He told us what we had to do and what sort of men we had to reach. He had quit the Twentieth Century… He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.

*  *  *

Let’s talk about the rich.

Not your average garden variety, run-of-the-mill millionaire richie riches or even those measily claiming to be multi-millionaires.

Chump change.

Billionaires.

The yardstick by which modern wealth is measured.

Last week, Wired magazine published some hacked internal records and files of Dialog, “a private, invitation-only organization cofounded in 2006 by the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats.”

Peter Thiel, tech investor, venture capitalist, amateur theologian, bad philosopher promoter, even worse politician promoter, democracy hater, Argentina relocator and practicing ghoul, with a net worth north of $20 billion. Not content with being merely filthy rich, Thiel’s extra-curriculars seem determined to add a layer of diabolical villainy to his persona. Topics for this year’s Dialog get-together include ‘Bring Back Nuclear’, ’Navigating WWIII’, ‘Battlefield Technologies’,

No evidence of discussions about what you’d hope people with money to burn might be concerned with: ending hunger, alleviating poverty, healing a depleted planet, edifying the human soul (unless, of course, the ‘Build-a-Cult’ chat is considered a spiritual endeavour). Even ‘How’s Your Sex Life?’ in the Dialog context of officialdom rubbing shoulders with economic mucky mucks feels more creepy than it does about personal fulfilment or satisfaction. ‘Money (Does?) Buy Happiness’? Like happiness has anything to do with any of this.

Happy rich people do not organize secretive societies in order to talk off the record on happy topics. Malevolent rich people organize secretive societies in order to privately wallow in their malevolence, their Montgomery J. Burns crapulence. They want to revel in their cartoonish cruelty in a breakout session I imagine to be called ‘Twirl That Mustache’.

Money is not about happiness. Money is about power. Money is about influence. Money could buy a boatload of compassion but the returns are dismal. Empathy’s for suckers, as the world’s richest man has suggested. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Imagine having more than enough money to feed the world, still leaving a fortune left over for your own indulgences, and to remain this soullessly uncharitable. Insatiable greed, the only remnants of your tawdry, grubby humanity.

It’s almost as if accumulating billions makes you a sociopath. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Accumulating billions takes a sociopath.

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a foundational text for cold-blooded, aristocratic-minded wealth hoarding libertarians and those grasping desperately at such status, Great Man™ John Galt leads a strike of brain-geniuses, withdrawing their labour and services, bringing an ungrateful world out there to its knees. A technocrats dream.

But that’s now how the real world works. That’s not how the real world ever worked.

Peter Thiel. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. The Google Twins. Mark Zuckerberg.

All owe their obscene fortunes to the contingencies of history and the generosity of the states they equal parts prey and depend on. Government largesse provides for their meat and potatoes, their wagyu beef and foie gras. You think your Prime subscription paid for the yacht Bezos couldn’t sail under a Rotterdam bridge? Like SpaceX and Google and Palantir and on and on, Bezos’s AWS leans heavily on government contracts and the laissez-faire belief that the private sector knows best attitude that has been the west’s mantra for nearly fifty years now. Without that, these guys would be nothing but car dealers, parcel deliverers and advertising execs.

And if they tried to John Galt us, stop selling us their goods and services, there’d be disruptions for sure, the lights would dim briefly, but not for long. Because nothing they provide cannot be replaced. There’s nothing unique to their brands or capabilities. Their genius lies exclusively in cornering a market, strangling competition and severely monetizing a product that, when push comes to shove, wasn’t theirs to monetize in the first place.

They can conclave all they want in private behind closed doors, preside over their self-important grimy gulches, and tell themselves that it is within their power to reshape the world and future in their own image. But it’s a puffed-up misreading of the speculative fiction that lines their mahogany bookshelves, unread or lazily skimmed.