Being rich is never enough. You can have all the money in the world but there will always be that nagging desire for attention. It eats away at your soul if you let it. It consumes all your thoughts. How can the world reward you with billions of dollars and yet people can’t see you for the all-encompassing genius you’ve convinced yourself you are. You’re the kind of person with a finger on the pulse. Someone who shrugs away criticism of your weird social and political ideas because you are an “innovator” by default. You’ve looked down from your manse or private island or bunker, surveyed the world, and diagnosed all of its problems. Everyone needs to hear your solutions. Not in the world of ideas kind of way, where different ideas and perspectives go through rigorous public and intellectual debate until consensus is reached. No, your ideas exist on a plain above the plebeian fray. Anything you imagine needs to go automatically to the “people.” In this case “people” needs to be in quotes because it can mean different things. What you mean is two different things. First there are the “people” from your circle – those with similar wealth, and naturally the same natural flow of killer ideas. The second are those on the listening end of the megaphone you’ve built for yourself. Some are calling it an oligarchy and that upsets you. To you, it’s the natural order of things.
Luckily, none of society’s problems have anything to do with anything you’ve done. You’re innocent. Actually, no, that’s not quite right. It doesn’t go far enough. You’re one of the good guys. You’ve watched countless hours of superhero movies, read thousands of comics, read the cliff’s notes of more than one science fiction novel, and of course taken all the right lessons from them. You would wear a cape (outside your home) if it was socially acceptable. You have the all the right answers without actually having to live like a normal person in the world. You don’t have to walk among them. Having lived experiences is overrated. In fact you’d just as soon shut up forever than walk in their shoes for a day.
You used to think the day would never come when someone would come along to consolidate politics and thought within a single class of overseers. You used to look at Russia and admire their corruption, the favor trading, the concentration of power, blatant scams; their allegiance to a few wealthy purveyors of their country’s existence and wonder why couldn’t replicate that. A lot of supposedly smart people think it’s a failed state, but they’re not looking at it the right way. You see it as the perfect mixture of libertarianism and authoritarianism. Libertarianism for you and your friends to have all the freedoms you could ever enjoy in this lifetime and authoritarianism for anyone with ideas that conflict with your own. Is that feudalism? Nevermind. Strike that thought.
That’s why you love to talk about free speech so much. It sounds so innocuous – free speech. Who would ever be against something free and essentially human? Nobody, obviously. You just want speech to be so free that anyone with enough resources can have as much free speech as they want. That only makes sense right? Better yet, if you control channels where a lot of speech occurs you can amplify the stuff you want or whatever angers the most people, whichever is most profitable. It’s always a good segue from any conversation to randomly pivot to free speech. You always catch people off guard. Free speech. You can sit in the front row of swearing in ceremonies if you want. If you think you have a great idea about how the government can invest in your business (and make the world a better place) then you have to let elected officials know. It’s a free country, with free speech. You can also say woke. It does the same thing. For example, let’s say you feel insecure about something, just for a moment, not as a standard disposition. You can blame it on woke. Problem solved. Nothing else to discuss.
So what could possibly go wrong with this new arrangement? All of the “people” who voted in the last election obviously knew you were going to play a big role in government, even with no official duties. They didn’t care about the price of groceries or any of that stuff. They wanted your confidence. They wanted your niche knowledge to govern their lives. They mostly just wanted to listen to all your great ideas. You’re swell and everyone should know it. You’re rich and so much more.
GLAZ 