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The modern cliched notion of “the elites” is effectively a strawman that aims to win over the hearts and minds of people by appealing to tropes better left in action movies. Hierarchy is a natural phenomenon - but the image of fighting against elites has become extremely romanticized and cartoonish to the point of no longer being about fighting injustices but rather now about combatting the mere thought of higher and lower classes. A class of nobility has existed de facto or de jure in every society that has manifested on the face of this earth. It is ridiculous to think that anything above the scale of perhaps a dozen (maybe even less) people could have any semblance of social flatness or homogeny without any notion of rank.

Admittedly, I get a bit lost in this piece – I probably am just not attuned to some discourse on twitter – but, I am not sure I buy that there are people decrying pick-up truck drivers as elites. Perhaps some references could help as a guide?

I do wholeheartedly agree with you that the university system – combined with the larger corporate employee system is a yoke placed around the necks of individuals and looks to strip them of individuation, volition, and dignity. You seem to be reaching at the fact that there are issues of scale here. And I don’t think this is disconnected from my first point.

Elites in the past came tied with certain societal duties; mostly protection of the land and people on the land. Later in the early stages of the industrial revolution in the West, elitism shifted from landed gentry to the merchant class a much more amorphous group not defined by birth or proper title – yet these people still provided a good – economic means and production in exchange for their own sacrifice – personal economic risk and their labor. As social elites, especially in American society, got more removed from direct social benefits and sacrifice via corporatism and the general corruption and collusion between large corp interests and the revolving door of government bureaucracy there naturally grew to be a disdain for elites. This disdain is ironically reaped upon by the establishment to put the mark of ham on individuals who are enemies to their interests by labelling them as elites. And as repugnant as it is that there exist a social class of prestige fully lacking skin in the game – we cannot allow that to blind us to the manner in which the term elite has been used to hoodwink people into a further deleterious and damaging ideology. It is okay to both hate the leeching corporate class and also decry the wanton use of “elite” slur.

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