Mandarins

Apropos of our recent discussion here (or at Cassandra's place?) about what our schools select for:
[L]ike all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should.  Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time.   They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less.  But if they think there's anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will.  For the good of everyone else, of course.   Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.

2 comments:

Grim said...

Well, that's the story of the last generation of politics. The elite have grown more and more detached, and have found themselves shocked more and more at what the American people really want. So they have embarked upon replacing that people via immigration policy, with a people that seems to prefer their own preferred solutions. In time, they'll have all the power they want, and since they'll have added enough people to vote for it their way, they can even call it democracy.

They are less entitled to call it American, as it represents a destruction of the traditions and traditional law on which the American project was based. Nevertheless, I expect they'll rather insist that it was the only way America was ever supposed to be.

DL Sly said...

I love mandarins. They're really good for ham glaze. Not to mention the perfect candying fruit.
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