Elitism Fails

In my previous post I pointed out how egalitarianism fails. Because all humans are different, giving humans equal rights on the basis of a presumed 'core humanity' is actually a distortion of logical contracts, since you are then dispensing something in an inequitable fashion. If all people regardless of virtue, performance, skill, or potential are to be treated the same way and have the same rights, you are looking at something which is exactly identical to the core tenets of some religions — salvation is by a single act and the afterlife is available to all who believe. Except, of course, that this problem is compounded by trying to do it in the all-to-obviously-inequitable material world.

But if all humans are not equal except in some specious idealistic sense, then logically some humans may be 'game-winners'; that is, given all the scenarios that they are exposed to, they have the qualities to achieve a 'win' condition in each of them. There may be no such humans, but there will certainly be humans who are game-winners in some situations. Conversely, there may be some humans who are 'game-losers' in every situation, and certainly, some who are game-losers in at least one situation. In fact, some game-winners for some situations might be game-losers in different situations.

This means that for each simple situation, there will be an elite of those more likely to win. For complex situations, there will be an elite of those more likely to win in all the possible sub-scenarios within the complex situation.

So elites automatically form, and therefore, we have to say elitism must exist — at least in the sense that we recognize that elites are winners and by that fact worthy of being recognized as such. In human societies, if those winners also happen to make us winners (e.g. a very successful hunter in a hunter-gatherer society), then we give them bonuses such as status and power (or huge salaries), medals and awards, stuff like that.

But elitism fails us at one remove, and that is if we unwittingly allow transference of elite privilege — we automatically allow a kind of halo effect to give unwarranted prestige to those associated with the true elite human by kinship, network, clan, or other relationship that is not relevant. There would then be people in the elite group who have not done anything for the community in which they have been raised to the elite.

The only way to compensate for this failure is if they are, after being raised to the elite, able to make others winners using the status or acquired privileges that they now have. So, for example, a poor man who marries into a rich family and is given rich-family associations and privileges could use any influence he has thus attained or accrued to benefit the poor. A son of a rich merchant, landholder, or industrialist, having inherited power and wealth not through his own doing could then use that inheritance to benefit others.

Given the human situation, all these advantages actually come from having people 'below you' in elite status (i.e. the various 'scorecharts' that determine how elite you are). Therefore there is conceivably a moral obligation for elite status to be justified if you didn't earn that status yourself, because your status depends on other people. In the old days, they called this noblesse oblige, the obligation of nobility.

In the modern age of egalitarianism, the use of that term is often shrouded in sarcasm and even an air of impropriety. But there are indeed modern nobles, dispensing state-level power and patronage sometimes because of unearned status. Consider the case of a member of Parliament or equivalent representative in a parliamentary democracy or equivalent state. Supposing he runs for office and is returned unopposed. Then he now has elite status without having done anything for anybody. He now has a moral obligation to do things for people.

This is especially true if such a person ends up with far greater access to 'elite bonuses' such as communication with higher powers, material resources, information and suchlike. Every bit of those trappings of the elite status should carry with it a concomitant and commensurate responsibility towards those in general who don't have such things.

So does elitism fail? Well, there is a tendency for humans to be very happy with privileges and not so happy with sharing them around or making use of them for other people. That is why altruism should be more widely appreciated, since it is at the very least a sign of the realisation that elites need a community to be elite in.