13. The Elite Mentality
or, Eyes on the Booby Prize
“People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.”
– C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
Elites are those who direct the ship of state. They supply the expertise needed for its navigation and operation; they oversee the discipline and performance of the crew; they determine the course to be followed. Every sizable human society that has ever existed has had its elites, for without these leaders and engineers such societies could not even come into being.
Still, like ordering the ponderous turn of a huge ship, held to a path by its own inertia, there are distinct limits to the changes in direction that elites can effect. As Marx famously put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The existing state of the nation and its economy, the prevailing ideology, the attitude of the masses, and, not least, differences in opinion between elites themselves all limit what can be done.
Further, the actions of elites are governed by gradations within their own ranks, for their stations in society are far from uniform. These grades of rank might usefully be defined as “service elites” at the base, “influential elites” above them, and finally “power elites” at the summit of decision making.
Service elites supply expertise in technical matters and management as doctors, lawyers, university professors, substantial small business owners, military officers, mid-level administrators, and so on. Their credentials and skills usually provide them with incomes well above average, but not enough wealth to maintain their status without working. Individually they don’t have any significant influence on state policy, though as a group they do when their interests align.
Influential elites are those of higher rank who can have some influence on state policy as individuals, though they do not determine its final shape. In the U.S., it might be said that they can quickly get their representative in Congress on the phone. Influential elites can include leaders of sizable local communities, owners of large businesses, prominent media figures, leading intellectuals, regionally important bankers and financiers, representatives of substantial political organizations, and government officials beneath the first rank. They often possess considerable wealth, from which they may derive much of their income. They also may make large contributions to political campaigns, which enhances their influence.
Power elites (to use the term of C. Wright Mills) are those who directly participate in making state policy. They are heads of the largest business corporations and financial institutions, members of the military high command, and of course those holding high office in civilian government, which in the U.S. includes the most important members of Congress and the judiciary, as well as close advisors to the president, heads of principal Cabinet posts, and the incumbent in the office of President itself.
********
Elites may provide the leadership and expertise which sustains and guides the state, but why are they elites? How do they become such? It is true that they often have greater specialized and technical knowledge than is typical for the masses, but this is most important for the lower ranks of the elite, who may build their careers on such knowledge. At the higher levels it may not be important at all.
In fact, what chiefly contributes to the dominance of elites is their particular mentality. And a crucial factor that defines the elite mentality – distinguishing it from the peasant mentality of the common people – is a difference in vision. As it was put in the preceding essay, the peasant range of vision typically does not extend beyond the end of the nose (which produces blind ignorance regarding matters that are not of immediate consequence). Elites, on the other hand, can more clearly perceive at least one thing that lies beyond the immediate: the path that leads to their personal advancement.
Thus the peasant’s vision usually sees no further than marriage and children, an occupation of a common sort, and establishment of a home in a place that is familiar. The ambition of the elite may or may not be greater, but it has a view of wider scope before it. As a result, in today’s world, elites – and those who aspire to elite status – will typically seek an education at the most prestigious university that will accept them, often for the purpose of making contacts with other elites or aspirants who can aid them in their upward climb. They are also attracted to prime sources of money, which in the West often means a career in the finance industry (such as a Wall Street firm). Those with established elite status will tend to socialize with others of the same rank, among whom they may find a marriage partner; their offspring will be sent to private schools, the most eminent they can gain entrance to. So it is that those who born into the elite are inculcated in the elite mentality, and may well have a path laid out for them, perhaps to gain even higher elite status. Their eyes are set on the prize.
Thus the commanding position of elites is closely associated with the vision of advancement that is so often part of their mentality. But there is another important factor that defines the elite mentality, for the higher position and greater wealth of elites must somehow be justified – certainly in their relationship to the masses, but also to themselves (except among the most sociopathic). This justification rests on the concept of merit: that it is the merit of elites that is responsible for their greater power and wealth.
