"A short series to mark the fourth anniversary of the widely-misunderstood revolution that is likely to make a Hell of human reality unless we come to understand its true nature."
A short series to mark the fourth anniversary of the widely-misunderstood revolution that is likely to make a Hell of human reality unless we come to understand its true nature.
A couple of months ago, when the President of Argentina, Javier Milei, addressed the motherWEFfers in Davos, he had the Resistance wires vibrating with exultant celebration, but mainly on the basis of a misunderstanding shared by the president and his admirers.
In the wake of his election last November, he was touted as a ‘far-right libertarian’ — an accusation that seemed to be contradicted by his willingness to go to Davos in the first place. Did he not understand that this body is a planetary club for quockerwodgers — i.e. the marshalled puppets who have been planted throughout the global political firmament? He knows, surely, that, being completely unelected and utterly without mandate, the World Economic Forum lacks all moral or political authority? Did he not know that he was going into a nest of globalist vipers? And, if so, why did he not simply rattle off a few observations along these lines and take his leave?
These questions occurred to me, but still I allowed that he might just be playing the game, as I had assumed Putin had been doing for a while, to get the measure of their agendas and capacities, with the clear intention of giving it to them up the Günter at the first opportunity.
The main reasons people on our side were celebrating President Milei’s speech was that it was critical of socialism/communism. One reader sent me a text saying he thought Javier might be crossed off ‘Uncle Klaus’s Christmas card list,’ a line that neatly captured the general sense of glee among members of the Resistance.
But do they/we really believe that the motherWEFfers are interested in pushing a communist programme on Western society?
The motherWEFfers are the agents of the FEW (‘WEF’ in a mirror), which is to say the richest of the rich, which chiefly means people who have never shown their faces, even in Davos, because they do not need to: Their puppets go there and report back.
We need to be clear that neither the people who go to Davos, nor the interests they represent, are either communists or capitalists. Insofar as they have any ideology at all, it might be called a radical brand of monopoly acquisitiveness — totalitarian by nature — something that might more accurately be called the ‘monetary monopoly power grid’, which is closer to Benito Mussolini’s brand of fascism than to anything else in the ideological firmament. Of course, in promoting this agenda, the proxies of the FEW like to bandy about socialist or Marxist tropes and even ‘principles,’ as though they were fanatically intent upon achieving equity for all persons, or justice for the downtrodden, or a more secure future for those threatened by 'climate change.’ This, indeed, is something like the seeming subtext of their rhetoric, but it is all mere theatre in the cause of misdirection. The WEF has no belief in anything other than profit and plunder. In the motherWEFfer worldview, ideological programmes are merely software; they do not serve as enduring maps of the kind of human future that is implicit in the WEF worldview, nor in the actions and programmes the WEF seeks to implement. They are mere bait designed to hook the gullible who have been conveniently soaked in ideology through most of what is laughably called their ‘educations.’ In the packed hall of the Davos Swiss Alpine School, Javier Milei was not so much confusing the dancers with the dance, but rather allowing the soundtrack to dictate his understanding of the movie’s plot-line.
There is a strong and strange parallel in many Western societies between socialism and religious faith. In our cultures, for pretty much all my sentient life, people in Western societies have thought about socialism more or less as conterminous with Christianity, or in doctrinal terms with liberation theology, whereby to be Left is to be kind, compassionate and generous, whereas being ‘conservative’ or ‘Right-wing’ is selfish, greedy and mean-spirited. Thus, when our cultures ‘think’ or talk about socialism, it is nice-sounding concepts like equality or solidarity that spring immediately to mind or tongue. This is what the motheWEFfers are trading off — all the things many young people find attractive in politics (when they do), and indeed all the things which so many children of the Sixties and their aftermath(s) — the ‘Boomers’ — have clung to all their lives — Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler notwithstanding — and continue to regard as representing what is most virtuous and ‘progressive’ in the political warehouse, and possibly in the human heart. The motherWEFfers have weaponised all these confused sentiments and energies, and intend to trade off them to bring about an ideological destination about as far from equality and inclusivity as it is possible to imagine — unless, that is, you regard ‘equality’ as the vast majority of humanity being equally poor and ‘included’ among the ranks of the destitute, and a tiny self-styled ‘elite’ owning everything and being as happy as psychopaths are ever likely to be.
