They Make The Rules, They Just Don't Live By Them

There are those who set themselves apart from society who nevertheless wish to determine the way society is run for the rest of us. Those who are not themselves educators think it is their right to run our education system. Those who are not doctors or nurses—in other words, those who run the HMOs, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical industry—are determining how our health care systems are run and how we are treated. Those who would never permit their children to major in the arts in college are the ones who decide which books will be promoted, which movies made, and which musicians will receive air play. Those who care nothing about how good government is practiced are choosing the limited pool of politicians for which you can vote. Those who—even if convicted of terrible crimes—will never see the inside of a real jail, wish to dictate how the rest of us are to be punished for disobeying the laws they have created. They are the shapers of a society they have no interest in being a part of. Their interests lie not in creating a healthy society but in extracting wealth the society they create.

They are choosing for us—you and me, and everybody you know or are likely to meet—how the corporation you work for will treat you, what news will reach you, and what you will be talking about at work on Monday morning. Whatever creative innovation that might be boiling up among the ordinary citizens and small entrepreneurs will eventually be ground up into sausage by a machine that is too big to be denied, a machine controlled by them. Whatever human interaction that still smacks of independent thought will be drowned out by the overwhelming spectacle that is created by their entertainment industry. And if you should ever by chance get to know someone who has gone from being one of us to one of them, remember that they never would have been allowed to do so had they been a threat to those who stand apart from us. Those tiny few who join their ranks do so because they are willing to play within the rules provided by their bosses. Even multi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg realize they have to go along to get along. Either one of them would have been squashed like a bug by the system if he had been perceived as a threat to the system. And they are still reminded that they can be destroyed should they fail to back the system that permitted their vast wealth. The chance of anyone within the system going against the system is exactly nil. They rose to that level of wealth because they were useful to the system and because they shared in the desire for the obscene wealth such a system provides.

The system in which you live is fashioned by those who have no interest in being a part of it, no interest in listening to what you have to say or meeting you on the street. It is not like in the old days when you would wave to the owner of the local bakery, pharmacy, or any other independently-owned business that helped shape your community. Your local stores are now mostly owned by someone you will never meet and who does not give one shit about your community. They might live in another state or maybe in a different country. You will never interact with them.

Those who operate the system in which you live, live in gated communities, hang out in private clubs, fly on private jets. They know each other because most are on multiple different boards of directors together. They live in the same communities and vacation at the same resorts. They get invited to parties on each others’ yachts. They share a very real bond because they realize they have a shared interest, one that is not yours.

You and I ain’t ever getting a ride on Betsy Devos’ boat. We are never going to be invited to the meetings where our fates and the fate of our planet is decided. Our opinions of their wars don’t matter, we just have to fight and die in them. And it doesn’t matter which party we support, because the politicians from both parties take their orders from them. No war has ever been stopped because the wrong party was in office.

It may seem as though I am drawing a line in order to cause a division between a “them” and an “us”, but this is not true. I did not force them to flee from my neighborhood, their leaving was a choice they made. It is they who constructed the walls, they who distanced themselves from us. It is they who don’t want to hear your opinion, confident that they know what’s best for humanity. I have never built a gated community to keep the extremely rich out, I have never hired security to keep others from taking what is mine. I do not monitor their secret conversations nor place informants within every large group of people interested in social or political change.

I did not create the division that exists. They did. They placed themselves above us and apart from us. They chose to make a nation where money and not people reigned supreme. They preferred money to humanity, placed their faith in the kind of wealth that could be stored in vaults rather than placing their faith in spiritual and communal concerns.

And why is it that they feel the need to shape a society they have no interest in being a part of? Because in doing so they can extract great wealth from those forced to live within the constraints they have built. And the money is necessary in order to purchase bigger yachts, taller fences, more people to protect them, and more bombs to drop on those who do not submit to them. And sadly, the more yachts they acquire, the more of the wealth of the planet they will need to waste on bombs.

I thought you might want to know.