but here’s an excerpt that sums up my view of the last 10,000 years
"After Epstein’s arrest in 2019, a media narrative coalesced around the question of his strange place in the global elite: Epstein the master salesman, a man who had skillfully conned his way into the world’s most powerful circles, fooling everyone in the process. But after my travels through the book, after hearing more of the petty gossip and childish drama of the people who rule our world, I realized this was obviously incorrect. Built into the premise of Epstein the mastermind scammer is the notion that some kind of legitimate path to a legitimate global aristocracy exists. To call Epstein a grifter is to assume he circumvented some genuine meritocratic world order, where the “real” virtuosos dutifully climb the “real” ranks into the oligarchy, powered by nothing but their native talents.
The truth is that the elite world that Epstein ascended into, the one I tapped into by way of the black book, is populated with hordes of loathsome, boring, untalented people living their bumbling, idiotic lives while just so happening to wield some share of the preposterous global bounty that he and the rest were after. For all the mystery surrounding Epstein’s fortune, its existence is hardly more inscrutable than the wealth of any of his other billionaire peers. He earned it the same way they all did, which is to say precisely not at all.
This wasn’t some masterful hack into the global aristocracy. It’s what everyone does. It’s what the whole thing is. There is no scam here. It’s grifters grifting grifters all the way down."
You don’t have to go back very far to find people getting handed power, despite their own narrative of how they got it, then they tell their women who to marry so they can get a male heir and give the power to them. There are a few other schemes to choose an anointed one, but that one is pervasive, even in indigenous cultures. The lie of that last few hundred years is that science, enlightenment, and democracy ended all that. It made it better, but it is far from ended.
This guy is really straw-manning, and his nerdy cynicism is tiresome.
A global elite does exist and they are talented in ways most people can never be. It’s no big secret that people like Epstein can sometimes tap into it.
Always good to get some insight into what you believe. Not sure, but you might be confusing scientists, engineers, hard working people who invent things with the people who exploit those innovations and fix the laws so they own them and reap the profits.
That’s my point. The people in powerful positions that appear to have gotten there by talent, in reality, most of them of stole their way into power. They figured out how to use and write laws to benefit themselves and use innovations that could help everyone for profit for only a few.
For me, to be rich is not enough to be member of the true elites …
In 2022, around 53 heirs inherited a total wealth of $150.8 billion, surpassing the total wealth of $140.7 billion accumulated by 84 new self-made billionaires.
" Behind every great fortune there is a crime. Behind Every Great Fortune Is An Equally Great Crime. The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, because it was properly done." Balzac