The U.S. government destroyed the World Trade Center and made it look as if terrorists did it. The CIA killed Kennedy. A secret cabal runs Wall Street and the world’s banks, cleverly manipulating the levers of finance for its everlasting enrichment. What these conspiracy theories all have in common is the presumption that the world is run by a small coterie of super-competent people—people so smart they make no mistakes, and can hide their elaborate machinations from the rest of us. It’s a comforting belief, providing order in the place of chaos. But it’s not the way the world actually works. If you poke your nose into any large institution—government, medicine, universities, newspapers, Hollywood, major corporations—you’ll find that even the most successful of them is plagued by the same spasms of stubborn foolishness, shortsightedness, and rank incompetence that you and I see in our own lives every day. Even the smartest among us can succumb to periods of collective madness, in which people cannot see what is right in front of their eyes.
Now it is the titans of finance who stand humbled before us, having invested lavishly in financial instruments neither they, nor virtually anyone else, truly understood. Century-old corporations are in ashes. Trillions of dollars in paper wealth have evaporated in a matter of weeks. And how did the sage statesmen who run Washington respond? By bickering like children over abstract ideologies and blame and hurt feelings, as another trillion or so in stock market wealth disappeared. It’s small consolation, as our 401(k) plans melt like ice cream cones dropped on a hot sidewalk, but we now know this about the cabal that runs the world: It’s no smarter, or wiser, than the rest of us. - William Falk
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
The magician who secretly smashed the Magic Circle's glass ceilingUnder The Radar Sophie Lloyd lurked in the all-male society by posing as a teenage boy for nearly two years, but was expelled after revealing her true identity
-
Kate Summerscale's 6 favorite true crime books about real murder casesFeature The best-selling author recommends works by Helen Garner, Gwen Adshead, and more
-
Team of bitter rivalsOpinion Will internal tensions tear apart Trump's unlikely alliance?
-
Editor's letterfeature
-
Editor's letter: Are college athletes employees?
feature The National Labor Relations Board's decision deeming scholarship players “employees” of Northwestern University has many worrying that college sports itself will soon be history.
-
Editor's letter
feature
-
Editor's letter: When a bot takes your job
feature Now that computers can write news stories, drive cars, and play chess, we’re all in trouble.
-
Editor's letter: Electronic cocoons
feature Smartphones have their upside, but city streets are now full of people walking with their heads down.
-
Editor's letter: The real cause of income inequality
feature When management and stockholders pocket all the profits, the middle class falls further behind.
-
Editor's letter: The real reason you’re so forgetful
feature When you consider how much junk we’ve stored in our brains, it’s no surprise we can’t remember our PINs.
-
Editor's letter: Ostentatious politicians
feature The McDonnells’ indictment for corruption speaks volumes about the company elected officials now keep.