Who Are ‘They’ When We Speak of ‘They’?
You’ve heard it before: They are in control. They decide who gets banned from Twitter, They manipulate the currency, They choose the outcome of elections. We don’t quite know who They are, but we can sense them: a secret cabal of elites who are running the world—unelected and unaccountable. And they don’t have our best interests at heart.
Just a few short years ago, most people would have instantly dismissed such talk as conspiracy theory. Today, it’s a widely adopted view. But who, exactly, are They when we speak of “They”?
It might help to ask: who is alive today that could exert the kind of secret control we fear? Certainly, they must be the world’s richest and most powerful individuals: the architects of the postwar order (and their beneficiaries), the nouveau riche who ascended based on their own merits and achievements, and the ambitious social climbers who clawed their way to the top through sycophancy and adroit navigation of the corridors of power.
But being rich and/or powerful is not necessarily untoward. It’s only when these traits are combined with a firm commitment to change the world—regardless of whether the rest of the human race agrees to or even wants this change—that something sinister becomes operant.
Many wealthy and powerful people have tried to change the world before. Not all of them could. Those who failed likely acted alone and without support from others. A single individual has a limited capacity to effect change, even an elite of means and influence. But by banding together with other like-minded individuals, his efficacy is magnified.
That means that if you believe They are effective, then They work in a like-minded group, or else they are not the “They” we fear.
Some elites have had considerable success in effecting change. Others were flashes in a pan. Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg sought to rid the world of sexual impropriety by promoting the virtues of a plain diet. The graham crackers and corn flakes stayed, but the idea didn’t last.
That’s why the most successful change campaigns always have a strong idea. This is more important than the wealth or power of the elites who are pushing it. A rich man can throw as much money behind an idea as he wants, and an influential person can talk it up until he is blue in the face, but if the idea doesn’t have legs, it’s not going to go far.
It needs to be persuasive, compelling, and rewarding—it has to be something that people want to spread on their own. Viral.
It is also true that the most successful change campaigns lasted a long time. They effected change long after the lifetime of the original elites who backed them—perhaps it was spread over the course of many lifetimes. The longer an idea is “spreadable,” the longer people want to back it with their money and power, and the longer it is able to change the world.
This longevity factor is important, and speaks again to the power of the idea. An elite might find it rewarding to dedicate his life to changing the world in a certain way. “Blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.” If other people are similarly inspired to change the world in the same way, even if they aren’t materially incentivized to spread it and even if they won’t live to see the idea come to fruition, then it is a very powerful idea indeed.
For an idea to inspire such devotion—especially the devotion of an elite, who has the means to peruse and sift through many ideas—then it must have force and life of its own. Something transcendent, even.
Now we are speaking of the power of belief. When an elite dedicates his life to changing the world because of an idea, it’s not the same thing as merely a pet project—it’s something that looks more like religion.
I believe that something on par with religion is the only thing that can bind the most wealthy and powerful people in the world, and the only animating force potent enough to drive their commitment to change the world.
The Two Oldest Religions
The oldest religion is man in relationship to God. For an individual to be free, for a civilization to be great, it must hold true to this relationship, and face the world with it. This was the religion of Adam and Eve before the Fall, and is the religion of the faithful thereafter.
The second religion came into being almost immediately after the first. As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity:
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could "be like gods" — could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God.
From this “hopeless attempt,” says Lewis, comes nearly all of human history: “The long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
When Whittaker Chamber, who risked his life and the lives of his family to defect from communism, describes what communism is, he uses virtually the same definition: a vision of man having replaced God. In his biography, Witness, he, says:
The tie that binds [Communists] is a simply conviction: It is necessary to change the world. … It is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods."
This is the vision of Man apart from God. According to this vision, the destiny of mankind, with all of its intellectual and creative capacity, is to unite globally, under the guidance and direction of an elect core of central planners, to supplant God’s place as the primary mind of the universe and to establish a paradise here on Earth.
This has been the idea that has spurred elites to build and rebuild Towers of Babel throughout all of human history. The elites of today are no different.
Curtis Yarvin, a brilliant political thinker, conceptualizes the architecture of the modern regime as a system made up of the Castle (military and law enforcement), the Factory (production of goods and services), the Bureau (professional civil service), and the Cathedral—the most important one of all.
“The Cathedral,” says Yarvin, “is information: truth, philosophy, ethics, narrative, art and intelligence.” In his words:
Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.
The doctrine, the Dream, of the modern regime is the vision of Man apart from God. If you’ve suspected that They include members of seemingly contradictory groups—uber capitalists along with socialists and Marxists, well, this is how you reconcile that conflict. Despite their methods, role, or caste, they are all dreaming the same Dream.
Centralization and Decentralization
The elites who are working toward a paradise apart from God see themselves as the heroes of their story. If their methods infringe on the rights and liberties of others, it’s for the greater good. They see themselves as benevolent.
The term they use for themselves is “global stakeholders,” and they view their elevated position as granting them the responsibility to reorder the world as they see fit. This is their duty, because ordinary people, left to their own devices, cannot effectively take care of themselves.
When the World Economic Forum presents their vision for a Great Reset, they point to the response to COVID-19 to indict the world not yet sufficiently under their control: “The inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions of multiple systems—from health and financial to energy and education—are more exposed than ever.” From their higher perch, they see how the whole thing can be run better.
They, the global stakeholders, have the “vision and expertise” to “build a new social contract” by determining “the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons.”
In other words, decentralized man doesn’t have the skill or vision to progress, therefore he must be brought under the control of the elites for his own good.
Decentralization is both an opportunity for the elites to gain more power and a direct threat to their system of control. Author and political thinker Maajid Nawaz, in a recent interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, says that the most disruptive new technologies of the modern era—the internet and crypto currency—have greatly destabilized the elites’ monopoly over information and currency. They are now fighting to maintain their grip.
Those in power “never let a good crisis go to waste,” and emergencies are often used by the elites in power to tighten their control. For example, when the public was so afraid of the spread of COVID-19, they were willing to relinquish some rights for security: for example, adopting vaccine passports.
Vaccine passports, Nawaz argues, puts in place the infrastructure necessary to roll out “programmable central bank digital currency,” a type of currency that the elites hope will replace cash. It’s essentially a digital government token, the central bank’s answer to Bitcoin—with a caveat: they can be “programmed” to be used only for approved purchases. After witnessing governments freeze the bank accounts of peaceful protesters, it’s no wonder that elites want to usher in this new form of money.
In the future, we will see more “emergencies”—pandemics, riots, racism, transphobia, hate speech, crime spikes, war, food shortages and supply-chain crises, what-have-you—that will be used to pressure people to hand over what freedom, sovereignty, and decentralized control they have to the elites, in the hopes that they will “solve” the emergency for them.
So long as ordinary people are allowed to express themselves freely, uphold their own values, seek true education for their children, protect and maintain their own communities, and to do so outside of the framework of the modern regime and apart from the Dream of the elites—They will continue to apply pressure.
That is why Nawaz frames the current moment as “no longer about left or right. It’s about up versus down, power versus those who don't have power.” Centralization versus decentralization
When we speak of They, we mean people of wealth and power who are bound by a vision of achieving utopia here on earth by uniting all of mankind under their guidance and direction. They are so devoted to this vision that they are willing to overcome the liberty and self-sovereignty of anyone who refuses their control.
There is only one other alternative to this vision. Man is meant to worship—that is an unavoidable truth. But you may choose whom you worship: Man, or God. What you decide will help determine the next chapter of the long story of human history.