13 July

It’s became very popular to see ‘oligarchs’ as the root of evil in modern life. I shared a few weeks ago the fate of the oligarchs that led the first Industrial Revolution. They got very rich and powerful at the time, but then history chewed them up and spat them out, and the benefits of that revolution flowed to the entire globe. Here’s another way to see an oligarch. Oligarchs exploit weaknesses in an existing status quo. Loopholes in collective life. This breaks the status quo in many ways, as old industries and ways of life are literally smashed. The oligarch gets rich, but their *social* role, which they’re not even aware of, is to provide sufficient wealth and power to break the old status quo. Wealth and power that comes from an existing dysfunctional status quo, that they exploit. They’re also often the victims of their own disruption, and it eventually overwhelms all of them in social impact. Only that concentrated wealth and status could force a change to a status quo. Nothing is more powerfully resistant than habit, than everybody just doing what everybody else is doing. Only catastrophes or oligarchs can break those habits.