“Above all things, good Policie is to be used, that the Treasure and Moneyes in a State be not gathered into few Hands. For otherwise, a State may have a great Stock and yet starve. And Money is like Muck, not good except it be spread. This is done, chiefly, by suppressing, or, at the least, keeping a strait Hand upon the Devouring Trades of Usurie, Ingrossing, great Pasturages, and the like.” – Sir Francis Bacon, 1625
There is a particular way of viewing international politics that takes hold of people like a fever, and once you are in its grip it is difficult to recover. It entails looking at what happens on the stage of our planet and seeing the banks and financial institutions as one node in a network of power, the military-industrial complex of the United States and its allies-slash-vassals as another such node, and the most powerful industries as a third such node. Once you begin to see political shenanigans from such an angle, it becomes difficult to believe in democracy or any other means by which individuals might influence the Great Game.
Compelling though this perspective might be, it falls prey to one of the two most common failures of critical thinking, namely conspiratorial thinking: the predilection for interpreting all events as the machinations of shadowy individuals. Whether this is the Illuminati or a grotesque projection onto Judaism makes little practical difference: once you see everything as pawns in the hand of a hidden power, you have lost your ability to understand what’s actually going on. The parallel failure of critical thinking is presuming wealthy people aren’t perpetually trying to stack the deck in their own favour by pre-emptively dismissing every interpretation that draws attention to this as mere conspiracy.
The truth, as ever, lies between the extremes. I have written before about ‘dragon sickness’, the corrupting effect of the accumulation of money expressed through the metaphor of J.R.R Tolkien. This concern is scarcely a new one, as the quote from Sir Francis Bacon, above, attests: money (like excrement) is no good unless it is spread around. It is absolutely true that the dragon hoards possess disproportionate political power, since money can bribe corrupt politicians and influence the media who would otherwise bring down those beset with dragon sickness. But despite this vast power, international events are never entirely in the hands of the dragon-hoarders. Conspiracy theorists radically overestimate the extent that the wealthy can control the chain of events, while those who dismiss conspiracies radically underestimate this.
However, the surest sign that Big Money does not control everything are the efforts expended to massage popular thought. If the command of events attained by the nodes of wealth were as perfect as conspiratorial thinking imagines, there would be no need for the preponderance of propaganda and pretense. On the contrary, precisely because these monetary nodes are neither unitary nor united, nobody has anywhere near the degree of control that is fantasised about. This indeed is why so much fear is spread about so-called populist movements. If democratic institutions could not affect events, it simply couldn’t matter if nations were overtaken by outsider political parties.
The fear engendered against populism is a sign that nobody controls everything, and in part for the reasons that Hannah Arendt elucidated: you may decide to take action, but you cannot control the consequences of that commitment. Events unfold beyond anybody’s power to control. Influence, yes, but like bad pinball players all you can do is flail about and hope to keep the ball in play. Literally anybody can be knocked out of the game at almost any time, for reasons impossible to predict – and remember that it is solely the influential that it’s worth anyone collecting kompromat for…
All dragon hoards provide political power to those that squat upon them, but every dragon, like Smaug, has a chink in their armour that political knights can exploit to bring them down. It is precisely popular movements that terrify those who flatter themselves that they’re in control, because the many have an inherent power against the few that can never be erased. We are all players in the Great Game, and what the future brings can be neither foretold nor controlled. Be suspicious of Big Money by all means, it is wise to be so... but never doubt that ruination is always mere inches away from us all – even the dragons.
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