Are The Plebs Taking Over?

sammsky1

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I've been thinking this a while and the penny dropped when I watched CNN's Jake Tapper after tRumps interview today as he seemed to have the same realisation..... Would welcome a discussion.

NB: Its deliberately facetious to make the point.


A developing theory of mine:

Most country's believe experts should be in charge of all aspects of society. To acquire expertise, one must be educated and sophisticated in understanding a subject. And so country's created institutions, accreditations and qualifications to allow people to demonstrate competence and depth of experience. Less than a generation ago, every country in the world had to build its own infrastructure to develop these experts who would then take up executive positions to influence on behalf of society. Of course there were some problems:

Firstly many experts could not empathise with the entirety of society because their own life exposure was so limited. David Cameron is an example: born into privilege: Eton was his broadest life experience followed by ever diminishing exposure to society as his career developed; is it any surprise that he lacked empathy, no matter his intentions?
Secondly, many leaders did not care for the entirety of society and took decisions that only benefited themselves and the stakeholders required to ensure they kept their position. There are too many examples e.g. politicians. bankers, media owners, journalists, football managers (Wenger!) ... the list is endless.
Thirdly, globalisation created a phenomena whereby some experts had a direct and negative impact on the lives of people in another country.

These factors led to the greatest income gap between rich and poor that society has ever known, and too many at the lower end asking why they have been left behind resulting in the UK's decision to BrExit and Donald Trump becoming Present of the USA. Its equally true in across Europe, India, Russia and other great nations.

There has never been an instance in living memory when a US President was so out of touch with his 'experts' who are puzzled why mass society supports him so much. The experts can see what needs to be done and how it should be done, and yet President Trump does it all so differently. And the masses of plebs cheer him on.

Perhaps what the experts don't realise is that Trump is actually one of them. He may have been born into riches and led a secluded elite life, but intellectually and morrally, he shares their opinions and ideology. Yes, a real pleb is in the White House.

The experts are appraising Trump as though he is an expert. But he isn't. He is a pleb. A very rich and now powerful pleb. And plebs don't like experts.

In many polls all around the world, politicians, media and corporations are voted as the least trusted experts in society. The plebs own the majority vote and have shown how powerful they can be.

Which raises a very interesting question to me: If plebs hate experts, can we expect all institutions open to popular vote being run by plebs into the future? And is it no longer desirable to be an expert?
 
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Plebs aren't taking over. Plebs have incorrectly identified the source of their strife and have inadvertently handed over a whole bunch of powers to the very people who are causing them pain in the first place.

It's the cattle taking over the slaughterhouse if you count "jumping into the meat grinder" as a synonym for "taking over".
 
sammsky1 said:
T

The experts are appraising Trump as though he is an expert. He isn't. He is a pleb.
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https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/pleb
derogatory, informal
  • An ordinary person, especially one from the lower social classes.
Origin
Mid 17th century: originally as plural plebs, from Latin plebs ‘the common people’. Later a shortened form of plebeian.
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Trump is a pleb?... in fairness I can think of a lot of 4 letter words I think are more applicable
 
That's because "expert" and "pleb" are such a silly way of dividing up the population. Half the neuroscientists I work with grew up on council estates.
 
What you're postulating @sammsky1 , has in one way or another been expressed by political philosophers since ancient Greece (not saying it to demean your thoughts, rather to support them). And more relevant to today, Madison, Hamilton et al. were also well aware of this when they wrote the US Constitution. These men knew well that a stable government was not one that granted maximum authority simply to whoever could obtain the majority of a popular vote.

People talk a lot about Democracy, and it really is a bit of a buzz word nowadays standing in for "politically fair/inclusive" in various contexts. But personally I've come to value Republic a lot more. If I were to have a choice between having a vote and having all other rights (free speech, property, association, movement, etc) I'd go for the latter (of course in the real world you use your vote to protect your rights). Right now we seem to be at a low point for Republic (at least in my short 12-15 year political conscience), with people anxious to elect a dictator/authoritarian/strongman that will solve everything, or hold referendums where hugely divergent paths are decided by 50%+1. In a sense Democracy is trumping all over Republic (in my simplified definitions of the terms. I know they are more expansive and fluid in actuality).

