Elites Don't Rule (I)

On the flatterers at the court of Mediocre Human Capital

There’s always hope for someone as long as he can still change his mind. Richard Hanania, famed advocate of political submission to ‘Elite Human Capital’ (EHC), recently introduced a wrinkle into his worldview when he decided that billionaires are inherently arrogant and deluded.¹ This of course resembles nothing more than the standard chud critique of ‘out-of-touch elites’; and Hanania’s resort to it against those above his own social station made him look very much like that most contemptible of things, a doctor who can’t stomach his own medicine.

But apparently I was not the only one to notice this, and either the criticism or the cognitive dissonance is getting through to Hanania – helped by a few rejection letters from publishers who didn’t like his upcoming book on Elite Human Capital. Now he is beginning to question the whole concept of EHC:

As he’s become a dominant political force, I’ve realized that I have an Elon Musk problem. He exhibits in extreme form all of the worst traits of Low Human Capital, but one has to admit he is smart and economically productive. So explaining to people that I have a definition of Elite Human Capital that excludes Elon Musk – or more precisely, that he is the antithesis of – became too difficult. This isn’t to say that the underlying idea here is wrong. We need a framework to understand the fact that he, and others on the right, lie all the time and have a deep hostility toward truth seeking and open dialogue, and this forms a [culture that contrasts with the one we find] among the mainstream media and other elite institutions.

No smirking at that last line, please; let’s stay focused. Moving on:

For the book I’m writing now, I’ve gotten a major publisher. The ideas I will present are going to be related to those that were going to be in the EHC book, but the topic is distinct and the ideas will be presented in ways that make more intuitive sense to people. As for the term Elite Human Capital, I’m going to stop fighting against what the marketplace of ideas is telling me and start to use it in a more intuitive sense, to refer to smart people. Musk is therefore EHC, though most EHC is, thank God, not like him and in fact disgusted by the role he plays in our political and social life.

“Mainstream media and other elite institutions.” “Smart people.” “Most EHC.” What exactly is the underlying idea here, struggling to be reborn outside its old inadequate framing? I would venture to suggest that it is not EHC, but MHC – that is to say, Mediocre Human Capital.

Consider the Wiktionary definition of the word elite. It is related to ‘elect’, in the sense of the ‘chosen’, and has definitions that include ‘of high birth’, ‘aristocratic’, ‘representing the choicest or most select of a group’. In the context of elite theory, it is associated with Robert Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’, and the word oligarchy (from Greek oligoi, ‘the few’) also traditionally refers to a small ruling group. Arguably the strict sense of elite is becoming debased, and this is reflected in other more ambiguous definitions for the word, such as “people who have a superior social or economic status”. But there’s nothing wrong with demanding more precision from those purporting to build a theory upon it – especially when they clearly enjoy basking in the positive connotations of the original meaning.

Much of Hanania’s writing is paywalled (elite theories come at elite prices!), so I can’t pretend to have reviewed it comprehensively. But let’s make a quick survey of the relevant posts on his site, as well as those of his fellow elite human capitalist Anatoly Karlin (who seems to have originated the theory). This, I think, should not only show up the imprecision of the term but also shed light on the underlying idea.

1. “The Soypill Manifesto” and “Why Jail is Programmed for all Rightoids”, written by Karlin, are preoccupied above all with the alleged stupidity of most rightists versus most leftists and the general tendency of the right to lose to the left. They read like a personal application form for a transfer of allegiance from one political faction to the other, on the grounds that one is relatively more intelligent than the other. But since both right and left wings are democratist factions with mass support (41% of white voters in the US support the Democratic Party), neither of them can be called an elite in any reasonable sense of the word. The intelligence gap between them also appears to be much exaggerated – suggesting that Karlin is perhaps suffering from ‘greener grass syndrome’,² or perhaps using the difference in intelligence as a face-saving proxy for the difference in political power that actually preoccupies him.

