There’s a common theme in life and art of the “inner circle.” That is, among the people who seem to be in charge, there’s an inner group of the people who are really in charge. (Although sometimes the people who are really in charge are hidden in the background.) C.S. Lewis speaks of the inner circle at the university in That Hideous Strength.
To get into that group you have to show your loyalty to a particular mindset, and sometimes there’s a price for entry. Sometimes that price involves giving the group the ability to blackmail you.
You hear about that sort of thing in gangs, where you have to go commit some crime before you can enter, or get to advance to a certain level in the gang. The concept was also explicit in the NXIVM cult, where women had to give “collateral” to join a special group. The collateral was stuff they could use to bribe you with.
There are tons of examples of this sort of thing, and I’ve heard some real-life examples that are scary.
If this happens with law firms and cults and gangs and such, is it more likely or less likely that it happens with more consequential organizations — like governments, big corporations, or maybe even governments and big corporations?
I’m not sure what to make of it. You have the Harvey Weinsteins and Jeffrey Epsteins of the world, who seem to show that powerful people are complicit in very awful things. And while it would be nice to believe that there are institutions to uncover such crooked behavior (the media, law enforcement), we know that often they are complicit. (Think of the Rotherham scandal.)
What’s your opinion of these kinds of stories?
Check out the Vatican!
Exactly. But it seems some people are quite willing to believe that there is a corrupt “inner circle” in the Vatican, but unwilling to believe the same applies to the U.S. government, or Disney, or ….
But the Vatican is inherently and shamelessly resistant to transparency and has the additional pretense of being the ultimate human authority regarding faith and morals. I think that you’ve got slightly a better shot with the US government, as creepy as it has shown itself to be on many occasions. Somehow I find it hard to think of Disney as having the level of power as the other two. But what the hell do I know? Nobody has ever tried to draft me into a secret society. Maybe they don’t like philosophers. 🙂
Disney owns a lot of influential companies.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/companies-disney-owns-worldwide/
I agree with this “inner circle” concept. These inner circles function almost exclusively to perpetrate unconscionable moral outrages. Occasionally those outrages are brought to light, as when the allies liberated the Nazi death camps at the end of WW II.
When/how are they exposed without having to kill millions of people?
@Crowhill: I would say that they almost never are. Usually, discovery requires a quick strike with an overwhelming force. The Nazi death camps would not have been exposed but for the precipitous collapse of the German army that gave the Nazis no chance to cover their atrocities. If Siberia had been invaded during the cold war, the Soviet Gulag system would have been similarly exposed.