I’ve been reading a bunch of books on the question concerning who–that is, which class–exercises power today, and many political thinkers agree that it’s the meritocratic-managerial elite who’ve been in charge, those often living (in the US) on the East and West Coasts, those wielding “soft power” through government, the media, academia, and the Big Five.

I think, as far as a telos is concerned, that we have a Scylla and a Charybdis on our hands. The Scylla is the endless attempt at being successful that’s sought by the 9.9%–that is, by the meritocratic-managerial elites living in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and the like. Most will continue to ask: “Where is my impact? What is my legacy? How can I achieve greater success?” It’s a sad admixture of wealth, status, social recognition, and “service”–sad in that it’s endless, fruitless, and ultimately far from happiness.

The Charybdis, meanwhile, is the life of pleasure. One argument is that the 90% of commoners, many of whom in a former time would have been working decent jobs in manufacturing, have been propped up by government support. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, as of 2022, “53%—more than half of all U.S counties—drew at least a quarter of their income from government aid” (free link here). Michael Sandel, in his book The Tyranny of Merit, has argued that the many have, by and large, become consumers. Uncharitably put, they’ve been “bought off” by pro-globalization elites who have benefitted disproportionately from free trade, large-scale immigration, tax arbitrage, and the like (see, here, Michael Lind’s excellent The New Class War).

I feel an almost invisible line might be walked between the Scylla (success) and the Charybdis (pleasure), and that line might be cumbersomely labeled a “simple, wholesome life moving according to the diurnal rhythms of the day.” This is, perhaps, no more apparent than in the Port William novels of writer, essayist, and poet Wendell Berry, one such being A Place on Earth. In the latter, a deep, quiet somberness is met with an unspoken, and very real love.

I don’t, however, think that we can readily head back to towns like these. And yet, although–in this regard, I disagree with Patrick Deneen (see his Why Liberalism Failed as well as Regime Change)–I don’t see us “going back home” to small towns where life, prior to, say, 1980 in Erie, Pennsylvania, would resume as if globalization hadn’t occurred, I do think that there’s poetic room for leading lives that are very quiet, almost invisible, and stunningly beautiful. These would be lives marked by self-knowledge (indeed, Self-knowledge) and by universal love–not by the appetites and not by the Promethean aspirations to “be somebody.”

The Daoist sage, after all, walks softly, leaving no traces behind. This style of life is touched as much by Knowledge as it is by Love. May our lives–one part sweet, one part simple–be like songs that are heard, that vibrate for a time, and that fall back into what they’ve always been: “the white radiance of Eternity.”