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.
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.
Humans just lead short, boring, insignificant lives, so they make up stories to feel like they're a part of something bigger. They want to blame all the world's problems on some single enemy they can fight, instead of a complex network of interrelated forces beyond anyone's control.
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.
I don't think so. I think it gives people comfort though to think the state of the world is in some way intentional, even if there's malice behind that intent. Because that means you can change the world for the better by simply changing how those elites act, or getting rid of them.
It's scarier for people to consider that we are flying blind in many ways and that chance has a lot more to do with our state of affairs than we'd like to admit. Because admitting that means you have to give up on the idea of changing the world, and have to settle instead for trying to change your own life. Which asks for a lot more agency, self-responsibility and effort out of a person.
Elites do exist and do change the world, but their end results are largely unpredictable. Even if there is specific intent behind how they try to change the world, they have no way of knowing what the ultimate result will be. Anyone can change the world - the hard part is trying to accomplish a specific change, and in trying to accomplish that, you may achieve something completely unexpected or even counterproductive to your goals. There are simply too many butterfly effects and too many complex cause and effects. Most elites are simply acting in basic human selfishness. Elites are not some gods, they are just people like the rest of us, they have go to the bathroom, they get sick, they get hungry. You can read the texts of Elon Musk between him and his network to quickly understand that their level of intelligence and analysis does not match their level of power. With great power does not come a great ability to precisely wield that power.
So for your question, I would say the world is influenced by elites, but not controlled by them.
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.
I think the world is driven by greed. I think we are moving away from war (slowly) and the battle over land, while still existing is slowly being supplanted by economic battles. It’s not organized, but every player- be it company, board, owner, law enforcement, or middle manager- is incentivized to act in their own interests. In the vacuum of a 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… there is no one steering the ship
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 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!
Nah, I find it doubtful that anyone powerful could collaborate well enough to pull that off. They’re all demonstrably pretty 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).
What background? They don't exactly hide it, from Murdoch to Musk to Putin. Them conspiring or not is irrelevant, they 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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 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, 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.
1 There's a really excellent recent series of interviews on post-neoliberalism here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think so. I think it gives people comfort though to think the state of the world is in some way intentional, even if there's malice behind that intent. Because that means you can change the world for the better by simply changing how those elites act, or getting rid of them.
It's scarier for people to consider that we are flying blind in many ways and that chance has a lot more to do with our state of affairs than we'd like to admit. Because admitting that means you have to give up on the idea of changing the world, and have to settle instead for trying to change your own life. Which asks for a lot more agency, self-responsibility and effort out of a person.
Elites do exist and do change the world, but their end results are largely unpredictable. Even if there is specific intent behind how they try to change the world, they have no way of knowing what the ultimate result will be. Anyone can change the world - the hard part is trying to accomplish a specific change, and in trying to accomplish that, you may achieve something completely unexpected or even counterproductive to your goals. There are simply too many butterfly effects and too many complex cause and effects. Most elites are simply acting in basic human selfishness. Elites are not some gods, they are just people like the rest of us, they have go to the bathroom, they get sick, they get hungry. You can read the texts of Elon Musk between him and his network to quickly understand that their level of intelligence and analysis does not match their level of power. With great power does not come a great ability to precisely wield that power.
So for your question, I would say the world is influenced by elites, but not controlled by them.
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.
No… and yes?
I think the world is driven by greed. I think we are moving away from war (slowly) and the battle over land, while still existing is slowly being supplanted by economic battles. It’s not organized, but every player- be it company, board, owner, law enforcement, or middle manager- is incentivized to act in their own interests. In the vacuum of a 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… there is no one steering the ship
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 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!
Nah, I find it doubtful that anyone powerful could collaborate well enough to pull that off. They’re all demonstrably pretty 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).
What background? They don't exactly hide it, from Murdoch to Musk to Putin. Them conspiring or not is irrelevant, they 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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 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, 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.
1 There's a really excellent recent series of interviews on post-neoliberalism here.
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.