Protecting Elites and the Class That Serves Them
| The Global Status Quo Optimizes Protecting Elites and the 'Clerisy Class' That Serves Them |
The incestuous embrace of privilege and power by entrenched, socially isolated Elites characterizes failed states and brittle, doomed regimes throughout history.
Every system is optimized to serve a specific purpose. As noted in my recent essay "What Metric Are We Optimizing For?", what the system optimizes is rarely explicitly stated.
Sometimes this results from not understanding the metric that the system is designed to optimize; but in other cases, explicitly describing what the system optimizes would trigger social instability.
The Status Quo around the world–from France to China to the U.S.–is optimized to protect its Elites and the sprawling Upper-Caste of academics, managers, think-tank toadies, technocrats, apparatchiks, functionaries, factotums, lackeys and apologists who serve the Elites, and are well-paid for enforcing the Status Quo on the disenfranchised castes below.
Demographer Joel Kotkin, author of the new book "The New Class Conflict", has coined the word 'clerisy' to describe what I have been calling the Upper Caste: America’s new class system. Oligarchs are assisted in their control by the 'clerisy class' — an amalgam of academics, media and government employees who play the role that medieval clergy once played in legitimizing the powerful, and in implementing their policies while quelling resistance from the masses. The clerisy isn’t as rich as the oligarchs, but it does pretty well for itself and is compensated in part by status, its positions allowing even its lower-paid members to feel superior to the hoi polloi.
