We Are All Oligarchs Now

The Invisible Court

An oligarch once required servants, slaves, or subjects. Visible people doing visible work. The relationship was clear, if often unjust.

Today, the ordinary person in a developed nation commands resources and labor that would have seemed magical to any king of antiquity. We speak, and devices answer. We desire, and products appear. We discard, and our waste vanishes.

The court is invisible. The servants are hidden. The system that serves us operates beyond our sight.

What Distance Enables

Consider what your daily life requires:

• Your device: Assembled by hands you will never see, from minerals extracted by workers you will never meet.
• Your clothes: Sewn in factories whose conditions you do not know, shipped across oceans by crews you cannot name.
• Your food: Harvested by laborers whose lives are invisible to you, processed in facilities designed to be forgotten.
• Your energy: Generated somewhere else, by someone else, with consequences borne by others.

Distance is not incidental. It is architectural. It enables us to benefit without witnessing. To consume without confronting.

The Comfort of Ignorance

We do not choose exploitation. We simply do not see it.

The systems that serve us are designed for invisibility. We are meant to experience only the result, never the process. The convenience without the cost. The benefit without the burden.

This is not innocence. It is curated ignorance. And it serves a function: it allows the system to continue without the friction of conscience.

The Complicity Problem

What is our moral position within such systems?

We did not design them. We did not request exploitation. We simply inherited a world where convenience is entangled with consequences we cannot see and may not understand.

And yet: we benefit. Daily. Constantly. From arrangements that would trouble us if we witnessed them directly.

This is not an accusation. It is a description of our actual situation.

Questions a Free Person Should Ask

• Who labored to produce what I consume?
• What conditions do I benefit from without witnessing?
• What would change if the invisible became visible?
• Do I want to know, or do I prefer not to?
• What responsibility comes with benefit I did not choose?
• Can ethical consumption exist within unethical systems?

What This Means for Ordinary People

This essay is not a demand for guilt or a call for impossible purity. We cannot individually dismantle systems that took centuries to build.

But we can refuse the comfort of ignorance. We can acknowledge our position honestly. We can make choices, where choices exist, that reduce the distance between ourselves and those who serve us.

We can support transparency over opacity. Local over distant where possible. Direct relationships over anonymous ones. We can, at minimum, know what we are participating in.

The oligarch who sees their servants is at least capable of mercy. The oligarch who never sees them is not even capable of acknowledgment.

Frequently Asked Questions