the real elitists

I’ve been obsessed for a while with the idea of the “elite” because I think it’s one of those concepts that, in a U.S. context, often gets used exactly backwards. I had a drunken argument about this a few months back in which I yelled “the elites are sleeping in their cars!” My interlocutor mistook me: “that’s right, the elites, they need to be paying more attention to regular Americans, who are sleeping in their cars!” I bellowed louder: “No, the elites you’re talking about, academics, adjunct professors, they’re the ones sleeping in their cars!!!”

The new elite in America is now the far right—except the far right is never elite, the far right is always butthurt about not being elite, in fact their entire political philosophy can be summed up as a state of being butthurt about not being elite (or as they say in France, ressentiment.) Curtis Yarvin, the so-called intellectual godfather of the far-right, was just granted a flattering New York Times profile in which he was photographed in brooding black leather and they didn’t make fun of him for going by the pen name “Mencius Moldbug” even once. And yet you can guarantee he’s still butthurt about perceived slights to his official status as an intellectual elite, because that’s what these guys are, and that’s what these guys do. If a Jane Austen scholar, sleeping in her car, were to disagree with Yarvin’s contention that the status of women in a Jane Austen novel (not the Regency period, but a work of fiction about the era) “actually seems kind of OK,” and therefore there’s no need for modern feminism—well that scholar would obviously be an elitist, part of the evil Cathedral trying to destroy America by actually reading and understanding Jane Austen, and what she was saying about the rights of women.

John Ganz and Max Read have both contended lately that we shouldn’t take Yarvin seriously, with Ganz calling Moldbug “behind the times” and not a serious influence on the groypers who are actually running the White House. Read argues that Yarvin may not be personally influential—i.e. groypers’ thought leader—as much as a representative of their ideology. I think this is closer to the truth: these guys don’t really read, after all, so they couldn’t be familiar with Moldbug’s work. And Moldbug himself doesn’t really read, either. Stripped of its intellectual pretense, of engaging with the monarchist Thomas Carlyle, of half-remembering novelists like Austen and Tolkien, the soul of Moldbuggery¹ doesn’t lie in its terminology (“neocameralism,” “NRx,” the destruction of the elite academic “Cathedral.”) Yarvin is just a forum guy; Moldbuggery is simply an extreme form of poster’s syndrome. The forum guy is the person who has read a few lines of something, and now thinks he knows everything. You’ve met him before; you’ve met him everywhere. He’s an expert on the economy, vaccines, food safety, child rearing, cultural criticism, crime, travel, climate change, ethics in video game journalism, “human biodiversity.” He’s amazing! He’s an autodidact, which is a word he looked up, which he thinks means that he reads a lot, which really means that he writes a lot. He’s certainly written more than he’s read. He may own at least one mug or T-shirt with the slogan: “I drink and I know things.”²

Yarvin happens to be one of the groypers that we know about, because Peter Thiel knows about him, and has given him money. The only way that any of these men ever stand out as rugged individuals, rather than as part of the groyper herd, is whether they’re already monied aristocrats. A recent Wired story about the chaos at the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) declined to name the 21 year olds that Elon Musk has put in charge over there, leading to speculation that they’re his nephews. It’s reasonable to wonder if they’re literal nepobabies—why else would Wired withhold the names of federal staffers at the tender ages of over eighteen? The true elite—the would-be natural aristocracy, the truly deserving, aren’t like those rude hardworking DEI civil servants with their earned degrees and their actual institutional knowledge. No, the true elite are so fragile that you can’t even talk about their widdle baby names and qualifications in the paper. They might get hurt.

It’s always been tough to write about this subject because the word “elite” has been backward and splintered for so long. The battle lines aren’t as cleanly drawn as we might like, either. The New York Times is the elitist paper, the paper of record: they love the elite. They love Curtis Yarvin; they love RFK Jr. They love do-nothing frauds; they love fame and emptiness. This isn’t all they’ve ever loved, of course, but they’ve always carved out a healthy space for it. Academia has often made space for it too, even as it’s also allowed hard and lovely and interesting ideas, while forcing many of the proponents of these same hard and lovely and interesting ideas to sleep in their cars. It’s always made room for the elites, by which of course they mean the true elites, the natural (rich, white, depraved) aristocracy. That many of the people running the country right now are the stupidest they’ve ever been, dumber than my dumbest cat,³ doesn’t matter very much to elite institutions, since it’s still the same show of fame and money and connections and family names. Supporting the Trump program, however, is an extremely bad idea for these elite institutions. “The Cathedral” shouldn’t open its gates to the barbarians, since the villains will never be sated, since they’ll always feel the butthurt ressentiment of not being good enough, because deep down they secretly know how dumb they are.

And speaking of stupidity, of elite institutions, of failures and barbarism, there have been some interesting excerpts circulating online from a biography of RFK Jr. Apparently, his Harvard application is rumored to have simply been his name, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” written on a sheet of paper. This may not be literally true, but it’s probably not far from the actual truth. He’s a Kennedy after all; he didn’t get into Harvard on his merits. RFK Jr. just told a congressional hearing that Black people don’t need to be on the same vaccine schedule as white people. He knows this because there was a single MMR study that showed a slightly different immune response in different populations, and he read a little about it once online, and therefore, etc. The study doesn’t argue what he’s arguing, and he has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about, and if he’s confirmed as HHS secretary he’ll get people killed, and his anti-vaccine advocacy already led to the deaths of at least 83 people in Samoa, but so what? He’s up for the job, and he’s a Kennedy. He eats brainworms, and he knows things.

I feel like what’s at stake in the RFK hearing, everywhere, isn’t just U.S. democracy and our health, and our precious institutions, but civilization itself. I keep thinking of It’s A Wonderful Life, specifically the scene where George Bailey is trying to explain that the bank’s money isn’t inside the bank, it’s in your house, and your house, and your house. Human knowledge isn’t inside my brain, it’s in your brain, and your brain, and your brain. I don’t know very much personally, except books and TV shows and how to make up fictional characters and some knitting patterns. But we all have our knowledge bases, and most of us also know that when our car breaks down we should go to the mechanic, and when we’re sick we should go to the doctor, etc. Because to believe anything else would be elitist. We operate under the assumption that people who have expertise in a subject probably know what they’re talking about. This is what civilization is and how it works: we rely upon each other to retain information and to perform tasks that we can’t manage alone. No man is an island of perfect knowledge and no house is an impregnable, self-sustaining castle. Of course, we’re always working in a trust-but-verify situation. If you feel your doctor isn’t listening or gives an unlikely diagnosis, you get a second opinion; if you feel your mechanic is trying to rip you off, you take your car elsewhere or come back with an intimidating friend. But what you don’t do is walk around thinking that because you read a couple lines on a web forum you know more about the inner workings of the human body or an internal combustion engine than somebody who studied it for a really long time and knows how it actually functions. To believe otherwise would be the worst possible form of elitism, civilization-destroying elitism, nuclear elitism. That’s an elitism that would end the world.

1. I wrote this piece mainly because I wanted to use “Moldbuggery.”

2. I don’t believe writers should be held accountable for ways their worst fans abuse their work; that’s outside of their control. However, I believe GRRM and the Game of Thrones showrunners should be held accountable for this line because it’s a terrible line.

3. Trotsky is my dumbest cat. Mars speaks several languages.