Post by @kiwi@kolektiva.social
Many societies throughout history have imposed sumptuary laws. These are restrictions on which people—or, more specifically, which *kinds* of people—can wear or display certain markers of status.
These might be restrictions on who can wear certain colors, or fabrics, or jewelry, or who can publicly carry weapons, and so on. Wealthy and aristocratic elites get one set of public ornamentation and display, while everyone else gets another.
The idea is to create and sustain immediately obvious signifiers of class, status, and wealth—to create and sustain specific *kinds* of public people.
The reason for this is that hierarchical status doesn’t just *happen*. Wealthy elites don’t just stumble into power and wealth; they must first impose it and then constantly reproduce it. One easy way to do this is through public displays of category: I hold power over you because I am immediately recognizable as a holder of power, and my exclusionary access to these ornaments is by itself an element of that power.
(Hence military and police uniforms, the elements of which often bleed over into [primarily male] fashion.)
But the general abolition of hereditary aristocracies over the last few centuries and their replacement by capitalist elites, who are *at least ostensibly* not hereditary or otherwise protected by class-specific laws, has created a problem for the people who rule us: how do they set themselves apart from the rest of us in obvious and tangible ways, so that they themselves feel powerful and can signal their status to everyone else?
That’s the whole promise of liberal capitalism, after all: that we are all juridically equal, as all the old feudal privileges have been swept away.
This is where we come to pedocon theory: our elites are not just involved in sexual abuse at astonishing rates, but are vocally committed to defending and promoting sexual abuse among their own ranks, especially but not exclusively of children.
https://www.axios.com/2026/10/21/ramaswamy-ad-acton-mother-ohio
I struggle to imagine that pedophilia, as an actual sexual attraction to children, is really so common among the general public that *so fucking many* of the wealthiest and most powerful people in our society are either engaged in or are weirdly sympathetic to the abuse of children.
Which means that many of them have adopted it, not because they are themselves pedophiles but rather because, I suspect, it is a public marker of class status.
Capitalism makes virtually every consumption good available to anyone, at least in some attenuated form. Sumptuary laws restricted access to fabrics and ornaments, but now virtually anyone can buy and display at least a cheap knock-off version.
What’s left to elites to signal their status? Perhaps it’s the power to commit the worst abuses and violate our society’s strictest taboos, in public, without facing consequences.
This is a long-winded way of saying: it’s not a cure-all, but if you want to seriously reduce modern society’s sexual abuses and especially abuse of children, please consider supporting your local anarchists in abolishing the state and capital.
@HeavenlyPossum I also think the urge to do violence is overrepresented among these people and this is a particularly prurient outlet for it, it's giving Westworld
@kiwi @HeavenlyPossum
I think it's exactly that - to be a billionaire is itself inherently an act of violence. It attracts almost exclusively people who are attracted to that kind of violence. Seen that way it's probably not surprising they're also attracted to another kind of violence.
Yes, there’s a huge amount of self-selection involved; the sorts of people who are likeliest to become billionaires are also likely to be highest on those personality traits.