Understanding Society
Justifying Privilege
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Divine right has given way to merit, but the purpose of the story remains familiar: explaining why some people deserve more power, status, or wealth. Drawing from Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug follows that justification from early settled rulers to modern capitalism, then asks who contributes more to society — bankers or nurses, brain surgeons or self-styled disruptors.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“With the advent of the first settlements and growth in inequality, chieftains and kings had to start legitimizing why they enjoyed more privileges than their subjects. In other words, they began engaging in propaganda. Where the chiefs of nomadic tribes had been modest, now leaders began putting on airs. Kings declared that they ruled by divine right or that they themselves were gods.
Of course, propaganda of power is more subtle these days, but that’s not to say we no longer design ingenious ideologies to justify why some individuals ‘deserve’ more authority, status, or wealth than others. We do. In capitalist societies, we tend to use arguments of merit. But how does society decide who has the most merit? How do you determine who contributes most to society? Bankers or brain men? Nurses or the so-called disruptors who’re always thinking outside the box? The better the story you spin for yourself, the bigger your piece of the pie. In fact, you could look at the entire evolution of civilization as a history of rulers who continually devised new justifications for their privileges.
But something strange is going on here. Why do we believe the stories our leaders tell us?
Some historians say it is because we’re naive and that might just be our superpower as a species. Simply put, the theory goes like this: if you want to get thousands of strangers to work as a team, you need something to hold things together. This glue has to be something stronger than friendliness, because although Homo puppy’s social network is the biggest of all primates, it is not nearly large enough to forge cities or states.