Who Rules The World?

If there are three things you should take away from Peter Turchin's book, End Times, it is (i) civil war and social unrest lies at the junction of elite overproduction and popular immiseration; (ii) popular immiseration is the consequence of the wealth pump--driving down the costs of labor in order to funnel more and more money to the elites; and (iii) in modern Western democracies such as the United States, the average voters (i.e., the middle-class) have zero influence on government policy. 

    Turchin explains the wealth pump thusly:

The fruits of economic growth have to go somewhere. If the state’s revenues are a relatively constant proportion of GDP, while the wages of common workers claim a decreasing proportion, the fruits of economic growth will be reaped by the economic elites that include the top earners (e.g., CEOs, corporate lawyers) and owners of capital. It takes time, but eventually the wealth pumped from the common people to the elites results in elite overproduction, intraelite conflict, and, if not checked in time, state collapse and social breakdown. The rich are perhaps even more vulnerable than common people during such periods of social and political turbulence, as outcomes of social revolutions suggest.

 (End Times, p. 81). How do you decrease the relative wage of workers? In his article, "The Wealth Pump In America – Two Examples," John Wilder explains how it has been done domestically: through women entering the workforce and, when that reached saturation, blowing the borders wide-open. (The elites also have the option of shipping higher paid manufacturing jobs overseas to low wage countries, e.g., Japan at one time, later Korea, then Mexico, China and parts of South East Asia). 

    Charles Hue Smith discusses the interaction of elite overproduction and popular immiseration in his December 10, 2023, article, "Could America Have a French-Style Revolution?" He brings, in my opinion, two additional ideas considering Turchin's analysis. 

    First, that popular immiseration can be brought about by declining purchasing power vis-à-vis inflation (bold in original): "Another common factor driving the masses to revolt is when the essentials of life are no longer affordable or available in sufficient quantity. Historian David Hackett Fischer has documented the perilous impact of inflation, i.e. the collapse of the purchasing power of wages."  

    Second, through their hubris, "the elite becoming tone-deaf to their own excesses and the instability their excesses are generating within the system, an instability that's currently hidden beneath the resignation and distraction of the masses and the mute frustration of the second-tier elites facing lifetimes of insecurity." It doesn't have to be this way. As I noted in my review of Turchin's book, the American elites in the 1920s and 1930s--taking note of building instability--introduced reforms that largely staved off massive social unrest. But Smith seems to believe that the current elite are lacking the necessary introspection to sacrifice and be flexible. 

    A good example of this, I believe, is the adamant opposition to student loan relief among elite Republicans. They know that the laws (and loan contracts) already provide for student loan relief for those most loyal Democrat supporters--government workers and those working for the leftist NGOs--but would rather poke out their eyes than have it extended to Republican voters. 

    Another example is immigration. One of the key concessions of the elites in the 1920s was to slam the door shut on immigration, which lasted until 1965. You would think that given the unpopularity of illegal immigration, the associated crime, the housing crises, etc., that the elites would be willing to at least do something about illegal immigration, but not so! As I've been pointing out over the latest fight over Ukraine funding, a significant share of elites in government would rather let Russia crush Ukraine than fund border security.

    Smith also touches on the topic of the lack of influence of the common citizens, writing:

    The fundamental source of democracy's stability is the dynamic competition of various interests and the dynamic equilibrium of the three branches of the state each balancing the others by restraining the dominance of any one branch or interest.

    But extremes of inequality undermine this stability, as the wealthiest elites now bring such a preponderance of wealth to bear that each of the three branches of the state are now beholden to the interests of the few, leaving little recourse to the many.

    When the agenda and narratives have been shaped by the wealthiest elites' foundations, think tanks, corporate PR and lobbyists, then electing different representatives has little effect on the power structure.

    The masses can still influence cultural / social policies by voting in a liberal or conservative slate, but the distribution of wealth, power and resources remains unchanged.

