This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
What An Actual Leader Might Say
Submitted by Paul Rosenberg via Free-Man's Perspective,
In the current deluge of wannabe leaders clamoring for attention and trying to convince us that they are the boss who should be applying rules to us, it strikes me that all of them are looking backward and none are looking forward. (I do not consider “My administration will give you more bennies” to be seriously forward-looking.)
So, since none of this crowd is going to venture anywhere outside of their hermetically sealed status quo, I’d like to give you an example of something a real leader might say.
Late summer 2015, Anytown, USA: A small platform stands at the edge of a cornfield. A very average-looking person steps up to a microphone and speaks:
Friends,
I stand here, not to praise you, but to acquaint you with reality, at least as well as I am able. Perhaps that means I should be killed or at least run out of town. But if that’s so, then so be it. I am tired of living a life other than my own – the pre-scripted, advertiser-generated life that is shoved before my eyes day by day. And I suspect that some of you are tired of it as well.
Please allow me to begin by pointing out that all the fights from all the platforms this election cycle will concern trivialities – Team Red versus Team Blue – and competing varieties of fears – terrorists versus outlawed unions versus less free stuff versus whatever works in your little corner of the world. At most, these are fights over personalities – He’s an arrogant ass, she’s a conniving witch, and so on – all of which really come down to, “My opponent is scarier than I am.”
None of these bobbleheads will ask the questions that matter: Who are we? What do we want? Where should we be headed?
You see, once we get past all the publicized fears – some real, but most imaginary – the dialog we’re having, if we care to admit it, is mostly self-praise. We laud our great “democracy,” even though not one in a thousand can define it. Or we brag about our wonderful “freedom” but avoid defining it, knowing that our definition wouldn’t stand up to the test. Freedom is “what we have,” and further questions are evidence of stupidity, bordering on treason.
The truth is that we’ve trained ourselves to evade reality. Praising ourselves is so much easier: Team America!
By doing this, my friends, we’ve been blind to the greatest opportunity that has ever stood before a human generation: If we wanted to, we could quickly and easily step into a golden age. In fact, we’ve been doing just that, half by accident, for a long time. If we bothered to work at it, even halfheartedly, we’d go down in history as the generation that transformed humanity forever.
But perhaps most of us wouldn’t like that. And if so, that’s our choice to make. My objection is that no one bothers to talk about it.
I’d like for you, for just a few seconds, to take a look at two graphs, which I pulled out of Julian Simon’s The State of Humanity. The first graph shows how much wheat is not grown, because our production capacity is so much greater than our demand for wheat.

This second one shows the price of wheat measured in wages.

And I have others like this, for other commodities.
There is one message that comes screaming through here, and it’s one that I know can be deeply troubling. Nonetheless, that message is true: Scarcity on planet Earth is dying.
I’ll pause to allow you a small freakout over that, to let all those prerecorded messages run screaming through your mind.
You see, our ruling systems have been built on the assumption of scarcity, and the idea that scarcity may be failing throws us into crisis.
Isn’t it odd that good news should upset us?
Scarcity, sadly, became more than a sad fact to us; it became a psychological necessity. But what if we no longer need to fight over resources? Is that a concept that we should rush to eliminate?
And in actual fact, there are fewer and fewer starving people all the time, and most of those are starving because of political distortions, not because of insufficient production technology.
All of this reminds me of a comment from Buckminster Fuller that I like to condense:
I decided man was operating on a fundamental fallacy: that he was destined to be a failure. I decided that man was, in fact, designed to be an extraordinary success. His characteristics were magnificent; what he needed was to discover the comprehensive patterns operating in the universe.
So, what if humanity is designed to be an extraordinary success? Why should this thought repel us, even before we honestly consider it?
You see, these are things we need to discuss.
We are, whether we like it or not, stepping out of scarcity, and it seems to me that we should decide whether or not that’s a good thing.
Our problem – our real problem, if we can muster the courage to admit it – is that we’re living with space-age technology and bronze-age rulership. But we can get past this problem if we wish, and we can easily meet all of humanity’s basic needs… if we wish.
