This is The System Of The World. It lays out in logical frankness how the various layers of the facade we call “democracy” and “free markets” interoperate and together create a grotesque caricature of the ideals they purport to serve and keep us all enslaved. Join us on a trip through The System.
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Authored by Mark Jeftovic of Wealth.net, [18]
The System of the World
The Trinity
The top Trinity is comprised of The State, The Military and The Kleptocracy (or Corptocracy) These are what C. Wright Mills called “The Power Elite” [19]
The State
The State provides the veneer of authority and perpetuates the myth of a “Social Contract” wherein citizens (more accurately called “Subjects”) will be ostensibly protected as long as they don’t try to look after their own welfare. As The Privateer’s William Buckler [20] documented exhaustively over his career: The ultimate goal of the State is to cultivate absolute dependency on it by it’s subjects. This is because until this happens there is a real danger that those governed will one day wake up and realize that the State is not only entirely unnecessary but actually malignant; a malevolent force actively impoverishing society to the benefit of it’s elites:
The Military
The “Big Stick” of the power structure. In the early stages of an Imperial culture the military is mostly used to project power externally and carve out territory. As the Empire atrophies, the illusion of external enemies is maintained in order to justify an inordinate share of the economic wealth apportioned to the military.
The military must be maintained because eventually the State/Corpotracy power structure will rely on it to protect it from its own populace. In the final precursors to collapse, the military is turned largely against its own citizens. History shows this inevitably happens but with varying degrees of success. The outcome can be a multi-generational dark age of totalitarianism or a violent bloody revolution. (Also see Mike Swanson’s The War State – The Cold War Origins Of The Military-Industrial Complex And The Power Elite [21])
The Kleptocracy
This is the economic and financial engine of The System. It stands behind the State and guides policy. It’s elites freely circulate from various boardrooms through corridors of State power and back.
These are closed institutions which harvest privatized profits (most of them plundered from the wealth of the Outer-class). Although they extol the virtues of free markets and the miracle of capitalism, they are largely protected from competition and will endorse policies and laws that enable them to externalize any losses.
The Veil
The Veil is a magical spell cast on the masses to quite simply obfuscate the true fundamental questions facing society and shape public opinion into seemingly disparate schools of thought that taken together produce a simulacrum of democracy, free will and choice.
In reality people are being channeled into one of several “acceptable” opinions. Anybody who has ever been a parent or caregiver to a child has learned this trick from experience, “Would you like to eat your vegetables with the blue spoon or the red fork? Good choice!”
Robert Greene, in his seminal work “The 48 Laws of Power” [22] identified this as Law 31: Control the Options – Get Others to Play With the Cards You Deal
“The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice; Your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets. Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose. Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose. Put them on the horns of a dilemma: They are gored wherever they turn.”
On a societal level this is executed via mass media, pop culture and what passes for “news”.
Rather than inform the public, or even more outlandishly, telling them the facts – mass media indoctrinates, molds and conditions the public consciousness.
It is in a word: Propaganda.
Alternative history aficionados and sci-fi geeks often like to posit narratives wherein a present-day dystopia is averted by some selfless time traveller going back and strategically assassinating some single figure who set it all in motion (usually Hitler). They always miss the point. They should really have had their sights set on Edward Bernays [23] – the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of propaganda as we know and experience it today.
[24]You go girl!
His methods were used for simple commercial gain in the early parts of the 20th century (like convincing women that it was fashionable to start smoking “Victory Sticks”, ideally those manufactured and sold by the fine folks at Phillip Morris) – it wasn’t taken to a population-wide industrial level until Joseph Goebbels read all his books and realized therein lay the keys to elevating the Nazis to power.
He owed a particular debt to Bernays’ Crystallizing Public Opinion from which he derived his basis for creating public opinion against the Jews of Germany. (Bernays was reportedly startled by this “[it] shocked me. … Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.”)
Nobody aspring to political power has ever forgotten or disputed the practical lessons learned by the Nazis. Every political campaign and policy initiative since has been run around the principles invented by Bernays.
In fact Bernays himself directly participated in early public / political opinion shaping exercises that set the trend for future US Imperialism when United Fruit hired him to convince the American public [25] that Guatemala’s democratic and legally elected president (Arbenz Guzman) was a dangerous communist and thus justified the CIA led coup to overthrow him. (This chapter in our history is where the phrase “Banana Republic” originated”).
