Bourgeois Missionary on a Bike - and a little Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

 “Serviltiy creeps into the very soul of the bourgeoisie and is increasingly taken for virtue.” Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.

I’m tempted to just leave this post with the video and Dostoevsky quite, but add a bit to it . . . (And to add, the use of bourgeois in a descriptive sense below will be much more about being mired in a certain inner state than simply being middle class.)

In the video above, having experienced an allergic reaction to seeing an Irish national flag, or Tricolour as it’s known, a well-educated middle or upper middle class Irish citizen tries to awaken and educate the working class people he is faced with, and raise them up to the more refined level he thankfully inhabits. If they allow themselves to be raised up by the agents of progress, they are justified, if not they will be absolutely vilified.

 Alas, after the missionary efforts of the perfectly obedient and right-thinking bourgeois on the bike, who in fairness is quite pleasant and well-intentioned, the native Dubliners in the video perversely choose to behave as living individuals possessed of free will, rather than as abstract digits in an academic textbook, and so don’t give up on their national flag and their sense of being a people - in this case Irish. For the ‘progressive’ person however, now so bloodless and abstract, just a receiver of thoughts to conform with, this more primal state of being a people, as felt by these working class folk, now induces an allergic reaction to his fragile, conditioned self. This sisn’t simply about opinions, but the national flag is experienced on this general abstract person as an aggressive force. It’s too real! And here there is a very telling quote from Nietzsche in the Of the New Idol chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 

Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye.

And so here the working class guys here are not ashamed to exist as a people, and are out of step with the ever-expanding bureaucratic behemoth of the state, while the bloodless bourgeois experiences no such aversion to its dictates. Remember for the progressive ideology, the nationalist sense of identity is seen as an antagonistic rival force of allegiance, and thus the national flag and sense of identity are to be attacked. Thus the progressive man on the bike’s automatic response to his national flag, and which inner reflex he imagines to be a manifestation of virtue. And while I’m here, this from the same passage by Nietzsche: 

Confusion of the language of good and evil; I offer you this as the sign of the state. Just see how it lures them. How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them.

Finally, to point out the line by one of the Dublin working-class guys, showing he perfectly understands this progressive dynamic of condescension invisible at play, when he says, “Can you explain it to me like I’m a two years old please.” What a brilliant line from someone possessed of a vitality this obedient bourgeois soul has no idea of.