I’ve decided that I’m an elite. This self-anointed status was prompted by Robin Hanson, who noted that people who condemn “the elites” rarely, if ever, consider whether they are themselves “elite”—Hanson then goes on to assess what proportion slice of the world’s population constitutes “elite”, it’s in line with his scientific and quantitative approach to life. I think I’m in about the top 7.4% of the world’s population, not judged by financial status alone but also by social-status markers and social connections. Elite status isn’t just about money and to talk about money when it comes to humans is a slight distraction, since humans really care about status—and they will garnish their status by attacking “the rich” when they themselves are pretty comfortable (it’s very relative; and just think about Engels the factory owner in this regard).
I’m definitely a defected elite—although, it must be said that I was trained in an institution that was designed to create a Catholic counter-elite in England (although my family isn’t Catholic); and in many ways I just carry out the elite training I was inculcated with there even though I react against it; functionally, since most Western elites are anti-Christian in general and anti-Catholic in particular, this makes me a defected elite. The reason elite consensus is very anti-Catholic is that America is the world’s predominant country and America was founded by Freemasons and is dominated by Jewish influence—and both these groups are mortal enemies to Catholicism (and Europe, since as Hilaire Belloc said, “The Church is Europe, and Europe is the Church”—the Roman Empire in continuation).
Elites compete for status, not money. At the moment it is high status among the predominant elite groups to be cosmopolitan, and that’s because they’re decadent—they want to signal openness to experience because tolerance indicates social security (i.e. you can afford liberality). Immigrant groups are brought into the West, in part, as trophies to demonstrate cosmopolitanism and to punish non-elites to mark status.