Bourgeois Overproduction and the Problem of the Fake Elite

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 36

Elite overproduction is a concept that was forwarded by the anthropologist Peter Turchin to attempt to explain some part of why we face growing social instability in today's society. This is an insightful concept that deserves serious consideration in our present circumstances. It is characterized by a society engaging in practices, like sending too many people to college or for advanced degrees, that create conditions for potential elites to end up underemployed and underaccomplished in the existing socioeconomic power structure of society, and it breeds resentment in this class of people. Indeed, it generates a bourgeoisie, which in turn generates social instability due to the overproliferation of their values and, eventually, ressentiment. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks through the idea of elite overproduction to focus in on the operant problem that it leads to, bourgeois overproduction, and posits that this problem is the seat of the Woke menace and many of the large-scale ills that have arisen in similar form over the past few centuries in prosperous societies. He also discusses the ways in which the Marxian characterization of the bourgeoisie was imprecise in a way that led to identifying something akin to this problem while misdiagnosing its true foundations (or his own role in it). Join him for a detailed discussion of this phenomenon.

Support New Discourses:

Website:

Follow:

Podcast:

© 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

[heidilovesliberty]

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C. S. Lewis

[Unimportant]

I really recommend people looking into the concept of midwits and how the somewhat intelligent are forcing the truly exceptional geniuses out of academia to maintain prestige and appearances. People who value perception over truth are a curse on the future.

[TheProphet]

This talk hit painfully close to home. I went to school for a History BA and then a Masters program. I got a year into the Master's program before the professors told us that a Masters degree won't actually do ANYTHING for us and we would need to go on to PhD programs if we wanted to do anything in the field.

This was back in 2006-2007 and at two years into the program and approaching my thesis, I realize the absolute corruption that existed there even at that time. We were forced to sign up for the AMH subscriptions and I could read what are (now) obviously woke/Marxist trash. It horrified me and disgusted me to the point that I never completed the program, I could not imagine ever taking these ideas as my own and knew I wouldn't be able to get a position in the field without doing so.

It was a waste of $70k that I am still paying back.

[csqr]

“False elite” is a great term James, it really improves on Turchin’s formulation of elite overproduction. Anyone who has spent anytime in academia knows there’s massive inflation in credentials creating these false elites who are envious and resentful of those who have succeeded in the marketplace.

[ARFthegodking]

This reminds me of the breakthrough realization I had when I read the article that said Idris Elba's character Luther was "Not black enough to be real." The criticism of the writer was very clearly that Luther wasn't enough like the author. I realized then that these people really just want everyone to be just like them, they view themselves as the gold standard of humanity.

[fireflamefine]

My first thought on the concept of false Elite's is something I heard Tucker Carlson once say in an interview. Loosely Quoted as "I don't have a problem with Elites, I just want impressive elites."

[aakkoin]

The Marie Antoinette-thing stuck with me... She wanted to be a sheep
herder for a little time for fun, to be "down to earth", and then returned to her life of absolute luxury. Probably feeling like a saint for working so hard for 5 minutes.

[Lesnooch]

This is accurate. I am pursuing a PhD in a niche field, and my station in life is pretty bad compared to that of my peers. But this was MY choice - I could have gotten a non-academic job. I cannot blame society for not showering me in praise and money for my niche research. At the same time, it's important to recognise that Academia has a terrible habit of shaming people for leaving Academia for better prospects, which needs to stop. I've literally heard people say that not going for an career in Academia makes you a 'loser'. Madness...

[kyleoliva]

College is a business, if you pay them to turn out product, they will keep turning it out. I own an electrical contracting company, if someone paid me to keep wiring buildings, I would happily keep wiring buildings....it wouldn't matter to me if the buildings were empty, as long as I got paid. The colleges keep getting paid, of course they don't care if the "buildings" don't get filled.

[snowyfictions]

I finished my B.A in Modern History last year, at the age of 26. Took 4 years. My recommendation is for more and more students to wait before going to uni. Get life experience. Make some mistakes. Visit Ireland (beautiful country). I did these three things, and my undergrad experience was highly transformative. Now I'm starting my own business and writing books with manageable student debt.

I firmly believe if we raise the average age of an undergraduate, universities will improve.