2. Hanania’s post “Elite Human Capital is Always Liberal” makes the case for a broad correlation between leftist or liberal views and high IQ, education, income, etc. No attempt is made to sift out truly gifted intellects from everything else on the right side of the bell curve (in one cited paper that I was able to access, the data on IQ range and distribution of the participants that would be needed to do this is not even made available by the authors), or to to distinguish advanced scholarly attainment from the degree-holding hordes (other data from Pew Research Centre distinguishes only ‘higher education’, and even mere secondary schooling for some countries), and all of this leads us to think that Hanania’s idea of ‘elite’ is everyone else’s idea of ‘above average’. Note also here that in his defence of conservative intelligence, Emil Kirkegaard concedes that “white extreme liberals are getting close to 110 IQ on average”, which is close to the very definition of a ‘midwit’ according to the originator of that term.

3. A mostly-paywalled post, “Elite Human Capital is Not Just IQ”, sifts the ‘relatively smart’ category in the direction of less IQ elitism. EHC, according to Hanania, is also defined as “an interest in ideas, and a moral code…that goes beyond tribalism or a primitive form of machismo”. In light of this, he says that a struggling New York journalist with an IQ of 120 is EHC, whereas a successful small business owner in Ohio is not. Similarly, he admits that “Donald Trump in his prime was probably smarter than Kamala Harris”, but associates the former with Low Human Capital and the latter with EHC because “the fact that she’s a career politician and comfortable in elite liberal circles makes her EHC”. This adds much context to Hanania’s criticism of LHC “corruption” and praise of EHC “higher ideals” – for while Trump “never showed interest in anything other than making money, getting his name in the papers, and having sex with models”, Harris launched her early career through preferential appointments from the man with whom she had an adulterous affair. EHC is thus apparently defined here neither by intelligence nor by morality, but by a concern for political power and cultural influence over wealth-acquisition (the traditional preoccupation of lower-class people) and the avoidance of certain plebeian behaviours.

4. Following this, in “Why Donald Trump and Joe Rogan Are Not Elites”, Hanania makes a distinction between those types of cultural and political influence that confer elite status and those that do not. Non-elites, according to him, owe their position to populist selection processes (although this locates them in precisely the sort of ‘oligarchy’ theorized by Michels); elites, on the other hand, are those who “participate in and have contact with long-standing, established institutions that have traditionally had cultural, political, and social power, even when the power of those institutions is waning”, and for whom social status is conferred by these institutions and the other elites who belong to them rather than the approval of the masses. (By this token, I suppose, Kamala Harris’s being trounced in a popular election only made her more EHC.)

5. “The Origins of Elite Human Capital Institutions and Communities” is the most telling Hanania post of all. It begins by identifying the origin of EHC in the geographical concentration and social segregation of relatively smart people in colleges and urban centres, and the “class consciousness” created by this. This is the very same phenomenon deplored by Murray and Herrnstein in the first chapter of The Bell Curve, on the grounds that it brain-drains the rest of society. Hanania goes on identify a ‘Low Human Capital’ type of status reflected in tribal chieftains, military dictators, and small business owners (which is evidently what Jack Vien calls personalism), and an EHC type that is institutionalized, wealth-despising, unmasculine, and based on ‘truth’, ‘virtue’ and ‘meaning’. EHC is defined as “the artists, bureaucrats, activists, journalists, and intellectuals that tend to assume power when democratic governments don’t take a heavy handed approach to controlling society”. As such, it is in constant conflict with ruling oligarchies (presumably non-elites according to Hanania) in China, Russia, Iran, etc., who do take a heavier hand; and it must constantly pressure Western states to subsidize its scholarly, journalistic and cultural activities.

6. “Elite Human Capital in Open and Closed Cultures”, while mostly paywalled, makes another interesting revision. Having previously gone out of his way to exclude all but the modern Western scholarly-bureaucratic class from the EHC category, Hanania now tells us that EHC takes different forms in ‘open’ and ‘closed’ cultures and subcultures, so even “Islamic fundamentalists” can be considered EHC at a local level (as can “more intellectual” nationalists, communists, degrowthers, etc., whereas MAGA populists and mass media trusters are united in the LHC category). Since the difference between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ cultures is unclear at best³, the only visible common characteristic of EHC in this scheme is higher intelligence than the vast majority of people; yet the fact that the Taliban appears first on the list of alt-EHC implies that another important criterion is success at taking power.

