[corimaith]

In the real world, individuals can't do much. It's only through the collective cooperation and the trust behind such cooperation that allows things to happen. Social Elites come with a wealth of trust from the legacies of families and connections that slowly built them up over hundreds of years. And such bonds survive even without the state, predate it and ultimately build it.

That is the "real world". Everything else is just an abstraction, propped up by a system that has only existed for a definite period of time and will not exist outside of that.

[overfeed]

I can't help but notice the contrast in the tone (and content) of this HN discussion, compared to the one on the ruling that ended affirmative action[0] for university admissions. Then, the majority of commenters were on the side of meritocracy. HN is consistently pro-elite, perhaps because a good chunk of folk here see themselves as intellectual elites.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658