I don't know if it should be ascribed to a failure of education, which ties into your uneducated x educated split, or something else. I do think the world gets a bit complex these days, full of policies and laws in place not because of their 1st order effects, but rather because of 2nd and 3rd order. Free-trade is one of these. Once you're taught the theory of relative advantages, etc. be it as an Econ, Pol Sci or any other college major, rarely are those people against it. But most people that don't know will probably think through, find the 1st order effect (job offshoring) and be against it.

Long (infinite?) topic... got to end of my energy to write right now.
 
sammsky1 said:
The experts are appraising Trump as though he is an expert. He isn't. He is a pleb. A very rich and now powerful pleb.
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Pleb is the last word I'd choose to describe Trump. I don't think he is one, nor have I heard anyone else describe him as such. From his TV shows to camapign to interviews, it's pretty obvious that he considers him far above Plebs.

sammsky1 said:
The plebs own the majority vote and have shown how powerful they can be. Which raises a very interesting question to me: If plebs hate experts, can we expect all institutions open to popular vote being run by plebs into the future? And is it no longer desirable to be an expert?
Click to expand...

It's nothing to do with expertise. It's more on adaptability. The world is becoming a smaller (integrated) place and there are people who cannot adapt to this. People who were facing competition from local markets, the face national competitors and now are competing internationally. This leads to a antipathy towards globalization. The advent of automation adds to the issue. Now plebs feel threatened because they'll be made redundant due to technology or priced out by cheaper markets in East.
 
@MTF

I don't know any system without popular representation which has survived for long and maintained free speech, association, movement. I do know a few lines for Madison warning against this, and his proposed solution:

The main designer, furthermore, was an astute political thinker James Madison, whose views largely prevailed. In the debates on the Constitution, Madison pointed out that if elections in England" were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place," giving land to the landless. The Constitutional system must be designed to prevent such injustice and "secure the permanent interests of the country," which are property rights.
Among Madisonian scholars, there is a consensus that "the Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period," delivering power to a "better sort" of people and excluding those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power (Lance Banning). The primary responsibility of government is "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," Madison declared. That has been the guiding principle of the democratic system from its origins until today.
Madison foresaw that the threat of democracy was likely to become more severe over time because of the increase in "the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings." They might gain influence, Madison feared. He was concerned by the "symptoms of a leveling spirit" that had already appeared, and warned "of the future danger" if the right to vote would place "power over property in hands without a share in it." Those "without property, or the hope of acquiring it, cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its rights," Madison explained. His solution was to keep political power in the hands of those who "come from and represent the wealth of the nation," the "more capable set of men," with the general public fragmented and disorganized...
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Jesus, please don't use the pleb like that.

It's offensive to us plebs
 
Society has simply been unable to keep up with the rapidity of change in the post industrial revolution world. And now in the info/communication age, it's changing ever more rapidly and the institutions built to support society are outdated. It is only by the strong arm tactics of the US that western liberalism was even able to stay intact in the latter half of the 20th century. And now that generation's offspring yearn for the boom of the middle class of the 50's, not realizing it was a historical aberration. You could say we are still dealing with the fallout of WWI and, by extension, the French Revolution.

It will never be the way it was for the US post-WWII again, vis a vis a mostly racially homogeneous middle class being the dominant force. But they can't come to grips with that, nor much their progeny who have also been brought up with this mindset. And when you combine these changing economic factors with the shifting of the fundamental bulwarks of their worldview, you get people angry. And these misguided zealots are more likely to vote than other segments of society, as has been evidenced recently.

Or, as Homer Simpson so eloquently put it, "This is why democracy doesn't work!"
 
Plebs are people, too, you know.

sammsky's theory is perhaps indicative of why these people are rejecting being ruled by their "betters".
 
berbatrick said:
@MTF

I don't know any system without popular representation which has survived for long and maintained free speech, association, movement. I do know a few lines for Madison warning against this, and his proposed solution:
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Which is why it was a hypothetical. But I am Madisonian, in that I will argue/vote for a system that greatly delays the ability of any majority to infringe/revoke the rights of minorities (not those minorities, the landowner minorites :devil:).
 
I think your analysis is quite controversial.

There are many countries, where politicians are not primarily recruited out an economic/cultural elite, yet the politics of these countries are not that different. I agree with point two, but both are not limited to elites (whoever they are), but are a common feature (to some extend) of almost every person. People make selfish decisions. It also not a black/white issue. Sometimes humans act altruistic and sometimes they don’t. Third is true, but it is true in both directions. The decisions of country can have negative and/or positive consequences on the people in another countries.