In a number of cases the idea of merit would seem to have validity, especially in regard to expertise or talent that is of genuine benefit to society. No one would argue that the ethical practice of medicine is without merit. The works of a great artist surely have an almost transcendent merit. A superior skill of leadership may constitute a merit of critical importance at the highest levels of the state.
However, a problem arises with the concept of merit, when it is defined in terms of itself. In other words, it might be asserted that an individual has a superior position because of possessing merit; and proof of that merit is then said to lie in achievement of the superior position – a perfectly circular exercise in spurious logic. In actuality, a superior position may be attained simply through a superior talent for climbing, perhaps based on ruthlessness, guile, or sycophancy, and fuelled by ambition and greed, rather than any ability required by the position itself. This would especially be true in a liberal society, in which positions are commonly achieved by ascent through the ranks. In a conservative society, on the other hand, positions are more often gained by descent (through inheritance), then justified by claims of superior “blood”, or even the will of God (or gods, as the case may be). Of course, in a plutocracy acquisition of great wealth is taken as a proof of merit in and of itself, no matter how that wealth is gained. Even possession of credentials for a position may not have validity, if the credentials have no relation to the requirements of the position, or have little real substance.
********
Given the superior wealth and position of elites, there will be many who aspire to attaining elite status. These aspirations might be gratified by attainments of genuine merit (such is always claimed, at any rate), but they might also be achieved by simple exploitation. In the latter case, the work of Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin in the field of demographic structural theory is highly instructive. According to this theory, in pre-industrial societies growth of population would often exceed growth of agricultural production in the long term, resulting in rising food prices, rents, and land values, but falling wages, which inflicted misery on the masses but benefited elites, whose numbers grew in an environment of rising asset wealth. Eventually, however, the number of elites would become so large – in relation to available resources and opportunities – that their own situation would deteriorate, with competition among them producing strife and open warfare, resulting in a systemic crisis and fall in population; which then set the stage for resumption of population growth in the commencement of a new cycle. Such cycles have been seen again and again in history, as the investigations of Goldstone and Turchin have documented.
The economic situation of industrial societies differs greatly from that of their agrarian predecessors, but with certain alterations demographic structural theory can still be applied. Instead of simple overpopulation, the factor producing immiseration of the masses becomes “labor oversupply”, which might be caused by deindustrialization or high rates of immigration. With wage growth suppressed by labor oversupply, a decreasing share of economic growth goes to workers and an increasing share to elites, which attracts a growing number to attain elite status, perhaps through higher education. Again, however, the growth in elites eventually results in elite “overproduction”, as there aren’t enough resources or places to support all of them (declining prospects for university graduates being a symptom of this). For the masses, rising inequality and falling hopes for a better future breed extremism (and, as explained in the preceding essay, the deterioration of the peasant to the know-nothing mentality); while for elites, the competition for resources leads to increasingly bitter polarization and strife. Thus elites, who are supposed to act as leaders, instead become preoccupied with struggles for power and money among themselves, resulting in a vacuum of leadership for the nation as a whole. In fact, some become what Turchin calls “counter-elites”, who may exploit disaffection among the population to lead a rebellion or revolution against established elites. In the terminology of demographic structural theory, society enters a disintegrative phase.
A factor that can, under favorable circumstances, mitigate or even reverse the onset of societal disintegration is an extreme national crisis that is exogenous (in the sense of not being the result of domestic elite infighting). For the United States, such a crisis was provided by the Great Depression and subsequent Second World War. In this case, a circumstance that favored social cohesion was the fact a broad range of the population was affected, including elites, especially in their lower ranks. A few people did jump out of high windows on Wall Street after the crash of 1929, but more generally suicides spiked some years later, during the depths of the depression. In 1934, Upton Sinclair reported in his book I, Candidate for Governor that in California “Six hundred lawyers were being dropped from the Bar Association, because they could not pay their annual dues of seven dollars and a half. Thousands of doctors were no longer able to collect fees – so it went, wherever one turned.” Indeed, some 9000 banks failed, taking with them billions in depositor money, as deposit insurance did not yet exist. A few years later, the attack on Peal Harbor and the formidable challenge of the Axis powers galvanized the population for the war effort, which was unprecedented in the United States for its size and degree of organization. The marginal tax rate on the highest incomes increased to over 90 percent, where it remained until 1963.
