After the Empire was dismantled, the churches spread throughout the territory became the substitutes for the scattered Roman administration. In general confusion, while the forms of a new era were barely visible among the mists of the provisional, the priests became notaries, hearers and mayors. The seeds of the future European aristocracy germinated on the battlefield, in the fight against the barbarian invader. In each village and parish, the community leaders who stood out in the defense effort were awarded by the people with land, animals and coins, by the Church with titles of nobility and the legitimate anointing of their authority. They became great farmers, counts, dukes, princes and kings.

Agrarian property was never the foundation or the origin, but the fruit of its power. Military power. Power of a ferocious and haughty caste, enriched by the sword and not by the plow, conscientious of not mixing with the others, of not dedicating itself, therefore, neither to the cultivation of intelligence, good only for priests and women, nor for the land, entrusted to serfs and tenants, not even business, occupation of bourgeois and Jews.

For more than a millennium it ruled Europe by force of arms, supported by the tripod of ecclesiastical and cultural legitimation, popular obedience translated into work and taxes, financial support obtained or extorted from merchants and bankers in times of crisis and war.

Its rise culminates and its decline begins with the foundation of absolutist monarchies and the advent of the national state. It culminates because these new formations embody the power of the warrior caste in a pure state, source of itself by direct delegation from God, without the intermediation of the priesthood, reduced to the subordinate condition of forced and recalcitrant accomplice. But it is already the beginning of the decline, because the absolute monarch, coming from the aristocracy, stands out from it and has to seek against it - and against the Church - the support of the Third State, which with this ends up becoming an independent political force, capable of intimidating the king, the clergy and the nobility together.

If the medieval system had lasted ten centuries, absolutism did not last more than three. Even less will the reign of the liberal bourgeoisie last. A century of economic and political freedom is enough to make some capitalists so formidably wealthy that they no longer want to submit to the whims of the market that has enriched them. They want to control it, and the instruments for that are three: the domain of the State, for the implantation of the statist policies necessary for the eternalization of the oligopoly; stimulating socialist and communist movements that invariably favor the growth of state power; and the regimentation of an army of intellectuals who prepare public opinion to say goodbye to bourgeois freedoms and enter happily into a world of ubiquitous and obsessive repression (extending to the last details of private life and everyday language), presented as a paradise adorned at the same time with the abundance of capitalism and the “social justice” of communism. In this new world, the economic freedom essential to the functioning of the system is preserved to the strict extent necessary to enable it to subsidize the extinction of freedom in the political, social, moral, educational, cultural and religious domains.

With this, the megacapitalists change the very basis of their power. They no longer rely on wealth as such, but on the control of the political-social process. Control that, freeing them from adventurous exposure to market fluctuations, makes them a durable dynastic power, a neo-aristocracy capable of crossing through the variations of fortune and the succession of generations, sheltered in the stronghold of the State and international organizations. They are no longer megacapitalists: they are metacapitalists - the class that has transcended capitalism and transformed it into the only socialism that ever existed or will exist: the socialism of grand masters and social engineers at their service.

This new aristocracy is not born, like the previous one, from military heroism rewarded by the people and blessed by the Church. It is born out of Machiavellian forethought founded on self-interest and, through a false clergy of subsidized intellectuals, blesses itself.

It remains to be seen what kind of society this self-invented aristocracy can create - and how long a structure so obviously based on lies can last.