elites – cafebedouin.org

“Fifty years ago, society was organized according to the industrial model. People were passive recipients of information. It was a top-down system with limited choices or diversity. You could buy two or three different types of cars and get your information from two or three different television channels and newspapers. This system produced a relatively uniform “mass audience” that was suitable for the needs of industrial society.

What we have seen since is a complete breakdown of that system. The loss of control over information has resulted in the breakdown of the mass audience and many of the old ideologies. In its place has emerged a more ideologically diverse and fractious public. The public, which is not necessarily synonymous with ‘the people’ or ‘the masses,’ can come from any corner of the political environment today. It is not a fixed body of individuals and lacks an organization, leaders, shared programs, policies, or a coherent ideology. The public is characterized by negation: It is united in being ferociously against the established order.”

—Martin Gurri in interview with Murtaza Hessian, “Trump and Brexit Proved This Book Prophetic — What Calamity Will Befall Us Next?” The Intercept. March 3, 2019.

“In a healthy society, the supreme task of the elites is to elucidate the master narratives binding together the regions, classes, and ideologies that make up a modern nation…The digital age has proved to be an extinction event for long-standing narratives. As the public has gained access to information and communication platforms, elites have progressively lost the ability to mediate between events and the old shared stories. Elite omissions and evasions, falsehoods and failures, are now out in the open for all to see. The mirror in which we found ourselves reflected in the world has shattered…the interpretation of reality is up for grabs…

…What comes next?

Maybe chaos. Complex systems can fall into turbulence and remain in that condition permanently. The collapse of elite authority could ignite a rolling conflagration, in which every aspect of social and political life is turned into a battleground. That would be the nihilist’s hour. If it ever arrives, even the broken shards of narratives will appear too big, too inclusive for an atomized culture, and our supposed “age of post-truth” will be considered, in hindsight, as a time of supreme self-confidence and certainty.”

Gurri, Martin. “The Revolt of the Public and the “Age of Post-Truth” thefifthwave.com. May 31, 2017.

Martin’s thesis is that human society demands heirarchy and that the mandate of legitimacy comes from recognition of superior qualities of individual elite members by those ruled by them. The rather large problem with his idea is two fold. One, historically, this state of affairs rarely, if ever, exists. Two, where it exists, it is in small bands where everyone in the society knows everyone else, not in the modern state that requires extensive hierarchy to function.

Elites form to protect their interests, and their support comes from the degree the population shares those interests. For example, British colonialism benefited their elites, and some of those benefits also helped the general British population. Colonialism may have also helped some of the local elites in the colonies consolidate their power. Still, somebody is being exploited, and those doing the exploitation are rarely exceptional men and women of superior qualities.