SOCIETY AND POWER - 01/04/2021On October 6, 1789, a group of French peasants surrounded the country estate of King Louis XVI of France and demanded that he and his family relocate to Paris. The people were sick and tired of the king living the luxurious palace lifestyle at their expense. And, fearing what might happen if he refused, Louis consented to their demand. The French Revolution was already well underway at that point, sparked in large part by people’s disgust with their out-of-touch aristocracy. France had been rendered bankrupt by the late 1700s; decades of costly foreign wars, coupled with endless extravagances by the nobility, had completely depleted the treasury. The government’s solutions alternated between pretending their financial problems didn’t exist, to raising taxes at every possible turn.
The nobles hardly noticed. They lived costly while passing on the inflation and tax increases to the peasants. French aristocrats were either completely clueless, or didn’t care one bit, that their policies were ruining people’s lives. The Queen, Marie Antoinette, is rumored to have summed up this attitude when she said “Let them eat cake”, in response to hearing how countless peasants were starving.
You know the rest of the story: the royal couple eventually paid for their conceit with their heads. But that didn’t solve France’s problems. Soon a gang of radicals took over and formed a new elite (which became known as the Reign of Terror). And just like the old elite, they knew best, and they were in charge of making decisions for everyone else. This new elite encouraged the population to rat each other out for petty crimes. They printed enormous quantities of paper money and engineered hyperinflation across the country. France’s revolutionary history is an incredible example of what happens when a tiny, out of touch group of elites manages to seize power and set the priorities for an entire nation.
We’re experiencing a version of this today in the West.
Prominent media personalities, politicians, tech companies, and self-absorbed social media celebrities, have appointed themselves our cultural nobility and seized the power to dictate just about everything, from how tax money are spent, to the words that we’re allowed to say, to how our children are to be educated.
It’s astonishing how quickly it happened, and how much has changed.
Today, the new elites have changed the priorities. They tell us that the debt doesn’t matter, and the government can spend as much as it wants. And with every new massive spending bill, they’re emboldened to spend even more money. Basic fiscal responsibility is simply no longer a priority.
Today, under the new elites, the truth is no longer priority. It’s about force-feeding the narrative they want you to believe, whether about Covid, race, politics, climate change, or anything else.
In 18th century France, people were starving, but the elites who ruled them were so out of touch that the prevailing attitude was, let them eat cake! Today there’s a new elite that makes all the rules. They’ve completely corrupted western civilization. They are fanatics who embrace Marxism, violence, racism, and censorship. And like the French elites before them, they’re completely out of touch with how much they’re destroying the country and people’s lives.
