fortunately TPTB are not 1 person, they are a decentralized group of infallible humans incapable of loving each other with eternal affection and equal intensity they may not even know they are TPTB, and then there is the second tears in the hierarchy. If Bitcoin is a tool for TPTB, the worst case is some of us are implicitly involved and indirectly subverting power from within the existing PTB hierarchy or from a tear above, it is most likely we aren't agents but lucky individuals who have front row seats to battle between the extremely powerful and the very powerful.
Occam's razor, suggests that's probably not the case.
Reminds me of another conversation:
Remember that "government" is just a word - there is no monolithic entity with that name. Instead, there are a large number of individuals who all have their own individual goals and motivations. The extent to which they cooperate to enforce certain policies on the rest of the population is a function of how well their individual goals and motivations align with the goals of the organization itself.
Regulators can't stop Bitcoin any more than the RIAA could stop P2P file sharing, so there's no need for Bitcoin users to self-censor out of a misplaced hope that doing so will protect them.
Every time regulators attempt to stifle Bitcoin and are unsuccessful, Bitcoin will gain more credibility and more users - and very importantly many of those users will be "defectors" from the government side. As governments are finding themselves unable to stop Bitcoin, their organizations will slowly start to fill up with Bitcoin users. Identifying the positive feedback loop in this scenario is left as an exercise for the reader.