on the critique of mass society
“You can! You must. When those few are the best. Deny the best its right to the top — and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”
– Ayn Rand, We the Living, 1936
There are teeming masses.
It’s natural to want security. When human dominance led to stressful levels of human population density agriculture arose such that self-production of food promised control and security. And then a lot of food enabled a lot of people. Before too long: teeming masses and teeming consumption. Dependencies. Elites (the ones who possess, construct, coordinate, influence) disdainful, but for the sake of social stability trying to arrange for Enough.
Provisioning Enough is burdensome and not much constructive, certainly not progressive. Ayn Rand said give power to those who deserve it, earn it or else there will be very little in the way of constructive progress.
Why doesn’t conservatism go away? Why does Ayn Rand continue to have adherents? Because it’s inevitable that mass society will result in teeming mouths to feed and disdainful elites. Within the context of mass society it’s understandable that some come to see redistribution, leveling, and Big Government as a Big Waste.
Better, of course, to have a heart. It’s righteous to strive for social justice. But it’s delusory to expect it. The left has been deluded to think of the masses in terms of a class-conscious proletariat with the potential for self-liberation. That’s ideology in the worst sense of the word.
Mass society is inherently unjust, unsustainable, and unsatisfactory. It breeds teeming masses and disdainful elites. It’s our current reality. We need to humanize it and socialize it as much as possible. But we also need to work to transition away from it.
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Of interest is how mass society criticism of differing orientations can be attributed to writers across the ideological spectrum (conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, socialists, Greens . . . reminiscent of the old trope about a group of blind people being asked to feel different parts and then describe what an elephant is):
