Anand Giridharadas

You will hurt the people with the least power in this world if you come

for the most powerful people in the world.

It is on its face such a bizarre story, but I think in other ways, a tempting and seductive one, because it has just enough truth to not feel like a lie.

I mean, Google did organize all the world's information.

Elon Musk has built things that can have an effect.

on the environment and climate.

Mark Zuckerberg does have enough money to make a dent in diseases, as he promised and then moved away from.

So they invented this story, and the story serves to say, don't mess with our power.

It was almost like the most powerful people on Earth used the people with the least power on Earth as human shields and said, don't come at us with your reform.

Yes.

I think this is one of the crucial, crucial points in how this whole thing works, which is, again, to just think about past elites for a moment, brilliance was not always an important part of the pitch.

If you think about the landed aristocracy in England, again, you think about upper caste people in India, or you think about Germans who were trying to criminalize being Jewish and then exterminate Jews.

it wasn't necessarily important to any of these stories that they were smarter than the people they were going against.

But in our age, for a bunch of different reasons, being smart has become very important to the self-conception of these people.

Because these other stories of what would justify these fortunes have faded, right?

Like inheriting the land, no one cares

that your great granddaddy lived on the land.

That's like an old story that no one cares about anymore.

It's important for a lot of these business people, they can't just be rich.

It's important for them to seed in you the idea that they're very smart.