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Do you believe the world is controlled by competing interests, or do you think there is a "power elite" that controls the world from the background?
There are lots of localized ideas about who runs the world, like oligarchs in Russia or billionaires in America or Rupert Murdoch and his media empire, but if there was anyone coordinating the activities of these disparate groups I would think it would be someone doing things without a public presence, so as not to draw a target on their back.
I've seen this idea alluded to a lot, but never really fleshed out before.
The world, society & economic systems are so unbelievably complex that I find it doubtful (and a bit naive) that a handful of elites could control it all, at least intentionally.
Does the world change based on the decisions of the few? Sure. Do they sit at a table or cocktail bar to plan it ahead of time? I doubt it.
I'd say there is a bit of both. It's preposterous that a cluster of people could control the whole world, or even a whole nation. There's certainly no unified consensus.
However, the rich and powerful have rich and powerful friends. We know from our history that they use this to their and their buddies advantages. We have entire swaths of law intended to mitigate this effect. There's always going to be backroom deals nobody knows about until way later. A more benign example: Microsoft is only Microsoft because Bill's mom had an in. Without that he'd probably have just been another flop in the stack-heap of failed 90's startups.
I don't think Murdoch is the leader (or puppet) of a secret cabal...but I do think he looks out for the interests of his buddies, and if one of them complains about a thorn in their side at a golf game...he controls a media empire to help build/bust public support.
How long was Epstein Island a thing? Epstein Island was basically just one big cocktail bar for the rich and powerful to discuss without the prying ear of the public. And does anybody seriously believe that was the only such island or resort?
And ultimately, this is why wealth inequality is one of the largest problems. A large number of moderately wealthy can't easily conspire the way 5 billionaires can. And the wealthier someone is, the more they are able to leverage that wealth to make outsized influence on the world...usually in service of further building that wealth.
I think that's the main problem: That perpetual wealth-building in our current dominant economic system disproportionately benefits the already-wealthy, while often coming at the expense of those whom help build that wealth.
More than that: the concept of networking isn't a conspiracy, it's just a fact of life.
Social groups made up exclusively of billionaires are very exclusive (because there's thousands of wannabe gold-diggers for every billionaire), and thus somewhat insular. And whenever there's an echochamber, it's really easy for them to rationalize that their position in the world is good and just.
Yeah - I mean name me a culture that doesn't value financial success at all? Or - at what point is just having supportive friends different from "living in an echo chamber"? I'm not trying to fight or criticize - just saying that having a functioning healthy society is kind of a complicated thing.
I may think about this stuff too much.
The difference is no matter how much my friends like me and agree with me, I still have to go to work, run errands, and generally deal with people who have no reason to kiss my ass and tell me how great I am.
A billionaire is mostly spending time with other billionaires or employees who aren't really in a position to criticize his ideas and opinions.
#at what point is just having supportive friends different from "living in an echo chamber"?
I think the difference is the power balance. In friendship both of you usually want to be in the relationship but are willing to break off if some lines are crossed and end the friendship.
In an echo chamber either a group of people are trying to please one person (either for personal gain or admiration) or a collective are only allowed to express a specific opinion with anything else locked outside, making it so each individual has to conform or get left out, without the collective caring.
I agree? Like the lines are really fuzzy right? I'm thinking about like High School cliques, or fraternities... and then zoom way out to like how Prigozhin was just Putin's cook. It's just turtles and gangsters all the way down. Where I am in the US it's kind of standard fare to have a group of "ride or die" friends.
To name a few, Native American and Native African cultures used to be this way before colonialism came in and upended everything. Many native African tribes didn't even have a concept of property ownership. There are also examples of this among Native American cultures. An object might be kept by someone who looked after it, but anyone was free to use it.
FWIW, there are several cultures that didn't place much value on financial success. Tang/Song China is an especially sharp contrast, but medieval Europe works as well—it wasn’t socially stigmatised here as it was in China, but nor was it held in particular esteem outside of a handful of specific enclaves.
