The great never look upon their inferiors as their fellow-creatures

The title of this post is a quote from Adam Smith, and perfectly sums up the British elite. I do not suppose that the British are any more guilty of this than their counterparts from any other nation, but it explains so much about the British system of government and British culture. Adam Smith mixed with the great of his day and was feted by them despite being uninterested in their flattery, preferring the relative obscurity of Scotland to the grand salons of London and Europe, so was speaking from experience. My guess is that such people disgusted him, as he cautions us

"Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless and independent? There seems to be one way to continue in that virtuous resolution; and perhaps but one. Never enter the place from whence so few have been able to return; never come within the circle of ambition; nor ever bring yourself into comparison with those masters of the earth who have already engrossed the attention of half mankind before you."

A truly great man, and I urge anyone visiting Scotland to visit his grave in the Canongate cemetery in Edinburgh and then visit the grave of David Hume, from whom I have learned so much, in Old Calton cemetery just five minutes walk from the Canongate. I raise this because we, in the UK, are treated everyday to graphic examples of this dismissive and inhumane attitude from our betters. I have said here before that those people in the UK who consider themselves as upper or upper middle class live in a completely different society from me. We share the same space, but do not share the same language, culture, ideology or value system, the things that identify our humanity. I do not believe that things have changed one jot with respect to such things since the British Prime Minister, Disraeli, described Britain as two nations whose populations have nothing whatever in common with each other. For example, I was watching a programme on food when a meal was presented for their judgment to three very bourgeois London centric judges and before he had even tasted the food one of the judges damned it because he said it was served on the wrong plate. Now, I may be missing something very crucial, but how on earth can you have a right and a wrong plate? How completely stupid can a class of people be that they can be offended by a plate? That's like saying you have the wrong fork or colour of hair. Half the world's population eat with their fingers, so they must be committing a grievous crime in the eyes of the British bourgeoisie. I mean, really, what does it matter?

You will probably have read of the imbecile from the pigsty who is demanding that we carry out dental checks to ascertain the age of immigrants to ensure that they are not cheating. How morally bereft have we become as a nation to descend to such barbarity. This is a person who is so consumed with hate for immigrants and foreigners in general that he cannot simply accept that we should (and here I confess to talking like a Tory) do the right thing. We have government ministers describing immigrants as bargaining chips, my loathsome friend Liam Fox describing them as cards that we can use ' for negotiating purposes'. These are people who simply do not see other human beings, they see untermenschen, the subhuman, because they are 'not like us.' I await them rolling out the nose and forehead profiles to determine their Aryan credentials. Am I the only person who sees parallels with the Third Reich in this British government? Remember, this is the government who described the immigrants fleeing the horrors of Syria as 'swarms' likening them to insects. Throughout the American election process we have been treated to the spectacle of Donald Trump behaving exactly the same way with respect to Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Hispanics, immigrants in general and of course the female 51% of the world's population, and being greeted with thunderous applause. Smith summed up the grovelling cap doffing attitude of the British when he wrote

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages."

There, written in 1776, we have the explanation for Brexit and Trump. We think we are so enlightened, so superior, when we are in effect descending once again into the barbarity that almost ended civilisation in the last century. I leave you with another quote from Smith that neatly sums up this malignant class and racial deference that is slowly destroying us as a society and as a civilised nation.

"A stranger to human nature, who saw the indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors, and the regret and indignation which they feel for the misfortunes and sufferings of those above them, would be apt to imagine, that pain must be more agonising, and the convulsions of death more terrible to persons of higher rank, than to those of meaner stations."

This is Doktor Kommirat's Adam Smith, this is not the Adam Smith of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. That Adam Smith is a fiction and never existed. Kommirat's Adam Smith was a true Scot who would have rejected such people's company. My Adam Smith would have joined me in a gin and tonic, and treated me as an equal. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat