Dacia Iluministă

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” –Guy Debord

“…a pseudo-world apart…where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life…” –Guy Debord

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” –Guy Debord

The 1968 French uprisings were almost entirely the product of the promptings of the Situationist International. It was their platform and political perspective that formed the ideological core of the protests. Quotations from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle were painted on walls, put on posters and distributed in pamphlets. The Last Bling King by Mike Hockney is heavily influenced by SI themes. Indeed, several members of the Illuminati assisted the SI in Paris in 1968. The French President, Charles de Gaulle, acknowledged that: “This explosion was provoked by groups in revolt against modern consumer and technical society, whether it be the communism of the East or the capitalism of the West.”

Isn’t the fundamental problem of 1968 exactly that of today, but on an even bigger scale? The Situationist theory of the spectacle and the spectacular society is heavily indebted to Marx. In the spectacular society, everything is turned into a commodity to be sold for profit. People themselves are commodities being bought and sold all the time, just as they buy and sell.

Are you in demand (seller’s market) or are you ten-a-penny (buyer’s market)? Our world is nothing but a marketplace where a price is attached to everything; one that rarely reflects the authentic value of anything (“He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”). Each of our attributes, whether it be intelligence, good looks, creativity, empathy, diplomacy, hard work, loyalty, is given a price. Ugly people have nothing to sell in the beauty market while a model can become a multi-millionaire from selling her looks. That’s how brutal and reductive our world is. God help you if you have nothing to sell: you are well and truly fucked. You will get the shittiest jobs and you will know that you can be replaced at the drop of a hat. You have no choices.

This capitalist world generates incredible alienation. To be reduced to a mere commodity can’t be anything other than dehumanizing. How can you give of your best if you are treated as an object? As Marx observed in Das Kapital, capitalism doesn’t care about whether anything is useful, whether it’s socially productive or raises the quality of humanity. It has no interest in such issues at all. It is concerned only with what profit can be derived from a product or service. A product or service that degrades the whole of humanity but makes its provider fabulously wealthy is perfect capitalism. It is not, however, perfect for raising the quality of humankind. Capitalism is rarely anything other than an assault on the quality of people. Quality would be of interest to a capitalist only if he could make money from it, not because it’s an intrinsic good. Should not governments be solely preoccupied with improving the people? A capitalist government couldn’t care less. Capitalist governments trumpet the doctrine of “negative liberty” – leaving people alone to get on with their lives as they see fit, within the law. “Life” in such a State mostly consists of shopping. That’s the primary function of the citizen – to shop. The shopper feels good because he gets a temporary high from any purchase, and he thinks he is free because he has many objects from which to choose.

A proper government should always be engaged in “positive liberty” i.e. in maximising human potential through active policy of the State and constant intervention in people’s lives. No one is left to rot. No one is ignored. The State is always showing an interest in you and encouraging you to move upwards and onwards. The positive liberty State is dialectical – aiming for an omega point of perfection. The negative liberty State, on the contrary, is interested only in the perfection of the rich i.e. providing the perfect lives for the privileged elite of society. Here, the State leaves ordinary people alone because it has no interest in raising them up. Quite the reverse. If all of the people attained much higher quality, they would be a direct threat to the elite.

The last thing the elite want is to have their position challenged, so they have selected a system and a doctrine that ensures that can never happen. Negative liberty inevitably gives rise to a two-tier society of the elite and everyone else. A positive liberty society wants to eliminate the elite because everyone ought to be of high quality and the concept of the elite should therefore no longer have meaning. “Elite” only makes sense in societies of huge gulfs between people.

In capitalism, the price of a commodity often has no connection at all with its intrinsic value. Some cheap garbage can be sold for a fortune if the garbage is manufactured by a big, prestigious brand name. In other words, a completely nebulous entity – the value of a brand – is used to create an enormous price hike for a product that is no different from a much cheaper one made by a non-brand name. You are paying a huge premium for the logo. Why are people so obsessed with logos? It’s because of status. Thus we see that even status can be turned into a commodity.

A high status person is, so the logic goes, someone who wears high quality designer brands. A whole new marketplace is created in intangibles – in snobbery, in imagined quality.

The fairy-tale emperor – stark naked in his new set of “clothes” – was the ultimate victim of the brand. The tailors who conned him swore he was getting the best suit of clothes ever, the ultimate brand. When he paraded through the streets, everyone else agreed that this was the best designer wear they had ever seen and cheered loudly. It took a little boy to puncture the insanity by pointing out that the emperor was in fact stark naked. THERE WERE NO CLOTHES AT ALL – NO BRAND WHATEVER.

“Brand” inhabits that strange world between the emperor receiving gasps of adulation from the crowd and howls of derision when the truth dawns. A brand can be destroyed in an instant and become valueless. The Tiger Woods brand was more or less wiped out thanks to one notorious event involving a car, a fire hydrant and a wife with a golf club.

The nebulous world of brand value is all about the imaginary, not the real qualities of the brand. People would have paid a fortune to have a suit like the emperor’s – even though there was in fact no suit at all. While the delusion prevailed that the emperor had the best suit of clothes ever, everyone wanted a suit just like his. The spectacular society inhabits that same imaginary fantasy space, that hyper-reality where truth, authenticity, reality and actuality count for nothing.

The elite are the absolute controllers of the fantasy sphere. And it must be emphasized that in that space there are never any little boys who point out the truth. The balloon is never punctured.

People go on believing absolute bullshit. Naturally, religion also inhabits this fantasy space where the truth never penetrates. Reason is the Devil’s whore, right? It’s as unwelcome as truthful little boys. The spectacular society seeks at all times to radically falsify reality, to create an imaginary space in which perceived status is everything. In this fantasy space, everyone is drawn into status wars, and the elite have all the biggest and best weapons. They outgun everyone. Yet all it would take to destroy their entire edifice would be one honest little boy.

In the UK, no one is EVER allowed to interrogate the head of State. Is that not astounding? Why should the head of state be unaccountable to the people of the State? Because everyone, especially the Queen and her advisers, knows that the fantasy space she inhabits and from which she draws all of her power, would be destroyed when she was unable to answer some simple question, some hostile probing of her qualifications to be head of state; when some commoner treated her with contempt; when she was exposed as an unintelligent nobody propped up by pure illusion, just like the emperor’s imaginary clothes.

The English Queen is the perfect symbol of the spectacular society and the control of the people by the elite through imaginary means i.e. the manipulation of fantasy, illusion, delusion, deception, camouflage, hyper-reality and spectacle. Consider the incredible pomp and circumstance, the phenomenal spectacle of the “Royal Wedding”. All of the resources of the State were devoted to creating a total fantasy to be beamed around the world to create an entirely imaginary depiction of the UK. Reality came along a few months later in the shape of violent riots. That’s what the UK is really like, not the preposterous, fake and phoney image projected by the “Royal family” and their sycophants.

The Wizard of Oz is another supreme symbol of the spectacular society. A man is able to project an image of total power to the world, yet behind the curtain he is feeble, pathetic and weak. His power is sustained purely by illusion. Thus it is with the elite. They could be overthrown at any time if the people woke up and saw past the illusion, if they heard the little boy laughing at the naked emperor.

Imagine if the whole congregation had laughed at the Royal Wedding and mocked the royal couple. That would have destroyed the English monarchy. That’s all it takes. That’s how thin the dividing line is between the Old World Order and the New. We could start creating a perfect world tomorrow if we escaped from the spectacular fantasy of the elite, their dream world Matrix that no one wants to leave.

