Democracy promises that all citizens possess equal political standing, yet the machinery of modern governance increasingly concentrates authority amongst those who claim superior judgment. This creates a troubling contradiction: we proclaim faith in equality whilst simultaneously deferring to a credentialed elite whose track record offers little justification for such confidence.
The pathways to positions of influence operate less as meritocratic ladders than as private lifts, transporting the already privileged to ever greater heights. Children from wealthy families attend elite universities at vastly disproportionate rates, not because they possess exceptional talent, but because they arrive with resources already in hand: private school educations, test preparation, family connections, and the polish that comes from growing up amongst professionals.
These institutions present themselves as identifying and cultivating brilliance, yet their admissions practices systematically favour those with advantageous backgrounds. When universities claim to select for merit whilst actually selecting for privilege, they launder inequality into apparent competence. This matters profoundly because societies have convinced themselves that concentrating power amongst the few remains acceptable if those few earned their positions through superior ability.
The Credentials Delusion
Remove the justification of merit, and the entire edifice looks rather different, less like a natural hierarchy of talent than an artificial preservation of class boundaries. The people occupying boardrooms, judgeships, and policy positions did not necessarily rise through exceptional wisdom. They rose through access to the right schools, the right networks, and the right postcode at birth.
History offers scant comfort to those who believe that concentrating power amongst the privileged produces sound decisions. The architects of disastrous policy failures from mass incarceration to financial deregulation possessed impressive academic pedigrees and commanded resources for analysis that earlier generations could scarcely imagine. What they lacked was wisdom born of diverse experience, the understanding that comes from living with consequences rather than observing them from a comfortable distance.
These catastrophes did not result from insufficient intelligence. They resulted from the psychological distance created when decision-makers occupy a fundamentally different economic reality from those affected by their choices. When you have never worried about rent, never delayed medical treatment due to cost, never watched your neighbourhood decay from disinvestment, you struggle to accurately gauge the human costs of policy failures.
What Elite Institutions Actually Teach
Wisdom proves maddeningly difficult to quantify or credential. One cannot sit an examination in good judgment or earn a degree in sound reasoning, though universities have tried to suggest otherwise. The qualities that produce genuinely wise decisions—humility about one’s limitations, curiosity about unfamiliar perspectives, willingness to question received assumptions—often develop through adversity rather than advantage.
Consider what elite institutions actually impart. Students learn to excel within existing frameworks, to master established disciplines, and to network effectively with similarly positioned peers. These skills prove tremendously valuable for individual advancement. They prove far less useful for questioning whether the frameworks themselves make sense, whether the disciplines ask the right questions, or whether the interests of an insular elite align with broader social welfare.
The wealthy learn different lessons about human nature and social obligation than those who depend on mutual aid for survival. Growing up with financial security teaches you that individual effort determines outcomes, that systems generally work, and that authorities deserve deference. Growing up without it teaches rather different lessons about how power operates, whose interests systems serve, and when rules deserve challenging.
Democracy’s Broken Promise
The founding principle of democratic governance holds that ordinary citizens possess sufficient judgement to govern themselves collectively. Yet contemporary systems concentrate power whilst treating widespread inequality as an obstacle for individuals to overcome rather than a structural problem requiring collective response.
This creates a peculiar situation. Societies proclaim faith in equality whilst simultaneously constructing elaborate sorting mechanisms to identify a superior class. They celebrate democratic values whilst deferring to credentialed experts whose training increasingly occurs in isolation from the lives of most citizens. They assert that anyone can succeed while ensuring that success primarily flows to those who begin with every advantage.
The resulting arrangement satisfies neither democratic ideals nor practical governance needs. Political equality becomes formal rather than substantive when economic inequality determines who acquires the credentials, connections, and confidence to exercise power. Meanwhile, the concentration of decision-making amongst the privileged produces policies that reflect their particular blind spots and interests.
The Psychology of Distance
Those at the bottom face material constraints that limit their capacity to contribute fully to collective decisions. Those at the top develop psychological distance that impairs their judgment about policies affecting others. Both represent costs of inequality, though we discuss the former far more than the latter.
When society expects the meritorious to succeed despite adversity, it avoids confronting the barriers it has constructed. This permits continued concentration of power whilst maintaining a veneer of openness. The few who manage to climb from disadvantaged backgrounds serve as proof that the system works, whilst their scarcity demonstrates precisely the opposite.
The intellectual output of elite institutions reflects these limitations. Research focuses disproportionately on questions that interest the comfortable—abstract theoretical puzzles, technological innovation that serves affluent consumers, policy recommendations that assume competent bureaucracies and stable funding. Questions about delivering services in resource-poor environments, or how communities might govern themselves without credentialed experts, receive far less attention.
Professional training reinforces this narrowing. Doctors learn medicine, but not how poverty shapes health outcomes. Economists master mathematical models but rarely examine whose interests their assumptions serve. Lawyers study precedent but not how legal systems perpetuate inequality. Each profession develops its own dialect, its own priorities, its own blind spots—all shaped by the relative privilege of those granted entry.
The Meritocracy Trap
We face a system that claims to reward talent whilst primarily rewarding birth circumstances. This creates pernicious effects beyond mere unfairness. When the successful convince themselves they earned their positions through merit alone, they feel entitled to their advantages and dismissive of those who lack them. If you genuinely believe you rose through superior ability, why wouldn’t you trust your judgment over that of ordinary citizens?
This attitude pervades institutions that wield enormous power over people’s lives. Policymakers design programmes without consulting those meant to benefit from them. Corporate leaders restructure workplaces without involving workers. Planners redesign neighbourhoods without engaging residents. At every level, credentialed professionals assume their expertise trumps lived experience.
