I grew up feeling fairly alienated, and with kind of a disdain for what I perceived as popular culture, because hey, it was the 90s. Over the next couple of decades, I mellowed a bit - life feels better when you're not complaining all the time, everyone's got flaws, at least we're all alive and moving forward, right? And then The 2016 election happened, and I regressed pretty hard: High school me was right, there are idiots everywhere.

I think what happens to some people is that this folds back into unadulterated cynicism. A person goes beyond loathing their fellow humans, and decides that they might as well abandon shame and lean into taking advantage of the idiots. This manifests in someone like Ted Cruz, a top performing lawyer at Morgan Lewis, who attended Ivy League universities - not a dumb guy - being who he is. Or former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson, studied at Oxford and graduated Stanford with honors, who studied violin at Juliard and won the Miss America pageant - and on Fox News, would hold up a dictionary to the camera and said shit like "I didn't know what the word Czar meant so I looked it up in the dictionary" because the grift was so good - but Roger Ailes' penis was a bridge too far.

And on a much smaller scale... you've got audiophile hucksters, who recognize that there are stupid people out there who nonetheless have lucrative careers - and will pay you $11,000 for a four foot tall stick of polished wood if you tell them it harmonically balances resonances inherent to 60hz line level voltage... or whatever.

Millennia of reinforcement of authority structures, decomposed and reconstituted into dumb capitalism.