This is going to be a pretty unstructured rant. I apologize in advance if it feels disjointed.
Just had to get this off my chest. Way too many people in my feeds echo this idea that just kind of "feels" right, in my opinion because it won't anger the folks on the right or the left too much and might even end up in some high-fiving across the aisle. Both will blame social media for some of it, because the content moderating folks there have a liberal bias angering the conservatives - and liberals take issue with the platforming, networking, and radicalizing that social media has provided for the far right. But these companies are largely just after profits. They want your data because they can sell better targeted ads with it, not because they're in on the great conspiracy.
The idea that we have been fooled into thinking we are each others' enemies is indeed a false one, but I will argue here that we have mostly fooled ourselves. We are the ones who have divided and distracted ourselves, and we are the ones who have the power to reverse course.
There is a desire to draw a line of distinction between ourselves, the citizens, the everyday people, from the puppet masters. The elites. The global elites. The party of Davos. The Bilderberg attendees. The Kochs. Soros. Even the mild-mannered life-saving Bill Gates. And of course many of these theories, not the ones YOU believe of course, place Jews at the center of this evil global cabal.
These powerful, wealthy, and influential people do exist. The question is whether their intentions, as stated on the about sections of the websites of their charitable foundations, should be taken at face value - and if not, what the their true motivations might be (beyond retaining/growing their wealth and keeping the pitchforks away) and why they seek to deceive.
Would they be any different than ours, those who haven't accumulated unthinkable amounts of power and wealth?
It's just too convenient. It corresponds perfectly to our desire to make sense of the world in a tidy way that can be summarized as good (us) vs evil (them). And it absolves us of blame. The burden of being better listeners, offering the benefit of the doubt, and arguing in good faith is off our shoulders. The burden of being well informed can easily be outsourced to whoever lambastes the other side and is most frequently links them to the despised elites.
The tricky part is that we do know people like Epstein existed, and that he hosted far too many people who occupy positions of influence and power. Guilt by association might not be completely fair, but the alibi of someone like Dershowitz that he never took his underwear off during a massage certainly doesn't inspire confidence. I don't think it's unfair to informally conclude, for our purposes, that Dershowitz was at least somewhat complicit in Epstein's pedo/human trafficking ring. Like other Epstein associates, he possesses a certain amount of power that could shield him from legal consequences.
My theory is that powerful people are just like many of us who do things like binge on netflix and stay up until 4am even though we have work in the morning. And then we show up at 9:05 because we showed up at 9:04 the day before and everything was fine. And before you know it we're strolling in at 11. I imagine the powerful experience a tremendous absence of regular person boundaries that results in some of them nibbling around the edges of socially deviant behavior until they finally take a bite.
Perhaps this boundary-pushing behavior occasionally manifests itself in the form of seeking greater and greater power and influence. We've certainly seen powerful people seeking more power in unscrupulous ways. But outside of scenarios where hostile foreign governments seek to divide us with strategic propaganda (they often create unsympathetic first person narratives supposedly as a historically oppressed person, to generate hate from the right, and hate for the right from the left, etc), I'm not sure I've seen much evidence of division being used as a tool to increase power over one's own subjects.
I consider it possible as a side effect, as the increase in partisanship here in the US often results in an excess of power at the federal executive level. But this is actually presidents doing the will of the voters who are expecting them to deliver on their campaign promises via executive order rather than scold them that they didn't deliver the midterm votes needed to get majorities needed to pass legislation.
Perhaps we act more as bees and ants than we know, and explicit cooperation and conspiration isn't the point. Maybe the outcome is no different. After all, the Boomers and Silents in power have collectively settled upon a system of interest rates going to zero while asset prices go to a million. Meanwhile they own property so housing costs skyrocketing is good, not bad for them. They went to college long ago so tuition costs don't mean a thing to them. Current healthcare premiums subsidize them far more than their healthy young peasant counterparts. You can't lay the blame squarely at the feet of the President, the fed chair, or any one single group it seems.
I believe it's more of an anti-conspiracy - most in power probably observe self-serving phenomena similar to what I've alluded to and DON'T get together with their peers in attempt to mitigate the ill effects of the policies that benefit them.
This is in line with Robert Conquest's 3rd law of politics: The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
A less conspiratorial reading of that, as interpreted by Milton Friedman, is that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people’s money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality — but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to “spend on others” in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to him or herself.
And I think that is collectively accomplished with zero acknowledgment between would-be conspirators. Because to admit grift to others would first require admitting it to oneself, and I think we've all internalized this idea that we're the good guys. Even if we have an extra slice of cake when no one's looking or stay up an extra hour binging. Or write a long-winded rant during working hours :)