@vord I agree with the idea that there is a bit of both, but less in the sense that the ultra wealthy are actively conspiring to do so, they are just better positioned to take advantage of chaotic systems (such that exist on earth and throughout the rest of the universe) because their wealth and capital provide less friction when opportunities present because of disaster.
To look directly at @grayscail ' s question that world is being controlled from "the background" I think that needs a bit more definition as I think there is definitely a scale here.
What would we consider the background in this regard?
WARNING: I'm about to get extremely hyperbolic and silly here.
I would interpret that as a group of lets say five (five points to a pentagram, SATANISM?!) is meeting behind closed doors and is voting yay / neigh (lets say their horses while we're at it) on if we do chemtrails, if we convince people of global warming, that we release a virus so we can alter people's DNA to lower their vibration to the source of the universe and be closed off to universal truth, lets put fluoride in the water to calcify people's pineal glands as well.
I don't think anything like that is happening
But while we're here, lets take a look at some of the things people believe are controlling from the background like this:
On one extreme end you've got folx who state that the worlds elite are actually lizards (origin of said lizards will vary with millage, some say the center of the earth, other say from the Draco star system and are at war with benevolent aliens from the Lyra star system. A rabbit hole for the morbidly curious ).
This has some overlap into a less extreme (still very extreme in my view) "the world is run by a cabal of baby murdering, adrenochrome drinking immortals" which I think was some of the underlying ideology of QAnon.
These ideas are connected to some very old anti-judaic mythos and conspiracies known as blood libel
This spreads out into the (still extreme in my view mind you) less fantastical theories that "jews / banks / media" run the world. I think the idea that people of the Jewish faith are the blame in this regard is ridiculous.
I think much of what we see is best explained by Naomi Klien's book The Shock Doctrine which spends a lot of time looking at disaster capitalism.
I think it is fair to say that many corporations that benefit from disasters and wars lobby the US Government to be involved with things.
On the surface I don't disagree with this statement @vord, I think more often than not those with wealth are better positioned to take advantage of major shifts that occur during / after disaster and monumental change because of their wealth, rather than actively conspiring to control the masses. Often what they do during this time allows them to better secure more wealth and assets.
I think that the quote from Steven Universe that @moocow1452 sums it up beautifully. To add to it, a lot of people fall into conspiratorial think due to fear. People then utilize and manipulate that fear to get what they want.
How do we best inoculate the population against such tactics and commit to critical thinking / reasoning?
IMO the answer to that last question is having a functional social safety net so nobody has to literally fear for their lives. That's bad for mental health, and bad for everyone.
Totally agree with this @HerosJourneyMadness - sadly it seems that there has been the fear mongering of "Social Safety Net = Communism/Socialism/ETC" which isn't really helpful.
This in turn makes it easier to keep people in the fear / manipulation loop.
I like to think of it in terms of colluding agar.io players, where your wealth is the size of your "blob". If all the biggest blobs agree to work together and only eat smaller blobs, there's nothing the smaller blobs can really do.
Also as an individual as your "blob" (wealth) increases in size, the game becomes easier to play since you have less actual competition, just the illusion of competition from tiny futureless blobs.
It's a depressing analogy, but I think it kind of works as an extreme simplification.
As a fan of agar.io, I commend you.
Yep. I have family members who are conspiracy theorists, and this is the argument that helps keep me sane when the topic somehow, despite our best efforts to avoid it, comes up. For example, regarding "chem trails," I think about all the people who would have to keep quiet about everything. Pretty much everyone who does airplane maintenance would know that there was a secret chemical-spewing port (or whatever it is) on every single plane that supposedly spews geoengineering chemicals. Every single one of these people are being bribed or threatened to keep quiet?
It's all just so preposterous. I'm willing to believe that there are people out there trying and sometimes succeeding at making shady shit happen, but when you get down to the level of tons of average people going along with it, it just doesn't make sense.
