Intellectual Inbreeding
The bloodlines of the new elite is just as poisoned as the bloodlines of old European royalty.
It is a matter of historical fact that the results of the “royals” of the past, while endeavoring to keep their bloodlines pure, created all sorts of mental and physical deformities.
The Habsburg jaw is a commonly recognized physical deformity. According to researcher Peter Dugre: “the Habsburg dynasty had been intermarrying for so long that one of Charles's ancestors, Joanna of Castille, appears in his family tree 14 different times. In fact, Charles I was more inbred than he would have been if his parents had been brother and sister.”
Hemophilia was also common throughout European royal lines, and even the “blue urine” disease - porphyria - was common in the highly inbred House of Hanover, to which King George III belonged, and was likely a cause of his insanity.
But by a large margin, madness, represented in bouts of deep depression and uncontrollable anger, episodes of delusions and religious obsessions were the most common.
Seems clear that swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool eventually produces bad results over time. When you don’t have biological diversity to replace and/or dominate the crazy at the DNA level, things go to Hell in a handbasket.
I began thinking about this when I saw John Hinderaker’s post at Powerline asking in the title “Are Our Elites Crazy?” Kimberly Strassel also covered it in the WSJ with “The Them-vs.-Us Election”.
Hinderaker pulls data from new Rasmussen polling (here) that defines the “elite” in the following way:
“The Elites are defined as those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile. Approximately 1% of the total U.S. population meets these criteria.”
But as Hinderaker points out, 150K ain’t much in the Naked City. Nationwide, it is more like 650K a year – but the one clear tie that binds is the fact that all these people have postgraduate degrees, mostly consisting of graduates of one of the eight Ivy League schools, plus Northwestern, Duke, Stanford and the University of Chicago.
Hinderaker continues:
These “elites,” so defined, are living in another world than the rest of us. They are extraordinarily loyal to the regime; 84% of them approve of Joe Biden’s performance as president. I wouldn’t have thought you could get that high an approval rating if you sampled the Democratic National Committee. And 70% of the “elites” trust the government to do the right thing most of the time; that rises to 89% among those who are “the most politically active members of the elite.”
These elites even trust journalists: 79% have a favorable opinion of them, as do 84% of the “Ivy League elite.”
When it comes to policy, these people are crazy. Forty-seven percent say that America suffers from too much freedom, compared with only 21% who think we have too much government control. Among the Ivy League elite, 55% say America is too free, with only 15% saying we have too much government.
So how do the elites want to limit our excessive freedom? A shocking 77% say they favor the “strict rationing of gas, meat and electricity.” That basically means living in a poor, totalitarian state like the USSR. And by 89% to 10%, the Ivy League elites want to see “strict rationing” of these most basic commodities.
These “elites” are fascists. Large majorities want to ban gas stoves (69%), gasoline powered cars (72%), non-essential air travel (55%), SUVs (58%) and air conditioning (53%). The Ivy League elites are even worse: the corresponding numbers are 80% for gas stoves, 81% for gasoline powered cars, 70% for non-essential air travel, 66% for SUVs, and 68% want to ban air conditioning. There is no polite way to put it: they are fascists.
What I noticed is the concentrations of these people. Maybe not physically close or on a reproductive level, on an intellectual and ideological level, these people often connected by the internet and social media.
In fact, they are just as inbred as the Habsburgs, the Hanovers, or any of the European royal houses.
Bad ideas are the same as bad blood. I believe there is a sort of intellectual DNA these people enjoy swapping with each other, thereby creating generations of elite progeny with each taking the bad ideas one or two steps further.
Not so much a physical malady, but most certainly the same sorts of mental illnesses suffered by hundreds of years of inbreeding of royals, and these “elites” certainly believe themselves royal with a divine right to rule.
Yet another outstanding post, Michael, Thank You!
And Holy S***!, what at once absolutely shocking but yet not terribly surprising Holier-than-Thou Lording-Over the-rest-of-us, these "elites" clearly hunger for.
Despicable!
Angelo Codevilla’s “The Ruling Class”” in Spectator magazine drew this portrait first. Rigid ideological and unempirical acceptance of shibboleths such as global warming etc. https://web.archive.org/web/20150714235155/http://spectator.org/articles/39326/americas-ruling-class-and-perils-revolution