55% of Ivy League graduates believe that the U.S. “provides too much individual freedom” compared with just 16% of ordinary U.S. voters.
Back in 2019, as I was developing what became the luxury beliefs framework, I read a newly published chapter published by Cambridge University Press titled “Why Are Elites More Cosmopolitan than Masses?”
Authored by a team of social scientists, this 2019 paper reports stunning gaps in political views and outlooks between elites and ordinary people in various western countries.
In the introduction, they suggest that elite attitudes are expressions of cultural capital. That is, the large gap in views between elites and everyone results from elites drawing symbolic boundaries between themselves and the provincial masses.
Indeed, another report found that 65 percent of Americans believed that the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good. This view is held across the board—across age, gender, race, political party, and ideology.
The authors of the 2019 chapter write:
“Mastering intricacies of gender and race relations discourse and behavior has become a marker for belonging to the cosmopolitan class, in a similar way that tastes for classical music and art were markers of bourgeois culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
As I point out in my debut book, luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.
If meat, electricity, and gas were strictly rationed, it is a certainty that Ivy graduates and other elites will find a workaround and remain unaffected.
Elite opinion also differs from non-elites on what used to be considered a foundational American principle: 55% of Ivy plus graduates and 47% of elites believe the U.S. “provides too much individual freedom” compared with just 16% of ordinary Americans.
Having interacted and worked with them, they aren’t so special nor smart. They just got a better break having rich parents who could afford to send them to a country club college, like Harvard Community College or Yale Junior College.
Guess what, we all die and take nothing with us. There is a lot of shit you have to put up with to live with your nose in the air. They just want to shit on people they consider below them.
Delusions of Adequacy 