Modern Khans

Why our system breeds them and protects them

Caption: Genghis Khan, master strategist, contemplating his domains—historical ambition meets modern execution. Courtesy of Gemini's Nano Banana

We tell ourselves a comforting story about the super-rich. They're brilliant, if eccentric, innovators. They're job creators. Their ambition, however outsized, is a turbocharged version of our own, a natural outcome of a competitive system. We pathologize their behavior albeit in the language of therapy or morality: they are narcissists, or they are simply greedy.

But this diagnosis is insufficient. It mistakes the symptom for the disease. The behavior of our modern plutocrats—the Musks, the Thiels, the Zuckerbergs—is not merely a product of avarice. It is the re-emergence of an ancient human archetype, the conqueror, stripped of its furs and mounted not on a steppe pony but on a labyrinthine financial and technological infrastructure. They are modern Khans, driven by a deep-seated, often pathological, will to territorialize—not just land, but data, markets, public discourse and the very fabric of reality. And this drive isn't an aberration our system tolerates; it's a feature our system actively harnesses, creating a symbiotic, co-dependent relationship that is quietly dismantling the foundations of social existence.

The pursuit of power, fame, and wealth as terminal goals is not a sign of health; it is a profound psychological dysfunction. It is the antithesis of human connection, replacing the messy, reciprocal bonds of community with the sterile calculus of control. The conqueror does not seek to understand the world; he seeks to impose his will upon it. He does not build consensus; he demands fealty. This is the mindset that views a population as a user base to be monetized, a workforce as a resource to be optimized and a planet as a series of problems to be solved by engineering fiat. It is a worldview devoid of empathy, because empathy is an impediment to dominance.

Crucially, this pathology is not confined to the billionaire class. It exists on a spectrum that permeates our culture. It is the fuel of the influencer economy, the ethos of the hustle culture guru, the silent commandment in every corporate ladder-climb. We are all encouraged to become mini-Khans of our own limited domains, to see our lives as personal brands to be maximized. The elite merely exhibit this cultural sickness in its most acute and technologically amplified form.

Their empires, however, are not built in a vacuum. They are constructed with the tacit, and often explicit, support of the state, particularly its most powerful and least accountable arm: the military-intelligence apparatus. These vast private companies function as perfect 'cut-outs'—deniable, agile and innovation-rich proxies for state power. In this relationship, the tech plutocrat is the modern 'useful idiot': he believes himself to be a free-agent visionary, a sovereign individual, while simultaneously executing functions that a public agency could never get away with.

The evidence is hiding in plain sight.

Consider Elon Musk’s Starlink. Lauded for providing internet to remote areas, it is also the most formidable dual-use military technology deployed in decades. Each Starlink satellite is equipped with sophisticated optical inter-satellite links (OISLs), a technical feature detailed in SpaceX’s own FCC filings that creates a resilient, global mesh network independent of ground-based infrastructure.^[1] This capability is not merely for streaming videos. The U.S. military has explicitly stated its intent to leverage such commercial mesh networks for critical functions, including beyond-line-of-sight targeting data and secure communications, as part of its Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) doctrine.^[2] Furthermore, this architecture forms the functional blueprint for the Pentagon’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture—a new, multi-layered satellite constellation designed to provide a global shield against advanced missile threats.^[3]

Then there is Peter Thiel’s Palantir. Named after the all-seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings, the company’s origin is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend: a CIA-funded startup.^[4] Palantir’s predictive analytics software now sifts through the data of entire governments, from immigration agencies to metropolitan police forces. It was a subject of a UK Parliament inquiry into Cambridge Analytica and the Brexit referendum, a testament to its power to not just monitor populations, but to model and manipulate their behavior.^[5] Thiel, a libertarian who famously wrote 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,'^[6] has built the eyes of the security state, outsourcing public authority to a private company he controls.

Most strikingly symbolic is the case of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. On February 4, 2004, the Pentagon’s controversial Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was forced to shutter its LifeLog project. LifeLog was a key component of the Total Information Awareness program—an attempt to create a vast, searchable database of an individual’s entire life: their conversations, their purchases, their movements, their relationships. It was killed by a bipartisan Congressional revolt over its terrifying privacy implications. The very same day, a Harvard sophomore launched 'Thefacebook.' The platform, which would achieve everything LifeLog set out to do and more, effectively became the cut-out. The state got its panopticon, without the messy oversight of a democratic public. The young Khan; gifted a monopoly.

This is not a conspiracy; it is a confluence of interests. The state gets innovation, deniability, and speed. The conqueror gets contracts, regulatory leniency and the ultimate prize: legitimacy for his empire-building project. It's a symbiosis that serves both masters perfectly, at the expense of a third, excluded party: the citizenry. Democracy is hollowed out, not in a dramatic coup, but through a thousand contracts, a thousand grants, a thousand quiet partnerships between the world’s oldest force—the will to dominance—and the world’s newest technologies.

This leads to the uncomfortable, inescapable conclusion: our current system of electoral democracy is not just failing to solve this problem; it is fundamentally incapable of doing so. We operate under the illusion of an oligarchy, a system where wealth translates directly into political power. The system is not corrupted; it is operating as designed. To ask the beneficiaries of this system to regulate themselves, to break up their own power, is a case of monumental naivety. It's like asking Genghis Khan to preside over the UN Security Council for all of our safety.

The solution, therefore, cannot be mere regulation. It must be systemic political change. We must re-imagine governance itself to be inherently resistant to elite capture. This requires looking beyond the flawed model of electoral democracy, which is so easily hijacked by concentrated wealth and influence.

Ad-hoc models like Citizens’ Assemblies hint at the alternative, but we must embrace a system designed from first principles to resist elite capture: Colocracy. This is more than a governance model; it is a manifesto for recognizing that society is, by its very nature, a 'conference of difference'. Colocracy architecturally embeds this truth through Proportional Demographic Selection, ensuring legislatures mirror the balance of difference in society itself. Its genius is a separation of powers that channels our human superpower of collaboration: a Lobium, where differences are synthesised co-petitively and a Decidium, where a sovereign citizen body renders final assent.^[7] This creates a system designed not for warfare, but for holistic wisdom; not for domination, but for shared responsibility. It is an architecture of power that is, by its very nature, institutionally hostile to the conquering mindset of the Khan, because its foundational principle is not competition, but collaborative rule.^[8]

The modern conquerors are not monsters. They are a mirror. They reflect back a societal addiction to scale, control and simplistic solutions that we all, to some degree, endorse. Their empires are the logical endpoint of a world that prizes growth over grace and disruption over durability. But to look in that mirror and see only a few bad apples is to miss the point entirely. The orchard is poisoned. It's time to plant new seeds.^[9]

Colocracy

by John Mackay

An introduction to what’s broken in modern governance—and importantly how easy it is to build something better.

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