We’re generally taught that elites are corrupt and selfish creatures. They extract every last morsel of labor power from the proletariat, every natural resource from the earth, sucking the vitality out of every living being like a predatory parasite only to spend the vast fortune they’ve stolen from society on meaningless hallmarks of nobility (in the old days, some gilded grandfather clocks, crystal decanters, Rococo-style furniture, and a château; now, a Maybach, some abstract art, a couple Rollys, and a Manhattan penthouse).

Seeing the elite class as purely exploitative and opulent is somewhat popular today (“eat the rich!”) and you see a lot of critiques of those who openly flaunt their wealth (and who are not, at some particular moment, in the favor of the establishment) [e.g. Kylie Jenner or Andrew Tate]. Most of these attacks, especially in the media, are directed at those people in the public eye and especially those with “new money” —professional athletes, social-media celebrities, and rappers at the most visible level, tech millionaires and crypto bros at a medium-visibility level, but this haughty contempt occurs even within much smaller networks of power: for example, the vitriolic gossip in country club locker rooms and social club cigar lounges against recently minted milli/billionaires in the finance/legal/biotech/defense/energy industries.

You see this mechanism develop whereby new money West Eggers feel a need to peacock (i.e. conspicuously consume) by buying a palatial estate, luxury vehicles, elite education for their descendants, and donating large sums to establishment institutions (as we discussed previously, an indulgence) in order to prove that they are “somebody” (a member of the ruling elite), while old money East Eggers resist this incursion into their established domain by vilifying these aspiring elites as greedy, opulent, selfish, or even salacious, thereby weaponizing morality to close off the gates to power.

The new money philosophy tends, historically, to be the most prominent during periods of intense wealth creation and elite expansion (in the American context think the Gilded Age or the Neoliberal Era [aka Gilded Age 2.0]) where the dream of getting rich is less of a mythology and old glass ceilings of the ruling elite are shattered with a fistful of Benjamins. These are eras of conspicuous consumption, disregarding previous moral standards, rapid social change, and novelty.

The old money philosophy, contrarily, dominates in a period where whatever wealth pump that was fueling the previous new money era runs dry, the economy stagnates, and the elite has to develop a mechanism to shut down the stairway to heaven and potentially have a brief purge in paradise. Here, the dream of getting rich is no longer sustainable, so it’s no longer pushed as the dream and potentially even spun to be an evil. Old moral systems experience a resurgence, tapping into the popular resentment of the inequality that has developed during the new money era. East Eggers (selectively) embrace asceticism, moderation, and sustainability in order to prevent the rise of any remaining industrious aspiring elites and purge (through social ostracism, exile, or other less peaceful means) any unpalatable peer-elites who don’t get with the new program. Thus the frustration of the people is manipulated into fueling a trimming of lower-level and aspiring elites while the old ruling elites, the truly exploitative class, come out not only unscathed but empowered.

This dynamic may (despite being somewhat reductive) sound quite familiar to what is occurring in the present day, but before applying a model to the present it’s best to test it on historical precedent, and one of the best examples of this (hypocritical) weaponization of the ascetic I’ve come across was during the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the early Principate.

Seneca the Younger was a Stoic philosopher who reached a degree of prominence in the first century AD. He was from an equestrian family (equivalent to the upper-upper middle or lower-upper class today) and studied rhetoric and philosophy in Rome (like going to a school today with a history of activism and social justice in New York). There he learned from various Stoic thinkers some of the philosophy’s tenets: virtue as the only true good and vice as the only true evil, using reason over emotion to face life’s ups and downs, understanding the logic of the universe, and resisting luxury and self-gratification.

He would later become the advisor to Emperor Nero (after first being his tutor), and he held considerable influence over Nero’s decision making in the early, “good” years of his reign (from ~54 to 62 AD). Despite all his writings on ascetic stoic philosophy, Seneca is often denounced as a hypocrite because of the considerable fortune he accumulated during his tenure as Nero’s advisor. By others he is celebrated as an early ethicist who found himself stuck in a corrupt regime at the heart of Roman politics but did his best to navigate the situation virtuously.

