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Notes -
PMC is less ill-fitting than priestly, although it still doesn’t quite capture my sentiment.
A priestly class actually has the respect of the other classes, and takes its mission in shepherding them seriously. The noisemakers the West has today fit neither of these criteria.
If anything, I’d say the primary characteristic of this class is being annoying in rhetorically-compelling (but not epistemically- or aesthetically-compelling!) ways. Think "Team Building Exercises" or other such nonsense. What are you gonna do, argue that team building and camaraderie is bad, hmm? Yet everyone who’s ever been subjected to this has the same thought in their mind: "this is such bullshit."
Dumbledore vs Umbrage is a good example of the contrast between the actual priestly class and the rhetorically-motivated class that fancies itself priestly.
Have you read Scott Alexander on Priesthoods? I think he makes valuable points there, and its the reason I like the priestly analogy. The PMC in general is absolutely not a single priesthood - there's to little general "intra muros" priest-priest communication happening, since they don't actually share any dogma. "Real" priesthoods (medicine, individual academic research fields, engineering, politics, ect.) have much more internal interactions than interactions with the outside "parish", and they care much more deeply about those internal conflicts than they do about what the rest of us think.
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