The power elite
In 1956, sociologist C. Wright Mills published the classic book The Power Elite, which looked at how a narrow segment of the population with high positions in different institutions (legislators, corporations, the military) tended to make decisions for the population as a whole, with the consensus among these actors displacing authentic democracy. • Current Affairs
Stats for nerds
1recommend
6mentions
4people
2016–2025years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- That's a great find.
I'm not sure though that G.W. Bush had a lower IQ than Al Gore, but certainly G.W. Bush related to people who didn't think that they were so smart or at least educated.
I found a lot of people in the early 1950s for instance who thought Dwight Eisenhower was a lightweight I think because of his image
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7WaUPACuY
and that he worked hard to come across as relatable to "the common man" whereas his opponent in the 1952 election was the opposite type.
Anyhow I'm sure that you've seen many of my favorite sources on this but I'll point out both C. Wright Mills The Power Elite and the Tom Wolfe books The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
Mills defies the reductivism of 2025 in that he says there is not just one power elite but multiple power elites and just analyzes those in a great amount of detail. Those two Wolfe books pursue a theory that people can't all compete in the "master" status hierarchy but we can all be a star in our own little sky and that it's OK to find meaning in little things -- he explores a bunch of entertaining case studies and I like it so much better than that Acid Test book that gets read to death.
- This is such an old discourse... Back in the 1990s we used to say that the journalists were left-wing but the person who owned the paper was left-wing.
C. Wright Mill's "Power Elite" is still worth reading
https://www.thoughtco.com/c-wright-mills-power-elite-3026474
What I got out of it is that there is more than one kind of elite: there is the person who owns the trailer parks and car dealerships in a small town who is pretty important in that town, there are college professors who have a certain kind of status, there are politicians and the titans of industry. There isn't just one elite, but many kinds of elite.
- Have you uh ingested benzodiapine? The other common GABA "agent". Ime at low dose (~1mg) it has the disinhibitive effect that might feel like energy to a schizotype.
Of course since you're a Tom Wolfe conservative..
(I never really figured why either of you would be conservative, care to explain further? My guess it's something about not wanting to hack human cognition at the molecular to uh sub-emotional range)
Stalking the billion-footed beast is his most introspective essay [I could find], but even there I found no trace of the idea of a "personal" status hierarchy that is meaningful without concurrently tilting at the universal.
I'd say "cool" captures Tom Wolfe's master status hierarchy..
Cool can be personal in the way God is, though.. (so "personal sky" as an alias makes complete sense.)
The Power Elite looks interesting.. I'll let you know when something comes out of reading that..
- Again, there doesn't need to be a conspiracy behind it (as Kanye believes) it's just what the market (and "the algorithm") selects for.
As C. Wright Mills wrote in The Power Elite, "To accept either view -- of all history as conspiracy or all history as drift -- is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful." The precise form of our situation is not inevitable. Just as algorithms are written by people, so are laws and extortion notes. The tools that oppress us may be refashioned into others that free us. We must keep in mind that tools are nothing in themselves; they take on significance when used.
I do agree "that machine sells to everyone". Perhaps it makes sense to compare the situation of teen girls to that of black families like you suggest, since there is a sizable overlap between these groups. Rather than despairing of all the awful media, however, would it be better to focus on better media? The Cosby Show was produced in the 1980s, but surely there are good things happening now? Not necessarily shows on television, which is itself the sort of machine we're discussing. I've heard good things about "Black Twitter"...
Conservatism seems reasonable in the face of the issues you identify, but it's not, especially if you're following Milton Friedman on the minimum wage as you indicate above. The real minimum wage right now is barely half of the inflation-adjusted $12 it was in 1968. Had it kept pace with productivity as well as inflation, it would have been $22 by now. [0] Our enemies don't care about ideology. They happily wore the skins of Republicans before they wore the skins of Democrats, and it will be no trouble for them to switch again.
The lockdown did harm teen girls, even if we can't prove it to the scientific satisfaction of thread parent. That's not even the really bad part. What they have done once, they can and will do again. When it is normal for children to plug into a device instead of going to public school, it will be easy for some asshole billionaires to arrange that the children will just plug into their "education" apps and all the money we used to waste on teachers instead can just go to collateral for some asshole billionaire personal lines of credit. After they've done away with teachers, the McKinsey consultants will start examining whether the children really need parents. After all, they don't need a home if they're plugged into their devices...
But seriously, give Whitlock a listen, especially one of the episodes featuring Royce White. They are both better than Steven "A" Smith, in every respect.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inflati...
- This is a ridiculous argument. So elites abandoned the masses by not acting aristocratic enough? They already consider themselves a whole separate caste of superior beings, not bound by the rules that govern us petty plebeians. Do you know how many superyachts there are in the world? Honestly this kind of worship of power is nauseating.
Chris hedges has written about this kind of thing more eloquently than I ever could:
“I, unfortunately, had the experience of being shipped off to a private boarding school at the age of ten as a scholarship student and live–I was one of 16 kids on scholarship, and I lived among the super-rich and I watched them. And I think much of my hatred of authority and my repugnance for the ruling elite comes from having been among them for so long.”
“I came–certainly my mother’s side of the family–from, you know, lower working class. I mean, people–one of my uncles lived in a trailer in Maine, and certainly people with no means. And I would juxtapose the world I was in with that world. And it was very clear that it wasn’t about intelligence or aptitude.”
“It’s very distasteful to see, because, you know, I would go to the homes of friends of mine and watch–and let’s remember they’re children, 11, 12 years old, ordering around adults–their servants, their nannies.”
“The rich are different, because when you have that much money, then human beings become disposable. Even friends and family become disposable and are replaced. And when the rich take absolute power, then the citizens become disposable, which is in essence what’s happened. There is a very callous indifference.
“I mean, these people — and C. Wright Mills wrote about this in ‘The Power Elite’ — they’re utterly cut off. I mean, the only people they ever meet who are members of the working class are people who work for them–their gardeners or their chauffeurs. They live in self-encased bubbles. They have no real contact with reality. I mean, they don’t even fly on commercial airlines. And yet they have absolute power.
“Now, that becomes very dangerous politically because they’re so out of touch and they are able to retreat into their enclaves in the same way that you saw in France under Louis XVI, people retreating to Versailles, or the end of the Chinese dynasty when everybody went to the Forbidden City.”
- Social class is astonishingly multidimensional as pointed out in the works of C. Wright Mills (Power Elite), Paul Fussel (Class), Tom Wolfe (The Pump House Gang), etc.
In my extended family there are no college professors, but a lot of cops, even a lot of women that are cops. (There are some accountants, but they are forensic accountants ;-)
When I get stopped by the cops I don't worry, they like my attitude, they will tell me that people don't like speeding in their residential neighborhood and to them I look more like a guy who doesn't like speeding in my residential neighborhood and not the kind of guy who likes to play Initial D in residential neighborhoods.
Sometimes I've been a bystander when it looked like the cops showed up to arrest the first black person they saw, or when 15 police vehicles show up to arrest some black guy as thin as a rail and I even have a friend who grew up in a much richer family than me who had a bad attitude towards the police and has had his ass kicked, etc. Somehow though, even though I am not a cop and I don't particularly see things the way cops do, I've somehow absorbed enough protective coloration that I have a lot of "privilege" in this area, and less in some other areas.
