You Barely Live Once
The primary sin of the wealthy is that they are afraid to live at all.
In the old America that any next regime inherits, there are far too many ugly things. There are also far too many human beings with nothing to do, and even more with nothing worth doing to do. This too is an ugly thing—the waste of a human being.
–Curtis Yarvin
Imagine an estate. Trimmed hedges, blue sod, creeping phlox, rare long-grasses delineating one botanical from another. A guard sits watch from a cabin that marks the start of a seventy-foot driveway. A chef prepares coffee and eggs, which head for the balcony overlooking the garden from which the centerpiece, a single pomegranate, has been picked. Your assistant draws a canopy to tamp down the sun as you prepare to read. Hours later: yoga or martial arts, calisthenics or riding lessons. Piano or Spanish guitar. Lunch, a nap. Painting. Skinny dipping in saltwater. Dinner, cognac, massage, bed.
To live like this is to inspire envy and yet the problem with the wealthy is they are afraid to live at all. Because the wealthy are constantly trying to justify their wealth, they busy themselves with expensive, credentialed, specialized make-work, anxious one might confuse the people they are (intelligent, punctual, competent) for the jobs they do (mediocre, superfluous, bureaucratic). Many of the wealthy privately suspect something amiss, a difficult-to-locate ripple in the economy causing them to have so much while others have so little. And yet, it is hard to imagine a society in which those with the highest SAT scores would not be at the top of the spoils system. Do they not actually have higher IQ’s? Are they not more conscientious and with lower BMI, more skilled at paperwork and other contemporary shit tests? Whither the place where weak rule strong? Has any lion ever tamed man?
It turns out your eyes are correct and that, while there is some intergenerational class drift, heritability dictates that those at the top tend to have children who stay at the top and so on and so forth. Once you realize that having a high verbal IQ will close-to guarantee you a certain minimal position in this world, you can begin to imagine alternative conditions under which we do not pretend it is possible to move an entire class into another class but reprioritize responsibilities and eliminate certain drudgeries rutted into our current way of living. My proposal is that we pull all the rich, miserable people out of the workforce (which accounts for success in efficiency), and allow them to manage petty estates (which account for success in quality).
Once you make peace with the fact that the same old class hierarchies instantiate themselves over and over, you can begin to set about understanding the conditions under which class differentiation can once again be accepted and conflict averted. Instead of trying to turn your gardener into a lawyer, we turn him into a greenskeeper. And instead of minting more lawyers (are there still not enough lawyers?), we mint an aristocracy. One that is comfortable being what it is: the class that sets the standards for fellow aristocrats and arranges the material conditions that allow other classes to flourish. Instead of playing office and neglecting accountability for performance, we play house and assume it.
Let them drink wine!
To some, wine-tasting (a prestigious enterprise) appears pointless and elitist. While I am not much of a wine-drinker, I have enough palette to tell when wine is bad and find this characterization of connoisseurs as stuck up and frivolous a bit uncharitable. I also have enough sophistication to appreciate when human beings are bad and, while the vintage currently ruling us is not great, they could be so much worse. In fact, I lament that more of our wealthy are not winos. I choose to celebrate those who display their own sophistication through their appreciation of various grapes and vineyards rather than engaging in more exotic leisure activities like bacha bazi, or dog- and cock- fighting which abound in further reaches of the Global American Empire. While I do find Caribbean ayahuasca/yoga retreats a bit decadent, they are so much more respectable than committing war crimes in the Balkans (okay, a small subset of yoga practitioners in Arlington, Virginia, also dabble in lucrative war crimes). In fact, as a lowly prole, I can even celebrate their passion for dermatological rejuvenation all the more that I prefer the subtle glow of freshly-exfoliated skin to the pleasures of human sacrifice (an aristocratic activity located in the further reaches of the Mayan calendar).
And yet, when I survey the land and look at America the country or America the empire, I can’t help but notice it does look like we’re sacrificing a human here and there. Here and there a spunky squeegee man is cleaning a windshield, a veteran of the Persian Gulf is nodding off under an overpass, a reader of mine lists all my typos from a Panera Bread in New Jersey.
Which makes me wonder if we should burden the wealthy, who are quite tired, with the demands of sobriety. Sure, a little morning coffee is a nice way to achieve alertness and promote healthy bowel movements, but chasing it with champagne and a cigar will make your dick sang. The humanitarian project of our age is cultivating quality winos and ending project management.
