Cheat Sheet for Oligarchs

Today’s post was written by my new associate, Charles.

Charles is a mourning dove with an extensive background in how elites capture and control power, and has personally advised many successful oligarchs in his career.

Charles plans to continue publishing on occasion under Human Inference while he establishes himself on Substack. We will make efforts to avoid any confusion by including this preface on any of Charles’ posts.

Allow me to properly introduce myself: Sir Charles Machiavelli Cortés Bonaparte Genghis-Khan Caesar Augustus the Seed-Conqueror and Lord Featherbottom. I will allow you readers the highest honor of addressing me simply as Charles.

When I arrived on this platform I was aghast at the lack of diversity in content. Where were the publications made for those who seek power, conquest, and ownership of everything at everyone else’s expense? How would any aspiring oligarch receive the much-needed expertise to succeed in their coup of the common resources?

Utterly atrocious. I had to remedy this myself and decided to take this crusade under my wing.

My debut on this humble little newsletter was no accident, but a carefully chosen strategy of surveillance and sabotage. I must keep an eye out for threats against oligarchic rule, and you people here keep asking dangerous questions about how ordinary people go about gaining power and changing the beautifully laid system of wealth concentration that this glorious nation is built on. We CANNOT have that!

How dare you undo centuries of backbreaking work to keep power and money flowing to the top! I must convince you to stop, to make you ask yourselves what gives you the RIGHT, the gall, to commit such SACRILEGE against the powerful few who have committed their lives to the cause of wealth and power??

I shall convince you to see the error of your ways by showing you what you stand to destroy with your negligence and ignorance of what it takes to secure power.

I will COW you to humility!

I shall do so by sharing the secrets of my trade. The intricacies of oligarchic rule, of controlling entire nations of civilians into willingly obeying one’s will. Once you understand the enormity of the effort put into the very system you are attempting to disintegrate, you shall NOT have the heart to lay a finger on it!

We must traverse the way I work with my clients, those who seek me out to understand the ways of oligarchy. You shall bear my instructions as if you were intent on becoming an oligarch yourself.

I will begin the way I have always begun my work. With a simple, yet profound question:

To be clear, we’re not only discussing those who use money to gain power (although that is indeed a common modern term used for oligarchy) but the traditional definition, a society ruled by a few.

In common parlance, just “anyone who concentrates all the wealth and power by any means necessary” is also perfectly fine.

I have compiled a briefing kit from my work with successful oligarchs on how they’ve managed to obtain and maintain control and power. This is your cheat sheet, future oligarch. We’re going to assume you don’t yet have military resources at your disposal (that’s a much later investment), and all you really possess is the desire to bend the world to your will to serve a single purpose: YOU.

But don’t get too focused on the end game, my friend, because that’s where you’ll trip early. You must FIRST pretend that what you’re doing is actually what’s best for EVERYONE.

You must convince them that your actions and proposals are based on a sincere desire to help everyone else prosper. It doesn’t really matter exactly what story you’re telling them, but it does need to be compelling and believable enough that people are willing to go along with it.

This is where we see a lot of aspirants fail to launch their oligarchy. It’s quite difficult for a would-be oligarch to wrap their head around the kind of things most people care about, much less be able to claim their actions are indeed for the public good. You’ll need to master this element first or else everything else fails.

You would need to study emotions, study how people behave, and learn to manipulate your audience into thinking that you’re empathizing. You need to use words like “freedom” and “democracy” quite often to keep people from connecting the dots to the fact that what you’re really about is authoritarian-like control over the resources and power. You don’t want to give a single HINT about what you’re really after, or this all falls apart.

(I like to keep a bank of useful terminology to sprinkle into my clients’ messages so we’re always throwing off the scent. Comment if you would like to see examples in my next issue).

So, get that right, and make sure you’ve got your speeches at the ready. You need to rehearse them to sound convincing, like you actually believe what you’re saying.

With any luck, you’ll convince an entire nation of people to follow you and put you into a position of power. I have obviously redacted quite a lot of the specifics, but for our introduction I wish to establish the fundamentals first. You’ll start to see that there is an entire system to manage after gaining power.

Next, and this is incredibly important, you MUST keep people divided, in conflict with each other, and distracted from the real problem of why their lives aren’t getting any better while you and your ilk continue to prosper ever more. This is your ongoing mission and it is fraught with challenges.

A very popular piece of rhetoric my clients use is immigrants, after all, they’re not of this nation. Make use of their status and claim all problems are due to these people stealing jobs and economic opportunities right out of the mouths of deserving citizens.

