currently reading Anathem and it’s reluctantly making me sympathetic to what I would take to be a simplified version of your...
currently reading Anathem and it’s reluctantly making me sympathetic to what I would take to be a simplified version of your main thesis: that we all wish we could be part of a special Caste suiting our own proclivities invested in ritual and so on. oh to be an avout cloistered in a little math, with no intercourse with the world but to save it every now and then!
That is a sub-sub-module of my “main thesis,” and one that’s pretty far from the mainline of my thinking – in particular, it requires a culture of people who all share massive solidarity and similarity in terms of their constructed roles, which is kind of the opposite of my default recommendation for identity-building – but there’s definitely some conceptual overlap there.
And, yeah, that’s one of those fantasies that’s going to appeal hard.
This is literally corporatism. Like that Mussolini quote, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
And people pipe up like “by ‘corporate’ he didn’t mean limited liability business entities” true, “corporations” were understood as tribes/castes/found families of industrial-era purpose and function