The structure of power in the United States

The structure of power in the United States is best understood as a type of pyramid.

At the top of the pyramid are the rulers of American institutions, the de facto royalty of the United States. This class includes members of government — the President, Vice President, leaders of Congress, the Supreme Court and inferior courts — as well as heads of the richest corporations, people like Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch, and major families like the Kennedys and Rockefellers (and increasingly the Clintons); in a phrase, “old money”.

All in all, perhaps 1 to 3 percent of the total American population occupies this top layer of social power. This small group of people owns about 40 to 50 percent of all wealth in the United States, and they control nearly every aspect of American life. They are modern day kings and queens.

The next strata of power is the nobility, people who are not as rich and powerful as the royals but who are nonetheless very close to power. A king needs loyal knights, dukes and barons who will ensure his rule; similarly, the royals of the 21st century require an enabling class of syncophants who will do the dirty work of maintaining structural inequality.

The modern nobles are the professional classes: accountants, lawyers, bankers, and members of similar professions, people who spend their entire lives in offices working with papers, spreadsheets, rules, and numbers. Their purpose is to ensure that the rich and powerful stay rich and powerful. In return, they are rewarded with shiny baubles and some degree of wealth.

The people who occupy this class are well trained, highly educated, and ambitious. They are culled from the finest American universities and professional schools and instilled early in life with the belief that to be successful and competitive is the greatest achievement one can have. Many of these individuals come from newly enriched families or from well-off immigrant backgrounds (especially Asian and South Asian immigrants). They are the “new money” to the “old money” of the royals.

Yet despite all their book smarts and diplomas, and regardless of whatever drive they may have to succeed in life, they will never be able to breach the top level of power. Their role is to sustain power, not to shift it, and they are ultimately expendable. This realization makes them scared and afraid that one day they will lose everything they have labored so hard to possess. It is perhaps another reason why they are so fear-ridden and anxious. They probably comprise somewhere between 10 to 12 percent of the American population.

The third layer of American power forms the largest section of the pyramid: namely, everyone else, normal everyday people who are simply trying to get by in the maze of modern existence. These people — anywhere from 80 to 85 percent of the population — go to work everyday, respect authority, and are generally decent human beings who have an appreciation of life that is largely missing from the worldview of the upper echelons of power. They find it difficult to understand why bad things happen in the world, and would likely be shocked if they were to fully appreciate the power lust, greed, and envy that motivates many of the nobles and royals.

Perhaps it is this normal sense of decency — increasingly absent as one climbs up the pyramid — that, in the eyes of the royals and nobility, makes the everyday individual appear innocent or naive. Such individuals are simply “the masses”, and according to the powerful, they must be ruled in their own best interest, told what to do and what to think.

Finally, it is worth mentioning a final, last strata of power, a thin foundation of people who bear extraordinary burdens. These are the largely invisible members of society — illegal immigrants and the truly disadvantaged — who cook, clean, harvest, and serve everyone else in society. They have few legal rights and very little money. Not a large number of people (no more than 7 to 10 million Americans, or 2 to 3 percent of the population) they are perhaps the hardest working members of society, and likely the most spat on.

How is it possible that such a pyramid might exist? After all, the royals and nobility are greatly outnumbered by the vast majority of the population. Why don’t the hundreds of millions of Americans who are just trying to survive rise up and distribute power more equally?

The reason is that those with power have been tremendously successful at keeping Americans separate and divided from each other. They label people by “race” to make poor light-skinned Americans feel as if they must compete with poor dark-skinned Americans instead of addressing the root problems of poverty and lack of resources. They claim that there are “Red States” and “Blue States”, glossing over the fact that Americans have much more in common than most people realize. Show me a person who doesn’t want health insurance, a well paying and interesting job, and time with friends and family — isn’t that everyone?

And most insiduously, they have created and sustained a way of life which insists that the point of life is to acquire consumer items. This, in turn, leads to a way of life where other people are seen as competitors as opposed to citizens and neighbors. We are supposed to find purpose and meaning in shopping, when all that we really need is companionship and liberty.

But there is good reason for hope. The fact of the matter is that the true lovers of human potential vastly outnumber the dividers and the separators. They may have structural power and all that entails — wealth, resources, military strength — but their power is useless against their greatest enemy: themselves. For while they have pledged allegience to the eye on the back of the dollar bill, it looks through their souls and sees only the emptiness of hate and despair. They are weak and small individuals, and if they are now unleashing destruction all over the Earth, it is because they feel a great destruction inside.

Their rule will end when they realize that there is nothing to fear by laying down their violent ways and finding a more resilient greatness that resides not with any title or bank account, but in their own hearts and heads. And when they do so, and rejoin the human fold, we can expect a world where every person will shine like a bright star in the heavens, as unique and as perfect as he or she was intended to be.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Social Alienation, Structure and System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.