Most people who pay attention have a profound disgust at what passes for the elite of the Western World, for good reason. I'm not going to mention the worst stuff because it is gross, but we are ruled by people who regularly sell out to the highest bidder, and who appear to have a predilection for producing blackmail material against themselves. Again, if you want to profoundly scandalize your visual palette, go Google these people. Nevertheless, I think some form of elite is absolutely necessary for a civilization worth living in.
The reason for this is that us humans do not have to understand something perfectly to do it right. For instance, most of us, this author included, could not fully explain when a car needs an oil change, and why it needs a particular kind of engine oil. Nevertheless, if we change the oil at appropriate intervals and use the correct grade of oil, our cars last longer, and they work better. We know when to change what oil into our cars because someone else told us, either in the vehicle manual or on the internet somewhere. Someone else, who knows car engines way better than we do, tells us how to make them work better. This someone would be the elite of car maintenance.
I believe that this applies to most, maybe all areas of life. The instructor or coach is the elite of the sport you do, and you do what they say for better results. David The Good is one of the elites of gardening, for instance. Ideally, our rulers would be the elites of managing countries, but they appear to not be. If they knew how to run the economy and the military and other things, we would enjoy an amazing standard of living. As a matter of fact, we still enjoy an amazing standard of living, even if the political elites worthy of the title are mostly gone now. In my estimation, because of the quality of past political elites, we are still riding on the momentum of a truly excellent civilization.
Going back to the oil change, tens of millions of cars the world over work better, because a few dozen experts have figured out the exact specifications of what a particular engine needs and when it needs replacement. An actual elite can raise the standard of living of many many more people, if those people do as the elite advises, even if they do not understand it entirely.
This argument requires that the elite are actually better than the average person in their area of expertise. Unfortunately, this is not universally a given. Nevertheless, when this is the case, many people can enjoy, and function, at a level beyond their understanding.
Therefore, I think an elite is necessary for a civilization. You do not want everyone independently figuring out their sanitary systems, for an extreme example. It is also necessary that the leaders are of an actual elite, but even an elite class with maybe half of them actually knowing stuff is better than nothing.
TL;DR: People can do stuff without fully understanding it, so they can do stuff in a way that's more intelligent than they are. Hence an elite to ideally provide more intelligent ways.
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