Thus, what people on our side have been mistaking for a leftist orientation on the part of the motherWEFfers is merely a mirror-image of the time-warped misconceptions of the leftist useful idiots who support the WEF agenda without knowing what it is, largely because of being misled by the ‘progressive’ camouflage designed to misdirect those for whom uttering virtuous noises is the most important thing.
Without doubt, more than a few of the puppets, apparatchiks and functionaries in use by the ‘elite’ predator classes are either openly or secretly leftist in tilt and stamp. This is because, although they are the least likely revolutionaries in their demeanours and lifestyles, they have, at certain moments (such as now), a need for revolutionary input so as to further and enforce their agendas. Many agents of the American Deep State, for example, are Communists, Trotskyists, Maoists and the like, as are members of the terrorist goon squads sent on to the streets of Western cities to put manners on the more uppity or reluctant citizens, but this manifestation of useful ideologues, aside from being operationally effective, is also a use of theatrical misdirection. We ought not be misled by the ideological pantings or antics of such actors: At most, they are merely ‘useful idiots’ of a slightly higher rank.
It was surprising to note that President Milei appeared to be taken in. In Davos, this recent January, he called on business and political leaders to reject socialism and instead embrace ‘free enterprise capitalism’ to bring an end to world poverty. A worthy thought, but where in the motherWEFfers programme is he observing egalitarian inclinations? Milei harangued the Davos meeting for what he perceived to be the WEF’s ‘socialist agenda,’ which he said would ‘only bring misery to the world,’ but had he read the body of crypto-literature produced by Herr Klaus Schwab? The leftist leanings of contemporary Western politics are designed to mislead the young who, out of ignorance of history, find leftist ideas attractive, but they have next-to-nothing to do with the ambitions of the people who were sitting in front of Javier Milei.
‘The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,’ he said, speaking here with more accuracy, for ‘collectivism’ is not the same as socialism. All socialists may be collectivists, but all collectivists are not socialists. His country had had enough of this brand of politics, he continued. ’We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world — rather they are the root cause.’ There is a great deal of truth in this, of course, but, at lest in the manner he was couching the point, it had little or nothing to do with Davos or its parachuting occasional denizens. Who ever suggested that the motherWEFfers were interested in solving the problems of the world? They are interested solely in solving the problems afflicting themselves and their clients and fellow-travellers.
But Javier Milei is 100 per cent correct in saying that ‘the Western world is in danger,’ though he could not be more wrong in adding that this is because ‘[t]hose who are meant to defend the values of the West have been co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism.’ His remarks about the continuing contrived war between men and women, the current spurious notions of social justice, and the rise and rise of environmental fundamentalism, were well-aimed and hit at several of the sacred cows of the Davos crowd — but they amounted in the end to low-hanging fruit.
I found it interesting that his speech was, superficially at least, a rehash of the main points — or perhaps I should say the chief contemporary interpretations, which is to say 'misunderstandings — of Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, which marks its 80th birthday this year. In this seminal statement concerning human freedom, Hayek warned the people of his adopted nation, England, about the dangers of what he intuited to be their flirtation with socialism in all its diluted manifestations — democratic socialism, social democracy, ‘Christian’ democracy, et cetera. I listened to President Milei in the English translation, and was struck by hearing Hayek’s (and before him Alexis de Tocqueville’s) word ‘servitude,’ which is certainly apposite in the context of what Uncle Klaus and his mates have planned for us. I was also paradoxically encouraged to hear the underwhelming round of applause that followed Milei’s remarks — not so much disapproving as perplexed. But, even on its chosen terms, his analysis was riddled with holes: in particular his failure to stress that the dangers we face now arise from a set of objective that take the outward form not of socialism but of rampant, unmoderated capitalism — though not of the market-driven variety he himself favours. Instead of a Communist Utopia, what is being constructed is a totally globalised planned economy, run to technocratic principles, with ESG scores, UBI payments, CBDC currency (tokens, not money), all based not on competition and free markets but on artificial intelligence (AI), data harvesting and surveillance, the micro-managing of every citizen’s existence, the seizing of the natural environment — including its capacities for food production — the tokenisation of natural features, (such as land, lakes, mountains, forests, and of livestock — though also of human themselves), so that everything — every blade of grass, drop of rainwater, leaf, rock and grain of sand — and everyone, every human life — will be ‘managed’ and, indeed, ‘owned,’ under the munificent kingship of Emperor Larry Fink, by his company BlackRock, the world’s largest criinal org. . . sorry, ‘asset-management company.’ This would, or will, amount to the total reinvention of human existence, which is one of the reasons the populations of all Western countries are currently undergoing a process of replacement (the natives would be likely to object to these modifications) and why utterance of the term ‘replacement’ is being refashioned as a ‘hate crime.’
