The influence and social consequence of the lawyers, cannot be underestimated: it’s breathtaking. Everybody who matters (look at the government) is a lawyer. The schools they attended are always the usual suspects, irrespective of the party in power. That is evidence.

That says a great deal about the type of people to whom you’re drawn and who value you in return, but that’s really all it says.

Whatever you may have once been or done, if you’re serving the interests of the priv elite – which includes preservation of the status quo and working to diminish opportunity for non-privs – then you are NOT a performance elite.

Back to education. We’ve been anti-intellectual since day one, so we don’t foster the critical thinking skills necessary to figure this out, and at the same time the priv elites are very good at constructing disinfo campaigns that feed that broad collective cluelessness.

So there’s a few words in answer to a question that we could write volumes on…

BTW, I thought of another pairing for the chart above. Performance elite: Information is power. Privilege elite: Disinformation is power. Should I add it in?

Obviously privilege elites are at the top of the food chain, money-wise. And obviously that class has a strong interest in either maintaining the status quo or in strengthening their control of the dynamics that feed their privilege.

Anything that seeks to elevate the underclasses, or that empowers significant individuals within the underclasses, is by definition a threat to the status quo, right?

If you like, feel free to loop back around to my ongoing argument about America’s war on education. The Bushes and Cheneys of the world have every incentive to kneecap programs that will generate a stronger performance elite. So you can expect them to support vocational ed programs, which produce lots of people who are good at producing value for a (and forgive this term) corporate hegemony. Armies of talented developers who don’t ask a lot of complicated questions about power are good for them.

True performance elites, though, well those are people who think and challenge in ways that threaten the hegemony.

So I think this is all a roundabout way of saying yeah, you’re right.

So, if we boil “elite” status down to outsized influence, I think we’re onto something that includes both the super wealthy and the intelligentsia.

If the standard is that anything I don’t write about explicitly is being “ignored,” well, we pretty much just rendered all communication futile.

Now, would you like to contribute some signal or is your mission here about pure noise generation?

I can not only imagine it, i know a few (one of them is actually a baker). And i wonder if J.S’s thoughts on shame and envy come into play here. In examples like the butcher, does the lack of quantifiable status (e.g. a degree) push people like this out of the category…by society or his self-view? I’m not talking about you, me, Ann, J.S., etc here but in the general and American sociological context.

I’m certainly not willing to say that such an example is anywhere near the norm, though i am willing to say that i probably should be near it. The smart person who loves to bake will probably be convinced to take a university track through life, even if that ends up being unfulfilling. In my baker example, he became one “later” in life (he’s not old).

So i wonder if the standard definition of “elite” is constraining because it focuses more on what people do than how they do it. More precisely, how they live…which turns all this in a near spiritual direction (at least for me). One is elite because they have a brain, but more importantly know how to and use it vigorously; it doesn’t matter what they do, because they do it extremely well. It isn’t simply because they have a lot of experience, but rather because something drives them to do whatever they’re doing extremely well.

With this in mind, many of the entries in the table jump right out at me.