It doesn't have to be a conspiracy - such a system could arise simply through evolution and survivorship bias. Imagine you have two power structures. One of them has a rigidly entrenched core group, with no possibility for advancement. The other of them identifies people who might be threats, and then offers them the possibility of advancement within the system.

Over time, such revolutionaries will arise in both systems. In the first system, they eventually gain a critical mass of disaffected youth, and overthrow the government. That paves the way for another system, and eventually, someone will try something like system #2, and that won't be overthrown by restless revolutionaries.

History actually looks remarkably like this, with plenty of absolute monarchies being violently overthrown by smart & charismatic revolutionaries, until a system arose where those smart and charismatic people can achieve personal advancement without overthrowing the system.

I, for one, believe in conspiracies...

... but I also believe in class conflict, which I see as different things. Our economic system is predicated on the existence of both a working class and an owning class -- it's no fun to be a general if you don't have a bunch a bunch of enlisted to boss around. And in the US, the myth is that the enlisted commoners deserve their lot from lack of smarts and ambition.

The owning class, and their educated lackeys like me, intuit that if we don't keep this division going, we lose our positions in the upper half of the pyramid, and adjust our day-to-day behavior accordingly without ever explicitly working it out in our minds. Also, we just plain feel more comfortable around people who share experience and cultural background.

These dynamics, plus a HUGE difference in access to educational know-how, are enough to sustain class divisions even while making it plausibly deniable that any systematic class oppression exists.

Also, there is a rhetorical technique called the "straw man" which the commenter is using: subtly re-characterize your opponents argument as something easily attacked, and then attack it. The commenter explicitly said there was no grand explicit conspiracy, but you attack him as if he did.

(One of the things I like about HN is that when issues like this come up there are smart people here on both sides -- libertarians and Marxists, united by a love of hacking!)

I have a little trouble conceiving of a completely classless society - at some point you have to acknowledge that, for example, some programmers are better than others, and that that's a positive thing. That acknowledgement alone creates a class. The important thing is upward mobility - we shouldn't define "better" as "knows the other people who are 'better'".

This cannot be argued. But many people conflate worth of skills and accomplishments with worth as a person. They over reduce the dimensionality of a superiority vector. And worse, assume transitivity of the elements composing said vector.

Often (though not always) the reason for differences in talent are directly traceable to personal background, and by allocating different resources to folks growing up is how we sustain our class system. Bourdieu.

> And I also don't propose that this was all cooked in a room full of cackling conspirators rubbing their hands together. It's just the way a power structure works.

His point is that the system of individuals acting to maximize their own benefit, because of the way that "benefit" is defined, favors entrenched players, even if it wasn't supposed to - no conspiracy necessary.

It is funny that you mention "game theory, maximize, benefit and central decision structure". Because I can draw a rough analogy from game theory and argue why a central decision structure likely exists at least implicitly.

What we have here in life is a positive sum game and if everyone is trying their best to play an optimal strategy then it is likely that they are at least at a correlated equilibrium. This in turn implies some central shared decision structure. I posit that in modern society this shared device is the status-quo, the media, status worship, fame chasing and celebrities. This correlating device evolves or rather is naturally selected by the top of a society wishing to keep it so. Things did not get this way by accident and our values are certainly not all set in stone or irrefutably valuable.

So long as everyone follows the signals given as optimal by this correlating device/trusted mediator we achieve correlated equilibrium. If anyone deviates then all bets are off. This then highlights why it is so key that the elite behave and indoctrinate as they do. And gibes well with what nostrademons had to say. If people are not acting in a way that "sensible" people should act to get and then stay ahead then we fall out of the comfy equilibrium and the stability of the status-quo is lost.