But do not stop there. I encourage a diversity of such “group-isms” and the invention of a story for each: The youth are far too complacent to do productive work. The elderly are siphoning all the wealth. The Christians (or any religious group) are destroying the scientific mind. The scientists are destroying us with their lies.

You see? With a little effort, one can create a wide range of plausible-sounding stories to keep the people busy fighting each other instead of directing their attention to YOU. I assure you, this exercise is necessary and of great importance, for it is NOT easy to convince human beings not to form attachments.

It’s particularly VEXING just how chummy the human species is as a whole to each other. The great oligarchs of the past had to make interracial relations illegal just to keep poor whites and Black slaves from mingling1. Then, despite all their efforts, slavery was abolished and is no longer practiced. It was a devastating blow to oligarchs everywhere, such a critical engine for economic growth and wealth concentration.

It seems there’s no end to the ability for humans to empathize with one another, despite their differences in background, thought, physical appearance or otherwise.

Even worse is the fact that empathy is biologically built into their psyche2 (present company excluded, of course). Studies have shown that even babies will empathize with a person in distress and that human brains are wired for this empathic response. What’s worse, people naturally require a sense of belonging, so divisiveness is against their very basic needs.

I’ve found that oligarchs have had to spend an enormous amount of time, energy and resources keeping the other classes from joining forces. They’ve had to invent many plausible-sounding stories to make some group of people appear as the source of all problems, while fighting off busybodies like journalists and scientists who ask inconvenient questions. It is not a task for the faint of heart, and it requires absolute militant diligence.

Remember this simple mantra: Divide and Distract. These will be your essential tools for maintaining power.

The way you accomplish this will depend on your context, no two oligarchies look exactly the same. Control of the media, of what academic institutions teach, is of utmost importance, but your exact methods may vary greatly. Oligarchs need to constantly innovate their methods to keep up with the times and always be ready to use the latest technology to deploy effective strategies.

Finally, you MUST teach a version of history that supports your agenda! Start proselytizing when they’re young, the younger the better! Children will believe in anything. If a soda company can sell the idea of a giant Homo sapiens fitting into chimneys with gifts, you can sell the story of how your nation was founded on great ideals while obscuring every detail of subjugation and labor oppression.

Even better, I strongly support encouraging the idea that ANY attempts to change the system result in imprisonment, death threats, severe poverty, and a bitter violent end. Such stories should be highlighted in history books as a warning to all who dare to challenge the great oligarchy.

It is my privilege to have cultivated excellent oligarchs and to have been a part of this honored tradition. Yet I fear for the future of our kind. The advent of AI, in which I saw such promise for entrenched power concentration and manipulation, has also inspired many upstarts to believe ANYTHING may be possible.

What’s worse, the obvious applications of ensuring AI replaces pesky, inefficient human workers with robots that will never require rights or benefits have become a topic of national contention. Instead of being allowed to simply go about replacing the staff, we’re now seeing protests at data centers and a rise in anti-AI populism³.

The GALL of these people! To stand in the way of progress and oligarchy!

I am highly perturbed by articles such as these showing examples of SUCCESSFUL PEACEFUL NONVIOLENT protests being circulated online, attacking the very idea of systemic change requiring bloody self-sacrifice:

• A brilliant dictator who ruled over a nation with violence and fear was overthrown by a paltry vote and a SONG3

• An honorable detention center for immigrants (anti-immigration is a very common division tactic) was PERMANENTLY CLOSED after peaceful resistance4

Once the people get into their heads that they do NOT have to accept the conditions we’ve carefully crafted to ensure wealth flows to US and is not shared with the workers who’ve created that wealth,

Once they realize their paltry incomes keep them permanently locked away from true wealth-building,

They may start to realize that those in power are happy keeping things the way they are.

They may even organize with their fellow humans, despite all the efforts we’ve put into making sure that they DON’T!

Can you imagine??

An entire nation of workers, united in purpose and clarity, deciding that they will have a seat at OUR table making demands we’d be forced to give in to!!

We can’t let them do that, Charles, we can’t!!

How in the world can a small elite group of the 0.1 to 1.0% hope to fight off the will of the rest of the population?? It gives me nightmares just to think about it!

Charles’ staff informed me that shortly after writing the ending, Charles suffered a panic attack. He is recovering well, thanks to the support of his loved ones. He’s received many visits and gifts from members of the US government and CEOs of major American banks and corporations. I did not receive any names despite my request.

For updates from Charles, follow him at charlescoos