In the course of a recent internet search for “lazy millennials,” “entitled millennials,” “milliennial brats,” and the like (call it an effort at self-diagnosis, if you wish), I came across one of the most biting and clearheaded blogs I’ve found to date covering work and the workplace. Normally, everything that I find on these subjects in any medium is some combination of banal, derivative, sycophantic, foolish, and intellectually dishonest. Perhaps this is in part because, although I disclose this at some risk to my credibility, I follow John Tesh on Pinterest (but mainly to enjoy him ironically and hipster-like; he, and Wilford Brimley, are my PBR). Tesh, however, does not set the lower bound for workplace advice; browsing workplace-themed blogs at random or the book section of any office supply chain is weirder and more disgusting. Michael O. Church, then, is a welcome relief from the endless drivel, and a fine writer and political thinker to boot.

One of Church’s favorite concepts is “libertarian socialism.” Outwardly, this may sound as ridiculous as the UK being governed by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, but what he proposes, a government safety net beneath a dynamic private sector, is exactly what most Western governments have attempted, with varying degrees of success, since the Second World War. Church’s proposal avoids by a wide margin the sclerosis of command economies (which, in extreme instances such as North Korea’s, causes an outright death spiral), but it also renders moot the sclerosis of large, ossified corporations, with their legions of marginal-to-useless bureaucrats, layers of political intrigue, and penchant for regulatory capture. His model is for an advanced sort of Jeffersonian yeomanry as an alternative to, and eventually a replacement for, the Hamiltonian model that predominates today. Here’s one of his critiques of the current system:

We have perversion here, and this very perversion is one of the strongest cases for scrapping corporate capitalism outright and building something new– something fairer and saner, with a stronger safety net, more allowance for risk-taking, and economic motivations founded in reward rather than fear and need. Many people, if relieved of the need to work, would add more value, by orders of magnitude, to society than they do now. Others, of course, would use this freedom as an excuse to do nothing, becoming parasites– this is unavoidable, and the strongest argument against a “socialist” welfare state. (The strongest argument for socialism over corporate capitalism is that it’s better to have parasites at the bottom than at the top of society, but I digress.)

Church is also a keen observer of class in the United States, not unlike the late Paul Fussell. In his view, however, the usual three-tier class structure is a gross oversimplification. In its place, he proposes three “ladders” (labor, gentry, and elite), with four rungs on each ladder, as well as “an underclass of people not connected to any of the ladders, creating an unlucky 13th social class.”

Some of Church’s descriptions of the intermediate classes are a bit bland, but his descriptions of the two extremes are not. First, the underclass:

Underclass (10%). The underclass are not just poor, because there are poor people on the Labor ladder and a few (usually transiently or voluntarily) on the Gentry ladder who are poor. In fact, most poor Americans are not members of the Underclass. People in the Underclass are generationally poor. Some have never held jobs. Some are third-generation jobless, even. Each of these ladders (Labor, Gentry, Elite) can be seen as an infrastructure based, in part, on social connections. There are some people who are not connected to any of these infrastructures, and they are the underclass.

That’s actually quite a charitable assessment, given how disproportionately responsible the underclass is for violent crime. His description of his top rung of the elite, however, is more colorful and unsparing:

Global Elite (E1, ~60,000 people worldwide, about 30% of those in the U.S.) are a global social class, and extremely powerful in a trans-national way. These are the very rich, powerful, and deeply uncultured barbarians from all over the world who start wars in the Middle East for sport, make asses of themselves in American casinos, rape ski bunnies at Davos, and run the world. Like the Persian army in 300, they come from all over the place; they’re the ugliest and most broken of each nation. They’re the corporate billionaires and drug kingpins and third-world despots and real estate magnates. They’re not into the genteel, reserved “WASP culture” of E2′s, the corporate earnestness and “white shoe” professionalism of E3′s, or the hypertrophic intellectualism and creativity of G1′s and G2′s. They are all about control, and on a global scale. To channel Heisenberg, they’re in the empire business. 

He continues:

There are E2′s who want to live well and decently, E3′s trying to provide for their families, and E4′s trying to get in because they were brought up to climb the ladder. On the other hand, E1 is pretty much objectively evil, without exceptions. There are decent people who are billionaires, so there’s no income orwealth level at which 100% objective evil becomes the norm. But if you climb the socialladder, you get to a level at which it’s all cancer, all the way up. That’s E1. Why is it this way? Because the top end of the world’s elite is a social elite, not an economic one, and you don’t get deep into an elevated social elite unless you are very simliar to the center of that cluster, and for the past 10,000 years the center of humanity’s top-of-the-top cluster hasalways been deep, featureless evil: people who burn peasants’ faces off because it amuses them. Whether you’re talking about a real person like Hitler, Stalin, Erik Prince, Osama bin Laden, or Kissinger, or a fictional example like The Joker, Kefka, Walter White, or Randall Flagg; when you get to the top of society, it’s always the same guy. Call it The Devil, but what’s scary is that it needs (and has) no supernatural powers; it’s human, and while one its representatives might get knocked off, another one will step up.

A link in the comment thread of this piece directed me to a similar, but somewhat more culturally oriented, proposal for five American “castes” by Mencius Moldbug of Unqualified Reservations. This piece and Mencius’ others on class tend to take a darker view than does Church, who himself devotes a number of paragraphs to what he considers serious class conflicts. On the whole, Mencius is exceptionally pessimistic, and he adheres to a monarchical political philosophy that has effectively been banished from most of the West for centuries.

Still, he has nothing on his peanut gallery. If you have a strong stomach, check out the comments made by a user calling himself DR below this piece. Some of the blogs and comment threads that I follow, partly for their entertainment value and partly in the interest of knowing my enemy, are patently sick. They’re full of crude biological determinism under a thin veneer of science, open misogyny and racism, and projectile Bircher-grade paranoia. (See this for an example if you have any stomach left.) One guy I occasionally argue with online recurrently accuses me of being a traitor to the white race even though I’ve bluntly criticized the violence of the black underclass and expressed my belief that former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle did not receive a fair trial or the proper verdict. Some of the stuff I read inclines me to wash my mouth out with a bar of soap afterwards. It’s certainly corrosive, especially to an audience that I assume includes disproportionate numbers of the socially stunted and isolated. None of it, however, seems as fundamentally evil as DR’s petty totalitarian proposal for the workplace development of today’s useless eaters. His very detailed proposal amounts to prior contractual approval of the worst stories you’ve ever heard about wealthy Saudis abusing their maids, and then some. My overwhelming gut feeling is that DR wrote it all completely in earnest.

There are damn well more destructive things than food stamps.