is it an ego for them or something? because it seems like these people want slaves even when it gets to the point where it is either too costly...too detrimental...or both. (See Rome, The Absolute monarchies, and the southern antebellum era.)
Ego, power trip, whatever. They want more power. They want to
feel powerful.
They read books written by R&P people or people who want to feel R&P and feed their egos, and get ideas. Things like 15-minute cities, the Great Reset, and more. They get dazzled by presentations with amazing CGI. They believe the Marxist derived thought that their overpaid, smug college teachers (who desperately wish for a technocracy so they can be R&P) taught them and was only reinforced by their growing even more disconnected from the everyman. Their smoothbrains engage and they spend money trying out various ideas to feel more R&P.
They want to feel superior, they want to control us. They want to exploit us. Everything is in service to that.
They aren't any smarter or more intelligent than the rest of us. But they have a clear idea of what they want: To be Rich and Powerful. When you've already achieved that, how do you feel like that again? Recapture that feeling of your first million? Of the first time you managed your employees correctly and succeeded? How much better was it the first time you fucked someone over in the Rat Race, and how do you capture that feeling again?
By making people live in windowless dorms and be forced to live in a cell smaller than a prisoner's and to go out into the yard so everyone can see you. By making us live in cities where we might as well be chickens laying eggs. By erasing gender, and tradition, and ethnicity, and religion so that we're all bland and samey and can be whatever our masters want us to be when they want us to be that. By destroying our families with policies and programs designed to encourage single motherhood and State Fatherhood, so we have nothing anchoring us or to gather around except what the R&P want.
It's not complicated, it's not some grand original thought. It's 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World.' Except they already functionally do. And like an addict they keep going for the higher high. Everything flows from that. Some of their ideas have wildly succeeded before, even.
And then, like most addicts, they do crazy shit for the next high.
The big problem is that there are Poor & Weak who believe that they can become R&P off of it, and then others who believe that this crazy shit makes sense or makes life easier or better. So it becomes self-sustaining. And even more pervasive. Some people are increasingly desperate, and they cling to the things that make them feel like they're part of an in-group, while disdaining the things the R&P have spent decades on getting people to disdain.