When I was a kid, I played Deus Ex. I was about 17 years ol…

In the story, of course, this has disastrous consequences. The systems are too vast and complex. The answer ends up being:

"They'd ruin everybody's life until they ran the whole system off a cliff."

But the genie was out of the bottle, for my young mind at least. The idea of secret cabals of the ultra wealthy and politically connected, exerting influence over the unfolding of history...

It was appealing. To imagine at least that someone was in a driver's seat.

Somewhere.

And look, it's not like there aren't clubs.

There are, literally, clubs. The Ivy League buys little hangouts in different major cities, so alums can efficiently transact that lucrative network. There's douchier, nouveau riche versions of the same. Cliques, associations, name it.

But it turns out, there's no board room somewhere secret.

In practice, there's no global board of directors. The system isn't that tidy. It's all the chaotic grasping of people desperate to keep themselves safe, and therefore powerful.

The alignment of the elites is emergent.

Any sufficiently aligned class interest is indistinguishable from a conspiracy.

They don't need to meet.

They don't need cloak and dagger coordination, though surely alliances form and shatter over time.

They just want all the same, basic things.

Rich people want to stay rich.

The world works as it does because of this simple fact.

Even the wealthy people who disagree don't fundamentally want to demolish the system over those disagreements because that would risk their comfort and safety

This makes sense. The defining feature of life is that it survives.

Money, power, they're the same substance in different states, like ice and water:

Ability to survive.

Humans are organisms that have been tuned by billions of years of evolution to survive and propagate.

That is the circuitry that has been honed on a timescale so vast that it will make your head cave in. It's mundane to us because we all have a version of the code.

But you set this survival drive of ours into an economic niche that's too juicy, and it will go into a feedback loop of cosmic proportions.

When guys are keeping so much money for themselves at the pointless expense of the workers who keep the machine running, that's illness.

The same way that a correct, normal biological function can corrupt itself and start cannibalizing all of the tissues in your body

Wealth collides with automation to gobble up resources and redirect them out of the larger system for narrow, dubious benefit.

But it's not just the wealth derangement that's an emergent outcome of preserving the status quo.

All these brains, all this basic human attachment to justice and fairness—you need stories to manage, to justify, the inequality.

So nothing needs to change.

Hate is both the mortar and the lubrication of an unequal society.

You need hate to justify excluding people from their fair share of the resources. So you decide they don't deserve it. Come up with reasons their judgment and values created their poverty and powerlessness.

With that hate, consensus hardens against doing things that would change the policy that created the inequality.

So they fucking HATE AOC because she won't play ball. She's sitting there, unapologetic, demanding a fair share for people like her.

https://t.co/eiV5P6LmVg

Some of these folks just really hate her so much. It\u2019s not even a stretch, the conclusion of this chain. And that tweet drips with disdain. pic.twitter.com/sZ7qnLgFA9
— Karla Monterroso (@karlitaliliana) December 19, 2020

They don't come for Katie Porter like they come for ~the squad~. Never quite the same energy. Why?

Because if these women, none of whom are white, are correct about how we've shared the wealth in this country...

That's it. The status quo has been illegitimate forever.

So the rich people get the poor people who look like them to hate all the people who do NOT look like them

And boom, the rich don't need to worry about redistribution of their ill-gotten wealth. That's the American scam, and they've pulled scams like it everywhere in history.

It's not a chessboard.

There are no grandmasters setting the course.

It's a storm. It's a chaotic system of organisms desperate to survive. From those seeds, complex patterns play out.

No Illuminati. Just similarities between people with the same standing in that system.

When I was a kid, I played Deus Ex. I was about 17 years old at the time.

I was able to understand that DX was a cartoon version of its subject matter. But it nonetheless captured my imagination, asking

"What if the entire planet could be managed by mere mortals?"

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When I was a kid, I played Deus Ex. I was about 17 years old at the time.I was able to understand that DX was a cartoon version of its subject matter. But it nonetheless captured my imagination, asking"What if the entire planet could be managed by mere mortals?"

More from Life

You May Also Like

When I was a kid, I played Deus Ex. I was about 17 years old at the time.

I was able to understand that DX was a cartoon version of its subject matter. But it nonetheless captured my imagination, asking

"What if the entire planet could be managed by mere mortals?"