The Comforting Stupidity of Our Ruling Class, By Richard Miller (London)

The avidity, truculence, stupidity, vulgarity, ignorance, and sheer villainy of our ruling class in the West — including that of Great Britain, Australia and Western Europe, sometimes leaves me feeling depressed: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/i-never-knowingly-or-willingly-acted.

One turns on the news and is greeted by a parade of ministers who appear unable to read a briefing paper, bureaucrats who cannot distinguish a spreadsheet from a manifesto, and activists who think civilisation began sometime after the invention of the soy-milk latte. Policies are announced with moral fervour and abandoned with bureaucratic amnesia. National traditions are treated as embarrassing relics. Borders are described as outdated concepts. Meanwhile the public finances resemble a teenager's credit card statement.

The spectacle has an almost operatic quality. One half expects a chorus to burst into song while the finance minister explains why the national debt will soon exceed the mass of Jupiter.

Yet the dispiriting aspect is not merely the incompetence. It is the tone of moral superiority with which incompetence is delivered. The modern Western ruling class has perfected the curious art of combining ignorance with condescension. It is the political equivalent of a man who cannot drive but insists on explaining the internal combustion engine to the mechanic.

Still, before we succumb to despair, it is worth recalling that this phenomenon is not new. Indeed, it may be a recurring stage in the life cycle of ruling elites.

History offers numerous precedents. The late Roman aristocracy spent much of its time debating the correct etiquette for dinner parties while the imperial frontier quietly collapsed. The ancien régime in eighteenth-century France developed elaborate theories of enlightened governance while proving incapable of reforming the tax system. Even the British Empire in its twilight produced administrators who believed that issuing memoranda was a substitute for strategy.

In each case, the ruling class mistook its own cultural fashions for permanent truths. What seemed obvious and morally irresistible to them later appeared absurd.

The encouraging part of the story is that civilisations are not identical with their elites. Nations possess deeper reservoirs of competence and sanity than the people who temporarily govern them.

Farmers continue farming. Engineers continue engineering. Families raise children. Soldiers and police maintain order. Shopkeepers open their shops in the morning whether or not the minister for social harmony has issued a new framework document.

In other words, society persists.

Indeed, the remarkable fact about Western civilisation is not the foolishness of some of its leaders but the robustness of the civilisation itself. Institutions built over centuries — common law, scientific inquiry, local government, voluntary associations — act as shock absorbers against political stupidity.

This is why Western societies repeatedly survive bouts of elite derangement that, in theory, should destroy them.

Another reason for cautious optimism is that ruling classes eventually encounter reality. Physics, economics, and human nature are notoriously difficult to cancel. A policy that ignores them may survive for a few years but rarely for decades.

Reality is patient. It waits. Sooner or later, the contradictions accumulate. Budgets fail. Systems stop working. Voters grow restless. At that point the ruling class either reforms itself or is replaced by people who can perform the basic functions of governance.

History again provides reassurance. The Britain that stumbled through the 1970s malaise somehow produced the reforms of the 1980s. The United States that endured waves of fashionable intellectual nonsense still managed to invent the internet, develop modern biotechnology, and send spacecraft beyond the solar system. Civilisations wobble, but they rarely fall over simply because their elites become silly.

And there is one final comforting thought. The present ruling class, for all its pretensions, is unlikely to endure forever. Elites are surprisingly mortal institutions. Their ideas go out of fashion, their authority erodes, and eventually a new generation arrives that looks upon the previous one with the same puzzled amusement that we reserve for Victorian spiritualism or the dietary theories of the 1970s.

The future historian may well look back on our age and marvel that so many influential people believed so many improbable things. He may even wonder how civilisation survived such leadership.

The answer, of course, will be simple. Civilisation was carried, as it usually is, by millions of ordinary people who quietly ignored the nonsense and got on with the business of living. And in the long run, that tends to win, because it is based upon common sense, not common stupidity.