I disagree with your conclusion and it is at least a pretty big logical step, that “economic inequality” is the result of 1+2+3. There is an interesting new book, that I haven’t read yet, because it is just out for a couple of days that makes a very different pitch:

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.

An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
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Maybe we are just too good at keeping peace. (tongue in cheek!)

I think it is worth looking into why politicians, journalists and experts are so unpopular. My personal opinion is, that this has primarily two different factors. The policy outputs/consequences are unpopular and the way public discussion is shaped is seen as arrogant/”out-of-touch”/condescending.
I’d doubt your (and MTF's) claim that experts actually know what needs to be done. They might have an opinion, but there is little that isn’t up for debate.


Answer to Question1) I think we can and should expect that people who are not part of the political mainstream are going to win elections in the near future and this will continue until A) mainstream politicans offer better alternatives B) out-siders (like Trump) discredit themselves by delivering bad policies. I don’t expect that neither A nor B is coming true in the near future. The more I think about it, the more I expect things to get a lot worse, before they get better again.
We are still in denial about this new reality (with some people already progressing to step2: more anger)

Answer to Question2) It depends on what we define as expert. The term is used very differently. But following up on my previous answer: Candidates in future elections might try to portrait themselves as outsiders, because being seen as politican might hurt them. I have no doubt that “mainstream candidate” vs “outsider” will be one of the defining categories in future elections.
 
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Why does every event these days get treated as its a completely new phenomenon? Its not the first time a politician has looked to benefit from the anger of the masses nor will it be the last.

I mean whats happening now is not significant in the grand scheme of the last 100 years, nothing significant has happened apart from another idiot in charge.

With globalisation, automation and climate change around the corner these are not going to be the defining years for any or us.
 
Smores said:
With globalisation, automation and climate change around the corner these are not going to be the defining years for any or us.
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It has brought to the surface, the mainstream even, a dissatisfaction with the consensus surrounding globalisation though. Even if Trump were to be impeached tomorrow (or the Brexit clock turned back eight months), the burgeoning resentment would continue. In the UK at least, the old guard of centrists remain in a state of confusion. The question now, is whether they treat the concerns with any sincerity; rather than waiting for the personalities to fall from grace and applying the language of yesteryear.
 
Dion said:
Plebs aren't taking over. Plebs have incorrectly identified the source of their strife and have inadvertently handed over a whole bunch of powers to the very people who are causing them pain in the first place.

It's the cattle taking over the slaughterhouse if you count "jumping into the meat grinder" as a synonym for "taking over".
Click to expand...


Edelman is the world leading corporate PR firm and advise heads of state and Fortune 100 CEO's. They issue an annual poll on 'trust.' Have a read of this years study, its as fascinating as it is scary. http://www.edelman.com/executive-summary/

"The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer finds that two-thirds of the countries we survey are now “distrusters” (under 50 percent trust in the mainstream institutions of business, government, media and NGOs to do what is right), up from just over half in 2016. This is a profound crisis in trust that has its origins in the Great Recession of 2008. Like the second and third waves of a tsunami, ongoing globalization and technological change are now further weakening people’s trust in global institutions, which they believe have failed to protect them from the negative effects of these forces. The celebrated benefits of free trade—affordable products for mass consumption and the raising of a billion people out of poverty—have suddenly been supplanted by concerns about the outsourcing of jobs to lower-cost markets. The impact of automation is being felt, especially in lower-skilled jobs, as driverless trucks and retail stores without cashiers become reality"

With unprecedented level of mistrust, plebs across the world dont trust the experts who created this mess and are demanding a change in the way things are done.
 
MTF said:
What you're postulating @sammsky1 , has in one way or another been expressed by political philosophers since ancient Greece (not saying it to demean your thoughts, rather to support them). And more relevant to today, Madison, Hamilton et al. were also well aware of this when they wrote the US Constitution. These men knew well that a stable government was not one that granted maximum authority simply to whoever could obtain the majority of a popular vote.

People talk a lot about Democracy, and it really is a bit of a buzz word nowadays standing in for "politically fair/inclusive" in various contexts. But personally I've come to value Republic a lot more. If I were to have a choice between having a vote and having all other rights (free speech, property, association, movement, etc) I'd go for the latter (of course in the real world you use your vote to protect your rights). Right now we seem to be at a low point for Republic (at least in my short 12-15 year political conscience), with people anxious to elect a dictator/authoritarian/strongman that will solve everything, or hold referendums where hugely divergent paths are decided by 50%**. In a sense Democracy is trumping all over Republic (in my simplified definitions of the terms. I know they are more expansive and fluid in actuality).

