Hiring: Deeded Courtiers

In the days in which monarchies were the state apparatus, before merchants became richer than kings, there were the royals, the peasants, and in-between the two classes, the courtiers. Courtiers were often deeded, in legal documents emitted by the king. They had documented privileges and rights to property, and they could expect that their loyal service to the king and queen would be repaid in promises of security and dignity for their own children. Kings and Queens, in turn, kept these promises not out of duty or beneficence, but because being physically surrounded by well-connected people who hate you is a substantial coup risk.

We no longer have monarchs, but I argue that we still very much have courtiers. The new monarchs, of course, are the capitalist class. Their facilitators are the elite cadre of technocrats who are genuinely impressive, but like the courtiers of old, increasingly selected from stagnant gene pools. These facilitators expect their oh-so-talented children to gain appreciable advantages in return for the devil's bargains they make. The capitalists are the new Rockefellers and they fly higher than weather; not on their own merit, but upon the shoulders of their facilitators. Capitalists do not have standing private militias, like the cartels in Central and South America, at least not yet. But they maintain a stranglehold on the state nonetheless.

The capitalist class ensures its dominance via those places where capital and definitions are hoarded and guarded by facilitators; a veritable army of "bullshit jobs" workers: High finance, Big Tech, Big Pharma, White Shoe law firms and embedded corporate lawyers alike, the C-Suite of any org, the NGO racket, and of course the entire lobbyist apparatus in Washington D.C. The "Deep State" very much exists, but it is much more banal than any conspiracy theorist would like you to believe. Yes, they are in fact having cocaine orgies with underage women, but these orgies are simply far less sexy and much more joyless than anyone might expect. There is no shower strong enough to wash away the ennui.

The courtier class lives well. Compared to the upper middle class of any other society on earth, US courtiers are rich beyond anyone's wildest imagination. They get all manner of golden crumbs and crust of bread, and that seems to be enough for them to sell out the entire planet. Right beneath them is the investor class, whose job it is to market widely the pleasant fictions that brilliant courtiers spin up. They make damn sure the linguistic resources by which people come to conceptualize their own exploitation as "investing in themselves" are always within reach. They flood the market. Never mind that net of fees, and net of climate change, most financial and real estate investments can only ever hope to lose less money than they might lose through inflation. There is no getting ahead, certainly not for the investor class.

Entrepreneurialism became supercharged by globalization, and the once-glorious market system at whose feet so many of us, deeded or not, have fallen to our knees, slowly ossified into an unfathomably complex public-private state. The proselytes of meritocracy are beginning to get cold feet, and the institutions of higher education are beginning to sound entirely too much like the communists that were snuffed out and in some cases martyred, for security purposes. In 2008 "high finance" fell, and the entire global financial system was revealed as an elaborate fraud, and in some cases, a bona fide Ponzi scheme. Central banks put their economies on life support, and now inflation is forcing them to remove the breathing tube.

Where will the courtiers' children go now, to waltz into breadwinner jobs? Will there be a new racket entirely? Or will the old rackets go on, fundamentally unchanged but hampered by ever more bureaucracy, like the detestable healthcare system of the United States, which was largely unchanged by the Affordable Care Act? Yes, preexisting conditions clauses were wiped out, and that was an undeniable good, but doctors can still take legal bribes from pharma. They just need to document those bribes somewhere, so that its "transparent." Never mind the fact that nobody has time to dig up the obscure website where you can check how much of a whore your doctor truly is.

Crypto was cropping up as a ZIRP-fueled "industry" that was ready, willing, and able to overpay the fail-sons of Harvard and Stamford graduates, until it wasn't. Until daddy Powell took the cocaine away. So now what? What comes next? The only certainty remaining is that something comes next. Because if the courtiers do not get their special privileges, then any incentive they have to keep selling out their friends, and ultimately the planet, goes away, right?

To quote an antifa hero, who was duly killed by Italian fascists (as translated by Slavoj Zizek): The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

Do not be lured by pleasant fictions that sound well managed and sane. There are no adults in the room. The latent evil of unclean psyches the world over is waiting to bubble up to the surface. The TAM (total addressable market) of bullshit medical interventions and managed identities is the entire middle class. Your child is nothing but a faceless place from which to mine to dollars needed to pay off debts to gain title to assets that will turn to dust as the ground gives way beneath us. Now is not the time for trust. Now is the time to be ever-ready to slay.