Britain’s affluent middle classes are detached from reality
The bourgeoisie are virtue signalling Britain into oblivion.
Britain’s affluent middle classes are ignoring reality. This important demographic is sleepwalking into disaster and thanks to their voting patterns are dragging us down with them.
Britain is being dismantled. We are below replacement fertility. Insane energy policies are bankrupting us and destroying industry. Relations are breaking down between the sexes, between generations, and between different ethnic groups now resident in Britain.
The country is a mess.
The most pressing issue is the rapidly changing demographics which will usher in a very different Britain than the past, an unstable poor country with no shared culture to hold it together. This process is well underway and feels unstoppable.
The working classes understand this, so they vote for anti-immigration policies as do the remnant of Britain’s old guard, the aristocrats and others long stripped of their power to make way for progressive liberal professionals who now run everything.
It is this group who are voting for destructive, anti-civilizational policies.
Their world is one of virtue signalling and posturing, all needed to keep up with the Joneses and demonstrate one’s woke credentials. Everyone who is anyone is on message with climate, multiculturalism and the destruction of sovereignty as we are captured by broken institutions.
Along with feelgood slogans like fighting hate and saving the planet they usher in dangerous policies around open borders and expensive unreliable energy sources, not to mention endorsement of authoritarian surveillance and control systems.
So far the affluent voting for these luxury beliefs have managed to distance themselves from the effects of their ideas. Others live next door to the violent immigrants. The windfarms are in distant neighbourhoods ruining someone else’s view. As for totalitarian surveillance, for now only the undesirables are caught in the digital dragnet, posting memes they disapprove of anyway, so the moral implications of such authoritarianism can be overlooked.
The middle class professionals have so far managed to ignore reality. Their retreat into fantasy is visible in their social media activity, their lifestyle choices and the charities they support. The broken, multicultural confused rainbow world now in existence is theirs despite being mocked, rejected and hated by almost everyone else.
This retreat from reality also manifests as feelgood voting. Britain’s Green Party and other hard-left entities are popular as they conform best to the shallow social media level thinking many engage in, often a litany of absurd adolescent ideas that are little more than slogans focus-grouped to sound nice.
This demographic believes itself morally superior to the rest of us with our hate facts and our stubborn refusal to go down without a fight.
But their continued denial of reality in the form of voting for destructive parties is becoming dangerous. They are beginning to realize they are not immune to danger.
Why oh why?
What is going on? What is going through their minds?
Some of it is virtue signalling. They win social approval for saying all the right things and supporting the latest causes.
Most is conformity. These are not the rebels. These are people tweeting about their latest thing marches on thousand-dollar iPhones while drinking pumpkin spice lattes and so confident of safety and security at their edgy anti-Establishment protest they often take their kids along.
They are in fact risk averse. They absorb the prevailing orthodoxy promoted by actual elites and respond like Pavlov’s dogs. Most of it operates at the slogan level. No human is illegal; not my president; meat is murder.
It is easy to overlook the appeal of prepackaged causes, how they provide an instant philosophy for those too afraid to reason independently while also enabling a synthetic identity to exploit when needed like ready-made political costumes it costs little to wear.
As a result this demographic is weak and lost. They are superior to no one.
Their defining characteristic is not clear thinking, it is often something much less admirable.
We imagine behaviour is a consequence of our underlying beliefs which we painstakingly construct with evidence. How we think dictates how we act. It makes sense, but it is a flattering inversion of reality.
Cognitive dissonance theory teaches us our actions create attitudes, and then our attitudes are defended even when proven to be crazy.
It is attitude and beliefs that are flexible and prone to being amended to suit the moment. Many have no convictions at all despite shouting loudly about all sorts of principles.
Britain’s laptop class boast about supporting windfarms and diversity. They certainly vote for parties that deliver them. Their attitudes are then brought into line with this and are maintained as the policies bring us to ruin. They cannot easily change them even as the country declines. They are too much a part of their sense of self. They bring too many social rewards. A similar pattern is observed with open borders and even online restrictions and censorship.
Herd thinking prevails. Those who challenge widely held delusions are met with hostility even when they are proven right. Facts do nothing. We see this time and again.
Combatting policies related to climate change seems impossible no matter what the data reveals. Even evidence of outright fraud does not move them. Voting Green means social approval regardless of how unworkable the actual policies.
This demographic seems unconcerned about foreign sex offenders going free just as it is relaxed about people being jailed for innocent tweets or other social messages. The direct effects are felt by others just as they can afford to heat their homes while energy prices double and triple. This detachment from consequences drives it all. None of it really touches them.
So for now they shy away from the reality to maintain their illusions. They are what cowardice looks like. Sacrificing their children’s future to maintain a lifestyle because everyone else they know is doing it too.
But the cracks are showing. They look around nervously as their expensive schools fill up with foreign groups, reflecting a wider demographic shift they were told was not really happening except in the minds of racists.
Energy is expensive, and becoming more so. The British government obviously has no plan to tackle it. There is talk of rationing and power cuts affecting everyone. What then? At some level they must know we are heading for disaster even as they back politicians who refuse to drill for oil in the North Sea and boast about their environmental credentials.