Another favorable circumstance for the U.S. during its period of crisis lay in the political realm. Its democratic institutions permitted a peaceful change of regime in 1932, and the incoming administration fortunately recognized the need for the innovative policies that become known as the New Deal, which often relied on ideas from the earlier progressive movement. The restrictions on immigration that had been enacted in the 1920s also contributed, by reducing effects of labor oversupply.
********
It might be said that the last great program of the New Deal was Medicare, enacted during the Johnson administration in the 1960s; indeed, Lyndon Johnson himself was always a committed New Dealer. It was in the following decade of the 1970s that things began to visibly change. That was when wages for workers began to be disconnected from increases in productivity, and income that would otherwise have gone to them was instead captured by elites. This process was supported by the gradual demolition of the New Deal regulations which had governed the economy, which in turn permitted the growth of financialization – that is, money breeding, or making money from money, rather than making money from making things. Stock market buybacks, with had generally been illegal, became permissible, and provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which separated commercial and investment banking activities and stabilized the bank industry, died the death of a thousand cuts over the years, its remnants finally being repealed in 1999. Anti-trust legislation, intended to prevent the formation of monopolies, was, for the most part, not even repealed, but often simply ignored by those entrusted with its enforcement. In fact, a law was passed that specifically promoted “bigness” in broadcast media, namely the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which permitted much larger concentrations of ownership.
As the portion of finance in the economy increased, that of industry fell – a process of deindustrialization, which was also advanced by exporting entire industries abroad, a practice that avoided the necessity for investment in domestic production, as well as dodging problems with troublesome labor unions and pesky environmental regulations. Deindustrialization of course tended to produce labor oversupply, as fewer workers were needed, and such oversupply was further abetted by increased immigration (initially permitted by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965), with the number of foreign born in the U.S. eventually reaching the high level previously seen during the Gilded Age. Increasing labor oversupply meant that workers had less ability to command higher wages in better jobs, while elite wealth grew through rising profits, rents, and asset values – thus aggrandizing the position of elites versus the common people.
The Powell Memo of 1971 set forth many of the ideas that would underlie the coming attack on the New Deal system. It was authored by Lewis Powell, a notable corporate attorney who (not incidentally) later came to have a position on the Supreme Court. In the years following the memo, business organizations would become much larger and more politically active, lobbying heavily for their interests. Powell’s memo was followed by the Horowitz Report of 1980, which called for businesses to increase the influence of pro-market ideology on law schools and judges; the Federalist Society, which aimed precisely at providing such influence, was formed soon after in 1982.
Though the documents of Powell and Horowitz set out to justify the policies that would later advance elite interests, they had little part in the actual implementation of such policies. There was no centrally organized conspiracy. Rather, the “crisis consensus” of elites that had arisen during the Great Depression and Second World War, and which supported national interest, gradually wore away in following decades, to be replaced by personal interest. Of course, this was justified (or actually rationalized), by a neoliberal pro-market ideology which held that private advancement (within the law) was necessarily good for public purpose (though at the same time the law was being altered, to expedite such advancement). This idea was put more bluntly by the character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street: “…greed – for lack of a better word – is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” And in the real world of 1987, it was stated even more bluntly by Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society.” After all, if a thing does not exist, it cannot be supported, or have any kind of purpose…
In other words, the aggrandizement of elites that accelerated after the 1960s was an ordinary expression of self-interest that began to gain ground after earlier crises ended, in a perhaps inevitable reversion to the mean. The process might be compared to a stream of ants plundering a picnic; it is not directed or controlled by their “queen” (who is simply their reproductive unit), rather each ant follows relatively simple rules of instinctive behavior as it forages for provisions. In similar fashion, elites follow their own individual visions for personal advancement – but with an important difference. In seeking to promote deregulation and privatization, expedite financialization, and consolidate control of government policy and public opinion, elites tend to create an entire environment that is increasingly favorable to their personal advancement.