Capitalism, according to Marx, leads to reification (which means regarding something abstract as a material thing, as a physical object; and depersonalising a human being by treating him as an object). In particular, the work a person does is the reification of that person i.e. he is turned into a collection of the objects he produces. If they are of low value then so is he. If they are assigned a high value then he is a commodity in high demand. In the marketplace of capitalism, everyone becomes a thing, a reification, to which a price can be attached. When compensation is being handed out after some disaster like 9/11, an actual price is placed on individuals according to what sort of job they had, what salary they were earning and what prospects they had. In other words, accountants can actually itemize everything about you and put a price on it, rather than regarding you as inherently priceless.

Capitalism is nothing but a system for making people into things. And once a person is a thing, it’s easy to treat them badly. After all, they’re just objects. Slaves were notoriously regarded as things, possessions, and chattels – but so are we all in a capitalist society based on pricing everything. In a notorious case involving a British slave ship, several slaves on an overcrowded ship were thrown overboard so that a lucrative insurance claim could be lodged for the loss of the “cargo”.

Everyone in a capitalist society lives in a condition of existential bad faith where they refuse to be free and remain objectified and sedated. People develop a false consciousness, manufactured for them by the propaganda of the elite. In the UK, not a single person should have anything but hatred for the Queen, and yet many millions think she is the best thing about the country. In other words, they have been perfectly brainwashed and they see something that is supremely hostile to their interests as being good for them. When the system can hand people Hemlock and convince them that its nectar, the system has got it made. It has become invulnerable.

The Spectacular Society is a gigantic brainwashing machine that creates a false consciousness in all those under its spell. It can convince everyone that the naked emperor has the finest suit of clothes in history. Once you have achieved that, there is nothing the people won’t swallow. Look at the Islamic religion. Once you accept that the Angel Gabriel appeared to an illiterate Arab and dictated the Word of God to him, is there anything Mohammed says that you won’t believe? If you reject even ONE word, you are no longer a Muslim. It’s all or nothing. Similarly, a Christian must believe that the God of the Universe was born in a stable to a 14-year-old Jewish “virgin”.

Once you’ve bought into that, why would you doubt a single thing about Christianity? It’s not as if inherently improbable assertions cause you any pause for thought, is it? The Jews think that God spoke to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, gave him the Ten Commandments and revealed the Torah to him. If you regard that as true, you are logically compelled to regard every word as true because why would you doubt any of it after you’ve agreed with the infinitely farfetched opening premise? Are you going to believe one set of preposterous claims but not another? How would you distinguish between them given that they’re all preposterous? Once you’ve signed up for insanity, is there any exit from the madhouse? Yet, ironically, Jews have no difficulty seeing through the nonsense of Christianity and Islam, the Muslims see exactly how idiotic Judaism and Christianity are, and the Christians think Judaism has been replaced by Christianity and that Mohammed is a devil burning in hell.

The Spectacular Society gets people to believe the most preposterous garbage such as “freedom and democracy”, “banks are good”, “capitalism can’t be bettered”; “the elite deserve all of their wealth and power”; “the British Queen and the American President are good people serving their nations” …and so on…an incredible litany of lies.

The Spectacular Society involves a perfect storm of brainwashing. The power of narrative is mediated by images rendered with technological perfection – the more real than real. The most beautiful people in the world are used to sell hyperreal dreams. The spectators are presented with perfection, and what could be more captivating, more addictive than that? Even better, video games now give spectators the opportunity to adopt a perfect avatar and place themselves in the middle of a fantasy world where they can be the hero. No wonder gamers can lose themselves for days on end. They have placed themselves inside hyper-reality. Nowhere is more seductive.

Nowhere offers more thrills. The trouble is that the spectator who inhabits reality is alienated from the avatar who lives in hyper-reality. All ordinary people are alienated from the perfection presented in the Spectacle. Only the elite are having perfect lives consistent with the Spectacle.

Everyone else is being conned by the Spectacle. And that, of course, is its primary purpose. The Society of the Spectacle can be thought of as a secret society devoted to spreading the propaganda of the elite. They are the ones who designed the Wizard of Oz’s scary face and booming voice (and hid the real thing behind a curtain). They are the ones who made the emperor seem fully clothed even though he was naked (the little boy who laughed at the emperor was just a fairy-tale!); every day we see naked people – the leaders of the world – and yet somehow we ignore their nakedness. We think they have legitimate power and that it’s right that they should rule us.

In the Society of the Spectacle, representations of the world are everywhere. The world itself becomes a representation. It is no longer lived. It is passively observed via screens. And what appears on screens is edited and airbrushed. You never see reality. Most art that succeeds in the modern world is right wing, which is why it attracts rich capitalist patrons and buyers. The lie is often put forward that art is left wing and subversive. In which case, why is it bought by extremely rich figures of the establishment? Would these patrons buy anything that mocked the Jews or Israel or Jesus or Mohammed or the Queen or the American government or the Yankee dollar?

There is no real art in the 21st century. Art is controlled by gatekeepers and patrons of the establishment. There is no radical art, no truthful art. Gallery owners would never display genuinely controversial art. As for the SI, they rejected all art that wasn’t political. They saw that the establishment was seeking to create art that offered no critique of the powers-that-be. Reactionaries seek to infiltrate and neuter any activity that challenges them. They have rendered art sterilize, banal, and degraded, and ensured that it can be safely integrated into the establishment’s propaganda machine.

Revolution is never openly discussed in the media. No one is allowed to call for an uprising against the elite. In fact, you can be arrested for using Facebook to suggest a riot, even if it never actually occurs. In the UK, people have been jailed for “virtual crimes”. George Orwell’s prediction in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that people would be arrested for “thought crimes” has now actually happened. What’s for sure is that the authorities are beginning to panic. Their towers of power are starting to crumble. Capitalism’s main product now is alienation – and that spells capitalism’s downfall.

The elite are no longer trusted or believed. They are no longer even regarded as competent. Their authority has vanished, so it’s only a question of time before capitalism dies. The Soviet Union staggered on for a little while after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in truth it was dead as soon as the first bricks were hammered free. Similarly, capitalism died went Lehman Brothers went down. Now the world is looking for a doctor with the guts to “call it” – to pronounce the death of the terminally ill patient who has stopped breathing and is showing no brain activity.

When the computer age began, people were promised a “leisure age”. What happened to it? Why has modern technology not resulted in vastly more free time for people? Why are so many people still engaged in stunningly dull jobs? In fact, what they are actually engaged in is a fraudulent economy. Most people don’t work in any serious sense. What they do is spend many hours AT WORK but few hours actually working. Most people are hopelessly inefficient and bored. If they managed to work authentically for even three hours a day that would be quite an achievement. Most people are skilled at pretending to work. In the Soviet Union, the usual joke was: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” In the capitalist West, the joke is: “They pay us for pretending to work.” All that matters is that money circulates throughout the economy and that people can buy things. The West is based on consumption economics and the economy grows as long as consumption grows. If consumption falters, recession looms. What kind of economy is based on such a ridiculous and inherently unstable model?

In the Star Trek vision of the future, there’s no money at all. All basic problems have been addressed technologically. Everyone can get on with leading a high quality life. Shouldn’t we trying to build just such a future rather than buying a new iPhone and iPad every year to prevent the consumption economy from collapsing?

Why isn’t the world heading towards a Star Trek future? It’s precisely because there’s no rich capitalist elite in Star Trek i.e. the people who currently rule our world have no role in the future. They don’t want the future to come to pass – because then they’d be out of a job and out of power. We are led by people who are obstructing the future because the future is hostile to their interests. The elite want only one thing – for the gap between them and everyone else to be so wide it can never be bridged. They want to go back to the feudal world where the workers knew their place and never challenged the elite. Privilege is simply a new form of hereditary rule. The medieval nobility had “blue” blood, and today’s moneyed aristocracy have the green blood of the dollar.