The rabbit hole always goes so much deeper
You'd have hundreds of engineers required to develop and manufacture such a product, and tons of people in academia and science who would want to publish scientific data on this mond altering technology to recieve recognition for their achievements
Imagine the sheer amount of material that would constantly need to be funneled into airports if every single airliner was spewing an aerosol during their entire flight?
You’d need tanks bigger than the fuel tanks onboard the planes, and you’d need massive tanker trucks driven by drivers who legally need to know what they’re hauling pouring into airports constantly.
All you have to do to validate your theory is look at real life examples of large conspiracies.
The biggest, most expensive, and most tightly controlled conspiracy of all time is most likely the Manhattan project. It involved over 100,000 people the vast majority of whom believed they were working for the very existence of a free way of life, and lasted five years, a tiny fraction of the number of people who would need to be involved in a chemtrail conspiracy lasting decades.
Even still, it generated over 1500 leaks, and that was well before the advent of the internet. Most governments involved in WW2 had a pretty good idea what the United States was doing, even if they didn’t necessarily know how feasible it was.
We’ve never heard anything from any credible source as evidence for a chemtrail experience. It would be a literal miracle to be able to get that many people to keep a secret for that long, especially for something that most of them wouldn’t even morally agree with.
Not that I don't agree with you, but can you share the source for 1500 leaks in the Manhattan project? I would like to read more about it.
this is a good read. The soviets especially had a LOT of information about the project, one of the contributing factors for why they were able to develop a bomb of their own so soon after the war.
I'll plug CGP Grey's Rules for Rulers, which I think makes this point better than I could. It's not just that systems like the government are complex; rather, by their size they must necessarily spread their power outward as you head downward. For example, even though the US President is the figurehead of the US government, the President has essentially no power (nor, in general, awareness) over local zoning disputes.
This remains true for authoritarian governments, albeit to a more limited extent. In principle a dictator could overrule any local official, but in practice there are too many local officials to micromanage every facet of life.
For me it’s not just that they’re complex but that they don’t run smoothly at all. I would expect things to be working together much better if it was all secretly controlled by a small group. Of course we can start introducing other conspiracy elements like “they make it look messy on purpose so people don’t suspect” but what would be the point of that, really? It just starts to all sounds a bit like a plot from Scooby Doo.
I actually can sort of imagine plans being cooked up over cocktails, but not in a nefarious way. More like two world leaders have a chat, they have an idea together and then they take it back to their respective parliaments to discuss and work on
I think the nefarious is more of a byproduct of being so abstracted from what this looks like 'on the ground' that the consequences aren't seen from the top till after the fact. It's not that they're malicious, just ignorant.
I see it as one of the poorest in a rich neighborhood all the time. There's this immense rich-privilege blindness for the struggles of people whom live on less than $80,000, let alone poverty.
To your ignorant, I would also add indifferent and apathetic to how life feels for most of us.
This idea - of a group of elites controlling the world - tends to be pushed by right wing anti-semetic people. It's a focal point of a lot of conspiracies where lizard people or aliens secretly control the world. Some people fall for this stuff because it's easier for them to think that the world is simpler than it really is, and that there's an easy explanation for all troubles in the world.
David Icke wrote a lot about the lizard people angle, but it's all a big dogwhistle for blaming Jewish people for all the world's problems. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion spawned a lot of this as far as I know, but blaming every problem on Jews goes back millenia. It's the modern version of that particular hatred.
For all the hand-wringing some do about an elite few who control "everything," I think on some level they must take comfort in the idea that "everything" is controllable in the first place. That it's just a matter of getting the bad guys' hands off the steering wheel, as opposed to the fact that there is no wheel, and never was, and all the chaos of the world is just emergent properties of the intermingling of many complex systems. The desire for an orderly world is more threatened by that prospect than the notion that we're merely in a temporary, reversible state of disorder.
