The most powerful people in our world pursue power for its own sake and do so with amoeba-like levels of wisdom and insight. Don't attribute any higher order of decision-making capability to them than you would to any random acquaintance in your life. If anything, attribute less.

Most people are deeply unconscious and patterned. Ruling elites are no exception, and in fact they are more unconscious. It's a common error to think of these people as rational actors; really their minds are running on autopilot in response to conditioning put in place long ago. 

That's why you'll see them continuing policies which destroy the biosphere they depend on for survival or escalating military aggressions between nuclear powers. They're not making cool, rational decisions, they're acting out impulses within themselves that they don't understand.

You'll hear people say "They wouldn't nuke themselves, it's irrational" or "If the climate situation was really that bad they'd have taken drastic action long ago," but this assumes you're dealing with rational minds and not what are essentially neurological computer programs. Really you're just looking at highly traumatized organisms mindlessly acting out patterns set in place much earlier in their lives to cope with distress and gain a feeling of safety and security. And virtually none of those patterns are useful for running the world in a sane way.

Any analysis which holds that elites wouldn't do something simply because it's not rational is an analysis which omits the important fact that, as Robert Heinlein put it, "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."

These people are not gods. They're barely even humans.

Reading by Tim Foley.