Many years ago I read a book by [I believe] Michael Parenti. He [or whoever it was] bifurcated the world intellectually into two kinds of thinkers—those who practice “the politics of conviction” and those who practice “the politics of convenience”.
The conviction folks construed the world of human interaction as reflecting either good or bad behavior. You did the right thing or you did the wrong thing. Sometimes this was predicated on theological renditions of one or another God, sometimes on secular and philosophical renditions of one or another Reason. Either way they were driven by a doctrinaire commitment to The Objective Truth.
More often than not, their own.
But, even more often than that, they rationalized a vast assortment of means in order to achieve the particular “kingdom of ends” they fancied.
The convenience folks, on the other hand, eschewed these dogmatic, catechismic cinder blocks and, instead, embraced pragmatism [or one or another rendering of Bismark’s “realpolitik”].
Indeed, sometimes with the best of intentions as enlightened Humanists.
Others, however, represented themselves as purveyors of moral or political or philosophical conviction but actually strove to mold and manipulate those around them in an endless pursuit of what they construed to be their own selfish, Machiaveillian interests.
These Bilderberg types [exemplified by, say, Henry Kissinger or the government in China] are the most powerful people in the world. They own and they operate the global ecxonomy.
And that is the way the world works today.
Or so it seems to me.