Historical Insights: Elites Are Frightened People

Every civilization, government, country, empire struggles between "every individual for itself" anarchy and tyrannic legalism.

Part of that push and pull involves a priestly caste that insists on increasingly complex rules (and terminology) that only the priestly class can carry out (or remember) until they have "a stranglehold on religious affairs, further elevating their status" (Aldrete).

 

Every single civilization. And in every single one, the insistence by the priestly class on rituals and rules and complex systems leads to upheaval: the Brahman caste's focus on difficult rules led ordinary people to turn to Buddhism. I take the position that the heretic pharaoh's rejection of Amun for Aten was a calculated move to combat the extremely powerful Amun priesthood. Martin Luther took a radical--and printable--stance against indulgences. The fact that Calvinism almost immediately went down the same "angels dancing on the head of a pin" rabbit hole is par for the course. On the other hand, that push-back led to Methodism and views of universal grace.

 

The focus on minutiae and status and judgment based on position ("our" guys can do whatever they want; the "other" guys must be cancelled) in multiple religions and social orders has led to "hey, what about the spirit of the law?--what about basic principles?" upheavals. Just look at people's reactions to current-day Progressives!

 

Yet the move towards elitism, despite its consistent failures, is so predictable, I've decided that something really basic and Freudian is going on here--even when power and money are not on the table (well, not relatively on the table: the Amun priesthood was miles more powerful than any current academic religion). 

 

That is, a desire to regulate everything, including "fun" and "dissent," must be a basic human impulse towards the desire for guarantees: my safety will be assured. 

 

The personal risk demanded by Paul's Christianity and other early C.E. religions is...scary to people. The underlying theologies, like the Sermon on the Mount, entail hoping people will be decent and nice and accepting when obviously, often, they aren't, in the same way that trusting an adversarial legal system means sometimes the system makes mistakes.

 

The elite theocrats will argue that they are acting to prevent those mistakes, but I suggest that actually, they are so terrified of losing their status they convince themselves that their failure will equal society's failure (see Frasier).

 

And they aren't wrong. Loss of status often follows mistakes and risk-taking based on personal moral integrity. Arguably, this loss is the point of "turning the other cheek" and like-minded philosophies/theologies: let go of king of the mountain posturing. 

 

Loss of status for elites equates to loss of identity. They hold on, constructing increasingly elaborate social defenses, usually based in some way on the idea that they are society's salvation. 

 

Ironically, of course, from the long view, their success is society's failure. But that's in the very, very long run, so I suppose the cognitive dissonance here isn't entirely unexpected or, from the point of view of those who hold it, useless (for them).