Yeah tbh it's a shame this post went up after the post about people using dogwhistles on tildes because there's almost nothing more laden with antisemitic dogwhistles than the idea that there's a cabal of elites controlling the world from the background. Almost every conspiracy theory (but ESPECIALLY those of this flavor) inevitably flows back to antisemitism. It's honestly kind of amusing how consistently they do (or it would be if it weren't so harmful).
Yeah, there is a ton of metaphorical spilled inc trying to pretend that "globalist" or terms like that are not just thinly veiled anti-Semitism, but it always is. At best, the defense is "yes, we use archaic anti-Semitic tropes to describe the small elite, but it's no Jews, we swear".
You are right that these ideas frequently lead to or overlap with antisemitism. However, speaking as someone who did not grow up with much money but has worked for wealthy clients and reads history, not everyone who is nervous about concentration of power into the hands of the extremely wealthy is antisemitic. The antisemitism is used by the power brokers to divert attention and it frequently works.
But also as I said in my other comment, the world and the economy are very large and very complicated and unpredictable. Some people have more influence than others but everything is in flux, people work at cross purposes and things can't be known for certain.
Absolutely. I agree that the extremely wealthy hold disproportionate power in the world. I think the anti-semetic issue arises when people starting believing that there is a cabal or conspiracy behind events, and not just independent selfish people acting towards their own interests. A lot of the conspiracy theories also tend to make out the evil elites as in complete control, as opposed to the more complicated reality that nobody is in complete control.
You're still talking apples and oranges though. One topic is whether or not there's clandestine collaboration at "the top" - and the other - which you brought in - is antisemitism. I disagree that this has to arise whenever there is mention of "a cabal or conspiracy". IMO bringing this into the conversation... with Lizard People no less... just easily derails, maligns, or damages what is otherwise a decent discussion. Why go straight to the proverbial bottom?
I think discussing all aspects of the topic is important, and it'd be dishonest to ignore a reason people might believe there is a single entity controlling the world.
On an aside, the reason lizard people are used as a cover for anti-semitism is partly because of the ridiculous nature of the topic - not in spite of how it sounds. If people don't take it seriously and let discussion about them flourish, it spawns anti-semetic discussions disguised under a silly veneer.
In my personal experience, this viewpoint has reliably been thinly veiled anti-semitism. I'm happy to hear about any counterexamples that buckle the trend.
I respectfully disagree that all aspects are important. I won’t engage about lizard people or antisemitism anymore. That’s not the topic at hand.
What do you expect people to provide you with as counterexamples? I know plenty of those people, but they're just people I know, not an article saying "80% of grand conspiracists are antisemitic, but the other 20% just sometimes mistake a veiled antisemitic essay for kosher".
Considering the history of the word "cabal," I think it would be dishonest to not mention antisemitism any time the word comes up.
That is pretty interesting- and just to clarify- my intention is not to diminish the impact and horrors of antisemitism. I’ve a passing understanding of the fraud called The Protocols of Zion and that long long history of Othering.
I’d just rather talk about how and who and why we ARE being manipulated. Yes- some of its very silly, but some of its not.
George Carlin has a great summary on this. There isn’t some evil cabal but you do have a lot of powerful people with similar interests and incentives.
That doesn’t mean they’re anywhere near complete control or planning things out but it does mean that yes they will often agree on what’s best for them and those like them.
What’s important to recognize from this is that it’s something you can influence through various policies but you have to get people to stop believing in nonsense Illuminati conspiracies first
吾見其不得已。
天下神器，
不可為也。
為者敗之，
執者失之。
或行或隨，
或歔或吹，
或強或羸，
或挫或隳。
是以聖人
去甚，
去泰，
去奢。
Wú jiàn qí bùdé yǐ.
Tiānxià shén qì,
Bùkě wéi yě.
Wéi zhě bài zhī,
Zhí zhě shī zhī.
Huò xíng huò suí,
Huò xū huò chuī,
Huò qiáng huò léi,
Huò cuò huò huī.