I am less interested in arguing over who Seneca actually was/what he believed (who is anybody anyway?), than discussing the effect of his philosophical ethics and how they (in some ways) enabled the corruption for which he is often derided.

Take this passage from one of Seneca’s letters, LXXXVI:

Who is there who could bear to have a bath in such surroundings nowadays? We think ourselves poorly off, living like paupers, if the walls are not ablaze with large and costly circular mirrors, if our Alexandrian marbles are not decorated with panels of Numidian marble, if the whole of their surface has not been given a decorative overlay of elaborate patters having all the variety of fresco murals, unless the ceiling cannot be seen for glass, unless the pools into which we lower bodies with all the strength drained out of them by lengthy periods in the sweating room are edged with Thasian marble (which was once the rarest of sights even in the temple), unless the water pours from silver taps.

And so far we have only been talking about the ordinary fellow’s plumbing. What about the bath-houses of certain former slaves? Look at their arrays of statues, their assemblies of columns that do not support a thing but are put up purely for ornament, just for the sake of spending money. Look at the cascades of water splashing noisily down from one level to the next. We have actually come to such a pitch of choosiness that we object to walking on anything other than precious stones.

What trend is he arguing against here? Who is he attacking? Why would the guy with all the money in the world, who was at the center of Roman politics, be advocating for living a simple life? Wouldn’t a Marxist view of history tell us that he, like the rest of the elite class, would necessarily push consumption and accumulation and exploitation to the fullest extent? So, the question is why in this case (as in others) those in power promote not consuming, not exploiting (resources or labor), and living in accordance with nature? Is it out of the kindness of their hearts or for some genuine concern for the planet or prosperity or morality?

Looking at the case of Seneca, it seems like the answer is no, and I would be inclined to say the same today, but to understand why we have to look (briefly) at the time Seneca lived in.

Starting in the 2rd century BC a truly extraordinary wealth pump began for Rome and its elites. The end of the Second Punic War (201 BC) made Rome the major Mediterranean power and flooded the city with slaves (cheap labor). Expansion westward into Spain and eastward into the Hellenic world brought in an increasing amount of plunder and tribute. The standard of living and the level of extravagance among the senatorial class increased rapidly and so did the number of nobles competing for positions of power. [1]

The number of elite aspirants increased proportionally to the wealth pump, as the more numerous progeny of senators and consuls sought out elite positions, and those made newly wealthy from the expansion of the republic (mostly equites) sought to move up into the club of Rome’s noble families (gentes).

As you might expect, elite competition (the game of musical chairs, as discussed previously) escalated dramatically in the late 2nd and early 1st centuries and was quelled only by a violent trimming of the elite class (the murder of the Gracchus brothers/supporters, the Sulla dictatorship, Caesar v. Pompey civil war, Octavian v. Antony civil war)[2]. Because of the heightened degree of violence (and family limitation practices), the elite reproduction rate fell below replacement level.

Simultaneously, the number of elite positions (senators, quaestors, etc.) increased (also known as an “inflation of honors”) and the republic was further expanded (Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and Pompey’s in the East), providing some modest relief to the decreasing pressure of the wealth pump and the position-of-power scarcity. Finally, war exhaustion set in (especially for formerly aspiring elites who acquiesced to falling below noble status), resulting in the consolidation of power under Augustus, the establishment of the Roman Empire and the beginning of Pax Romana. [3]

When Seneca was in power, the memory of a century of civil war and discord was very much still present in people’s minds. Those in power likely did not understand in any concrete or coherent form the dynamics we just discussed that led to the crisis of the Republic, but some of them could have come away with a reasonable takeaway: all that wealth creation and conspicuous consumption we were doing a generation or two ago led to the enrichment of those pesky equites and they were the ones funding and fueling the degradation of our mores, all the violence and instability, and were the ones who wanted to take our positions of power away from us. We need to stop with all this profligate spending, reestablish good moral values, and thereby maintain our power.

Seneca’s Letter (and his overall philosophy) was a part of this ideological campaign to vilify luxury and consumption, and those socially mobile, new money freemen who contribute nothing productive to society but only take. He attacks procuring goods from around the empire (free trade) in favor of self-sufficiency. He wants you to live within your means, not aspire towards some noble level of splendor and luxury, especially if you are one of those “certain former slaves.”

