What Personality Type wants Political Power?

on nobles and peasants

All societies have those with power and those without, this was just as true for the Romans as it is for us. I can make this generalization because all societies have this fundamental divide.

We could look at both Uruguay and Mongolia, and we will find the same distinction between those who have political power, nobles, and those who do not, peasants.

Any attempt to understand how politics work will fail if it does take this fundamental distinction into account. So, this essay will ask two questions; what makes someone a noble or a peasant? And what do all peasants and all nobles have in common?

What makes one an aristocrat?

Of course, this question can be answered in many different ways, but I think that the key to this riddle is the question of: Who is interested in politics? And why?

Let me tell you a secret, you are weird. The average person would be scrolling through TikTok or watching something on the TV, but yet here you are, in your free time, reading an essay about an abstract political concept like “aristocracy”.

So, why does the average person find such a conversation topic so fucking boring? And most importantly, why do we find such abstract topics so enticing?

We certainly are not a different species compared to the normal people who would rather be watching some sportsball or scrolling through their Instagram feed. And yet we are here. Why?

This is a very personal question that I have been asking myself for a long time. Because most of my friends and family seem disinterested in these questions that have always interested me, and so, this essay is my attempt to answer this very question.

I believe that my great interest with politics comes from my will to power, all people are interested in power, and I am certain that that is the reason why I am sitting in front of my Substack writing, instead of scrolling like my Roomie over there.

Simply put, thinking and writing about these concepts feels good. But why is my will to power engaged given that I am not currently in any position with political power?

Because I believe that if I have ideas that are good and interesting, other people will listen to me and I might even have a small impact in the world of politics. So, for me reading and writing is my way to satisfy my will to power and chances are, that if you are reading this, this applies to you too.

This is the fundamental drive behind all moralizing. We, who moralize, want to apply our morality onto others, presumably for their own good, and this justifies us using political power. As a consequence, when we moralize, we feel powerful and we like it.

The goal of moralizing is to create universal imperatives. The emphasis should be on Universal because we are doing what Kant did 200 years ago, we are making rules that apply to all humans without exception.

We want to say that something is good or bad because that this applies to everyone, and such imperatives give us the justification to seize political power so that we can enforce our moral imperatives in the name of all that is good and… noble.

Indeed, without universal moral imperatives, the state could not justify itself. In our current age, most governments justify their existence by saying that their mission is to protect the imperatives of liberty, democracy and human rights.

This is what Gaetano Mosca, a political scientist of the Italian elite school, calls a “political formula“. For example, the political formula of the Aztecs was that if they had to make blood sacrifices to the gods, otherwise the sun would not rise tomorrow.

The political formula of the Soviet Union was that they needed power to liberate the workers of the world and bring forth a classless, stateless utopia. Indeed, here we can witness what happens when a political formula fails; state collapse and revolution.

Therefore, it is only logical that we feel powerful when we are reading and thinking, because in no uncertain terms we are creating a brand-new political formula inside of our heads. We are creating an argument that explains why we should actually be the ones with political power and not the current regime.

And there we arrive at the fundamental distinction between, us, who are obsessed with ideas, and those normal people who find all of this very boring; we attempt to satisfy our will to power with ideas, while the rest of humanity does this with football games, shopping and business ventures.

That is the reason that I am not calling this essay “The Nietzschean distinction between nobles and peasants“. We all have a will to power, the difference is that nobles pursue power with universal ideas, while peasants do so with local symbols of power such as entertainment, social status and most of all, money.

If I may go on a tangent, the biggest mistake that most people make in the topic of class is that they associate status with money. There are no bigger peasants than those who believe that by they will be “high-class” when they get a new Ferrari or live in Tony Montana’s mansion.

Nobles are those who get their status from their character and not from their clothes or mansion. However, this idea of “money“=“class“ comes from our good friends in marketing, who realized that that is the best way to convince people to buy outrageously overpriced products in the hope of appearing “sophisticated“.