Shìyǐ Shèngrén
Qù shèn,
Qù tài,
Qù shē.
I see you will not succeed.
The world is a spiritual vessel
And cannot be controlled.
Those who control, fail.
Those who grasp, lose.
Some go forth, some are led,
Some weep, some blow flutes,
Some are strong, some superfluous,
Some oppress, some are destroyed.
Therefore the Sage
Casts off extremes,
Casts off excess,
Casts off extravagance.
Full passage with variants can be found here.
I mean, no, there is no one power group that controls the world. The world is divided into competing geopolitical alliances and each country has its own influential people. Influential in business does not necesarily mean influential in Geopolitics.
Do powerful people associate with other super rich people and have more influence on events than the rest of us? Obviously yes. But if you read history, plans fail. Events are unpredictable. People stab each other in the back. Popular movements change things. There are competing groups jockeying, to the extent that groups even exist. Many of the rich and powerful are in it for themself and their family only.
And I think that's really it. When you have multi-generational wealth, that manifests as "elites rule the world", because building multi-generational wealth from nothing is still the exception rather than the rule.
The conspiracy stuff (basically everything that is typically discussed that @pi-rat brought up) is unquestionably anti-semetic. But when average people start seeing pictures of political dynasties like Bush and Clinton rubbing noses with other wealthy people (especially criminals), it triggers that monkeybrain stuff @bitwaba referred to.
Pair that with actual conspiracy stuff like "Fruit company pressures USA to deploy military to protect profits on bananas" which happens all the time. And compared to the influence an average person has on the world.....that's basically 2 steps from God.
I'd wager if wealth inequality were brought back in check, the conspiracy furor would die down substantially.
It's true that multi-generational wealth is a factor in American politics, but many of the richest people in the world weren't born extravagantly wealthy. Even going back to the Gilded Age, many robber barons came from humble beginnings and just got lucky with their entrepreneurship.
Sure figures like Bill Gates and Elon Musk came from wealthy families, but there is a massive differences between tens of millions of dollars and billions of dollars. The vast majority of intergenerational wealth is actually squandered. 90% of families lose their intergenerational wealth by the third generation. The idea of "elites" and "old money" is more in line with old-world aristocracy and social class than multi-generational economic class.
This actually isn't as solid as was previously expected.
I don't have the relevant stats on hand right now (although would be willing to provide them later today) on which a pair of studies in Sweden and in Florence demonstrated that as a whole both of these societies had very high correlation between wealth a few centuries ago (the span varying between studies due to the datasets they relied upon) and contemporary.
Not every descendant will remain wealthy, but odds are at least a few of them will.
That's what I'm kinda referring to. Actually retaining multigenerational wealth is rare. And growing it the way the robber barons did, required a level of ruthlessness that shouldn't be tolerated.
It's that 10% (or the 1% if you will) where the systemic problems start rising.
@vord thanks for taking the time to read what I said, greatly appreciate it.
I whole heartily agree that if we were able to bring wealth inequality in check things would seem a little less tin-foil hat all the time.
This I think is a really important point to bring up; as often there are some nuggets of truth in the conspiracy (such as wealthy people / corporations) holding way too much sway over how things go in the world in the name of profit. I find though, often these things (governments stepping in on corporations, coups being lead by people trained by the US government , etc are all available as public knowledge. Conspiracies that are completely outlandish that are linked to some of the things that are real can just easily be waved away.
EG: Why would you believe that nut job? Lizard people from the center of the hollow flat earth? Just ridiculous to believe that, and that person also is saying we encouraged a coup in Honduras that put a drug dealer in power, allowed multinational power corporations kill first nation activists , and has significantly contributed to the immigration crisis we face in our own country? That's just ridiculous!
Apologies for the hyperbolic US centric bit above, but hopefully it illustrates the point I'm trying to make (real evil shit happens all the time no one talks about it though).
