The crimes of the moneyed classes are safeguarded by their improbability
In Brecht’s Threepenny Novel, the character of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum observes:
Politicians can only take money because people picture their corruption as being altogether finer and nobler than it really is. Should anyone portray them as they are, that is, quite unscrupulous, then the whole world would cry out: What an unscrupulous rascal! and, by that, mean the portrayer.
It made me laugh.
And from one of Brecht’s unpublished drafts, writing in the 1950s about the 1990s to come:
The authorities had been able to cancel travel entirely since television now showed everything that interested delegations…. By means of raising productivity and volunteerism as well as by increasing efficiency, it was possible to limit the number of workers needed. At last, about 99% of the population could devote itself to the real goal of life, to the filling out of forms.