The most obvious conclusion to draw from all of this is that EHC is an opaque, amorphous concept, with only a superficial connection to meritocracy and IQ, and that Hanania has not so much moved the goalposts as played pick-up sticks with them in the course of trying to define it. Its association with gloating diatribes against populist idiocy and right-wing loserdom (more egregious in Karlin’s writing) leads us to suspect that it is about finding excuses to agree with the ideology of the stronger faction, and that this is as far as its ‘elitism’ goes. Unprincipled submission to superior power has always been a prudent position, but time was when it came with one repentant essay and a life of humble quietude thereafter.

But there’s a more charitable way to interpret the underlying idea that Hanania is getting at, and it is this. The modern liberal state, which is most developed in the West but replicated to some extent everywhere else, has two special characteristics: 1) the denuding of power from actual persons in order to vest it in abstract institutions, and 2) the tendency to expand as these institutions grab more power and take over more functions from the remnants of pre-existing ‘natural’ society.⁴ The maintenance and expansion of this state on the one hand, and the reduction of the rest of society to passivity and dependence on the other, requires the mass alienation of relatively smart people from natural society and their recruitment into an extended scholarly-political-administrative class. This is what we see with the huge expansion of higher education (to the point at which some one-third of the US population, and a similar share of the UK one, reportedly holds scholarly titles), and the corresponding growth in ‘professional-managerial class’ positions (which, according to the heterodox Marxists who defined this term, rose from 1% of total US employment in 1930 to 35% in 2006).

This extended scholar-class, or clerisy, can be called an ‘elite’ in the sense of ‘ruling class’ – that is to say in the sense that it is distinct from the masses, runs most of the extended government, and is represented by the dominant political faction. We can also admit that it is highly competitive at the top, reasonably closed to the lowest human quality, and (according to Murray and Herrnstein in The Bell Curve) more efficiently sorted for cognitive ability than smaller scholar-elites before it. Yet in terms of its ‘human capital’, and with an eye to the original definition of the word elite as the ‘cream of the crop’, this class is being so massively overproduced nowadays that it can only be characterized overall and on average by ‘relative smartness’ and ‘relative high status’ – in other words, by midwittery and mediocrity. Hence the term Mediocre Human Capital, which is admittedly polemical, but no more so than the terms thrown around by Hanania and Karlin.⁵

This brings us to the role of liberal and leftist ideology. It should go without saying that these are ideologies of modern Western states, particular to our own time and place, and that there is no universal reason why a scholarly elite should be anti-conservative, liberal, democratist, etc. (any more than that it should be Catholic, Vedic, or Confucian). But such arguments ring all the more parochial when we remember that it is the ongoing expansion of the state that employs and empowers the modern clerisy, and most justifications for that expansion come from leftist ideology.⁶ Conversely, since those saddled with the low-class task of making money are obliged to foot the bill for all of this, we should not be surprised to observe an antipathy to leftism among them regardless of their ‘human capital’.

Yet we might go further here. Surely it is the mediocre majority within the clerical class that has to be accommodated by the creation of new scholar-elite positions, since it cannot hope to compete for a smaller number of higher-status ones. Moreover, such expansion presumably renders academic and bureaucratic institutions less amendable to control by elites within them, increasing the sway of the more numerous MHC over their betters. In light of this, we might expect stronger commitment to left-wing causes⁷ among mediocrities than elites within the clerisy.