Or as Vox Day recently noted, quoting from Turchin's book (underline added):

    The political scientist Martin Gilens, aided by a small army of research assistants, gathered a large data set—nearly two thousand policy issues between 1981 and 2002. Each case matched a proposed policy change to a national opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. The raw survey data provided information that enabled Gilens to separate the preferences of the poor (in the lowest decile of the income distribution) and the typical (the median of the distribution) from the affluent (the top 10 percent).

    Statistical analysis of this remarkable data set showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes. This is not entirely unexpected. What is surprising is that there was no—zilch, nada—effect of the average voter. The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent. There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies. Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

The consequence of this is that "issues on which the common people and the economic elites disagree are always--always--resolved in favor of the elites." (End Times, p. 130).

    But this raises an interesting question. If voters have zero influence over public policy decisions in democracies, who actually rules? Who are these wealthiest, most powerful elites?

    Back in October, Edward Ring wrote an article at American Greatness that explored this question. Entitled, "Who Rules the World?," it addressed the question of whether there is an uber-Elite above and beyond what even Turchin categorizes as the elites. He dismisses the standard conspiracy theories set forth about one or two handfuls of powerful families ("The Queen, The Vatican, The Gettys, The Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up. Oh, I hated the Colonel with is wee beady eyes, and that smug look on his face. 'Oh, you're gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhhh!'"--So I Married An Axe Murderer). He nevertheless believes it is a legitimate question:

    Asking the question “who runs the world” in this hypothetical manner doesn’t require a conspiracy theory. It’s a simple question, worth asking. Where is the power to alter human destiny most concentrated? Attempting to answer this inevitably takes us down a rabbit hole. But to refrain from asking is to act as if this doesn’t matter when it’s arguably the only thing that matters. Is it safe to assume the world is just a chaotic miasma of factions, hurtling into the future, or that if it isn’t, that the people in charge are acting in our best interests?

* * *

    ...  Anyone familiar with the ESG movement recognizes that it is being rolled out and enforced by banks and financial institutions who make access to cash, loans and investments contingent on compliance.

    Similarly, anyone watching the contemporary obsessions with gender ideology and climate alarm has to acknowledge that corporations have incorporated them into their products and marketing. And do corporations control governments? ...

    Regardless of how you calculate wealth and financial control, and who you determine occupy the top spots, it is probably naive to think that individuals with stupefying wealth would not also be controlling the most powerful institutions in the world.

* * *

    To explore the question of who, or what, operates unseen and yet largely determines our collective destiny may be a fool’s errand, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Maybe this global hierarchy, should it exist, evolved naturally and without the intervention of aliens or the inspiration of God contending with the temptations of Satan. But regardless of exactly how power is distributed at the highest levels, or whether it is right or wrong, it is increasingly concentrated in the hands of elite individuals and institutions, and preserving competition between them is one of the only ways we may hope to maintain whatever freedoms, or even illusions of freedom, we have left.

    The coordinated efforts to reset our entire civilization in order to prevent a “climate crisis” are an obvious and troubling example of elites grasping for more control, and less competition. And their agenda is so fatally flawed – renewables cannot power the global economy, and “owning nothing” does not make people happy, it destroys their character – that it is fair to wonder what truly motivates them? Satanic greed? Malevolent reptilian aliens gaining the upper hand in earth’s cosmic battlefield?

    A red-pilled American who is relentlessly bombarded with the same transparently false, transparently misanthropic messages from every mainstream institution can be forgiven for believing in conspiracy theories.

    So perhaps none of the details can be known, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exactly how things are.

He doesn't have an answer. It's obviously more than a fad: Journolist gave us a peak behind the curtain at how a conspiracy of journalists were able to shape and agree on what was reported (and what was ignored) in the news. Similarly, Sen. Chuck Schumer's comments about the intelligence agencies having seven ways to Sunday to retaliate against politicians they did not like was another peek. And it surely was no coincidence that 50 former intelligence officials all signed a letter falsely claiming Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation just when it might have become an issue in the 2020 election. And BlackRock telling the companies in which it invested that they must enacted various diversity and environment goals in order to obtain financing. 

    We are sort of in the position of someone in the 1940s trying to figure out whether organized crime existed and what power it exerted, with those in authority (Herbert Hoover and the FBI) saying it was a myth and there was no Mafia.