The Pyramid Protects Itself

There is a particular kind of news story that arrives dressed as a scandal and is really a diagram. You have to squint past the famous name in the headline to see it, because the famous name is doing what famous names always do — pulling your eye to the top of the pyramid, where the drama is, and away from the pyramid itself, where the mechanism is.

The reporting this month from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is one of those. On its surface it is a story about a president and the files. Underneath, it is a field recording of voluntary servitude — the thing Étienne de La Boétie sat down and explained in 1548, when he was barely out of his teens, and which no one has explained better since.

So let me do the squint for you, because it is the whole argument of this book, caught alive.

Picture the room. Not the man — the room. The reporting describes his most senior people filing into a secure bunker, more than once, over a summer, to figure out how to contain a crisis. The vice president. The chief of staff. The White House counsel. The press secretary. The deputy attorney general. The director of the F.B.I., on speakerphone. Some of the most powerful individuals in the most powerful government on earth, and they are spending their evenings in a windowless room working a single problem: how to keep one man from being damaged by what is in the drawers.

Now ask the question La Boétie asked. Why?

Not why is the man at the top protected — that part is obvious, the powerful are always protected. The real question, the one that cracks the whole thing open, is why do all these other people do the protecting? They are not him. Most of them, on most days, are not even especially loyal to him; the same reporting has them privately furious, blaming each other, one of them eventually shouting across a conference table that the others “got us into this.” These are not devotees. So why does the apparatus bend? Why does the Department of Justice, why does the F.B.I., why does the whole machinery of the state lean, as if by gravity, toward the protection of one person?

La Boétie’s answer is the spine of this book’s third chapter, and it is merciless in its simplicity. The tyrant does not stand alone against the many, and he does not need to. He builds a pyramid beneath himself: a layer of people whose own position depends on the arrangement continuing, and beneath them another layer that depends on them, all the way down. Each person in the structure is not serving the man. Each person is serving their own small stake — the title, the access, the cut — which happens to require that the structure stand. You do not need to buy a nation. You need only to buy the layer directly beneath you, and let each layer buy the next. “He never had to defeat the many,” is how I put it earlier in these pages. “He only had to hand the middle a reason to keep him there.”

Watch the room again and you can see the reasons being handed out. One adviser argues for releasing everything — and is overruled, not because anyone proves him wrong, but because the others can feel what release would cost them. Another lays out options like a man pricing risk: petition the courts to unseal documents that almost certainly won’t be unsealed, so that the refusal can be blamed on the judges. This is not the behavior of villains twirling mustaches. It is the behavior of intermediaries — competent, anxious people protecting the rung they are standing on. The structure does their thinking for them. That is what a structure is for.

And here is the detail that turns the diagram from clever to damning, the one I cannot stop looking at. The reporting describes two men who had spent years outside the pyramid, building large followings precisely by promising to tear this kind of thing down — to expose the cover-up, to release everything, to restore the people’s trust against a corrupt establishment. Then they were brought inside. They were given rungs. And when the moment came, the account has them putting the official seal on the very memo that closed the case — the “nothing here” document — over their own loud objections, because their cut now depended on the pyramid standing. One of them is later quoted, in private, in something close to anguish: I warned you, and you ignored me, and I gave up everything.

Read that line slowly, because it is La Boétie’s entire thesis compressed into a single human cry. I gave up everything. He means his audience, his independence, his millions — the things that made him dangerous to the structure from the outside. He traded them for a rung. And the moment he was on the rung, the structure had him, and the man who came to expose the pyramid found himself holding it up. There is no better illustration in any textbook. The forces that should pull the powerful down get staffed, every time, by people who would lose something by pulling.

I want to be careful here, in the way this book is always trying to be careful, because the failure mode of an argument like this is to see pyramids everywhere and stop checking.