It is my personal belief that the real conspiracy is that the world governments are truly incompetent when it comes down to it and letting people believe they are more powerful than they are gives them power by fiat.
Generally not till decades later, especially now...but otherwise yes.
Fair enough. I guess the point I was attempting to make is that a lot is available even now, yet people stretch to find things from the imaginary.
Background? No.
They don't exactly hide it, from Murdoch to Musk to Putin. Them conspiring or not is irrelevant. I don't believe they do. They simply share enough goals, and structural biases put them on the same paths. They own newspapers, social media, billions of bots, many politicians. Consent can be manufactured, and then people will vote or even violently support someone quite clearly acting against their best interest. There's no reason to form Illuminati or something, the organization is emergent from the system, and the hiding evidently unnecessary for survival.
Right? I mean the ones you mentioned are only the ones us plebes know about - the ones 'out front' taking the heat. Who knows how else the world has been shaped in more clandestine ways. The southern 1/2 of the the Americas is STILL in turmoil so the US can have $0.15 bananas.
You probably know this, but there is of course a very good book by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky on this very subject that I would encourage anyone interested in this discussion to read.
Honestly it boils down to two things for me; unending human greed and an innate desire for people to have simple answers to complex problems. Rather than try to wrap their head around finances and banking, it's easier for some to just pin the blame on some nebulous "shadow state" conspiracy or George Soros.
Human's greatest superpower is being able to pattern match and extrapolate from data.
We're so good at it that we can even find patterns where there are none.
To be fair, the details around ownership of assets, international finance and banking and geopolitics and import and export relationships are somewhat camoflaged if you don't know what you are looking at.
Yes, but the point was rather than understand the system, it's easier for people to blame some faceless group of "evil doers" who apparently control all strings of society.
I don't think anyone - not any person, or any group of people, nor any single organisation - controls the world in any meaningful way.
There are certainly people, and groups, and organisations, who have a large sway in particular regions or in particular industries or in particular cultures. But noone controls the world.
If there was someone controlling the world... they're bloody incompetent!
I want to trade replies with this guy.
Yea, controlled is the wrong word, as it would imply that they're succeeding. It would be foolish to say they weren't trying to control the world though. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing the influencing.
Perhaps its just a language thing from having multiple meanings of control, ranging from "exerting influence" and "steering like a car." Conspiracy theorists almost exclusively use the latter while sane people use the former.
This is a more eloquent version of what I was trying to say also. Anyone who has studied WW1 knows that what the elites believe and intend and plan does not map one to one with what actually happens.
No… and kind of? Sorry this is all over the place - I ran out of time.
This topic is my jam - I think that - No - nobody is "controlling" things - but that some conglomeration of power structures - not limited to individual billionaires - do "manipulate" things to steer the direction of events - and not always in an altruistic direction.
I think the world is driven by greed. I think wars over land are being supplanted by economic battles (even Ukraine is pretty economically motivated). It’s not organized, but every player- be it company, board, owner, law enforcement, or middle manager- is incentivized to act in their own interest. In a dysfunctional legal landscape where money is considered the same as speech and corporations have legal personhood, and politicians are forced onto the money treadmill called campaigning… moneyed interests have all the power. I don't think that happened by design or with intention to the extent that it has, but I think entrenched power structures perpetuate it because altering this is a threat.
Lawrence Lessig - one of my heroes - gave a series talks about "Institutional Corruption" in the mid-10s that went over like a ton of bricks. Pretty sure it iced him out of discussions because we don't hear much about him anymore. I'd guess nobody could get past the word "corruption" -It's a pretty recriminating word - but, if you look at the qualifier - "Institutional" - that's where the fix can be found.
