Elites Have More Control Over Opportunity

than most who chase their ambitions.

Photo by Cédric Dhaenens on Unsplash

(Look at those fancy elites flying over our heads)

Many social scientists are trained to examine class with variables like income, education, or occupational class. Much of this concerns the government datasets used to explore things like labor markets, consumer spending, etc. It’s a variable bias. And it’s not necessarily wrong to look at class distinctions this way. It just gets very wonky, very fast. Dry as the Sonoran desert in which I live.

In graduate school, in cultural anthropology, I became infatuated with the work of a French sociologist - Pierre Bourdieu - who took a deliberately multi-variate approach to discussing class distinctions. I desperately wanted more complexity and nuance. And I got it! Bourdieu’s approach defines social classes based on precise combinations of cultural and economic “capital.” His defining book on this subject - Distinction - came out in the early 1960s. In this very hard-to-read-even-in-translation tome, Bourdieu unpacks many different social ‘classes’ in urban France, including one over-represented here on Substack - those with elite educational capital but inferior economic capital (due to their chosen careers in the arts, academia, carving wood spoons and the like). These well-read folks have intellectual status but can’t engage in elite material displays (and often develop a deliberate aversion to them). As a result, they do not tend to become influencers (even with the internet). Instead, they are a form of resentful bourgeoisie (he was French, don’t laugh), folks who dream big and possess refined intellectual tastes but chase a finite set of elite social positions of authority and influence in any society (hint: most institutions grow roles at the bottom and in the middle, not at the top). It is much easier to crank out college-educated elites with middle-class incomes than crank out college-educated elites with incomes in the top 5%.

America has produced more frustrated elites in the past thirty years than any country on Earth. The acceleration of college degree graduation is the primary cause. I once termed these folks “underfunded elites” with my old consulting team. Over-educated, highly opinionated adults like myself who do not come from trust funds, work in private equity, or run large companies. But we went to college with the folks who do. We may even have roomed with them and shared a toilet with them. Oh yes. Same education. Same poop. Very different lifestyles. Very different levels of control over their circumstances. And very different opportunities due to very different social networks.

I am now going to oversimplify for the sake of clarity. Social class distinctions matter because they reflect differing levels of individual-level control within complex societies. Control over income, sure, but also control over one’s ability to get included in elite social networks where education AND money intersect (this is the primary opportunity factory in modern countries). Think of the latter as the 1% crudely. These paramount elites live in social networks that unlock social mobility for everyone else. For every poor kid who ‘made it,’ there is almost always a set of very powerful elite individuals who selected them from the mix and mentored them or at least baptized them as exceptional. My Dad certainly benefited from this phenomenon.

The Role of the Future in Class Dynamics

In the modern world, control over where I’m headed often trumps mere control over signaling who I am. The latter was an ancient human default in eras when identities were primarily fixed and assigned to you by society. Anthropologists call these ascribed identities. They are ascribed essentially by your elders who preceded you. Sound unpleasant? Yes. From your smartphone-curated existence. Sure. If you want to piss off any upwardly mobile person anywhere in the world, interview them and then verbally assign them to a couple of static, pre-modern identity boxes (ethnicity, race, gender, etc.). And, while you’re at it, delete their info from your phone. They certainly won’t answer your calls anymore. I made this mistake a few times in urban India. Oops.

Historically, in even complex human societies, social mobility has been laughable, at least within one’s lifetime. Economic growth was not even measurable in a single human lifetime before 1800.¹ So, individuals had little incentive to make elaborate plans for their own personal futures. Very little in everyday life changed aside from wars, disease, famines and the like. 99% of humanity focused on the present. Many pre-modern cultures had circular views of time, making a theory of progression or evolution impossible to conceive.

But, in the modern world, a linear future is a massive concern for most individuals. Control over where I’m headed is perhaps the greatest source of interpersonal conflict. In marriages. In households. In towns. In nations. Look at the current state of American politics. It boils down to a debate about where we’re headed as a nation full of people asking where am I headed? What is the future of America? This furious debate is essentially a national projection of our cultural concern with our own individual futures in a rapidly changing social world where, increasingly, no one knows quite where they stand.

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This is a brief interruption to remind you to grab a copy of my new book, especially if you like this essay!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled post!

