The Triangle Of Power

Maybe kings weren’t so bad

indi.ca
13 min readSep 5, 2024

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Growing up, I learned that people overthrew kings, and we had people power now. But growing into a people and having precious little power, I can see that something is wrong. Instead of one monarch oppressing us, we have even more oligarchs, completely unchecked now. Power was portrayed as a line, which we flipped, when in fact it’s a triangle.

You can view the triangle as having a monarch on one side, oligarchs on the other, and people on the third, usually as bystanders. A monarch might come from the oligarchy and preserve their interests, but occasionally they might do something crazy like actually relieve (debt) pressure on the poor. For this, they would be called tyrants, or populists, and violently attacked by the oligarchs. This was as true for ancient Greek or Roman civilizations (which I’ll refer to) as it was centuries ago, or even now.

The American Revolution was, in fact, an oligarchic revolution against a monarch. Some colonial oligarchs overthrew a king, and continued oppressing the masses even worse than before. All the talk about ‘the people’ was just branding from people that branded human bodies and sold their own rape-borne children. At founding only a minority of white people could vote, nevermind…

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indi.ca
indi.ca

Written by indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.

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