Inspiring this way of thinking has a dual effect: 1) it lowers the wealth threshold of elite status and allows people to base their status no longer on material abundance but virtue (the acquirement of which is not based on economic realities) and 2) it cuts off the mechanism of wealth generation for those aspiring elites who are enriched by luxury spending, thus shrinking the pool of aspirants. Taking this course was at the time a practical necessity because the empire had reached a zenith (further expansion into Persia or Germania would have likely not been cost-effective), so the only other option was to settle the populace into stagnation.

Now, here’s a quick caveat: Seneca was one of these new money people (or at least 2nd generation). He was born in Spain, the son of a wealthy rhetorician and eques. So he was a part of this burgeoning “knight” class vying for power in the expanding bureaucracy of empire. His endorsement of this stoic, stagnatory ideology reflects his transition into a position of power, into the establishment. Perhaps, he (like many self-flagellatory sons of and daughters of elites today) felt (or was taught to feel) a certain degree of guilt for the wealth which his family and his class had accumulated. By embracing this ascetic ideology it allows him to justify his recently acquired position of power, while keeping his head below the tallest poppy and avoiding frequent elite purges. The person who was of the class that benefitted most from the late Republican wealth pump spouting an ideology of moderation and equanimity may seem hypocritical, but it seems to me to be a structural survival mechanism, a way for new elite blood to both protect their status from other and rationalize it to themselves.

Nevertheless, this method of self-preservation didn’t work out in the end for Seneca: he was ordered to commit suicide by his former pupil, Nero, after being connected to a conspiracy against the emperor. The hypocrisy — the range between purported humility and practice ambition, between teaching and practice — was just a bit too great, his head held a little too high in the poppy field…

But let’s get to the modern parallel to this stagnatory ideology, which I think in this case it’s best to show you (rather than tell) with my modern reworking of Seneca’s letter (which may read like those calls-to-action in the name of sustainability and ethicalism championed by today’s intelligentsia):

To live like a founding father — like John Adams on his humble farm in his un-air-conditioned house — is, today, unthinkable. We need our delivery trucks buzzing around, the Uber Eats moped drivers with our late-night Chicken Tikka Masala, this oil-guzzling global supply chain extracting, exploiting all to satisfy our vanities, our egos, to instantly gratify our every impulse. Would you be able to survive without your 65” flat screen? your German-engineered appliances? What about the chips from Taiwan or the cobalt mined by children in the Congo? God forbid your home isn’t “smart” enough to adjust the temperature or the lighting with a single guttural utterance as you lounge on the couch with a pint of ice cream and a brain freeze. And that’s just the baseline for your average modern imbecile. Imagine now the sprawling estates of those tech billionaire drop outs, those irreverent sound cloud rappers and YouTubers, those crypto scammers — decamillionaires overnight! You see their yachts, their gold chains, their bowling alleys and movie theaters and infinity pools, their Lambos and private jets: such opulence, such decadence, such disgusting waste. And where did they get it all from? From your laziness, your consumption, from all your sacred freaking choices*. All this vice must stop for the sustainability of our planet, for social equity, and for the happiness of future generations.* [4]

You may see now how this asceticism can be weaponized to sow guilt through a population to cut off the wealth pump for a certain class of new money elites. Certainly, there is some validity to the critiques made here (exploitation of people and resources, civilizational decadence, unsustainable practices); however, the main function is a means of attacking a certain elite segment: the entrepreneurial class (like the equites class before it).

By fixating on the consumptive aspects that this class has (at least in recent history) fed into and accelerated, this approach places the blame for all the guilt of a ~300 year evolution of consumerist culture, capitalism, exploitation, and Western imperialism on this new entrepreneurial class, while the establishment types who have benefitted from the much longer history of extraction exclusively enjoy the fruits of their old exploits.

The most negative repercussion of the mass-adoption of this frame of thinking is that it vilifies innovation and reaffirms the authority of corrupted institutions, preventing the natural transfer of power from one decaying generation and class to a younger, more meritorious one. This leads to stagnation, and the stench of declines seeps into the very fabric of society.

