Who, if anyone, or what, if anything, is in charge?

In many ways this is the question of the age, inspiring passionate debates across the ideological spectrum, with divergent answers springing not just from left and right but from every boutique micro-ideology howling within humanity’s splintered mind. Dissident rightists talk about elite theory and the Cathedral, an emergent managerial structure sprawling across the institutions that coordinates itself with power-seeking talking points the way ant colonies use pheromones to swarm towards food supplies. Libertarians ascribe malign incompetence to the state and its lumbering bureaucracies, and to the central banks and their fraudulent fiat currencies. Accelerationists point to the blind idiot god of technocapital. Wignats talk about The Jews. Conspiracy analysts finger the World Economic Forum, the bankers, the intelligence agencies, the reptoids. Christians speak of the Devil, gnostics of archons. The Woke rant about the invisible witchcraft of systemic racism, white privilege, cisheteronormativity, misogyny, and every once in a while, recall their origins with Marx and remember to blame capitalism.

What all of these have in common is that they remove the source of agency in public affairs from the visible to the invisible. It is not the politicians that we can see who coordinate the world and provide impetus to policy changes, but hidden puppet masters – human or systemic – who manipulate them from off-stage. If there is a single, unifying theme around which most of the current year’s human species can coalesce across all ideological divides, it is this: the true power is hidden.