Decreasing general propensity for violence, increasing refinement of social control technologies, increasing class stratification, the replacement of liberal with progressive justifications for institutions (e.g. the state), and internet communication technology (most notably, Google and social media) will result in the emergence of an ethic of nobility and peasantry, unless the current sharp correction goes through. The new noble class will not correspond well to any existing economic class, which will be a source of conflict for as long as this remains the case.
As life shifts from rural/frontier communalism (mutual support, barn-raising etc.) to atomized urbanism and Malthusian class competition, Christian forgiveness and the Quaker Inner Light will be replaced with an attitude closer to Zhang Xianzhong than to anything known from the West. The attitude toward local strangers may not necessarily deteriorate—I don’t think we’ll see anything more like samurai killing random peasants to test their blades than what we already see in America—but the nobility will regard the peasantry with disdain and fear, and each other as evil unless useful. On some level, they’ll know that the peasantry might rise up collectively and overthrow them (so they must be hated, feared, controlled, and suppressed); that individual peasants might rise to noble status (so they must be hated and kept down); and that all the other nobles are, in a Malthusian sense, making their life worse by existing as nobility, and that their risk of downward mobility is high (so any given noble will hate all the other nobles that aren’t directly useful to himself and want them expelled from the nobility).
These are the things I think we’re already seeing.
Decreasing general propensity for violence, increasing refinement of social control technologies, increasing class stratification, the replacement of liberal with progressive justifications for institutions (e.g. the state), and internet communication technology (most notably, Google and social media) will result in the emergence of an ethic of nobility and peasantry, unless the current sharp correction goes through. The new noble class will not correspond well to any existing economic class, which will be a source of conflict for as long as this remains the case.
As life shifts from rural/frontier communalism (mutual support, barn-raising etc.) to atomized urbanism and Malthusian class competition, Christian forgiveness and the Quaker Inner Light will be replaced with an attitude closer to Zhang Xianzhong than to anything known from the West. The attitude toward local strangers may not necessarily deteriorate—I don’t think we’ll see anything more like samurai killing random peasants to test their blades than what we already see in America—but the nobility will regard the peasantry with disdain and fear, and each other as evil unless useful. On some level, they’ll know that the peasantry might rise up collectively and overthrow them (so they must be hated, feared, controlled, and suppressed); that individual peasants might rise to noble status (so they must be hated and kept down); and that all the other nobles are, in a Malthusian sense, making their life worse by existing as nobility, and that their risk of downward mobility is high (so any given noble will hate all the other nobles that aren’t directly useful to himself and want them expelled from the nobility).
These are the things I think we’re already seeing.