Now, it’s easy enough to complain about the hypocrisy of this ascetic ideology (it certainly fails to withstand any Ben Shapiro-esque logical challenge) but such a critique is no way to win hearts and minds. This entrepreneurial class, the tech/crypto/creator/antiestablishment crowd, the new money, aspiring-turned-counter elites need to develop an oppositional ideology.

What this new mental framework would look like, who am I to say; but trying to figure out what it will be seems — in an era where we are told that everything’s been done before and that we should just get in line to enjoy the abundance — like one of the few things worth doing.

[1]: Turchin, Peter, Secular Cycles, pg. 194, 198

[2]: I would be remiss if I did not include in these conflicts the Social War from 91-88 BC which led to the granting of citizenship to a significant number of Rome’s Italian allies and thereby an expansion of the elite pool. Despite this outlier, the overall trend of this period, however, was a shrinking of the elite pool.

[3]: Turchin, Secular Cycles, pg. 206-8

[4]: As I rewrote the Seneca letter, I realized that Seneca’s philosophy in terms of historical timing may be closer to Marx's critique of laissez-faire/neoclassical ideas. It reminded me of the gilded age's nouveau riche, who might have used their newfound wealth in conjunction with old money elites and new progressive ideas to form and cement their control over a new state bureaucracy, which would cater both to the traditional elite and the 2nd generation of the newly minted affluent class. A similar process occurred at the start of Roman empire.

If you look at it this way, then our republican era is already over — the old American Jeffersonian republic is already dead — and we have been and are living in the age of tacit empire. In that case, we might be heading toward a crisis period more similar to 165-197 CE, a period that was a bit messy (to put it lightly).

Yet, the same practical effects of Seneca’s ideas are still comparable to those ascetic ones expressed today. While Senecan/Marxian philosophies may have paved the way for building new bureaucratic structures, the reflective corollary is that when those bureaucratic structures begin to decay these philosophies are recalled by those who are dependent on it (the establishmentarian/Marcus Aurelius/sustainability types) to perpetuate their dominance and uphold the status quo. To put it more simply: imperial official quoting Seneca to promote moderation in 166 is to corporate bureaucrat quoting Marx to promote ESG in 2023.

We’re generally taught that elites are corrupt and selfish creatures. They extract every last morsel of labor power from the proletariat, every natural resource from the earth, sucking the vitality out of every living being like a predatory parasite only to spend the vast fortune they’ve stolen from society on meaningless hallmarks of nobility (in the old days, some gilded grandfather clocks, crystal decanters, Rococo-style furniture, and a château; now, a Maybach, some abstract art, a couple Rollys, and a Manhattan penthouse).

Seeing the elite class as purely exploitative and opulent is somewhat popular today (“eat the rich!”) and you see a lot of critiques of those who openly flaunt their wealth (and who are not, at some particular moment, in the favor of the establishment) [e.g. Kylie Jenner or Andrew Tate]. Most of these attacks, especially in the media, are directed at those people in the public eye and especially those with “new money” —professional athletes, social-media celebrities, and rappers at the most visible level, tech millionaires and crypto bros at a medium-visibility level, but this haughty contempt occurs even within much smaller networks of power: for example, the vitriolic gossip in country club locker rooms and social club cigar lounges against recently minted milli/billionaires in the finance/legal/biotech/defense/energy industries.

You see this mechanism develop whereby new money West Eggers feel a need to peacock (i.e. conspicuously consume) by buying a palatial estate, luxury vehicles, elite education for their descendants, and donating large sums to establishment institutions (as we discussed previously, an indulgence) in order to prove that they are “somebody” (a member of the ruling elite), while old money East Eggers resist this incursion into their established domain by vilifying these aspiring elites as greedy, opulent, selfish, or even salacious, thereby weaponizing morality to close off the gates to power.

The new money philosophy tends, historically, to be the most prominent during periods of intense wealth creation and elite expansion (in the American context think the Gilded Age or the Neoliberal Era [aka Gilded Age 2.0]) where the dream of getting rich is less of a mythology and old glass ceilings of the ruling elite are shattered with a fistful of Benjamins. These are eras of conspicuous consumption, disregarding previous moral standards, rapid social change, and novelty.