But perhaps we don’t want to. Maybe it’s more important to us that we should be the biggest dog in town and that everyone else should be a little yap-yap dog.
And if that’s the case, we need to admit it to ourselves. Perhaps we’ll decide that what we really need is to be the dominant dog, and that all the morality stuff we talk about – golden rules and loving our neighbors – was all juvenile blather; that what we really want is to dominate everyone else.
And if that’s the case, we should get busy rebuilding our civilization in the form of the Roman Empire. We should get serious about beating the hell out of everyone else… at least until a new Christ comes along (or perhaps just people who remember the old one) and convinces our subjects that there’s a better way to live.
But in the meantime, we could kick the crap out of a billion brown people for a century or two, minimum. That’s our choice to make, of course, I’m only suggesting that we be forthright about it.
So, my friends, let me conclude by saying this:
If what we really want is to be the big dog, to feast on the fact that we’re able to kick all the smaller dogs around, then let’s do it. Let’s go full-Caesar on ’em. Let’s conquer everything, steal what we like, and live it up.
Or, if that’s not what we really want, then let’s get the golden age started; let’s dump the hierarchies that steal half our earnings and labor to keep fear alive. Let’s build and plant and thrive; and let’s welcome others to thrive with us.
Thank you for not shooting me.
- 26899 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -


Bravo!
Government is evil.
We need less evil.
Nobody'd believe him. The AGW and peak oil proponents would run him out of town.
But got to admit, we're sure as shit not running out of FSA, folks!
"What An Actual Leader Might Say"
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child. - Hans Christian Andersen
To Bad we don't have Honest Brokers in DOJ, FBI, SEC, FINRA, FTC, GAO, CBO, FED, Treasury, OCC, FSOC, BCFP, CFTC, FDIC, FHFA, SIPC
Does a child not have as much right to privacy and freedom from parental conditioning as the parents expect for themselves? It is one of the most fundamental problems facing humanity today. The future depends on how we solve it. It has never been encountered before. For the first time man has come of age, a certain maturity has happened - and as you become mature you have to face new problems.
Slowly, slowly, as man progressed, he became aware of many kinds of slavery. Only recently in the West have we become aware that the greatest slavery is that of the child. It was never thought of before; it is not mentioned in any scripture of the world. Who could have thought ... a child and a slave? A slave to his own parents, who love him, who sacrifice themselves for the child? It would have looked ridiculous, utter nonsense!
But now, as psychological insight has deepened into the human mind and its functioning, it has become absolutely clear that the child is the most exploited person; nobody has been exploited more than the child. And of course he is being exploited behind a façade of love.
And I don't say that the parents are aware that they are exploiting the child, that they are imposing a slavery on the child, that they are destroying the child, that they are making him stupid, unintelligent, that their whole effort of conditioning the child as a Hindu, as a Mohammedan, as a Christian, as a Buddhist, is inhuman; they are not aware of it, but that does not make any difference as far as the facts are concerned. The child is being conditioned by the parents in ugly ways, and of course the child is helpless: he depends on the parents. He cannot rebel, he cannot escape, he cannot protect himself. He is absolutely vulnerable; hence he can be easily exploited.
Parental conditioning is the greatest slavery in the world. It has to be completely uprooted, only then will man be able for the first time to be really free, truly free, authentically free, because the child is the father of the man. If the child is brought up in a wrong way then the whole of humanity goes wrong. The child is the seed: if the seed itself is poisoned and corrupted by well-intentioned people, well-wishing people, then there is no hope for a free human individual. Then that dream can never be fulfilled.
~ Osho, the book of children, chapter 3 - Conditioning
Makes one wonder how the human species survived.
From logic?
Which after several millenia and several dark ages was finally identified, written down, and taught by Aristotle?
Human species survived better than all the other species because of their volitional, discerning, decision making, capacity.
These decisions then instructed their body what to do to survive.
The principles, like this one, never ever change. Only the measurements change.
Please take this to heart, stop wondering, and tell 2 friends to tell 2 friends.
