One of the fun things about reading history is you occasionally bump into names or places that still resonate today. For instance, I was recently reading about the English Civil War, the Roundheads versus the Cavaliers. Names like Richard Lee, John Washington and George Mason were Royalists on the side of the king. They were also ancestors of Robert E. Lee, George Washington and George Mason.

Americans are raised to think of the Founders as fierce republican patriots who detested monarchy on principle. In reality that was never the case. America was a hodgepodge of people and cultures from Europe with all sorts of weird ideas about how to best organize their societies. Events, however, helped change their thinking and their subsequent deeds shaped the new country to this day.

It’s a reminder that human societies are run by men with a long past and they shape their world for subsequent generations. Modern scholars dismiss the great man theory of history, but modern scholars are deeply marinated in all sorts of lunacy. The claim that men are merely the product of their environment misses the forest for the trees. Men are a product of and a shaper of their environment.

Learning about the great men of history is a great starting point. Study Washington, Jefferson, Mason and Randolph and you learn about the Tidewater region of America that produced them. From there you learn the history of the colony and its cultural ties to the Royalists of England. That helps explain why the Tidewater region joined the Yankee colonies in revolt, despite having very different views on liberty.

That’s the thing. Every society has its ruling elite and they are people who respond to events. They can change their minds and go off in a direction that history says is at odds with the tide of history. In modern America, for example, we now have gay marriage in spite of the fact most Americans think it is ridiculous. The people in charge want it, so they make it so, despite being opposed to it not so long ago.

History is, in many respects, the study of the shifting culture through the lens of the great men who shaped it. The ruling elite in the first half of the 20^th century were men of the industrial age. Many were not that far removed from the shop floor or the plant offices. Those who inherited their wealth often served in the military with the same men who worked in their father’s plants. The men running the war against Hitler were men of their age even as they were fighting to reshape their age.

This brings me to the central question of our time. What sort of men run the world today?

The West has just gone through one the great revolutions in human history. The technological revolution has and is altering the basic relationships of human civilization. Europe and the Euro are not possible in an analog age. The growing surveillance state is a direct result of the technological revolution. The people who made this revolution and have risen to the elite in this age are also products of this new and different age.

This interesting post on the nature of this new ruling elite is both interesting and unsettling.

This post is a graphic summary of an upcoming data-driven book on Silicon Valley’s political end game: the path toward overhauling the Democratic Party and orienting our lives toward innovation.

At its core, the book argues that changes in the economy also changes the political ideology in power; some personalities and value systems thrive in different occupations and industries. The growth of the knowledge economy has empowered a novelty-seeking personality that places an extreme faith in the power of information to solve the world’s problems.

A growing demographic of highly-skilled college-educated liberals will transform government’s role to be about directly investing in citizens, funding them to become as entrepreneurial, civic, and healthy as possible.

The ultimate goal is to make life as close to the college experience as possible: a life dedicated to research, exploration, and creativity, while automation ensures that everyone has enough food and leisure time to pursue their unique contribution to the world.

The first thing to understand about this emerging ruling elite is they are nothing like normal people. Most grew up in upper middle-class homes, went to private schools and finished up in elite universities. These are folks who lived in a parallel America. They drove the same streets and ingested the same popular culture, but did so from an entirely alien perspective.

It’s tempting to think of this new elite as just an Apple version of the old elites, but that’s a mistake. Consider the media. In the industrial age, news reporters and columnists were jobs filled by men of the working classes who had high literacy. They lived in the same neighborhoods as their readers. Their kids played with the plumber’s kids. Many served in the same roles in the military as their readers. Today, the typical media person is a graduate of an elite school and only knows the sons of toil as servants.

The men and women running the technological age are people used to winning because they have known nothing else. They were sent to good private schools where they got good grades, which led them to excellent private colleges. Ellen Pao captured the imagination of our rulers because she was such an outlier. Her biography was supposed to end with her running a fortune 1000 firm, not as a disgraced grifter.

Pao is a good transition to others who grew up outside of America. Barak Obama is so wildly popular in Silicon Valley because he is a lot like many of these people. He was born somewhere, raised in various places by parents who were citizens of the world, if “citizen” was a real thing, which it is not. That’s the view of the technological elite. They may or may not be Americans (or British or Europeans or whatever), but that’s the accident of birth. They are citizens of their class, first and foremost.

This alienation of the ruling class is not new to history. It’s probably been the norm, at least in Eurasia. It is a departure from what most of us grew up understanding about our world. People used to getting their way and unprepared for failure are going to be different types of rulers than those who rose up through the ranks. It’s the difference between the man who built the business and the man or inherited it.

Not surprisingly, the companies of Silicon Valley look more like a college student union than the old fogey businesses of the past. You can’t really blame them for wanting to maintain this perpetual adolescence. The best of times, particularly for males is late teens through late 20’s. The college campus is now an idyllic playground of perpetual youth, where everyone’s primary duty is to wait on the special little snowflakes.

The trouble is “a life dedicated to research, exploration, and creativity” only works as long as someone is doing the hard work of civilization. Yale is a wonderful campus full of high-IQ, self-actualizing people, but it is guarded on the perimeter by hard men with guns. You don’t want to wander too far from campus as the neighborhoods get ugly very quick. Automation may be the solution, but it brings new problems.

That’s where the alienation is most obvious. Walk around a place like Yale or even a Georgetown and it feels synthetic. A normal person feels like an intruder because they are an outsider. They have responsibilities, struggles and all the petty hassles of life. They face failure, which is something wiped clean from the life of elite colleges. If you want to know why John the Savage hung himself, spend a few days on an Ivy League campus.

The world our new rulers imagine for us will be an alien place compared to what we are used to. We will all be strangers in our own lands, assuming it gets that far. I’m fond of pointing out that Huxley got most things right while Orwell got most things wrong. At the dawn of the technological age, most people would have said the opposite. Maybe as the technological age creeps forward, some third option will reveal itself.