The commanding cultural and economic heights of our society are run by people who wish us ill.  The political heights also though to a lesser extent.

One strategy is to make concessions, avoid making waves, try to be useful to these elites and get them to leave us alone by being nonthreatening.  For most,* this strategy is based on a model of what the threat to us is like.  If the model is wrong, the strategy is wrong.

The people following the strategy usually haven’t thought through the model, but it is still their implicit model.

The model is that the elites have a set of demands that they want and they will be satisfied when these demands are met.  The model is that we have done threatening things in the past and the elites are, at least somewhat reasonably, responding to these threats and will be placated when they see that we are no longer threatening them.  The model is that there is someone in charge who can be negotiated with and who can call off the dogs.

This model is implicit because it doesn’t hold up very well to examination.  This model predicts that once the sexual revolution won in the 80s, that would be it.  Or the feminist victory in the 90s.  Or the gay marriage victory a few years ago.

No part of the model holds up.

Other models that fit the facts better.  Because they fit the facts better, they will make for better strategies.

One model is that we are faced with a revolution and a secular religion.  Revolutions that promise to deliver utopia in this life require scapegoats and will continue to crush the scapegoats as long as any are left or can be invented.  Religions are not content with apostates, heretics, and unbelievers even if the hold-outs are harmless and defeated.

Another model is that we are faced not with flesh and blood, but with principalities, powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world.

Another model is what is called HLvM.  High-Low versus Middle.  Here is a brief explanation I ran across recently:

“High-Low versus Middle” is the simplified version of Jouvenelian conflict. The more nuanced one is that power centers- and here we mean both political i.e. coercive, and cultural i.e. status-granting centers, which are often the same but not always, are engaged in constant conflict with their own subsidiaries, said entities being institutions whether formal or informal that aid the power center in its exercise of government. Power centers, whether out of fear of being deposed, or sheer simian lust for power (Bond mostly spares us from speculation on the why), always attempt to accrue more power to themselves from their subsidiaries. Because the very low-status have little power to take, centralizing authority must take from its own lesser allies, which are sometimes not very lesser at all. To do this, Power must ally itself with other elements of the hierarchy, most often by promising those lower on the rung greater goods and status than those between it and the Power.

-there is more explanation at the blog using examples.  I’m linking for that.  But there is also some vulgarity and the post wanders off into some pretty strange territory.  There is no quality control on the internet, be warned.

Under this model, it’s a mistake to think that you can compromise or bribe the elites to leave you alone. The logic is to crush you. Whether you act like a threat is irrelevant. Threat analysis is all about capability, not intent. The very things you would need to show that you are inoffensive–self-control, discipline, long term thinking–show that you have capability and therefore show that you are a threat.

You either get absorbed into the elite, are crushed by the elite, or replace the elite.

*There is a pacifist Christian strategy which looks superficially similar but is going to be very different in some respects, and has a different model of the threat.