How They Rule

Our way of thinking is so infected by ideology that in order to understand how power works in our society, we have to understand the nature of power. What is power? How does one person control another person? The main way any ruling class stays in power has been based on three things, violence, lies(or more neutrally, information), and gifts. You will do what another person wants you to do, even against your own interests if...

a: they threaten you with enough pain or death that obeying them becomes the better option,

b: you believe that doing what they want is what you should do, regardless of the effects on you,

or

c: you are given something you need in exchange for doing what they want.

Under a feudal system, the lords would threaten people with their armies, executioners, dungeons, whips, dogs, and whatever else it took to make sure people followed their rules. The Church would tell everyone to do what they said, and do what the lords said, otherwise awful punishment would await them after death. They promised them happiness and pleasure in heaven, and to a lesser extent on earth. Both groups maintained control over resources people needed, the lords over the land, mills, bridges, roads, and other necessities for production, and the Church over beautiful art, places to interact with other people in the form of churches, and scientific knowledge.

The modern "democratic" state claims to deal with one of these tools of power, the use of violence. The police, the army, and the prisons are all under the control of the elected officials, who are elected by the people. The first issue with this is that the state does not have 100% control over violence, though that is minor. All of the assassins and soldiers for organized crime, private security, and militias combined couldn't compare to the state, though none of those three are democratic, and they often back up the ruling class(more below). Despite the so-called democracy, the state is often hard to understand for most people, so those who do understand the law, lawyers, have a bit of power, and generally sell that to the highest bidder. Elected officials are well-known for lying to the voters as well, and if a politician can simply tell whatever lies he wants in order to get people to vote for him, such a system can not really be called a democracy.

On top of that, the issues of ideology and resources have not been democratized in any way. No religious leader is elected by all of the people they affect, though their power over their congregations and the wider culture is indisputable. There are also numerous ideological mouthpieces for the rich. The rich own nearly all the media in the capitalist world, so the media will reflect their owners values and desires. The rich fund colleges, think tanks, and education for their employees. They own the companies that write books for schoolchildren. Intellectuals, scientists, and educators, while everyone would agree they are needed for a functioning society, on top of the influence by the rich can form a smaller facet of the ruling class on their own. We all need knowledge, and those who control knowledge will have power, if only a little bit of it. At the very least, they will set the ideology, the framework through which their students view facts, which will often reinforce the ruling class. The rich also give resources to people who do what they want, and while this is usually called "getting a job," there are plenty of other ways of moving resources to those who do their bidding and denying them to those who don't.

**The Business Class**

The largest and most powerful component of the ruling class, the business class, here broadly refers to those with large amounts of capital. Most of us spend most of our lives in undemocratic workplaces, doing whatever our boss wants because if we do not we will lose our job and suffer for it. Money is necessary for survival, and the rich have it. This exists on a larger scale as well, with big businesses and banks choosing where resources are allocated, where jobs appear and where they don't, and which small business owners and individuals get loans or contracts. Police will defend property at all costs, even if you need to steal or trespass to survive, and as the rich control more property, they command much more police protection. The rich can also hire private security to do what they want and protect their interests, and there is a long history of the rich using hired guns to stop their workers from unionizing, or shut down protest.

The rich set the popular ideology by influencing every part of our society. Colleges, think tanks, and scientists are all funded by the wealthy, and often reflect their interests. They produce movies, choosing which ones get funding and which do not, and changing them for their interests. The news is generally delivered by well-paid millionaire presenters working for billionaires. Business owners often try to educate their employees into believing what they want as well, and can even require employees to undergo training.

The rich also control the state, through various methods. The most powerful is known as capital flight. The capitalists can threaten the government with the possibility of them moving their capital to another place under a different government that will give them more favorable policies. The capitalist can even withhold their investment for a while, in something known as a capital strike. This action will hurt the economy under the offending government, and suffering voters will pick someone else, even if it is actually someone worse for them in the long run. We are incentivized to vote for business interests! A politician, to stay in power, will do what business wants as well, to avoid the suffering of their people, collect taxes, and stay elected. Even a leader who wants to take away power from the rich with the support of the population will be under threat of economic devastation caused by the wealthy, and will be unable to actually govern in a way that threatens the interests of the business class without people suffering.

