Crystal Girl (Part II) How Rich White Women Unleashed a New Religion

The inflationary asset bubble didn’t just support high stock prices and Crystal girl becoming a millionaire, it supported our whole transition from being practical to being full of abstracted, though passionately-held principles. That may sound good but it could spell our collective doom.

To understand what I mean – let me first explain what practical thinking looks like.  

Imagine if instead of you being you, a person living a nice life in the developed world with access to the internet, you are a young male living on the coast of Somalia.

What do you worry about?

The short answer is survival. You worry about your daughter having food, your little fishing boat having petrol, your wife not getting raped by the aspiring pirate next door etc.

Navigating life or death problems narrows your focus and makes you very practical. 

If you for instance needed to sell your daughter off to the local warlord so that you have enough food to feed your other three children, you wouldn’t necessarily have the ability to take a principled stand against child sex slavery, you would just have to make a painful practical decision. 

Practical thinking at the end of the day is straightforward – you maximize your material circumstances and ability to survive.

It doesn’t mean you are engaged in morally dubious behavior. Being highly moral can often also very practical. It just means you just are not living your life consumed by abstract thoughts or problems because you have very real problems in front of you that you have try to rationally solve. 

Now, let’s imagine instead of being a young poor Somali male, you are a well to do female with a trust fund who just graduated from a liberal arts college and lives in New York. 

Sitting in your 5k a month apartment that is heavily subsidized by your parents, you are entirely removed from this other Hobbesian reality happening in Somalia.

With no near-term pressing survival concerns, you have lots of excess cognition. 

You worry about abstract things like your social status as conveyed by social media platforms or you worry about abstract issues like global warming or systematic racism or whatever the cause de jure is. Sometimes you combine the two and demonstrate your social status by signaling your virtuous involvement in said issues. 

As the head space of this young professional fills up with abstract ideas and concerns, they stop living in physical reality and start living in an abstract reality that is consumed by narratives. It is these narratives that provide the framework for which they act.

Now society as a whole is always veering between the practical framework and more imaginary frameworks. 

But as you see sustained prosperity, it is easier to remove the shackles of practicality and lean aggressively into speculative frameworks and start living in abstract narratives. 

We see this happening today in America in the turn away from practical meritocracy and towards moral ideals of “equity”. The equity principle and its accompanying beliefs in white supremacy and the patriarchy as a means to explain reality, and in particular differences in outcome, have captured the imagination of the most prosperous among us. Rich white women remote from practical concerns are the biggest proponents of it (see here) and they, the rich, are in turn imposing this new orthodoxy on the institutions that they control. 

This should scare you. 

Whenever a society finds itself falling in mass into an abstracted approach to reality coupled with moral passion, you are bound to see a severe break in order. 

It happens in two ways. 

The first way is that the new world view can easily become intolerant, even totalitarian, particularly if the imagined principles and ideals cannot be effectively defended with empirical evidence and reason.  Any efforts to negate it are met with increasingly strident responses, As folks get more strident in their views, they will increasingly engage in good guy/bad guy narratives to explain those who disagree with them. In time, this can lead to a breakdown in polite discourse and eventually to civil war.  

Secondly, as we focus on dogma purity instead of efficiency, we hurt our own economic productiveness and competitiveness. 

When you are forced by scarcity to be practical, you tend to make economically correct decisions. When you lose that imperative, you will in the end create the conditions by which the material prosperity is lost. If you are hiring the person with the most ideological purity instead of whoever is best for the job, then the trains are eventually going to stop running on time. 

So, is this all the Fed’s fault? 

This new state of affairs is to due to multiple actors but the Fed’s role here is present.

Through the mechanism of low interest rates, the Fed has suppressed the discipline of business cycles and created a boom in asset prices that produced dramatic wealth inequalities and a new plutocratic class that could afford to be entirely divorced from reality. Untethered from material scarcity, without the grounding of any traditional religion, and seeking to validate their bewildering wealth, this plutocratic class in turn developed their own religion – wokeness. 

This new religion, like Christianity before it, seeks to reverse the ruling hierarchy in favor of a new class so that “the last shall be first, and the first last: for many are called, but few chosen.”  

Those chosen to be elevated by this new religion include not just the “oppressed” – African-Americans, LGBTQ, feminists—but also—in a distinct departure from the Gospel— excessively rich, white allies, who achieve redemption by embracing the woke worldview and performing various performative acts to show their solidarity with the oppressed. 

As in Christianity, there is original sin in woke-ism, but in the form of slavery and bygone prejudice which taints only members of the oppressor race. That white-only original sin provides woke warriors moral superiority and a justification to demand change to all of the institutions and rules that have produced the existing order, including long-established metrics of merit and talent.

Their arguments rely more on faith and emotion than reason and it is important for the woke to keep re-visiting the anguish of that original sin, while forbidding any questioning of its current relevance or the destructive consequence of the proposed remedies.  

In many ways the transformation of our society that the woke religion is seeking echoes the transformation Christianity affected in Rome in the 4th century.   Christianity sought to overturn the value hierarchy of classical antiquity – as reflected in its art, culture,  customs and religions- and it largely succeeded.  

In the end, that transformation, as well intentioned as it might have been, led to the downfall of Roman civilization. Something similar may be happening here.