that’s gotta be a pretty frickin small ‘grouping’ if it consists only of elitists. usually on planet earf, in order for a group to increase in size, it has to successfully manage it’s environment and divide up the labor involved in doing it. so if you got a group of only ‘elitists’, they’re either living off the wealth snatched from some other group, or on their way out (because none of them wanna work). dawkins once created an analogy model to describe what is called an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), and he used a community of birds to do it. in this community there are three types of birds, as follows:
grudgers: birds that will pick mites off of birds that pick mites off of them.
suckers: birds that will pick mites off of birds that don’t pick mites off of them.
cheats: birds that don’t pick mites off of other birds, but allow other birds to pick mites off of them.
and he explains how the cheat type is the only anomaly that wouldn’t allow a community with an ESS to exist. if you did the math, you’d see why. a community with cheats would result either in extinction, or extinction. you could have a temporarily stable group of cheats and suckers, but eventually nothing would be left but the cheats… and then nothing would be left at all… because they’d all die of mite infestation.
only a group of grudgers and suckers, or a group of grudgers and grudgers, or a group of suckers and suckers, would have an ESS.
now this analogy works well to describe the kind of relationship the ‘cheat’, which is the’elite’ (modern capitalist) would have to its community. so your hypothetical grouping of only ‘elite’ isn’t something realizable unless we’re talking 800 a.d. barbarism or post-apocalyptic mad max. which is to say, you can do your whole ‘kinsmen tribal’ thing, but it would have to be as a cult that rented out an apartment building or warehouse to live in and made its money trading stocks.
but that’s too easy, too simple. the grand project of mankind is more than that, and it involves building social ecosystems that are sustainable indefinitely. and to do that, we gotta get rid of the cheats or we’ll all go extinct.
and this is why i can’t pay any attention to these silly philosophy forum cliques made up of conservative nordic wanna-be alpha-males who play philosophy as if it were a dungeons and dragons role-playing card game. no, you guys are not, and will never be, the noble warriors of truth, nor will what the few of you ever say at a philosophy forum amount to more than a hill of beans. king arthur is dead, and we have killed him. stop stammering about your virtue like a blue-bottled priest! (that was a nietzsche re-mix, btw)