Politicians also need to get media attention in order to even be considered. They need campaign funding, and coverage from media companies(nearly all owned by the wealthy). They will make promises to the rich in order to get this, and the rich will only give this to politicians they like.

Politicians are bribed on top of that. Even in developed nations with strict corruption laws, politicians can be given jobs at companies for the work they do for them. Politicians can be rented property at low prices, get paid millions for giving speeches, and receive benefits through business they own from the ultra-wealthy, often without any legal trouble in places like America.

The rich can lobby politicians more than anyone else. Lobbyists build relationships with politicians, and in some cases even write the bills that become laws. This adds up to near complete monopoly of influence on our government by the businesses it supposedly governs over.

**The State Bureaucracy/The Political Class**

The democratic system that in theory controls our governments, weakened as it is by the wealthy, is further weakened by the individuals within government. Government is a bureaucracy, and as a bureaucracy, knowledge and power is divided among many people. It is impossible to elect all of them, and impossible to replace all of them when the government changes. Their knowledge is essential to running government, and the deep complexity of the government and the limited number of elections available to appoint so many candidates makes democratic oversight impossible. In the US, for example, one president chooses all appointed judges, 15 executive department heads, and several other important positions. None of these people are elected, and they all come through one elected official, who will make concessions to the class of the politically skilled in order to gain and hold on to power.

The military is a large part of this. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, (the three dominant western powers) the military is a global, powerful force, with a collective (and individual, in the case of the US) footprint on every continent, command of the seas, and amounts of funding so large that no one actually knows where it all goes. None of the military leaders are elected, and no elected official could be expected to reign in the military on behalf of their voters. Smaller, peripheral militaries are heavily influenced by military funding, arms sales, and cooperation from richer and more powerful nations. They are also more likely to overthrow political leaders if they do not properly defend ruling class interests, but any military can do this, and this threat influence policy.

In the intelligence community, things are even worse. Intelligence officials can lie to politicians, and have been known to hide programs from them in the past. The idea that a wing of our government can be functioning completely without democratic oversight is frightening. They can also threaten politicians with blackmail, theoretically, and share intelligence in such a way to scare the politician into doing what they want. Intelligence agencies have historically been involved in the overthrow and replacement of many world leaders.

The voters also accept the idea of a political class in some ways. Political families have a reputation for being able to govern effectively, and name recognition can help in politics. This is not a democratic force, as it is ultimately illusory, a way for a small political class to keep getting elected. Beyond that, political families tend to share amongst themselves and hide from others the knowledge and skills to govern effectively, to control the rest of government more effectively, and to run an effective campaign and get elected. Political parties are needed to organize voters, and a relationship with the party is needed to get elected. Party elites are very influential, and in the American Democratic party, certain party elites known as superdelegates even get extra voting power to go against what people want.

Our system is also not as democratic as we would think, even on paper. Prisoners cannot vote in many countries, including the United States. Resident aliens often cannot vote, even though they have a clear interest in who runs the country. Citizens living in US territories cannot vote in US federal elections. It is proven that poor, disabled, and less educated people have more trouble voting than others. Voter intimidation, campaigns to confuse voters, and under-equipped voting stations can prevent people from voting. Gerrymandering is a huge problem in the US, keeping existing parties in power and skewing the vote. The US Senate and electoral collage also skew the vote in favor of certain interests. These problems combine to keep the "wrong" people from voting, enable gaming the system, and keep elites in power.

**The Old Ruling Class**

The job of the clergy is to tell people what God wants them to do. In many religious traditions, including Christianity, the dominant one, these orders come with a carrot and stick, the ultimate carrot and stick, eternal pleasure and eternal suffering. Anyone who truly believes what the clergy tells them will agree to become essentially their slave, to do whatever God asks of them because God's word is really the only one that matters, even over clear reality and basic morality. This applies to politicians as well, and people's voting habits. While many people are not religious, and no religious traditions but the most extreme cults actually have a dynamic of absolute submission to the one who speaks for God, most people are in some way affected by the commands of the religious teachers, and some are extremely devoted.