But I was struck by President Milei’s apparent lack of awareness that the cardinal problem we face at the hands of the motherWEFfers is not socialism — nothing like it, in fact — but a bid to create a neo-feudal world camouflaged with weaponised Marxist dog-whistles to draw in unsuspecting leftists. It was as if President Milei had formed his view of the World Economic Forum from reading the Economist or the Financial Times. He had nothing to say about LGBT goons, child-grooming, legalised genital mutilation, land-grabbing, population culling, mass migration, or the censorship programmes designed to pull a curtain on such enterprises, as well as on recent crimes and their cover-up. I’m not sure why. Perhaps he does not understand — and yet he has come across, in various interviews, as a highly thoughtful and intelligent man. He seemed unaware that the sole element of the Marxist toolkit that interests the motherWEFfers is the adoption of a technocratic digital tyranny, whereby the population of the world, though primarily the West, will be imprisoned and enslaved.
I would highlight also President Milei’s apparent failure to grasp that the statistics he purveys in support of his claim that market capitalism is the most effective model of economic operation are, in respect of at least the past five decades of Western economic life, contaminated by the deceptive action of funny money, generated out of fiat currencies and powered by fractional reserve banking, which is essentially a mechanism designed for whole-scale plunder. I would certainly have expected an Argentinian whose name is not Bergoglio to understand and reference that. Having the attention of the world beyond the Davos Swiss Alpine School, he might usefully have sketched all of these relevant conditions, but instead he stuck to a stale ideological analysis, for which he was widely and ludicrously praised.
We all surely know by now that what interests the people Milei was addressing is not egalitarianism, but the creation of a Trojan horse seemingly stuffed with good-intentions, which is really designed to deliver the world to a Hell of centralised totalitarianism — the very conditions invariably spawned by attempts at total planning and control such as Friedrich Hayek defined as the engine of the socialist programme, and rightly anathematised. Hayek’s rejection of socialism was not an aesthetic or ‘economic’ one; what he warned of was its deep nature rather than its bells and whistles. What he highlighted was the fact that its incoherence and ultimate unworkability inevitabily lead to a tightening of control. Issuing warnings about socialism in his time, he did so mainly because he could see that it represented the thin end of totalitarianism. And, just as it would be a misreading of his message to search the present merely for signs of such ideological regression — ignoring his deeper concern, which was the accompanying threat of the will-to-power, one man over others — it would be a mistake to decide that The Road to Serfdom has limited relevance for us now that the concepts of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have shifted ground, that both capitalism and socialism now take different forms than they used to. Capitalism, it is true, has degenerated into a form of corporatism, which now pursues not market freedom but centralised control, protectionism and ultimately the very characteristics of mid twentieth century socialism that Hayek warned about. Socialism and socialist activism, too, have shifted ground, becoming as operational adjuncts of this corporatism, rather than offering any form of resistance to it. This, I think, is what President Milei may have been seeking to describe, though I believe he had failed to think it through in its granularity and relative novelty. Whereas I suspect that his intention was to differentiate different styles of capitalism, his remarks came across as simply contrasting left-wing with right-wing philosophies in the time-honoured fashion, and accordingly drawing the ideological dividing-lines in the wrong places.
