There's a name for this: original sin. Every one of us is born radically bent toward ourselves and wish the world to revolve around us and our desires. People with money and power can get away with what human beings naturally want to do: steal, rape, kill and destroy anyone in the way of whatever their fancy is. Low level criminals commit crimes because they have no investment in the community and don't care. High level criminals commit crimes because they can get away with it. This is why we have the maxim "power corrupts." Humans don't handle power well for the most part. Us peons are fortunate in a way, we don't have the same temptations because we know we can't get away with it. If people were good, any economic system would work, even communism. But people aren't good naturally. We need enough people in the culture that fear God to make a nation able to handle liberty. (John Adams: "Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.") We also need LIMITED government and separation of powers, so that different branches of government will check the power of the others. Congress has abdicated its roll to the 4th branch, the bureaucracy and they are running amok against us. They need to be slashed in half or more. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke truly when he said that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
I feel like politics would be different if the average voter understood how common psychopathy is.
Psychopaths aren't (just) one-in-a-million mutants like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson; they are every person who is three standard deviations from the mean in the wrong direction when it comes to sensitivity, compassion, and empathy. They are defined not by their sadism, but by their apathy towards other people.
They are at least one percent of the population; Paul Zak's experiements with oxytocin suggest they could be one in twenty. Statistically, one percent of them have genius-level IQs. At least one person in ten thousand is Lex Luthor.
Do Americans read Lenin? They seem to concentrate on Marx who didn't actually see any realisation of his theories. I think Lenin thought the Revolution and realisation of Marxism would take place in the USA when Capitalism had reached the stage of monopolies controlling everything. Then the workers would rise up and the good old Workers Paradise would be formed. Seems to me the West has reached the stage required for Lenin's dream to work - we just need some modern leaders with the courage to lead the people out of the capitalist fascist situation!
Outstanding article, thank you very much for writing it. This is the essay that should have been written and published decades, nay, centuries ago!
"Government, banking, and management consulting were more than happy to help them do that."
That is because they are all either created out of whole cloth, or captured soon after creation by Capital, and they all have only ever existed and operated in the interests of Capital. The peasants don't own corporations, and hence don't need any of this devilry - except to operate in Capital's economies!
"I believe that we are witnessing a leadership fight between the military industrial complex that has run the world since at least World War II and the biowarfare industrial complex that wants to be in charge now instead."
Recall Donald Rumsfeld's presser on September 10, 2001 (that date should seem eerily familiar) declaring the unaccounted $2.3 trillion in the Pentagon's book-keeping: “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” Rumsfeld joined Gilead Sciences (the pharmaceutical monster that would become the developer and maker of Remdesivir for COVID-19) as a director in 1988, becoming chairman in 1997 until being sworn in as the 21st Secretary of Defense in January 2001.
Could the presser on the very day before 9-11 be interpreted as Rumsfeld rebuking the 'old-guard' military-industrial complex for getting its way with 9-11 (a false flag attack as pretext for a large-scale predominantly conventional military operation in the Middle East), rather than a biowarfare operation, involving a pathogen (anthrax?) and a wide-scale, possibly global "vaccination" campaign, which would have furthered his own interests and those of the Capital faction he represented?
"Violence has been the basis of our economy for 500 years, the rest of the economy was mostly just to keep people busy until the next war, and that violence has accelerated over the last four years as the biowarfare industrial complex has attempted to take over the world."
I'm not a historian and I'm as prone to a lack of judgement as well as discernment when I consider historical narratives, and so, with this caveat in mind, I tend to focus on the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) in the Holy Roman Empire and the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648) between Spain and the Dutch Republic, as being a pivotal moment in the advancement of Capital. The treaties recognized the independence of the Dutch Republic and the sovereignty of the German states, establishing the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. I view this as being a major development in the establishment of the modus operandi of the Capital behind the thrones, consolidating their zones of interest and entrenching the contrivance of the modern state as the theater of operation for Capital into the future. These events and the primacy they afforded Capital where further enhanced when the The East India Company (EIC) joint-stock company founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was founded in the Dutch Republic (present-day Netherlands) in 1602, both events that established the modern corporation as the vehicle for conducting business, par excellence.