CAPITALISM – DO NOT RESUSCITATE. NILL BY MOUTH.
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Dada:

One of the spiritual precursors of Punk Rock was the Dada anti-art movement that flourished between 1916 and 1922, and of which several Illuminati artists were members. It sought to oppose mainstream art in every way and rejected aesthetics, form, meaning, polite sensibilities and conventionality. It celebrated ugliness, absurdity, offensiveness, surrealism, nihilism and vulgarity. Its aim was to subvert and destroy the bourgeois institutions that had led the world to the slaughterhouse of WWI. It was surely time to reject the culture and aesthetics that had brought the world to that abattoir of the endless trenches. How do you respond to the insane orgy of mass homicide except by trashing everything that the old society stood for, by spitting in its face? One critic declared, “Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man.”

Dada is sometimes identified as the birthplace of postmodernism with its emphasis on cynicism, distrust, skepticism, irony, satire, and mockery of the all grand traditions. The Nazis regarded Dada and its offshoots as degenerate and Jewish, reflecting all that was corrupt and perverted about the modern world. Dada artists characterised their movement as “a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the post-war economic and moral crisis, a saviour, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path… a systematic work of destruction and demoralization… In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege.”

Is not sacrilege a worthy response to two World Wars? And is sacrilege not the right response for the economic catastrophe the super rich bankers have brought down on our world? WHERE IS THE REVOLUTION? Where is the uprising? Where is the anger? Flashes of anger appeared in the UK during the riots, but where is the sustained HATE for the ruling class? Why hasn’t their card been well and truly marked? They have failed. Now they must be removed from power. They are quick enough to fire any ordinary worker for poor performance. So why aren’t they being fired for destroying the global economy?
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The Cabaret Voltaire:

The Dada movement is often identified with the Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland, where all sorts of anarchic events were held. Poetry, dance, music, recitations, readings of manifestos, and experimental art were all on the agenda. In WWI, Switzerland was a neutral country and many artists and freethinkers fled there. The Cabaret Voltaire became a place where the madness of the war was exposed. Exhibitions and performances at the club were often brutal, chaotic and insane as they attempted to capture and reflect the madness and horrors of war.

Look at the bars and clubs of today, preoccupied with making people drink as much as possible to boost the profits of the capitalist owners. Did you know that bar owners deliberately ramp up the sound levels because people drink much faster when they can’t hold meaningful conversations with their friends because of the noise?

Where is the creativity in bars and clubs? They are sterile meat-markets geared up for moronic drunkenness. In the UK, endless bars are filled with endless cretins screaming their heads off and throwing up after drinking twenty pints of beer and numerous shorts, chasers and shooters. In the UK, this is what is regarded as a “top” night out.

It ought to be compulsory for all bars and clubs to have intellectual and cultural content. How can you ever improve the quality of the human race just by pouring alcohol down people’s throats?

We need more Cabaret Voltaires and fewer corporate bars.
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The Situationist International:

DADA WAS AN INFLUENCE on the Situationist International (SI), an avant-garde revolutionary group founded in 1957 which played a prominent part in the French protests and strikes of 1968. The May 1968 general strike, where unions, students and radicals made common cause, brought the French economy to a halt and sent shock waves throughout the world. For a moment, it seemed that France might launch a new revolutionary phase in world history.

The SI movement’s main text was The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord, one of the key theoreticians of the SI. Debord’s central thesis was that capitalist society had created a fake reality in order to conceal its rotten, toxic core that degraded the whole human race. The media, the advertising industry, Hollywood, Disneyland – these were the primary players in the construction of a fantasy land, a world of endless spectacle, a hyperreality. Now people are trapped inside a phoney reality in which all truth and authenticity have dissolved.

The Situationists were so-called because they thought they could break the spell of the fake spectacular society by constructing “situations” – subversive, radical actions of an artistic or political nature in which the participants become conscious and authentic once more, aware of the possibilities and energy of real life. Debord grandly described a “situation” as: “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.”

The aim of the Situationist International was to construct revolutionary situations that would shock the masses into a realisation of their predicament. Stunts, pranks, events, happenings, art shocks, flash mobs, street theatre, demonstrations, protests – all were valid to wake up the people. Jean-Paul Sartre had previously described a situation in a play as that which breaks the spectator’s passivity towards the spectacle. For the SI, the situation broke the consumer’s passive acceptance of the spectacle. It shattered the illusion, pulled back the curtain, made the people confront the lie and rediscover reality.

The Situationists created the new field of psychogeography, defined as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”

Psychogeography will be one of the pillars of the New World Order. The environment is critical to the healthy development of consciousness. The elite are raised in the most enviable environments where the exquisite landscapes and luxury buildings they inhabit and enjoy tell them unambiguously that they are special, marked out for grand futures, better than others, superior, destined for great things. The great schools and colleges of the world are never ugly old dumps in hideous urban ghettos.

Most people in the world have to live in psychogeographical nightmares. Ugly, violent, stupid, overcrowded, deprived environments generate brutish people. What could be more certain? All ugly environments must be destroyed. If somewhere isn’t good enough for the elite, it’s not good enough for anyone and must be demolished. All environments must be made exquisite and they will then produce exquisite people. The New World Order must bring about a much more beautiful world. The best designers, architects, engineers, psychologists and sociologists must work together to create wondrous environments that provide sustenance for the soul. Another SI tactic was labelled détournement by Debord and “involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle” i.e. it fights fire with fire. It subverts the “truth” of an entity by re-contextualizing it to expose the flaws that are deliberately disguised by the elite as part of their propaganda war. The aim is to mock, satirise, undermine and ridicule the elite, to show that the emperor is completely naked. If it is relentlessly deployed against the elite, détournement shatters their ability to sustain the illusion they have weaved to fool the people.

Détournement means “rerouting, diversion, hijacking” in French. The English word detournement is derived from it and means reusing elements of the mainstream media to produce a subversive message. English words such as “turnabout” or “derailment” reflect the meaning of détournement. The idea is to use the weapons of the elite against them, to turn the weapons around, to derail their propaganda machine before it can do any damage.

“Culture jamming” is a similar tactic deployed by anti-consumerist movements to sabotage mainstream media messages, corporate advertising and cultural institutions. Culture jamming is a form of “subvertising” – advertising that subverts rather than promotes, using such tactics as altering corporate logos to convey the precise opposite meaning of the one intended by the corporation. So, for example Nike’s logo of “Just do it”, with a tick, could have been replaced during the London riots with “Just steal it”, with an even bigger tick. Subvertising is all about spoofing, parodying and satirising the absurd propaganda of the elite.

In a healthy State, it should be mandatory for all mainstream ads to be accompanied by subvertising – then the advertisers will have to start being much more truthful to avoid being relentlessly mocked. Advertising would thus be turned into a dialectical industry. When your idea of something is radically shifted from one of fawning obedience to the elite to one of revolutionary rage, your world is changed forever. Once you no longer buy into the myth of the English Queen, for example, it becomes impossible for you to understand how there can be such a thing as a monarch in the 21st century, with human beings being referred to as her “subjects” and being expected to withdraw from her presence by walking backwards because it would be infamous for a “commoner” to turn their back on royalty.

Imagine the degree of false consciousness that has been built into the people of the UK to make them have anything but supreme contempt for the Queen. The Queen’s greatest supporters are the ruling elite on the one hand, and the most stupid members of the working class on the other. Badly educated, brainwashed people are always fanatical supporters of tyrants and mad religions.

