gat

of this originally creative group. Dominant minorities manage the rest by conscription of all into a
massive two-tier proletariat. The guiding protection is a mechanism to ensure these proletariats
don’t learn much lest they become "demoniac." This is the unsuspected function which school
tolerance of bad behavior serves—in both school and society. The great majority of proles are
kept away from what history refers to as education. This can be done inexpensively by leading
children from ambitious exercises in reading, writing, declamation, self-discipline, and from
significant practical experience in making things work. It really is that simple, and it needn’t be
done forever. Even a few years of control at the beginning of childhood will often suffice to set a
lifetime stamp.
Toynbee, and by extension the entire cultivated leadership class he represented, was unable to see
any other alternative to this stupefaction course because, as he hastened to assure us, "the religion
of the masses" is violence. There is no other choice possible to responsible governors who accept
the melancholy conclusion that peasants are indeed revolting. The only proles Toynbee could find
in the historical record who managed to extricate themselves from a fatal coarseness did so by
escaping their proletarian circumstances first. But if this were allowed for all, who would clean
toilets?
You might expect such an observation would lead inevitably to some profound consideration of
the astounding crimes of conquest and domination which create uprooted, landless classes in the
first place—England’s crimes against Ireland, India, China, and any number of other places being
good examples. But a greater principle intervenes. According to certain sophisticated theory, you
can’t operate a modern economy without an underclass to control wage inflation; in spite of bellcurve
theory, a mass doesn’t subordinate itself without some judicious assistance.
In his glorious Republic, which may have started it all, Plato causes Socrates to inform Glaucon
and Adeimantus, twenty-four hundred years ago, that they can’t loll on couches eating grapes
while others sweat to provide those grapes without first creating a fearsome security state to
protect themselves from the commonality. It would appear that long ago some people realized
that a substantial moral trade-off would be required to create ease for a fraction of the whole,
while the balance of the whole, served that ease. Once that kind of privilege became the goal of
Toynbee’s creative minority, once high culture was defined as a sanctuary against evolutionary
reversion, certain horrors institutionalized themselves.
The clearest escape route from tidal recurrence of caste madness is a society bred to argue, one
trained to challenge. A mentally active people might be expected to recognize that the prizes of
massification—freedom from labors like toilet cleaning, a life of endless consumption (and
reflection upon future consumption)—aren’t really worth very much. The fashioning of mass
society isn’t any chemical precondition of human progress. It’s just as likely to be a signal that the
last act of history is underway.
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