In fact elite behavior, like ant behavior, may ultimately be based on sheer instinct. Why else do billionaires strive to pile up more billions upon billions, and wielders of power seek ever more complete domination? To what possible end? If intelligence is knowing how something is to be done, and wisdom is knowing if something should be done, then elites, in spite of possibly greater intelligence, do not display any greater wisdom than the masses. Thus, if the masses generally exist in a condition of blind ignorance (as noted in the preceding essay), then elites, by virtue of their more acute vision of personal advancement (but no greater wisdom), may exist in a condition of blind ambition, their eyes fixed on the “booby prize”, their intelligence employed to rationalize their “merit”. And since elites are the leaders of society, then what is human society, really – other than blind ignorance, led by blind ambition?
********
Of course, as national interest breaks down in favor of personal interest, it may well happen that national power also breaks down on the international stage. This is what has been seen of late, as the Western hegemony, presided over by the United States, has been challenged by a rapidly surging China and a resurgent Russia; and has even suffered reversals at the hands of a determined second-rate power, in the form of Iran. Suddenly, as the production of military equipment is no longer satisfactory, the perils of deindustrialization become apparent. The reaction has generated policies that will putatively re-industrialize the nation, but these have not yielded any great result to date; and in any case, just as deindustrialization was a process that extended over decades, so too would re-industrialization likely require several decades to implement – but in the meantime, will the competition stand still? Furthermore, the lure of simply making money from money, of financialization (in opposition to industrialization) remains powerful. Nothing has been done to reverse it; in fact, just the opposite, as evident in the promotion of so-called “cryptocurrencies” and a massive “artificial intelligence” bubble. It would seem that nothing can be done, unless a big private profit – for elites – can be made in doing it. And even then success is hardly guaranteed, as the failure of California’s high speed rail project attests.
If the personal interests of elites tend to become inimical to the national interest, what can be done to control or reverse the process? As described above, a serious crisis can serve this function, but only if there is a constructive response that is broadly supported. Absent these conditions, the result may be catastrophic. A constructive response to crisis would require capable and enlightened leadership, as came to the fore in the United States in 1932, but the prospects for such in the present day would seem to be practically nil. Instead, there appears to be only a vacuum, surrounded by climbers, grifters, and incompetents. Further, elites now seem to be largely insulated from the worst effects of crisis, even in their lower ranks, as the general policy is to bail them out of their difficulties (even if self-caused), as seen in the aftermath of the crash of 2008; thus a response to crisis is unlikely to be broad-based.
However, another method of controlling elite behavior may be possible, as seen in the major challengers to the West, Russia and China. Their governments are more authoritarian, and it is in this that a counterweight to elite power could lie: namely, autocracy. Instead of a two-way division of society into elites and the masses, it becomes a three-way division, into the autocracy, elites, and masses. The autocracy, composed of a single or very limited number of individuals, becomes a kind of super-elite institution which ironically may have the power to constrain and direct the behavior of lesser elites. This has most dramatically been seen in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the kleptocrat oligarchs who aspired to political domination were expelled, and in China, in its periodic purges of officials. Such a three-way system has a long history, including the reign of Peisistratus in ancient Athens, down to the regime of Huey Long in Louisiana. It may actually produce improved conditions for the masses, as their slice of the “pie” might be increased by the autocrat, who gets a healthy piece himself, while the portion going to elites is decreased. On the other hand, the greater devotion to national purpose seen in Russia and China may also be due a “crisis consensus” among their elites, having come through the collapse of the Soviet Union in the first case, and a devastating revolution in the second.
