> You have given in to the worst assumption about humanity, that we are hopelessly and irredeemably tribal. That we will only support our personal clan.
The argument I made does not assume we will only support our personal clan. It assumes we will support our own clan most of the time.
As long as enough influencers hold onto their influence or pass it down to their heirs, social structures will persevere. The very reason the structures exist in the first place is because they can withstand churn. There is a reason that "optimal group size" (hint: humans is 150) is higher in social species, and there is a reason why social species are evolutionarily more successful than other species. The fact that humans congregate into social structures is a driving force behind our evolutionary success. The resilience of social structures got humanity to where we are today. It would be naiive to think we could reprogram society to adapt to anything different than what has proved evolutionarily successful for the aggregate success of our entire species.
The problem with dominant social structures is that they are by their very nature so durable. If we want to mitigate their durability, two solutions are commonly suggested. One, we can reduce the ability of influencers to create new social structures by institutionalizing their influence ("inheritance tax"). Second, we can break up the social structures and start over ("wealth distribution"). Neither of these are particularly feasible for a number of reasons. Introducing either of these measures as solutions would require changes to the tax code. The effect of such a change would only have local effects, because there are hundreds of tax jurisdictions throughout the world. There is no way to unilaterally make radical alterations to the tax code, especially when the alterations upset the status quo.
The economic solution to disrupting the structure of the social graph would be to provide incentives for monetary flows that help disrupt it. We need to give the most powerful people in the world a reason to "donate" their influence to the least influential regions of the social graph. Otherwise, the lazy among them will default to the easiest option, which is consolidating wealth and power within their own clan. As long as enough of them choose the easy way out, the social graph will survive.
Massive change calls for massive shifts of incentive. I see very little chance of this happening for the political reasons cited above. Also, defining "influence" is tricky because its very definition is wrapped up in the factors of its magnitude. You cannot regulate something as intangible as "influence" because there is simply no way to quantify it.
> This is so bleak, and so easily disproven (by lots of fields, including prestigious ones), that it makes me sad even to read it.
Yes, it is a bleak outlook. I would rather confront the facts than bury my head in the sand.
I will not challenge you to find a solution to "fix" the current state of affairs. Instead, I have a more preliminary question for you.
What is the shape of an optimal influence graph for humanity? What does it look like, and how does it differ from what the graph looks like now? What changes can we make to progress the current graph in some direction toward the optimal one?
These are the questions you ask to solve problems. You do not blindly hope that humanity has some dormant gene in complete contrast to its evolutionary fitness, and that we can somehow summon it to fix all the problems in the world. There will always be problems. The way to fix them is not by resisting our human nature. It's to work with what we have, accept our constraints, and confront the problem in the light of day, not under the sand.