It doesn't seem like he's advocating for new special powers for a new special in-group so much as waxing thoughtfully about what better to do with what they already have. It's easy enough to be cynical about his motivations. Maybe the distinction of being a "natural aristocrat" is merely self-serving and conceited. But we have aristocrats whether we like it or not. Perhaps a subset of the modern aristocracy might be more naturally aligned with his idealistic notions, and thus heed a calling to transformatively serve the public out of which they rose. I personally can forgive a bit of hubris if it is wielded responsibly and aimed at lofty, altruistic goals (because I'm a total sucker for that kind of rhetoric).
"Is this principle or opportunism?" is an extremely pertinent thing to ask when confronting any kind of proposal or plea. In other words, does the person really believe in this on its merits, or have they ran the simulation in their heads, taken note of where that would put them, and are now pushing the idea that would get them there?
For example, an ardent supporter of tax reform who strenuously argues that the cutoff should be such-and-such is someone who should be paid much more attention to if they're advocating to increase taxes on the rich in such a way that it results in their paying more, over the rich person who argues we shouldn't be taxing the rich.
Not completely unrelated: In the bad days of the late aughts when software designers were beginning to be deified and given way too much inscrutable power to make dubious decisions, I came up with a simple litmus test that could be applied to determine whether one's stated justification was horseshit* or not: it's to ask them, "In all your time as a designer where you have justified your decisions on the basis that the new way is better for the userbase as a whole—and so individuals who don't like the new defaults need to sacrifice for the greater good—are there any instances where you have undertaken a change where the result was you being among those in that instance who were negatively impacted by the change?"
(I think your taxation example is great, and it’s one I’ve used before to test myself on my own stances. More generally, that sort of test roughly rhymes with Kant’s universalization test.)
Wisdom is a funny thing. It isn't knowledge per se, but it is the ability to navigate the "space of knowledge". One who is wise is one who can strip the noise out a context, (or recognize that a context stripped by another is missing noise unjustifiably cut).
You can teach people knowledge til the cows come home, wisdom comes only through the act of living and navigating through it. Given that, it is no surprise that given Jefferson's umwelt, ge had opinions on the topics he did. Note, however, how in spite of that there, the mechhanisms and processes built originally still included measures specifically tuned to spoil the natural tendency of wealth centric aristol to arise and dominate above those that could actually do the work of leading well.
Which worked just fine right up until the public threw out the benefit of that wisdom with the implementation of national political parties, and resorted to wealth accrual as the primary metric of success rather than other works.
>Does it improve the User Experience?
>Are you willing to martyr yourself for the sake of improving everyone else's lot?
are your bullshit filters.
Not trying to downplay you for it, just, figured I'd help tighten it up to be more concise. I also apply that set of heuristics, and boy, do those two little points there razor the population of software devs into 4 bloody piles.
Sounds like a good question for philosophy, too bad we live in a world where it plays little role beyond amusement/mockery.
> The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.
(Everybody wants competence. This is a universal human desire; it should be separated from a political structure that reifies power in those who think that they’re the most competent.)
The point was simpler than that: virtue, ariste, etc. is already a shared human value, one that people apply to their decision making processes already (including in democracies). Anybody asking us to consider it a “lost idea” is trying to sell something other than the thing we’ve already bought.
Do you think he pined for the establishment of and recognition of an American aristocracy?
I took from the reading less that Jefferson was desirous of it, and more that he recognized the inevitability of something indistinguishable from it arising, and wishing to somehow thumb the institutional scales as it were to amplify the "aristocrat by virtue" rather than merely the "aristocrat that came into it by heritance". He was very concerned with the tendency of heritable wealth to snowball, but, also to result in increasingly incompetent wielders thereof.
Remember, this is the same guy who wanted a new Constitutional Convention every 19 years when the next generation came of age, and mandatory sunsets on all acts of government. To be clear, if you were an aristocrat in charge of things/in a position of power in Jefferson's imagined world, you were not in for a fun time. Wielding that power would be a hell of a lot of retread ground over and over and over and over. In fact, the only way to exercise power in that circumstance, would have been knowing how to use it effectively. There'd simply be no room for maintaining your personal capricious self-edifying precipises of power, because of the sheer effort of keeping them in place against the march of time, and the agreeableness of those you're sharing the world with, and who ultimately bear the burden of doing the work.
The system we have now, (First pass the post, and once it's in it's in forever) is quite the opposite.