Let's talk about central planning.
Let's talk about these central planners creating fiat money from nothing and blowing bubbles followed by predictable crashes.
Let's talk about reguatory capture.
I have a hard time believing the premise of this article if it is applied to oil, and it would seem the author is implying that it can be applied to oil when he says, "And I have others like this, for other commodities" and "Scarcity on planet Earth is dying."
The problem is not that we're running out of oil; the problem is it's increasingly becoming a losing sum game in terms of energy required to extract it.
I dunno. I like his optimism though.
I'm thinking that a leader might nsay something like this- "Hey! Walk-away! Get back on topic before somebody notices that you're a statist boob with both Mommy and Daddy issues! Show us on the doll where your parents hurt you...."
That second part-that was tough love.
He's looking at numbers and just seeing what he wants to see. We produced less then the absolute maximum possible for a good reason, it was not profitable, our market system told us that our level of production was as high as it could go and get a positive return on investment, and even then we had oil shortages and all massive ecological problems doing what we did.
gov't is obsolete
If government is obsolete, how then would you govern yourself?
How would you govern yourself with respect to those that are closest to you? Your family, your friends?
Same principle, how would you govern yourself, your family, your friends, with respect to those that are farthest from you?
Governance is an inescapable moral premise.
Obsolescence of it is immoral.
i would govern myself the same way that i do now.
how i would govern family and friends? what a ludicrous question - i have no right to govern others, nor any desire to do so.
if everyone would come to that same conclusion, the world would be a great place to live in.
government is immoral - no human being has the right to rule or claim ownership over another human being.
obsolescence of government is an insecapabale reality - hopefully sooner rather than later.
I wouldn't vote for this moron, as he doesn't address the fact that our planet is overpopulated.
Deforestation and the collapse of marine ecosystems are clear signs of this.
We may have the means and technology to produce more wheat than 1801 but that doesn't mean that we live on the doorstep of a golden age of abundance.
We have simply lived through a century or so of cheap available energy, which, like all natural resources we crave, will soon be depleted.
The human race is a slave race genetically programmed to be dominated and today we are suffering from mass insanity on a global scale.
The 80% or so:
A nation of sheep you say?
Need to belong?
Need to be led?
Need to think within the framework and stay compliant?
.................................................
The 19% or so:
Need to lead?
Need to excell?
Need to grow and learn and think outside the box?
Need to be trendsetters rather than trend followers?
...................................
And... Finally the 1% or so:
Need the power and have the ego and the psychopathy to lead in an S&M kind of way?
Need to get on top by questionable means?
Need to stay there despite their failures as they are incapable of accepting reality?
.........................................................
Is that the world we are talking about?
Yes! that is your world.
Find out who you are by knowing where you are.....(If you can)
These are all cold facts and not assessments:
We have more than enough means to produce energy renewably across the board. Look at germany. A coordinated world effort could make enough solar panels to power the world virtually indefinitely in an year or two. Deforestation and the collapse of marine ecosystems is again a sign of abuse and mismanagement, since both are renewable. To increase variety in competing markets and beat competition fish and seas which should not be fished are fished. It has nothing to do with the EFFICIENCY in food production, which has skyrocketed in the last century and has long overcome scarcity. World hunger is an artifact. The expense americans afford to lose weight would pay for all of the world hungry more than once. Overpopulation is a myth. All animal populations (including humans) have been proven time and time again to adapt to the available resources. Western and now asian countries have been dealing with the aftereffect of a demographic CRASH, so the world population expansion is continuing in places where SCARCITY IS BEING SLOWLY REMOVED, and when that occurs, will stop. In other words, the ballooning population is in response to improving food availability in emergent markets.
It's time to leave the coocoo thinking of the eighties' hippies behind and embrace mathematical reality.
"Leader"??? I am a man; I am not a dog, nor am I a soldier or a slave.
I'd ride with Christ, but I'd never follow-- not even a christ.
Fuck this authoritarian brain-training. Fuck "leaders."
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
I'm running low on ice right now.
This is such bullshit! Is there no justice?
