Here, perhaps, is the greatest problem we face these days: Everything is full.
Saunter over to your favorite bar for that longed-for bone-dry martini, and the waiter will inform you, without even bothering to feign a whiff of regret, that no table will likely be available until sometime during the next presidential administration. That sushi place downtown everyone is talking about? They’ll mark you down for 7:30 p.m. on a Thursday late in 2049. The airline you were thinking of flying with to your next overseas vacation is proposing that you try swimming there instead. Everywhere you turn, things are tight, crowded, and impossible.
The observation is neither new nor mine. It was made in 1930 by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who followed it up with another, less mundane, and far more pressing one: The reason everything is so crowded is because the masses have rudely elbowed their way from the backbenches of public life into the foreground, the rarefied space once reserved for the few and the refined.
Before you roar that this is America and that we’ve no place here for crusty old continental caste systems, you may want to revisit Ortega y Gasset’s masterwork, The Revolt of the Masses. It is perhaps the most urgently relevant century-old book you’ll ever read. The masses of whom he speaks aren’t the poor or the untitled—quite the opposite.
Who are they, why are they making us all miserable, and what might we do about it? Allow me to answer the question by telling you about my acquaintance, Dr. D.
The doc—name withheld and some biographical details tweaked to protect the feelings of the innocent—is a celebrated physician in a large West Coast health system, the sort of medical superstar folks feel truly privileged to see once they’ve somehow pulled some strings and scored an appointment. In his very narrow field, Dr. D, MD, is like Zeus atop a tiny, neon-lit Olympus, all-knowing and omnipotent. Outside of it, Dr. D is—to use the technically precise term inscribed in the Clinical Handbook of Psychological Disorders: Sixth Edition—an absolute and utter putz.
His taste in art, if you can call it that, is banal at best, with Beyoncé displacing Bach at the top of the musical food chain. When Dr. D reads books—which he does only when comfortably ensconced in his beach house, ski lodge, or some other fabulous resort—he limits his literary diet to the latest feckless work some celebrity has deemed “important.” And his knowledge of just about everything else, from history to philosophy to the scientific pursuits that lie just north of the tip of his nose, is similarly middling. And yet, when Dr. D plops himself down at your dinner table, you can bet on him delivering a thundering disquisition on just about anything and expecting you to look on and admire his profundity.
But Dr. D is wrong. About pretty much everything. Pretty much all of the time. Because Dr. D, his glittering credentials notwithstanding, is precisely who Ortega y Gasset was talking about when he mused about the specialist who knows his tiny corner of the universe, is profoundly ignorant of all the rest, and yet exudes enough glaring arrogance to blind himself and those around him.
There’s a reason the specialist is the purest example of what the Spanish thinker dubbed el hombre-masa, “the mass-man,” a creature as confident as he is clueless. The mass-man, Ortega y Gasset explained, has three distinctive marks: “An inborn, root-impression that life is easy, plentiful, without any grave limitations,” which inspires him both to feel absurdly powerful and to display no gratitude for the efforts of those who preceded him; a tendency to act “as if he and his like were the only beings existing in the world”; and, consequently, the will to “intervene in all matters, imposing his own vulgar views without respect or regard for others, without limit or reserve, that is to say, in accordance with a system of ‘direct action.’”
Sound like anyone you know?
The answer, of course, is “yes.” We all have mass-men and mass-women crowding our lives, making spaces once sanctified by reverence feel crass and pointless. That bar where you once perched in silence, observing an old man mixing your libations with the care and precision of the priests in the Temple of old? It’s now thick with mass-dudes ordering vodka and Red Bulls and congratulating themselves on achieving optimal alcohol absorption with minimal effort. And I won’t even talk about being queued up like cattle to shuffle past famous paintings in once quiet and contemplative museums.
We used to believe, as Ortega y Gasset elegantly put it, that “to live is to feel oneself limited, and therefore to have to count with that which limits us.” But mass-man instead shouts that “to live is to meet with no limitation whatever and, consequently, to abandon oneself calmly to one’s self. Practically nothing is impossible, nothing is dangerous, and, in principle, nobody is superior to anybody.”
That, put succinctly, is not only a problem but the problem of our moment in time. We’re living through what Walther Rathenau (who served as the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister for a few months before he was assassinated by ultra-nationalist fanatics) called the “vertical invasion of the barbarians.” In academia and corporate America, in publishing and in Hollywood—everywhere you look, the masses have taken over. The problem isn’t so much that this institution or that has gone woke, say, but rather that our institutions have been seized by people whose worldview is perilously solipsistic, shallow, and devoid of admiration for that tenet without which no institution could ever stand erect: tradition.
What to do? Thankfully, Ortega y Gasset offers not only a diagnosis but also a cure. On the other side of the trench dug by the masses, he wrote, stand the nobles. And while they may not necessarily possess the vast resources of the mutually accrediting mediocrities who run just about everything these days, these fine souls—teachers and bus drivers, mothers and fathers, men and women from all walks of life—still believe in excellence, and in the work it takes to achieve it.
The excellent man, Ortega y Gasset mused, “is he who contemns what he finds in his mind without previous effort, and only accepts as worthy of him what is still far above him and what requires a further effort in order to be reached.” With every achievement, “he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself.” The excellent man therefore realizes that “nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us”—“by obligations, not by rights”—and he knows, too, that to live nobly is to live a life of eternal servitude, forever bound to higher powers and higher causes he may never truly understand or even experience. This yearning for that which is higher, when coupled with disciplined labor and humility, is how we build communities and societies worth defending and preserving.
Which is why we would all do well to keep a copy of Ortega y Gasset’s work on our desk. It’s just as much of a blueprint for living well as it is a work of philosophical observation. To read it today is to shake off the cobwebs of fatigue, despair, and anxiety and leap joyfully into the hard work of self-ennoblement.
How? First, by learning from our mistakes. “The past,” Ortega y Gasset quipped, “will not tell us what we ought to do, but it will what we ought to avoid.” Socialism, bigotry, open borders—these disastrous ideas and others just as terrible excite the masses because they offer mystical catchall solutions to intricate problems. We should begin by tuning out their siren songs and then, once we’re safe, proceed to step two. It’s equally simple: Let’s serve!
The masses consider service a sucker’s lot, a yoke to be carried only by those poor saps who aren’t willful enough to change their fortunes. This attitude is why their favorite political vehicle is street protest, not the slow cobbling together of fragile coalitions. It’s why they idolize the “exit,” the moment when a start-up company is sold for a small fortune, making its founders instant millionaires. The masses have little patience for volunteering, and they have no use for community work of any sort.
That’s where you and I come in. There is a massive opportunity here to rescue our civilization from the uncaring experts who have degraded it into a series of loose affiliations and petty transactions. We can step in with the spirit of noblesse oblige and show that we nobles, who still believe in tradition and answer to a higher calling, are spiritually prepared to take our rightful place as leaders. Not for material gains, not for fame and glory, not for some gilded degree or online following, but for something far more precious—the well-being of future American generations.
