Hating People With Power

I think I found the thing underneath a fight that looks like two fights.

People who hate capitalism and people who hate communism are angry about the same thing. They just point at different villains.

• Hate communism, and it's because the government holds all the power.
• Hate capitalism, and it's because corporations hold all the power.

Take the labels off and the complaint is identical. Someone else is holding all the cards, and it isn't me.

When it clicked

This clicked for me watching the mood turn on billionaires. Elon Musk is the clearest case. Whatever you think of him, almost nobody hates him for the genius part. They hate him for the size of the number next to his name. The wealth itself became the offense.

I see it close up. My brother leans socialist. My brother-in-law is further along and thinks socialism is the answer. Neither of them is stupid, and neither is really arguing about economic systems. They're angry at the status quo, and the status quo is a handful of people who own most of everything.

The example that breaks my own thesis

Here's where my own argument falls apart, in a useful way. If the problem is concentrated power, then Amazon should be enemy number one. It's one of the most concentrated companies on earth. But I don't hate Amazon. It ate so much of the supply chain that it puts goods on your porch in a day and drops the price of groceries doing it. The concentration delivered something real.

So it was never concentration. There's an old line, usually credited to the writer William Gibson: the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. That's the actual problem.

Go to San Francisco right now and you can watch it happen. Empty Waymos drive themselves around the city while the rest of the country is still arguing about whether that's even safe. The future is parked on their streets. Same story with psychedelics. There's a growing pile of evidence that mushrooms and a few related compounds can pull people out of depression and addiction, rewire things nothing else touched. Powerful stuff, and also not distributed. Still edgy, still gatekept. In ten years we might look back stunned that people stayed stuck while the fix already existed and just hadn't reached them.

That's what people are actually angry about, even when they call it "capitalism." The solutions exist. The future exists. It's in sight, and it's walled off. Larry Fink at BlackRock has argued a version of this himself: the problem isn't that capitalism is broken, it's that ownership is too concentrated. The value got made. It just didn't get around.

So the enemy was never size. It's distance. People don't hate that power exists. They hate power that's stopped reaching them.

And it runs the other way too. Distance is what breeds the hatred; proximity quietly dissolves it. Sit with almost anyone for a few hours and the cartoon villain turns back into a person. The people angriest at power are almost always the ones standing furthest from it.

The anger is right; the aim is wrong

I'm not going to wave the anger off, and "you don't know how good you have it until it's gone" can sound like exactly that. Here's why I'll say it anyway: people make bad decisions when they're angry, and anger snowballs. It's hard to think analytically with your blood up. The anger is pointing at something real. It's just aimed at the wrong target, and aimed badly it burns down things worth keeping.

So get specific. What actually failed people? I'd start with college. For a couple of generations it was the reliable ladder. Go, do the work, and you land in the middle class, maybe higher. That deal is broken, and a lot of today's anger is the bill coming due on it. But that isn't capitalism failing. It's an institution that stopped doing its job.

College was supposed to teach you enough to go push the frontier. Instead it became a credential mill. People learn what the last generation already knew, then turn around and gatekeep it, charging the next group for the same regurgitation. That doesn't expand the boundary of knowledge. It rents access to it. Compare that to something like the Manhattan Project, where the country pointed a pile of talent at a hard problem and told them to go make something that didn't exist yet. That mission seeded ideas we still live on, the internet among them. One model pushes the frontier. The other guards the gate. We built our whole "path to the middle class" on the one that guards the gate, then acted surprised when it betrayed people.

And here's the piece the angry side genuinely misses. A lot of them treat money like a fixed pie, where every dollar you make is a dollar taken from someone else. That's the part of the worldview that's just wrong. Capitalism's whole trick is that the pie isn't fixed. You can create value that wasn't there before, which is exactly what Amazon and the Waymos and the rest of it are doing. Nobody took your slice. The trouble is that the new pie keeps getting baked in a kitchen you're not allowed into.

You can't just take the power away

So if power has drifted out of reach, why not seize it back? Because of what's left when you do.

