4 ms·

How, if true, does this bear on the validity of the idea?

• woodruffw 3y ago
  On the validity of aristocracy as an idea? It makes it an ironically self-defeating one: to actually possess (political, among other) ariste is to not seek power for its own sake. Thus, openly pining for aristocracy demonstrates a lack of ariste. (Everybody wants competence. This is a universal human desire; it should be separated from a political structure that reifies power in those who think that they’re the most competent.)
  • mistermann 3y ago
    It makes it appear that way, but exerting an inevitable causal filter on the physical manifestation of the future is highly speculative.
    • woodruffw 3y ago
      I’m having trouble parsing this; I don’t think I made a prediction about the future. The point was simpler than that: virtue, ariste, etc. is already a shared human value, one that people apply to their decision making processes already (including in democracies). Anybody asking us to consider it a “lost idea” is trying to sell something other than the thing we’ve already bought.
  • salawat 3y ago
    Question: Do you think he pined for the establishment of and recognition of an American aristocracy? I took from the reading less that Jefferson was desirous of it, and more that he recognized the inevitability of something indistinguishable from it arising, and wishing to somehow thumb the institutional scales as it were to amplify the "aristocrat by virtue" rather than merely the "aristocrat that came into it by heritance". He was very concerned with the tendency of heritable wealth to snowball, but, also to result in increasingly incompetent wielders thereof. Remember, this is the same guy who wanted a new Constitutional Convention every 19 years when the next generation came of age, and mandatory sunsets on all acts of government. To be clear, if you were an aristocrat in charge of things/in a position of power in Jefferson's imagined world, you were not in for a fun time. Wielding that power would be a hell of a lot of retread ground over and over and over and over. In fact, the only way to exercise power in that circumstance, would have been knowing how to use it effectively. There'd simply be no room for maintaining your personal capricious self-edifying precipises of power, because of the sheer effort of keeping them in place against the march of time, and the agreeableness of those you're sharing the world with, and who ultimately bear the burden of doing the work. The system we have now, (First pass the post, and once it's in it's in forever) is quite the opposite.