The 3 groups of humans trying to rule our world are:

1 - the collective
2 - the trained professionals
3 - the status quo

In order to arrive at such a short list the internal disagreements may be considered part of the method.

The quest to combine them comes from 1) their desire to exclude the others and 2) their fatal flaws that prevent each from functioning in the long run without the others.

The status quo

Having the best advisors money can buy at their disposal and a well preserved library of "tricks" going back hundreds if not thousands of years the Elite is ideally equipped to preserve it self and able to plan many years ahead. Sadly the motives often leave much to be desired. Even if one is looking to do the right thing one may be completely out of touch with reality. More often than not the status quo occupies the mind with art and other kinds of entertainment that (while interesting) in high dosage make up a mind that is completely impotent when it comes to leadership.

Those born as royalty or with great wealth and those who gathered their wealth during their lives may enjoy the finest teachers and may have the greatest potential the sense of duty in contributing to society is rare. The actual work required to keep society running is left to less capable individuals who dare think as small as their small wallet.

We may see limited effort towards preserving and expanding their disproportionate wealth but that too may be delegated to their servants. When we see full time effort towards expanding the fortune we should really be worried.

These people, you see, are not in the game for the money but they are in the game for the game it self. They cant think of anything enjoyable to do besides from taking more and more and more from the have nots . Countless people may die in the process as long as their wealth grows by tiny fractions of a percentile.

The collective

Against popular assumption it is not incredibly hard to make a system that allows collective planning and collective decision making. The primary hurdles are the status quo and those who studied the topics the decisions relate to. Thus far the later efficiently prevented it from happening. Even when it does happen those with sufficient power and those with sufficient skill will be able to unmake the effort and/or take control over it.

Each individual on our world has his own unique set of experiences, knowledge and a gut feeling to go with it. Combined with instincts this makes for a highly calibrated sensitive process that elegantly navigates the obstacle course that is their life.

If we strip away the unique properties we are left with a set of wildly primitive instincts that are important to have but make up only a tiny fraction of each person.

The problem is that we all have different ways of dealing with it. Some carefully consider emotions of all kinds others fully purged them from their system and the rest of us did something in between.

By overly focusing on things we have in common the instincts remain but our so elegantly custom crafted means of interpretation is so diverse that (with some exception) we collectively fail to agree about it.

Any serious plan has the tendency to exceed that what the collective can comprehend. If the plan is clever it becomes suspicious, if the plan is amazing it shall be rejected for being to good to be true. This is not to blame on any group of people, we all have our blind spots.

Academia

Besides from obvious advantages our professionals may use any amount of public funds to engage in the intellectual masturbation called pure science. Outside their area of expertise they are endlessly less competent than average Joe but continue to pretend to know everything (while never describing it like that) even when confronted with endless evidence they will first move heaven and earth to preserve the lies injected by the status quo and finally refer to the lies as a honest mistake.

After a selection process tailored to elevate people with the highest absorption rate the student is drowned in data purposefully not granting him time to consider any of it. This was done to filter out the disruptive quality of thoughts of your own.

We can see the community of suckers for what it is clearly in the publishing process. First one needs affiliation, simply having credentials is often not enough. Then one may either pay to be published or submit the work for free. After that the hard worked publication is reviewed by faceless unpaid professionals. And finally it ends up behind the most idiotic maze of paywalls ever created by man.

Would we build leadership from academics alone utility would not be guaranteed, little to no effort shall go towards making the stuff accessible to the public in the most general sense thereof. There would be one or more truly amazing plans but the details would only be understood by a tiny group of specialists.

The final straw will be considering not involving the public a positive quality.

Most of our greatest professionals are so incredibly engaged in their work that knowledge about everything outside that area is a premise worth laughing at.

Inside their field they perform the finest work produced by men and run the extra mile to secure accuracy but they are not infallible. After building a body of work on an error it is hard for the person or the community to admit it. We may refer to heavier than air flying machines (which is often brushed off as a lame example) but there are countless well researched examples of flawed methods. We may do careful clinical trials for a single type of medication, in reality multiple drugs are prescribed simultaneously. If that doesn't matter, why do clinical trials at all? This example doesn't do the full list justice. The paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by John P. A. Ioannidis was the most downloaded technical paper from the journal PLoS Medicine.

The finest work by our finest minds doesn't mean it is flawless.

Most people reading this are probably technologists but did anyone accurately anticipate the implications? It is obvious the solar flair will come one day, converting our paper administration into electronic "documents" may not be the most brilliant idea. The internet seems awesome but are we not giving those who seek to moderate public discourse the means to do so? It sure seems reasonably benevolent but how shall we tell how well censorship works if success is to be measured in not knowing about it?

ehm?

So the elite wants us to work 24/7 earning barely enough to sustain ourselves. Slightly less if there are to-many workers. Slightly more if there are to few. Seeing the little people suffer is a joy in it self.

The angry mob wants us to go back to hunter gatherer, cannibalism and living in trees.

And the professors want to hoard all public funds into the creation of the useless-ium particle while telling us how important the work is while we starve by the side of the road.

(I'm only 73.5% joking.)

But if we combine all 3 into one formula we can work part time for a very decent salary, force our scientists to do useful things while leaving them enough time to do whatever they think is important and we can create so much wealth that the elite would sit back in their chair simply enjoying how amazing it all is.

The later doesn't seem so important but without them no plan can succeed. At this moment they run the farm and we are the cattle.

The how is the question for intelligent readers to ponder. It must be a detailed plan full of exponential growth as a product of prosperity. It must sound great to our owners and it must be highly scientific.