Originally Uploaded to YouTube and Odysee on August 8, 2022
Recently I took the time to read through Academic Agent’s book, The Populist Delusion, which has been an excellent reader’s guide to the principle thinkers of elite theory, such as Mosca, Pareto, and Bertrand de Jouvenel. However I want to focus on the last of those three thinkers, De Jouvenel, and his model of high-low versus middle, because the more I read this, the more and more of this model I see inside of Spandrell’s famous popular concept of Bioleninism.
So today we’ll be examining De Jouvenel’s model of High Low versus Middle, and applying it to Bioleninism, before drawing out the implications onto today’s current political landscape.
Bertrand de Jouvenel was a 20th Century French political philosopher and futurist, a critic of liberalism in many ways while still an ardent defender of its focus on liberty and limitation of power. His 1948 work, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth is one of his most well known treatises on the nature of politics and human relations throughout history. De Jouvenel argued that society could never be separated from the state, and that the concept of the separation of powers has never been fully realized, nor do democratic systems fail to prevent the secular trend of the growth of the central authority of the state. It is within On Power do we get the model of high low versus middle, or sometimes referred to HLvM. This model does not explain necessarily the nature of power itself, but how power is further centralized and attained. How individuals, groups, institutions, are targeted for the explicit purpose of snuffing out competition.
This brings us to the model itself. De Jouvenel wrote that society is primarily divided into three social strata broadly labeled as Power, Aristocracy, and The Common People. Now this is a very broad categorization, as even De Jouvenel argues that the middle class is separate from aristocracy that would side with power if push came to shove. C.A. Bond’s book Nemesis: The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders (an excellent book I might add) he uses the terms Center, Subsidiary, and Periphery. The periphery can be swapped for the term clients, if you’re Curtis Yarvin. For the sake of this video, we will be using the terms High, Middle, and Low with the respective language from Yarvin, Bond, and De Jouvenel throughout for further clarification on this broad scope.
Power, as De Jouvenel put it, is an easy way to understand the High part of this model of society and the nature of where power is centralized. We can see it throughout our society today in the West, where power can be concentrated, through the nature of the state, (although we know it is much more than the just the government apparatus itself.) This is why the middle is so hard to define, and why De Jouvenel made it an effort to delineate the aristocracy and the middle class, but we’ll get into the Middle in a bit shortly.
The Low, Clients, The Common People, The Periphery, are reliant on the nodes of Power, The State, to achieve their ends of comfort and and desires. This becomes the central point of the High Low versus Middle Model. As De Jouvenel notes, power is always in competition to root out and destroy other avenues of power that could challenge its own. And these alternatives to the current power structure, have been often seen in the middle classes. The Middle, or De Jouvenel’s aristocracy, isn’t as clear cut as the rest. While many could consider the Low to be those dependent on the state, spiteful mutants, and the rest, the Middle has far more areas of concern. As there are those who do align with power or have their wealth by nature of a relationship with the state to ally with it, such as the aristocracy, but there are those who are independently wealthy and not reliant on the state. And as a Academic Agent points out in his book, these individuals can be seen as the Petite Bourgeois or Kulaks. And it is these potential avenues of power, by means of being dependent on a growing central authority, is both where revolution can happen, but be the targets of the regime. Power continually centralizes, and it is the middle that must be snuffed out, for that where a threat to power lies.
With this rudimentary introduction to the model at hand, we can apply it to Spandrell’s concept of Bioleninism. If you’d like to know more about it, I’ve linked his blog, Bloody Shovel, in the description along with my previous video on the subject as well. In his three part blog post on the subject of bioleninism, an elite vanguard achieves one party rule by getting those who can play ball with you, with quote:
“…the ideal politician is the man who doesn't have anything else going on for him. Someone for whom being a politician is the best thing that ever happened to him. Somebody who positively known that if he ever leaves the party his status would drop.”
This can come from a few places, such as the middle class if it choses to align with power, or as Spandrell points out with the current individuals on the ground for the left, people that Matt Gaetz of Florida would say are ugly and unattractive, make for the best commissars to enforce the regime’s ideology on those Kulaks. After all as Spandrell puts it, there’s always biology. And just as a good politician, or anyone willing to take power away from those in the middle would be that by those who in Power can offer, or threaten as leverage against the lower classes and dregs of society.
As Spandrell puts it quite nicely
“If there’s a way to grab power somebody will grab it. All he, or more likely she at this rate, has to do is say: give me power, or else, all of you, all those evil fat women with a make-work office job, all those foreigners living off the public purse, all those just plain unpleasant people with unhealthy lifestyles; all of you, give me power, or if you don’t, we’ll go back to 1959, it’ll be ok to be white, and all of you will have to make your bed, clean up your room, and do actual work. You’ll be on your own.”
Spandrell argues that Biological Leninism is the organizing principle of all centers of power in the West, and that it keeps getting worse all the time, is because it’s not quite getting the job done when it comes to diversification. The job is concentration of power. It’s achieving absolute control, and this includes individuals who aren’t necessarily just regime approved targets.
This brings us back to De Jouvenel’s High Low Versus Middle model. Academic Agent writes that with regard to the middle class, the Kulaks, the consequences that would follow on their path to power.
“They can ally with Power, or they can ally with the subsidiaries; should they ally with the latter, they too will become the target of Power which will brook no dissent.”
Which brings to seeing the model in action today. Just as the regime talks about Yale being too Pale and too Stale, or CNN’s Eight White Economists you’ve never heard about determining whether or not we’re in a recession, you can tell who the Kulaks are in this situation. Returning to the end of Chapter Six of The Populist Delusion:
The media daily propagandizes against ‘white privilege’ explains why white people are ‘the problem’. But why would power so heavily focus on this group, ‘white people’? Because it comprises people who are independent of the state, would-be aristocrats, subsidiaries in potential, and even a few truly independent institutions, and therefore the largest threat to its hegemony.
And by “its hegemony” he is referring to the current class of individuals in power. Even now as the Republican Party and other Conservative institutions work to find a multi-ethnic coalition for future electoral victories, they too will become the target of power. After 2020, articles discussing “mutliracial whiteness” and “the rise of the far right latina” are making it clear that allying with the middle, white people, will make you just as much a target of the regime. Even now with constant attacks against Asian Americans in the United States being heavily slanted demographically based upon the perpetrators, it still doesn’t lead to anything because in our current model, both victim and perpetrator are tangentially on the side of power.
De Jouvenel’s model offers insight to power and revolution, and Spandrell’s concept of bioleninism fits nicely to it as the regime to continues to ramp up its list of racial enemies in the United States, making it toxic for others in the middle class or even their subsidiaries to align with them. Spandrell argues that it’s only a matter of time before unipolar control takes place in the United States, but as the rhetoric heats up, it will be important to know these things as time goes on. What may come is unknown when that hour arrives is unknown, but the game stays the same, but the players certainly change.
De Jouvenel and Bioleninism