Leftist slang for the irrational survival belief adopted by working-class people under capitalism in which elites and oligarchs are assumed to have earned their power through superior intelligence, evolutionary advancement, or moral worth rather than inheritance, class privilege, or structural advantage.
“Peasant
Brain” reframes hierarchy as
destiny. It converts concentrated wealth into proof of
genius, nepotism into merit, and inherited
power into evidence of biological or spiritual superiority. It functions as a psychological coping mechanism: if the ruling class is simply better, then one’
s own precarity is natural, not engineered.
A modern update of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s critique of “economic royalists,” the term suggests that today’s oligarchs do not rule by divine right but by the myth of meritocracy—an ideology absorbed and defended by the very people it subordinates.
