Intellectual grandiosity.

So-called capitalism is more like gravity, a set of laws that apply to and describe the behavior of surplus wealth, in particular wealth generated by industrial societies, which is to say unprecedented massive wealth. The human race never saw anything quite like it before. It became both a moral embarrassment and a political inconvenience. So among the intellectual grandiosities of modern times is the idea that this massive wealth can be politically managed to produce an ideal equitable society — with no side effects.

Hence, the bold but hapless 20th century experiment with statist communism, which pretended to abolish wealth but succeeded mainly in converting wealth into industrial waste and pollution, while directing the remainder to a lawless gangster government elite that ruled an expendable mass peasantry with maximum cruelty and injustice.^[1]

Mr. Kunstler puts his finger on the fundamental conceit of so-called intellectuals in our time. Nothing but nothing should not be attempted and even the most ludicrous ideas had their legions of grasping dreamers, fools, moral midgets, sycophants, and conniving, lying power seekers.

Welfare for foreigners and parasites, Ponzi-scheme retirement systems, a classless society, world government, the end of the nation state and national borders, the inundation of the white race, the plundering of the productive, multiculturalism, the destruction of the Christian faith, an end to sex differences, the sacramentalization of sodomy, the vagification of the military, world government, and the worship of primitives, among other things – all mad policies pursued with a vengeance by a political class enamored of the powers conferred by the lawless, centralized, tax-glutted, propaganda-soaked state.

“If you can, you must” became the mantra of political leaders who had access to any economic surplus with never a sideways glance at the experience of millions in the Gulag, the laogai camps, and the killing fields.

The Age of the Dumbass had dawned with a vengeance.

Notes
^[1] "Piketty Dikitty Rikitty." By James Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation, 4/28/14.