Mowing the Thousand Flowers

Mowing the Thousand Flowers

 

One persistent danger to elite society is its own overproduction. When too many elites chase too few elite positions, someone has to lose. So how do elites prune out excess fellow elites?

One method is to periodically rewrite the rules for being a member of respectable society. For instance, make sexual customs cycle from puritan to libertine and back again. Let a thousand flowers bloom, then roll up the lawnmower. This way one can eliminate as many fellow elites as you wish, during the puritan phase, for offenses against propriety committed during the libertine phase.

This method tends to select for hypocrisy. Consider the case of Al Franken, exiled from the Senate after photographic evidence of groping a woman; and Brett Kavanaugh, promoted to the Supreme Court after credible accusations of sexual assault. The former resigned right away, the second fought back with angry self-pity, perjury, and cover-ups. The orange conman himself compared the two, and derided Franken for his sucker’s integrity. Thus the President sets the moral tone of the age; in this case, downwards.

The puritan-libertine elite-pruning cycle selects for hypocrisy. To the system’s believers, this is a bug; to the system’s critics, it is a feature; and to the system’s masters, it is the core process.