We're not taught this stuff because it's pure elitism [. . .]

But let's get real: my buddy went to good schools with the kids of other people who wanted to send their kids to good schools and while we can be mad that Felicity Huffman paid for her kid to get in on a tennis scholarship or whatever, the fact of the matter is the world has been run by Old Boy's Clubs since it was Thag and Ag and always will be. Both books argue that these networks are not aberrations but are the archetypal human response to organization - you need a hierarchy for officialdom and you need a network to accomplish things in spite of the hierarchy (the "tower" and the "square" of Ferguson's book).

It certainly seems like an archetypal human response. I didn't see the connection until you point it out, but C.S. Lewis wrote much more generally about the inner ring (and then warns us that the desire to be in the inner ring is responsible for a lot of the evil):

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

This all said, I still just see the OP as a beacon to like-minded people. Not a celebration per se, but a hey, gather round if this sounds like it's up your alley and it seems like right up Hubski Road.