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It’s possible that many elites just believe in ideologies that are both harmful to them and the wider population. In fact I think this is often true. I’m not sure why this is seemingly not included in your example.
Plenty of people believe in entirely stupid things and always have. The rich person who suffers because the ‘justice reform’ candidate they voted for wins by a hair and lets their environment deteriorate might just believe in a bunch of really dumb memes. “Everyone acts in their absolute self-interest all the time” is the logical flaw in your reasoning. People often do things that aren’t in their best interests.
Then these ideologies should hopefully die out when the adherents keep getting filtered out every time their policies fail and they lose any and all influence they might have accrued to that point.
Not enable them to make endless excuses and to continue on unabated.
If not, then it all just builds up to a much larger, catastrophic failure further down the line.
The issue, again, is that their ideologies ALSO often enable them to duck or shift consequences, possibly indefinitely... until the whole system blows up at once.
We want to filter out these problems early enough that they don't pose larger risks later.
And people should be positioned so their own screwups blow back on them in proportion to the damage they cause, so that the system as a whole can improve when they're removed from it.
It's not about being 'absolutely' self-interested all the time, but making sure that your self interest is at least aligned with those whose interests you represent so that there's an incentive for you to AVOID screwing them.
Most elites, seemingly, have gotten to a position where they can enrich themselves without regard as to whether they're causing damage or no.
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