Here’s how it works
Rather than a single section of an org chart, each of these nobles will become head of their own organization (an estate). This grants two gifts to anyone who had an impressive GPA, participated in student government, or is in any other way a responsible human thrilled by the prospect of civic engagement and currently populating the administrative class. In this arrangement, you maintain all the positives you get from local elections, chamber of commerce, HOA luncheons, and Positive Interaction Meetings with your neighborhood cops. However, your opinion, which also happens to be the best opinion, is actually the prevailing opinion 100% of the time. This matters because the system is ethically perfect, deontologically sound. The best opinion (you wouldn’t hold it if better existed) is both the one that is heard AND legitimate because it opposes no one and is opposed by no one. All decisions are made with 100% integrity to the project that is managing an estate that reflects the whims of its steward and the steward makes decisions that prioritize the health of the estate.
Your estate is comprised not only of land and property (which you own) but also human capital–employees, who voluntarily enter into commerce with you, exchanging labor and availability for money and any other benefits you may confer. Room, board, apprenticeship, insurance, healthcare, 401k, security, education. You may also give them money and orgasms, which was a common pathway to economic and marital success prior to the Clinton Administration.
Yes, there is a power dynamic here. Yes, you may think you don’t like it but, in affairs of the heart, ask yourself if you would prefer to be courted by a highly accomplished celebrity Chad/Stacey or someone who is in every way equal to you? In your professional life, would you prefer to be led by a localized branch manager who has elected medium health coverage and has a picture of his kids on his prison-quality office desk or would you rather someone your natural superior who wears nice threads and knows how to decorate? Is this actually worse than the reality you already inhabit? After sixty years of American Race Maoism and in-office castration maybe we hear me out?
Where we went wrong
At some point in our journey through inclusivity, a completely understandable (and forgivable) error emerged.
Because our current political order (The Civil Rights Regime) prevents us from having positions of prestige that remain inaccessible to any one group, many then assume that, if an upper middle class woman doesn’t already gravitate towards the job, it is then low status, which is why it is low status to service clerical work at the Department of Motor Vehicles but high status to do it for the Department of State. This convenient fallacy allows one to dismiss a lack of female representation in any one field by labeling it low status, which is why we have institutions like the WNBA and no one argues we should have more female janitors.
One may note that public schoolteachers (despite their middling intelligence) attempted to solidify themselves as a part of the upper middle class by demanding they receive pay for “working from home” during COVID lockdowns, an accommodation made for paralegals but not personal trainers. Readers may note that women unsuccessfully teaching America’s youth how to critically think is bankrolled by US taxpayers and completely different from men unsuccessfully teaching America’s adults how to get skinny, which is paid for by no one.
And because our current political order adds another layer of protection for its marginalized citizens, it also prevents us from having negative opinions about the quality of people producing all the labor in public schools or the DMV. With this second protective layer, we sanitize both the employees of these powerful and necessary bureaucracies along with the esteemed citizens they serve so that it is impossible to tell one from the other. In 2024 no one is illegal and no one is better than anyone else. We are all DMV now.
The trick works like this: Upper middle class women think bagging groceries is demeaning, so we give all grocery baggers their own bachelor’s degree, which is totally proven to make you upwardly mobile, especially when every single human has one. Then, noticing that it’s a bit depressing to see such a learned and noble people engaging in lowly menial work, we protect them by eliminating that very work. From there a small subset of former baggers, having completed a twelve-week coding bootcamp, ascend the corporate ladder of Computer Stuff, eventually founding the Boston Dynamics of self-checkout drones.
Since, we already inhabit a world in which the upper classes do not labor, where the cost of produce is kept low by foreign migrants, where you can click a button and send a certified organ donor to valet your dinner from Millennial Salad Spot, where a subset of your friends’ daughters can reasonably be expected to dabble in pornography or low rent prostitution, it would be better to class it up and develop horticulturists, valets, chefs, and courtesans. Something lively and less miserable.
On Misery
We are far too mean to the rich. A large portion of their lives consists of naked reputation management because, while you do not have to be that exceptional to hold wealth, you do have to be exceptional to handle reputational damage while maintaining any position above middle class. Take, for instance, Ancient favorite Mike Tyson. This man has been thrown in prison for rape but is currently allowed to distribute marijuana (an illegal substance) inside of the United States. Your father (also an organ donor) has never missed a day of work and can spend the rest of his life applying for the correct licenses only to get audited by the IRS every year of his life. But almost no one in the upper middle class in this country can even build a spreadsheet as well as Mike can throw darts (not even his preferred sport). And so, Mike can have a tattoo on his face but you, as a highly paid mediocrity, you make sure to keep your skin blemish-free. You pay someone to trim your lawn each week so that it doesn’t get unkempt. And all of your opinions are received opinions because, unlike Mike, you can suffer consequences.