President Milei favours what he calls ‘market-driven capitalism,’ as did Friedrich Hayek. By setting it in opposition to ‘socialism’ he is falling into an old trap — precisely the one the motherWEFfers had set for him, and it is precisly the same trap that has captured virtually the entirely of the Western liberal world, causing self-styled left-liberals to stare into the middle-distance while their governments trample upon the West’s 3,000 year history of freedom. This, I suspect, explains why Klaus Schwab gave President Milei such an unequivocal welcome, declaring that his ‘more radical methods’ had delivered ‘a new spirit to Argentina.’
[Go to 4 minutes in.]
Had he wished really to call out the motherWEFfers’s agenda, President Milei might have concentrated on the later sections of Hayek’s book, especially the chapters titled ‘Economic Control and Totalitarianism,’ ‘The Socialist Roots of Nazism,’ ‘The End of Truth,’ and, above all, ‘Why the Worst Get on Top.’ In these sections, I suggest, we get to understand the deeper significance of Hayek’s philosophy, which is all too often written off as anti-leftist prejudice, i.e. in ideological terms, mere reactionism. I plan to publish a thorough reappraisal of this important book in the coming weeks, but here, to begin the 40th anniversary ‘celebration,’ I shall confine myself to a brief perusal of its most urgent messages for the present moment.
The Road to Serfdom does, of course, proffer a strong warning about socialism; but deeper down it is a warning about suppressing the human instinct for spontaneity in the interests of efficiency or order. And this is where it comes into its own in the present moment, for, with a couple of minor edits, it might well be adapted as a blueprint critique of what is happening in the world now. While it is usually valid to invoke ideological categories to track and critique the movements of ‘useful idiots’ deployed by whatever tyrants may be on the prowl, it is not, in this case, valid to see as ideological the threats, plays or ploys of the WEF, on behalf of its unseen clients (the FEW). The objectives of these actors are, first and foremost, of an intensely tyrannical nature, and, as already stated, are almost utterly devoid of ideological content.
Fiedrich Hayek’s emphasis on socialism had mainly to do with the timing of his writing of The Road to Serfdom, which emerged in the middle of the Great Depression and near the end of the Hitler war. Socialism he defined as all those ideas devoted to empowering the state. Although he had much to say about the baneful content of socialism, his emphasis was on the methods and practice if its execution, his underlying thesis focussing on the propensity of collectivist systems to destroy human spontaneity by virtue of their insistence on centralised planning and control, and their habit of summoning up distorted forms of science in order to pass themselves off as ‘modern’ and ‘rational.’ This, precisely, is the aspect of the motherWEFfers’ machinations that should most concern us, for what they have in mind for our futures is a collectivism most unsocial, a ‘cooperative’ of the idle-enslaved under the silicon thumb of technology, and a state of ‘equality’ among populations achieved, as already observed, by rendering everyone equally bereft of property or wealth or freedom of any meaningful kind.
Hayek’s chief preoccupations at the time of writing The Road to Serfdom were to draw attention to a prevailing backlash against free-market capitalism due to the growing sense that it had failed, and his desire to avoid in Britain a post-war continuation of the policies which had, of necessity, dominated the previous few years of WWII. Every time there’s war he dryly noted, the size of the participating governments gets bigger and bigger. These thoughts came to him when he was a lecturer at the London School of Economics — itself a leftist stronghold, though open to alternative ideas. At the height of the Blitz, when the college evacuated its operation to Peterhouse College, Cambridge, Hayek became a regular volunteer lookout, sitting on the roof in the small hours, keeping watch for German bombers. It was this experience that, contemplating the putative aftermath of the war, caused him to fear that even an allied victory would result in the continuation of the wartime policy of centralised control of economic and social affairs, with the state owning, planning and controlling everything, and the people looking statewards for answers and solutions: ‘As in war, so in peace.’ This, above all, is the context in which his warnings about socialism require to be read — as the expression of a fear that victory and defeat would amount to the same thing, in effect an imposition of state power and control that would lead the allied West willy nilly to National Socialism, with the retention of English being the sole and small ‘consolation.’
