Hard-wired marginalisation

Nepotism, obstruction, neutralisation, sycophancy, personal imperialism and acquiescence are labels of convenience^[1].  It does not matter what we call them, and they may not cover all the social processes that cause privilege to entrench^[2], power to concentrate, and society to stratify and ossify over time.  They are natural processes in the sense that they will run their course unless we act deliberately and collectively to restrain or ameliorate them. 

These concentrating mechanisms are often quite rational from the perspective of the individual decision maker, but may be detrimental and irrational from the point of view of society as a whole.  The individual acting to further their own self‑interest does not in many of these instances further the long term interests of society^[3] as a whole.  To the contrary, they often inadvertently subvert them.  This is the antithesis of Adam Smith's famous `Invisible Hand'^[4] in which the pursuit of selfish ends by individuals is argued, in the aggregate, to maximise the social welfare of society as a whole. 

It is because of these sorts of processes that all ethnic groups other than the ethnic group that is dominant in the power structure of a society are marginalised.  The disadvantaged ethnic groups need not be minorities ‑ take pre-Mandela South Africa for example.  Neither is ethnicity the only selection criterion used explicitly, but most of the time informally, by the power structure at any of its layers to determine who becomes part of its exclusive club.  In many societies women face considerable obstacles in becoming official and overtly active members of the upper layers of the power structure, though women do have, and always have had, considerable informal and indirect power^[5]. 

The quandary is that whatever measures and agencies we set up to carry out the required interventions, will themselves be subject to those same natural processes.  A high degree of self‑awareness, of knowledge of institutional self^[6], will be necessary to stop them from succumbing from within to the very forces they will seek to neutralise or manage within society as a whole.  A formidable array of checks and balances needs to be set up and vigilantly maintained to stop the weeds from overrunning the garden^[7], but not so formidable that the array itself becomes a noxious weed^[8].