Do they want to be our gods?

IMAGINE you had ownership of practically all the world's money and resources, wealth beyond the dreams of kings and queens, conferring on you a sense of ultimate power and importance.

- BEN HUNT

Having control over the contrived legal machinery lets you live above the law, which means you can do whatever you want with impunity. Total ownership of mainstream media, education, and science allows you to control the thoughts of the majority of the population, whose only purpose is to funnel ever more money and resources into your grasping hands.

With that intoxicating feeling of near-total power, where do you go next? How do you secure your status for ever? How do you shield yourself from the retribution of the downtrodden masses? How do you ensure that the seething slave class can never see their way to reclaiming what your 'master race' has stolen from them over millennia, thus cementing your rightful place as master of all the Earth? There remains one last enemy; one final battle to win, which would ensure that you and your line can continue to lord over everything you survey in perpetuity.

That enemy is hope, and hope is a potent force.

In Man's Search for Meaning, the psychologist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl documented how the human spirit can prevail when all other power seems stripped away. He wrote: 'Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.'

In the movie The Hunger Games, President Snow shares the reason why the authoritarian regime does not simply execute two dozen of the slave class each year to set an example to the rest: "Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it's contained." 

To achieve ultimate control, a tyrant must contain any Great Hope among the subdued, leaving them to cling onto small hopes, for temporary relief from pain and the numbing opiate of worldly comforts.