In Bernays’ own words:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
- Propaganda
The delivery mechanisms for propaganda to the public today are the major media outlets. Television, radio, newspapers crystallize into an inverse-Pareto structure (80% of the media outlets are owned by a very few number of conglomerates who are firmly entrenched within the Corptocratic wing of the The System.)
The challenging entity to the apparatus of The Veil is the internet, which we’ll discuss a little later.
The Yoke
The Yoke is a subtle, ever present method of control over every member of the populace.
The best possible Yoke is one the wearer doesn’t realize he’s wearing or one that the pack animal mistakes for being a natural characteristic of its habitat or environment.
Because of the level of sophistication attained by The System, it need not be physical carrots and sticks. The System employs monetary policy because it works even more effectively than brute force coercion.
These are: Debt, Inflation and Taxes.
Debt
is the super elixir of The System. With debt you can consume before you produce, you can consume more than you produce, and you can live beyond your means … for awhile.
The distinction between productive debt (money borrowed to invest or build something that can then self-liquidate the debt) and destructive debt (going on vacations, benders or sprees on your credit cards) has been abandoned; in fact the emphasis is now on the latter as it it “stimulates consumption“.
Governments use debt to live beyond their means and they encourage the populace to do the same. For governments debt is to finance entitlement programs, empire building and for the public it is so that they can continually consume.
When everybody is in debt, they are trapped because the populace must service their debt, but government and the banks get to cheat, because they control the monetary system, they can create:
Inflation.
Most people think that prices slowly, naturally, inexorably rise over time just as sure aging and erosion. They also think that that is “inflation”.
It’s not, inflation is an expansion in the supply of money, but only when the government or it’s bankers do it. When you or I expand the supply of money it’s called counterfeiting.
We are led to believe that inflation is “natural”, so much so that most governments speak pretty openly about having a “targeted inflation rate”. The most recent example of this is called “Abenomics” in Japan, with their “2/2/2″ campaign to: double the money supply, target inflation at 2%, grow GDP by 2%, within 2 years.
Abenomics has gone on long enough (or unfolded fast enough) to illustrate exactly how this works:
[26]If you want more pizza, just cut a slice in two!
The perceived “wealth” effect of asset prices going up is driven entirely by the value of the currency these assets are priced in going down.
It doesn’t stop there:
- Borrowers prosper because they can service their debt in “cheaper” currency.
- It is not only asset prices that rise, everything else does too: commodities and staples. Thus, the “cost of living” increases.
- This has the effect of pushing assets “up the chain” toward the elites at the top, because those with less wealth have to spend more of their income on just staying alive, while the elite amass more assets which appreciate in price.
That’s still not all because:
The government under-reports price inflation.
Official government statistics of inflation are inaccurate and low, because if the “true” rate of inflation were admitted, the populace would realize that the cost of living is rising faster than their wages, or for those lucky or foolish enough to have savings: the inflation rate would be seen to be higher than meager interest earned on their savings (this is the one/two punch of rampant money creation combined with artificially suppressing interest rates) – See http://www.shadowstats.com [27]
Finally, after the government uniformly steals from everybody via targeted inflation, after they lie to everybody by under-reporting and skewing the actual price inflation and then make it nearly impossible to earn an actual return on what money can actually be saved, there is:
Taxation
Where we all have a portion of our income confiscated by the government where it is used to finance the perpetuation of The System.
We are taught in school that taxation is unavoidable and that inflation is normal and natural. Deflation is written up in our conventional textbooks as an unthinkable harbinger of horrific malaise.
In reality, deflation is only devastating when your money is based on debt and your entire economy depends on perpetually expanding credit a.k.a borrowed money.
Prior to 1913 there was no personal income tax (that is also the year the Federal Reserve was ushered into existence in what can only be described as a backroom deal and a midnight vote on Christmas Eve – See The Creature From Jeckyll Island [28])
Under the Classical Gold Standard, mild deflation was not uncommon and instead of it being a virulent period of Great Depression, it instead unfolded during the Industrial Revolution: one of the most explosive periods of human advancement in history.
(This is why crypto-currencies like Bitcoin are emerging [29] as an evolutionary monetary response to incessant centrally planned interventionism and inflationary policies.)
