We need a culture war, not a class war

YES, that is a clickbait title, and I did it intentionally to raise the hackles of those of a certain ideological mindset. Now that I have your attention, relax – I’m on your side. But hear me out.

Ever since Donald Trump’s Elon Musk’s calamitous election win, and the disgusting, profligate display of billionaire greed that immediately followed, even before he is officially installed in office, there have been many, many voices on the “left” calling for a class war, and calling on the public to refuse to be drawn into the bogus “culture war” the billionaire class has created for the peasants to keep them distracted from the billionaires’ looting of the country and the world. The idea was spectacularly punctuated by Luigi Mangione’s assassination of a particular execrable upper-class offender – the CEO of a health insurance company – and the upper class’s complete bonkers asymmetrical response to it. A terrorism charge? Seriously?

So yes, a class war does seem to be the direction we’re headed; the one-percent can only oppress everyone else for so long before the pressure can no longer be contained, and it blows up in their faces.

However, history has shown us that “class wars” never work out well for the lower classes. A good example is the period 1848-1849 in Europe; some progress was achieved, but on the other hand, the outcome of that period that started with so much hope was the rise of the Industrialists, Modern Imperialism, the Gilded Age, and World War I. And, by extension, Communism and Fascism.

There is no reason to presume that a class war this time is going to work out any better, because the roots of that one-percent class that everyone loathes (and rightly so) go very deep, right down to the very bottom of society. It is our culture, from bottom to top, that is to blame; classes are merely a consequence of it. “Capitalism” is the closest term I can think of to describe the flaw, but that does not quite adequately describe its complexity – in the simplest terms, it is the monetization of everything, and the unfortunate fact that we have evolved to think of everything in terms of some quantifiable value.

Need an example to help you visualize this? How about cryptocurrency?

I am not going to pretend that I know how to fix this, or even where we should begin to break this cultural monolith, but I hope that people will begin to have the conversation. We need to find a new way to do business, and to live. Everything else is just a time-wasting side quest.