[coolworx]

Meanwhile... electricians and plumbers are in higher demand than ever.

[smithtimothy]

I do feel bad for these people who where told to go into debt to get a degree but what astonishes me is that they never blame the universities. So strange.

[EricFieldBttryBulldog]

The root word of “bourgeoisie” was “bourg”, which was the Old Frankish word for castle. The term bourgeoisie originally meant the non-noble permanent residents of the castle and gradually expanded in the later medieval era to mean the permanent residents of any city. During the medieval era they were an important class because they were not bound to the land like serfs despite not being members of the nobility. During the early modern era it gradually expanded to mean the educated public urban class from which most merchants and civilian bureaucrats were drawn from. By the French revolutionary era this included master craftsmen and self-employed tradesmen, but not their journeyman employees (apprentices were considered legally bound persons in the same way as indentured servants and slaves). With the rise of public ally traded corporations the term evolved to mean the managerial class.

[jeffberner]

Just a comment. Having spent some time in France, I would observe that as an outcome of the French revolution that the French have an appreciation of the value of work which is different than in the United States. The belief of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" is real in French society. As a consequence, anyone who is productively employed in society is treated with respect. The job of a waiter is a well-paying job, as is the job of a baker or sales clerk. Here in the states, we have this mistaken belief that the only way to judge worth is through salary. The French have a much better life because they don't share that to the extent that Americans do.

[christianbolt]

One of the problems is that there is no moral hazard for universities and banks. The students are stuck with the debt after they are lied to by faculty about all there non existent opportunities

[natedoherty]

I'm a commercial carpenter. I saw this in 2002. When everyone one of my rich classmates were all going to college. Ya see, there's nothing sweeter in life, than being dumber than you but more successful. I bathe in college kids tears.

[timothykuring]

I wasn't really interested in going to college. I was a top student in any and every class in high school, so parents, teachers, and advisors said it would be a waste if I didn't go to college. I wouldn't take scholarships because I didn't want to commit to any field, or narrow specialization. So I worked my way through college. I excelled in every subject. In fact, it was a little embarrassing the way professors complimented me. One professor, for instance, came into the lecture hall, walked to my desk, showed the class my A+ paper and placed it on my desk, then went to the podium, slammed all the rest of the papers down, and told the rest of the students they could collect their papers there. Another professor asked me to teach the course when he was absent.

In college, many professors urged me to become a professor, others seemed to envy my talent, and yet others wanted to crucify me. But I couldn't justify taking large debts for a poor job market. I also figured that I wouldn't fit in the university system. I thought 90% of the students shouldn't be there at all. If I were a professor, I would have flunked 90% of every class. This was the early 1980s, and I told other students at the time that it was stupid to borrow money for college. They would look at me funny, but they wouldn't argue. By at least the 90s, I thought people were beginning to understand that college was a fraudulent racket, and it was stupid to borrow money to go to college. I may have gotten that impression only from the conspiracy, intellectual, and traditional conservative publications I was following. It may not have filtered into the popular consciousness by then. Other commenters here mentioned that they were aware and chose trades, so the ideas were out there for people who were paying attention.

I had been absolutely appalled by the lack of intellectual rigor in college. I was appalled to see a paper written by a journalism major. There wasn't a complete sentence or a complete thought to be found. It was jumble of errors that I couldn't have parodied in one of me best coffee fueled comedy writing sessions. I asked him how he graduated from high school. He was also one of the most amazingly arrogant people I have ever met. I knew people who were arrogant and brilliant. It didn't bother me so much. But he was a bad stew of arrogance and stupidity, and I think of him when the presenter here talks about people who should not be in college. Fake elites.

I was a little confused with the term at first, because I think of elites as the people running things from behind the scenes. My family was such. My grandfather was on the board of directors of many major US corporations during World War II. He had to turn down an offer to run German businesses outside of the Axis, all over the world. His brother pioneered radio and television in Chicago, and designed the system of using multiple microphones for Hollywood. They worked. They weren't the idle, ruling class, but they worked on the world and their work had a major impact all over the world.