Strip the power off the people at the top and you don't get a fairer game. You get a game with nothing to play for. That's the thing the anti-capitalist side has to wrestle with: people need something to strive for, and capitalism's real engine is that the climb is uncapped. Leave the ceiling off and people chase it. Cap it, and you get the quiet stagnation of a place where there's no point reaching.

Watch where money actually goes when people get the choice. In China, where the state can seize your business and reach into your accounts, a lot of people route their savings into the US stock market. Not because they love America. Because here there's no ceiling on what you can earn and no government that can simply take it. People vote with their capital, and they vote for the place where the climb is real. That instinct, the wanting to climb, is the exact thing you'd be killing.

Turn billionaires into Batman

So you can't seize it, and you shouldn't kill the climb. What do you do with people who genuinely have more power than everyone else?

You root them. The instinct right now is the opposite. Demonize them. Mamdani built a whole campaign on it. Watch what that does, though. Shame power and it leaves. It moves the money, the company, the residence, and the place that demonized it gets nothing back. Peter Thiel is the case study in motion: a New Zealand passport, a foothold in Argentina, a smaller and smaller public footprint at home. The more the culture turned on him, the more of him quietly left. Demonizing power doesn't distribute it. It exports it.

The move I'd make is to turn billionaires into Batman. Batman is a rich man who decided his power belonged to a specific place. He doesn't leave Gotham. He pours himself back into the city that made him and stays down in the streets of it instead of floating above. That's the conversion. Celebrate the people who actually climbed, then pull them in and root them, instead of driving them out.

I think they'd take the offer, because most of them already want to. Elon wants to get humanity to Mars so the species doesn't go extinct. Whatever you make of him, that's an altruistic bet. Powerful people mostly do want to give back, and a lot of them feel the strange shame of holding that much and not knowing what to do with it. Here's the catch nobody says out loud: the skill that makes you rich is not the skill that makes you good at giving it away. Accumulating and distributing are different talents. Someone can be a genius at piling up capital and clueless about where it actually needs to go. That's the real gap. Not that the powerful hoard out of malice, but that they're good at one half of the job and were never helped with the other.

Which is why I want to bring back a word we've basically stopped using: patronage. The Medici funding the Renaissance, Carnegie building the libraries, the rich tying their name and their money to the place and the culture that made them. We don't celebrate that anymore, and we should. Give the powerful a path to give back that roots them instead of laundering them, and a lot of them will walk it. Shame sends them to the airport. An honest invitation keeps them home.

What I'm actually worried about

Here's the version that keeps me up. The anger never gets aimed. It just snowballs, the way anger does. There's a hard backlash against Trump, and a true believer from the left, an AOC or a Mamdani, rides it into real power and starts bolting on the policies that cap the climb. It would feel like justice. It would also quietly remove the thing people were striving toward, and you don't get that back easily. The mob would win, and winning would cost it the only thing worth winning.

There's one wild card I can't read yet. AI might be the first concentration that hands something back on its own: intelligence, cheap, to anyone with a phone. The most gatekept resource there is, suddenly un-gatekept. If that's real, it breaks the whole pattern. But the darker read is just as live. Julian Dorey put it plainly on his podcast: "we now have very clear psychopaths who run companies like this… who joke openly that this is probably going to end humanity while building bunkers." Same technology, opposite endings. One hands the future back to everyone. The other builds the highest wall yet and puts the worst people on top of it. It's too early to call, so I'll leave it where it actually sits. Undetermined.

The silent thing under the loud argument

The fight that looks like left versus right, capitalism versus communism, is mostly a fight about who holds the power and how far it's drifted from everyone else. The silent ones in it aren't the loudest voices on either side. They're the people watching this play out who've read enough history to be wary of the mob, who know that anger feels like clarity and almost never is.

So aim the anger. Be specific about what actually failed you. Don't burn down the climb to punish the people standing at the top of it. Pull them back down and root them instead of driving them out. And keep one eye on whether the machines are about to hand the future back to the rest of us, or just build the highest wall yet.