The irony is that this approach consistently produces worse outcomes than more participatory alternatives. Top-down development projects fail because designers misunderstand local conditions. Workplace reforms backfire because executives misjudge what motivates employees. Urban renewal destroys functioning communities because planners cannot see the informal networks that make neighbourhoods work.
Rethinking Authority
Addressing this contradiction requires rethinking fundamental assumptions about who possesses relevant knowledge and whose jjudgmentmatters. The goal should not be simply expanding elite institutions to include more people, though broader access certainly helps. Rather, it involves questioning whether concentrating so much decision-making authority in credentialed experts serves the public interest.
Distributed decision-making,llowing those affected by policies to shape them, offers one alternative. This approach treats lived experience as valuable knowledge rather than an obstacle to overcome through professional expertise. It assumes that parents might understand education, that workers might comprehend workplace safety, and that residents might grasp community needs even without advanced degrees.
Such arrangements require different structures. Rather than selecting a few to make decisions for many, they involve creating mechanisms through which diverse voices can contribute to collective choices. This proves messier and slower than technocratic governance. It also produces decisions that better reflect actual circumstances and consequences.
The barriers are not primarily technical. Society possesses the tools to gather input broadly, to facilitate deliberation, and to incorporate multiple perspectives. The obstacles are psychological and political, the reluctance of credentialed elites to share authority, and the carefully cultivated belief that only those with proper training can make sound judgments.
Learning From Exclusion
Those excluded from elite pathways often develop capacities that the privileged lack. When you cannot rely on institutional authority or formal credentials, you learn to build coalitions, to persuade sceptics, to solve problems with limited resources. When you experience bad policies directly, you develop a keen awareness of unintended consequences. When you navigate multiple worlds, working class and professional, immigrant and native, marginalised and mainstream, you acquire facility with different perspectives that single-context dwellers never develop.
None of this suggests that education lacks value or that expertise doesn’t matter. Technical knowledge remains crucial for addressing complex challenges. But technical knowledge alone proves insufficient without wisdom about how to apply it, and wisdom develops through diverse pathways that our current systems fail to recognise or reward.
The question is not whether some people display better judgment than others; they do. The question is whether the institutional arrangements that currently identify and elevate certain individuals actually select for wisdom, and whether concentrating power amongst them serves the broader good.
The Cost of Maintained Fiction
Pretending that current arrangements represent meritocracy does active harm. It legitimises vast inequality by suggesting the successful earned their advantages through superior ability. It discourages challenges to concentrated power by implying that credentialed elites deserve deference. It narrows the range of perspectives informing decisions by excluding those who took different paths.
Most perniciously, it prevents us from accessing the distributed intelligence that exists throughout society. When we assume that wisdom concentrates at the top, we ignore the knowledge embedded in communities, workplaces, and families. We dismiss the insights of those who live daily with the consequences of distant decisions. We impoverish our collective judgement by privileging a narrow slice of human experience.
Breaking this cycle requires more than tinkering with admissions policies or expanding financial aid. It demands confronting the assumption that society benefits from identifying a superior class and granting them authority over others. It requires acknowledging that wisdom often develops through hardship, that diverse perspectives improve decision-making, and that those affected by policies deserve a voice in shaping them.
Towards Genuine Democracy
A genuine commitment to democratic equality requires taking seriously the judgment of ordinary citizens—not because everyone is equally wise, but because collective decisions benefit from diverse perspectives and because those affected by policies possess relevant knowledge. It requires questioning the assumption that proper credentials indicate sound judgement and recognising that wisdom develops through varied pathways.
This need not mean abandoning expertise or dismissing technical knowledge. It means integrating expert advice with lived experience, professional analysis with community wisdom, theoretical understanding with practical insight. It means creating structures where those with formal credentials work alongside those with experiential knowledge, where neither automatically trumps the other.
Such arrangements will prove uncomfortable, particularly for those who benefit from existing structures. Sharing power always feels threatening to those who hold it. But the alternative, maintaining formal equality whilst accepting vast disparities in actual influence, produces the worst of both worlds. It neither achieves the efficiency that might justify technocratic governance nor honours the democratic commitment to collective self-determination.
Conclusion
Equal power and unequal wisdom need not be incompatible, provided we understand wisdom correctly. The challenge is not that some possess greater insight than others, whichwill always be true. The challenge is that our systems for identifying and elevating people systematically confuse privilege with merit, credentials with wisdom, and professional distance with sound judgement.
Current arrangements fail both practical and principled tests. They neither produce particularly wise governance nor honour the democratic promise of equal standing. They concentrate power amongst those whose background and training ill-equip them to understand the lives of most citizens, whilst excluding those whose experience might offer a valuable perspective.
Addressing this requires courage to question comfortable assumptions about merit, authority, and whose knowledge counts. It requires building new structures that distribute power more broadly and integrate diverse forms of expertise. Most fundamentally, it requires recognising that the wisdom needed for good governance cannot be credentialed, cannot be taught in isolation from ordinary life, and cannot be monopolised by any class, however impressive their academic pedigrees or professional titles might be.
The stakes could not be higher. Societies face challenges, environmental, economic, and social, that demand the best thinking from all quarters. We cannot afford to ignore the intelligence, experience, and insight of those excluded from elite pathways. Democracy’s promise was never that everyone would govern equally well, but that everyone would have equal standing to participate in governing themselves. Honouring that promise whilst acknowledging different forms of wisdom may prove difficult. But it remains both more honest and more practical than the fictions we currently maintain.
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