Let me start with a brief introduction.
Children can, in the most fascinating ways, be little narcissists. Little psychopaths. Little sociopaths. And strangely enough, it’s beautiful to witness. You know — it’s primal behavior.
The kind of behavior that, hopefully, fades away through learning, education, and life experience.
Now, I’ll briefly jump to something else — but you’ll see how it all connects later.
I was about 32 at the time. It was 1994.
And I think a lot of people can relate to this: in the years after adolescence, you sometimes feel the urge to write poetry.
You’re discovering so many things, and you want to capture them — simply, clearly, and powerfully.
That’s exactly what I tried.
I’ve always had a big imagination, but writing poetry — that’s a different skill entirely.
Still, I wrote a short poem.
And lately, it’s been stuck in my head.
It went something like this:
A table ringed by glasses past,
beneath a lamp with golden cast.
The thoughts once spoken in that space
would one day shake the human race.
Yes, it sounds intense.
But even back then, I had a feeling — and over the past year and a half, it’s come back to me —
a sense that something was happening, and I finally found the word for it: scheming.
It’s an old-fashioned word.
Who still uses it today?
But it fits. It means: deciding something behind closed doors, before those affected are even aware of it.
And that, exactly, is what I’m talking about.
Everything I’ve said so far connects to that.
Because scheming — well, that’s something kids do.
You might remember this: you had a small group of friends, maybe four of you.
One day you show up to school, cheerful, as usual...
but suddenly, something feels off.
They don’t greet you the same way they did yesterday.
And you wonder: what’s going on?
As a kid, you don’t understand.
But now we do: the other three had made some secret agreement — about you.
They schemed.
They decided something without you.
You were the fourth kid. The outsider.
The one left out of the plan.
And that brings me to today’s world.
You start to ask: what’s really happening in politics?
Up until recently, many of us still believed that:
politicians go to parliament, they debate things in public,
and outcomes emerge democratically.
But now we have the internet.
We’re in all kinds of chat groups, sharing ideas.
But so are politicians.
Globally.
They’re in their own closed groups —
exchanging messages, coordinating —
and we’re not invited in.
That’s something we need to be deeply aware of.
We like to hold onto the image of the decent statesman:
someone who shows up, debates in the chamber,
then goes home to read policy briefs.
But that time has passed.
These days, world leaders are sitting together in private chat threads.
Digital round tables —
the modern version of the table with glass circles from my poem.
That’s where things are being schemed.
That’s where decisions are made.
If you’d told me this ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I would’ve said, “Maybe two of them make a secret deal now and then.
But that’s not allowed.
That’s not how it works.
Everything is supposed to be public.”
But just look at what’s happening around the globe.
The same things are unfolding everywhere.
Not always at the exact same time —
but what happens in one country today
often shows up in another country tomorrow.
And again, I think of those kids.
Three kids, scheming at a table marked with glass rings.
And the fourth kid?
That’s us.
The masses.
The people.
One day we stood up, looked them in the eyes,
and realized: something about them had changed.
What I’m really trying to say is this:
All this scheming — it’s profoundly childish.
And I’m glad I can finally see through it.
But sadly, those children have grown into very powerful beings.
