Gather 'round, kids, it’s another instance of The_Filthy_Commie’s unposted comments he saved up. This time on how ‘‘elitism’’ can be good:

When I was still a lib, I was one of those ‘‘elitist’’ pricks. If something was popular I became suspicious. If too many people were believing something, and I found out it was bullshit, or that it was a morally wrong position to have, I would tell myself, see? this is why you have to be suspicious of things if they’re popular, because ‘‘the masses don’t know anything’’. It saved me many times from falling into that groupthink of western bullshit, the kind we see with Ukraine, the hatred towards Muslims, Russians, and Chinese, and other vitriol. I would also have present this thought when assessing new things: ‘‘for something to be mainstream, it has to be for the common denominator, and the common denominator has bad taste, hence what is mainstream is in bad taste.’’ Looking back, its funny how adopting an ‘‘elitist’’ position like that, which apparently many westerners believe they represent, as arbiters of ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘universal values’’, helped me to overcome them with their own tools. What I mean is that by looking down at those looking down on the world, I was able to understand the world better. At the very least, I was able to get closer to a sort of ‘‘internationalism’’, and not close myself within western nonsense, because I knew that the positions held in the West were not the only ones, and that more often than not, they were not only incorrect, but immoral.

But, just as socialism will come to the world bearing the birthmarks from capitalism, so, too, I became a communist bearing the birthmarks of an ‘‘elitist’’ prick. At least, it helped me maintain critical thinking, introspection, reflection, self-criticism and what I call ‘‘good taste’’, which is simply not being a piece of shit. It makes me laugh to see how something that could have turned out so badly, this intellectual ‘‘elitism’’, was actually helpful in my case. Nowadays, I’m more humble, even if we ‘‘tankies’’ keep being right all the dang time.