A Planet for Rent

The Majority Shareholder

As soon as they realize that the power actually controlling Earth is the Planetary Tourism Agency, xenoid financiers and investors ask their human hosts why one person isn’t in charge of the whole mechanism instead of the cumbersome Board of Shareholders, where nearly two hundred humans argue endlessly among themselves before reaching any agreement.

Upset by the delays that this decision-making process inevitably entails, the xenoids insist every so often that the body should name a single Majority Shareholder with plenary power. One individual, backed by his peers’ vote of confidence, who has full authority and responsibility to conclude deals with all non-human investors, discuss budgets and agreements directly, and so forth.

They base this proposal on the fact that the system of representative democracy, which humans always champion, is inevitably more agile than participatory democracy. Though they recognize that it is also less just, to be sure…

The more than two hundred shareholders on the Board always listen with respect to these proposals while glancing at each other with almost imperceptible smiles.

Of course a representative system would save time.

But saving time isn’t the key thing here; trust is.

None of them has enough trust in any of the others to think that, were one of them to become the Major Shareholder, he would defend the interests of all in an equitable way… rather than putting his own interests first.

That is the only reason the Planetary Tourism Agency has no Majority Shareholder or anything remotely similar. When the xenoid financiers who call so vociferously for creating the position think it over, they are actually glad that things continue as they do. Some of them even go so far in their change of heart that they speak of “excessive concentration of power”—and propose expanding the two hundred shareholders to four hundred or a thousand.

Earth divided by two hundred is perfectly controllable.

Earth unified under the will of a single man who has the confidence of all the others would be a different matter entirely.

That is why the most important Xenoid Emergency Plan of all, more important even than their general offensive against the infamous Xenophobe Union for Earthling Liberation, is their Karolides Project.

Karolides was a charismatic Greek statesman who came close to unifying the Balkan peninsula in the twentieth century. If he had succeeded, Germany might never have propelled Europe into World War I. But he was assassinated, the Balkans broke up—and ever since, whenever people talk about political fragmentation, the term they most commonly use is “Balkanization.”

In the unlikely yet conceivable case that a new Karolides should arise among the shareholders of the Planetary Tourism Agency… everyone knows what fate the true masters of the planet have in store for him. And how quickly it would fall.

Politics is implacable.

Divide and rule.