I don't know if it should be ascribed to a failure of education, which ties into your uneducated x educated split, or something else. I do think the world gets a bit complex these days, full of policies and laws in place not because of their 1st order effects, but rather because of 2nd and 3rd order. Free-trade is one of these. Once you're taught the theory of relative advantages, etc. be it as an Econ, Pol Sci or any other college major, rarely are those people against it. But most people that don't know will probably think through, find the 1st order effect (job offshoring) and be against it.

Long (infinite?) topic... got to end of my energy to write right now.
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Yes! you are a man of high intellect ;)

Its a subject that even the great late Winston Churchill mused upon a few months after defeating Hitler in the 2nd World War:

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
 
History repeats itself. Money wolves will always find a way to reach the top of the human food chain and exploit the citizens. Now they do it smarter: make sure life is reasonably comfortable (roof, hot water, electricity, gas) so that incentives to overthrow governments are little. Then engage in all kinds of tactics to make lots of money while more and more wealth goes to the elite.
 
Organic Potatoes said:
Society has simply been unable to keep up with the rapidity of change in the post industrial revolution world. And now in the info/communication age, it's changing ever more rapidly and the institutions built to support society are outdated. It is only by the strong arm tactics of the US that western liberalism was even able to stay intact in the latter half of the 20th century. And now that generation's offspring yearn for the boom of the middle class of the 50's, not realizing it was a historical aberration. You could say we are still dealing with the fallout of WWI and, by extension, the French Revolution.

It will never be the way it was for the US post-WWII again, vis a vis a mostly racially homogeneous middle class being the dominant force. But they can't come to grips with that, nor much their progeny who have also been brought up with this mindset. And when you combine these changing economic factors with the shifting of the fundamental bulwarks of their worldview, you get people angry. And these misguided zealots are more likely to vote than other segments of society, as has been evidenced recently.

Or, as Homer Simpson so eloquently put it, "This is why democracy doesn't work!"
Click to expand...


These 'zealots' are huge in number and not going away. ie: They'll still be there in 3 1/2 years time in for the next US election, but this time, be even more emboldened, organised and opinionated, as they now know they have a very powerful voice and can manipulate society to deliver to their behalf. They also know that can only occur when pleb who truly understands and sympathises with them will be in charge.
 
Dwazza said:
Plebs are people, too, you know.

sammsky's theory is perhaps indicative of why these people are rejecting being ruled by their "betters".
Click to expand...

But many of them are 'barely' people and live lives closer to animals!

Im not being facetious here ... in my recent trip to New York, I spent an afternoon photographing graffiti in Harlem, and was quite shocked at what I saw on the streets. Though some of the very poor lived in New York City, their lives, opinions and general level of development ws not dissimilar to people who live in isolated villages in Africa or Asia.

Likewise, the mentally of living simply to 'eat, drink feck and sleep' is a reality of so many lives in the world - So many people in the world do not have life purpose beyond this and remain stuck in the lowest of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

These people have now found a voice.
 
PedroMendez said:
I think your analysis is quite controversial.

There are many countries, where politicians are not primarily recruited out an economic/cultural elite, yet the politics of these countries is not that different. I agree with point two, but both are not limited to elites (whoever they are), but are a common feature (to some extend) of almost every person. People make selfish decisions. It also not a black/white issue. Sometimes humans act altruistic and sometimes they don’t. Third is true, but it is true in both directions. The decisions of country can have negative and/or positive consequences on the people in another countries.

I disagree with your conclusion and it is at least a pretty big logical step, that “economic inequality” is the result of 1+2+3. There is an interesting new book, that I haven’t read yet, because it is just out for a couple of days that makes a very different pitch:


Maybe we are just too good at keeping peace. (tongue in cheek!)

I think it is worth looking into why politicians, journalists and experts are so unpopular. My personal opinion is, that this has primarily two different factors. The policy outputs/consequences are unpopular and the way public discussion is shaped is seen as arrogant/”out-of-touch”/condescending.
I’d doubt your (and MTF's) claim that experts actually know what needs to be done. They might have an opinion, but there is little that isn’t up for debate.


