● The guiding principle of mediocracy is that society is sovereign over the individual, and that it should control both culture and everyday life. The following tenets elaborate this.
1. The world is satisfactorily explained, in all key respects, by an established body of knowledge and theory. Publicly sanctioned cultural representatives are in agreement on all crucial points. Any change to this body of knowledge/theory requires consent from the relevant community of specialists.
2. ‘Reality’ and ‘objectivity’ are concepts which cannot be grasped by individual humans, and are best defined in terms of the consensus of the cultural community.
3. What has been successfully captured by means of theory includes human psychology. This is to be understood in terms of Freudian drives (principally sex and aggression) which in turn are driven by evolutionary adaptation. The individual’s apparent free will and individuality are illusory, being derived from biological drives and social conditioning.
4. Human beings are identical in all significant respects. They may differ in trivial ways such as appearance, or athletic aptitude. However, they do not have innate qualities relevant to any cultural dimensions we care about.
5. All cultural output of significance (this includes technology and customs, as well as arts and other disciplines) is social rather than individual in origin. That is to say, it is best regarded as the product of society. Any ostensible individual contributors are themselves merely the products of their communities.
6. Basic moral principles have been established. The most important one is that all social arrangements require the consent of the whole community (or a majority) in order to be legitimate. There is no area within which an individual may legitimately act without reference to the community, unless the community has previously sanctioned such an area.
7. The second key moral principle follows from the first. Inequalities which have not received collective consent for specific reasons are not to be tolerated. This includes arrangements which presuppose some innate difference between social groups, or which appear to reflect some such difference and must therefore be based on an unfair bias (since such differences do not exist).
8. Rights and freedoms (property rights, freedom of expression etc.) also require community consent, or at least a demonstration that they are in the community’s interests.
9. What happens in practice may deviate significantly from supposed principles, depending on context. Moral standards are rigorously applied to some social groups (particularly members of the higher socioeconomic classes) while other groups may be able to ignore them in practice, particularly if enforcement is implausible.
10. What is said is generally not what is done.
Oxford Forum should be given funding.