Brains and Wealth: Technocratic Darwinians Now in Command
A new technological chain of being or world order is fully in place. Like the upper reaches of science and mathematics, the national elites who run things remain out of public view for the most part. Power over society works best when it’s least identified or understood.
One political scientist who does understand is Charles Murray, but few have read his book Coming Apart which contains the chapter “The Foundations of the New Upper Class.” Those at the top stay deliberately out of the limelight, though they’ve harnessed the highest gift that God gave to mankind: brains.
Beyond the struggle for survival is the struggle for social power. Brains beget wealth, Murray implies. The rest falls into place, including monopolies, governments, media, and universities. Democracy and governments are handmaids, enabling machinery, meant to manage.
The rest of us? We’re the masses who are provided steady doses of entertainment and cheap consumerist supplies. We willingly give up our technical understanding of the science and technology we’re daily immersed in. The early survivalist novel Lucifer’s Hammer (1977) saw exactly what was happening:
Whole nations depend on technology. Stop the wheels for two days and you’d have riots. No place is more than two meals from a revolution. Think of Los Angeles or New York with no electricity. Or a longer view, fertilizer plants stop. Or a longer view yet, no new technology for ten years. What happens to our standard of living? Yet the damned fools won’t pay ten minutes’ attention a day to science and technology. How many people know what they’re doing? Where do these carpets come from? The clothes you’re wearing? What do carburetors do? Where do sesame seeds come from? Do you know? Does one voter out of thirty? They won’t spend ten minutes a day thinking about the technology that keeps them alive.
Of course, few people have read this book either, falling easily into the most cogent definition of what freedom of speech actually is for us: free only if it has little impact because little known or understood.
Meanwhile, Murray’s next chapter, following the one mentioned above, is “A New Kind of Segregation,” subtitled “In which I describe how the cultural divide between the new upper class and the rest of America is being reinforced by residential segregation that enables large portions of the new upper class to live their lives isolated from everyone else.” Their wealth inoculates them. They can be extreme liberals. It’s part of the game to throw people off. Bringing in the cheapest labor through immigration is part of the game. And so on. We are now a technocracy.
