many people can have elite jobs in Washington, the rest are just lower-level bureaucrats. And so they start to fight for control of the reigns of power, and in doing so they over-extract from the peons below them, which immiserates the peons. This often takes the form of decreases in standard of living, loss of social mobility, higher housing prices, higher taxes… This causes turbulence in society, and Turchin’s models predicted chaos in 2020 and for an extended period thereafter.
However, this led me to a question. What does the elite ruling class do to try to protect itself when they are getting close to having too many elites?
Here is where Henderson’s work may have some predictive value. In the past, elites ruled by amassing money, and by adopting elite mannerisms that the lower-class would find difficult to navigate. An example would be the elaborate social codes of upper-class Victorian life. Pass the fork the wrong way, not learn the absurd art of the fox hunt, and you were socially ostracized among the upper crust. Have the correct manners, know when not to ask if this is a mistress or wife, and your sins were forgiven after a tour of the Continent on remittance.
So does this apply today? Well, manners and accents are standardizing a bit thanks to TV. People all, no matter their strata, get to watch the same shows, talk about them at work, and whatnot. There may be variation between groups in what you CHOOSE to watch, but you have the OPPORTUNITY to find meaning in Downton Abbey or American’s Got Talent as you choose, depending on which channel you go for. It makes it hard to have elite barriers. But beliefs, well, those can really stratify you.
Furthermore, having such odd beliefs doesn’t just separate one, it makes it difficult to survive outside an elite environment. If you have a belief that, for example, working hard and being on time is a marker of whiteness, other people will have trouble working with you. If you constantly preach about those beliefs, people will avoid you. The only way that you can do well is if you are capable of living within a group of elites. ones who have similar beliefs, and ones who are capable of dealing with the incredible hypocrisy involved in them.
The transition cost, however, is high. In order to be able to live within an intersectional peer group, you must be able to manage the following (this is not nearly a complete list):
You must put in the effort to manage intersectional thinking and understand how power dynamics work in the woke system.
You must give up on reasonable dialogue, discussion, and argumentation. As James Lindsay has shown in New Discourses, the woke seek not these things, nor do they tolerate them. Agree and submit, or be destroyed.
You must then be able to determine which of the woke power dynamics are most relevant to the group you are with, so you can parrot those. This is a process of self-abnegation, because you must be constantly listening and trying to understand the ‘prophets,’ or leaders of your social circle, to determine what they find objectionable.
You must be constantly on the lookout for transgressions against those dynamics. This is exhausting, because you are going to be constantly scanning the actions and behaviors of others to determine if they are micro-aggressions, if they transgress in any way the behaviors that you should be seeing.
You must ALSO be monitoring your own behavior, such that YOU do not transgress those new norms you are learning. This is extremely tricky, because what if you trangress? How do you atone? Do you hope that nobody notices? And what if you did something several years ago that was ‘problematic?’ What do you do about that?
Not only must you apologize for past behaviors, you need to watch out for future accusations. The landscape of woke is always changing. New genders are being added, nomenclature is changed and then the change is called out. So you have to be constantly wary and re-examining and atoning for your past, even though when you said it, it was fine by the standards of woke then.
Atonement - you must adopt a constant posture of atonement for your own imagined sins against wokeness, but you can also mask them by constantly calling out others for theirs. In other words, you must demonstrate piety. This may involve calling out former friends for their behavior, which you are encouraged to do. You may be required to reflect and report on this to your social circle, to show constant progress. You may also need to make up bad behavior from people, often non-woke friends, or white male friends who are woke. You may need to put them on a list, at great cost to them.
You will likely need to cut ties with your former life, after all, they are engaged in problematic behaviors. This removes your support, and is usually replaced by support of the woke new friends you are trying to make. If this sounds like a cult, you may be right. Certainly there have been reports of people turning against family and friends, reporting them, breaking ties with them, and so on. Abigail Shrier has mentioned this in the trans context, but others do it in the feminist context.
Let’s think about some of these steps. Not only do you need to change your way of thinking, but you need to start constantly analyzing what you did in the past, you need to constantly look for transgressions in yourself and others, and you need to constantly scan for whatever new thing has entered the woke ideology and mindset. This is stressful, and only the leaders, the trendsetters in the ideology, are mostly immune to the change and illogic of it. The followers, what might be called the nouveau woke, are constantly trying to keep up with a dizzying set of changes, to mindset, to ideology, to behavior, and must cope with a dangerous set of social pressures. They may have to cut themselves off from their family and friends, and lose most of their sources of support and identity. And with it all comes the constant threat that, if they do not comply with every one of these constantly changing behaviors, they will be canceled, and lost the respect of the society they are trying to enter.
Those who are born into the upper class, the elites who set the trends, are much more immune from cancellation. They set the trends, they gain forgiveness by promising to do more work, they are protected. But those who try to join their class, for them this is much more difficult. A lot of these behaviors, these woke mindsets and habits, are not healthy. You are teaching yourself to create Cognitive Distortions and constantly ruminate on them. Woke thinking requires a number of habits that are anathema according to cognitive behavioral therapy, including mindreading, fortune-telling, all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, over-generalizing, shoulding, and labeing. These are thought patterns found in those with anxiety and depression, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was designed to STOP people from doing them in order to TREAT their anxiety and depression. Furthermore, cutting yourself off from social support is a great way to make mental illness worse.
To sum up, I don’t think that these woke beliefs are simply to separate the elite from the herd. They may actually function as a glass ceiling to prevent competition and keep the lower classes in their places. Try to join us elites and you become isolated and mentally ill. How’s THAT for a barrier to entry?
Conceptualizing class stratification
1. Is this cycle similar to the MacLeod life cycle of the firm? How could the Elite be bloated on top when it is the Gentry middle that becomes overproduced? https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
2. If not, Is "Elite Overproduction" really Gentry self-delusion? Or is the three-layer system not applicable to the theory of Peter Turchin overall? https://danco.substack.com/p/michael-dwight-and-andy-the-three
3. Is this principle universal across stratified cultures and organizations? https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2020/04/three-layers-in-brief.html
4. Can this explain the increased proportions of minorities in critical times of any social movements? (citation of Graeber in https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/movements-are-always-a-distorted)
Conceptualizing mental health
1. It is possible that CBT can't cure this problem, and that social support should come first https://hoarse.substack.com/p/cbt-is-dumb
2. Falsely manufactured communities are no different from cults (see Circling) https://graymirror.substack.com/p/circling-and-nerd-society https://graymirror.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-circling-fashion-and