Remembering Half Moon Street--and David Rothkopf's Superclass

The 1986 film Half Moon Street was a commercial and critical flop when it came out, and seems to have been pretty well forgotten since, never being "rediscovered," acquiring a cult following, or enjoying renewed attention on any other basis. And I know of no reason why it should be otherwise. Still, I can say that a particular bit of dinner-party dialogue in the film did get my attention and has stayed with me since. Specifically a character named Hugo Van Arkady (so IMDB informs me) remarked that the actual population of the world, which had then been approaching five billion, was actually just five thousand. As his dining companions wondered at his reasoning he filled in the picture by giving the "real" populations of different countries. Billion-person China had only two people in it, Britain forty-five, Germany sixty.

Just what was the criteria to be a member of the "world's population" when it was counted in such a manner?

Well, years later I happened across David Rothkopf's book Superclass (2008) as I had Half Moon Street--in which he discusses the global "power elite," and suggests that it has six thousand members, out of a population then over six billion.

Just as Van Arkady had it, only one in a million count--not the "one percent" but the 0.0001 percent, with not even their immediate families making the cut, just them, only them, unless they take their own places in said club.

Anyone who reads Rothkopf, I think, will not strike anyone as particularly egalitarian in his values (as anyone who works for Henry Kissinger in such a capacity as managing director of Kissinger Associates seems unlikely to be), but he does not express Van Arkady's blatant contempt for the "starving millions" without whom the "superclass" would not have their wealth and power, would not exist as an elite at all. Still, there seems no question that that superclass' courtiers in the press and the arts constantly flatter their pretension that they are the only people who matter to such a degree that what Van Arkady said explicitly, they say implicitly, all the time. The courtiers do well out of such flattery for the most part, but among the less happy consequences of their extreme version of the Great Man Theory of Current Affairs is that it has had just as distorting effect on understanding of the world as the Great Man Theory of History.