His emphasis on socialism was, to an extent, a secondary aspect of his thesis — German National Socialism being, at the time, the most visible manifestation of an ideology of centralised control, with Soviet Communism a close second (and Hayek made minimal ideological distinction between them). At that time in Britain, the conventional wisdom was that socialism offered itself as a kind of halfway-house between capitalism and fascism, whereas Hayek understood ‘Nazism’ as a close relative of what had emerged in the east, with tyrannical centralised control being the most ominous common factor.
One of the striking things about ideological conversation through history is its consistent refusal to bend with the times, or acquire the necessary suppleness to capture the ebbs and flows of reality. It is as though concepts like ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have constant, eternal meanings, unaffected by proximate conditions or developments. Thus, the ‘conservative,’ the ‘capitalist,’ the ‘right-winger,’ will mount the same critique of socialism/communism in 2024 as his father mounted in 1984, or his grandfather in 1959. In his turn, the leftist will respond with the same defences of the working class values of equity, compassion, decency, inclusivity, solidarity, and other claimed virtues of the socialist disposition, as though nothing much had changed, when in fact the entire focus of leftist agitation has shifted from the working classes to the Woke classes — two utterly divergent and incomparable social, ideological and moral categoriess.
These conditions of thought-sclerosis have supplied an entirely new camouflage for the predator class, who want simply to own everything and everyone. And, because we think of capitalism as the expression of greed expressed economically, we fall into the trap of hearing only the old drumbeats, whereas the dance has taken on an entirely different form.
In these sclerotic thoughtstreams, the capitalist/conservative will warn ominously about the dangers of government overreach emanating from the Left, the destruction of individual choice as a consequence of command economics, the elimination of incentives arising from policies of redistribution, and so on — always with the implication that such evils will be avoided by simply taking a walk on the Right side. Leftists awaiting their turn will come back with lectures about avarice and the evils of unrestricted competition. No matter what the political or economic climate, it’s the same old Punch and Judy show. And so it goes, even into 2024, when it must surely by now be clear that the menaces and dangers facing the world have nothing to do with any of this, but relate to the an unprecedented convergence of power at the top of the former capitalist structure, and this arising neither from ideology nor from familiar strains of authoritarianism but directly as a consequence of the effects on our cultures and systems of the past five decades of funny (which is to say ‘fake’) money. This half-century has witness the seeming apotheosis of usury and the alienated essence of man’s work and purpose, which, being of late times insinuated as his sole tangible reason for existing, casts doubts over his very future existence. The culture of fake — ‘funny,’ not funny — money is a culture of looting, of turning tricks in which a procedure of ex nihilo resubstantiation renders unto the trickster the assets of his neighbour and leaves his neighbour with worthless paper soaked in tears. This, all but literally, amounts to a form of magic, which though it leaves its victims bereft, retains about it an aura of righteousness, of work ethic, of ‘success.’ And this ‘success,’ paraded on the world’s power stages, willy nilly translates into more power, so that rapidly the world moves not towards the Left or the Right, but toward a form of monopoly criminality.
The danger facing the world now arises not from socialism qua socialism, or even communism qua communism, but from an edifice of hyper-capitalism that feints in a leftish direction while drawing to itself the greatest convergence of wealth the world has ever seen. I’ll say it slightly differently: The threats to human reality, life and existence today derive not from any prospect of state socialism, but from state-supported bureaucratic corporatism (fascism), posing as mainstream capitalism while keeping itself wrapped in a cloak of progressivism to camouflage the ancient art of looting in a virtuous robe. Even more so, the problem requires to be perceived in the context of the unprecedented access to virtually unlimited power afforded this behemoth courtesy of fake money, which has enabled it to impose its will upon reality while blocking the access of human culture to thought of the implications or consequences for humanity, or the future of human reality.