If you're interested in listening to what I like to conspiratorially think is one of the talks that caused the GOP to go full terrorist 2 years later, this is Larry's first talk on the topic... it's a great way to spend an hour (starts after a long boring intro):
https://youtu.be/CgAcGuxy-yo?si=5JTU-XZ3FNf3_YXE&t=795
That said- I do think we are being manipulated. I think social media - maybe even this site - definitely Reddit and Twitter are used to distract and propagandize and radicalize. But I think the purpose is actually to undermine trust in institutions that threaten established power structures. If Reddit is successful at helping people organize and that hurts Wall Street, then it is turned into a cesspool of rouge mods and the main app the leaders of the movement use is suddenly ripped away in the name of profits and an IPO.
If Colour Revolutions get started on Twitter, then Elon Musk goes in and dismantles it at the behest of billionaire despots
If towns start building their own fiber networks, then Comcast gets the FCC to outlaw that.
The list goes on… and it does tend to get tinfoil-hat-ish but there is a ton of actual weird crazy shit happening all the time.
I think the deterioration of US public schools was allowed to happen because charter/private schools make money and influence and politicians like giving the tax breaks. Did anybody outright SAY "we need to keep the masses dumb so we have a labor force to exploit and subjugate"? I would like to think not, but I did have a coach who used to say "the world needs ditch diggers too"... so...
I wonder sometimes if someone put together enough historical context we could better see the extent of "steering" that happens. I have a fantasy of some amazing data analyst who takes all the amazing people who have worked trying to 'change the system' and died premature deaths and did a statistical analysis that determines there's X likelyhood that Y percentage of these people were killed.
Nah, I find it doubtful that anyone powerful could collaborate well enough to pull that off. They’re all demonstrably petty, self interested, and illogical.
Seems more likely — and terrifying — that we’re simply hurtling into the future on a runaway train conducted by the extremely wealthy and generationally powerful, who bicker non stop over the controls, and endlessly stab each other in the back to get a better view out the window.
Kinda explains why everything keeps going to heck (please pardon my language).
C. Wright Mills in his book The Power Elite describes a large number of different elites such as the people who own the trailer parks and car dealerships in a small town, academics, military generals, billionaires, etc. That’s the way to think about it. Although this book dates back to the 1950s it is a good read today because of the framework and methods that it uses.
I think conspiracy theories are one of the many pernicious movements that take the place of religion today. That is, people find the idea that “somebody” is in control of it all comforting and the belief helps them find meaning in a world that can seem meaningless.
Note there are ideas like “the invisible hand” of the marketplace that appeal to social physics and a certain interpretation of Marxism where people are driven to behave in the interest of “capital” itself. For instance your phone company won’t upgrade slow DSL to fast fiber because the copper network itself can still make money without competition or the old US Steel pursued protectionism in the 1970s because the obsolete blast furnaces could make money if competition was curtailed or Elliot Capital Management hounded Argentina because money was going to make somebody reproduce the meaning and power of money.
I've read articles in the last few years about private equity buying up trailer parks.
That’s really bad. I just learned how private equity is like 90% of what’s wrong with the US in this podcast episode:
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-the-daily-zeitgeist-28516718/episode/who-killed-the-free-ambulance-its-118097697/
(Well, that and the lizard people) (I kid!)
Yeah. 90 percent might be an extreme figure, but see also these articles
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/er-doctor-private-equity-in-medicine-is-dangerous-to-patients
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/more-orthopedic-physicians-sell-out-to-private-equity-firms-raising-alarms-about-costs-and-quality/
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/funeral-homes-private-equity-death-care/
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/private-equity-ophthalmology-eye-care-high-profit-procedures/
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/noble-health-private-equity-rural-hospitals-missouri-employees-medical-bills/
Ahh the old Reddit hyperbole bleeding through in my writing again. Yeah, who knows… but I should drop a link to the guest’s book - I’ve not read it, but looks good:
https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/brendan-ballou/plunder/9781541702103/
As a lifelong and diehard hyperboleator, I thoroughly resent the implication that blame for the practice lies at reddit's feet.
Thank you for that word. I’m going to have to incorporate it into my normal vocabulary.