The old money philosophy, contrarily, dominates in a period where whatever wealth pump that was fueling the previous new money era runs dry, the economy stagnates, and the elite has to develop a mechanism to shut down the stairway to heaven and potentially have a brief purge in paradise. Here, the dream of getting rich is no longer sustainable, so it’s no longer pushed as the dream and potentially even spun to be an evil. Old moral systems experience a resurgence, tapping into the popular resentment of the inequality that has developed during the new money era. East Eggers (selectively) embrace asceticism, moderation, and sustainability in order to prevent the rise of any remaining industrious aspiring elites and purge (through social ostracism, exile, or other less peaceful means) any unpalatable peer-elites who don’t get with the new program. Thus the frustration of the people is manipulated into fueling a trimming of lower-level and aspiring elites while the old ruling elites, the truly exploitative class, come out not only unscathed but empowered.

This dynamic may (despite being somewhat reductive) sound quite familiar to what is occurring in the present day, but before applying a model to the present it’s best to test it on historical precedent, and one of the best examples of this (hypocritical) weaponization of the ascetic I’ve come across was during the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the early Principate.

Seneca the Younger was a Stoic philosopher who reached a degree of prominence in the first century AD. He was from an equestrian family (equivalent to the upper-upper middle or lower-upper class today) and studied rhetoric and philosophy in Rome (like going to a school today with a history of activism and social justice in New York). There he learned from various Stoic thinkers some of the philosophy’s tenets: virtue as the only true good and vice as the only true evil, using reason over emotion to face life’s ups and downs, understanding the logic of the universe, and resisting luxury and self-gratification.

He would later become the advisor to Emperor Nero (after first being his tutor), and he held considerable influence over Nero’s decision making in the early, “good” years of his reign (from ~54 to 62 AD). Despite all his writings on ascetic stoic philosophy, Seneca is often denounced as a hypocrite because of the considerable fortune he accumulated during his tenure as Nero’s advisor. By others he is celebrated as an early ethicist who found himself stuck in a corrupt regime at the heart of Roman politics but did his best to navigate the situation virtuously.

I am less interested in arguing over who Seneca actually was/what he believed (who is anybody anyway?), than discussing the effect of his philosophical ethics and how they (in some ways) enabled the corruption for which he is often derided.

Take this passage from one of Seneca’s letters, LXXXVI:

Who is there who could bear to have a bath in such surroundings nowadays? We think ourselves poorly off, living like paupers, if the walls are not ablaze with large and costly circular mirrors, if our Alexandrian marbles are not decorated with panels of Numidian marble, if the whole of their surface has not been given a decorative overlay of elaborate patters having all the variety of fresco murals, unless the ceiling cannot be seen for glass, unless the pools into which we lower bodies with all the strength drained out of them by lengthy periods in the sweating room are edged with Thasian marble (which was once the rarest of sights even in the temple), unless the water pours from silver taps.

And so far we have only been talking about the ordinary fellow’s plumbing. What about the bath-houses of certain former slaves? Look at their arrays of statues, their assemblies of columns that do not support a thing but are put up purely for ornament, just for the sake of spending money. Look at the cascades of water splashing noisily down from one level to the next. We have actually come to such a pitch of choosiness that we object to walking on anything other than precious stones.

What trend is he arguing against here? Who is he attacking? Why would the guy with all the money in the world, who was at the center of Roman politics, be advocating for living a simple life? Wouldn’t a Marxist view of history tell us that he, like the rest of the elite class, would necessarily push consumption and accumulation and exploitation to the fullest extent? So, the question is why in this case (as in others) those in power promote not consuming, not exploiting (resources or labor), and living in accordance with nature? Is it out of the kindness of their hearts or for some genuine concern for the planet or prosperity or morality?

Looking at the case of Seneca, it seems like the answer is no, and I would be inclined to say the same today, but to understand why we have to look (briefly) at the time Seneca lived in.

Starting in the 2rd century BC a truly extraordinary wealth pump began for Rome and its elites. The end of the Second Punic War (201 BC) made Rome the major Mediterranean power and flooded the city with slaves (cheap labor). Expansion westward into Spain and eastward into the Hellenic world brought in an increasing amount of plunder and tribute. The standard of living and the level of extravagance among the senatorial class increased rapidly and so did the number of nobles competing for positions of power. [1]

The number of elite aspirants increased proportionally to the wealth pump, as the more numerous progeny of senators and consuls sought out elite positions, and those made newly wealthy from the expansion of the republic (mostly equites) sought to move up into the club of Rome’s noble families (gentes).