The Sex Pistols, in all of their “offensive”, anti-establishment, punk clothes, signed their record contract in front of the gates of Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s luxury residence. Their explosive song “God Save the Queen (and her fascist regime)” was released in 1977, the year of the Queen’s silver Jubilee (25 years since her accession to the throne). This was a perfect work of détournement – taking the title of the national anthem and making it the ultimate protest song against the elite. The song reached number 1 in the charts but was in fact omitted and replaced by a blank space in the chart list – because the music industry and the BBC refused to offend the Queen. The song was banned and never heard in the mainstream media despite being No. 1. The elite always seek to ban the most potent challenges to their power. Can anyone imagine any contemporary band being banned? It’s unthinkable. Bands of today are all anodyne, shiny capitalist cheerleaders with nothing to say. We need a return to real music, the music of the Revolution. We need a new incarnation of Punk, which was in turn a new incarnation of the Situationist International and Dada. Revolution must break out on all fronts and a cultural revolution must accompany a political revolution.

The opposite of détournement is “recuperation”. This is the process by which subversion is reclaimed by the mainstream, repackaged as a commodity and sold to wannabe subversives. The perfect example is the famous poster of Che Guevara. Here we find the image of an arch-enemy of capitalism being packaged for sale by capitalists. Thus revolution is tamed – it’s just another commodity. Profit can be made even from subversion.

The manipulators of the Spectacle have proved adept at maintaining social control by embracing the challenges to their control and neutralising them via commodification and recuperation. If a capitalist can make money out of the image of Che Guevara, he won’t hesitate to do so. He has no expectation that those that buy the poster will read about Guevara and adopt his political stance and tactics. He assumes, and he’s invariably right, that the Guevara poster is just a phase a young person goes through and implies a rebellion against parental authority rather than against the State itself. Soon enough, the young person moves on to other posters – of superheroes, pin-ups, celebrities, Lord of the Rings, or whatever. Che would be spinning in his grave. Recuperation is equivalent to capitalist sublimation. Something dangerous is intercepted, remoulded, defused and incorporated within mainstream society as something safe, sanitised and profitable. It no longer poses any threat.

In the past, religion was a primary promoter of spectacle. Consider the astounding Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe; St. Peter’s Square in Rome; the elections of new popes when the College of Cardinals assembles in all its glory; the hysteria over holy relics; the dream of Jerusalem and the Holy land that inspired the Crusaders. Everything to do with the Catholic religion remains spectacular to this day. Islam tries to put on a spectacular show at Mecca. Even the unspectacular Protestants have tried to create super churches, huge choirs, faith healing shows, speaking in tongues and so on.

We have lived under the Illusory Principle of the Spectacle for too long. It’s time for the Reality Principle to be restored.
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The Profit Principle:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas….The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” –Marx

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, at least neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” –Adam Smith

What is the primary aim of the ruling elite? It is to control EVERYTHING. To control what you buy, what you think, how you think, whom you vote for, whom you dream about, whom you admire, whom you think are the rightful rulers, what gods you believe in, what heaven and what hell.

They can pull it off because they control all of the levers of power. They control the education system. They control the economy, the government, religion, the media, art, business, the police, the army, the intelligence services. Their gatekeepers control the books that get published, the movies that are made, the material that appears on the news, the TV shows that get commissioned.

This is all embraced by the concept of THE ESTABLISHMENT. They control the system of privilege that ensures the top jobs are permanently allocated to only those who come from within the system. They have succeeded in creating a permanent hegemony, an elite of dynastic families – a new aristocracy – that will go on and on. Even better, they have worked out how to commercialise every aspect of life, to make PROFIT from everything. Consider Facebook. It’s ostensibly a free service and yet Mark Zuckerberg is a multi-billionaire.

The people on Facebook don’t realize that they themselves are the commodity Zuckerberg is selling. Facebook’s subscribers have turned themselves into a product that capitalists can sell. Every time you update your page, make a comment, or post a picture, what you are actually doing is investing more and more in this capitalist product. The more heavily invested you are, the more time you spend on there – so capitalist advertisers know exactly where you will be. And because all of your information is on there, they know exactly what you’re interested in and what you’re likely to buy. The intelligence services also know exactly who you are. The police can monitor you. Future employers can vet you. You have offered up your whole life to your capitalist controllers, and you did it for free, and indeed you were eager to do it. You even had a smile on your face. No one forced you to do anything. You turned yourself into perfect fodder for the capitalist machine.

Because that’s what the capitalist machine has designed you for – to engage in precisely this type of activity where you become an actual product in the capitalist system – a commodity to be bought and sold like everything else. Your actual life – as presented by you yourself on Facebook – is now a capitalist profit centre. It’s not you who makes any money out of it, of course. You sell yourself for nothing. That’s how cheap you are, how gullible. You’re a slave and you don’t even know it. You have been objectified and commodified. You are someone’s “bottom line”.

The capitalist system knows who you are, what you are, where you are, what you like, what you want, what presses your buttons – and you handed it all to them on a plate for nothing because they gave you an easy tool for socially interacting with others. That’s how easy it is to deceive the world, to manipulate it, to turn unwitting people into profit centres for billionaires. Facebook is the perfect example of how capitalism can take a need – for online companionship – and turn it into a pillar of the capitalist infrastructure. Capitalism can profit from anything. It can sell anything, including you – and, moreover, get you to do all the hard work and data entry for free in your “spare” time.

At work, you spend your time making money for a rich capitalist. When you’re not at work, you’re still making money for a rich capitalist. The only time you’re not making a capitalist rich is when you’re asleep. In all your conscious hours, rich capitalists are giving thanks for your existence because you are making them loads of money. And the richer they get, the less chance in life you have. You did it to yourself. No one twisted your arm. That’s the genius of capitalism. Only one thing can overcome the establishment – REVOLUTION. But who will revolt? People love capitalism too much. They’re hardwired into it.

When you turn yourself into a capitalist object, when you give yourself for free so that someone else can sell you, and you don’t even realise it – then you’re in serious trouble. “By means of the spectacle, the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise.” –Guy Debord

The elite always pretend to speak for the whole when in fact they are speaking only for themselves. They have identified their own interests as those of everyone. In their minds, they think that the relentless pursuit of their own agenda is beneficial for all.

What do the elite offer? The chance to sit in square boxes (houses), staring at a variety of bright, colourful screens – flat screen TVs, touchscreen iPhones, iPads, iPods, Xboxes, PlayStations. At all times, we are presented with opportunities to buy objects. We are also presented with endless narratives about wonderfully exciting lives lived by glamorous, beautiful people who deliver a stream of perfectly scripted lines.

But where has our actual life gone? We are alienated from reality. We are isolated, disempowered, lonely, unfulfilled, surrounded by images and tales of perfection, but acutely aware of our own imperfection. We see the perfect lives of the celebrities and the super-rich and we live vicariously through them. They certainly don’t live vicariously through us. This is an asymmetric arrangement. We worship them, and they have contempt for us (though they dutifully proclaim their love of their “fans”). We crave new narratives, new images, new visions of perfection. We’re addicted to this bright, sharp hyper-realty, and the greater our addiction the worse our withdrawal symptoms. We can’t escape.

Everywhere, we are absorbed by the Spectacle. We crave it. We want it bigger, better, shinier, in higher definition, 3D, 4D, 6D, surround sound, with enticing scents included. The Spectacle is all-consuming. Once you’ve enjoyed the spectacle, you can’t live without it. It’s the perfect Matrix.

Capitalism keeps delivering better spectacles that glue us to our seats, passively consuming everything they sell us. But where are our lives? Where did they go? On our headstones, they will engrave the inscription: “He watched every spectacle we offered, but his own life was no spectacle. He did nothing. He achieved nothing. He just spectated.”