Answer to Question1) I think we can and should expect that people who are not part of the political mainstream are going to win elections in the near future and this will continue until A) mainstream politicans offer better alternatives B) out-siders (like Trump) discredit themselves by delivering bad policies. I don’t expect that neither A nor B is coming true in the near future. The more I think about it, the more I expect things to get a lot worse, before they get better again.
We are still in denial about this new reality (with some people already progressing to step2: more anger)

Answer to Question2) It depends on what we define as expert. The term is used very differently. But following up on my previous answer: Candidates in future elections might try to portrait themselves as outsiders, because being seen as politican might hurt them. I have no doubt that “mainstream candidate” vs “outsider” will be one of the defining categories in future elections.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your critique. And Im am being deliberately controversial as Im trying to understand a phenomena I don't yet fully understand.

I still cant get my head around how Trump's defied every single electoral tradition. He was an independent candidate, who forced the Republican party that didn't want him to adopt him. He won the election with a media budget only 25% the size of his opponent and without any endorsement from popular society. And having won, no-one from the traditional 'expert' world truly understand his appeal.

What I do know to be factually true is that society has spent that past 200 capitalist years creating Government, Corporations and Media as institutions of trust. And yet, as the Edelman survey shows (http://www.edelman.com/executive-summary/), we have reached a tipping point in that society does not trust these institutions any more. This is not going away. So I ask you: what happens in 5 or 10 years time? I don't think we'll simply revert back to the way things were.
 
sammsky1 said:
With unprecedented level of mistrust, plebs across the world dont trust the experts who created this mess and are demanding a change in the way things are done.
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Except there are 'experts' who have been completely ignored. Experts on climate change, economics, health care who all say we've been taking the wrong path for a while now. Are you telling me that the 'experts' these 'plebs' have handed power to; Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Le Pen are the people who are going to accurately identify and solve their problems?

This all comes down to the ludicrously simple and frankly bizarre categorisation you've come up with as "plebs" and "experts". What exactly is Nigel Farage an expert in? Boris Johnson? Michael Gove? David Cameron? George Osborne? Thresa May? What about Sir Christopher Pissarides, nobel laureate in economics who thinks Brexit is a massive pile of shit? Is he not an expert? What office did he hold that granted him power to feck things up? Is Jeremy Hunt an expert in health care? What about the thousands of medical professionals who are in opposition to everything he has done so far?


Power isn't being taken away from 'experts'. It was never in the hands of experts, experts are routinely ignored. To call the current bunch of c***s who hold and will continue to hold power 'experts' is an insult to everyone who has gone through the process of becoming an expert in their field.

What has happened is that the slightly more right wing group of bought-and-paid-for, born-to-rule gits have figured out a way of snatching power from the slightly less right wing but also bought-and-paid-for, born-to-rule gits by convincing people that the problem is the Polish worker who will come over her and do a job for £7.20 an hour instead of the union rate of £15.50 and not the fact that we have a minimum wage that requires government subsidies to survive. All the while surrendering one of the few rights they had to hold these people accountable and handing over even more rights and powers in the process.




If the plebs had "found" a voice the Trump campaign wouldn't have needed Cambridge Analytica to harvest massive amounts of personal data to come up with a targeted, spoon-fed cocktail of nationalism and xenophobia. Look at how many people are vigorously against 'Obamacare' but overwhelmingly want to keep the ACA, despite the fact that they're the same thing.

The 'plebs' (of which I count myself one in this deranged classification system) have been manipulated, again. And it's not to their benefit. But then when is it ever?
 
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sammsky1 said:
But many of them are 'barely' people and live lives closer to animals!

Im not being facetious here ... in my recent trip to New York, I spent an afternoon photographing graffiti in Harlem, and was quite shocked at what I saw on the streets. Though some of the very poor lived in New York City, their lives, opinions and general level of development ws not dissimilar to people who live in isolated villages in Africa or Asia.

Likewise, the mentally of living simply to 'eat, drink feck and sleep' is a reality of so many lives in the world - So many people in the world do not have life purpose beyond this and remain stuck in the lowest of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

These people have now found a voice.
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How much do you actually know about the world and people's lives? Referencing Asia and Africa as if they were countries. Did you take your time to talk to anyone on your pleb safari?
 
Blodssvik said:
How much do you actually know about the world and people's lives? Referencing Asia and Africa as if they were countries. Did you take your time to talk to anyone on your pleb safari?
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Have lived in 4 Asian countries for 10 years in total. Visited all countries in Asia except N.Korea and 7 countries in Africa.

Talked to lots while I did.

I don't understand your point.
 
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So much unjustified snobbery, it's painful
 
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