As you might expect, elite competition (the game of musical chairs, as discussed previously) escalated dramatically in the late 2nd and early 1st centuries and was quelled only by a violent trimming of the elite class (the murder of the Gracchus brothers/supporters, the Sulla dictatorship, Caesar v. Pompey civil war, Octavian v. Antony civil war)[2]. Because of the heightened degree of violence (and family limitation practices), the elite reproduction rate fell below replacement level.

Simultaneously, the number of elite positions (senators, quaestors, etc.) increased (also known as an “inflation of honors”) and the republic was further expanded (Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and Pompey’s in the East), providing some modest relief to the decreasing pressure of the wealth pump and the position-of-power scarcity. Finally, war exhaustion set in (especially for formerly aspiring elites who acquiesced to falling below noble status), resulting in the consolidation of power under Augustus, the establishment of the Roman Empire and the beginning of Pax Romana. [3]

When Seneca was in power, the memory of a century of civil war and discord was very much still present in people’s minds. Those in power likely did not understand in any concrete or coherent form the dynamics we just discussed that led to the crisis of the Republic, but some of them could have come away with a reasonable takeaway: all that wealth creation and conspicuous consumption we were doing a generation or two ago led to the enrichment of those pesky equites and they were the ones funding and fueling the degradation of our mores, all the violence and instability, and were the ones who wanted to take our positions of power away from us. We need to stop with all this profligate spending, reestablish good moral values, and thereby maintain our power.

Seneca’s Letter (and his overall philosophy) was a part of this ideological campaign to vilify luxury and consumption, and those socially mobile, new money freemen who contribute nothing productive to society but only take. He attacks procuring goods from around the empire (free trade) in favor of self-sufficiency. He wants you to live within your means, not aspire towards some noble level of splendor and luxury, especially if you are one of those “certain former slaves.”

Inspiring this way of thinking has a dual effect: 1) it lowers the wealth threshold of elite status and allows people to base their status no longer on material abundance but virtue (the acquirement of which is not based on economic realities) and 2) it cuts off the mechanism of wealth generation for those aspiring elites who are enriched by luxury spending, thus shrinking the pool of aspirants. Taking this course was at the time a practical necessity because the empire had reached a zenith (further expansion into Persia or Germania would have likely not been cost-effective), so the only other option was to settle the populace into stagnation.

Now, here’s a quick caveat: Seneca was one of these new money people (or at least 2nd generation). He was born in Spain, the son of a wealthy rhetorician and eques. So he was a part of this burgeoning “knight” class vying for power in the expanding bureaucracy of empire. His endorsement of this stoic, stagnatory ideology reflects his transition into a position of power, into the establishment. Perhaps, he (like many self-flagellatory sons of and daughters of elites today) felt (or was taught to feel) a certain degree of guilt for the wealth which his family and his class had accumulated. By embracing this ascetic ideology it allows him to justify his recently acquired position of power, while keeping his head below the tallest poppy and avoiding frequent elite purges. The person who was of the class that benefitted most from the late Republican wealth pump spouting an ideology of moderation and equanimity may seem hypocritical, but it seems to me to be a structural survival mechanism, a way for new elite blood to both protect their status from other and rationalize it to themselves.

Nevertheless, this method of self-preservation didn’t work out in the end for Seneca: he was ordered to commit suicide by his former pupil, Nero, after being connected to a conspiracy against the emperor. The hypocrisy — the range between purported humility and practice ambition, between teaching and practice — was just a bit too great, his head held a little too high in the poppy field…

But let’s get to the modern parallel to this stagnatory ideology, which I think in this case it’s best to show you (rather than tell) with my modern reworking of Seneca’s letter (which may read like those calls-to-action in the name of sustainability and ethicalism championed by today’s intelligentsia):

