Experts have jobs. They need to understand those who don’t.
And herein lies the problem.
"They see the overclass as enacting policies that are presented as good for the whole country but really mostly benefit people from the ruling class, whose lives have gotten better over the past few decades while the rest are left behind."
I believe in capitalism and meritocracy. But I also believe that any ideology, taken to the extreme, will only end in failure. Because human nature is not black and white. There are so many shades of gray in between. And the story of human history is therefore about striking a balance between conflicting ideals such that we make progress as a whole.
China is a good example. Yes, we know it is a communist country, but China has also learnt that pursuing communism by itself will not work. That is why China has opened up its economy, with some form of capitalism and meritocracy within its otherwise communistic and autocratic system. The thing is to strike a balance that allows China's society as a whole to move forward.
The American way, however, has been moving toward an increasingly extreme ideology of denying anything that is not democratic, capitalistic, meritocratic. I have previously written about the fallacy of "communism is bad". At a time when the U.S. needed to harness popular support to win a struggle against the Soviet Union, splitting the world into black and white, blue versus red seemed to be easy and effective.
And when American politicians saw the effectiveness of this "divide to win" strategy, they started to bring it into domestic politics, resulting in the extreme political divide we see today. A society that is so divided today, taking conflicting ideologies to their extremes. You have a "ruling" class that keeps stressing that capitalism is the way for the U.S. to grow and prosper, denouncing social welfare for being communist. As a rhetoric, that may sound nice, but the human story has reached today not because we focused entirely on survival of the fittest. Somewhere along the way, we have learnt that the key to species survival and prosperity is not in individuals who are each the best of their kind. Rather, it is about how an entire group can work together, each playing different roles, to allow the entire group to thrive better than others.
In any society, people will have different capabilities, different skills, different levels of proficiency. The people at the top are there because there are people at the bottom propping them up. The key is how to take care of the entire group without flattening the structure (communism taken to the extreme) because a flat structure provides no incentive for those who can to bring about progress. A flat structure, in other words, is stagnant. At the same time, we need to make sure that our societal pyramid has a system in place to take care of the pyramid's base. Because it is the base that props up the pyramid, allowing those at the top to chart out a better course for the future. If you let the base die away, the top will collapse on itself.
There is no "best" system. But there are bad ones. And because there are so many shades of gray, there is no single system that works for everyone. It is up to us to arrive at individual systems most appropriate for our own societies to move forward. And those systems are always somewhere in the middle ground. Depending on the people in the system, sometimes the solution is more to the left, sometimes more to the right. But it is never at the extreme ends, because we never have homogeneous human beings.
I only hope societies can find their balance. Before going to the extremes result in conflicts that negatively impacts the entire human species.
And herein lies the problem.
"They see the overclass as enacting policies that are presented as good for the whole country but really mostly benefit people from the ruling class, whose lives have gotten better over the past few decades while the rest are left behind."
I believe in capitalism and meritocracy. But I also believe that any ideology, taken to the extreme, will only end in failure. Because human nature is not black and white. There are so many shades of gray in between. And the story of human history is therefore about striking a balance between conflicting ideals such that we make progress as a whole.
China is a good example. Yes, we know it is a communist country, but China has also learnt that pursuing communism by itself will not work. That is why China has opened up its economy, with some form of capitalism and meritocracy within its otherwise communistic and autocratic system. The thing is to strike a balance that allows China's society as a whole to move forward.
The American way, however, has been moving toward an increasingly extreme ideology of denying anything that is not democratic, capitalistic, meritocratic. I have previously written about the fallacy of "communism is bad". At a time when the U.S. needed to harness popular support to win a struggle against the Soviet Union, splitting the world into black and white, blue versus red seemed to be easy and effective.
And when American politicians saw the effectiveness of this "divide to win" strategy, they started to bring it into domestic politics, resulting in the extreme political divide we see today. A society that is so divided today, taking conflicting ideologies to their extremes. You have a "ruling" class that keeps stressing that capitalism is the way for the U.S. to grow and prosper, denouncing social welfare for being communist. As a rhetoric, that may sound nice, but the human story has reached today not because we focused entirely on survival of the fittest. Somewhere along the way, we have learnt that the key to species survival and prosperity is not in individuals who are each the best of their kind. Rather, it is about how an entire group can work together, each playing different roles, to allow the entire group to thrive better than others.
In any society, people will have different capabilities, different skills, different levels of proficiency. The people at the top are there because there are people at the bottom propping them up. The key is how to take care of the entire group without flattening the structure (communism taken to the extreme) because a flat structure provides no incentive for those who can to bring about progress. A flat structure, in other words, is stagnant. At the same time, we need to make sure that our societal pyramid has a system in place to take care of the pyramid's base. Because it is the base that props up the pyramid, allowing those at the top to chart out a better course for the future. If you let the base die away, the top will collapse on itself.
There is no "best" system. But there are bad ones. And because there are so many shades of gray, there is no single system that works for everyone. It is up to us to arrive at individual systems most appropriate for our own societies to move forward. And those systems are always somewhere in the middle ground. Depending on the people in the system, sometimes the solution is more to the left, sometimes more to the right. But it is never at the extreme ends, because we never have homogeneous human beings.
I only hope societies can find their balance. Before going to the extremes result in conflicts that negatively impacts the entire human species.
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