Its ability to do this arises in the first place from the severing of the connection between money and human endeavour arising from the outright abolition of the Gold Standard in August 1971. This meant that money was no longer in any degree accountable to those who depended on it for the exchange of the essentials of existence, or other necessities or benefits directed at furthering human existence, or for rewarding work and creativity, or for measuring the relative values of the goods and services on which human flourishing required to count. After the abolition of the Gold Standard, money became a free-floating entity, generated by banks under loose state licence, which predictably enabled the money systems of human society to fall into the control and effective ownership of those who already had access to the citadels of gambling, which had hitherto existed as marginal phenomena leeching off the toil and invention of the mass of humanity, but latterly incrementally turning into the veritable crucible of ‘meaningful’ economic activity. In the beginning this phenomenon had been bound by the protocols of a residual culture born of a time when money existed as nothing more than a cypher of exchange in concrete matters concerning essential human functions; but gradually these protocols began to wane in relevance to ‘wealth’-generation, and this process was to accelerate when the limited natural life of this system of generating money as debt, by state fiat, came into view, as it did especially since the financial meltdown of 2008. Unlike the old system, which saw money as a material representation of tangible goods and services, the life of which was limited only by productivity, i.e. and the human willingness and capacity to work, the new system operated by exploiting residual dynamics from the old patterns of operation, in particular the maintenance of phantom quantities of confidence and trust that had no concrete basis other than in the idea that no one in the system could possible desire it to fail. For many years, with occasional hiccups arising mainly from temporary loss of faith, this system continued to succeed to excess, delivering to its participants unprecedented wealth — in the first place on or of paper, and subsequently in the capacity to exchange this paper for true wealth, the actual ‘stuff’ of reality — land, buildings, objects, patents, intellectual property, et cetera. But, precisely by virtue of its nature and capacity to deliver spectacular outcomes, this system was as though an expanding star accelerating towards its supernova, a moment that cannot be much longer delayed. Paradoxically, as the moment of explosion approaches, the power of the star increases exponentially, which in the instance of the present metaphor means that, although there is now almost unlimited ‘money’ with which to play, in the end it will all be worthless except whatever has been transferred into concrete assets. By accident or design, therefore, the terminal nature of these moments provides, while it lasts, a perfect mechanism for turning paper assets into tangible ones, which is to say plundering the real world by means of worthless tokens, in the manner of a small-time confidence trickster, whose hands move faster than the speed of light.
The ostensible mystery is how this process was enabled to continue all these years without coming to the attention of those most in danger of being dispossessed by it — this being the vast majority of humankind. In part this was down to the corruption of public conversations, the bought blindness-to-corruption of most of those occupying roles as ‘experts’ and commentators, and the vested interest of the institutions involved in managing and policing the system, whose managers themselves became, or imagined they had become, minor players in the game of winners-take-all.
An additional factor was the level of distraction afforded in recent years — but especially since the final-warning collapse of 2008 — which served to divert public attention from the eye of the coming storm. The central element of this programme was the insinuation of a condition of intense irrationality into the public realm, whereby concepts that might previously have been thought insane or deranged were presented more and more as perfectly everyday and unexceptionable (men winning women’s sports events, children being taught about anal sex, and so forth). For as long as a state of near-outright irrationality could be maintained, there was every chance of delaying the supernova beyond any definite period, so that its timing could be arranged to the maximum benefit of the main players. This is why there is so much money available now for apparently ridiculous and destructive purposes — nonsense, filth, craziness — because these quantities create not just helpful divisions, but also diversions which have the appearance of a kind of carefree extravagance, of nonchalance, of crypto-drunken abandon, which in turn distracts the human race from the kind of introspective brooding which could have the consequence of destroying trust and confidence in the fake money-driven pseudo-reality as it plunges towards its doom.
Participation in this game of existential brinkmanship — because it involves the diversion of money from its proper course through the channels of human endeavouring — amounts to a form of hoarding, once regarded as a cardinal sin of economic husbandry, the 'private virtue’ that becomes a ‘public vice.’ Indeed, it is much worse than that once notorious economic sin: It is virtuous in neither realm, for in the private realm it serves only to feed avarice and nugatory trading, and in the public realm acts to starve true human striving of necessary sustenance, or renders these processes impossible through inflation, high interest rates or other conditions bequeathed by the roulette tables, but with purely destructive powers in what was once the ‘real’ economy.
