No surprise there.
I’ve long thought that it’s a near universal (and potentially entirely so) thing that fundamentally elitist philosophies are, at heart, comforting fantasies - that people don’t promulgate them because they’ve reasoned their way through to the conclusion that they’re apparently valid, but because they so desperately want to believe that they are.
I think sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes it’s because of one’s own failure to recognize the philosophy in time that one later learned. For example, I have a theory that Atheism weeds one out from power. If you are shrewd enough you recognize that it is better to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing than to resign from the game. I came to this conclusion after weeding myself out.
Forgive me if I misunderstood what you wrote, but pretending to be something you are not in public just to reap the benefits of said social status seems excruciatingly exhausting to me. I think “better” in this context is very subjective to what you value in life.
More influential. More a part of the larger apparatus. Similar to the idea of social darwinism, I removed myself from the equation so my ideas will not propagate.