alt Hacker NewsThere are a few people in charge, they just don’t advertise the fact. Similar how the ‘Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence’. These both appear correct to the vast majority of people because of the Pareto distribution of outcomes, the vast majority of people experience the incompetence / no-one in charge and don’t experience the relatively tiny number of events when the competent malevolent people in charge do make their decisions. Consider if you were hosting the Jekyll Island meeting, how many people of what caliber would you invite to be there? And that’s just one of the meetings we know about. Another good one is the involvement of Bohemian Grove in selecting Ronald Regan to run for president. Their motto, "Weaving spiders come not here", like many institutions, describes the opposite of what actually happens there.
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No, that's what I was getting at. Thinking "they" are in charge is actually very widespread, with varying opinions on who "they" actually are—whether it's billionaires for you, the Rothschild's for others, or Reptilians for some.
How great it would be to have a select few evil masterminds, a clear enemy to roil against! That isn't reality, though. Would the super-secret council of puppet masters have allowed Trump to become president of the USA (again) and ruin the economy? You'll have an answer to that, obviously. It matters little. Reality is far more complex, shadow masters prefer stability over chaos, and the world is generally full of competing and opposing interests.
A few rich men might hold a lot of power in their hands, I give you that; but unless you limit "the world" to mean an arbitrary smaller region of earth, nobody is in charge of it all.
> Consider if you were hosting the Jekyll Island meeting, how many people of what caliber would you invite to be there? And that’s just one of the meetings we know about. Another good one is the involvement of Bohemian Grove in selecting Ronald Regan to run for president. Their motto, "Weaving spiders come not here", like many institutions, describes the opposite of what actually happens there.
That's some pretty classic conspiracy theory stuff. No evidence of anything nefarious, just heavily implied.
> Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
I feel like this needs updating, sometimes it is greed, other times it also very much is malice, sometimes making those appear as incompetence or just "complex circumstances" is beneficial.
Like how you have a culture war in the US while the rich rob you blind. How you have the "us vs them" politics while checks and balances are dismantled (including accurate reporting on science), alongside social support programs. How around 2020 companies rose prices across the board while claiming supply chain issues, just for those prices to never really come down. Same with the global DRAM manufacturing and the effects across the board on RAM, GPUs and storage - the companies just don't give a shit about consumers, they are choosing this. Also how the housing market is completely unreasonable. Same with US trying to break up EU and increasingly siding with Russia.
Sometimes there's just malice or greed, even when it's not just a small group of shady people in a dark room, but rather entire social groups whose interests and ideologies just happen to align. A lot of people aren't even trying to serve the greater society in the slightest, the prevailing attitude increasingly seems to be "fuck you, I got mine". It doesn't seem entirely new, though, since the whole millennial generation largely got saddled with that economy by those who came before, what's going on is just a bit more open now. Also using US as a good example here, but obviously similar issues are on the rise in Europe as well and elsewhere.