Is there one such brave citizen left that can throw off the shackles of those that have bought and paid for their service?
these black and white charts are racist
Freakin robots. Up my FAFSA Yellin. Distribute the fiat equally.
Ah, maybe we can do away with the fiat.
Let's let the market find its own currency, the plebes are pretty resourceful...
DaddyO
Let's see if we can just get through this Fourth Turning first.
To understand who "we" are is to understand who "they" are. And to understand who "they" are is to understand everything.
You seem not to understand the difference.
How bad do you want it? Just asking because its within our grasp.
"Leaders" are TOLD what to say.
Otherwise they are shot out of office.
US Presidents - Actor, Chauffeur, Salesman, PuppetThen they would not be leaders.
well said mr. rosenberg.
That read as if it were from a true politician, if you ask me. In the end, it said nothing, because it would never happen, the kicking out the hierarchies, etc.
If you have a polling problem and no one else can help...and you can find them, maybe you can hire...the B-TEAM.
Starring, Crazy Uncle Joe Biden as Col. Hannibal Smith...Elizabeth Fauxchontas as Face and Bernie Sanders as Murdoch.
Can you believe this shit? A narcissistic demagogue on one side v either a career criminal or Biden the thoughtless wonder.
This is how far we've fallen.
We're still fucked, in spite of up a bunch on the Dow today. Still well fucked.
We meaning humans right?
and almost all other species included
(cockroaches should be OK)
Decisions, decisions. Jeb or Hillary. A crime family that used its financial wealth to acquire political power, or a crime family that used its political power to acquire financial wealth. Let us hope we choose wisely.
The Republic is dead, the Empire is collapsing....... the US is Rome - in fast forward - without the tolerance and acceptance that kept Rome on top for so long.
A Bush vs. Clinton race just confirms our fall into Latin American Bananna Republic status with the oligarchy fighting over the little left while the rest of the population lives in serfdom. Smedley Butler saw this coming - as did Ike.
Hopefuly we'll escape a Dark Ages redux with a complete collapse of civilization.
Leadership....huh,.....and all my corporate training was to learn how to make humans act like robots, or vengeful pirates....., Damn..., in all seriousness, having a leader would be a good fucking start! Where do we buy one though?
"If what we really want is to be the big dog, to feast on the fact that we’re able to kick all the smaller dogs around, then let’s do it. Let’s go full-Caesar on ’em. Let’s conquer everything, steal what we like, and live it up."
Yep! Lets quit pussy footing around singing Kumbaya all lovey dovey day long pretending everything should be civil.
Declare it what it is and go for it!
"Our problem – our real problem, if we can muster the courage to admit it – is that we’re living with space-age technology and bronze-age rulership."
Too that I would add, "stone-age followership".
All 4 Estates of the Realm are Broken.
Today there is primarily a problem of "no-followership". There are plenty of new ideas and innovations, but none of them can seem to attract a large and solid base to launch a broad-based movement from. Ergo, we remain stuck with the demagogues.
This guy makes a few good points about politics and leadership but basing the earth's health (scarcity) with facts about grain production resulting from hydrocarbon fertilizer inputs is bogus. There is no doubt that the human population as it lives today is beyond earth's long-term carrying capacity. All you need to do is look at the ocean fish stocks, massive soil erosion, tropical forest loss and depleted aquifers to know nature will force a change. We are yeast bumping up against the side of the petri dish.
Yep.
On the other hand there are at least 4 Dark Ages we know of where people died off and technology & history were lost.
-
- Dark Ages (historiography), the period in Europe following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire
1. European Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries CE), particularly:
--- European Early Middle Ages
--- Migration Period of c. 400 to 800 CE
--- Saeculum obscurum or "dark age" in the history of the papacy, running from 904 to 964
2. Bronze Age collapse (c. 1200 BCE)
3. Greek Dark Ages (c. 1100 BCE – 750 BCE), a period in the history of Ancient Greece and Anatolia after the Bronze Age collapse
4. Dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450–1863 CE)
5. Digital dark age, a future time when it might not be possible to read historical digital documents
We have the technology to increase food, water, & energy, production. If we apply these improvements, humanity can thrive for millions of years. If we don't, we wont. You choose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lyXi1efbYrk#t=4028
But the Monopolies want us to spend money on their products and services... so there is no Leadership in the USA.