To live like a founding father — like John Adams on his humble farm in his un-air-conditioned house — is, today, unthinkable. We need our delivery trucks buzzing around, the Uber Eats moped drivers with our late-night Chicken Tikka Masala, this oil-guzzling global supply chain extracting, exploiting all to satisfy our vanities, our egos, to instantly gratify our every impulse. Would you be able to survive without your 65” flat screen? your German-engineered appliances? What about the chips from Taiwan or the cobalt mined by children in the Congo? God forbid your home isn’t “smart” enough to adjust the temperature or the lighting with a single guttural utterance as you lounge on the couch with a pint of ice cream and a brain freeze. And that’s just the baseline for your average modern imbecile. Imagine now the sprawling estates of those tech billionaire drop outs, those irreverent sound cloud rappers and YouTubers, those crypto scammers — decamillionaires overnight! You see their yachts, their gold chains, their bowling alleys and movie theaters and infinity pools, their Lambos and private jets: such opulence, such decadence, such disgusting waste. And where did they get it all from? From your laziness, your consumption, from all your sacred freaking choices*. All this vice must stop for the sustainability of our planet, for social equity, and for the happiness of future generations.* [4]

You may see now how this asceticism can be weaponized to sow guilt through a population to cut off the wealth pump for a certain class of new money elites. Certainly, there is some validity to the critiques made here (exploitation of people and resources, civilizational decadence, unsustainable practices); however, the main function is a means of attacking a certain elite segment: the entrepreneurial class (like the equites class before it).

By fixating on the consumptive aspects that this class has (at least in recent history) fed into and accelerated, this approach places the blame for all the guilt of a ~300 year evolution of consumerist culture, capitalism, exploitation, and Western imperialism on this new entrepreneurial class, while the establishment types who have benefitted from the much longer history of extraction exclusively enjoy the fruits of their old exploits.

The most negative repercussion of the mass-adoption of this frame of thinking is that it vilifies innovation and reaffirms the authority of corrupted institutions, preventing the natural transfer of power from one decaying generation and class to a younger, more meritorious one. This leads to stagnation, and the stench of declines seeps into the very fabric of society.

Now, it’s easy enough to complain about the hypocrisy of this ascetic ideology (it certainly fails to withstand any Ben Shapiro-esque logical challenge) but such a critique is no way to win hearts and minds. This entrepreneurial class, the tech/crypto/creator/antiestablishment crowd, the new money, aspiring-turned-counter elites need to develop an oppositional ideology.

What this new mental framework would look like, who am I to say; but trying to figure out what it will be seems — in an era where we are told that everything’s been done before and that we should just get in line to enjoy the abundance — like one of the few things worth doing.

[1]: Turchin, Peter, Secular Cycles, pg. 194, 198

[2]: I would be remiss if I did not include in these conflicts the Social War from 91-88 BC which led to the granting of citizenship to a significant number of Rome’s Italian allies and thereby an expansion of the elite pool. Despite this outlier, the overall trend of this period, however, was a shrinking of the elite pool.

[3]: Turchin, Secular Cycles, pg. 206-8

[4]: As I rewrote the Seneca letter, I realized that Seneca’s philosophy in terms of historical timing may be closer to Marx's critique of laissez-faire/neoclassical ideas. It reminded me of the gilded age's nouveau riche, who might have used their newfound wealth in conjunction with old money elites and new progressive ideas to form and cement their control over a new state bureaucracy, which would cater both to the traditional elite and the 2nd generation of the newly minted affluent class. A similar process occurred at the start of Roman empire.

If you look at it this way, then our republican era is already over — the old American Jeffersonian republic is already dead — and we have been and are living in the age of tacit empire. In that case, we might be heading toward a crisis period more similar to 165-197 CE, a period that was a bit messy (to put it lightly).

Yet, the same practical effects of Seneca’s ideas are still comparable to those ascetic ones expressed today. While Senecan/Marxian philosophies may have paved the way for building new bureaucratic structures, the reflective corollary is that when those bureaucratic structures begin to decay these philosophies are recalled by those who are dependent on it (the establishmentarian/Marcus Aurelius/sustainability types) to perpetuate their dominance and uphold the status quo. To put it more simply: imperial official quoting Seneca to promote moderation in 166 is to corporate bureaucrat quoting Marx to promote ESG in 2023.