It's interesting to me that this video is age-restricted to people over 18 by YouTube. It's definitely worth watching if you are a fan of using art to critique social norms that excuse things like Apartheid or child labor in diamond mines. A couple of show notes - The weird looking older guy in the video is Elon Musk's father Errol and at the end of the video a guy is pissing on the grave of Cecil Rhodes the founder of De Beers diamond company. The YouTube channel this video comes from is called Elephant Graveyard. It's a good place for some absurd takes on the ruling ideas of this epoch.
Google AI tells me, ""The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas" is from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's The German Ideology, meaning that the dominant class in society, by controlling the means of both material and intellectual production, disseminates its worldview as the generally accepted and rational perspective for everyone.
Speaking of mining - I'm currently reading the book Germinal by Emile Zola written in 1884-1885. It's a story about the men, women and children working in an underground coal mine and the owners/shareholders of the mine. I just got to the part where the wealthy spoiled daughter of the mine owner gives a starving mother and her two young children (out of seven) a bag of used clothing rather than food or money. Her mine-owning Papa is sure that miners would only waste money on frivolous things which is in line with J.D. Vance's take on poor people in Appalachia, as outlined in his ruling-class-created book "Hillbilly Elegy". It's hard to imagine a new college graduate getting a book deal for telling a story about people on food stamps buying steak (a revival of Reagan's welfare queens from the 1980's) without the support of someone with money and power. The ruling class wants a particular story about poor people to be told; J.D. Vance is willing to do anything for money, including using his mother's problems with drugs as fodder for his book, so the billionaires in the leisure class found their boy.
It also reminds me of something Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley said about poor people, and the basic philosophy of the Heritage Foundation when it comes to poor people, which is a combination of either they aren't poor (they have TV's and cell phones for God's sake) or they are poor because they are lazy. The mine owner in Germinal can't understand how the miners could be starving since most of the family is working in the mine. Some things don't really change much no matter what century you are living in.
