To Change the World: Proposition Four

Cultures change from the top down; rarely if ever from the bottom up.

It is sometimes true that political revolutions and economic revolts occur from the bottom up, but on their own terms they are almost always short-lived.
According to Dr. Hunter, long-term cultural change always occurs from the top down. In other words, the work of world-changing is the work of elites, gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management to the leading institutions in a society.

The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Awakenings, the Enlightenment, the triumph of capitalism over mercantilism and feudalism, all of the democratic revolutions in the West, the rise and triumph of science; and in our own day, the triumph of the therapeutic, postmodernism in law, architecture, literature, and popular culture, and now globalization itself, all began among elites and then percolated into the larger society.