Bernard Rapoport
Under these conditions, the toads are virtually a cancer within the social body. Far from crowning a harmonic hierarchy of elites, they build their own structure of power, influence, and prestige, without overlapping with the other levels of elites. The dynamism of their anti-natural structure ultimately harms the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the nation.
Just as the top rung of a ladder should be in proportion to the rungs below it, the true elite should be proportional to the other elements of the social body. A ladder with an inordinately high last step would be unusable.
In modern industrial societies, this disproportionately high last rung is often constituted by enormous fortunes, entailing inordinate power, influence, and media coverage. The holders of such fortunes, individual or corporate, possess property and interests throughout the country and even in diverse parts of the globe. Transgressing the natural and sound limits of private property, they practically constitute states within the State.
Frederick Vanderbilt Field, great-great-grandson of railroad tycoon Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt and an American leftist political activist, who supported many openly Communist organizations.
In time, this unnatural situation produces a mentality in the members of these counter-elites that tends toward a doctrinal skepticism that scorns the ideas, manners, and traditions of Christian civilization, and leads to an almost exclusive preference for the power and status that the mega-fortunes confer as a means of exercising an almost tyrannical action over the nation.
This conglomerate of super-national individual and corporate toads form a trans-elite at the summit of economic life that more closely resembles a nomenklatura than an authentic elite.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII: A Theme Illuminating American Social History (York, Penn.: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), American Appendix, p. 188.
Nobility.org Editorial comment: —
Cancer develops within an organism, but it does so in a disordered way. It no longer contributes to the organism’s general good. Indeed, the cancer’s growth is highly detrimental, possibly fatal.
So it is with counter-elite “toads.” Something in their relationship with the broader community has gone awry. They develop in a disordered way. They break with the past, and care nothing for the future. They live only for their own pleasure. Tradition means nothing to them and Christian civilization they scorn.
Their loathing of society’s common good and the Christian order frequently leads them to help other enemies of Christianity in their subversive attacks.