And, as your language is inoffensive, so too is your occupation. You hold a job like Systems Engineer or Data Analyst. You do not get neck tattoos. You do not speak publicly about your sex life. You do not even allow yourself a public erection lest it chafe on your chinos.
Nor should one should expect you or anyone in the upper classes to suddenly begin a spate of body-modification or sexual assault. Nor would we want it! To the contrary, one should expect that those who feel entitled to run the modern world display a touch more generosity, a little noblesse oblige if you please. It is almost unforgivable that they display such a paucity of spirit, designing minimalist retail spaces where obese teletubbies Facetime the fathers of their illiterate children before buying them diabetes water only a devil would design. The devil, if he would only become a little more impressive, we might respect him.
Sympathy for the Devil
It’s worth pointing out that being wealthy today does not give you access to better music or literature than anyone else. It does not remove pornographic ads from your children’s iPhones nor does it suck the canola oil, microplastics, or corn syrup out of your food. And this lack of differentiation is not because we have raised the standard of living for the poor to such great heights—rather, the standard of life for the wealthy is just so bad. While they do not share their financial wealth, they are indeed generous with their cultural wealth, which is currently lame and sucks super hard.
Similarly, the wealthy cannot travel in style because they are forced to sit with proles and, even when they can afford first class, they cannot make the plane leave on time, nor can they make the flight attendants fuckable, nor can they make the area around the airport (nor even far from the airport) crime-free. Nor can they make the parent of the child some rows back pretend, through any act of politeness, that it will not be going to prison for leaving too much petechiae on the whites of the child’s eye when it finally stops crying later that night.
Many of the more suburban readers might note that it would be better to live in the middle class of the 1960’s than the upper classes of now. It’s nice to have sensors on your car’s side mirrors but better to have neighbors to your left and right who you do not need to watch for fear of educating your children.
And proles too have been laid low by modernity. Does it feel dignified to go into a job where your interactions are policed by hypertensives with perfume allergies, wearing clothes made by Asian slave labor? Does it feel dignified to make women’s primary interaction with men one that makes them compete for capital all week? Does this system seem to be going well?
What’s in it for the rest of us?
In the passages above, I manage to speak at length about the fate of those near the top as though the underclasses are an afterthought. However, I wish to clarify that they also get a good deal out of this.
In case no one has noticed, email, data entry, and increasingly Byzantine HR practices are also making people miserable. Libs are correct: there are many different types of humans with different predilections. And it is indeed a sin to make a bright-eyed, attractive woman Shift Manager in the same way that it is tragic to take a headstrong young man and position him to take shit off of risk-averse functionaries who have been selected for because they will never be headstrong nor creative–in the same way that it is fucked up to take your golden retriever and make him sit upright at a desk with spectacles while you lecture him on MMT.
My dawg, would it actually be a downgrade to spend your morning going to a farmer’s market or garden to pick out the ingredients you’ll use to create another family’s food? Would it be better to get on another Zoom call to check up on whether a federal grant has been correctly dispersed to a corrupt NGO shell company or would you rather throw on some tunes and do another person’s laundry? Is it really that demeaning to give up paper and team-building exercises to do something in Meat Space?
And for those who wonder how the employees of these estates will fare without a robust Human Resources architecture, I am here to tell you that HR will be more powerful than it has ever been. Through the technology of reorganization, HR will able to hire and fire any employee it chooses. It will be able to mediate any disturbance in the ecosystem of the estate. Entire protected categories may arise simply from fiat (such as making it contraband to call the chef fat or the courtesans loose); similarly, no current group protection will be honored simply because it is willed by anyone aside from the head. In fact, the distance between the person making staffing decisions and the person executing them will be annihilated, perfect efficiency established at once.
How is this different from slavery?
To address the question literally:
No one owns any person.
Employment is totally voluntary.
To address the question metaphorically: Consider a couple in the wild so immediate in their lust that the man advances on his female counterpart in front of an audience. Within the blink of an eye his hand worries into her décolletage or graces the demilunes of her tuchus as they swap spit on what must be a magnetic portion of this mortal coil. Then a cry from the audience! Such an event certainly perturbs the otherwise-pleasant evenings of these passersby, a critique completely valid for those who stand outside of the limelight, on the sidelines of history. But, for the two on the inside where so much energy exchanges so rapidly, they do not even see those who would envy or deride them.
It is true that, from the outside, many of life’s most beautiful elements register as abject violence. This is why those who cannot fuck extol the virtues of chastity and consent, objects for which they will never be asked, and why those who are most concerned with violence will never have the pleasure. You would have to step away from your desk, embrace forgotten knowledge, and get to the inside to realize it’s just a little foreplay.