May , 2026

Though the press describes the Milken Institute Global Conference — which will draw thousands of family-offices representing roughly $3 trillion in private wealth to Beverly Hills this week — as a gathering of the elite, it is, in fact, a gathering of the counter-elite [1]. Historically, American elites have been well-connected Mayflower descendants with authority over institutions and a sense of noblesse oblige. That hereditary elite has come down in the world so dramatically — capitulating to an insurgent counter-elite bonded by capital and co-investment – the e-word no longer means what it used to. This was predictable. As Peter Turchin observed in End Times, aristocracies almost never last longer than 150 years. The reason is simple, albeit counterintuitive. To retain control, hereditary elites must admit enough outsiders into their ranks to stave off insolvency, inertia, and inbreeding, but not so many institutions stop transmitting their values. When they fail, counter-elites capture institutions or build their own.

The math is brutal. Elite positions scale linearly; counter-elite power scales exponentially.

The popular story is that American elites overdid the gatekeeping — Harvard still has 1,600 freshmen and the Senate still has 100 seats — but if gatekeeping triggered decline, elite overproduction sped it up. Between the mid-1970s and 2011, the number of lawyers tripled while the US population grew 45 percent. Arguably, the hereditary elite didn't let in too few people. They let in the wrong ones (at least in part because traits predictive of massive success make for massively unpleasant company). Single family offices are now on track to surpass hedge funds in AUM by 2030. Capital that the elite failed to absorb is creating new power centers. Was the Milkenization of America inevitable? No, but exponential beats linear every time.

Much to the delight of hard-drinking middle school English teachers, a lush new adaptation of Lord of the Flies just dropped on Netflix. It's a pretty good show based on a pretty bad book. Much like Atlas Shrugged [2], LOTF is a propulsive literary achievement built on the faultline of a false binary. Authored as a rebuttal to R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, in which stranded British boys civilize natives and dispatch pirates, Golding's masterpiece indicts the imperial hubris of England's ruling elite without rejecting the Victorian civilization/savagery binary. Morally sensitive but politically unimaginative, Golding couldn't envision peaceful anarchism even though it turns out to be quite common.

As anthropologist David Graeber argued convincingly in The Dawn of Everything, democracy emerges from the fringes and frontiers. Graeber's claim — based on fieldwork in Madagascar, studies of stateless peoples, and research into the voluntarily marooned pirates from whom America's founding fathers (and corporations) borrowed ideas about representation, shareholding, and written constitutions — was simple: "Human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be." Natural experiments support this idea. In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys castaway on a South Pacific island for fifteen months gave their Australian rescuer a tour of their garden, gymnasium, and badminton court as well as a tutorial on dispute resolution. But it's the unnatural experiments that stick in the public imagination.

Years before LOTF, Golding divided his Bishop Wordsworth's pupils into rival factions to see if they'd turn on each other. They did. He concluded that they were, by nature, nasty, brutish, and short. Not so. They were just short. The rest they learned from him.

Outside a handful of hemp-necklaced enclaves – the Berkshires, Michigan Northwoods, and Humboldt County – and suburban Minneapolis, May Day passed largely uncelebrated. That sucks.

The first of May was once the most reliably festive day on the English calendar. The Tudors celebrated. James I issued the Book of Sports in 1618 to defend the holiday against Puritan attack. Charles I reissued the volume fifteen years later as, in America, the Pilgrims abolished the maypole. Lay siege to it, really.

The tradition wasn't lost so much as it was hunted to extinction.

A country cannot celebrate both May Day and Thanksgiving. The mythos of one contradicts the mythos of the other. May Day is a celebration of natural bounty enjoyed. Thanksgiving is a celebration of natural scarcity overcome. One is about deserving. The other is about receiving. One is about work. The other is about good fortune. Which is why, in 1628, a band of armed Pilgrims led by murderer Miles Standish snuck up on the residents of Merrymount [3], a thriving trading community twenty-five miles north of Plymouth known for its raucous May Day celebrations, seized community founder Thomas Morton, and left him stranded, naked, on an island off New Hampshire.

Morton arrived after the Pilgrims, but by 1628 he'd effectively cornered the New England beaver market by paying the Algonquians better and selling them guns. He was rich, and the men who'd followed him across the Atlantic were rich too — one of his servants cleared £1,000 in five years on beaver, multimillionaire money — which bothered the not-so-Puritan, upper-middle class English merchants settling Boston. The May Day raid on Merrymount was financed exclusively by rival traders – capitalist averse to truly free markets who found common cause with religious extremists who resented Morton’s happiness and loathed both his penchant for pole dancing and gratitude.

In his book New English Canaan — which received the dubious honor of being the first publication banned in what would become the United States — he describes arriving in Massachusetts Bay in 1622 and watching the Pilgrims starve in a country he found absurdly rich. “The more I looked, the more I liked it," he wrote. "If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor.” Historian Bernard Bailyn would later call Morton "one of the strangest, most flamboyant, and most belligerently impious people ever to wander into the coastal scene."

Three centuries on, Philip Roth would advocate, through the narrator of The Dying Animal, for adding Morton's face to Mount Rushmore. Roth called Merrymount a "utopia of candor," built around people as they are, as opposed to the Pilgrims' “utopia of virtue,” built for people as they ought to be – according to those with social capital. At Morton's Merrymount, the residents drank and traded and flirted with their native neighbors as the Puritans flirted with starvation.

Virtue and plenty are not antithetical, but they have a complicated relationship. Governments exist almost entirely to manage surpluses, because surpluses require a conversation about distribution and redistribution which in turn requires a conversation about people who don't work hard — who lack virtue — still getting something. The Pilgrims solved that problem — compounded by a belief in pre-destination that dictated mortal behavior did not dictate immortal rewards — by avoiding a surplus.


They settled at Plymouth — sandy soil, poisoned spring — and planted English barley and peas instead of maize. They lived next to one of the richest fisheries on the planet, but rarely fished because they brought the wrong hooks [4]. They were surrounded by deer, but didn't really hunt, because venison in England was a privilege of the landed gentry.

The standard story is that the Pilgrims came to escape religious persecution. They came to escape religious freedom. Twelve years of Dutch tolerance had produced a generation "drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses," William Bradford fretted, "getting the reins off their necks." One way to get the reins back on was to build an agrarian society at odds with the environment. As Plymouth minister Robert Cushman put it in 1621: "Idle drones are intolerable in a settled commonwealth."

The Protestant Work Ethic was not then (and is not now) about results. The pilgrims worked harder than Thomas Morton and his merry men because they chose to do so. And that choice informed the culture that took root in the New World. Americans with more food, more leisure, more medicine, more square footage, and more discretionary income than almost anyone in human history live in permanent suspicion of privilege, treating personal surpluses with suspicion while voting against redistribution. In a sense, the long-term project has been to create failed plantations for most and Merrymounts for some.

Morton's maypole was eighty feet tall, a goodly pine with a pair of buck's horns nailed near the top. It took the Pilgrims a long time to cut it down. It took them longer still to expunge its memory. But the Utopia of Virtue ultimately triumphed over the Utopia of Candor. That’s why May Day passed largely uncelebrated – and largely unmourned.