Have Our Elites Lost The Mandate Of Heaven?

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The top monkeys are doing very well indeed, while the troop is feeling that the Monkey Gods have signaled their displeasure with the failure of the top monkeys.

The consent of the governed and the Mandate of Heaven have an interesting relationship. In the ancient cosmology of ruler and ruled, the right to rule was viewed as a metaphysical construct: the gods (or God) granted individuals or blood lines the Divine Right to Rule, with the understanding that this right was contingent and could be withdrawn.

The Chinese called this metaphysical approval the Mandate of Heaven, and a series of natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, etc.) were interpreted as the withdrawal of the rulers’ right to rule due to their failure to properly comport Heaven and Earth.

(Failures of leadership such as losing wars and exacerbating famines didn’t help.)

Once the ruled concluded the Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn, that was the metaphysical green light to overthrow the existing ruling elite and replace it with another regime.

All nation-states have some version of the consent of the governed, which is based on the idea that rulers are granted authority because they have unique powers that benefit the commoners.

This power might be supernatural, as in a priest-class which claimed that its rituals insured bountiful harvests, or a natural superiority such as being a successful general and compelling leader.

Whatever the source if the elite’s power, if the elite failed to deliver the implicitly promised benefits to commoners–bountiful harvests, security from invasion, etc.–then the consent of the governed could be withdrawn, as the elites had failed to hold up their end of the bargain.

In the current era, the ruling elite’s claim on superior powers that benefit the ruled boil down to 1) charismatic leadership and 2) difficult-to-acquire expertise that gives the elite an edge in decision-making, planning and innovation and 3) immense wealth, which they claim is proof of their technocratic / financier superiority, as they claim their wealth was earned by merit rather than being skimmed via monopoly, corruption, insider trading, financier trickery, regulatory capture, etc.

In many ways, the current faith in technology as the solution to all problems has a metaphysical component: many people are offended if their belief in the supremacy of technology is questioned.

The current technocratic elite is in a sense the modern equivalent of a priest-class with special powers to conjure technological-managerial marvels that carry the implicit promise of delivering benefits to commoners–bountiful yields, security, etc.

As prosperity and security decline, and technological-managerial marvels (Big Data, AI, etc.) fail to fix what’s broken, faith in the priesthood of technological expertise is fading, and the consent of the governed is eroding: the priesthood’s incantations and rituals are failing to provide the promised benefits.

There is another factor that causes the ruled to remove the consent of the governed: soaring inequality driven by the elites taking a larger share than the economy/society can sustain.

Put another way: if the ruling elite mismanages affairs while increasing their share of the economy’s surplus, the decline falls on the commoners.

If the ruling elite manages to expand the economy by 2% annually but increases their share by 10%, the slice of pie left for the commoners shrinks accordingly.

Once ruling elites make the mistake of believing their own PR (we deserve our authority and power due to our superiority), they lose touch with the day-to-day realities of insecurity experienced by commoners, and this leads to the hubris and magical thinking of “let them eat cake.” (Actually, Marie A. said, “let them eat brioche,” but we get the idea: if there is no bread, give them something better than bread, as if that better staple is in universal abundance because it’s abundant on the tables of the ruling elites.)

This academic study presents the case for inequality bringing down elites and collapsing societies.

Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.

A book that covers the history of inequality being reset tumultuously The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.

Given that the top 10% in the U.S. own very nearly 90% of all income-producing assets and collect 97% of all income derived from capital, while the wealth and income of the bottom 90% have stagnated or declined, it’s self-evident that inequality has reached the collapse / withdrawal of consent of the governed stage.

It’s also increasingly self-evident that the technocracy elite has failed to deliver the implicitly promised benefits across a spectrum of measures of well-being.

The top monkeys are doing very well indeed, while the troop is feeling that the Monkey Gods have signaled their displeasure with the failure of the top monkeys (no Mandate of Heaven for you) and the erosion of security and well-being are evidence the elite has failed to fulfil its part of the bargain.