In recent years, we’ve learned disturbing things about the beliefs and behaviors of the ruling class. We still don’t know how far the Epstein scandal reaches, but it seems like everyone above a certain level of wealth was, at minimum, aware of him, and had a pretty good idea of the “services” he provided.

There’s a degree to which we’ve always known about this. It’s not a coincidence that vampires, with their predatory and sadistic nature, are traditionally aristocrats in fiction. We’ve always known about this, but the propaganda of capitalism pulled a veil over the eyes of far too many in the cores of European empires. It’s been a while since it was spelled out so publicly and explicitly, but the fact remains: For most if not all of our rulers, the measurement of power is the ability to inflict suffering without consequence.

As Tegan recently pointed out to me, that’s the meaning of “fuck you money“, when you get down to it. It’s having enough power that you can be an asshole to whoever you want, and they can’t do anything about it, except stay out of your way and hope you don’t make them a project.

This is a pretty common dream, at least in the US, and it’s enacted by petty tyrants at every level of society. We can discuss the psychology behind that another time, but the point here is that for a substantial portion of the population, and a majority of the ruling class, the best-case scenario is that they are indifferent to our suffering.

And so if we wrongly assume that our rulers are indifferent, rather than people who enjoy making our lives worse, how is our suffering considered?

Because it is considered. They know the scale of harm they cause, and they know it upsets people. Most of them don’t understand what motivates the peasantry beyond survival and greed, but they know they know we have cause for anger at them, and they know they need to keep an eye on us. How much trouble will we cause for our “betters”? How likely are we to start burning warehouses or killing executives? Our suffering is measured in unrest.

It is this calculation, I think, that has driven the rise in spending on police in the United States. Remember Atlanta’s “Cop City”, that I wrote about a few years ago? That’s still a thing, and there are more of them being set up all over the country. Since 2001, police have been increasingly armed and funded like a military force, and now these domestic law-enforcement officers are being trained in urban warfare, as if American cities were gang combat zones out of an 80s action flick.

They understand that we can barely survive. That was their goal all along. They want us too poor, sick, divided, and desperate to demand anything better, and because they know pushing people to that point tends to result in violence, they want us terrified as well. They don’t just want us to be under constant surveillance, they want us to know we are under constant surveillance. They want us afraid to speak our minds, even among friends. Our suffering, to them, is a metric. It’s a number on a dial that tells them how effectively they’re exploiting us, and how much they need to spend on violence and propaganda to keep us in line. As they feel their capacity to control us increases, they turn up the dial on the suffering. More overtime, less pay, less healthcare, more dangerous working conditions, and higher rent for worse homes. They want humanity to spend every waking instant working for their profit, without time or resources to actually live our lives. They want us to be slaves, or something so close the difference is meaningless.

They believe that is the best possible world, they believe they deserve that kind of power, and they are willing to destroy everything, because they think the worst-cased scenario for them is that they’re like Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road; god-kings ruling over a feeble, grovelling populace by controlling our access to the means for basic survival.