"So the revolution we seek is to stop the violence at the top while building an economy based on actual innovation and respect for the rule of law."
Actually, I don't believe that it would be possible to stop the violence at the top without creating and applying greater violence than the top possesses. That might result in a cataclysm of violence, and the victory in might give us might only be a Pyrrhic one. Furthermore, they are mortally-opposed to an alternative economy based on actual innovation and respect for the rule of law to be built by us, and they will never allow an alternative because it would cast them down and impoverish them.
What I do seek is for the people to stop supplying resources, labor, creativity, and regard to Capital. Stop working for their money, stop spending in their economies, stop observing their institutions and rituals, governments and bureaucracies. Just walk out en-masse. Starve them until they are too weak to bother us, or until they die.
What you're describing is what I call the Psychopath Syndrome of power politics. The sad truth is that this tiny subset of the population, probably one percent or less, cuts a massively destructive swath through society because they lack the facility of conscience that governs most of us. It's too bad we can't screen for the psychopath gene (if there is one) and lock these people up before they can do any damage.
There's a great scene in the classic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail where King Arthur meets two peasants, who happen to be anarcho-syndicalists well able to articulate their form of local government. Arthur reacts with impatience, finally telling them to shut up. "Look! Come see the violence inherent in the system!" shouts the peasant. The more things change, the more they stay the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
Toby—small request!— the question you pose about the way forward is only the great question that humans have been asking for tens of thousands of years. Plato grappled with it in his Republic 2,400 years ago, which some scholars see as a satire of utopian government, others like Karl Popper as a blueprint for class-bound aristocratic totalitarianism. Plato saw governments as cycling through aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy, and back again. (He favoured aristocracy if he's to be taken at his word.) Toynbee saw similar cycles playing out in civilizations throughout history. It's the orobouros, eating its own tail, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. If there's any hope, it's that dictators and autocrats inevitably overreach themselves and precipitate their own destruction.
Sean Arthur Joyce: Please accept my sincere compliments on the depth and scope of your comment; "If there is any hope". Obviously, you are well read and thoughtful.
FYI: I am 76 years old and my only Hope is the Return of Jesus Christ as King of kings.
Great post. This quote is a summer of our political landscape. "Capital hedges its bets by investing in both the old guard and the new upstarts."
No longer different sides of the aisle in DC. Just a uni-party of shareholders in big pharma and military suppliers. It's how Kate Brown is now worth over 200 million when she's never had a salary over $175,000.
"Because the twin Leviathans of the military industrial complex and the biowarfare industrial complex are engaged in a battle for control of the entire world and they are trampling the rest of us in the process. So the revolution we seek is to stop the violence at the top while building an economy based on actual innovation and respect for the rule of law. How we get from here to there is what we must urgently figure out."
How about converting to analog from digital? Is that feasible technologically to begin a parallel economy? Cut the cord to digital and use analog instead?
Laugh if you want, but I propose that this question can (and must) be answered metaphysically; to quote Abraham-Hicks, "One who is connected to their Source [God] is more powerful than millions who are not."
I think of it as the meme of the little fish forming a much larger fish than the big, ruling class fish and devouring it. If you can't be controlled individually, does anyone else have any true power?
That is to say -- setting aside societal structures which might either help or hinder -- can any real change occur at anything other than an individual level?
Violence explains how a lot of VERY wealthy people got that way. A difficult read, but well-researched, is Gold warriors: the covert history of Yamashita's gold - how Washington secretly recovered it to set up giant Cold War slush funds and manipulate foreign governments by Peggy and Sterling Seagrave. Horrifying. These types are still ruling the roost.
Video: Joe Biden Continues To Lie About The Economy – The Breadwinner
A week earlier, in response to a question concerning how the continued inflation issue was destroying the middle class, the president said to CNN’s Erin Burnett, “It was nine percent when I came to office, nine percent.” For whatever reason, Biden appears to have resorted to repeating this falsehood, some of which I will discuss.
