Horizontal Class – Elites

 

Horizontal or Reproductive and Influence Class

Reproductive class refers a rough division of humans into a distribution by their reproductive value. There is a competition between the classes, as there is a competition between all living organisms – and there must be for evolution continue and the species to persist. The competition between the classes is dysgenic at the bottom and eugenic at the top. In other words, classes are the result of evolution in action. And the question of whether an action is eugenic or dysgenic provides us with complete moral decidability in the broadest possible ethical and moral questions facing mankind. There are no moral dilemmas. There are no morally undecidable questions.

 

 

Horizontal Classes

 

Definition of Horizontal Class: Reproductive Strategy

 

Three Dominance Hierarchies

What dominance hierarchies (classes) can man climb?

1. Physical (force)
2. Economic (exchange)
3. Gossip (insurance, inclusion, exclusion)

We can climb all three of them – and we do. If we can.

 

Three Elite Classes

( … )

1) The Military
2) The Priesthood: talk/gossip/rallying/shaming, Academy, Politics.
3) The Judiciary: violence, order, law, war

And
4) The Burghers: trade, enterpreneurship, finance, treasury.
5. Those who Work

Combinations

And a persuasive argument can consist of one or more of these strategies, often in great complexity.

Force/Punishment/Limits < Exchange > Demand/Inclusion/Exclusion

It is possible and often preferable to combine all three forms of power in order to coerce people most effectively. Conversely, it is possible and preferable to create an institutional framework in politics that restricts the ability to combine different forms of power in an effort to constrain power.

All known societies employ all three sorts of incentives to at least some degree in order to evoke from its members the necessary degree of cooperation for the society to survive and flourish. However, different societies differ radically in the relative proportions of these different kinds of incentives used within their characteristic mix of incentives.

 

Or, more romantically:

—“Human life can for convenience be divided into four major spheres, the pursuit of power (politics), the pursuit of wealth (economics), the pursuit of [mindfulness] salvation and meaning (religion), the pursuit of social and sexual warmth (kinship).”— McFarlane

People give priority one or more different weighted combinations, or perhaps ‘chordic’ representations of these strategies. They do so out of habit, and class inclination, just as they follow religious and class sentiments due to their upbringing.

People who belong to institutions have different capacities for adopting these strategies. Force requires discipline and long Time Bias. Remuneration requires cunning and invention. Moral claims require loyalty to consensus, and absorption of, and therefore payment of, opportunity costs. Different social classes have different time biases and consist of people with different time preferences, requiring different types of discipline under different social and economic conditions. ie: it is easier to have a long time preference if one is genetically disposed to better impulse control, and lives in greater security. It is easier to have a short time preference if one is more persuaded by impulses, less disciplined, and in an environment of scarcity.

Under markets, the social classes are organized by intelligence (otherwise by violence, or corruption, or propaganda and deceit). Intelligence is the ability to absorb content in real-time, to learn abstractions in time, and to permute those abstractions in application to problems in real-time. Intelligence regresses toward the mean over generations. Therefore class membership is an indicator of the likelihood of class mobility, and upper-class position is difficult to maintain. While we use the word ‘middle class’, and most people in the west live middle-class lifestyles, the middle class means possessing disposable income and participating in the market. Therefore the majority of citizens are in the upper proletariat and lower-middle classes, which we call the working, white-collar working and craftsman classes.

There are different costs to these institutions: Force is extremely expensive. Creating non-corruption, and order (some network of property definitions and their means of transfer). Property is a term for a scarce good that must be used, consumed or transformed in the process of production, even if that process is human sustenance. Remunerative institutions require the complex task of concentrating capital then maintaining it in a constantly changing kaleidic and competitive environment. Moral claims require constant advocacy, verbal skill, maintenance of numerous relationships, and constant payment of opportunity costs.

Social classes have different access to each of these forms of coercion. Those in the institutional class, or upper class, have access to force in the form of policy and law. Those in the capitalist class, or middle, have access to capital: money, and market institutions.

In each strategy, people form elites and organizations for utilizing those strategies. The elites create philosophical frameworks. Each of these frameworks consists of moral claims, and institutional means of perpetuating those claims, and the social benefits of adopting those claims.

Each of these institutions is open to corruption, which is the privatization of opportunity and reward, for personal consumption at group expense. Corruption is a fraud.

Each of these strategies, under the organizations, institutions, and elites, compete against other strategies, organizations, and elites, and each attempts to use its own organizations to obtain discounts against other organizations.

This competition is analogous to the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, if more complicated: each group can successfully compete against one another under most circumstances but can defeat and be defeated by some other combination of forces.

The human mind is comfortable with identity and causality. It can with practice, understand a one-dimensional causal spectrum. It can, with effort, understand two dimensions of causality. It can with more effort to understand three dimensions of a causal spectrum.

Human emotions for example, consist of probably no more than three stimuli: Dominance-Submission, Pleasure, and Activation. And that all human emotions, in their seemingly infinite variety can be described as using these three axes of stimuli. Likewise, human social behavior consists of three different forms of coercion, in some combination, and this set of axes leads to seemingly infinite variety.

But it only seems infinite. At it’s base, there are only three forms of social organization. These three forms can be combined, as they are in the majority of the population in some manner or another. Or they can be used as one of three specializations, each of which attempts to play rock, paper, scissors, with the other two.

All known societies employ all three sorts of incentives to at least some degree in order to evoke from its members the necessary degree of cooperation for the society to survive and flourish. However, different societies differ radically in the relative proportions of these different kinds of incentives used within their characteristic mix of incentives.

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