NYT's Adam Davidson Parrots Disinformation as He Extols Rule by the SuperRich

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"Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence."

So Conrad celebrates competitiveness, when he managed to find his way onto the low-risk elite path when it was less crowded than today. And high income disparity serves that end. If you lose your economic perch, unlike in more equal societies, you are almost certain to lose most of your putative friends. If you can’t socialize at their level, over time you disappear from their set (and that’s before you factor in the possibility of serious budget problems). Yet as you peel the layers back, despite his confidence that the world would work better if it was mashed into his template, it sounds utterly miserable.

Just because someone has an internally consistent world view does not make it accurate. Fans of slavery, alchemy, the Inquisition, trial by combat, and Ptolemaic astronomy all had logical looking arguments supporting their now discredited views. Conrad at first seems to yet another evangelist of a hopelessly flawed and dangerous orthodoxy, and the more he speaks, the more he seems to be deeply imbalanced, so intensely invested in his distorted personal mythology that he is driven to make the world at large reflect it back. It would be far better for Davidson and the New York Times to treat people like Conrad as epitomes of deep-seated cultural pathologies, rather than promote them.