What appears on the surface as a transformation is a mere rearrangement of the stage. Only names change; the system remains. If today’s world was imagined as a jungle dressed in a semblance of peace, the silence from habituated submission and carefully crafted consensus. Beneath the canopy of the dense trees, every creature follows a rhythm. The donkey bears the burden it did not choose, the predators prey not out of spite but design and the grazers roam. A utopia of equilibrium appears, but balance is a fragile illusion — one graze away from collapse.
The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is inevitable. Free riders graze more than their share, feed beyond their contribution and prey beyond need. They corrode the ecosystem with routine, not revolution. This ‘orderly’ disorder then becomes the new order. The system crumbles not from above but from within, with a sham of change. Thus, the call for change persists. What keeps the order intact and who profits from its slow unravelling? Is it the crown, the silent ants, or something more elusive in the shadows?
The answer hides in plain sight: the middleman. They are the purgatory — between power and truth, between policy and principle. Over time they become invincible not by might, but by proximity.
The ruler outsources his senses. He sees what the middleman shows him, and hears what he whispers to him. The governance, thus, drifts into a realm where delegation is dependence. The crown rules but through borrowed senses and padded truths. As Machiavelli suggested to the Prince, “The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men who surround him.”
The middleman syndrome is not just a glitch, it is a pathology — insidious, slow and systemic. Its first prey is competence; then merit is strangulated by convenience. Foucault would cite it as a brilliance of modern power — not coercive but capillary, flowing through institutions, colonising minds. Kafka explored a similar Castle where the messenger cast a shadow longer than the message itself. Orwell’s pigs in his Animal Farm, who once cried for change, mirrored the humans they overthrew.
The reality bends, the old regime does not die, it moulds. Faces metamorphose and the status quo stays. Repeated whispers transform into standard operating procedures. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Those “more equal” are not emperors but attendants. The power appears in its most enduring form when it operates without appearance and the myth of reform carries on.
It manifests in today’s world as each new leader, ruler, or government, riding on the horse of a long-awaited answer, arrives as the purifier of corruption, the bringer of enlightenment and the slayer of red tape. Hirschman’s trinity — Exit, Voice and Loyalty — offers three choices: walk away, speak out, or keep quiet out of loyalty. But what if the exit is exile, the voice becomes noise when the middleman language becomes the lingua franca of power, and loyalty is complicity, not principle but paralysis?
So, where does one turn in this relentless loop, where end is beginning, and beginning is end? To the crown who has borrowed another’s lenses? To the ruled who words vanish like breath on glass? Or to the middleman who is the phantom force of invisibility and control?
Perhaps, start with looking inward and inquiring about what we accept as normal, who we entrust to filter our truths. As in this world, middleman’s power endures not because of strength but, by being diffused and dispersed — everywhere and nowhere. Maybe the loop persists not because we do not want change, but because we are searching for change where it cannot be found. Think critically, challenge assumptions, get clarity and act wisely.