What is "oligarchy?"
Who deserves to govern?
The image above is a 34,000 year old outline of a man’s hand, found in the Chauvet cave-system discovered in the Ardeche region of southern France in 1994
Early humans lived in small bands during the long ice age that lasted until 11,000 years ago, finding shelter in the many limestone caves of what is now Europe
Kinship & need defined the formation & survival of people then, who nevertheless manifest the distinctive human trait of wishing to assert & distinguish themselves
Thus their devising some technique for grinding stone into powder & blowing it onto the cave wall, forming an outline of one’s own hand (I find it especially touching that one of the man’s fingers has been broken…)
Such outlines, including those of children, abound in the many such cave systems, as I have seen for myself
But the first point is that such small bands of humans surely nevertheless formed around heirarchies; i.e., persons ranked by age or status
(“heir-” meant “sacred” or “trusted; the “-archy” suffix is from Greek archon, meaning “commander” or “captain”)
A second point is the human ability & desire to rank: that is, to judge importance (or ability, but also “possessions,” as we shall see)
Once people began to multiply & to form communities (including cities) the impulse to rank early on produced monarchy (the “rule of one”) but also by the citizens of ancient Athens, and uniquely in human history, democracy (from “demos” = district) and “krateoo,” meaning “to rule,” “to be sovereign”
Prior to their contentiously devising democracy, Athens had been governed by a tribunal of archons as well as intermittently by coalitions of wealthy landowners
(Our impulse to rank includes the tendency to value the quality of those few ranked superior)
The Greek term for “rule by a few” is oligarchy; which persons constitute those few may be a function of wealth (hence the error of taking oligarchy to mean rule by the wealthy)
The real problem of who shall govern, again, is thus rooted in our tendency to rank
The creation, at the founding of America, of the concept of rule by the people, produced the attendant practice of election: which aimed both to select persons and, most importantly, regularly to replace them with others
The practice of elections thus tends to reduce the influence of the human tendency to equate rank with importance, or value