10 easy steps to oligarchy
We can do this!
The following is intended as satire and snark (/s). It contains offensive ideas. Proceed accordingly, or not.
Oligarchy: a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few
10 easy steps to oligarchy ⬇️
Observe the rich powerful people. Nice life if you can get it.
Aspire to be a rich powerful person. You can do this!
Be categorical. Conclude that wealthy powerful people are essentially superior to people who are not. Admire them. Give them your loyalty and obedience.
Notice that the poorer less powerful people are mostly people of ‘color’, women, children, and people who have recently immigrated to your country. (Ignore the poor ‘white’ native men; they’ll just complicate things.)
If you are an ‘inferior’ type, engage in whatever mental gymnastics are required to deny your essential unworthiness and curry favor with your betters. Hope for the best.
Give yourself permission to mistreat other inferiors without guilt as a means of signaling your values and improving your place in the hierarchy. You’ve got this!
When the powerful people start to turn on people like you, engage in whatever mental gymnastics are required to convince yourself that they ‘deserve’ their mistreatment, and that you are different from them. You’re safe.
Over time, as your scheme for achieving wealth and power fails to produce the desired results, keep hope alive. Try harder. Convince yourself that everything is going according to plan. The rich and powerful know what they’re doing, right?
When you start losing your hope of becoming one of the rich and powerful in this life, adopt the belief that your reward awaits you in the next one. Recognize that you are actually the superior person because of your poverty and suffering. Be very proud.
Stop trying to climb the social/economic ladder. Accept your caste. See the arrangement as natural law and the correct workings of a ‘free market’. Celebrate the peace of mind that comes from giving up the struggle for more. Become a guru and teach others how dangerous it is to hope/strive for something better. You can make some money doing that. You might even become an influencer and get famous and rich and powerful and … Hey, wait a minute!
Our constitutional democratic form of government must meet the insistence of the great mass of our people that economic and social security and the standard of American living be raised from what they are to levels which the people know our resources justify. Only by succeeding in that can we ensure against internal doubt as to the worthwhileness of our democracy and dissipate the illusion that the necessary price of efficiency is dictatorship with its attendant spirit of aggression.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937
Mental gymnastics, the way of things. Maybe it has always been this way. Is is worse now because it is our effort to train for, or atone for?
FDR. If there were ever a man I would like an hour with, he would be the top of my list. I agree, he made changes because to not have made dramatic proposals would have impacted the 'real' lives of the wealthy.
What a wonderful quote from FDR!