A Quote by Gore Vidal
You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.
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The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses.
The ruling class is smarter than you, and they're more creative. And if you forget that lesson, you go down the drain. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been.
Our whole life is a fooling around. You can do it because you are not aware of how you waste time, how you waste energy - how life is wasted you are not aware. It is going down the drain. Everything is going down the drain. Only when death comes to you, you may become aware, alert: What have I been doing? What have I done with life? A great opportunity has been lost. What was I doing fooling around? I was not sober. I never reflected upon what I was doing.
American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
Contempt is the only asymmetrical facial expression, so it's easy to spot once you're aware of its signs. One researcher has successfully tracked it in couples as a predictor of divorce. When someone is angry at you, you've still got traction with them, but when they display contempt, you've been dismissed.
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.
It doesn't actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they've had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run.
They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?
There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?
Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.
All over Europe the organs that represent dogmatic interests are in permanent opposition to the progressive tendencies around them, and are rapidly sinking into contempt. In every country in which a strong political life is manifested, the secularisation of politics is the consequence. Each stage of that movement has been initiated and effected by those who are most indifferent to dogmatic theology, and each has been opposed by those who are most occupied with theology.
There has been no appreciable improvement in our country's ability to produce the kind of talent we need in this space. There have been some small initiatives around the country that have been noteworthy.
Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.
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