It's off topic, but I thought by far the most important scene was one that no one ever talks about, near the end where the protagonist meets that Elite occultist/oligarch or whoever he's supposed to be.

That guy mentioned something about men like himself having ambitions that men like the protagonist could not understand, which is why he never knew what was really going on. I thought that was a key insight to understanding how the world really works. As I carried it forward from the time I saw the movie, I also noticed that virtually no one understands this and why the point is completely glossed over in discussion about the film.

So everyone has ambitions, which we could restate as things which are important to them. Maybe it's "get money" or "fuck bitches" or "protect my tribe" or "have health insurance" or "be powerful" or whatever. You could probably rank these according to some logical scale, but the particularities of that are not the problem.

The real problem is this: everyone subconsciously assumes that the world is driven by people with ambitions of a no higher "level" than their own. Another way of saying it is, no one believes ambitions of a higher level exist, and so no one else could be driven by them. That flawed premise skews all analysis of events. And that's exactly what the guy in the movie was talking about.

Take the analysis on the "No Agenda Show" podcast. John Dvorak is a smart and worldly guy, but he's driven by money. You hear him bitching and moaning abut donation levels all the time, but that's not the real tip-off. All of his analysis is driven by trying to figure out who is trying to make money, and that's because he literally can't imagine anyone being driven by goals on a higher level. He drags poor Adam Curry down to this level, even though Adam would eventually recognize a higher plane (witness his recent conversion).