Aristocracy 2.0

The "natural" state of human society is a hierarchical order with a few wise persons, usually male and predominantly white, at the top of the pyramid. This is how it's always been, and good conservatives will defend this natural order to their last breath.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

I, among others, often use the term "status quo" when talking about the power structures that are being protected by the government. And by that I mean any government in today's first world. "Status quo" is "the current state of things", and if you're currently rich and successful, then you are not interested in disrupting this status quo; why upset the existing socio-economic arrangements when they served you, and often your ancestors, so well? If you are currently not so rich, and have to struggle hard to make ends meet each month, you probably are interested in upsetting the status quo. Or are you..?

Capitalism, or at least the version we've been enjoying since the French revolution, is the aristocracy re-invented, hence the title of this post. Unregulated capitalism, through it's mechanism of accumulation of personal material wealth, ultimately keeps intact the "natural" state of human society in which all real power is concentrated in the hands of the 0.1 percent. Within capitalism and other socio-economic theories, there's two competing ideas about value. Adam Smith, as well as Karl Marx, supported the "labor theory of value", in which the price of a good is the sum total of the costs of the raw materials and the amount of labor value (wages) required to produce it. And of course a "reasonable" profit-margin on top of that.

In the labor theory of value there's a somewhat objective relation between the price you pay for a product and its actual value. Nowadays however, with the help of some of the greatest defenders of the aristocracy, starting with Edmund Burke, the "father of British Conservatism", "price" is determined by what consumers are willing to pay. This is true in some sense of course; if consumers don't want to pay what you ask, the price has to come down. This gives power to the consumer, and it's why the phrase "voting with your dollar" has gained such traction; it seems to perfectly go alongside the democracy we all love so much.

"He opposed democracy for three basic reasons. First, government required a degree of intelligence and breadth of knowledge of the sort that occurred rarely among the common people. Second, he thought that if they had the vote, common people had dangerous and angry passions that could be aroused easily by demagogues; he feared that the authoritarian impulses that could be empowered by these passions would undermine cherished traditions and established religion, leading to violence and confiscation of property. Third, Burke warned that democracy would create a tyranny over unpopular minorities, who needed the protection of the upper classes."
_{source: Wikipedia: Edmund Burke - Democracy}

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

But it is the opposite of democracy. It is the very reason why democracy has failed us since its inception. It is why a free and open marketplace is democracy's greatest adversary. It is why conservatives will defend capitalism to their last breath, and why they will oppose any government intervention in the game that lets us individuals find our stratum in the hierarchical order of power, by working hard or having a genius idea. This game, as well as the "natural" state of human society, necessitates the existence of underdogs and powerful rulers. The free market has created a new aristocracy called the plutocracy, and a new ragtag rabble, popularly called "the 99 percent".

Contrastingly, democracy is a purely egalitarian ideology; it's the idea that all individuals have equal power in determining who will make the policies needed to achieve what we on average want to achieve. It's the idea of "one person, one vote", whereas in the marketplace "one dollar, one vote" assures the rich many votes. The fact that modern politics is essentially an extension of corporate power, is the best indication of the victory of the new aristocracy. The dichotomy between value and price is the root of the strange opinion held by most conservatives; that it's somehow a problem to raise minimum wages to a level where they can be called "living wages", but not a problem at all that Bill Gates "earns" several million dollars a minute. One mental dichotomy leads to another.

The sad thing is that we're all raised with these two opposing ideologies, we hold them both high. And being human also means being naturally opposed to change; we hold on to all sorts of traditions just for the sake of holding on to them. This is not good nor bad, and we all have some conservatism and some progressivism in us, and very rarely does an individual reside at one of the extremes of this specific left-right scale. Our political bias is revealed when there's a choice to be made between the egalitarian view of democracy and the hierarchical view of capitalism.

Is a good education necessary for all individuals, or is it something to be earned by working hard or by having parents with money? Keep in mind that a democracy, for it to work, needs its participants to be well informed; it's not a child's game. The aristocracy concluded that giving a vote to the masses could never work for this very reason, it's why Burke and his ideological successors can say "government requires a degree of intelligence and breadth of knowledge of the sort that occurs rarely among the common people". He's right, but should the answer be that therefore the aristocracy should stay in power? Despite the democratic experiment we're in the middle of now, the answer has been to keep the aristocracy, now version 2.0, in power. Don't you think it's time for a new operating system? Like democracy 1.0?

Please watch this video, where anarcho-capitalism is discussed, as well as a "natural aristocracy"; a system where the best and brightest individuals of society, while not having direct control over society, guide it with their wisdom and with their successes. Gives me the creeps to be honest, but it's the best example I could find on short notice of how pure capitalism results in this natural aristocracy. It's in my opinion the worse meritocracy where "merit" is measured only in capital gains. You know, some animals just are more equal than others...

_{On Aristocracy, The Old Order and Anarcho-Capitalism}

Let me just add that both democracy and aristocracy, both the egalitarian and the hierarchical view on human society are not "natural". The fact that we're on top of ALL food-chains means that we don't have to abide by the rules of that hierarchy anymore. It's simply a choice for us to make, and there is no such thing as "human nature". We are the most elastic creatures alive; drop a baby to be raised by wolves, and it'll die or become a wolf in human's clothing. Leave it with apes and we get Tarzan. Well, maybe not Tarzan, but you know what I mean. If we were to let ourselves be ruled by the natural laws of survival of the fittest, all men would be mating with as much women as humanly possible, as to assure his next generation to have the best chance to produce yet another generation. Some traditions should be broken, but we have to choose to do so.

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