“The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards”

Abdul Ghani’s formula—“The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards”—is a compact theory of political power and complicity. It assigns distinct roles to decision-makers, enforcers, and bystanders, arguing that rule depends not only on the powerful but also on those who carry out orders and those who permit them. Its sweep is deliberately immense; the novel’s smaller scenes of responsibility and care, however, show how much individual action can matter within the vast system it describes.

The formula in the courtyard

Abdul Ghani unfolds the argument during a conversation with Lin in the rain-splashed courtyard garden at Abdel Khader Khan’s house. Sheltered beneath the veranda, the men drink sweet tea while rain pours around the open centre and the fountain continues to send water upward. Abdul Ghani speaks in his best Oxford English accent and eats honey cakes, giving an abstract political proposition a companionable, domestic setting. His manner is genial, but the scale of the claim is anything but small.

The formula divides society into three groups according to their relationship to power. The one million evil men are the rich, politicians, and religious fanatics whose decisions determine the direction of the world. The ten million stupid men are soldiers and policemen who enforce those decisions. The hundred million cowards are officials, administrators, and other paper-shufflers who know what is happening yet look away, often defending themselves as people merely following orders or doing their jobs. The remaining six billion, Abdul Ghani concludes, mostly do what they are told.

Power, enforcement, and silence

The categories describe a chain of responsibility rather than three unrelated kinds of person. Decisions begin with a small group, but those decisions acquire force through the people who implement them and the institutions that let them pass as routine. Abdul Ghani’s examples make the consequences concrete: the machinery of obedience can place one person before a firing squad or condemn a million people to famine. In his account, distance from the original decision does not erase participation in its effects.

His description of the enforcers is pointedly double-edged. Soldiers may be brave, he allows, but he calls them stupid because governments and causes use their lives as expendable pieces and eventually betray or abandon them. The criticism therefore falls both on rulers who direct violence and on systems that recruit courage while denying those who serve them lasting care. Abdul Ghani’s claim that nations neglect no men more shamefully than their war heroes sharpens this irony: public service can be celebrated in principle while the people who perform it are discarded in practice.

The cowards’ role is different again. They may not issue commands or carry them out directly; their power lies in knowing enough to object and choosing not to. Bureaucratic language—doing a job, following orders, or assuming someone else would do the same—becomes, in this account, a means of disguising a choice as inevitability. The formula’s moral pressure falls especially on that gap between awareness and action. It presents silence not as an absence of involvement but as one of the conditions that allows rule to continue.

A theory of history and politics

Abdul Ghani calls the numbers the real truth of politics and rejects Marx’s emphasis on class as the decisive explanation. In his formulation, classes themselves remain in the hands of a tiny group, so the crucial division is not simply between economic classes but between those who decide, those who enforce, and those who consent through inaction. He presents this arrangement as a recurring structure, not a feature of one government or moment: it has generated civilizations over ten thousand years, built the pyramids, launched the Crusades, and, he says, both caused empire and rebellion and possessed the power to impose peace.

The progression from vast historical examples back to the six billion who comply gives the speech its unsettling scale. The formula sounds like a joke, and Abdul Ghani laughs as Lin laughs with him, but its humor does not soften the accusation. Instead, the numbers make ordinary obedience look like a political fact with immense consequences. At the same time, they are Abdul Ghani’s emphatic interpretation, delivered in conversation; the novel gives them force as a character’s theory rather than presenting them as an independently verified count of the world’s rulers and functionaries.

The human scale of responsibility

Elsewhere, the novel places responsibility in scenes too intimate to fit neatly into Abdul Ghani’s arithmetic. In the crowded slum, people hesitate to interfere in what they regard as a domestic dispute, even when it becomes violent. Qasim Ali breaks through that reluctance by directing the community to stop Joseph’s abuse. After Joseph’s punishment, the same men who had disciplined him wash and comfort him, offer help if he is genuinely sorry, and bring him into a process of forgiveness. The episode does not overturn Abdul Ghani’s account of institutional complicity, but it makes visible the alternative his categories leave in the background: people can intervene together rather than merely look away.

Lin’s recollection of the Standing Babas attack offers another contrast between action and abstract labels. Faced with a sword-wielding attacker, Lin’s first instinct is to step back and prepare to fight; Prabaker’s is to move sideways and shield Karla, although he is neither a fighter nor in love with her. Lin reflects that he might have been the one to defeat the attacker, but that Prabaker’s instinctive act was the real heroism. Set beside the formula’s enormous populations, this single protective gesture insists that the moral meaning of a person is not exhausted by a position in a social category.

The expression thus works both as a political diagnosis and as a provocation about personal responsibility. It identifies the cooperation and silence that sustain power, but the novel’s other encounters keep agency in view: a person can protect someone, challenge a harmful convention, or help another person return to the community. The numbers explain the formidable reach of obedience; the small acts of courage and care show why that reach is not the same thing as inevitability.