But, far worse than a mere vice or sin, what is being done is a crime against humanity, a crime that cries out to Heaven for vengeance. The burning out of the star will bring into unambiguous view a crime that started slow and is likely to end sharply and with extreme prejudice. Its end will have been inevitable from the beginning, and none of those implicated may be deemed entirely blameless. From the beginning it had been an attempt to ignore the laws of physics, to make substance out of nothing, but without recourse to traditional magic. The crime will relate to the usurpation of the money system in the first place, an event that will emerged as having occurred a long time before — perhaps 53 or 54 or 55 or more years ago, though probably not much more. This ‘grand theft aurum’ will amount to the strangest crime in history, for though undertaken with knowledge aforethought, it will have continued for more than half a century relatively undetected, and will have become manifest as catastrophe only in its culmination, when the consequences will be visited upon all but the entirety of the human race. For then it will become clear that the whole thing was from the beginning a kind of three-card trick, whereby men in suits had methodically enriched themselves by asset=stripping the world, using a fraudulent form of currency to imply substance and value, while in reality it bore no relationship to either. These players had ‘borrowed’ (i.e. stolen) the instrument of measure, exchange and reward upon which the human race had depended, and misappropriated its logic and licence to multiply their own wealth — first in paper form and later tangibly — but in a manner replicating the action of a cancer in the biological realm, that now threatens the happiness and health of the great majority of humanity.
At the moment of the implosion, the criminals stand to be winners, but only if their crime remains unstatable, if the world continues to maintain its innocence as to what has been happening, and this can only be achieved by the maintenance of a mendacious culture in which nothing is permitted to be stated truly, or at least loudly enough to be widely heard, which is why arrangements have been in place to ensure that every purchasable voice might be compensated for maintaining silence, and the remainder frightened into the same state without monetary cost, which is achievable only by an unprecedented coercion
This is the mission that set sail in or around the Ides of March 2020, four years ago, more or less to the day.
Actually, the really commencement of the final Act of this long-running crime series was the intervention on August 15th 2019 (Assumption Day, in the Christian calendar) by BlackRock, the world’s largest criminal organisation (‘asset-management company’ in funny-money parlance, haha), to instruct the world’s governments and their superiors that BlackRock wished the economic life of the planet to be placed in an induced coma, so as to avoid its clients losing anything, or as little as possible — that not a drop of their wealth be spilled in the financial collapse then believed to be imminent. Assumption Day is a Christian feastday, commemorating the taking up, or reception, or ‘assumption’ into Heaven of the human body of the Bressed Virgin, to be reunited with her soul rather than to remain on Earth and undergo the same process of decay and degeneration as the bodies of mortals. It would be foolish of us to imagine that this timing was purely coincidental, for this was to be the beginning of the process whereby Emperor Larry would be assumed into a state of de facto kingship of all reality. The word ‘assumption’ has other connotations also — indicating something that ‘is certain to happen,' i.e. inevitable; something that is ‘accepted as true without necessity of proof’; a ‘presupposition’ or ‘presumption,’ ’an action of taking on power or responsibility’ — and that day, BlackRock invoked all of these meanings, with the de facto outcome that its CEO, Larry Fink, laid his claim to displacing the democratic powers and sovereignties of what had hitherto been the Free World, and took possession of the conch that had been held by the People for — variously, depending on the location — hundreds or thousands of years. It took another seven months for this demand to come to realisation, but in or around the Ides of March 2020, Laurence Douglas Fink was investured as Emperor of the Whole World (though especially the Western part), albeit not explicitly on his own behalf, rather as the earthly representative of unseen unseens and unknown unknowns who held the chits of the near half-century-old roulette game in their breast pockets and were anxious to prevent reality getting in the way of their ultimate payday.
In trying to comprehend — and afterwards, hopefully, explain — what had been happening through the middle years of my life to prepare us for what is now unfolding, I have stumbled upon a metaphor that I think at least promisingly apt. When I say ‘prepare us,’ I don’t mean adequately from our viewpoint; I mean from the viewpoint of the ‘preparers’ (or should that be the ‘preppers’? Probably not).