It is also important to mention that by no means are the labels of “noble“ and “peasant“ supposed to be statements of value, and indeed they could be easily replaced by “intellectual” and “commoner“.

There is no clear reason why it is better to be an intellectual than a normal person, indeed I do believe that peasants are far happier than most intellectuals. But what happens when peasants achieve political power instead of nobles?

Types of government

Of course, there are more than enough non-ideological governments who are made up of peasants, one only needs to think of the average Latin American kleptocracy. All of these governments are based on the principle of patronage, which means that the government is run on political favours.

These governments are, however, terribly unstable and inefficient. They cannot motivate their police officers to stop taking bribes, they cannot motivate their soldiers to risk their lives, and they cannot stop themselves from plundering their own nations like parasites.

Such states are inherently unstable because a working state needs all of their bureaucrats and policemen to ignore their own personal interests by rejecting bribes and forgoing embezzlement. The state run by peasants cannot do this, because there is only one force powerful enough to do this, and that is ideology.

I think that we can make the statement that all stable governments have a political class that is interested in ideas as a means to getting power and justifying the existence and actions of the state.

Also, historically, we can also see that even the regimes that have been run in the name of the peasants are actually run by nobles. The Populares in the Roman Republic were not represented by common people, but instead by Marius and Caesar, nobles¹ who saw a chance at power by representing the interests of the common people. Or the fact that almost all communists, with the exception of Stalin, were university educated and economically well-off.

Only a state run by nobles can actually produce a coherent ideology that makes a working state possible. Government by ideological nobles might be the only way to paradise, it is also the only way to hell.

While a government run by peasants will be a dysfunctional mess, it will look like Colombia or even Honduras. But the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge could only be achieved with a government of fanatical nobles.

So, I am left with the conclusion that a country can only be stable and prosperous when nobles with good ideas are in power. This returns us to the Ideas of the Italian Elite School but this time to Vilfredo Pareto.

He states that the destiny of a nation depends on its aristocracy because from the nobles will come the dominant ideology that will lead a nation to prosperity or ruin. This is especially a fact because fashion flows downward.

The most ideas and lifestyles of the most fashionable flow down to the rest of society, this has been seen a thousand times throughout history. For example, Christianity flowed down from the Roman nobility of the 4th century or, for a recent example, take the acceptance of homosexuality. Gays found acceptance in the Oscar-Wilde-reading section of the European Intelligentsia in the late 19th century, and only 70 years later came the first pride parades.

So, if we want to understand our political situation as it currently stands, we need to ask one simple question: Who are the nobles that make up our political class, and what will this mean for us in the coming decades?

Well, in western democracies, we can see a political class of bureaucratic nobles. These ruling nobles are chronically obsessed with procedure and because of this we can see large inflexible institutions that are in charge of the government.

This certainly leads to inefficiency and to short-sightedness because responsibility is not placed onto one capable person, but is divided among all the deputies and secretaries who pass it around like a game of hot potato.

For example, all ageing western nations are going to face a pension crisis because there are simply too many retirees and too few workers. However, nobody wants to be responsible for the extremely unpopular, but unavoidable, issue of pension reform. So, no one takes responsibility and the problem just keeps getting worse.

The other aspect of the ruling nobles is that the current aristocracy legitimizes itself with the imperative of equality that necessarily leads it to be progressive and to seek the inclusion of disadvantaged groups in their institutions.

Finally, this aristocracy is very cosmopolitan and has the tendency to work insane amounts of hours to climb up the ladder even if it also means abandoning the rest of the ambitions of their personal lives such as family and hobbies.

But I am not too personally close to any bureaucrats to the point where I can confidently describe how their lives look like, so, I will leave this description here. Although I might dedicate a future essay to the lives of our dear bureaucrats.

In the next essay, I will catalogue all the types of aristocracy that I think that we see in our current world and see what traits we can observe in each one of them.

1. Ok, ok, you got me. Marius was not a noble, but the man was well-connected to the nobility in Rome and sure as hell that he was nor a pleb.