In any case, a problem with autocracy is its vulnerability to corrupt, incompetent, or megalomaniac autocrats, who have been seen often enough in history. Lenin was first among equals in the ruling politburo of the Bolsheviks, which at least was governed by consensus at the top; but he was eventually succeeded by Stalin, who connived his way to total despotic power, with results that could be extraordinarily malevolent. Autocracy may also lead to lesser elites completely abandoning any idea of national purpose, leaving that to autocrats, while social cohesion as a whole disintegrates. And finally, if the path of ascent to autocracy by aspirants becomes undefined or uncontrolled, a highly destructive battle for ultimate power may result. Nevertheless, vulnerable though autocracy may be to various glaring faults, it may become inevitable – if the national purpose of the many has dwindled, to the point that it can only be supplied by a few.
********
Sources
The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills, published 1956. A work examining the structure of power in post-World War II America, documenting the transformation of old “local society” centers of power into an amalgamated “national society”, with national corporations becoming ascendant over regional businesses, accompanied by the establishment of a “permanent war economy”, and an increasing predominance of executive power over legislative.
Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, by Jack A. Goldstone, published 1991. The foundational work of demographic structural theory in its quantitative analysis of history.
Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, by Peter Turchin, published 2016. Examines history with mathematical modeling, correlated with empirical observation; and applies to the United States, in particular, a demographic structural analysis updated for a modern industrial society.
End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin, published 2023. A work largely directed at a general audience that warns of the increasing danger of social and political disaffection.
********
A Personal Afterword
As I noted at the end of the previous essay on the peasant mentality, I am of the lower orders, though in certain ways I am like the elite. But there is one way in which I am not like the elite: I have never had a clear view of the path that would lead to my personal advancement, and for some reason have never attached importance to any conventional idea of progress along such a path.
I was born into a family of the pseudo-middle class in the midst of the 1950s, a family that had no pretensions beyond its “place”. My father never graduated from high school (evidently due, characteristically, to a dispute with a teacher), though he held a lower level white collar job. My mother did have a high school diploma, but beyond that only some secretarial training at a business college. I did quite well in school, which seemed to have the approval of my parents; however, my performance was never remarked upon, much less pointedly encouraged. Any learning that I acquired, or any interest in the arts, was entirely up to me (though my mother did try to make sure that her children attended decent schools). In high school one of my classmates was taken aback by my failure to apply for entry to any kind of prestigious university, even though I had won a few awards – I simply had no interest in such. In the end I attended a local university and earned a bachelor degree, motivated, in part , by nothing more than inertia (though I have never actually made use of my academic accomplishment). Until a few years ago I was the only member of my family, or its descendants, to have achieved so much as a four year degree.
What did matter to me was hard to pin down, even to myself. Certainly it was nothing practical. I blundered about, trying this and that, but nothing satisfactory resulted. Unlike my parents, who had lived through the Great Depression, I was not driven by stark necessity. As a consequence I never had a real career, only menial employment. I have also never had a wife or children, again having little interest in such.
Aside from lack of interest in a career, starting a family, or owning valuable possessions, my reluctance to adopt a conventional way of life may actually be due to a veiled, nebulous fear – a fear of our society, and all that it means, with its occasional atrocities, prejudices, regimentation, and general irrationality. I suspect I have always had this fear, from a very young age. The situation is doubly strange, in that on the surface, consciously, I have often seemed to accept the reality of human society, and navigated its conventions well enough; but underneath, unconsciously, there has always been distress, even revulsion, at the nature of that society. Such agitation occasionally breaks through to the surface, its meaning becoming clearer to me in my later years. It is why I have gone out, by myself, into a desert place.
And so my disquiet has led me to try to understand what so disturbs me, to find an answer to “why things are the way they are”, as expressed in the essays I am now writing. But another factor that seems to have impelled me is an unusual desire for knowledge, often obscure or latent, but always persistent. It may be a desire for something that is true in and of itself. In this I was perhaps influenced by my mother, who had a disregard for wealth and social position, and instead valued something beyond them: a certain basic decency. In truth, it is not so much that I disapprove of blind ambition for money and power, but that I do not even understand it. It is simply one more aspect of humanity that baffles me.
In any case, I am what I am (and as Popeye would have added, “that’s all that I am”). I have no idea why that is so, but simply go on. Perhaps that is the nature of life itself.