Your not saying anything different than the 7th century cverpopulation shrills. We are running into enregy, not running out of it. Rent Ants and get a 5th grader to tell you what it means.
I don't know who you're example is from the 7th century but none of the examples I used of planetary degredation were happening in the 600's. Make a cogent argument or continued to be viewed as a moron.
What we can do vs. What we are doing is the point. You provide no answers, just doom.
Feds wildly disagree on number of agencies, range is 60-430
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/u.s.-govt.-unsure-how-many-agencies-it...
How big is the federal government? So big, it has lost count of just how many department and agencies it has, according to a federal watchdog group.
Quoting federal officials, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said the number given ranges from a mere 60 to a whopping 430.
In face, Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president of policy for CEI, found this gem of a quote inside the Administrative Conference of the United States source book. It lists 115 agencies in the appendix but adds:
"[T]here is no authoritative list of government agencies."
-
Don't laugh. Yet.
Digging through other counts offered by federal officials, he found an online Federal Register Index of 257.
United States Government Manual lists 316.
Then there was a 2015 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing during which a senator listed over 430 departments, agencies and sub-agencies.
"As bureaucracy sprawls, nobody can say with complete authority exactly how many federal agencies exist," blogged Crews on the CEI site.
wrg
Fuck dat golden age commie pinko bullchit! Let's go kick sum mooslim ass! Fucking ay Merika! Long live the empire!
Christian man allegedly killed by 3 Muslim immigrants in Maine...
http://www.wnd.com/2015/08/slain-christians-head-allegedly-bashed-by-mus...
- Illegal arrested for child rape in NC... (Breitbart)
- 70,000 Crimes by Aliens http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/20/no-comment-nbc-covers...
I don't need to imagine. Any speech by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin puts American "leaders" to shame.
This is Satan's world. Based on his rep, he is not big on sharing power and what is good for humanity.
Besides, Pina coladas and walking in the rain, he loves corrupting and capturing souls and torturing humanity. He is the father of lies.
No one is to big to fail or jail.
And prove it.
A goodly speech.
I'm for the Golden Age.
Its a great hypothetical speech but it left out bits about how well the candidate has been polling recently or what kinds of ratings he gets on NBC or how he loves a large military while having never served or how many buildings he owns or how many Saudi oil scum fucks he has in his god damn rolodex or how he knows dick-hole vulture capitalists like Carl Icahn who are gonna make America great hegemons again...
Fracking is destroying the Saudis. And it has just started.
Nice!
Unfortunately the reality is that there are more signs of a recession coming.
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/05/29/mergers-and-acquisitions-set-record...
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/02/20/fed-warns-of-two-bubbles/
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/02/24/would-you-pay-39-more-than-asked/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-27/when-will-we-ever-learn/
Here is how to respond.
http://michaelekelley.com/2014/10/16/8-things-to-do-when-recession-happens/
Here is how to get your mind off this stuff.
http://michaelekelley.com/category/humor/
Good luck!
Lot's of delusion within some good rhetoric. The world and resources ARE finite, and with +7 (and growing) billion people we're soon finding our how limiting this can and will be.
Resources are finite. Ingenuity is not (at least not for many centuries). Do more with less. 10 mpg cars give way to 50 mpg cars. That increases the resources by 5X,
Work from home? Another increse. Shop from home? Another increse.
Cannabinoid medicine. Big pharma takes a hit.
etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Malthusians like yourself are done for.
No need to judge me like that. I hope you're right, I really do. Chances are though that the human population bubble cannot be sustained. Timing this is a different matter though. Extend for another few decades is quite possible. Time will tell. Peace and all the best to you and all.
That is exactly what is happening to the oil market. As fracking spreads around the world the world will no longer need the Middle East for oil. Europe will not need the Russians for gas.