The class composition of the state has always been based on what is popularly called “the Noble Lie,” an idea famously illuminated in Plato’s masterwork of political philosophy, The Republic. Plato held that the good or ideal society, the one that would provoke the proper virtues, had to be based on an “ingenious falsehood” that would protect the purity of the ruling class and keep everyone content in their place in society.
After setting out the three classes to be established by the lie, Plato explained that there would be a few from each level of stratification who could experience social mobility, either upward or downward. Still, he warned against the possibility of members of the lowest class — born with “copper or iron” in their souls — ascending to power; “there is an oracle,” he wrote, “which declares that the city shall then perish when it is guarded by iron or copper.”
We’re taught the same today, that society would crumble around us if not for the watchful stewardship of the state and its elites. Nothing frightens the Middle East’s ruling class, those relying on the Noble Lie, more than the class awareness implicit in recent popular movements; it is necessary for them to undermine the idea that a society can be exploitative of the laboring class, can allow a small elite conquest through coercion, while nonetheless allowing a level of “social mobility.”
D'Amato is undoubtedly right about Middle Eastern, and, indeed planet wide meritocracy. It doesn't actually exist anymore- it can't due to the massive bubble in education. Apparently, the Middle East followed the West's example and seduced it's children into Higher Education, the end point of which was supposed to be some sort of office job and a solid shot at the upper middle class. Meritocracy sells to the international Facebook and Twitter crowd; people just smart enough to think they could make it, but too ignorant to realized all the socialism that they 'benefited' from in the past is precisely why they can't get jobs now.
Lisa Goldman in her article, In Post-Revolutionary Cairo Patriotism Is Newly Fashionable, puts it bluntly:
The majority of Egypt’s population is under 30, and they cannot get ahead, even when they play by the rules – by attending university, graduating at the top of their class and serving a mandatory year in the army. Then they try to enter the job market, and there is either no work, or the work available does not pay a living wage. Hence the humiliation and discontent.
Also, Vox Day, informs us the Tunisian unemployment rate among those college graduates is 45 percent, three times higher than the national rate. That's why so many of them who participated in the recent revolt a) spoke English, and b) had the time to participate.
World governments created an illusion, and an artificial class- the falsely educated. The mirage is disappearing, and they are angry, but they are not likely to be people who would climb any kind of social ladder. The evidence is all around us here in America, where tattoo parlors are springing up everywhere; people at a certain social level reinforce their own class behaviors. Indeed, slumming, as well as young middle class men and women outright adopting low class behavior, has become the new direction of social mobility.
Men and women who want to improve themselves are rare. Those who actually try to navigate from a lower class to a higher one are rarer still, and often the largest source of resistance comes from one's own class. Money doesn't define class; behavior does, and it's your own class that will get offended when you start acting differently from them.
The ruling elite are primarily bureaucrats; in a free society there would be a natural elite, probably looking more like many small kingdoms. In the administration of property, (and people, for some will delegate) division of labor and specialization works. Thus a family with good skills for dealing with land will accumulate a lot of it, and have others willing to live and work there. Nobility emerges naturally if, for instance, you actually have to plan on getting your family on a solid enough footing to be able to take care of you when you get old, instead of using your government to steal from everyone. Obviously, those in power often do steal regardless of whether they come from nobility or not, but we know the bureaucrats of our age always steal.
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