this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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We're so very close but we're not quite getting that last point. What I'm saying is it's a distinction with very little meaningful difference. It's interesting from an academic point of view, but that's it. How they rationalize their privilege and sell their legitimacy to people makes no difference.
It's more than just academic. The question is not whether aristocracy or plutocracy acts in a fundamentally better or worse way than the other, which you seem to be focused on, but whether they act in a different way from the other, which they very much do. The basis of their power comes from different roots, and because of that, they have different interests, different goals, different avenues of action, different preferences in compromise with wider society. Failing to understand that will result in failing to understand the reasoning for political maneuvering by one or the other.
I firmly disagree. There is no meaningful difference in motivation or expected outcome. The behaviour is functionally identical. In neither case is there any commitment to compromise with society, both Aristocracy and Plutocracy leverage economic factors to control and contain the wider community, to arbitrary and capricious ends; frequently little more than the further consolidation of power. The terminology is different, it sounds different, but it does not behave different in any meaningful way. Any social contract is entirely grounded in what we choose to demand as a society, not intrinsic to the flavour of elite class.
It's the same motive, the same tools, and the same outcome, just re-branded and with a fresh coat of paint. Plutocracy in this era leverages scientific and evidence based psychological conditioning, social control, and new communication mediums to play on a variety of fundamental cognitive biases and limitations instead of leveraging religion alone as the primary means of containment of the governed, nothing more. As I said, it's Aristocracy with a business degree. If you want to get specific it's Aristocracy with a business degree and a marketing team instead of just the clergy.