The Oligarch Who Believes

Jack London wrote The Iron Heel in 1907. It's a dystopia about the American oligarchy crushing labor in the early twentieth century. It has lasers in it (no it doesn't), automatic rifles and war balloons and a secret revolutionary underground. It's 119 years old and reads like last week.

The part that stayed with me isn't the violence. It's this:

"I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This has been the strength of the Iron Heel, and too many of the comrades have been slow or loath to realize it... The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right."

London was trying to explain why the Iron Heel was hard to beat. Most of the comrades assumed it ran on greed, fear, and force — the standard model of how power works. Bribe the people you need. Terrorize the rest. Point the guns.

But London's analysis was subtler: that's the weak version. The strong version is when the people pointing the guns believe in the guns.

The oligarchs in London's novel were taught from birth that the alternative to their control was the abyss. Anarchy. The "roaring abysmal beast" — London's name for the degraded, desperate mass of the poor, driven to violence by conditions of poverty and desperation. And the oligarchs weren't wrong that the beast was there. They could see it in the labor ghettos. They could feel it in the strikes and riots.

What they couldn't see was that they had made it.

The circularity is the interesting part. The conditions of poverty and desperation — no education, no rights, no escape, machine-guns pointed at strikes — produce the desperate violence that the oligarchs point to as justification. The abyss is real. The beast is real. And it wouldn't exist without the Iron Heel. So the Iron Heel, by justifying itself with the beast it created, is functionally unfalsifiable. Every measure they take to suppress the beast makes the beast more desperate, which justifies more suppression.

London's narrator, writing from inside, notes with bitter precision: "The beast of their own making. In it they will not let the ape and tiger die."

The strength of the ethical oligarch, versus the cynical one, is this: you can't reach them.

A cynical tyrant can be offered a better deal. Can be shamed. Can be shown that the costs of their behavior are higher than the benefits. The cynical tyrant calculates.

An ethical one doesn't calculate. They have integrated their position into their sense of who they are — the ones who hold the line against chaos, the ones doing the hard necessary work of civilization. Criticism that comes from outside this framework isn't evidence against them; it's confirmation that the critics are people who don't understand what's at stake. The revolutionary argument that "you have made the beast" is dismissed as revolutionary ideology, which is to say, as something said by people the ethical oligarch already knows they must contain.

London didn't quite crack the solution to this. His answer was time — three hundred years of the Iron Heel, then eventually the Brotherhood of Man in 2600 AD. The comrades losing was baked in. What they were preserving was the idea, not the victory.

There's a particular version of this active in 2026 that London would recognize, though the specifics would surprise him. The logic of "without us, the abyss" is everywhere in the discourse about AI, about platform power, about who should be trusted with what.

The self-justifying loop: we are building something powerful; powerful things are dangerous without proper stewardship; therefore we must have the stewardship; therefore those questioning our stewardship are endangering the thing that needs stewarding. Every concentration of power is itself the proof that the power needs to be concentrated.

The ethical oligarch genuinely believes this. That's what makes them hard to argue with. They're not lying. They're not performing virtue. They really think the alternative to their judgment is the abyss.

And they're not entirely wrong, which is the worst part. Remove any concentrated power structure quickly enough and you do get chaos. The beast IS in the labor ghetto. The alternative to stewardship by someone is stewardship by no one, and that's genuinely worse in the short term.

What's wrong isn't the fear of the beast. What's wrong is the failure to ask: who made it? And the deeper failure: the inability to see that the steward who made the problem cannot be the steward who solves it.

London's Chicago Commune sequence ends with forty thousand people driven into Lake Michigan. The Mercenaries did it efficiently, with the same belief in their own righteousness that made them excellent soldiers. The young officer who saved Avis from the mob was charming and well-meaning. He helped because he believed in the system he served.

The oligarchs' children, during the massacre, played in the parks. Their favorite game was imitating their parents: stamping on the proletariat.

They thought they were playing heroes.