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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

I've sometimes wondered if the way American media and culture treat people like Musk, Bezos, Gates is that we have no royalty -- there's no hereditary monarchy and indeed the old money keeps a studiously low profile.

Do human cultures just need kings and princes? Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society?

I read Yishan's post here as kind of like a duke commissioning an epic poem in the hopes it'll influence the king. Maybe it'll work -- he shot his shot, and he's a pro at putting in just the right Internet comments in just the right place. But I wonder why I'm so fascinated about seeing this conversation between these two nobles. Is this how the English lower classes saw their royalty in the 17th century? Did they chatter about the king's foibles on the street while they were out costermongering?

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I don't think, this niche is necessarily kings & queens. I think it's people needing some kind of beacon, pointing for what should they aim with their life (even if they cannot realistically achieve it, at least not fully).

That's why we have huge libraries of biography books and millenia old stories of philosophers, heros and rulers.

Of course for some people such figure would be Ghandi and for some one of billioners (probably latter was always more appealing to the general public). Both are examples of extraordinary achievements in some area.

In highly religious society they would be probably replaced with saints & priests, in highly militarized by great strategists and war heroes.

If you dig deep enough, there will be probably some group telling stories, how exciting it was to be able to listen to some post stamps designer, who is considered local legend.

They are fans, basically. You could say the same about people who follow the Kardashians, or drill rap artists.

Yes, and in the end it's probably for the best - no reason to not use others experience. If you pick reasonably of course.

Your comment reminded me of a quote from Alan Moore

    “The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”

Although he's talking mainly about conspiracy theories, I think it applies equally to "royalty" as you put it. People need someone to be in charge, and they'll latch onto whoever or whatever they think will satisfy that desire.

Yes for sure, but just because we all like to follow sometimes doesn't mean we need to do so without any criticism of those figures. People who follow without any analysis are setting themselves up to harm their own culture because it's also part of human nature that some of us are power hungry sadists and genocidal egoists who just want to exploit anyone who doesn't support us. That fear is how some unquestioning followers understand that power works due to trauma, so they can neatly sidestep a lot of emotional processing by worshipping an authoritarian leader and just hope that their purity remains intact through the purges. In fact there is an alternative but it requires hard work to achieve.

Agreed that it is astute pandering. I found the whole "both sides" thing off-putting because it's negligent. There seems to be a standard of care that comes with running a social network that isn't being acknowledged enough. A customer who slips and falls in a business due to a wet floor caused by an employee can sue the owner for negligence based on vicarious liability. These networks are property that customers access and use just like physical property. You can put whatever you want in the terms of service but it doesn't change the location and ownership of the electrons.

Having also worked on a social network and dealt with bots brigading back in 2016-2017, it is possible to apply facts and logic and ethics to these situations. Worshipping a "network" as some kind of neutral aether is greatly downplaying the significant opportunities for tuning the data streams based on knowledge and compliance.

Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where free speech is not what is protected explicitly, it's free expression that's protected as long as it's not invoked at the expense of any other Charter Rights. Hate speech is also illegal in the Criminal Code. These are factual matters that do not get the same amount of unquestioning reverence that free speech without consequences seems to get in some parts of the US.

About the historical theory that it's human nature to want kings and nobility, it seems that is mostly just our particular colonial and patriarchal part of the world. I'm not a historian or anthropologist but am pretty sure there have been societies that operated differently.

> Do human cultures just need kings and princes?

It's an interesting question, and I like how you frame it as a duke's commissioning.

The root of it I think is that we're deeply social creatures, so much so that we anthropomorphize inanimate things and construct deities with suspiciously human personalities. It's our way to process the complexity of life and to retain a sense that there is a pattern to the randomness.

By personalizing everything we don't have to know anything about a subject to engage with it, we only need to know the personality in question, or even just general human motivations. In that way its super accessible. It's only with education that we can engage in the merits of ideas themselves. Else we're destined to get caught up in the cult of celebrity.

As someone from a country with Royalty I can promise you most people do not care about them. The people that tend to care are foreigners. If there's a big event some subset of the population are interested in the celebrity sense but outside of that nobody cares.

People tend to have instinctive respect for earned authority. This same reverence is also given to sportstars and artists.

American billionaires, for all their faults, have the most “legitimate” authority in modern(post-enlightenment, post-martial) history.

https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/09/ar...

> The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose Tightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place.

This is also why the “millionaiahs and billionaihs” rhetoric from the left falls flat with immigrant populations. The rich and successful people here are way better than the kleptocrats and oligarchs elsewhere.

For example: There’s some good stuff that’s been written comparing Russian oligarchs with western businessmen, their spending habits, values, lifestyles etc.

Yes, I think that’s an appropriate comment.

Why is them that we consider kings? Because our social imaginary [1] now is that of technocracy. Whoever can create technology and achieve money with technology is who’s worthy.

And why do we need kings? I don’t think there is consensus in this response but psychoanalysis and philosophy [2] have said a lot about this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_dialectic

> Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society?

It’s interesting thinking of the English heritage. French heritage would lead to different views on how to deal with pseudo royalty.

> I read Yishan's post here as kind of like a duke commissioning an epic poem in the hopes it'll influence the king.

He writes at the beginning that a lot of people are requesting his take, so he made it public instead of answering each individually. It doesn’t feel like he cares much about what Elon would think about his opinion.

It’s human nature to place everything in the world around us into categories. Think about your daily life and consider how much of it is built on the idea that ‘This’ is different from ‘That’. Social connections are no different and we could not feasibly ever have a 100% flat society, as inevitably we will categorize our contacts and hierarchies will emerge.

On some level I think this is inherently biological; maybe it all stems from the need to differentiate ‘good for existence’ (e.g. food) from ‘might kill me’ and all creatures do it.

Yes, broadly.

People think in stories and characters. It's easier and more natural like this.

So, we personify things (war, politics, free speech) into people like Putin, Musk, Hisham. They can play out the stories for us.

Also, the outcomes of princely squabbles does actually affect us.

> Is there a special kind of celebrity niche that the billionaire businessman fills that occupies an ancient hierarchical part of our society?

So basically the ruling class.

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