> That is exactly what hereditary peerage is. The few, by definition. The aristocracy.
Not true at all - there's nothing special about having a rich land-owner in your ancestry - most people do.
In fact, now, after a few centuries of reversion to the mean, the hereditary peers are the only people in government who are representative, in the statistical sense.
(Not that this is related in any way to the actual reason why this is being done - the actual motive is that a hereditary peer is necessarily British, and Starmer hates the British and wants them disenfranchised so that he can continue with their destruction. But that's another story..)
You and Searle both seem to not understand a simple, obvious fact about the world, which is that (inhomogenous) things don't have the same thing inside. A chicken pie, for example, doesn't have any chicken pie inside. There's chicken inside, but that's not chicken pie. There's sauce, vegetables and pastry, but those aren't chicken pie either. All these things together still may not make a chicken pie. The 'chickenpieness' of the pie is an additional fact, not derivable from any facts about its components.
As with pie, so with 'understanding'. A system which understands can be expected to not contain anything which understands. So if you find a system which contains nothing which understands, this tells you nothing about whether the system understands[0].
Somehow both you and Searle have managed to find this simple fact about pie to be 'the grip of an ideology' and 'metaphysical'. But it really isn't.
[0] And vice-versa, as in Searle's pointlessly overcomplicated example of a system which understands Chinese containing one which doesn't containing one which does.