The issue is this: All our livelong lives we have been present for a kind of continuous social or ‘cultural climate,’ which might be termed ‘liberalism,’ ‘progressivism,’ ‘Enlightenment liberalism,’ ‘democratic liberalism,’ or perhaps a half-dozen other variations on that familiar and singular theme. You will understand what I mean: the general sense that we lived in a society in which the People were sovereign, at least nominally, but in which, at a minimum, the licenced governing power flowed upwards— in the manner of a light — from the People, in which the broad approach was to leave citizens alone unless they broke the law in some way; in which everyone was deemed equal under the law; in which privacy and liberty were optimal values; in which what you did in bed was your own business so long as coercion or minors were not involved; in which you were entitled to accumulate as much wealth as you could manage, provided you paid all due taxes; and in which, above all things, it was axiomatic that each citizen was entitled to speak his mind, with minimal qualifiers (‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre, et cetera — unless there actually was a fire, in which case even this indulgence was permissible), and no matter how much anyone else might be offended. And the even more critical thing was that any individual member of that society was deemed to be entitled to dissent from any, or most, or even all of those principles, philosophically speaking — which is to say in his own mind, in his family or group or community, even in public — provided that, in his actions he extended, however reluctantly, token acquiescence to the general thrust of the democratic liberal project thus described, for as long as its fulfilment remained the desire of a majority of his compatriots, and insofar as mere observance of the law and acceptance of the government’s functional authority were concerned.
And this dispensation was protected by a constant conversation — by no means always polite — which acted as a kind of sentry-detail on the superstructure of the culture in which this system or dispensation was apprehended, managed, cherished and implemented. By the process of constant talking — and occasional shouting, sometimes tearful or overwrought — the intermittently-developing weaknesses in new proposals were identified, thrashed out and mended, by way of ensuring that bad ideas did not get implemented in the public square. This conversation was a chaotic, stochastic process, in which the ‘rules’ were implicit and intuited rather than expressly understood. Argument was the chief mechanism, and this was subject to unwritten rules of engagement, arrived at over only God-knew-how-long. There was no fixed locus or forum, and anyone could have an input so long as he could persuade at least one other citizen to listen. Between adversaries, there was a time for hate and a time for cantankerous disharmony and even occasionally a time for agreeing to differ — and all these conditions were regarded as equally valid and vital. It was never thought either necessary or particularly beneficial that agreement or consensus be reached; the talking was everything, because it alerted each and every factional viewpoint to the red lines marking off the potentially dangerous hazards and frailties in each instant proposal, so as in time to be fenced off by more moderate opinion, and in general, on a day-to-day rolling basis, to be addressed by a process somewhat resembling that of a colony of ants nibbling at a stray potato crisp.
In this informal crucible, the general experience was that there were fundamental points of agreement, though not necessarily many. One of them was that the exercising of power needed to be carefully monitored and kept in check. Certain dangers were recognised in this respect, above all that power took many forms, the most dangerous of which was the potential for distortions arising in the system due to the influence of large amounts of money, which had the power to purchase distortions of spontaneity and pass them off as freedom, and that this was something that everyone, including the financially endowed, had an interest in curtailing in the interests of the cohesion of the overall model. This caused, almost by way of an adaptive immune response to an exogenous interloper, a high degree of suspicion to develop in the sentry-culture concerning the relationship of monied interests or individuals to elements within the governing system. This healthy suspicion, indeed, was close to being the core principle directing this chaotic system of thought and self-governance. As a consequence, almost all the argumentational factions that emerged within the culture of the system were distinguishable by their attitudes towards — and positions on — questions relating to money: how should the society’s internal flows of wealth and income be organised?; what were the limits that might properly be set on the capacity of money to buy power or access or privilege within the system?; how was the question of ensuring freedom to operate economically (a good thing) to be separated from the risk of having the system of power distorted by the necessity to protect this ‘good thing’ from the natural human urge to game the system?
Virtually everyone involved in the conversation could pretty immediately be identified on a spectrum emanating from the importance and urgency of these questions. There were people who called themselves capitalists and people who called themselves socialists. They did not agree on many things relating to how the benefits of the endeavours of people within the society might best be organised, but they were pretty much unanimous on the idea that it was not a good idea to allow success in the economic sphere of a particular actor or group to be a factor in tilting the scales of power in one direction or another.
In or around the ides of March 2020, all this changed out of all recognition, and the world has yet to come to grips with the implications.
[Part II of this short series will appear next weekend.]
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What is, "Aurum?" My dictionary says it's a plant.