The attitude of the left toward elites might be blamed on Karl Marx, but Conan the Barbarian is the true villain.  He started the Age of Empires, a form of human organization not known for its liberal values.  The classless system of hunter-gatherers was replaced with a two-class system of oppressors and oppressed.  That segued into an aristocracy, which was a bit more polite, but still elite villains, according to Marx.  But Marx put business moguls in the same category, which is totally uncalled-for. 

Moguls don’t coerce, which was the stock-in-trade of the barbarian upper class.  They offer value.  They are the elites in organizing people to accomplish things.  They merge matter, energy, and information to produce things that we want.  They operate in the positive sum game game of trade, compared to the barbarian zero-sum game of theft. 

We need to reexamine what we mean by elite.  In a meritocracy we should be able to acknowledge superior performance in any category.  Just as a statistical exercise, we can use standard deviations to find people well above average, say from one to two standard deviations above average. Better than that and you’re in the top 2-1/2 percent of, to put it as generically as possible, successful people.  Or we may reserve the word “elite” to that one in a thousand person who’s just got it together, at 3+ SD.

The purpose of culture is to convey information through time, especially information about survival.  The agricultural age birthed a new meme, “We can survive by raiding the siloes of our neighbors!”  The Barbarian meme is one of the Great Memes of Humanity – though “great” only in the sense that Valdemort was a great wizard. 

The next Great Meme was far more liberal, “We can trust total strangers!”  It exploited the non-zero-sum game of trade.  It also introduced a middle class, which is one reason it’s “great”.  Not all the cultures in today’s world have embraced the more modern meme.  Nor have any modern societies completely evolved past the barbarian meme.  To some extent, we’re all still stuck in the Bronze Age.

The Barbarian meme is the backbone of empires and kingdoms. Coercion still works. Modern dictators are a continuation of a long line of abuse, usually among people who didn’t catch a lot of modern memes.

The basic mistake Marx made was to equate the new elite with the old.  The aristocrat/barbarian became wealthy using force.  The new elite didn’t force anyone to buy their products.  They created wealth from raw materials by altering them into more useful forms.  They added wealth to the world, instead of just transferring wealth from one coffer to another via armed robbery.  In addition, lives are inevitably lost in a raid, so barbarians are really playing a negative sum game.  But since the winning King/chiefs profit, the losses are acceptable.