"Greater economic power will be in the hands of too few"
About this Quote
Ludlum’s line reads like a stripped-down mission briefing: short, declarative, and already tinged with a warning siren. Coming from a novelist who made his name turning geopolitics into page-turning paranoia, “Greater economic power will be in the hands of too few” isn’t an abstract worry; it’s a plot engine. The sentence primes you to look for the hidden room where the real decisions get made, and to assume that the official story is theater.
The specific intent is predictive and prosecutorial at once. “Will be” doesn’t argue; it indicts the future as if the verdict is settled. “Greater” implies acceleration: not simply inequality, but inequality compounding over time. And “too few” is deliberately unspecific, a rhetorical move that invites the reader to supply their own villains: boardrooms, oligarchs, intelligence-linked financiers, faceless institutions with initials instead of names. The vagueness is a feature, not a flaw. It mimics how concentrated power feels in daily life: everywhere in impact, nowhere in accountability.
Contextually, Ludlum wrote in the long hangover of the Cold War, when faith in big systems was fraying and multinational capital was starting to look like a sovereign force. His thrillers thrive on the suspicion that ideology is a cover story and money is the real command center. The subtext here is that democracy can survive loud arguments, but it can’t survive quiet ownership. When economic power concentrates, consent becomes something managed, not earned.
The specific intent is predictive and prosecutorial at once. “Will be” doesn’t argue; it indicts the future as if the verdict is settled. “Greater” implies acceleration: not simply inequality, but inequality compounding over time. And “too few” is deliberately unspecific, a rhetorical move that invites the reader to supply their own villains: boardrooms, oligarchs, intelligence-linked financiers, faceless institutions with initials instead of names. The vagueness is a feature, not a flaw. It mimics how concentrated power feels in daily life: everywhere in impact, nowhere in accountability.
Contextually, Ludlum wrote in the long hangover of the Cold War, when faith in big systems was fraying and multinational capital was starting to look like a sovereign force. His thrillers thrive on the suspicion that ideology is a cover story and money is the real command center. The subtext here is that democracy can survive loud arguments, but it can’t survive quiet ownership. When economic power concentrates, consent becomes something managed, not earned.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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