To start with the fact-checking, it is completely untrue that inflation was at 9% when Biden became president. On the other hand, it was only 1.4%. Even before the epidemic, it was well below the typical two percent Federal Reserve range. Only until the current president signed the American Rescue Plan, a two-trillion-dollar scam that injected even more deficit-financed money into an already overheated economy, did inflation start to soar.
It was not until the summer of 2022—more than a year and a half after Biden became office—that inflation rose to nine percent. I am sure if we give the president enough time, he will come up with something even more egregious than this one.
Video: Joe Biden Continues To Lie About The Economy – The Breadwinner
A week earlier, in response to a question concerning how the continued inflation issue was destroying the middle class, the president said to CNN’s Erin Burnett, “It was nine percent when I came to office, nine percent.” For whatever reason, Biden appears to have resorted to repeating this falsehood, some of which I will discuss.
To start with the fact-checking, it is completely untrue that inflation was at 9% when Biden became president. On the other hand, it was only 1.4%. Even before the epidemic, it was well below the typical two percent Federal Reserve range. Only until the current president signed the American Rescue Plan, a two-trillion-dollar scam that injected even more deficit-financed money into an already overheated economy, did inflation start to soar.
It was not until the summer of 2022—more than a year and a half after Biden became office—that inflation rose to nine percent. I am sure if we give the president enough time, he will come up with something even more egregious than this one.
Ignorance is bliss
There's a name for this: original sin. Every one of us is born radically bent toward ourselves and wish the world to revolve around us and our desires. People with money and power can get away with what human beings naturally want to do: steal, rape, kill and destroy anyone in the way of whatever their fancy is. Low level criminals commit crimes because they have no investment in the community and don't care. High level criminals commit crimes because they can get away with it. This is why we have the maxim "power corrupts." Humans don't handle power well for the most part. Us peons are fortunate in a way, we don't have the same temptations because we know we can't get away with it. If people were good, any economic system would work, even communism. But people aren't good naturally. We need enough people in the culture that fear God to make a nation able to handle liberty. (John Adams: "Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.") We also need LIMITED government and separation of powers, so that different branches of government will check the power of the others. Congress has abdicated its roll to the 4th branch, the bureaucracy and they are running amok against us. They need to be slashed in half or more. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke truly when he said that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
I feel like politics would be different if the average voter understood how common psychopathy is.
Psychopaths aren't (just) one-in-a-million mutants like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson; they are every person who is three standard deviations from the mean in the wrong direction when it comes to sensitivity, compassion, and empathy. They are defined not by their sadism, but by their apathy towards other people.
They are at least one percent of the population; Paul Zak's experiements with oxytocin suggest they could be one in twenty. Statistically, one percent of them have genius-level IQs. At least one person in ten thousand is Lex Luthor.
‘F*ck you peasants"
And we, the herds of modern moron peasants were/are very happy with the fuckery...
https://voza0db.substack.com/p/morons-just-dont-get-it-78d
And YES, the 99% still don't get it
https://voza0db.substack.com/p/morons-just-dont-get-it-11e
And funnier than all of that is that we really don't want to... get it. We just LOVE being peasants.
Brilliant! Thank you!
Do Americans read Lenin? They seem to concentrate on Marx who didn't actually see any realisation of his theories. I think Lenin thought the Revolution and realisation of Marxism would take place in the USA when Capitalism had reached the stage of monopolies controlling everything. Then the workers would rise up and the good old Workers Paradise would be formed. Seems to me the West has reached the stage required for Lenin's dream to work - we just need some modern leaders with the courage to lead the people out of the capitalist fascist situation!
Outstanding article, thank you very much for writing it. This is the essay that should have been written and published decades, nay, centuries ago!
"Government, banking, and management consulting were more than happy to help them do that."
That is because they are all either created out of whole cloth, or captured soon after creation by Capital, and they all have only ever existed and operated in the interests of Capital. The peasants don't own corporations, and hence don't need any of this devilry - except to operate in Capital's economies!
"I believe that we are witnessing a leadership fight between the military industrial complex that has run the world since at least World War II and the biowarfare industrial complex that wants to be in charge now instead."
