Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

224 What To Make of Itclass conflict in which the advantaged members of societyand their elite leaders struggle for the minds of the less advantagedin order to protect their own advantages from incessantmass demands for a larger share in all the benefits ofsociety, including goods and services but no less so status,influence, and power. In James Madison’s eyes, governmentshave to be constructed to curb the demand of the“majority faction” for an equal division of property. Thestruggle continues in our time, conspicuously in recentclass-motivated attempts to cut back the welfare state. Tacticalmoves aside, it is to the advantage of the advantaged topersuade the disadvantaged to be satisfied with the manybenefits that market society has already bestowed on them.Elite efforts endlessly teach—once through shamans,then chiefs, then nomadic raiders, then through lord andbishop, and now through contemporary elites—the virtuesof inequality, hierarchy, authority, loyalty, obedience, docility,trust, and faith. If each of these in its modest place is infact a virtue, an indiscriminate endorsement of them is aformula for mass deference to elites. The steady and indiscriminateoverendorsement of these virtues is supplementedin every period by additional messages relevant to the cultureof the time. At one time they taught the divine right ofkings; in our time they teach the doctrinal correctness ofcapitalism. Elites of course end up persuading both themselvesand their own children. Hence all over the world theelite message, in a largely unilateral flow of communication,displays a high degree of continuity.Some radical critics of the market system see elite communicationas successfully “selling” the market system tothe masses. Elites, they would say, succeed even though themarket system is in fact an exploitative social process forlocking mass into such limited shares of society’s benefits