So: the cold version. Maybe this is nothing but ordinary damage control, the kind every administration of every party runs when a story threatens the boss, and I am dressing the mundane up in a seventeenth-of-the-sixteenth-century costume to make it feel profound. Maybe the reporting is sourced from people grinding their own axes, each shaping the scene to make themselves the one who warned everybody. Maybe the specific man and the specific files barely matter and I am, frankly, doing the thing I told you not to do — letting a famous name carry an argument it can’t carry.

Take all of that. Concede most of it. And notice that the concession is the point. If you strip out the famous name, and the party, and the lurid particular of what was or wasn’t in the drawers — if every individual in that room is an ordinary, replaceable person doing the ordinary, structurally-determined thing — then what you are left with is not a scandal at all. It is a mechanism, and mechanisms don’t depend on the wickedness of the people running them. That is exactly why it is durable, and exactly why the structure, not the man, has to stay the thing you aim at — even, as we are about to do, when you say the names out loud. Next year there is a different man, a different party, a different drawer. The pyramid is the constant. The pyramid is the thing that will still be standing when the names have changed.

Now — a distinction I owe you, because I nearly let the careful paragraph above smuggle in a cowardice and call it wisdom.

There are two different rules at work in how this book chooses its targets, and they are not the same rule. The first is a matter of honor and it is absolute: the joke is on the con, never the conned. The folks in Wyoming who were told their neighbor was the problem — who were handed a face to hate so the rung-holders could keep their rungs — are not the target of anything, ever. They were worked by a good con, and falling for a good con is not a character flaw. It is the con working as designed. You do not reach them by mocking them. You reach them by showing them whose hand is in their pocket.

But the con men and the rung-holders are not protected by that rule. They are its opposite. Naming the deputy who proposed pricing a court refusal so the blame could be pinned on judges; the official who went on television and implied a “client list” was sitting on her desk and then produced binders of nothing; the two men who built audiences promising to blow the whole thing open and then, once they were handed rungs, put the official seal on the memo that closed the case — naming them is not punching down. It is pointing at the load-bearing beams and saying there, those, that is what holds it up. The intermediaries are the single most nameable people in the entire structure, because no one’s sense of self is wrapped up in defending a deputy attorney general. You can say their names all day and lose no one you meant to keep.

The one place the caution actually bites is the face at the very top, and even there it is tactical, not moral. The man who runs the con is fair game; I have no tenderness for him. But he is also a totem, and his followers have been trained to feel a blow against him as a blow against themselves. So the discipline is not don’t name him. The discipline is name him in the direction that frees the conned rather than the direction that recruits them to his defense. Same name, opposite aim. “Here is the man who ran the con on you, and here are the people he paid to keep it running” — that opens a door. “Here is why you were a fool to fall for it” slams that door, and slams it on the exact person you came to reach. The forged channel wants you to choose the second sentence. Choose the first.

So: name the rung-holders, plainly. Name the man who built the pyramid. Just never, not once, aim the fury downward at the people the thing was built to fool.

La Boétie did not write a despairing book, and neither am I. Because the pyramid’s strength is also exactly where it breaks. It runs on the eyeline — on each layer being able to see only its own rung, on the many never quite assembling the whole picture at once. And every so often the picture assembles anyway. A trove gets dumped into the open. A man on a rung says I gave up everything loudly enough that the people below him hear it. The servitude was always voluntary, which is the worst news and the best news in the same breath: worst, because it means we have been holding it up; best, because a thing held up by the many can be set down by the many. You do not have to storm the top of the pyramid. You have to stop being a layer of it — and help enough others see the rung they’re standing on that they step off too.

That stepping-off is not a mood. It is a number, and a method, and a set of channels you can actually build — which is what the rest of this book is about, and what the next dispatches will keep dragging back to the structure every time the news tries to sell us a face.

The man at the top of any pyramid would love for you to spend your fury only on him — the lone-villain story is the cheapest insurance he owns, because it leaves every rung beneath him intact and every fooled neighbor feeling accused. So name him, by all means. Then spend the weight of it on the rungs — the bought middle that actually holds the thing up — and spend none of it, ever, on the people the pyramid was built to fool. That is the difference between taking a pyramid apart and merely repainting its top.