Power, Race, and the Architecture of Global Inequality
I pulled down my last piece owing to a a streak of bad luck. I was on verge of being denied boarding owing to the airline’s administrative error. At any rate once I got over that hurdle, the experience made me reflective again. Transiting through Cairo, an even harder metaphor hit me:
The world isn’t a battleground, a marketplace, or even a village. It’s a plane. A giant 300-seater Airbus. Maybe even a cruise ship in the sky (imagine a sky ship of sorts). Always moving. Never arriving.
The Cabin Configuration
The layout is brutally simple—and mostly inherited:
Economy (Global South): Mostly Black and Brown passengers. Cramped. Surveilled. Blamed for turbulence.
Premium Economy (Second World): Mostly Asians and Whites. Comfortably squeezed. Quietly aspirational.
Business Class (The West): Predominantly White. Distance is the product.
First Class (The Elite): Silent, insulated. Oligarchs, dynasts, technocrats.
Private Cabins (The Powers that Be): Unseen.
This is where the Captain lives. He owns the plane. He doesn’t fly it. The pilots—Westernised, credentialed, precise—steer the aircraft. But they don’t own it. They are glorified staff. The Captain never appears. But the course is his.
Money Buys Comfort. Power Is Untouchable.
Officially, your seat is determined by money—a proxy for merit. Work hard. Behave. Move up. Fly better. That’s the myth. The truth? Power isn’t earned. It’s inherited. Embedded. Insulated. It lives in private cabins behind bulkheads and NDAs. It steers the direction but never takes responsibility for the crash.
And when one passenger upgrades, they usually leave their family behind.
Advancement is lonely by design.
The Stewards: Smiles, Schedules, Surveillance
The stewards are overlooked by design.
They aren’t just servers—they’re regulators.
- They carry messages between classes.
- They enforce tone and emotional regulation.
- They alone have weaponised tools of enforcement, silent but real.
They know who to be naughty, nice, or nasty with.
Almost always correlated to class—and seditious behavior.
They alone have access to the pilots.
Sometimes, to the Captain.
Always at his pleasure.
Without them, the illusion of order would collapse before the next meal service.
Entertainment as Sedation
Each class gets a different drug:
Economy: Distraction and budget meals.
Premium Economy: Hope and quiet ambition.
Business: Entitlement and distance.
First Class: Seamless luxury, ideology-free.
Every screen shows you something.
None show you how the plane actually works.
Solidarity—families sharing meals, distracting themselves together—makes the journey bearable.
But solidarity is discouraged. Especially empathy.
In Premium Economy, you are trained to ignore the newborns crying in Economy—and instead feel annoyed.
Empathy hurts revenue.
It breaks the illusion of status.
Different Modes, Different Worlds
Each cabin lives in a different psychological mode:
Economy: Survival.
Premium Economy: Endurance.
Business: Management.
First Class: Hedony (they are the only class outside of the Captain, who don’t need the toilets to join the Mile High Club)—and hazy consultations with the Captain.
The passengers vote for the pilot every few years.
The loser becomes co-pilot.
The Captain remains untouched.
The structure is permanent.
Only the uniforms change.
Meaningful conversation is banned.
Constant chatter is encouraged to detect dissent.
Silence is suspicious.
The system isn’t scared of anger.
It’s terrified of solidarity.
The Forbidden Question
Nobody asks:
Why is the plane structured like this?
Even worse:
What would it take to land it?
When those questions arise, the stewards act.
The smiles vanish.
The enforcement appears.
You realise:
You were never meant to ask.
Only to fly, consume, and dream of sitting closer to the nose.
Why Revolt Never Happens
Passengers don’t talk across rows.
Economy envies Premium.
Premium mimics Business.
Business performs for First.
First tries to find the Captain.
The walls are thin.
The silence is engineered.
If they ever spoke across class lines, they would realise:
They outnumber the pilots, the stewards, and the Captain 100 to 1.
They could restructure the plane.
Change its destination.
Redesign its purpose.
But they don’t.
Because hope is stronger than anger.
And upgrades feel safer than uprisings.
Final Reflection
Everyone feels the turbulence.
Almost no one questions the altitude.
Everyone talks about comfort.
No one talks about destination.
Everyone is told the plane is the best that has ever flown.
Everyone is warned that previous planes—revolutions—always crashed.
No one knows if the oxygen masks are real.
Or if the life rafts even exist.
The world isn’t broken.
It was built to fly like this.
And the Captain is counting on you never asking why.