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The use of the term The Cathedral to refer to the complex of modern upper class institutions (focused on elite universities, media, officials etc) is a bad one.
The proper term should be The Madarinate - The Mandarins (in a general form) are the middle class knowledge specialists who serve the Upper Classes - serve them as advisers and officials.
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The modern Mandarinate is most visible in the leadership class of the large bureaucracies in government, civil administration (national and local), law, NGOs and powerful charities, and the linked bureaucracies which run all large and powerful modern institutions - schools, colleges, hospitals and health services, the military and the police - and so on.
Until modern times, the Mandarinate were social cohesion specialists - their job was to hold large societies together, because a large society which cohered, which held-together, was often de facto invulnerable and unconquerable (e.g. Ancient Egypt or China).
The modern situation is different because the modern equivalent of ancient rulers is the Mass Media system (rather than specific individual people), and the Mass Media is not promoting of social cohesion but is subversive and destructive of order. The Mandarinate serve their masters in the sense that modern officials and bureaucrats operate to destroy order.
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The Cathedral is a bad name, because Chief Priests are not necessarily, usually or primarily Mandarins.
And because The Cathedral falsely conflates the servant middle class of officialdom - who implement the policies of the ruling class, with the actual ruling class equivalent that is the Mass Media: who set the policy, which is a long term strategy of self-destruction/ suicide.
(This strategically destructive ruling class has not existed before in history; because this is the first non-religious/ secular ruling class - who serve the anti-god/s of destruction rather than the god/s of cohesion.)
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