We must have an airistocracy – not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose – or mankind will fail… And here my peculiar difficulty with democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of humanity cannot be won to that. The solution does not lie in direct confrontation. We can defeat democracy because we understand the workings of the human mind, the mental hinterlands hidden behind the persona.
We need Constructive imagination working within vast complex of powerful people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom power is diffused today, to produce that self-conscious highly selective, open-minded, devoted airistocratic culture, which seems to me to be the next necessary phase in the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives modified and redirected by literature and art.
Carol White, The New Dark Age Conspiracy, New Benjamin Franklin House, 1980, p.5