Everything around them is changing faster than they can adapt.
The unrest and the low trust is now sensed even by them. They certainly catch glimpses of the troubling headlines the traditional media can no longer hide. “Hooded youths” and “teens” abusing girls as young as 11 or 12 on their way to school. Who behaves like this? This never used to happen and now it feels like it is everywhere.
The digital controls they unwisely endorsed are backfiring too. They were told the hate came from ethnonationalists and white supremacists. But the headlines show us stabbed Jews and wounded police officers not lynched immigrants. The concrete bollards are at Christmas markets not mosques or migrant hotels. Who then are the threat?
The world they helped vote for is closing in on them. They have a dim but growing awareness their virtue signalling is going to cost them. It is only a matter of time now.
What next?
This is a key demographic. They can swing elections and change the fate of nations. They are the managerial and supervisory classes and work within most of the institutions. They matter whether we like it or not.
But the immediate prognosis is not encouraging given who they are.
This group have many names; the laptop class, the non-governing elite, the chattering classes. Historically these are the bourgeoisie. Those wealthy enough to live well but not so wealthy they can be independent from the system.
Every major philosophy has damned this group as useless for real change. Their key feature is risk aversion. An unwillingness to rock the boat lest they lose it all.
Today’s equivalent are proving their historical critics right. They are not necessarily bad people, just weak and easily led. We saw it during Covid. They couldn’t get their injections fast enough. There was very little critical thinking on display even within the medical profession.
The social media posts from this section of society viewed it as a terrible bore preventing them from travelling. There was barely any scrutiny even when the focus moved on to their children who were at zero risk.
This disinterest in scrutiny is helping others destroy us. Plus their own prejudice prevents recovery. Their disdain for British culture and hatred of visible patriotism in the form of flags or supporting national sports teams is learned behaviour, often inculcated during their education and a key way to distance themselves from the working classes who tend to be the opposite.
This foolish affectation plays into the hands of our destroyers. They are socially rewarded for such oikophobia which they imagine as a kind of enlightened internationalism rather than an abandonment of their own heritage and people, something they rely on for survival.
It manifests today as annoyance at the inconveniences brought by Brexit, by which they mean mild impediments to travel like visas. They care very little for autonomy or sovereignty. The concept of liberty is lost on them. If this had been America’s Revolutionary War they would have reported Washington to the authorities for the disruption he caused to their comfortable lives.
These are not the revolutionaries. They have sold our nation’s autonomy for semi-detached houses and nice cars. They want to reverse Brexit to make weekend city breaks to Barcelona a bit easier to accomplish not for deep concerns about the autonomy of nations. They tacitly like supranational organizations like the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization and the United Nations because they are swayed by utopian goals and the slick videos selling them. They conveniently file away challenges to their worldview as hate or backwardness making them easy to dismiss. Anything but analysis.
Their prize, to live apart from the great unwashed, has detached them from the reality that is nonetheless unfolding around them. They are steering themselves toward oblivion as they invite unwise policies on the back of luxury belief voting.
But until they step back from the virtue signalling and stop voting to bolster their identities as social justice champions, nothing significant changes. As a voting block they can bring too much hardship to bear on others. It is largely their vision of society we are living in, even if it was originally downloaded from others with a quite different view of the world.
Although perhaps events are now overtaking them. They may be ignoring reality, but reality is not ignoring them. Even they are beginning to notice all is not well in Britain as inflation soars, millions pour in and headlines get scarier.
The consequences of bad policy are coming for us all. There is a narrow window of opportunity to vote our way out of trouble, but that is closing. The next few years will tell us if Britain’s chattering classes will wake up quickly enough to avert disaster.
If they refuse to face reality they may take all of us down with them.
I've been watching the UK and Canada, marveling at how far people will allow this to go. We have the same problem here in Minnesota, with Somalis. It is clear to me, most liberals in my State would give the whole State to third world immigrants. I shudder to think it could get considerably worse here.
It has made me exceedingly illiberal. I would support full remigration as the humanitarian option. God speed Spiff.
There's a very easy test, to see if someone is liable to have bourgeoise leanings.
Ask them if they got into fights at school (any age).
If no, they are high-risk, and likely to fall for whatever Siren-call seems the safe way.
Meanwhile, people who did get into fisticuffs at school, for whatever reason and no matter the outcome, are far more likely to be either classical nationalist right, or classical Marxist left (i.e. not postmodernist or relativist).
Completely anecdotal of course, but compare to your own school years: does it not ring true, that the weak and wimpy and cowardly were also the ones most likely to espouse, mimic and endorse whatever the Correct Opinion was, while the bovver boys and tuff chicks were much more down-to-earth and with few if any illusions as to what's real, and what's wishful thinking?
That's because you can't rationalise a punch in the face, and you can't stop someone from punching you by calling them names - you have to punch back, or be saved by someone else using force on your behalf.
Which also suggest the only way forward, when it comes to the bourgeoisie:
Force.