The ruling elite

By -
All societies that have ever existed have had some sort of ruling elite. Even the most egalitarian groups of hunter gatherers have elders, or a chief, or something along those lines. Any group, faced with the choice to migrate east, west, north, or south, faced with a disappearance of food where they are, that had everyone just wander off which ever which way, is no longer with us. It is mere fantasy to think we can do away with such a class.

The problem with the current ruling elite is not that we have one, but that it is a degenerate ruling elite. They have lost the view of the common good.

And of course all ruling elites are self interested: what we can hope for is one that tempers its self interest because it believes that the common good exists, and that it has a duty to seek it.


Comments

  1. Prateek4:02 AM

    Was it in Tocqueville that I heard a similar idea?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sails5:51 AM

    Is there a difference between 'common good' and 'public purpose'?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more