Preventing the Elites from becoming Nefarious.

What happens when an Elite group becomes greedy? You'll know if you read newspapers. Here we’ll talk about the “How” part of the question.

A Possible Lifecycle of an Elite group that ends up being Nefarious:

“Democracy is like a train: when you reach your destination, you get off”.

The corruption of democratic movements is inevitable.

The actual process of corruption isn't inevitable but it’s awfully tempting within an organized group in the long run. More often than not, it’s what ends up happening.

Building an organization of personalities is hard. People have different opinions, perspectives, perceptions, and notions on every possible decision being made. People at some point start to think that they should be in charge instead of the leader.

To streamline this process, things, like resolving debates and appointing leaders, should be sorted which will keep the organization expeditious, cooperative, and efficient. Nailing this down requires a huge amount of persistence and wit. The pressure to pull it off influences a lot of Organizations to embrace unfair and undemocratic processes.

This trend is so pronounced that the pioneer of modern sociology, Robert Michels called it, “The Iron Law of Oligarchy”. No matter how democratic an organization may seem during its birth, subsequently, it’ll relinquish a dimension and complexity that makes genuine democratic participation impracticable. This leads to a small ”leadership class” within the larger organization that will (may) start to quench their thirst for power and run independently like an Oligarchy.

This is a very common temptation inherent to any institution, group, movement, country, or any collection of people trying to get things done. There is this strong need for a legit, rational, systematic way of dealing with all these complexions in organizing people.

The actual problem, in reality, is the minority voices are silenced rather than given fair notice.

The interest of the organization which used to be open-to-all becomes increasingly sorted out by a small, exclusive group of people behind sealed doors. Often in tradition, it becomes obvious that nothing can be accomplished or put on the agenda without the approval of an influential leader who is plugged into this Oligarchy.

Elites psychologically tend to brand themselves as faithful servants carrying out the will of the people meanwhile, in reality, they make enormously influential decisions about the direction of the organization with their privileged position to get their way.

This is a common syndrome that Michels called “The Iron Law of the Oligarchy”.

Finally, Michels became so distrustful and skeptical about democracy and moved to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party. Jaw drop!

Measures to Counter it:

• Be aware of this tendency and actively resist it.

• The rank-and-file of a group should aware that their leader “may” try to pull this scam off on them and refuse to let them get away with it.

• People who end up being a leader should be aware that they are susceptible to falling into this pitfall and refuse from cooking up a flimsy justification for it.

• Leaders are valuable but aren’t irreplaceable. They should be accountable.

• No leader should be allowed to kill fairness in the name of efficiency.

Summary:

• An Organization is formed.

• The pressure to maintain the Organization will lead to the formation of a smaller group to make important calls. (Elites or Oligarchy)

• This small group often tends to be polarized by a single person.

• If the person is crooked, the whole Organization is Doomed.

• Else, Win-Win.

• Hence, be aware.

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

The Term an Elite group should never be longspun, or this famous Batman Quote comes into action.