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Autonomy, Opportunity, and Control

In the lead-up to writing my recent book about individualism in America, my literature review reminded me of a key theoretical distinction I had forgotten - a cultural desire for autonomy (in work, love, food, fun, or family life) is separate from the opportunity to exercise that autonomy. Without the opportunity to individuate, various forms of autonomous desire became dark prisons of resentment and frustration.

Every failed artist and intellectual knows this deeply.

Perception of control over our future results from how our specific cluster of opportunities intersects with our individual set of autonomous goals (to the extent you have any).

The more that one’s autonomous, individualistic objectives stray into the domain of fantasy (because there is no relevant opportunity), the more the limits of individualism as a choice ideology become clear and potentially tragic. You lose a sense of control over where you are headed. You start feeling stuck in the present - a cardinal sin in a frothing modern economy predicated on destroying the past and replacing it with the new. Again and again.

Time and again in American history, some individuals have desired to exercise lifestyle autonomy but never found the right opportunities. Often, these desires get repressed. Sometimes, they turn into demons. Historically, this is the lived reality of our most disadvantaged subpopulations. Not long ago, this was the reality for most ambitious women.

Throughout history, abandoning families, family businesses, ethnic, social networks, marriages, or even one’s children (i.e., solo immigration) has been necessary to exercise autonomy to chase opportunity. It has involved big acts of agency, often wrapped up in painful acts of refusal and rejection. One politically incorrect reason so few working-class or poverty-stricken adults never become well-educated (or successful financially) is that some do not want to escape the social world they know well. They want better jobs in the social world in which they live, no matter how unlikely these jobs are to come and find them. Folks who feel this way do not have the spirit of social detachment that exercising maximal autonomy requires. Frankly, I believe this reluctance to abandon the world you know is a normal human response (and frustration).

What is abnormal in human history is what America promotes as a secular religion to the entire world - a lonely escape from your past as the best and most convenient option. Shedding social obligation becomes a magical path to opportunity. Just walk away and write postcards to them. This is vastly easier if you’re an only child with no cousins! It’s tough NOT to abandon prior relationships and focus your life on future-leaning personal goals in the modern world.

In the survey research for my new book on the state of American individualism as a way of life, I confirmed that individualism is a choice ideology we all share and has little to do with class. As the fictional oeuvre of John Steinbeck and reams of social science research has revealed - the ‘poor’ have as much interest in autonomy as the rich.

What’s different is that class (or caste) privilege affects opportunity. If you belong to the educated elite (the top 9-10%), you will encounter far more opportunities in life and far more opportunities to control your everyday existence. You will have more opportunities to reclaim your social status if you falter, as I did when I bailed from academia to rescue my mental health. I had a huge safety net that made re-directing myself possible. I had an elite degree that made it much easier to climb the resume pile in the business world. I could overnight FedEx a cover letter and application to make a strong first impression because I didn’t fuss about the cost. And on and on the privilege goes.

In literary parlance, I had the agency and the means to re-direct my life to something other than academia AND to ensure it was meaningful (i.e., not becoming a manager at Gordon Biersch). “Agency” is just a sexy lit-crit word that points to the desire for autonomous action in the world, however limited.

I bring it up because, in the 1980s, the most important intellectual movement in my field of cultural anthropology centered on a post-colonial acknowledgment that ‘the natives’ feel just as much agency as any other adult human (i.e., the anthropologist). It was a vigorous theoretical and empirical debate about how to acknowledge the humanity of people living in the tribal and developing worlds. It was a call to end the condescension into which the field had defaulted - the simplistic placement of grown adults into monotone boxes. I did my own South Indian field research in this new mode. My dissertation uses individuals to illuminate local social issues, written as much like a novel as a social science treatise.

Agency is human. A desire for varying levels of autonomy from tradition or assigned social networks is heavily cultural (and psychological). Opportunity is a function mainly of class dynamics and how cleverly you exercise the autonomy permitted to you.

Sociopaths excel in modern America, in part because they are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to seek opportunity or create one out of thin air.

The rest of us, however, do not have the same ability. Nor do we all recover so easily from opportunity-seeking gone wrong.

One of the great unsung obligations of the educated and affluent ‘elite’ is to create opportunities for others less fortunate than them and to do it until it hurts (i.e., not just because it may further your small business goals).

If class distinction rests on a continuum of control, those with the most control must share their power and resources.

I feel like this generosity is waning in America. Do you?

1. see Thomas Piketty - Capital in the 21st Century