Wealth is allowing people to buy consent for their worldviews these days. this is an incredibly naiive take.

How does one buy consent for a worldview? Buying and selling require two parties - the party who is selling their viewpoint to the highest bidder isn't blameless.

Traditionally, through personal networks in media and industry — placing talking heads and op-ed’s and editorial direction to repeat your message.

More recently, purchasing a social network and then flooding it with your worldview.

The party who accepts the bid generally wins the election.

When you say “these days,” you mean the past 10,000 years, right?

Power based on consent likely existed throughout the Holocene: “Big men” with their gift-giving and elaborate feasts, chiefdoms comprised of aristocratic lineages… the gameplan has always been to collect favors by promising future returns, religious blessings, and the like. You can see the parallels to present-day VC. These pre-historic admin dudes emerged alongside the steepening wealth inequality gradients and population growths of agrarian societies.

Comforting to know their influence is limited and precarious, as the social following can always fragment. This is what anthropologists call segmentary structures. More interesting, if severely depressing, is the theory that power based on consent is arguably the precondition for scaling social cohesion beyond kin and villages to cities and civilizations, thereby serving as the foundation for more durable power structures.

If you have bought consent, you have power.

It's weird to not understand that wealth buys power.

It’s naive to believe these are not connected. Wealth buys power.

> It’s naive to believe these are not connected. Wealth buys power.

Raw power > wealth (see Putin, Vladimir: he doesn't need wealth or even to "own" anything, his raw power gets him everything wealth can buy and more). But for weaker people who aren't so powerful to control the system itself, wealth can get you a lot of power within that system.

They are not intrinsically connected. Not everyone who is wealthy is powerful, not everyone who is powerful is wealthy.

They’re roughly proxies for each other. But I think land is a much more fundamental source of power. Makes sense that a lot of these types have started to invest in defense fortresses and opine about building new cities.

That's a dangerously myopic take in a political landscape where money == speech and speech == influence.

Wealth is power

Then surely GC would've only needed to say "power"?

"lemme just jump in this swimming pool while ignoring the water"

How does a politician or his opponent ignore millions of dollars donated to political campaigns ?