One must always be cautious of simplistic claims and laymen’s theories about the source of destructive governance and the loss of collective prosperity. Such are the most common claims of agitators, but they often have no validity when assessed rationally.
The notion of an exclusive club of rich people, the billionaires, deciding our fate, is one such kind of mistaken simplistic theory. It proposes a link between people’s net worth and their attraction to Malthusian or dystopian visions of the world, which are then pursued to the detriment of the masses.
Great Reset as the work of the rich?
Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom (of fame for Megaupload and later the cloud service Mega) was recently tweeting about the ‘Great Reset’, positing that the ‘elite’ want to shield themselves from the shocks of a plan they have to preserve their own wealth at our expense.
The only problem with this idea is that Kim Dotcom’s own 10-million-dollar net worth is higher than Great Reset mastermind Klaus Schwab’s rumoured 1-million-dollar net worth. Such a discrepancy would appear to throw any kind of analysis suggesting a Malthusian billionaire elite, planning mass serfdom of the people through the Great Reset, into doubt.
In addition, other perceived heroes of the masses against a Great Reset-pushing elite include Donald Trump and Elon Musk, net worth 2 billion dollars and 290 billion dollars respectively.
Such numbers are arrived at simply by searching on the internet. They are not hidden.
Billionaire power
It is striking that the people positing the sinister plans of the billionaires often rally behind individual millionaires and billionaires as their heroes, while many of their adversaries pushing such things as the Great Reset possess poultry sums of money that are expected simply of random politicians and economists.
What is happening is that many people are convinced that power is just a direct extension of money. They succumb to the simplistic assumption that whoever has the gold makes the rules. However, it is better to say that whoever has the power makes the rules, and power derives often from knowledge rather than wealth. Furthermore, those who have power gain wealth, whereas those with pre-existing wealth often just lose it.
There is indeed an elite responsible for policy in Western countries, which looks upon the masses with scorn and condescension, but any assertion that they are a group of super-rich property owners or royals misses the real point.
Whatever the threat to the welfare of the public from the halls of power may be, it is not necessarily the work of the rich, and not even the malign doings of the royal family of Saudi Arabia or the United Kingdom. Many agitators simply point to those with more wealth or property than us as a way of getting an emotional response from their audience, based on envy.
In reality, a rich person or celebrity is just as likely to sense something wrong with the world as a poor person, and be just as powerless to act. On the other hand, a poor person may indeed have the knowledge from which to derive power, and so be able to act.
Then who are the 'elite'?
Meritocrats.
Our politics and our perceptions are shaped not by a moneyed elite, but rather by a self-appointed ‘power elite’ that consists of people who merely curried favour enough to pass through the revolving doors of think tanks, mainstream media and the government, allowing them to create ideas (think tanks), manufacture consent for them (media), and implement them (government). At no point in this process does this powered elite have any empathy with the public, merely viewing them as a hurdle to the implementation of their own vision. Such individuals will repeatedly hold offices to which they are appointed and that do not require a democratic election (National Security Adviser in the United States, for example). While no single such post is necessarily powerful, together these unelected posts allow a narrow group of people cut from the same statist ideological cloth to continuously guide the nation state on a course opposite to the wishes of the people, regardless of electoral outcomes. It is this meritocratic group spanning think tanks, government agencies, and media conglomerates, that all think alike in their will to subvert democracy, to compel the regime against the wishes of the people.
One thing to bear in mind is that what is being described here is not a flaw of any kind of system that can ever be corrected by the law, nor is the diminishing of democracy by the hands of meritocrats necessarily a bad thing. It may well be that this professional governing corps really does produce the best outcomes for a nation, whereas the people are foolish. The meritocrats are simply an element that can be either ripe or rotten within any organisation, and there is a good case that this element has become fully rotten in Western democracies, having become obsessed only with its own security, fearing the nation as a hostile mob to be monitored and suppressed.
The elite are not especially rich, but merely favoured. Many of them could be nice people, in the manner of a prince, but amenable only to those they know or meet, and that is an exceedingly narrow group. This persistence of the same narrow group of meritocrats for too long can become inimical to any authentic idea of democracy or republic, which are reduced to lies.