Hierarchy

Although from the 60's onward, hierarchy has been considered the worst possible thing in the history of mankind, it is actually quite a useful construct. It appears everywhere, in nature as well as society. The reason for that is simple - it is to allow the best to rise to the top. In animals, it is used primarily as a way to pass on the best genes to the next generation. Instead of having a bloody mass fight every single time a female flaunts her pheromone soaked genitals around, males of the species establish a sort of pecking order in which it is pretty much known who gets to have sex with how many females. Thus saving both lives and energy in the process. Females are usually more egalitarian in that aspect, but even they have a breeding rights and child care hierarchy, to ensure the offspring of the most capable ones have the best fighting chance.

In humans, that is just one of hierarchy's many aspects. We see it everywhere around us. In school (not just physical hierarchy between kids but intellectual, between kids one one side and teachers on the other), in the workplace, in academia, at parties...The thing that hippies hate so much basically seems to be an inevitable law of nature. Attempts have been made to do away with the hierarchy, such as communism, but aside from causing lots of misery they really failed to do away with it and may have even enhanced it. Yes, true communism was never achieved, but not by accident as proponents would like you to believe. It can never be achieved at all, natural selection is too strong a force fighting against it.

Such false beliefs in egalitarianism slowly but surely grew more popular until they became a de facto social norm of the 60's. And although the few sane individuals of a new generation are starting to see through that fallacy for what it really is, there's one place where hierarchy has been considered bad ever since the 18th century, and that is politics. It is directly opposed to everyone's experience in every single area of life, yet for some reason, here it is considered to be a good thing.

Even though most people will say they don't like or believe in hierarchy, in reality they do. When they're sick they go to the doctor, not to a random guy on the street. When they want to get educated, they go to a school and listen to teachers. When they want to learn karate, they go to a guy who has a black belt in karate, not some random lardass sitting on the couch whose personal best in sports was being a goalie from whom the ball accidentally bounced off, although he was trying to dodge it in order not to get hurt.

All in all, people flock to established experts. They believe them to be better at things they're experts in than the regular folk. Yet in politics it's the other way around. A Regular Joe, which translates to a person whose knowledge of politics, economics, national security, science, etc. is in best case minimal and in worst case completely delusional is considered to be perfectly equal to a person who actually has deep knowledge of those same things. In every other field of human activity, such a democratic system would have been considered sheer lunacy, yet in politics it is the widely accepted norm. To find out that our leaders are pathological liars at best, and incompetent psychopaths at worst, should really not be too much of a surprise to anyone, yet for some reason people still seem to be perplexed by this revelation.

In democracy, people get exactly the sort of leadership they deserve. Regular Joe is easily swayed by emotional arguments, has a lacking knowledge of history, short time horizon, and even shorter memory. Although top politicians in a democracy may not be the best people to run the state, there is one thing where they excel, and it's figuring out what the people want and how to promise them those same impossible things without sounding completely dishonest or mad in the process. And since they're only temporary governors, their personal time preference is adjusted to their time in office, usually of 4-8 years, which is extremely high when going by sovereign state standards.

In practice, this system basically creates politicians who promise people what they want to hear, then take long term loans to help them fulfill as many of those promises as possible during their short mandate, and finally do their best to leave as big a wreck as possible for the next guy in order for themselves to appear better in the public eye. Any problem that takes longer than 5 or so years to solve is kicked down the road? Falling birth rates? No problem, we won't get those babies into workforce in less than 20 years. Immigration? It's great, these people do the same thing as raising kids but better, they'are ready to work right away. Sure, they may turn this country into a 3rd world terrorist nightmare, but it won't happen for at least 50 years. Social programs? Bring them on, we can have a great decade and we won't have to worry about paying the loans before the next 30 years expire. Kids being grumpy for learning too many new things? Go out and play for the whole day, when you're happy your voting parents are also happy and your lack of skills won't show in the next 20 years anyway.

What was seen as a long distant future back in the sixties is unfortunately the reality of today. The loans are coming due, demography is catastrophic, immigrants are creating their own no-go zones and rape squads in the midsts of our cities and local population can't put 2 and 2 together without a calculator. Just as a Regular Joe can't take care of his own life and is doomed to spend his life as a member of a lower class, so are countries whose policies are selected by Regular Joes doomed to long term ruin.

One may wonder how people like the USA founding fathers could have been so oblivious to these issues. Fact of the matter is - they weren't. What was then a democracy would really be considered a quite peculiar system today. The constitution itself didn't specify who exactly had the right to vote, but the states usually limited it to white male landowners. Those votes were then given to the electoral college, who could really toss them all in the garbage and vote for someone else if they decided the trust of the populace is misplaced.

While votes being limited to white male landowners may seem harsh today, one must realize that even those limits couldn't keep the lower classes from decision making process from more than a 100 years. Slowly but surely, they were taken away, and less and less competent people gained the right for their opinion on how to run the country be considered with equal merit as the people who actually knew how to take care of their lives.

If taken out of today's Overton window possessed by political correctness, all those rules actually made some sense. The first rule, for a man to be a landowner, meant that a person who is voting needs to know how to take care of a property. Indebted people living in public housing and surviving on welfare clearly have no idea how to handle even the simplest of tasks, let alone a whole nation.

Being white is basically a heuristic for people whose mentality is similar enough to that of people who settled this land first. Basically a safeguard against immigrant groups with alien culture establishing their own nation-inside-nation turfs. While it is most certainly not a one-on-one correlation and can be unfair in many cases, it is really not about fairness but about designing a system to keep the culture intact.

Similarly to the previous, while some women are brilliant and rational, many are actually pretty communal and emotional creatures. Going back to the small tribe, it makes perfect sense, as they were the ones who were taking care of the weak infants and youths. But when that mentality is perfectly adapted to a small tribe, care-bear mentality on a state level is the road to ruin. Men are by default crueler creatures, and a ruler needs to be just and cruel simply because he hasn't the resources needed to accommodate everyone's wishes. This is not to say that some women wouldn't choose their leaders wisely and make great decisions. Many would. But as a group, when given rights in the 1920's, they swayed the world into an egalitarian hippie nightmare. Yet again, an unjust heuristic that more or less managed to do its job for a 100 or so years.

Ultimately, all these safeguards managed to fail at one point or another, leading us to the system that we have today. Although the system designed seemed marvelous at first, it turns out the safeguards were simply not strong enough to keep it from long-term collapse. Some people suggest a return to the origins, the Constitution and all that. But even if it could happen, it is simply not enough. If a thing has happened once, it will happen again. The basis of the system is, however, pretty brilliant. The only thing it really needed was stronger safeguards, to prevent it from degenerating into a system that we have today.

What we have today is a system where every idiot's opinion is equally valuable, and which is therefore suited to idiots' desires. This is not to say there isn't a hierarchy in democratic politics, because there most certainly is. But that selection mechanism of that hierarchy is wrong, because instead of selecting the best people for the job, or at least selecting what smart people think are the best people for the job, it selects what average people think are the best people for the job. And those things are quite often hopelessly mismatched.