The Treadmill
The lubricant for The System is consumption. When debt is used for money and saving is actively discouraged (either by suppressing interest rates or making credit irresistible) then The System will keep working fine provided consumption not only continues, but rises. It isn’t enough to just keep consuming – if everybody did that the economy would not “grow” (as measured using politically acceptable government heuristics) and it would skid into a “recession” (although it would never be acknowledged to have done so until long after it purportedly ended).
No, what has to happen is that everybody has to keep consuming more. By ever increasing consumption, debt can be serviced and expanded.
It is considered “out-of-scope” to ask how consumption can keep rising indefinitely against a backdrop of finite resources. Those who are interested in knowing how (hint: it can’t) are encouraged to read Chris Martenson’s Crash Course [30].
The Soma
For our purposes, Soma is analogous to the happy-joy-joy drug posited in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, wherein:
To maintain the World State’s Command Economy for the indefinite future, all citizens are conditioned from birth to value consumption with such platitudes as “ending is better than mending,” “more stitches less riches”, i.e., buy a new item instead of fixing the old one, because constant consumption, and near-universal employment to meet society’s material demands, is the bedrock of economic and social stability for the World State. Beyond providing social engagement and distraction in the material realm of work or play, the need for transcendence, solitude and spiritual communion is addressed with the ubiquitous availability and universally endorsed consumption of the drug soma. …
In the book, soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free “holidays”. It was developed by the World State … as a self-medicating comfort mechanism in the face of stress or discomfort, thereby eliminates the need for religion or other personal allegiances outside or beyond the World State.
Within the context of The System, anything that serves the purpose of keeping everybody distracted from the fact they are enslaved by an utterly corrupt power structure that has lost all credibility can be referred to as “Soma”.
Soma can exist on both sides of legality – if it is legal it can be promoted within society as an acceptable distraction. If it is illegal it comes with the added bonus of criminalizing large tranches of addicts who can then be employed as slave labourers within the prison-industrial complex.
Soma need not be purely addictive substance abuse, it can also encourage compulsive behaviors such as gambling, gaming, shopping, watching TV, sex or eating. The main goal is that it saps the energy of as many serfs as possible and prevents them from self-actualizing.
A Compliant Populace
Don’t misunderstand, The System isn’t a shadowy conspiracy of hooded villains plotting everything. There is a certain amount of wisdom behind the old adage “Never blame on conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity”.
The System is the result of certain logical outcomes of human nature which has been iteratively exploited by certain predator-type personalities. Expediency, short-term thinking and a desire to externalize responsibility for one’s actions creates an operating logic all its own and creates conditions conducive to these forces.
[The System], you see, operates in a way that is similar to computer operating shells. While the shell does not directly dictate activities within its subsystems, it does impose a system logic and operational route map. The system logic either reserves and then conventionalizes design decisions – from the most conventional level right through to primary concepts – or it prevents specific decisions from being made.
– The Public Eye [31] (An Investigation Into The Disappearance of the World, Brian Fawcett 1990)
Those with sociopathic proclivities gravitate toward the top-end of The System, those more docile and pliable fill out the lower tiers of the ponzi.
A small but growing minority of sovereign individuals stand apart from The System. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to become one of them [32].
To do so, stop being a sheep.
The most revolutionary act you can commit internally is to take personal responsibility for every aspect of your own life and to live consciously as much as possible. Shed your addictions, swear off soma and start self-actualizing.
The most revolutionary act you can commit externally is to start your own business (even one on the side) and to become financially unleveraged, literate and independent.
Put a price on your fealty. A price not in monetary terms, but ethical ones. From now on loyalty is not something you unquestioningly surrender as an accident of birth, skin color or creed. Patriotism is now obsolete. You will no longer pledge into a corrupt system – if somebody or some thing wants your loyalty, they’ll have to earn it.
From there you help others do the same and one by one, cell by cell, larger groups of the sheep go into self-imposed exile from the herd.
If enough people can do this, (and can resist the temptations of being co-opted), then The System will eventually lose all relevancy and implode. This will probably take about 20 to 40 years to unfold and in the meantime there will be a strong, counter-evolutionary trend toward authoritarianism / totalitarianism (Bertrand Gross’ Friendly Fascism [33]), collectivism and kleptocratic faux-capitalist brand socialism (none of which is to be confused with genuine real-world or virtual community.)
There is a long dark period ahead to slog through, are you up for it?