Lehi’s Dream is the parable for our age. Its oddest parts turn out to be its best parts.

The Great and Spacious Building has no bottom.

It does not rest on reality.

Perhaps it cannot rest on reality?

The Dissenting Sociologist argues that there are sound reasons why Hillary Clinton would label some 25% or more of the population as deplorables.  By her standards, these people are unclean.  They are impious.

They almost have to be impious. Their lived experience working with things makes it impossible for them to understand and recite the cant of our creeds.  Conversely, the good-white upper middle class life makes it possible by separating life from experience.  In other words, the Great and Spacious Building has not foundation because it has to have no foundation.

The typical early-adulthood bourgeois experience starts with attending University. There the student learns the correct cant from the source, and is rewarded for repeating it. He then goes on to take a white-collar job, where the exact measurement of his productive output is difficult or altogether impossible, and where in any case proven mastery of this or that form of correct ritual jargon will be a criterion of his fitness for assuming a management role. Once again, he is rewarded for repeating, in the presence of superiors, cant he need not actually understand, and which likely has no precise denotation in any case.

The working-class experience is different. The blue-collar youth is much more likely to enter the workforce immediately, or following completion of vocational training. In any case, whatever technical terminology he learns does have a precise technical denotation that must be understood in order to carry out practical operations whose success or failure will have productive consequences immediately and transparently known to everybody in the work process. (N.B. much the same set of considerations can also go for University-educated STEM personnel, especially engineers- who, to the extent that this is the case, really comprise part of the working-class, notwithstanding that both the salaries and social prestige attached to these positions are often very high).

The bourgeois youth acquires, both by training and experience, a “postmodern” worldview in which there is no objective reality worth worrying about, and pleasing superiors in positions of power- which means telling them the things they want to hear- is what really counts. Use of language, for him, is thus primarily a matter of social, i.e. ritual and magical, efficacy. His working-class counterpart, who bears the weight of objective reality on his shoulders the live-long day as though Atlas, primarily uses language that has a direct connection to material reality, exerts its effects by direct action on material reality as opposed to acting on social reality from a distance, and thus has mechanical as opposed to magical efficacy. This individual naturally regards the postmodern attitude with scorn, those who use magical language as untrustworthy charlatans, those who are socially but not mechanically efficacious as effeminate, and ritual cant with skepticism, if not open derision.

Religious folks are also bad whites. Not just because we already have our own creeds that make it hard to accept the ideology of the Great and Spacious Building (though some of us sure try!), but also because we belong to small scale communities that we have to try to make work on their own terms.  The Mormon ward, the Protestant congregation, the traddy Catholic parish, are points of contact with reality.

I am reading Girard’s Scapegoat book right now.  Its about persecution, among other things.  When societies are under stress, they designate victim groups to persecute, based on far-fetched explanations for how the victim groups are at fault.  I am starting to wonder if the farfetchedness is not a coincidence.  Perhaps the persecution has to be based on nonsense.

The Great and Spacious Building may have no bottom and may engage in loud, mocking laughter because it has to.

Just now, writing this, I have put together the dissenting sociologist’s point and Girard’s.

Just when I thought I had reached the maximum grim for this election.

We have met the new scapegoat, and it is us.