The traditional sacred rulership that descends from the arbitrary unanimity of the originary scene has waned in modern society with the growth of the pragmatic authority derived from reciprocal exchange. By founding this authority on the reasoned consent, explicit or not, of the members of the group, Hobbes and other early modern political theorists in effect reduced the sacred center to a function of the group itself. This process appears to have achieved stability in the political sphere. Today, strange as it might have seemed less than a generation ago, there are no more major arguments about the best way of organizing the government of advanced societies. What remains in greater flux is the intellectual authority that guarantees the value of discourse.
Specialized expertise is the democratic means of avoiding mimetic conflict.
One appeals not vertically to higher authority, but horizontally to specialized technique. Gnostic wisdom is dispensed by gurus, not experts. The same market system that links the local experts in its productive capacity tolerates the separation of beliefs in its consumptive capacity. Both expertise and wisdom are forms of strong authority. The expert must be strongly believed because he has wagered his professional career on knowing more about the matter than anyone else.