The Pyramid Scheme

There's a lot we can learn about genius from the pyramids. All societies have applied the pyramid concept in one form or another. The United States has been disproportionately successful relative to other nations because it has applied its concept of the pyramid more effectively and broadly than have its competitors. That edge is eroding quickly.

Most elites throughout history have conceived of themselves as being the capstone of society's pyramid, with the vast majority of masonry beneath them, the "commoners" or the "plebs", or however else one might have it, who serve no function other than to support the capstone.

Central to this belief, which dominated the entire world until 1776 and the huge majority of it until 2000 or so, was the surety that no commoner could ascend to the capstone. We can see this conviction manifested to various degrees from the divine right of kings to the underfunding of urban schools.

The flaw in this system is that all progress, all innovation, all civilization must necessarily emanate from the capstone, and the capstone alone. 99% of the pyramid was excluded from any meaningful station. From time to time, people born into the capstone applied their genius effectively, but more often than not the capstone was content with simply being on top. The geniuses and entrepreneurs and prophets from the "lower" 99% were never allowed to contribute to the capstone.

Then America came along and implemented the (at first very narrowly applied) proposition that the capstone should be constructed organically from the best elements of the lower 99%; that there was no "natural" capstone in and of itself. As America progressively overcame exclusionary bigotries, it drew upon ever-larger reservoirs of potential and genius from the lower 99%. And American power expanded accordingly.

Other societies have now caught on, of course, and the American premise has been adopted worldwide. This is good news. But now we must focus on the corollary of the pyramid scheme; if the base is not continually nurtured, the capstone will draw on a shrinking base of talent and will eventually wither into a state of stasis and paranoia.

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is a phrase I've always enjoyed, coined by Rene Descartes. This quote led to the naming of the Descartes mountains on the moon, where Apollo 16 landed in 1972. The concept of the shoulders of giants is always at play; our task as a society is to keep creating giants whose shoulders will support out progeny.

For example, any scientist who makes a breakthrough in physics, for example, is standing on the shoulders of giants because he or she is simply adding a capstone to the pyramid of knowledge constructed by his or her predecessors. The reason science has advanced so rapidly recently is that the knowledge of the giants has been available to an enormous pool of commoners, a pool whose size alone will guarantee the emergence of more giants.

For the pyramid to continue to aspire to new heights, the manna of every new capstone must trickle down to the entire base, so that the largest pool possible sends its giants up the pyramid to add yet another level to the capstone. But what happens when the discoveries made at the capstone, the new knowledge, does not trickle down to the base of the pyramid? This is what is happening in America today.

In America today, a large portion of the base of the pyramid does not receive the knowledge trickling from the top. If a third of our children do not receive an adequate education, how many giants have we chopped off at the knees?

America has been the world's richest nation since 1880, and it will continue to be so until at least 2080. But what is happening to the American pyramid does not bode well. For wealth alone does not accurately portray a society's health. Distribution of that wealth is far more telling.

This is not a Marxist argument; it is an architectural one. If the base of the pyramid is cracking, what does it matter how smooth or how high the capstone is? For any society to succeed in the long run, it must have a secure pyramid, with a capstone accessible to all and a healthy base. Our country today and in the foreseeable future resembles less the pyramids than it does the Washington monument.