With tongue in cheek, I recently imagined the possibility that a small group of very wealthy men meet secretly to decide what steps should be taken to continue the status quo — to allow them to continue to amass huge profits and maintain their power in a supposedly democratic society. I want now to suggest that while the meeting of such men might be a “paranoid fiction,” the notion that the country is becoming increasingly undemocratic and that the wealthy exercise their power in insidious ways is by no means a fiction.

In his book The Revolt of The Elites, subtitled “And The Betrayal of Democracy.” Christopher Lasch notes that the dissolution of classes was one of the “great benefits of democracy.” He quotes Henry Adams as saying that “Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization now aims at this mark.” Lash, in expanding on this claim, notes how we have always rejected the notion that there is in this country a “laboring class.” As he goes on to point out

“A laboring class implied as its necessary antithesis a learned and leisure class. It implied a social division of labor that recalled the days of priestcraft when the clerical monopoly of knowledge condemned lay people to ignorance, illiteracy, and superstition. To have broken that monopoly — the most pernicious of all restraints on trade, since it interfered with the circulation not only of commodities but also of ideas — was widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the democratic revolution.The reintroduction of a kind of clerical hegemony over the mind would undo that achievement, reviving the old contempt for the masses and the contempt for everyday life that was the hallmark of priestly societies. It would recreate the most obnoxious features of class societies, the separation of learning from everyday experience.”

In other words, democracy is incompatible with the notion of social or economic classes. In a democracy everyone is educable and all have a right to participate fully in the political process. Priestcraft presupposes an intellectual elite that has knowledge and exerts power through that knowledge, as was the case, for example, in ancient Egypt. These classes of men were less concerned about closeness to their God than they were about their presumed authority over the ignorant. As Lasch notes in this regard, “[Priestcraft] was incompatible with the authority of reason and freedom of mind.” And that’s the point.  Ignorance among the many was encouraged in order to assure the power of those who knew — or claimed they know. Is it possible that we are headed down that same road?  Lasch does not suggest this, but I do wonder.

Consider these items: To begin with there is the obvious shrinking of the middle class in America, the continued growth in wealth and power of the very rich, and the growth in the numbers of the poor who depend upon others for their daily bread. Next, there is the widespread attack on the public schools, targeting such things as teacher unions which seek to assure the teachers a living wage and, presumably, allow the profession to attract better minds to our schools which currently rank near the bottom of the 32 “developed” countries. This trend is coupled with the stress on job-preparation in the schools and the trend away from liberal learning in the colleges, a trend that assures that those who graduate will know something about one or two subjects, but lack the ability to think critically about things outside the area of their expertise. They may learn how, but they are not encouraged to ask why.

Both of these trends seem directed toward creating a class of persons who will make good workers but fail as leaders, malleable and adaptable, but not thoughtful and imaginative. The very few who can afford to attend private schools and continue to amass great wealth might very well be separating themselves as a “priestly class” who claim to know what is best for the country and — through the media which they control — what is best for the masses to think about. It was never clear that the priestly class in Egypt really knew anything important, but it was clear that they used what they knew to control those who knew even less. Knowledge is power; ignorance guarantees the lack of power.

Though I hesitate to attribute superior knowledge to our “ruling elites,” a pattern is emerging that suggests the priestly class that claims to know and thereby gains control over those millions they keep in the dark by pulling the strings of those they have seated in places of political power and controlling the media that daily preaches to the masses the false values of a materialist culture.