Churches often support the other leaders, praising capitalism and commanding people to follow the law and submit to government. Many churches praise and glorify the military and attempt to stir up hatred of official enemies. Churches receive special tax privileges from the government as well, and many religious programs receive government funding, even though the state claims to be secular. Many churches and religious organizations have lots of money, some pastors are millionaires, and some large corporations are run according to religious principles. The name recognition of being a pastor can even be a path towards political office.

The aristocracy is still around as well, taking another small share of the power from the people. Some countries are still ruled by kings, but even in countries like the United Kingdom, where the Monarch is mostly ceremonial, one cannot deny there is power in the fact that the Prime minister must have a private conversation with the Queen every so often, and the Queen has the ability to say whatever she wants about the Prime Minister, and her position as Queen grants her an automatic platform. The aristocracy is generally very rich, in part supported by the state, and has connections with other wealthy individuals and state leaders. Some positions in the British House of Lords are also passed down from father to son.

**Lawyers**

If violence is monopolized by the state, and regulated by laws, then those who can manipulate laws in effect become like a class of knights, people with a share of control over violence, loyal to the ruling class. Like most of the religious class, lawyers' power is relatively limited compared to the billionaires, the generals, the elected officials and the heads of intelligence agencies, but they are well paid by wealthy people to do what they want, in support of the ruling class. Law also provides the skill to find holes in the law to do things that would otherwise be illegal but are technically not, all sorts of tricks to fight competition and avoid taxes used by the wealthy. Any class that is above the law, even only the spirit of the law, is a more powerful class. Lawyers allow the rich to not be tricked by the legal system into admitting guilt to things they have or haven't done. While the law is a set, written standard, the practice of law is not apolitical, and the skillful manipulation of law can be used to shift many things in the favor of those who deeply understand it, at the expense of those who don't.

**Organized Crime**

The intelligence community and the rich often interact with organized crime. Organized crime is connected to many legitimate businesses, which in turn interact with the wider business world. Former US President Donald Trump had many connections to mafia figures he interacted with from his real estate business days. The CIA collaborated with organized crime in order to try to overthrow the government of Cuba. Politicians use organized crime as a bogeyman to scare people into doing what they want, and granting the police more power. Organized crime has corrupted many officials in the highest levels of government, from police chiefs to leaders of entire countries.

At the ground level, organized crime rules through violence and drug addiction, in the most violent and exploitative form of our modern system. Here slavery still exists, mainly of women as forced sex workers, which wealthy and middle class people seem to buy just as much as anyone else. Organized crime is the the descendant of brutal ancient hierarchy virtually unchanged, with slavery, violence, small wars over territory and resources, and a violent culture of glorifying warriors. Their leaders often enter the "legitimate" ruling class thanks to their wealth and connections, or the "legitimate" ruling class will collaborate with them, far more often than they will fight them.

**Intellectuals**

The Academic world is another place where some power is held. While it can be somewhat independent, there is significant influence on the academic world by the ruling class. Many business leaders sit on the board of directors or advisory boards of universities. They donate heavily to universities, skewing their research and priorities in favor of ruling class interest. The CIA and the US government more generally have also skewed priorities with funding.

While almost never truly rich, professors and academics often come from privileged backgrounds, and are swayed by the history of science and education even more skewed towards a small elite. They have the individual power to affect their students ideology, the students who will most likely become more powerful and culturally significant than people who do not go to higher education. They affect larger numbers of people with their research. While academics are a bit more likely to go against prevailing opinion, there is still a class of academics connected to the core elite and willing to express their interests, whose voices will always be amplified, while those who don't are blacklisted. Even those academics who promote social change can dampen and divert the flow of revolutionary and progressive energy toward something that ultimately reinforces the ruling class.

**Union Bureaucracy/Labor Aristocracy**

Unions, like many academics or activists, can challenge the ruling class and redistribute power to normal people, but they often do the opposite and can enforce the ruling class and the system that creates this class divide. Unions by their very nature try to maintain their own power and ensure their own coninued existence, which makes them inherently reformist and moderating institutions that can keep the workers in the in line, even if they get them some benefits.

Union leaders are often corrupted by relationships to organized crime and businesses, enriching themselves at the expense of the workers and becoming another component of class rule. They have often been influenced by governments, like the relationship between the US Government and the AFL-CIO. Unions can thus become tools of government, business, and organized crime, and become enforcers of ruling class power rather than resistance against it.