Most people are spectators. Life passes them by. They watch others living and wish it could be them. Yet they do nothing to make it them. Instead, they worship celebrities. Who is alive these days other than celebrities and the rich?

The world is just as they planned it. They are the living and we are the dead, or rather the undead. We are the zombies in the shopping malls keeping the rich rich. We never challenge them. We do everything they say, everything they want. They are the wolves and we are the dogs they have tamed. All we want is a biscuit and a spectacle to look at.

It has been said that Debord’s aim was “to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images”. Are we not all in thrall to the spectacle? What is Hollywood if not an industry dedicated to creating bigger and better spectacles? Do Hollywood movies get smarter? Do the plots become more intelligent? Is there better characterisation, more psychological depth, and enhanced realism? Or do explosions get louder and brighter, car chases longer, dialogue less plausible, actors more and more ridiculously pretty and perfectly honed (and infinitely less credible as real people in the real world). We get high definition. We get 3D. We get “sniffaround”. Always, the spectacle grows and at exactly the same time the quality, plausibility and quality of the content shrinks. That’s the spectacular equation.

We need much less spectacle and much more reality. We need to start living authentic lives again.
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The Perfect Citizen – According to the Elite:

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” –Adam Smith

First of all, the citizen shouldn’t really think of himself as that at all, but as a subject (in the manner of the people of the UK being the subjects of a Queen). He should recognise a rightful, divinely mandated higher authority (the elite) and never seek to challenge them. He should subject himself to their will at all times.

The perfect capitalist subject should be loaded with debt, hence terrified of losing his job, hence docile and compliant at work, never disobeying his inept and corrupt managers. He should be exhausted after work, hence unable to cause any trouble. He should sit in front of an assortment of bright screens, living in a fantasy world that presents no challenge to the elite. He should not read books since an educated subject will only cause trouble. He should have his credit card ready at all time, to make purchases. He should derive intense pleasure from buying objects. At the weekends, he should go to shopping malls and every type of consumer outlet where he can spend even more money. He should be preoccupied with consumerism and have zero spiritual yearnings, except as regards those institutional systems of approved religious control such as Christianity.

The capitalist elite want you to be someone obsessed with consumption, with consumer objects and services, with passivity in the face of stories and images presented to you by the capitalist elite on screen (all of which you pay for).

Everything you do should be making money for a capitalist somewhere. You have no other legitimate function than to make the rich richer by buying their goods and services. You should be tame, timid and docile. You should support law and order and never challenge your managers and leaders. You should accept your lot in life and be glad.

George Orwell wrote, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” And that’s all that the elite want from you – that you should exist as a consumerist automaton, not that you should be a living human being who refuses to accept their system.

Are you a perfect capitalist citizen? If you are, isn’t it time to WAKE UP?! Isn’t it time to say, “I REFUSE.” No more will you do the bidding of the capitalist elite. No more will you comply with their system of privilege that penalises you and makes you a second-class citizen. If you accept being on the bottom tier of a two-tier society then you truly are a loser.
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What a Fucked-up World:

A volunteer for the American Peace Corps told an astonishingly revealing story. He was working in a remote village and had a first-aid box. A village boy stood on a broken coke bottle and went to the volunteer for help. The volunteer gently removed the bottle, cleaned the wound, applied antiseptic and bandaged it. He asked the boy to return the next day to check that everything was OK. The boy duly returned, and everything was healing nicely. The boy had also brought two friends with him who had cuts on their arms and legs. The volunteer patched them up. Next day, ten adults arrived for treatment. By the end of the week, fifty people were in a queue for treatment. The volunteer’s medical supplies were almost exhausted. The village elder summoned him. “You’re causing me many problems,” he said. “People all around the area have heard of you and are coming here for treatment. But my village has no food and shelter for them. There could be big trouble. I want you to go away for several weeks. When you come back, never treat anyone again.”

And that’s what the volunteer did. He later reflected that if he hadn’t treated the first boy, he would probably have died of blood poisoning. He didn’t reflect on all those who subsequently died for lack of treatment. Doesn’t this sum up the world? Even helping people can cause problems. Giving a little help is futile. You should give TOTAL help or not bother at all. Tokenism is a disaster.
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Too Big to Fail?:

“If you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, the bank has a problem.” –Robert Maxwell

Robert Maxwell was a notoriously corrupt Jewish businessman and media mogul in Britain who committed suicide when his crimes started to catch up with him. Banks have adopted his modus operandi. If a small bank has a liquidity problem, it could go out of business. If an enormous bank has a liquidity problem, it must be bailed out by the taxpayers to stop the whole economy collapsing.

The question is this – why would any sane government allow banks to get so big that their failure constitutes an economic catastrophe? Cui bono? Did the elite deliberately engineer such a situation so that they would have complete control over the economy? OF COURSE THEY DID! None of them will be committing suicide. They have the government exactly where they want it.
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4/5

Introduction:

THIS IS ONE OF A SERIES OF BOOKS outlining the religion, politics and philosophy of the ancient and controversial secret society known as the Illuminati, of which the Greek polymath Pythagoras was the first official Grand Master. The society exists to this day and the author is a member, working under the pseudonym of “Adam Weishaupt” – the name of the Illuminati’s most notorious Grand Master.

The Illuminati’s religion is the most highly developed expression of Gnosticism and is called Illumination (alternatively, Illuminism). Dedicated to the pursuit of enlightenment, it has many parallels with the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. It rejects the Abrahamic religions of faith: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, considering these the work of the “Demiurge”; an inferior, cruel and wicked deity who deludes himself that he is the True God, and who has inflicted endless horrors on humanity.

If you wish to judge for yourself how deranged the Demiurge is, you need only read the Old Testament, the story of the Demiurge’s involvement with his “Chosen People”, the Hebrews. You may wonder why the “God of All” entered into an exclusive and partisan Covenant with a tribe in the Middle East several thousand years ago, why he promised them a land (Canaan) that belonged to others, and why he then actively participated with them in a genocidal war against the Canaanites. Even more bizarrely, according to Christian theology, he then dispatched all of those Hebrews, whom he had supported so fanatically, to Limbo – the edge of Hell – when they died. They couldn’t go to Heaven because they were indelibly marked by the “Original Sin” of Adam and Eve. Only the atonement provided by the agonising death of God’s “son”, Jesus Christ, could wipe the slate clean and allow the Hebrews to be released from Limbo. But there was a catch. Only those who accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour were eligible for Paradise.

Of course, the Chosen People of “God” have almost entirely rejected Jesus Christ. Therefore, from the Christian perspective, nearly all of the Chosen People are now in hell proper. Don’t you find God’s behaviour distinctly odd? Indeed, unbelievable? Don’t alarm bells start ringing? Doesn’t the behaviour of this God sound rather more like what would be expected of Satan?

Remember that this same “God” ordered Abraham to perform human sacrifice on his own son, Isaac. Abraham, rather than rejecting this monstrous command, rather than denouncing the creature that gave it as evil incarnate, agreed to butcher his own flesh and blood to demonstrate how slavishly and mindlessly obedient he was – the prototype of all psychopathic, fanatical “believers”.