Such divisions within the ruling class are not much discussed in dissident circles, dominated as they are by a populist viewpoint in which all higher reaches of the social pyramid merge into one oppressive whole. One notable exception is Eugyppius, an ex-academic, who speaks not of the concentration of power by elites but of its diffusion into a vast mob of mini-mandarins:

This is the diffusion of power downwards, from the upper reaches of the political system, into the bureaucratic institutions, academia and even the press. This diffusion, which has happened in varying degrees throughout all of our countries, and which is still ongoing, means that all major government initiatives arise from a broad consensus of the new political elites. Major media organisations, learned societies, and all branches of the bureaucracy collaborate to realise the same consensus vision everywhere. … This diffusion of power is an increase in the entropy of the governmental order. It is an irreversible political decay. In abandoning concentrated political power for rule by a thousand committees, our governments have traded the possibility of strategic, coherent action for armour against their political opponents. They have effectively demobilised themselves. As their powers become ever more diffuse, their scope for action and their field of endeavour become ever more limited. Only those policies which can inspire broad factions of the ever-expanding petty elite will ever find their way onto the agenda.

Although we have said that Mediocre Human Capital has most to gain from this process, this does not mean that it is not well within the interest of elites within the clerisy to support it. Only by doing so can they increase the political weight of their class as a democratist faction on the one hand, while mitigating the potential discontent of overproduced elites on the other. Perhaps the option to become one of the many conservative scholar-elites attested throughout human history⁸ is simply not available to them in a democratist system.

Yet there are drawbacks and dangers in this. One is the denuding of power from the centre of government to the “ever-expanding petty elite”, which presumably affects the upper strata of the bureaucracy (i.e. the core civil service as opposed to NGOs and quangos) as well as elected officials. Another is the numerical power of the overproduced-elite mob within the institutions, as Eugy shows in a post on wokeness in academia:

Wokeness first got off the ground in Anglophone universities after decades of hiring and admissions preferences had filled them with revolutionary tinder at the bottom. The expanding administration seized this opportunity, and via ever new initiatives in the area of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, aligned itself with the affirmative action fraternity against that old academic aristocracy, the tenured faculty and their departments. That is, at base, all that Wokeness is. ... Everyone preaching Wokeness is either a direct, personal beneficiary of the power process it represents, or a would-be target seeking ideological cover. The end state towards which the Woke are driving, academically, is a university system where an all-powerful administration manages a wholly subordinate faculty employed on renewable contracts. At the political level, they aim to expand the managerial state still further at the expense of the native middle classes. Whatever the specifics, the goal is always to replace the ‘aristocrats’ of the prior system – which is to say, those whose status and position is partly independent of and a check upon the current regime – with a new nobility, who owe their position entirely to the administration or the state.

Obviously, in this Cultural Revolution-like context, it becomes difficult to trace the motives behind the simple expression of leftist ideology. For the MHC mob and its allies, such ideology is a belly-growl and a battle-cry. For elites (in this case the tenured professors in universities, but the principle can be applied more widely) it is at least sometimes a form of crypsis, a wise defensive strategy for all prey animals.

And this brings us at last to the limits of my argument. Although I’ve criticized Hanania and Karlin for failing to sift out the elites from the mediocrities, I’m not sure I would know where to start with that or whether there’s even much to be gained by trying. There is no agreed-upon body of ‘elitist’ positions that can be easily discerned from the variants of mass politics practiced by the left and right; and in all likelihood, whatever groups truly deserve the name of ‘Elite Human Capital’ do not possess any sort of distinct self-consciousness.

Once upon a time, some on the right entertained the notion of encouraging such an elite consciousness to develop, and of bringing it into alliance with the existing populist resentment of the petty elite. Arguably, such a thing is already happening (with Trump, Elon Musk, Christopher Langan, etc.), albeit in a haphazard way and without much help from a right that has returned to the old one-sided strategy of agitating the populace. Yet in some ways this helps, as the appeal should not be to the self-interest of elites (a preoccupation of the weak and ignoble), but to their responsibility not to abdicate leadership in the face of an incompetent mob.

There’s not much to ‘midwit theory’ as a statement of fact, but the memes associated with it can be read as an expression of hope for such a rightist high-low alliance:⁹

If you would please consult the graph.

