Contrary to socialist utopian thinking, there will never be a classless society. In any society a small group of elites will rise to the top and become its leaders. There are many ways in which one could become a leader, but it essentially boils down to two paths; ethical or unethical. Since there are an unlimited number of unethical paths, I will write today about the ethical, or the virtuous path.
The moral high ground in leadership is the road less traveled, the thorny road of challenge, growth and character building. It is the road that men choose. Being an unethical leader is easy, being an ethical leader is not. What are some of the things that make up an ethical leader and what are the societal structures that can help or hamper him?
Corporatism (what most people think is capitalism), and socialism do not provide the framework for ethical leadership to blossom. Ethical leadership requires societal norms, practices and structures in place to hold those in power accountable. These norms have developed over centuries, they are such things as “noblesse oblige” and chivalry. These norms take into account a ruling class who is expected to be virtuous and rule justly. Such norms gave birth to the ideal of the “Rex justus”. While socialism and republicanism aim to “level the playing field” they take away the obligations of a nobility towards those whom they rule over. A congressman or senator has no legal or moral obligation towards those whom they rule over, an aristocrat does.
In a democratic/socialistic society, leaders are “ruled by the people” rather than the people being ruled by a ruler. When a ruler rules, he has the responsibility over the financial, physical and spiritual well being of his subjects. He must take care of them, he must put in place structures in society which facilitate virtue and the progress in virtue. He must be a father figure. “Holy Rus” was such, not because the men in power or those ruled over where any “holier” than at other times or other places, but that the societal structure was in place for people to attain “holiness”.
Alas, people are people and rulers are also subject to the faults, inadequacies and problems of everyone else. They must constantly be waging war on themselves and their shortcomings in order to become a better leader and a better man. Hereditary nobility allows men to work on the betterment of themselves and then pass the baton to their sons, teaching them from an early age the elements of leadership and instructing them in attained wisdom.
Castle Saint John 
Good post. Let me add something, if I may:
The aristocrat is able to have a sense of noblesse oblige that the self-made man rarely has precisely because he has not earned his position. The capitalist or democratic leader has allegedly attained his position by his own merit and therefore feels entitled to take full advantage of it. The noble, on the other hand, has what he has as a gift of God, and is accountable to God for how he uses it. He may not, in fact, be in any way intrinsically superior to those he is placed in authority over, but he is destined to rule them nonetheless. This creates a sense of responsibility that’s difficult to replicate in a self-made man, who is much more susceptible to pride.
There is a distinction between purely practical reality and ideological narrative that I think needs to be clearly understood. This is why all reactionaries ought to study the history of Japan, because in Japan more than in any other country, a stable separation of the two has been achieved and maintained, with ideological sovereignty incarnate person of the emperor, while practical sovereignty was vested elsewhere for most of history, yet with no diminution of the warrior class’s devotion to the Heavenly Sovereign.
In the case of rulers, in order to give them the best incentive, they ought to be practically owners, but ideologically stewards. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has written at length on why owners rule better than stewards in Democracy: The God That Failed, but the short version is that a steward, because he has no permanent control of the property, nor any interest in its capital value, but only a temporary control of the profits generated by it, has the incentive to exploit it for short-term gain, while the owner will take long-term care of it, both because he controls the profits in the long term and because a capital depreciation of the property hurts him directly.
On the other hand, in the ideological rather than economic sphere, a steward has the incentive to take care of the property in the sense that, believing it not to be his own, he knows he has no right to mistreat or damage it, while the owner has at least the ideological permission, if not the incentive, to damage the value of the property, because, after all, ‘it’s mine!’ He may even wish to damage it to prove his ownership of it (this, in my opinion, is fundamentally the vice of the sadist), in much the same way that a child might tear apart his toys with the rationale that ‘they are mine so I can do this if I want to!’
The best solution, then, is rule by a man who for all practical purposes is an owner (and therefore has an owner’s economic incentives and associated low time-preference) but is socialised to think of himself as a steward (and therefore has the cultural imperative to care for those under his charge as one who will one day be called to give account for them.)
Surprise, surprise: Traditional, Christian monarchy fulfills both criteria by making the monarch (or lower noble) the effective owner of the state or fief in life but accountable to God for his care of it in the afterlife. It’s the best of all possible worlds.
Well said. This also points to the Orthodox perspective of the bishop being the, “servant of the servants of God”. Often misinterpreted (on purpose??) by modernists in the Church to mean the bishop is somehow answerable to the “people”, it really means that he gives an account to God for his stewardship over those whom he must educate and lead.
YES. ‘Servant leadership’ is a big thing, especially in Protestant circles, and it generally seems to be taken to mean that the follower gets to boss the leader around and sit in judgment over him and obey only if he (or more often she) agrees anyway.
Which monarch was it (Franz Josef maybe? James I? Or perhaps Charles the Martyr; sounds like him) who said that a king is responsible for his people but not to them?