do modern elites have no sense of shame?

this may be asking the wrong question

we all love to rail and rage at the appalling inversions of the parking lot of a climate conference looking like a dubai gulfstream showroom or the selfsame governors and prime ministers demanding mask mandates and lockdowns running off to french laundry to feast with friends or to closed salons to get their hair did.

we catch them breaking rules and thrill to cry “hypocrite” as though calling a penalty on the play will chastise them or that catching them all putting their masks on right before the cameras roll represents some sort of gotcha.

but what if it isn’t?

what if, in fact, it’s validation and they LOVE it?

what if getting caught acting like the rules do not apply to you IS the sensation they crave because, when nothing happens because you did, it proves that you really ARE special and that indeed you were correct:

the rules do not apply to you.

aristocracies have always coveted such markers from coats of arms to the right to wear swords or to duel and even murder outside the law because of your special status. an commoner aping such manners would be thrown into prison or perhaps hanged.

it was precisely the ability to do such things with impunity or even with the backing and plaudits of the king that made you the nobility and if you were, you made damn sure that everyone else knew it.

these hereditary titled prerogatives are gone. but the propensity of people in power to crave to signal to everyone else just how much power they have is not.

they want a marker. they excite to walk barefaced past the masked staff. they delight to fly 12,000 miles in a G-5 and burn more fuel than an african village does in a year as they take a side trip to brazil to pick up a climate award they will probably throw away.

this is not shameful for them, it’s pure, intoxicating joy.

it’s proof they are special.

and the worst part is the more we call them out on it, they better this buzz gets.

heap ever more notice and opprobrium that they but not you may do this thing and have nothing happen and the happier they shall be. it’s better than leaking a sex tape.

and the only thing better than this is to be able to force the proles to do that which they do not want to do and then to make them thank you for it.

that is the apogee of this vanity driven narcissistic need to signal status.

it’s an electric self-pleasuring frisson to such people. it’s a reason to get up in the morning. it’s identity. sure as any drug, it’s addiction.

we have literally mistaken giving the puppy a treat when it pees in the house for rubbing its nose in it .

we’re enabling, encouraging, and driving it.

it’s simply who they are.

it’s hardwired into the marrow of their beings and the axis mundi of their stunted selves.

without this level of external validation of their imagined exceptionalism, many might well have no self at all. the hull is all rust, all dependence. it’s been ages since there was still a boat underneath anymore.

and this is why it will never stop if you allow such people near power and keep validating their being above the rule by letting them flaunt it without consequence.

many got a deep taste of it this year and found it to their liking and your return to freedom endangers their newly aggrandized sense of self importance and eminence.

the illusion that we can shame them into being better is dangerous.

it’s like using buckets of blood as shark repellent.

this has become a zero sum game with many of them. and they are playing to win.

it’s time we did too…

calling them hypocrites and phonies is pointless.

it only validates to them they that are special.

your outrage is their dopamine.

instead call them stupid. better still, call them irrelevant.

become self sufficient, self governing, and disinterested in them and theirs.

build back without them.