The elite leadership of ‘superiors’ has failed us
The harsh right and its Supreme Court is vaunting the “superior man” paradigm. Their idea, as Heather Cox Richardson (“Letters From An American” blog) has described it, is that the energetic and smart men who (we are told) create the wealth and innovations that work to the advantage of us all should run societies, should make the decisions that direct our lives.
A corollary is that those elites are better people than the rest and so deserve to have a grossly disproportionate share of wealth.
We have had this sort of social system for thousands of years. The foolishness of this class of people is starkly evident. These better people have developed a series of systems in which “common sense” drives us to manipulate life and resources to an extent that savages our querencia and so degrades complex living networks that all our lives are stripped of beauty, and our posterity are put at great risk.
We have had more than sufficient experience with the leadership-by-superior-men system to know with dead certainty that the benevolence of elites is a lie, a mirage. “Superior” actually codes for “most ruthless.” Such people cannot get beyond their self-interest. They lack any wisdom to guide benevolent policies if, improbably, they were to escape the gravitational pull of their own pleasures.
An alternative — we, the people — is an idea, an image, we do not have before us. We naturally form beliefs and ideas about how life can be out of the beliefs and ideas that are published abroad, so to speak. And what do we see, what do we hear, forever and ever? A hero, a lone figure who stands apart from the dopey populace, brings the answer, saves the day. (As Leo Tolstoy pointed out in The Slavery of Our Times, elites always couch their bad behavior in a myth that excuses them.)
This lone-savior image is so dominant that we cannot imagine communities, all together, resolving their own problems. I wonder, though, if this is not in truth the way people have made life better all along – that is, together, without any fatuous “hero” gumming up the works.