losing touch with reality

My recent post how dumb do feminists need to be? and a recent post at The Knight and Drummer, The Survivability of Men and Women both deal with the issue of feminists being hopelessly out of touch with reality. It’s not just a problem with feminists though. It’s more and more a problem with our whole society.

As an example, there has always been a city-country divide. City dwellers have always despised rural folk. And city dwellers have always been a little vague as to how reality actually works. They have a vague notion that food comes from farms but they’re pretty sketchy on the details. They probably know that milk comes from cows, but they’ve almost certainly never seen an actual cow. The fact that farming is hard work undoubtedly never occurs to them. It is very unlikely that any city dweller realises just how dangerous an occupation farming is.

That city-country thing has always existed of course. But there are other divides that are just as dramatic, and becoming more dramatic. Middle-class urbanites generally have no notion whatsoever that they are dependent on nasty horrid working class people for their very existence. They assume that when you flick a switch you get electricity, and when you turn the tap you get clean fresh water. They do not comprehend that such miracles only occur because blue-collar workers labour night and day to keep them happening.

Middle-class urbanites also never stop to wonder how all that food and other stuff gets onto the shelves at the supermarket. They remain blissfully unaware that some dreadful working-class man drives the truck that brings those things to the supermarket.

They have no comprehension of the full extent of their dependency. If those blue-collar workers weren’t there for even a brief period it would be more than just an inconvenience. Within a few days people would start dying, In large numbers. Middle-class city dwellers would start dying. A city without electricity, running water and trucks to deliver food would become a very very unpleasant place very quickly.

The things that blue-collar workers do for a living tend to be the things that keep us all alive. The things that a large proportion of those urban middle-class people do for a living are often entirely useless. What would happen if all the sociologists, psychologists, investment counsellors, financial advisors, insurance brokers, diversity officers, advertising execs, aromatherapists, interior decorators and social workers disappeared? The answer is that it would have no effect on society whatsoever. Life would go on. The same applies to the majority of bureaucrats.

It’s not just that women in the workforce generally contribute little or nothing productive to society. A very large chunk of middle-class males don’t contribute anything either.

This has become more pronounced as we have moved towards being a service economy, as distinct from an economy that actually makes stuff. The great thing about a service economy is that you end up with a situation where the majority of people do entirely useless jobs. They are mere drones, supported by a small number of men (yes, men) who do the work that keeps everybody else alive.

And the drones develop an extraordinary detachment from reality. They don’t even know of the existence of the people keeping them alive.