Recall Donald Rumsfeld's presser on September 10, 2001 (that date should seem eerily familiar) declaring the unaccounted $2.3 trillion in the Pentagon's book-keeping: “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” Rumsfeld joined Gilead Sciences (the pharmaceutical monster that would become the developer and maker of Remdesivir for COVID-19) as a director in 1988, becoming chairman in 1997 until being sworn in as the 21st Secretary of Defense in January 2001.
Could the presser on the very day before 9-11 be interpreted as Rumsfeld rebuking the 'old-guard' military-industrial complex for getting its way with 9-11 (a false flag attack as pretext for a large-scale predominantly conventional military operation in the Middle East), rather than a biowarfare operation, involving a pathogen (anthrax?) and a wide-scale, possibly global "vaccination" campaign, which would have furthered his own interests and those of the Capital faction he represented?
"Violence has been the basis of our economy for 500 years, the rest of the economy was mostly just to keep people busy until the next war, and that violence has accelerated over the last four years as the biowarfare industrial complex has attempted to take over the world."
I'm not a historian and I'm as prone to a lack of judgement as well as discernment when I consider historical narratives, and so, with this caveat in mind, I tend to focus on the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) in the Holy Roman Empire and the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648) between Spain and the Dutch Republic, as being a pivotal moment in the advancement of Capital. The treaties recognized the independence of the Dutch Republic and the sovereignty of the German states, establishing the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. I view this as being a major development in the establishment of the modus operandi of the Capital behind the thrones, consolidating their zones of interest and entrenching the contrivance of the modern state as the theater of operation for Capital into the future. These events and the primacy they afforded Capital where further enhanced when the The East India Company (EIC) joint-stock company founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was founded in the Dutch Republic (present-day Netherlands) in 1602, both events that established the modern corporation as the vehicle for conducting business, par excellence.
"So the revolution we seek is to stop the violence at the top while building an economy based on actual innovation and respect for the rule of law."
Actually, I don't believe that it would be possible to stop the violence at the top without creating and applying greater violence than the top possesses. That might result in a cataclysm of violence, and the victory in might give us might only be a Pyrrhic one. Furthermore, they are mortally-opposed to an alternative economy based on actual innovation and respect for the rule of law to be built by us, and they will never allow an alternative because it would cast them down and impoverish them.
What I do seek is for the people to stop supplying resources, labor, creativity, and regard to Capital. Stop working for their money, stop spending in their economies, stop observing their institutions and rituals, governments and bureaucracies. Just walk out en-masse. Starve them until they are too weak to bother us, or until they die.
What you're describing is what I call the Psychopath Syndrome of power politics. The sad truth is that this tiny subset of the population, probably one percent or less, cuts a massively destructive swath through society because they lack the facility of conscience that governs most of us. It's too bad we can't screen for the psychopath gene (if there is one) and lock these people up before they can do any damage.
There's a great scene in the classic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail where King Arthur meets two peasants, who happen to be anarcho-syndicalists well able to articulate their form of local government. Arthur reacts with impatience, finally telling them to shut up. "Look! Come see the violence inherent in the system!" shouts the peasant. The more things change, the more they stay the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng
Toby—small request!— the question you pose about the way forward is only the great question that humans have been asking for tens of thousands of years. Plato grappled with it in his Republic 2,400 years ago, which some scholars see as a satire of utopian government, others like Karl Popper as a blueprint for class-bound aristocratic totalitarianism. Plato saw governments as cycling through aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy, and back again. (He favoured aristocracy if he's to be taken at his word.) Toynbee saw similar cycles playing out in civilizations throughout history. It's the orobouros, eating its own tail, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. If there's any hope, it's that dictators and autocrats inevitably overreach themselves and precipitate their own destruction.
And so the entire cycle can begin again...
Sean Arthur Joyce: Please accept my sincere compliments on the depth and scope of your comment; "If there is any hope". Obviously, you are well read and thoughtful.
FYI: I am 76 years old and my only Hope is the Return of Jesus Christ as King of kings.
Great post. This quote is a summer of our political landscape. "Capital hedges its bets by investing in both the old guard and the new upstarts."
