Cracking the Code on our Ruling Class

too much hierarchy and not enough trust

Late last week I did a piece on “Morality and Lefty Politics.” I asked questions about why: why unlimited immigration, why Claudine Gay, why we let criminals run riot.

I said that it was a combination of our rulers wanting to help the helpless and the ruling class looking out for No.1.

And everyone else is asking the same questions this week:

Victor Davis Hanson on “A Culture in Collapse” asking why: the exploding federal debt; the military meltdown; why the race obsession; why the transgender craziness; why the massive tolerated looting; why the reduction of education to ideological boot camp; why the open borders.

Zman on “DIE Another Day.” All the madness over Claudine Gay comes down to

a reality at the heart of the whole thing. That is the logic of the egalitarian religion must lead them to these self-destructive ends… Once it was immoral to notice natural inequality and the fixed nature of people, the old system was doomed.

Only problem, he says, is that the graduates produced by the new egalitarian system are incompetent.

Jeffrey A. Tucker on “A Nation of Non-Compliers.” He writes of a transit elevator still sporting social distancing signs — that everyone ignores. He wonders about the people that put the whole COVID response together: what did they think they were doing? “Something is going on, something malevolent.”

Yes, what is going on?

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that we are not dealing with malevolence or stupidity. Let us create a Narrative to say that the apparent failures we see all around us arise from rulers and high-status humans applying instincts that work in face-to-face society but not in our current society.

We could say that we are still acculturated for rural agricultural society of five hundred years ago.

Or we could say that we are genetically still adapted for hunter-gatherer life of five thousand years ago.

And we don’t have a clue how to organize human life in the industrial / machine / electronic / computer age.

I suggest two ways to approach an understanding of human life.

First, there is the hierarchical culture of men, that is all about defending the food-growing territory from the band next door, and determining who gets sexual access to women.

Second, there is the egalitarian culture of women, that is all about getting on with the other trustworthy women in the community in the fundamental work of staying alive, and bearing, feeding, and raising the children.

Let us say then that men have a vertical hierarchy of power and women have a horizontal relationship of trust.

Now let us apply this across my Three Worlds: the Life World of the village, the Abstract World of the market, and the War World of politics, armies, and, I suggest, churches and corporations. Oh, and don’t forget universities, Claudine baby.

Let’s talk about War.

As I have read, war in the Life World of the village is very limited and usually involves a show of force. This is because, if all the men get killed in a battle, the village or the band ceases to exist and the women are absorbed into a neighboring village or band. Also, if a man gets killed in a battle with the next band, then he is the brother, the cousin, the son, the blood relative of the Big Man of the band and all the other men on his side in the battle. Not good.

Notice how warfare has tended to escalate as human communities have got bigger on the road from band to tribe to city to dukedom to nation, culminating in the World War to end all world wars that ended in the nuclear demolition of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And notice how, as war gets bigger, the men killed on the front line become less and less related and known to the Big Man running the war.

Do you see that in the nuclear age we seem to have reached the limit of War World with the notion that nuclear war means Mutually Assured Destruction?

Now I am presently reading two of Henry Kissinger’s books: American Foreign Policy and Diplomacy. It occurs to me that what he is talking about in his endless disquisitions on diplomacy is the establishment of trust. In other words, the job of the modern diplomat is to establish trust where otherwise there is the instinct to kill or be killed.

So I say that all the institutions in War World — governments, armies, bureaucracies, activist groups, corporations, churches, universities — are all hierarchical organizations that naturally that instinctively teach people to act like the warrior men of a village.

If you go back to the three chappies quoted at the top of this article, it is easy to see that they are all describing a world of kill or be killed; cancel or be canceled; obey or be banished. And I say that hierarchical War World institutions are programmed for war and conflict rather than trust and reciprocity.

I say let’s wind down the conflict-programmed institutions of War World and move towards the trust institutions of Abstract World.

Hmm. Maybe we should call Abstract World: Trust World.