Does God’s command to Abraham sound like something that would ever pass the lips of the True God? We pity you if you think it does because you are surely a creature of the Demiurge and one of the legions of the damned. If, however, you doubt the credentials of the Abrahamic God, you may be receptive to the message of the Illuminati and our future-oriented, rational, scientific, mathematical and dialectical religion of light – Illumination.
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Quotations:

“A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.” –Sigmund Freud

“I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos-especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom… Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical.” –Jim Morrison

“I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.” –Howard Mumford Jones

“Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.” –Aristotle

“On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin’s remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.” –Ellen Willis

“Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.” –Simone Weil

“The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.” –Mikhail Bakunin
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The Historical Dialectic:

“If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for something.” –African Proverb

BE UNDER NO ILLUSIONS. You are living in one of the most important epochs in human history, if not the most significant of all. This Age began in 1989, the year that will come to be seen as the beginning of the end for all the dominant structures of the Old World Order. Where we stand now is at the juncture of old and new humanity. The War of Enlightenment, which has been raging since the time of Copernicus, can finally be won. The ignorant, greedy, superstitious and selfish past – the age of mad religions, evil monarchs and super rich tyrants who have dominated and degraded humanity – can be put behind us once and for all.

“What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.” –Nietzsche (writing in the 1880s)

“I WANT ALL OF YOU TO GET UP OUT OF YOUR CHAIRS RIGHT NOW.” –Howard Beale (Peter Finch) delivering his “mad as hell” speech in Network.

In 1789, the French Revolution decisively ushered in the Modern Age. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the establishment of the American Republic had signalled the beginning of the end for the era of powerful monarchs, but America was a distant colony of the British Empire and not yet a giant on the world stage. Its liberation did not provide a fundamental psychological rebooting of the human mind. Europe was where the world was controlled and only in Europe could the transformation to modernity truly begin. The decisive blow was struck in France, which thus takes the honour of being the first modern European nation and world power. When one of the most powerful monarchies on earth fell to a people’s Revolution, and the King and most of his ruling order were executed, the irreversible signal was broadcast to the world that it was no longer business as usual for the ruling elite. Now the people would have their say.

The age of monarchs did not however properly end until the bloodbath of the First World War. In 1917, the Russian Revolution toppled the Tsar who was executed by Bolsheviks in the following year. 1918, the year in which the global cataclysm ended, also saw the end of the powerful German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the meantime, the British monarchy, terrified of its people, was compelled to change its name from the Germanic “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha” to the English “Windsor” – a fake name for a disgusting, fake family.

The one hundred and twenty-nine years from 1789 to 1918 is how long it can take for a dialectical age of the World to be fully resolved. The Illuminati-inspired American and French revolutions began the modern world but only a World War completed the job.

The 1917 Russian Revolution was the beginning of the next phase of the dialectic: class war between the rich capitalist elite (who took over from monarchs and the nobility as the power elite) and the ordinary people. A war between capitalism and communism was inevitable, but, before it could break out, a new dialectical force appeared on the scene, a synthesis of capitalism and communism called Fascism (or “National Socialism”). Fascism was based on the concept of a capitalist elite being subordinated to a totally dominant national leader (a Duce or Fuehrer). The Leader allowed the capitalists to make healthy profits, but only if they did his bidding.

Capitalism, in Fascist countries, was harnessed to State policy rather than to free markets. Fascism and communism were both based on the same economic model of an enormously centralised command and control system under the charge of a totalitarian, paramilitary political party. The central difference was that communism outlawed private ownership of industry whereas Fascism was happy to use the capitalist class as its economic agents. National Socialism in Germany was spectacularly successful, transforming a nation in economic ruin and chaos, suffering from disastrous hyperinflation and enormous unemployment, in a few short years. Of course, most of the reason for the success lay in the fact that the whole nation was given over to rebuilding the German military machine to its former glory and providing the infrastructure – such as autobahns – to allow rapid deployment of forces to any part of the nation.

In the modern day, China has much more in common with Hitler’s National Socialism than it does with Marxism. Like Hitler, the Chinese totalitarian Communist Party now actively utilise the capitalist model of private ownership under central direction. Technically, China is no longer a communist nation but National Socialist i.e. Fascist. National Socialism has proved to be an extremely effective way of running economies – far superior to free market capitalism – because it is capable of avoiding the disastrous, irresponsible, greed-fuelled boom and bust cycles of irrational free markets.

Markets are like tiny, hysterical children, driven by greed during boom and fear during bust. There is no rationale at work, no controlling mind. National Socialism, on the other hand, provides a coherent framework, aligning the interests of the State with the capitalist economy.

Contemporary America is not governed by politicians but by banks, corporations and lobbyists. Non-elected entities, unaccountable to the people, direct the destiny of America. Politicians are irrelevant and have no real power at all. Elections are meaningless and are performed merely for show. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge, Democrats or Republicans. Wall Street, and the Jews and Freemasons of Goldman Sachs in particular, run America. America isn’t a nation; it’s a corporation run by business and banking interests, and a large army of lawyers.

The Illuminati’s economic system – which can be variously called social, public or meritocratic capitalism – has, technically, a certain similarity to centrally controlled National Socialism, with the critical difference that there is no totalitarian party in charge and no Fuehrer. In social capitalism, there are no privileged elites, no dynastic families, no inherited wealth, no free market mayhem, and no boom and bust.

In social capitalism, the most meritocratic individuals set economic policy according to the needs of “positive liberty”, the doctrine of actively seeking to improve the quality of humanity. All economic activities that seek to degrade, exploit and sedate “the masses” are outlawed. Free markets are fine, to the extent that they support meritocratic objectives. They are never fine if their purpose is to make disproportionate wealth for greedy capitalists who have no interest in the Commonwealth.

Despite all the obfuscation of economists, economics is a simple subject. It is in fact entirely a function of politics. In the nineteenth century, capitalism was production-oriented. That suited the political need to build an advanced industrial nation with a complex infrastructure. Capitalist goods were sturdy and long lasting. A person might own a single pair of shoes for years. Production capitalism was about functionality and utility: everything had to be useful, practical and enduring. But what happens when the infrastructure is built and everyone has their indestructible shoes?

After WWI, American capitalism had to reinvent itself. It switched from production to consumption and the birth of the consumer, who has been the focus of capitalism ever since. People no longer bought things because they needed them but because they wanted them. This was a revolutionary change. Now the purpose of capitalism was no longer to manufacture useful things but to stimulate demand for, essentially, useless things. This suited the political agenda because consumers, with an immense number of choices regarding what goods and services to buy, saw themselves not as cogs in a machine but as free people. Democracy, freedom and capitalism became effectively synonymous, and were always presented as a single package. So, if you were hostile to capitalism, for example, you would be branded an enemy of freedom and democracy.

The major competitor of capitalism was communism. This was also production-oriented but because it banned private ownership, profit-making and extra reward for harder work and better ideas, production proved inefficient, cumbersome, non-innovative and the goods produced were slipshod and ugly. In other words, the politics of communism and its hatred of salary differentials, hence of any incentive for anyone to try hard and come up with new ideas, inevitably gave rise to an unmotivated workforce manufacturing low-quality goods. There was no market to test goods, and no competition between rival companies since the State prohibited commercial competition.

While the Soviet Union produced endless ugly junk, capitalist America produced endless exquisitely produced junk. Americans liked their glossy junk that they were free to choose much more than the Soviets liked their shoddy junk that didn’t work most of the time and which offered them no choice.

Communist China was once like the Soviet Union, and in fact even more backward, but when it became “National Socialist” China, everything changed. The Chinese started manufacturing reasonable-quality consumerist junk that massively undercut American prices. So, the whole Western economy started buying enormous amounts of Chinese goods. Credit was handed out like candy to allow people to buy as much as possible. Major American corporations began transferring their production facilities to China, hence work started to dry up in America. As jobs became scarcer, the salaries of the low-paid were driven down.