No longer different sides of the aisle in DC. Just a uni-party of shareholders in big pharma and military suppliers. It's how Kate Brown is now worth over 200 million when she's never had a salary over $175,000.
What does this mean? It is over my head.
The stock market will inflate another 20% before the bubble bursts, research firm says
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stock-market-inflate-another-20-225426070.html#:~:text=Business%20Insider-,The%20stock%20market%20will%20inflate%20another%2020%25%20before,bubble%20bursts%2C%20research%20firm%20says&text=The%20stock%20has%20another%2020,6%2C500%20before%20staging%20a%20correction.
What does this mean?
The stock market will inflate another 20% before the bubble bursts, research firm says
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stock-market-inflate-another-20-225426070.html#:~:text=Business%20Insider-,The%20stock%20market%20will%20inflate%20another%2020%25%20before,bubble%20bursts%2C%20research%20firm%20says&text=The%20stock%20has%20another%2020,6%2C500%20before%20staging%20a%20correction.
"Because the twin Leviathans of the military industrial complex and the biowarfare industrial complex are engaged in a battle for control of the entire world and they are trampling the rest of us in the process. So the revolution we seek is to stop the violence at the top while building an economy based on actual innovation and respect for the rule of law. How we get from here to there is what we must urgently figure out."
How about converting to analog from digital? Is that feasible technologically to begin a parallel economy? Cut the cord to digital and use analog instead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital-to-analog_converter
Laugh if you want, but I propose that this question can (and must) be answered metaphysically; to quote Abraham-Hicks, "One who is connected to their Source [God] is more powerful than millions who are not."
I think of it as the meme of the little fish forming a much larger fish than the big, ruling class fish and devouring it. If you can't be controlled individually, does anyone else have any true power?
🙏
That is to say -- setting aside societal structures which might either help or hinder -- can any real change occur at anything other than an individual level?
Violence explains how a lot of VERY wealthy people got that way. A difficult read, but well-researched, is Gold warriors: the covert history of Yamashita's gold - how Washington secretly recovered it to set up giant Cold War slush funds and manipulate foreign governments by Peggy and Sterling Seagrave. Horrifying. These types are still ruling the roost.
Fascinating! I'll check it out! The book is selling for $149 on Amazon! It's a collectors' item!
Video: Joe Biden Continues To Lie About The Economy – The Breadwinner
A week earlier, in response to a question concerning how the continued inflation issue was destroying the middle class, the president said to CNN’s Erin Burnett, “It was nine percent when I came to office, nine percent.” For whatever reason, Biden appears to have resorted to repeating this falsehood, some of which I will discuss.
To start with the fact-checking, it is completely untrue that inflation was at 9% when Biden became president. On the other hand, it was only 1.4%. Even before the epidemic, it was well below the typical two percent Federal Reserve range. Only until the current president signed the American Rescue Plan, a two-trillion-dollar scam that injected even more deficit-financed money into an already overheated economy, did inflation start to soar.
It was not until the summer of 2022—more than a year and a half after Biden became office—that inflation rose to nine percent. I am sure if we give the president enough time, he will come up with something even more egregious than this one.
https://www.thebreadwinner.co/2024/05/16/video-joe-biden-continues-to-lie-about-the-economy/
Video: Joe Biden Continues To Lie About The Economy – The Breadwinner
A week earlier, in response to a question concerning how the continued inflation issue was destroying the middle class, the president said to CNN’s Erin Burnett, “It was nine percent when I came to office, nine percent.” For whatever reason, Biden appears to have resorted to repeating this falsehood, some of which I will discuss.
To start with the fact-checking, it is completely untrue that inflation was at 9% when Biden became president. On the other hand, it was only 1.4%. Even before the epidemic, it was well below the typical two percent Federal Reserve range. Only until the current president signed the American Rescue Plan, a two-trillion-dollar scam that injected even more deficit-financed money into an already overheated economy, did inflation start to soar.
It was not until the summer of 2022—more than a year and a half after Biden became office—that inflation rose to nine percent. I am sure if we give the president enough time, he will come up with something even more egregious than this one.
https://www.thebreadwinner.co/2024/05/16/video-joe-biden-continues-to-lie-about-the-economy/