It is a brutal culture of greed and self-assertion out there, worse than ever. And it is spreading and amplifying.
Why? The Internet has few moral codes: it is a new technology. Those behaviors which have allowed the greatest individual advancement are those most tightly connected to the basest instincts. But not just this.
Society has been rotting by its head. Once retired, President Truman refused to cash in, he said it would “demean the presidency“. So Truman gave speeches for free in schools, and lived in circumstances so modest, a law was thereafter passed to insure a decent retirement to presidents.
Fast forward to what is going on nowadays: politicians are expected to cash in spectacularly. Ex-president get gigantic amounts of money for showing up at social function. Obama got $600,000 dollars from the Columbia Drug Cartel, after he showed up at the conference the Cartel was organizing, the EXMA conference in Bogotá, Colombia.. And this is not an accident: Obama wrote in books that he used cocaine. Even Politico admits Obama protected the Hezbollah cocaine cartel. Officially, to help the Jihadists controlling Iran.
US Representative Ilhan Omar paid her husband’s political consultancy firm $2.8million during the 2019-2020 election cycle, campaign finance records show. And it is not just the top politicians who are rotten to the core, and employed by the bandits that they are supposed to subdue. Top economists partake in the kleptocracy. Between a jaunt at the head of the Federal Reserve bank, under Obama and Trump, Janet Yellen, now the head of the US Treasury under Trump’s successor, got $810,000 for a speech at the hedge fund “Citadel”. It is not just the fact they commit the crime of influence peddling, it is that they flaunt it. Thereupon, the entire elite imitates them.
I know a very wealthy lawyer whose firm got one of these ten million dollar checks as a “stimulus”. I wondered why he had not pitched in a part of his multi-million dollar salary to help secretaries and janitors. He laughed, and told me that was “free money”, the government would never seek reimbursement. This is exactly what happened (he is a republican, although close friend to prominent “democrats”).
I know a young hospital administrator who works miles from patients; she got her second jab already. We see in all this that the elite behaves as one. It does not matter what it is, money, vaccines, the elite grabs it all. It is not just an elite of money, it is an elite of power. This has happened sometimes in history, bringing a revolution when all the low lives got together in a vast insurrection against the elites.
As it is the Internet has enabled to internalize and publicize the worst pulsions. The worst pulsions are felt to be virtues, as they enable the worst individuals to succeed the best. Inequality reaches peaks previously unimaginable, with a very small number of persons controlling the feeding of all the minds. It has turned out that Big Brother is Big Tech, and it is thoroughly demented and as base as one can get.
And we have new generations which don’t know any better than this world of inverted values. The starship is upside down and will burst in flames any time. And there is no Elon Musk to save that. Or maybe there is but nobody is listening to her, so she may as well not exist.
The Internet of things may arrive someday. We already have the Internet of beasts.
Patrice Ayme
***
This was an extended version of a (published!) comment I sent to the New York Times in answer to:
Don’t Hate the SoulCycle Celeb Who Got the Vaccine. Hate the System.
Loopholes make it all too easy to jump to the front of the line.
On January 29, Stacey Griffith, one of SoulCycle’s most popular and glamorous instructors, received the coronavirus vaccine, something that might have passed without incident had she not been 52, extraordinarily fit and aligned with an expansive notion of what it means to be an educator. Taking advantage of the fact that teachers were now eligible for inoculation, Ms. Griffith applied for an appointment…
Perhaps unaware that vaccine access has been a source of great tension — and that the privileged are conniving their way toward safety as the less fortunate remain behind — Ms. Griffith posted news of her triumph on Instagram. The outpouring of anger that followed quickly prompted her to apologize to her nearly 65,000 followers for a “terrible error in judgment.”
However enraging it might be that a celebrity spin teacher could secure a shot weeks or months ahead of her turn — and however dispiriting it is that there are celebrity spin teachers — the problems around the unfair administration of the vaccine extend beyond individual acts of selfishness, entitlement or obliviousness. The distribution system has been too porous to safeguard against terrible judgment and the human inclination to take whatever might be had. In essence, it seems too easy to cheat.
… Some effort should also be spent on a campaign shaming anyone who is planning to finagle their way to the front of the line. As it happened, Ms. Griffith got her vaccine at a moment when the United Federation of Teachers estimates that a few thousand of its members had vaccine appointments with the city canceled because of shortages in supply.
Across the country, the pandemic has kept millions of children from going to school in person. Ms. Griffith’s outdoor classes for the weekend, however, are fully booked.
