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A big American founding myth is that we eliminated the aristocracy from our government, but the real American innovation is making it much easier to join the aristocracy starting as an outsider.

Sure, great. A little closer to meritocracy, one hopes.

But governance is complex enough that you’d ideally want to be trained from birth to do it. Programs of similar intensity to olympic training, for example.

That was a potential upside of the previous method. You had a limited set of preselected kids who were almost certainly going to rule one day, so you could put them through the training to do so. It often worked pretty well.

Now anyone who is good at twitter can ostensibly rule without knowing anything about how to do it.

Remember Boaty McBoatface? Our current timeline is the spiritual equivalent of running an internet poll to determine who is in charge of a nuclear reactor. Except orders of magnitudes more reckless and dangerous than that.

We need a better synthesis.

#DeepTakes

meritocracy

American aristocracy could learn some things from the old world