The more free we are, the more power laws can manifest as the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design

From The Grand Canyon-Sized Chasm Between Elites and Ordinary Americans by Rob Henderson.  The subheading is Ivy Leaguers versus everyone else.  

I agree with the primary point of the article, that the Mandarin Class, the clerisy have three dangerous attributes:

They are unmoored from the traditions of Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism.

Their belief systems are self-serving.

Their belief systems are separate from and orthogonal to the beliefs of a public still broadly grounded in Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism.

Click to enlarge.

It is a good essay making an argument I already believe.

This was the insight which I found novel and valuable.

Again, the elites encompass only about 1% of the population, but they are prominent in every U.S. institution, from Wall Street to academia to tech to media.

Most grow up in the same parts of the country, attend similar schools, study at the same colleges, work in the same occupations, live in the same metropolitan areas, travel to the same conferences, and consume the same media.

To be clear, there’s no conspiracy. Power laws dominate when people can move freely within an interconnected complex system. And the more interconnected and freer the system, the more pronounced the power law. Economies, supply chains, trade, education, media, and markets have become more intertwined and global. Centuries ago, when the U.S. was a scattered collection of states, things were very different.

Ironically, this relatively interconnected and free system that now exists has given rise to a situation where power is accruing into the hands of people who are skeptical of freedom. Power itself seems to obey a power law, accruing into the hands of fewer and fewer people. However, powerful people’s attitudes about that power is not set in stone. Naturally, the people who have lots of power will want to exert it, usually with the best of intentions. But the outcomes of our actions don’t always reflect what we believe to be the goodness of our hearts.

For years now I have been puzzled by the self-subverting nature of Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism.  The safer and more prosperous we become (as a consequence of Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism), the more we seem to foster enthusiasm for its antithesis - a worship of authoritarianism, central planning, disregard for human rights, disavowal of the importance of the individual, etc..  The most recent example of that subversion being postmodernist, critical theory, social justice Wokeism.  

Why?  Why does Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism inadvertently foster this evil adder, waiting to bite the breast that warmed it?  

Perhaps it is, as Henderson suggests, that freedoms and rights do unleash the manifestation of the reality of power laws.  The more free we are, the more power laws can manifest.  The more power laws manifest, the more there is a concentration of influence in the clerisy.  

And then that ties into Henderson's other idea - Luxury beliefs.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.

Which ties into the whole issue of doing bad by (nominally) doing good.  I.e. the subversion of the whole system through a mechanism of status preservation of part of the system.

There is an echo of this dynamic in the historical gender debate/movement.  The countries with the most egalitarian cultures and freest and most gender neutral laws also have the greatest manifestation of sex differences.  This irony became apparent about thirty years ago and has been denied and argued and debated.  But it remains increasingly evident.  You have a higher percentage of women pursuing stereotypically male subjects such as hard sciences in a place like Iran than you do in Sweden.  

When given the freedom (de facto and de jure) and with the economic wherewithal for the freedom to be exercised without financial penalty, then women behave more stereotypically female and men more stereotypically male.

Again - not by intent or conspiracy.  In the gender example, it is more clearly because of the nature of freedom and prosperity that come from the consequences of Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism.

As Adam Ferguson noted in An Essay on the History of Civil Society:   

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

And power laws are one of the most frequently overlooked functions (establishments) in any dynamic social system.  

UPDATE:  The more I think about Henderson's point about the emerging manifestation of social power laws under Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism, the more I consider Gregory Clark's work on the persistence of high (and low) status over centuries.   A phenomenon noted in multiple countries and cultures (England, the United States, Sweden, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Chile.)

I am struggling to articulate the connection and the causal mechanism but there feels like there is a connection in there somewhere.