No, I don't have daddy issues. Mine died when I was four years old and I barely remember him. My stepfather, who was a wonderful man and I miss terribly, died horribly seven years ago of cancer.

But now that you've brought up the topic of the inevitablility and right of authority to lead the rest of us poor schmucks to enlightenment, let me spell it out for you. I'll use Marxist terminology because I know it will annoy you, but all social philosophies accept the general outline. There have always been three social classes: the proletariat, the bourgeosie, and the aristocracy. The aristocracy owns things. The bourgeosie run things. The proles work. I make this up all on my own, the great English SOCIALIST George Orwell did.

The major goal of the proletariat is to become bourgeois. The major role of the bourgeosie is to become aristocrats. The latter just wants things to stay just as they are. The bourgeosie wants to expropriate the position of power of the aristocracy, and they often enlist the aid of the proletariat to do so; the bourgeosie loathes the aristocracy, because they work for them, and they know the aristocracy holds them in total contempt. However, they can't really admit this to themselves because they aspire to be aristocrats. Instead, they often accuse the aristocracy of aligning themselves with the proles to keep them sandwiched in between. This is where that "liberal elite" meme got started. Fortunately, as we shall see below, there is some truth to this.

At the same time, the bourgeosie are terrified of the proles because (1) they suspect them of wanting to steal all their stuff, and (2) they are perfectly aware how easy it would be to slide back to that contemptible state if they lose their tenuous grip on what little prosperity they have.

Over the centuries, human progress has gradually erased these boundaries and slowly a more egalitarian society has evolved, where the boundaries between these classes has started to blur. The social mobility has increased to the point where it doesn't take violence to move from one class to another and where a larger proportion of the population has come to collect in the center of the spectrum of power and wealth. The factors which have made this possible are the free market, public education, democracy and socialist principles merging together in a compromise forged by historical processes and human struggle. This process is still underway, by fits and starts, and will probably continue for eternity. At least, all good people hope so.

The bourgeosie fear this process, they fear it will deny them their God-given right to security and privilege, and they rationalize their opposition to this natural evolution by declaring themselves the sole inheritors of class characteristics which they refuse to see in others and which they feel they alone possess: among these are decency, the work ethic (middle class, of course, is there any other kind?), patriotism, piety, gentility, morality, charity, and a host of other fictions they have aped from the fantasies and conceits of the aristocracy and which they now claim for themselves alone.

There are good and evil men in all three classes because class membership is not genetic as the aristocracy would have us believe, or a sign of intellectual superiority as the bourgeosie has convinced itself. Class membership is purely a matter of luck, and although birth into a class is neither a guarantee nor a curse that you will stay there forever (as it once was), it still plays a major role in determining where most of us will spend our lives. Human progress can be measured by how quickly this paradigm is dismantled, and that process is ongoing and irreversible. This does not mean all humans are equal, or that they all deserve the same, or that people should not be rewarded for excellence or penalized for failing to contribute. What it means is that classes should not be given the right to engineer the conditions for their own perpetuation. Communicating this truth to the proletariat is the task of good men in both the aristocracy and the bourgeosie who understood this truth and its essential dignity.

Perhaps Shrek is playing a role in communicating this to our children, speaking for those men. The very fact you find this so disturbing I find comforting and reassuring.