The petty kings of corporate empires swagger through their lives as if they had led armies to conquest. None of them did. The real warrior kings kicked ass on their own behalf. In more modern times, your stereotypical gangster has racked up at least a murder or two themselves before rising to upper management. The present kings of corporate states, on the other hand, have not fought any of their own battles. If armed force was needed, they hired it from the countries in which they are nominally headquartered, or perhaps from the murder-for-hire mercenary contractor industry.
A historical warrior king would need personal security: bodyguards, a palace regiment, things like that. Our modern corporate potentates need that personal protection now, as well, because they've pissed off so many people. A warrior king in or shortly past his prime might be able to serve as his own last line of defense. How many of the current crop of corporate tyrants could do the same? They have to hire everything. They need poor people they can trust, when poor people in general cannot trust them.
The right wing has a conflicted relationship with poor people. On the one hand, they need us to do the dirty work. On the other hand, our poor character is what makes us poor: we're lazy moochers who breed like hamsters. And a lot of poor people are not Caucasian. They have to meet a more stringent standard to be acceptable. Maybe they rise to the level of a Clarence Thomas in their service to white wealth and patriarchy. Maybe serving as a social media influencer is enough to preserve their illusion that they will be okay when power completely solidifies in a few hands.
From the top down, ruthlessness is the guiding principle. Survival of the most useful. It's presented as meritocracy, but who determines merit? The people writing the checks. They might as well rule by divine decree, because they judge from a high throne, controlling the lives of the masses with their manipulation of the economy.
The philosophy is seductively hard-core. Down among the workers, we divide ourselves on the basis of world view. The right talks about rugged individualism and ascribes all success to personal virtues of courage, strength, industriousness, and intelligence. In grayed-out text, barely readable, are the words "and race." That text is emerging more and more boldly, but they still maintain a little plausible deniability to allow space for their non-white allies to be used now and discarded later.
The left speaks of collectivism, which divides into many branches. Those range from benign social support programs to totalitarian control of all industry and business. From right or left, totalitarian control is undesirable. But is it avoidable? The world grows more and more crowded. Technology gives the controlling class more and more powerful tools with which to exert that control.
By breeding a chronic inferiority complex among the workers, the ruling class perpetuates the system by which the lower orders keep each other in line. Your value is directly proportional to how much of your life you sell to other people. If you are lucky enough to work at something that fulfills you creatively, the sale of your hours goes to produce the work by which you define yourself. For instance, the young man who recently built us a small deck and a fence takes great pride in his craftsmanship. He asks for referrals from anyone who has hired him, to line up more and more jobs. But there are only so many hours in a day, and there's only one of him. Like every contractor I've ever known, he has to juggle simultaneous jobs among clients who all want their job done yesterday. We may try to be patient, but inevitably chafe at delays. Still, he can rate his success on the work he gets and how well he does it.
Most of the rest of us look for "work-life balance" because our jobs were a compromise between what we really wanted to do and what we ended up doing, just so we could have shelter and food.
Can you have work-life balance when your job is to take a bullet for the rich bastard if necessary?
Marc Elias has written about billionaire capitulation to the Trump regime, but it isn't capitulation. It's the open acknowledgement that government and the top echelon of the private sector have completely merged. There is absolutely nothing adversarial in that relationship. The corporatocracy has claimed the power.
The last vestiges of the electoral system mean that we still have the power to catapult them out of there. While the party of big business works feverishly to cripple the power of voters before the next election, they also realize that voters are conditioned to apathy. Mass psychology favors the status quo, and the status quo gave us the shitshow that we're in now. Massive turnout of voters opposed to any or all of what the regime is doing now and its successors plan for later would stop them dead. What are the odds? It would either beat them back or force them to drop all pretense and try to suppress us by force.
The threat of force from our ruthless overlords is scary, but what's the choice? Let them rule and they will soon resort to strong-arm tactics even more widespread than they are now. So: vote against them now and maybe there's a scuffle, or roll over for them and hope that the jackboot never lands on your particular neck.