On the other hand, they were very different from this class of people who thinks they can just go to college, pick a major from a menu, do what they are told, and be set for life. They paid attention to what was going on in the world, and learned what they needed to learn to do things. For instance, my grandfather was initially a floor trader on the Chicago board of trade, but he decided he needed to learn law at night school. As a lawyer, he got into the fights - even having to make extra-legal threats against the teamsters union, when there was conflict with the corporation he represented.

The approach is not a course of study. Colleges don't teach people how to break a union.

Those elite were content to live humble middle class lives, and they avoided publicity as if it were both a horror and an impediment. There was no obvious or conspicuous consumption. Their houses and cars were humble and unspectacular. My grandfather thought it was ridiculous that the lawyers who worked for him were all building mansions on the North shore area of Chicago. He said they couldn't afford them and they were "house poor". Most of them couldn't even afford to furnish their houses. It was gross over-consumption, and I suppose the colleges were full of their children and grand children.

I had other reasons for refusing to pursue advanced degrees. I was strongly opposed to Marxism. I got in arguments all the time with Marxist and socialist professors and students. It was the clear social drift of American campuses, and there were old professors who warned me that I would probably not get tenure, because Marxists had taken over most of the administration and they were highly prejudiced against conservatives. I would be shunned by colleagues, and I didn't want to be a professor badly enough to borrow money and fight against the current for a career.

I don't think the elite now are the same as the elite of former times. They were WASPS and masons then, but now we have decades of influence by the CIA and the military/industrial complex. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and their ilk are purely actors. They are front men for the controlled release of technology developed by the military. They are false fronts and false elites, but I suspect there still are the old fashioned kind of elites who will avoid publicity like a curse. They do not ever, ever want anyone to know who they are. This is something the aspiring false elites may never understand. It is a whole different world view. The desire for any kind of publicity will mark a person as stupid and inferior among the actual elites. "Social climber" they will say, and they will all bring out their knives to cut the social climber.

I've always worked in the working class and the service industry. I could not fail to notice the way popular culture held in contempt all sorts of the work I did. I did construction, over the road truck driving, landscaping, fast food, store clerking, etc. All those college bound fools were brain washed to think they could enjoy high wages without ever having to break a sweat. And they were stupid to borrow money for their useless courses.

For decades, my eyes would roll at the stupidity of their productions in the world. I would laugh at them and say to the working class people around me: "I went to college with those idiots. They were idiots then and they are still idiots. We are doomed!" Their types were everywhere.

Warren Pollock had an excellent blog I used to follow in the early 2000s. He spoke of the overabundance of "free riders" as the speaker calls them, but he had a term I liked, which I'm trying to recall. A sort of crony capitalism, competing bureaucracies, kleptocracy. I can't remember his term, but it described a society of free riders. There is no connection between actual productivity and wages, and Pollock often said the value of labor was zero. People should not be thinking in terms of laboring for wages, which is what even these so-called fake elite are doing. ("I have my degree, now I want somebody to pay me a lot to do something.") It's too passive. It's not looking at what is needed and figuring out how to deliver a product or service directly to customers, who won't pay you a red cent if you can't deliver reliably, and cheaper than the market.


These fake elites won't admit that they made the mistake of borrowing money to study stupid things, without bothering to figure out or understand that the whole system was rotten and collapsing, and colleges were just one of many crony fiefdoms, set up to vacuum money out of young fools before cutting them loose with their debts. It has been such an obvious trap for so long that the false elites have no one to blame but themselves.

[waynebollman]

I was in college for computer science back in the early-mid 80s. When we got to the late 90s and early 00s I noticed that the cirriculum for the same degree had been significantly watered down. Undergraduate tracks in general were looking more like high school studies. And it just kept going downhill from there. The masters degree has been the new bachelors degree for quite some time, and now it appear that the PhD will soon be the new bachelors degree - in some fields at least. It's gross, weird, and tragic. And most of all I find it annoying because, as this presentation explains, it has resulted in a bunch of very average people who have WAY overrated themselves.

[atheinasophiajade]

I love when you admit to yourself "This guy deserves to be a mathematician"

[E.OrthodoxMHNIN]

Leaving my graduate studies behind was best decision I ever made. Not only was I a striver who would have been an idealogical pariah I was also in a field that was massively over producing PhDs. In fact, many of my instructors were unable to find work in the field that paid well enough and was stable enough for them to maintain a family. Yet somehow it still make me feel like a failure.