A long time ago a co-worker told me “there’s no asshole like the boss’s son”, though I cannot remember now who I am quoting. What he was saying was that the boss made the business what it is now, it’s success is their success. The boss’s children, if they have become involved in the business, normally entering at a position of authority that they have not in many ways merited, will desire to be taken seriously, as if they were a clone of their parent and just as responsible for the position the firm may be in. We often hear the word “we” then spoken.

I would extend this witnessed phenomenon even further, I’d say there’s no asshole like…. the boss’s child, the boss’s close personal associates, the boss’s marital partner, and those the boss has formed friendships with and then decided to include in their doings. Now the reason I say that is that just like in Roman times, power people can have associated, often younger, persons that they are not related to by blood, but they have all-but made children of. Just like every relationship between workers and bosses can go bad, they can go too well also. What I mean is objectivity is lost, relations are clouded by friendships, judgement can be lacking. I think this does not yield stability, it promotes dogmatism.

If we were to imagine what the difference would be between an executive board where the boss had selected the advisors or included family, and the senate of the Roman Republic, or the current French parliament, we would easily identify that in a seeded support group the result would almost inevitably become blanket agreement with the boss who hand picks his/her sycophants so as to be correct all the time in their personal estimations. If we look to a body of people that have been thrust together, not by their own choosing but by the choosing of a meritocratic system, we find competing dialectics, themselves honed into baseline agreement by revision and removal of error (that was the theory anyways). In this mode of organising any structure, though it is not without it’s own corruptions like we have seen too many times, there is the possibility of the correct action to emerge, whereas in the former there can only be the cultish following of a single person, and their abilities and intellectual limitations, that guides. Add then into this mix the boss’s son, who will steer the ship as his parent had before him, and enjoy the same sort of blinkered following, yet crucially lack the previous incumbent’s experiences that built the structure in the first place, and we will be very lucky not to have allowed for only the outcome being a calamity.

James O’Brien made the statement “born three nil up, but think they scored a hat-trick”, and what he means is wearing the clothes of someone else’s successes as if you were a crucial contributor to that success. I very much knew what he meant when he said it. O’Brien is echoing what we maybe all realise, that successive political actors, and maybe power individuals, the folks he is describing, have assumed that they are leaders, and able, simply because they started in a position of power that they inherited, or were enabled to by association. What they really resemble is The Boss’s Son, arriving at the factory or the board room at 21 years old and stepping straight into management, jumping from the ground to the second highest rung of the ladder, as if they had actually climbed it. That is not to say that everyone need start on the shop floor, but… everyone should be grounded in some way so as to understand the implications of what they make real for others. A political actor exhibits moral hazard in that they do not live the decisions they make for others, a boss must realise that the product they sell is dependent on having people enabled by financial means to buy it, so employees really.

Trump started out with just a pocket full of dreams, and 300,000,000 dollars in guaranteed loans from his dad who had built a property empire, Musk started out with just a vision and only the profits from his dad’s diamond mine, Bojo started out with just a rich writer who is descended from aristocracy as a parent. These are the bosses sons, treating the world as if they know it by association rather than effort. Some might argue that it has ever been so, and yes they would be correct if we look at the whole of history up until the industrial revolution that made men of ideas into a new aristocracy, or to mercantilism which made traders of goods into rich men, or to the sciences where discoveries in medicine and material effects could elevate the scientist to prominence, but it is beyond the 20th century that we see the re-emergence of the problem I am highlighting.

Each possibility of human freedom from structural oppression arises in a conflict between the speed of change and the ability of those that hold existing power to capture the change within legislation. Where the velocity is too great for the power holders, or where they miss the opportunity, is where a new power is created by the change. To combat this in latter times the power base has engaged in physical conflicts to gain control of resources and the rights to all materials yet discovered (by gaining the right to the places where they may be discovered), and enacted tight lawful restrictions on any alternative to the now in terms of what can be offered. Power bases often act to own, before the fact, the intellectual capital of individuals, or entrap the results of their efforts within clauses that prevent them from reproducing them. The internet is an example of where the technology is ahead of the legislation, though there are many efforts in play to capture it that are pretending to be for our collective good.

For example, hemp and bamboo are marvellous materials, so is wool, but the things that these materials can be used to do is restricted in law in the UK, and for no good reason other than to protect those who make profits from what is already done with other materials that they have control over. What I am saying is that for some of human history, when ideas competed and were equal, without existing power regulating them, the better idea won out frequently, but in modernity the legislation and the power is ahead of the possibility for new ideas, and the protection of the existing power structure prevents the sort of progress that would remove the boss’s son acting like a monarch of the business landscape.

Politics and business now work this way, since politics is a business and run by a business model (a mistake in my opinion). I contend that if you wish to know why nothing really works anymore, it’s because the world is now run in this business fashion, by people who didn’t participate in the building of the component parts of it, an abstraction. They are merely inheritors, and they have, because of structural oppression, inherited also the power to prevent their own challenge. They are the boss’s sons, and we are the victims of the boss’s son effect.

Paul S Wilson