Aristocratic Degeneracy

The top is all rot.

Earlier this week I took my daughter to the park. My favorite one to take her to is downtown in the historic district.

After watching her play with kids for a bit I convinced her to take a walk with me to the rivers edge and the old pier. The houses on the river's edge are all from the early 19th century. The lanes are lined by trees covered in Spanish Moss and the sunset over the May River is one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen.

The area was built in the early 19th century as a resort for wealthy Lowcountry plantation owners to get away from the summer heat. During the Civil War, it was burned down except for several churches and prominent houses. The history of the area, its ups, and downs, from the early founders to today are fascinating and I look forward to learning as much as possible about my new home.

But the history of the South Carolinas Lowcountry is not what I want to write about this morning. I brought it up because walking the old streets and looking at the houses, a lot of them falling apart, built by wealthy men and women made me think about the idea of aristocracy.

The terminally online topic du jour over the last few days has been the FTX financial scandal and the chaos at Twitter now that Elon Musk has taken over. I have very little interest in either topic. I’m convinced that financial market transactions and speculation on imaginary money is one of our world's undisputable evils, usury at its worst, and I think that the best result for the Twitter story would be for the whole thing to shut down and never come online again.

What I want to talk about is the people involved. Well, the quality of people. The owners of FTX and the parties involved in Twitter are all considered the peak of our society. These are Millennials and Gen Xers born into privilege, the sons and daughters of professors, born in places like Palo Alto, and attended prestigious schools like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. Some of them are worth billions.

These people are our elites. Our aristocrats.

These people are disgusting pathetic losers. Look at their pictures. Mutants. They make the most inbred Habsburg look downright majestic. These people, the cream of the crop of our society's educational system are petty children, stamping their feet and posting on their social media toys. They are disgusting, immoral degenerates, who create nothing. Disgusting parasites.

Looking at pictures of these freaks makes me want to put on my Phrygian Cap and march with my boy Maximillian.

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One of the most glaring, but infrequently discussed, features of the modern bugworld is the extreme degeneration of our aristocracy, of our elite. All healthy cultures have aristocrats and the Western World, and other world civilizations were built on the division between the priests, the warriors, and the workers. This breakdown might be a universal cultural archetype on a Jungian level.

This tripartite system where the Priest class oversaw the spiritual, the Warrior class secular political leadership, and the working class handled farming and manufacturing should be nothing to anyone who has even a basic understanding of history. The entirety of European history can be broken down and explained by the dynamics and conflicts between these three classes. The fall of the Roman Republic, the struggles of Holy Roman Emperors against Popes, the Renaissance, and the revolutions of the last two centuries all have at their core the three estates.

But we are not here to talk about all three of the estates. Just one of them. The warrior class, the nobility, and the aristocracy. The class that has degenerated the most out of all three.

Now, of course, we are living in a post-French and Soviet revolution world, one where the ideas inherent in those movements are taken for granted, and ideas like hereditary nobility, and cultural breeding, are considered obscene, racist, and anti-democratic. We live in the world of all persons are created equal, and if they don’t like how they are created they can re-create themselves. That’s our current standard.

But let us talk about the gentry, the aristocracy. The word itself is Greek, first used in Athens. It’s a combination of the word Arete which roughly translates to a virtue that means the best and the word Kratos which is power. So the best power, or best leadership. An aristocrat is the best leader, physically, spiritually, and culturally.

Throughout history, the gentry, or well-born, genteel, and well-bred people, the aristocrats, were identified with wealth, power, and the height of culture. Most of all the gentry was identified with standards.

The upper class, with its origin in the Warrior Castes, has always been linked with the upholding of physical, spiritual, and cultural standards. The intellectual and oratorial skills of the Roman Patricians. The Chivalric codes of Christian Knights. The strict honor culture of Bushido and the Samurai. Honor culture, perfection, self-improvement, and spiritual superiority have been part of the upper class since the dawn of civilization.

Consider the monuments of the ancient world. Built by warrior kings. The treasures of the Italian Renaissance were all commissioned by elite Merchant Princes. The beauty of Versailles or the Winter Palace in St Petersburg was all built by the elite aristocracy.

Our elites give us nothing and create only filth and trash. The aristocrats of old gave us Brunelleschi’s Dome and The Mona Lisa, ours give us bitcoin scams and the mental degeneration of Twitter. The elites of old escorted pilgrims to Jerusalem, ours look like they couldn’t pick up an empty barbell.

You might criticize me here, accuse me of idealizing the past, of having to look back to the idealized romanticized chivalric codes or the Samurai. But, no, just look at our very own early 20th century. The idea of an elite gentry, of gentlemen, still existed. Look at the British gentry like Tolkien. Warrior poets, well-educated men who led troops in the trenches of WWI and returned home to lives of education and culture. Even America had a solid core of blue blood gentry in the old families of the North East and South, and of course in the new money that retained the class of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

So what happened? How did we go from a culture led by gentlemen to one where our elite billionaires are disgusting slobs?

Historically culture has been top-down. The elite adopts new trends, new art forms, and new cultural ideas, and these modes are then adopted by the middle artisan classes, and finally the working masses. The farm girl dreamt of the sophistication of the debutante. The princess didn’t dream of the life of a prostitute.

In our present culture, by my reckoning sometime around the late 1960s, this process has been inverted. Our elites, or who we have accepted as being our elites, no longer are the vanguard of class and culture, but instead ape the worst elements of the lower class.

A complete degeneration of the ancient system and I believe the key to explaining so much of our cultural ills. Look at our leaders. Look at our cultural icons, punching each other at once elite and prestigious events. Our art and culture elites are nothing but jumped-up prostitutes. Our industrial leaders, who built this country out of brick and steel, now peddle in digital nothing, filthy usurers, who contribute nothing to society.

We live in a sad, degenerate world.

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This is what I’ve been thinking about on this cold Saturday morning. The degeneracy of our upper class and the lack of cultural leadership in the past twenty or so years could take up an entire book. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Until next time. Keep safe in the Labyrinth.