Symptoms of a declining civilisation

The single most far reaching thing Communists did in Eastern Europe was to destroy the elites. In Great Britain the traditional elites are being killed with kindness. Kindness to marginalised or poor people. 

The result is that the elite that rules the country in twenty years time will be very unlike the one that has emerged organically over generations and centuries.

From today's Sunday Telegraph. 

'In 2022, 68 per cent of places at Oxford and 72.5 per cent at Cambridge were awarded to state-school pupils – up from 57 per cent and 61 per cent in 2013 (93 per cent of children in England and Wales are state-educated). Last summer, every place for law at Edinburgh University was awarded to students from deprived areas or disadvantaged schools: of 400 applicants living in the country’s poorest postcodes, 168 won a place, while the 555 hopefuls applying from the wealthiest 60 per cent of areas failed to score a single one.

'“There’s so much pressure to be able to say, ‘This year we’ve admitted 70 per cent from state schools rather than 55,’” says David Abulafia, historian and life fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. This criteria “is not useful if it results in people who are less capable and less well-qualified being admitted, rather than people who are real high-fliers.”'

Most of the news from the West is deeply, deeply depressing these days but this depressed me much more than anything I read in a year. That is saying very much indeed.