Ordinary American people couldn’t afford repayments on their mortgages. Consumption stuttered and went into reverse. The global economy stalled. All the hidden debts in the system were suddenly brutally exposed and enormous numbers of people started defaulting on their loans. Banks, having loaned incredible amounts of money to all and sundry in order to maximise their profits, and retained practically no capital reserves (because the more they loaned, the higher their profits were, so why not loan every last cent, thus massively inflating the profits of the banks and securing gargantuan bonuses for the senior personnel?) were now all technically insolvent since they didn’t have the capital to meet their immediate financial obligations. That had never been a problem in the past because they could borrow what they needed from other banks, but now the other banks were in the same boat and couldn’t lend – the whole system had imploded. The game of musical chairs had ended and there were no chairs left at all.

According to the laws of free market capitalism, the entire banking system should have gone out of business, but of course that would have meant the death of capitalism itself and political chaos. So all the rich people were allowed to keep their wealth and the gullible taxpayers had to bail out the bankrupt banks. Now it was the State rather than the private banks that was groaning under an unmanageable debt. Governments all across the West had to slash public spending. Millions of workers were laid off and salaries frozen for everyone else. But the rich bankers kept getting their vast bonuses – now paid for by the taxpayers. The rich had found their holy grail – the privatisation of profits (i.e. they keep all of the profits in the good times) and the socialisation of losses (i.e. the taxpayers pick up the pieces when the high-risk games go wrong).

That’s the world we live in now. Capitalism is dead, replaced by capitalist socialism – the most monstrous economic miscarriage ever known. The rich, as the controllers of the global economy, simply get governments to transfer the losses of private corporations to the State sector. America could easily have declared itself officially socialist and proclaimed that the State was now running the entire economy, including the banks, since the taxpayers had effectively paid for the whole shooting match.

Ask yourself this – why are you paying for something even though you don’t get to own it nor to enjoy any of the profits (vast bonuses), which go to the people who screwed up the whole thing in the first place? Is that the act of a rational people? Moreover, how can employees of insolvent banks be getting bonuses at all (these are not of course paid out of genuine profits since there aren’t any – instead they’re paid directly by the taxpayers)? The reason they are paid bonuses is that that they will all leave if they don’t get them, and the banks will collapse. In other words, they’re blackmailing the taxpayers and extorting money from them with menaces. Why don’t the people lock them up in jail as if they were Mafia hoodlums (which is effectively what they are)?

Contemporary economics is a madhouse. Politicians aren’t in charge of it. The super-rich are. The whole point of Western economic policy is simply to prevent the rich from ever losing their wealth, and to keep saddling the taxpayers with ever-increasing debt. The official economic objective of the West (though never expressed in these terms) is: KEEP THE RICH RICH.

The West is terrified of what would happen if the wealth of the rich were allowed to be challenged. Banks would collapse, the stock market would endure the biggest fall in history and the entire political and economic system of the West would die. To avoid this, we keep the rich rich. They have a gun pointed at our heads and we are doing nothing to disarm them.

We are now playing out an economic catastrophe. There are hedge funds in America that are betting so heavily against the Euro that they are making its collapse almost inevitable. Bur if the Euro goes down, so does the global economy. So American capitalists are actually using the levers of capitalism to destroy capitalism in order to make massive profits from the collapse.

What these retards have failed to understand is that without capitalism, all of their ill-gotten gains will be useless.

When ultra-capitalists are betting on capitalism to fail, you know that the system has become insane. This is what it means to have “free markets” in charge of the global economy rather than intelligent politicians and economists with a clear agenda.

Neither Communist China nor Nazi Germany would ever have permitted free marketeers to destabilise the economy. Under Hitler, all of the hedge fund managers would have been put in concentration camps. In China, they might well have been shot as criminals.

Is it not an astonishing thing that although Western taxpayers have had to effectively buy the Western banking system, not a single politician anywhere suggested that governments should henceforth be running the banks for the public and not the private good and that all future profits would be returned to the citizens? Why weren’t all the rich bankers, who had spectacularly failed to run their banks responsibly, fired and replaced by publicly accountable officials? Why weren’t all of the enormous bonuses stopped? Who arranged the bail out? – expensive gangs of ex Goldman Sachs executives! Well, surprise, surprise. That’s like putting vampires in charge of the blood bank.

The American, hence world, economy has been hijacked by the rich elite and its only purpose is to protect the wealth of the rich come what may. The Afghanistan War bankrupted the Soviet Union, but the debts of the communists were as NOTHING compared with the debts of today’s capitalist West. If the Soviet Union was a failure, the capitalist West is an enormously bigger one. Why has no one in the media commented on this salient fact?

The degree of anti-socialist indoctrination to which Westerners have been subjected is so extreme that no one even suggested that the banks should be “socialised” from now on and that their specific remit should be to grow the economy in a stable way without boom or bust cycles fuelled by insane greed and hysterical fear. What sane person would say that banks shouldn’t have that function of serving the interests of the people? As it is, the purpose of banks is to generate enormous bonuses for a select few Jews and Freemasons. That’s their raison d’être.

Free markets must, ultimately, be under political control. If they’re not then they invariably submit to oligopolies and cartels and become irredeemably corrupt. All information relating to all markets should be freely available to all participants in the market at exactly the same time. There should be no hidden gambles going on such as those of hedge funds. Everything should be transparent, including all of the identities of all participants.

Capitalism, hitherto, has been about materialism, about producing objects, mostly of a junk nature. What’s the point? Capitalism doesn’t need to be about objects. Imagine a world with only ten percent of the objects that we have right now. Imagine that to fill the gap, ninety percent of the human working population wasn’t involved in producing and selling objects but in creating and delivering educational services covering all conceivable subjects. Imagine that you could make a living from teaching the subject you love best and that everyone around you was doing exactly the same. We all sell our knowledge to others and they sell their knowledge to us, and we all become smarter. There’s barely an object in sight. We go shopping for new knowledge, not for new disposable objects. Imagine an enormous marketplace in knowledge where we pick and choose what to learn – rather than an enormous marketplace in objects where we pick and choose what junk to take home with us and that we use to define who we are (“Hey, look at me, I own this set of objects so I must be cool and desirable.”).

All that really matters is that you should have a viable job. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling as long as there’s a marketplace for it. Objects need not be the main point of capitalism at all. It could be anything: art, culture, knowledge, music, spirituality, whatever you like. All that matters is that money should flow round the system, allowing everyone to live comfortably.

Imagine that you taught classes several times a week, and you also attended classes of other people. Instead of accumulating objects, you accumulate knowledge. Some subjects might have much higher demand than others and therefore the teacher can ask for more money. Some teachers might offer cheaper classes in order to boost numbers. Some might want a select audience and charge high prices, and thus we see all the normal marketplace mechanisms coming into play, but without an object in sight.

If we lived in a knowledge economy rather than an object economy, wouldn’t we become enormously smarter? Wouldn’t the quality of the human race rise prodigiously? Wouldn’t crime fall, and social deprivation? We would have a much more informed, cultured human race, with far fewer needless objects collecting dust. The planet would be much cleaner if we could avoid all of the pollution associated with industry and replace it with the ultimate “clean”, eco-product: ideas. We live in a staggeringly stupid and unimaginative economic system where we define ourselves by what objects we own. We have thereby turned ourselves into objects. We’re barely human at all.

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The capitalism versus communism dialectic was taken on a detour by WWII when the capitalists and communists were compelled to unite to defeat the extremely dangerous hybrid form (National Socialism). Then it was business as usual – the “Cold War”.

In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolised the end of communism. Yet, amazingly, it also signalled the beginning of the end for capitalism, although no one realised it. Borrowing from Hegel and Marx, Francis Fukuyama produced a brilliant but absurd book proclaiming that History had come to an end because “liberal democracy” had now manifestly defeated all challengers. Liberal democracy would be rolled out all across the globe and that would be it for the rest of time.

