Unleashing a chaos that now threatened to consume them all

In the Secret Bunker Beneath the Swiss Alps

Lord Ashworth let his scathing critique of the younger faction's hypocrisy sink into the tense atmosphere of the bunker. Herrera and Tanaka, along with their allies, were pale, their justifications dying on their lips at the stark dissection of their idealistic failures. Baron Von Hess and the other Elders nodded in grim approval.

But then, Ashworth sighed, an almost imperceptible sound of weariness beneath his steely facade. He placed his brandy glass on the polished mahogany table.

"However," he continued, his voice losing some of its sharp sarcasm, taking on a more contemplative tone, almost one of grudging confession, "I will not be the one to claim that our own hands, those of the Old Guard, remained untainted by the pristine purity of our... original principles of absolute control. The truth, as is often the case in matters of power, is considerably murkier."

He looked at the members of his own faction, some of whom were now staring at him in surprise.

"While you, in your enlightened and impatient recklessness," he said, turning back to Herrera and Tanaka, "were unleashing your 'controlled' plagues and your economic 'reforms' that left millions without a livelihood in the countries we consider the backbone of our global power, we too had to act against our most ingrained nature. We had to... improvise, in ways that would have been unthinkable to our ancestors."

A bitter, almost imperceptible smile touched his lips. "We distributed money, yes. With a generosity that would have shocked our 19th-century bankers. We established emergency food distribution networks, utilizing our own vast logistics chains, because your actions had left entire populations in our major industrial and financial strongholds on the brink of starvation and revolt. We offered you massive aid, presented, of course, as acts of 'strategic corporate philanthropy' or 'elite social responsibility,' expecting nothing tangible in return in the short term, simply to prevent our own carefully constructed power structures from crumbling under the weight of the despair you yourselves so effectively sowed."

"Even," Ashworth continued, and here a murmur of disbelief ran through even some of the Elders, "we forgave massive sovereign debts to several minor nations in the so-called 'Global South,' debts we'd known for decades would never be able to pay us back anyway. It was a calculated loss, a way to prop up friendly regimes and maintain a semblance of stability in a world going mad. And yes," he added with a cynical half-smile that now seemed more directed at himself, "we even 'released' several satellite countries from their most onerous contractual obligations to our conglomerates. It was... extremely convenient at the time. A way to reduce our exposed losses and concentrate our resources while you played Russian roulette with the global order you claimed to want to 'reform.'"

He paused, his gaze turning strangely introspective, almost lost. "Although I must admit," and here his voice laced with genuine, if irritated, and deeply disconcerting puzzlement, "that before your ambition led you to unleash that... large-scale biological attack and the subsequent charade of universal vaccines... before it all became this circus of cosmic horrors that you, in your stupidity, helped invite into our world..."

He leaned forward slightly, his pale, cold eyes fixed on Tanaka and Herrera with a new, if still hostile, curiosity. "In truth, they were achieving something. Something that had us... deeply concerned on the Inner Council. Something that challenged our oldest and most tried-and-tested models of economic and psychic control."

"The connection," he said slowly, each word falling with the weight of an unwanted revelation, "the deep resonance with the Eye of Chaos that we ourselves had woven so carefully and for so many centuries into the very fabric of the US dollar, the euro, the yuan, all the fiat currencies that underpinned our system of financial illusion... that connection, gentlemen, had been broken."

He let the statement hang in the air. Even Von Hess seemed to tense.

"For untold generations," Ashworth continued, almost as if speaking to himself, "that Eye—that symbol of our invisible influence on every transaction, that anchor of psychic dependency and perpetual economic debt that held the world in its web—had remained unchanged, its power subtle but absolute. And suddenly, in the years before your... escalation, it began to fade,

to lose its grip, its dark glow. I still don't fully understand how such a deep connection, so deeply rooted in the collective psyche through the economy for so long, could have been broken so... cleanly, so silently."

He looked directly into the stunned faces of Tanaka and Herrera. "It was thanks to your vaunted 'shift in human consciousness.' Your seemingly naive global educational initiatives, your 'progressive' cultural movements encouraging critical thinking and individual sovereignty, your insistent promotion of 'decentralization' and transparency... however idealistic and dangerously utopian these notions seemed to us, they were, in some insidious and effective way, eroding the very foundations of our psychic-financial control. They were, inadvertently or not, teaching people to see the invisible chains, to question the value of the wallpaper we call money. And that, gentlemen," he concluded with a sigh that was almost a grunt, "is something we had not anticipated seriously enough. A power we failed to counter in time with our old methods."

Lord Ashworth leaned back in his chair, his moment of unexpected, strategic candor over. "But then, of course," he added with a flash of his old disdain, "you became frightened by your own anarchic success, or simply ran out of patience and subtlety, and resorted to the old, crude methods you so criticized in us: fear, disease, direct control, and sanitary tyranny. And here we are." With the world in flames, mad gods knocking at the door, and you all failing to understand that for one brief moment, you almost achieved what you claimed to desire, even if it was to our own profound dismay."

Ashworth's revelation hung in the air, heavy and full of bitter irony. The "young" faction, in its initial idealism, had unwittingly achieved what no revolution had ever achieved: beginning to break the chains of global financial control. And then, through their own ambition and fear, they had ruined it all, resorting to tactics that made them equal to their hated Elders, unleashing a chaos that now threatened to consume them all.