Special mentions to Paul Ehrlich (the "population bomb" guy). Got all his predictions wrong, never changed his mind, got a lot of money for it eg from the Ford and the Rockefeller Foundation. His ideas led to millions of forced sterilizations and abortions in China and India, with his full support, by far surpassing anything the Nazis did in that regard.
> believe in an "interior enemy" (for MAGA it's the deep state)
It's their neighbors, not the "deep state". Renee Good and Alex Pretti were the enemy within. People in inflatable costumes or pussy hats are the enemy within. Uppity kids in high school who get thrown to the drown and put in a choke hold. People filming ice on public streets. They are the enemy within to MAGA. It isn't distant and abstract. It's personal.
This. I think so much of the fascism and corruption afoot in the world comes from people who believe they deserve things they are incompetent to get. Their sense of entitlement is in conflict with their competence and unrestrained by concern for others. To soothe their ego wound they project their faults onto the person who has what they want. "It isn't my failure; it's your trickery!" Now instead of shame and impotence they feel righteous anger.
I think you are correct. I've spent extended time in uber wealth circles, and this describes the offspring mindset of the generations after wealth acquisition. Their incompetence matches their entitlement, and then they walk into nepotism.
You may be supremely competent but unlucky enough to be born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, competing with the wrong people, to rise to the level that you feel you deserve.
I look at this re-occurring overproduction of elites concept, and feel like it has good points but seems to be welded like a weapon, soon followed by statements like "you're just unlucky, get over it."
We must begin with the presuppositions. Begin with the questions:
1. What are elites?
2. What are elites for? Why do they exist?
We can't really talk about "overproduction" of elites without knowing the answers to these questions.
Elites are meant to be guardians and servants of the common good. This is why traditionally, we spoke of the nobility: they were supposed to protect the common good for the good of society and model virtue so that others had a point of tangible reference. In order to do that, you needed to be properly educated. Not technically trained, but educated, which is something relatively rare in proportion to the vast numbers who are pushed through compulsory schooling and even university.
So, are we "overproducing elites"? Given how mediocre our "elites" generally are, I would suspect that we have rather an underproduction of them, and instead an overproduction of the vacuously credentialed.
One obstacle, of course, is that in a modern liberal culture, we are forced into a kind of impotence when speaking about the common good. On the one hand, modern liberalism imposes its own measure of the good life that elevates liberty for its own sake - divorced from any tradition and any objective measure - as the end of human life. Indeed, tradition is caricatured as an obstacle that impedes liberty rather than as a liberating dialogue spanning centuries and millennia that helps us orient our lives by sharing with us the wisdom of out predecessors.
On the other, this very hostility toward tradition or any objective normative claims (which are unavoidable; see first point) acts as a corrosive agent that impoverishes and constrains the scope of legitimate political discussion. Over time, this scope has been whittled down to economics. Everything else is privatized. Of course, the inevitable effect is that economics them begins to swallow up everything else. Everything is recast as an economic issue, and the human good is confined to economic categories. This explains the rise of consumerism, because a society whose common good can only be a matter of economics, and one that recasts all of life and reduces it to economics, can only comprehend the good life as a matter of consumption. This is a recipe for misery and delusion, of course, but the is the necessary result.
In such a culture, wisdom and what counts as elite are measured in economic terms. Universities become institutions not for liberating human beings by developing reason, virtue, and understanding, but ostensibly tickets to "economic success". Billionaires are our aristocracy, not because they are excellent or virtuous or duty-bound to serve in that capacity by virtue of their rank, but because in a consumerist society, money is magical. This is interesting, because traditionally, the nobility was often prohibited from engaging in trade and commerce. It was seen as beneath their position. If an aristocrat was wealthy, his wealth was not what conferred onto him his rank.
An elite only exists in order to serve the common good. That is its only legitimate reason for being.
Well, of course there would be a range, just like today. It seems like 1/3 will always be skeptical of authority, 1/3 will always literally worship authority, and then there's the spectrum between. I saw some "computational anthropology" paper some months ago saying that same ratio appears fairly consistent going back to the Greeks and the initial ratios of their early Democracy.
This seems like a fundamental problem with juries. If everyone knows you, most people detest you, and you can only be tried by a jury which is indifferent to you, is that jury truly impartial? What sort of people could be in Hitler's jury, say, to take it to an extreme?
You want a jury with good judgment. Maybe people indifferent to the publicly known actions of the accused are that way precisely because they lack good judgment. Yes, they need to judge the case in question, not everything the accused has ever done, but perhaps indifference to those facts extraneous to the case indicates they will judge pertinent facts in a way the public at large wouldn't recognize as just.
You're still better off with a jury trial over letting one judge make a decision. Your chances of finding impartiality among 6 or 12 jurors is much greater than taking chances with one judge. Unless you're a company or politician who has a financial or political leverage over a judge, then you want to avoid a jury. Sometimes a counter party can have all kinds of quid pro quo, indirect, leverage over a Judge or even a District Attorney. It's a lot more difficult when you have 12 people to deal with.
The vetting and training process for judges is a lot longer and deeper than the vetting process for juries (though voting for judges kind of throws this out the window). Presumably part of the purpose of this is to establish whether the prospective judge can judge impartially despite their private feelings.
Most of the world does without juries. In the US we don't use juries for all trials. The Supreme Court and circuit courts do without juries. If we don't use juries for our most important legal decisions, why are they better in the cases in which they are used?
I'm not a legal scholar. I'm sure untold volumes have been written about this. Just on its surface, though, it looks like nothing more than an accidental quirk we inherited from the English legal system.
I was sued. I was 19 years old working as a painter for a dishonest contractor that paid crap wages. I nosed out of a parking lot after work one day to see around a line of cars turning in and a big sedan ploughed into my little econobox. Several years later, as the statute of limitations was about to run out, the driver of the sedan sued me. My insurance companies first move, before doing any discovery, was to offer her $50k. She said no, so discovery began. It turned out she'd been mis-prescribed an anti-psychotic to create the symptoms she was suing me for having caused. The case was thrown out. The insurance company's legal bills ended up being much less than $50k, but the way it worked was they took a guess at the break even point, offered a bit less than that, and made an offer.
That's not to say this is how it works when Meta is on trial. I just thought it was useful perspective on the nature of settlements.
In legal terms they often call this a "nuisance fee", although it's normally much smaller when the defendant thinks there is a 100% chance they will win but just wants to avoid all the costs.
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