I think it's easy to underestimate the power of ideologies as ready-made frameworks for coordinating the actions of power blocs. It's not shadowy powerful individuals cabal'ing in shadowy lairs.
Transnational neoliberalism1 has been a coordinating ideology for finance, trade governance, and equity since the 1980's. The public failures of this ideology (inequality, industry consolidation, environmental and health externalities, etc.) are resulting in new coordinating ideologies in reaction - authoritarian nationalism seems to be the current result. That means resource extraction, property owners, military, and religious power blocs are becoming ascendant.
Neither ideological pole is particularly unfriendly to wealth protection, which is the primary motivator for the billionaire power bloc. The media power bloc has a historical alignment with the billionaires, regardless of ideology.
And that leaves the rest of us in the fragile shelter of democratic institutions, or rushing to adopt whatever new polar alignment offers the most safety.
So yes, you could say that the world is controlled by competing interests, but those interests are best summed up under ideological headings.
1 There's a really excellent recent series of interviews on post-neoliberalism here.
I both thank and curse you for that link... I'm now deep in that rabbithole. My favorite excerpt so far, from the Amy Kapczynski interview, because it clearly articulates my vision for what a socialist, UBI-enhanced market, or anarcho-communist society might look like (emphasis mine). It's nice to see that people smarter than me have been discussing this for some time:
Replacing the "market will provide" with "we will provide" when it comes to providing our societal needs. Many interpret that "share work that no one wants to do" as "forced labor," but that sorta comes with the territory when coming up with a fair system of distributing unpleasant labor: Everyone whom is able needs to contribute.
The dynamics of our world are built out of competing interests, but there have been such limits placed on the ability for anyone but the most ruthless and determined to meaningfully impact change for as long as we've had society that, based on the way esteem and wealth are handed down generationally, it can appear like there's evidence for a concerted and effective directly powerful council of some sort if you forget to remember all the millions of fuckups and interpersonal spats and the utter frailty of human mind and collaboration on which this conspiracy would be built upon. Our brains just can't conceive of global complexity. People try to control everything though. That doesn't mean they do, or have, but there's no way that most people who end up in the position of running fifteen companies including propaganda manufacturers don't think they deserve to decide what tomorrow looks like.
Most of the discussion I'm reading is focusing on famous billionaires, which underlines another way the general public is blind to the breathe of this issue, as many have pointed out in other ways. There are over 4,000 billionaires in the world, each of us could maybe list 20 max. Of course they're conspiring in private, but not like batman villains.
Like so many have pointed out, our world is vast and complicated. One person, let alone a dozen, probably can't "Control" it like we think. But much in the way animals collective behavior can impact the ecosystem they live in, the way the biggest and strongest in our food chain behave effects ours. The mindset these people have when they pursue something ripples through sectors of our economy and can definitely alter it's functionality, rippling into other sectors. If I decide to paint my house gray, I may impact my two neighbors decisions about their paint colors when the time comes to repaint. My impact is small. But the people we're discussing don't need to know someone to talk to them, they can still get a meeting. Our grasp is so, unbelievably, shorter than the average billionaire and that's not even differentiating between the classes of billionaires.
Undeniably they meet and discuss their plans/opinions, but it's probably mostly business. But "Just business" can extend into the Supreme Court as we have recently learned. "Just business" can get forests clear cut or oceans pillaged. The whims of these people, most of whom we can't even name, ripple much further than anyone in this thread.
I think there are individual competing entities that occasionally work together out of convenience flailing about causing most societal ills simply as they seek their own benefits. Nobody is control, and the harm/evil are entirely random.
I think there's basically a conspiracy of self-interested fools, but even these are less conspiracy, more damaging things while flailing about acting out of "rational self-interest" or guided by their own ideology.
To what end would a single covert group control everything?
These conspiracies and shady deals come about when there's something to be gained or achieved, not just for the fun of it. If there's nothing to gain then there's no reason to control it.