In truth, this post isn’t really a dunk on Hanania (that’s just the bait), but an introduction to something a bit more constructive. I’ve long thought that the neoreactionary and elite-theorist right, for all of its pretension to ‘understand power’, fails to understand the paradox of a ruling elite that is also a democratic mob composed of middle-status, middle-wealth and middle-intellect people. This failure of understanding results in an incoherent mix of pro-elitism and anti-elitism, pro-democratism and anti-democratism, which cannot sustain itself for long against the consistency of bog-standard populism. Hanania’s sloppy, slippery use of the word elite does not fall too far from the schools of thought that he has renounced, and if anything he has more self-awareness about it than most.

Readers familiar with those schools of thought, such as neoreaction and elite theory, might wish to entertain a few questions:

1. Does not the concept of a ‘high-low-versus-middle alliance’, derived from Bertrand de Jouvenel’s history of alliances between government power¹⁰ and the lower orders of society against intermediary power-holders, become somewhat misleading (which is not to say wrong) when power is bloated and diffused?

2. Does not the same hold true for Michel’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’ in states subject to bloating and diffusion of power?

3. While accepting these principles, might we not also identify I.) a conflict between the ‘middle’ and the ‘high and low’, wherein the petty elite draws power away from the nominal ruling elites while also weighing more heavily on the subjects; and II.) a ‘leaden law of democracy’, or more exactly ‘broad oligarchy’, by which the state gravitates towards the petty-elite mass consensus?

If you have any thoughts on these, by all means let me know them, and stay tuned for the second part.

1. I don’t have access to Hanania’s paywalled posts, but a certain Kryptogal was kind enough to give me a potted summary of this one.

2. Note, on the other hand, the numbers of non-credentialed rightwing supporters and high-credentialed leftwing supporters shown here.

3. More precisely, ‘closed culture’ is a propaganda slur for any society that seeks to limit democratist influence in the same way that Western states limit non-democratist influence.

4. Although it could be said that all societies are ‘natural’, because they are composed of organic human matter, this would be like saying that all machines are natural because they are constructed out of naturally-occurring materials. We can denote by words like ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ those social forms that spring up everywhere from quite rudimentary roots (which is not to say that they are always invariably the same forms), as opposed to those that are heavily dependent on the machinery of modern civilization.

5. Careful about spreading it around, though. Most dissident and online free press writers (present author included!) themselves fall into the category of overproduced low-ranking scholar-class detritus, and often show an inflated sense of their own intelligence in the form of certitude that they are more ‘redpilled’ than others.

6. This sort of reasoning has the defect of reducing everything to base self-interest, and one might object that there are a great many conservative intellectuals and clerically-qualified right-wingers opposing the state-expanding leftist ideologies. Yet while self-interest isn’t everything, it can have a distorting effect, and may contribute to two characteristics of democratist conservatives: their obsession with debating every demented accusation against normal society from ‘the libs’, and 2) their extreme reluctance to resist or counteract those libs anywhere other than the debating-room. In the sense that they are incentivized to repulse the enemy tactically, while doing nothing to defeat him strategically, they could be analogized to a class of defence lawyers in a dystopian kritarchy where prosecutors are allowed to drag innocent people into court at random.

7. Some might object that not all strands of left-wing opinion are relevant to the expansion of the state and clerisy, but that’s not how mass politics works. For most people, it’s a civilized form of war in which they attempt to defend whatever positions are held by their own side against the other, and it is mostly the order of battle that grants these positions significance.

8. One possible counter-argument for EHCists would be to look more closely at some of these conservative scholar-elites (like the Vedic Brahmins, Confucian mandarinate, medieval Catholic and Orthodox clergy, etc.), and try to identify tendencies within them that could be classed as ‘relatively leftist’ according to some more or less anachronistic criteria. I suspect, however, that most of these would be the tendencies that divide all scholarly and religious elites from power-holding elites and wealth-producing classes.

9. As such, there’s no essential reason for the memes to be drawn over an IQ bell curve; a number of other qualities, such as wealth, status, social conformity, etc., would do just as well to make the same intuitive point.

10. It should not be forgotten that Jouvenel, in his main work On Power, spoke not of “the high” but of “Power”, “the state”, etc. – which are considerably more flexible terms.