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The problem with this view is that, to a first approximation, all people have functioning brains and working hands. That is to say, they can do things, and a subset of those things can kill you no matter how "superior" you may be. I've read up-thread that some Tech guru just got stabbed to death on the street in San Francisco. My guess is that in most ways he was unquestionably superior to his murderer, but those ways did not include being immune to stabbings.
Show that you can actually protect and serve them in some meaningful capacity, and they might offer the obeisance, or at least obedience and loyalty. But I've seen no evidence that you or people who think like you are capable of that. Your statements leave me with the impression that you are fundamentally selfish, and selfish people cannot be trusted with power of any sort, precisely because their understanding of the function and use of power is exactly backward. The noblesse oblige comes first, then the loyalty, never the other way around.
You'll get no argument from me that Enlightenment obsession with Levelling is stupid and obviously destructive, or that some people are better in important ways than others. But Hierarchy is a means to an end, not an end in itself, and you don't appear to comprehend that.
They aren't, though. The society you exploit for your personal aggrandizement is maintained by mutual consent, not force. Failure to understand this on the part of Elites like yourself has an appreciable chance of causing your own personal death, and a much larger chance of significantly degrading your standard of living. The power you are appealing to does not exist. It is a mirage, a hallucination, and it is in serious danger of leading people who think as you do off a cliff, and dragging the rest of us with them.
This may be, but perhaps you could describe the actual specifics of what decisions they've made that justify such an analysis?
Oh, absolutely. In the end we are all human and have the standard human weaknesses (can't go without fresh air for more than 5 minutes, inevitably age and degrade etc.). People get stabbed daily in SF though, it's still a testament to his superiority that his case is the one that gets broadcast far and wide all over the globe while the stabbing of his murderer would have led at best to a few sentences on Page 2 of the local newspapers.
Who do you think pays the taxes which allow the lower classes to live the lives they live? The people at the top subsidise the lower classes to an unimaginable degree in the west. Not just through direct taxation, but also indirectly through job market laws, tariffs etc..
The reason a coffee costs £3 in the UK but 30p in Turkey is because the UK labour market is artificially restricted to Turkish people who'd happily take 50p for a coffee but can't move to the UK to do so. The jobs that the PMC do by and large already recruit from a global talent pool so we don't benefit from the labour market restrictions on foreigners while the jobs of the lower classes have their wages massively propped up by them. Every time I pay £3 instead of 30p for a coffee I'm being forced to subsidise the western lower classes by another £2.70.
By and large the actually competent people who choose to work in a field beneficial for humanity rather than just care about making as much money for themselves as possible are already helping/serving the lower classes (ok, as someone in finance this is not me). For instance I know people who went to work in the NHS in IT managing an ecosystem set up by a US for profit company rather than just work for the for profit company directly and get paid 3x. Same with competent people choosing to work in the public sector etc.
Strangely though I never hear the laudations of the lower classes for these competent people who are giving up large sums of money they could be earning to help society. Rather I get a fair bit of envy and opprobrium towards them that these people are still earning multiples of the average wage and thus don't give a shit about society. See the vitriol targeted at Andrew Bailey (Governor of the BoE) for earning six figures (he could easily earn 7 figures in industry) after he asked employers to tamper down on pay rises for staff to mitigate the risk of an inflationary spiral.
Now this I take objection to. In life I try and incorporate elements of the code of my ancestors, the Pashtunwali. Generosity towards others is a fundamental component, and in real life I give freely. Indeed based on just your comment above, if you agree to it, I will match a $1,000 donation from you to the Helen Keller International Vitamin A program (one of GiveWell's top charities of the year). I try to do my charitable giving in private but in real life I have been praised (more than once) for my generosity towards the less fortunate. Doesn't mean I don't see them as beneath me. As Christ said (see Acts 20:35): "It is better to give than to receive".
Indeed it's easy to talk the talk about how "we are all equal", but when it comes to walking the walk and actually helping the poor many of the exact same moralisers who act holier than thou suddenly balk. The offer stands, I'll match your donation to them (or any other GiveWell top charity should you prefer another one) up to $1,000. I encourage you to take it. It will help the actual global poor who's only crime is being born in the wrong place.
Of course. We humans are a hierarchical species though and need some sort of it to exist for long term flourishing and at the moment the zeitgeist is trying to smash it instead. Equally see how breathing is a means to an end, we don't live to breathe but it is absolutely necessary and if something happens to us that impairs our ability to breathe it is generally number 1 on our list of priorities to immediately fix.
Of course. Society depends on mutual consent. The law of the jungle is nasty and brutish. Indeed it is most nasty and most brutish towards those least able to mitigate it, namely the poor and stupid. During revolutions the poor suffer more than the rich, the rich are only the ones whose names are remembered by history.
Power doesn't have to be forceful to exist. See how rising interest rates are killing off a lot of the excesses of the last decade because suddenly money isn't cheap any more. Same here, the people who run things have a large amount of power over those at the bottom, see Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent for an example of how you control the masses with effectively zero force.
Not caring about education, not valuing personal excellence, not finding a stable partner and settling down with them instead of sleeping around (both men and women), not maintaining strong familial bonds, gambling money they don't have, buying stuff on credit when they don't have any concrete plan for paying it off, not taking care of their health, not eating well (contrary to claims it's pretty cheap to eat well healthily), not striving to improve themselves as a human being, general trashy behaviour, doing drugs and being a public nuisance afterwards, advocating for policies that artificially keep their wages high relative to the true global value of their work (were it any other product we'd absolutely be calling it a cartel), not taking advantages of the massive opportunities that citizenship of a western country brings them etc.
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