Politics & Power Quote by Richard McKenna

McKenna’s line lands like a polite warning with a knife behind it: the scariest political facts aren’t hidden because they’re too complex, but because they’re too destabilizing. He’s not marveling at monetary plumbing; he’s anticipating the recoil. “The ordinary citizen will not like to be told” frames money creation as a kind of forbidden knowledge, less technical than psychological. People want currency to feel natural, earned, morally tethered. Admitting that banks “create and destroy money” snaps that story, revealing cash as a ledger decision as much as a physical thing.

The second sentence widens the target from economics to power. “Control the credit” is the real sovereign function here, because credit decides who gets to act in the future: who can buy homes, start businesses, wage wars, survive downturns. McKenna’s verb choices are intentionally muscular - “direct,” “hold,” “destiny” - turning finance from a neutral service into a command system. The “hollow of their hands” image is the kicker: it’s intimate, almost casual, suggesting domination that doesn’t require jackboots, just approvals, rates, and access.

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of the Great Depression and amid mid-century anxieties about technocracy, McKenna is tapping a recurring democratic fear: that elected politics is theatre staged atop an unelected credit regime. The subtext isn’t simply “banks are bad.” It’s that public consent becomes fragile when the public learns how much of modern life runs on money that can be willed into existence - and withdrawn just as quietly.