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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

"There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents."

This is self-evidently true. One of the problems in current society is fetish for equity, the idea that everyone should be treated the same, regardless of their talents and virtues. Some people are smart, some are dumb. Some are generous, some are narcissistic. Those who are talented and virtuous are the one we need in charge of society. It is important, indeed essential, to discriminate: to prefer the smart and virtuous over the dumb and selfish.

"There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth."

Unfortunately, these are the actual people currently in charge of society. The wealthy, political elite - be it the Kennedy clan of Massachusetts or the Dassault clan of France - they wield the levers of power, sometimes openly and sometimes behind the scenes. Far from any feeling of noblesse oblige, they wield this power for their own purposes.

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The fetish for equity is about looking for hidden mechanisms of artificial aristocracy, such as biases embedded in language, culture, and institutional structure.

I agree that some go overboard with it to the point of being ridiculous and often self defeating, but the fundamental idea that society is riddled with bias and hidden mechanisms of privilege is kind of obviously true.

Nobody really believes that everyone is equal in all measures of ability. That’s a straw man. It would imply that everyone is identical.

Many including myself are skeptical of attempts to tie this to categories like race or culture in broad ways. I also think that ability is very multidimensional and am skeptical of any attempt to flatten that into things like IQ. Fitness in evolution in nature has millions or billions of dimensions.

Looking for hidden mechanisms of power is all well and good, but an excessive focus on equality can also be misleading. In many ways, our contemporary societies are suffering from a clear overproduction of aspiring elites each of whom is "fairly" and "equally" competing for a fixed pie of increasingly tyrannical rule over others, in a way that's detrimental to everyone and precipitates a breakdown in social trust and cohesion.

A 'natural' aristocracy is inherently less dependent on achieving a position of power, so overproduction is inherently mitigated. It's not clear that the privilege conferred by a seemingly "equal" mechanism of strenuous competition is any less objectionable than the overtly unequal privileges of wealth or birth that Jefferson rightly objected to.

In one sense I agree with you. I don’t usually like to claim something is self-evident, but nonetheless, I think it’s clear to most that there is a great deal of variety in skill, intelligence, and virtue across the average human population. I think it’s also true that we should strive to have those who are the most knowledgeable and the most virtuous to lead. That would include a degree of humility, so that those in charge may also listen to the advice of more knowledgeable experts in certain fields.

On the other hand, I’m not really sure I’d place the blame same as you do. In fact, a focus on equity is meant to eliminate the factors that get in the way of meritocratic hierarchies (such as inherited wealth, for instance). I’ll admit, I would rather we pursue justice to eliminate the source of these factors, but the powerful are not interested.

Either way, I’m not sure what the answer is. Democracy in all its forms is imperfect, and even terrible at times. But there aren’t really any good alternatives in the real and imperfect world of imperfect human beings. Philosopher kings are great on paper and on paper only. So that always brings me back to better education, less corruption, democracy, and a culture of respect towards those more virtuous and to experts in their respective fields.

> I don’t usually like to claim something is self-evident

> Democracy in all its forms is imperfect, and even terrible at times. But there aren’t really any good alternatives in the real and imperfect world of imperfect human beings.

Hmmmm.

> Philosopher kings are great on paper and on paper only.

Hmmm.

> So that always brings me back to better education

In?

> It is important, indeed essential, to discriminate: to prefer the smart and virtuous over the dumb and selfish.

This sounds reasonable at first glance, but I would challenge you to describe a society in which the "smart and virtuous" are elevated over the "dumb and selfish" that does not rely on an external power structure to enforce this hierarchy.

One conceit of a "natural aristocracy" is that it should be self-organizing. In practice, we know that this process will ultimately prize traits that consolidate power. Some people are stronger than others, some are willing to use physical strength to bully others, and those who are in both groups will rise to the top of a "natural aristocracy" that prizes brawn.

Every society can be described in terms of some hierarchy and power structure. In fact seemingly 'structureless' societies tend to be the most tyrannical of all, because power relations simply become opaque. Only very small groups of humans can be said to be genuinely free of any kind of (perhaps ephemeral and shifting, but still real) hierarchy.

We seem to be making some variations of the same point here. The implication I was trying to draw out is that in GGP's "natural" aristocracy, there is a separate power structure that maintains that society's shape. That means that the "natural" aristocracy is neither natural nor an aristocracy, since it is artificially maintained and is subordinate to the separate power structure.

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