This demonstrated better than anything else the demented triumphalism of the capitalists. The leading capitalists now thought they were gods and routinely referred to themselves as “masters of the universe”. Given that there was no longer any viable alternative to capitalism, the leading capitalists could afford to dispense with all concerns over social fairness and demand ultra-capitalism based on zero government interference in the workings of markets. All controls were removed. Regulation practically vanished. Everything the capitalists wanted, they got. All sorts of laws restricting and controlling markets were repealed. Retail banks could start having investment bank functions. The amount of capital reserves they legally needed was shrunk to almost nothing, allowing every dollar invested in the bank to be maximally leveraged (meaning that the risks were magnified to a ridiculous degree). The whole economy of the West began to revolve around a single factor: house prices, the primary barometer of family wealth. While house prices went up, all bets were successful and everything seemed to create healthy profits. People actually convinced themselves that house prices could never fall. Mortgages were given to ninjas – “no income, no job or assets”. At this point, the system had become insane. The idea was that ninjas could keep borrowing against the rising value of their home and keep paying the mortgage: the ultimate Indian rope trick.

Of course, if anything went wrong, if house prices failed to go up, the whole system was CERTAIN to collapse. Not just to collapse, but to take the whole global economy with it. Any sane form of government, any economic system based on reason rather than voodoo, would have seen it coming a mile off. After all, isn’t one of the primary tests of a rational system the ability to analyse, predict and take evasive manoeuvres? A few experts – very, very few – did give warnings, but were promptly ignored and called doomsayers. No one in casino capitalism likes a party pooper. Voodoo beats reason every time.

Sure enough, house prices finally fell, and so the financial crisis descended on the world in 2008. After three years, things aren’t getting any better. In fact, the warning signs are all there again that we are on the verge of not just recession but the greatest Depression in human history. If it comes, and the odds are now maybe 50/50 or worse – does any leader on earth have any grasp of what’s going on, or any ability to control events? The markets have consistently crushed the politicians.

What is the “market”? It’s essentially a small, elite group of cartels intent on making money in whatever circumstances. When they act in any particular direction, the rest of the market – the hangers on, the sheep, the dumb cattle – does the same. Any effect is instantly massively magnified. Most players in the market aren’t reacting to any rational analysis of anything at all; they are simply reacting to whether indices are going up or doing. If they’re going up, the investors feel great and invest more. If they’re going down, they start to panic and sell.

The market is therefore a small group of hugely influential players harnessed to an enormous number of small players who are infected with greed or fear in an instant. The stock market can crash by hundreds of points in minutes because someone has spread a plausible rumour of impending disaster. Such rumours aren’t accidents; they’re agreed strategies by big players to “short” the market. The more they can drive down the market, the more money they can make.

Once they’ve driven it down, they can then of course buy at the new cheap prices and make a huge profit as the prices surge upwards again. So, they profit whether the market is going down or up and, more often than not, they’re the ones making it go down or up. Small players can’t have any significant effect at all on the market by themselves. Only the big players can set the trends. The whole system is geared up for manipulation and corruption, and none of it is ever meaningfully investigated.

So, this “market”, outwith the control of any government on earth and susceptible to extreme manipulation by organised cartels of big players, can change the economic climate in a second and induce ferocious greed or equally ferocious fear. Moreover, there are enormous computerised trading systems in operation and these aren’t under any human control at all. They are totally reliant on the skill of those who programmed them and anyone who knows anything about programming knows that all programs contain bugs and some of these bugs only appear in unusual situations – exactly the unforeseen and untested situations that occur during rapid boom or bust. And this is supposed to be a sane system! Who’s flying this plane?!!!

We’re over the ocean, and we’ve just realised there’s no pilot in the cockpit and there’s a catastrophic fuel leak. That’s capitalism for you. It’s utter insanity to leave anything to any “invisible hand” of any market unless you can rationally define the hand, all of the parameters associated with it and its entire scope of its operation. If you can’t, you have no choice but to tightly regulate it.

So, the death of communism had the unexpected effect of delivering a fatal blow to capitalism too, though that was the last thing that people grasped in 1989. They thought the opposite had taken place; the absolute vindication and perpetual triumph of capitalism. Yet that’s exactly when hubris takes over and, as the ancient Greeks understood so well, nemesis is sure to follow. Capitalism removed all the factors that had kept it relatively sane. The reason for this was that the rich elite demanded the removal of all obstacles blocking their path to ever-increasing profits. Governments gave them whatever they wanted and there was an enormous boom, with most of the money going to a tiny elite.

In relation to Barack Obama, the great hope of democracy, political analyst Drew Westen recently wrote in the New York Times of Obama’s failure to reshape the country: “A final explanation is that he [Obama] ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation. But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks.”

400 people in the USA have as much money as the bottom half of the American population – 150 million people!!!

400 versus 150,000,000.
400 versus 150,000,000.
400 versus 150,000,000.
400 versus 150,000,000.
400 versus 150,000,000.

Is this sane? Is it rational? Is it comprehensible? Where is the REVOLUTION?!!! What kind of person tolerates this situation? How can anyone think this is the right and proper way for a country to develop? 400 private individuals, unaccountable to the people, have the same power as 150,000,000 Americans. Is that what the Founding Fathers intended? Wasn’t the separation of powers supposed to stop any group acquiring too much power? Why wasn’t it applied to private individuals? Why were the rich allowed to stand outside the separation of powers? Precisely because of that, they were allowed to use their enormous wealth to buy the political system lock, stock and barrel. They controlled the politicians, but no one controlled them. That’s the law of wealth. Wealth makes you a king above the law, a dictator with absolute power.

The rich became mad with vanity, greed and power. And they have brought destruction upon the rest of us, while suffering no consequences at all. The people are so powerfully brainwashed by the elite’s media machine that no one has taken any action against the rich.

That same situation of infinite power in the hands of the elite applied in pre-revolutionary France. The monarchy and aristocracy though they were immune. Then came 1789 and the world changed forever.

1789 is coming again. The countdown has begun. The arrogant elite are no longer held in high esteem. They are no longer respected or even deemed competent. They are now viewed as crooks, robber barons, carpetbaggers, looters, spivs and conmen in it purely for themselves. The total erosion in the reputation of these people will reap a terrible consequence in due course. They are now living on borrowed time, blissfully unaware of the storm coming, as oblivious as the elite of France at the start of 1789.

If they were at all rational, the rich would surrender ninety percent of their wealth to pay off the huge debts that their criminal irresponsibility and recklessness had on the global economy, and they would still be able to live in luxury. But we know they never will. The dialectic always plays out to the end. These infinitely greedy people are incapable of doing the right, honourable and rational thing. And thus they will reap their inevitable “reward”. 1989, exactly two centuries after the French Revolution, saw the birth of another critical dialectical strand that’s having an enormous impact on our world. It was the year Englishman Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. The internet has been a revolution in itself but it also has another unprecedented effect: it’s a Revolution ACCELERATOR.

In past ages, books, newspapers, radios, music records, film and TV all served as social accelerators, but these were almost always controlled by gatekeepers working for one elite or another. What makes the internet radically different is that the gatekeepers can be bypassed. The “word on the street” can become the word all around the globe, without the elite having the vaguest idea what’s going on. The internet allows the elite to be taken out of the loop.

The sociological phenomenon of “other-directedness” goes hand-in-hand with the internet and massively magnifies specific effects. Other-directedness involves such things as peer group pressure, fashion, group-think and hysterical contagion. Other-directed people are not truly in control of their own behaviour. They are so influenced by others that they quickly adopt whatever posture and opinions are held by the dominant and “coolest” group. Fashions, opinions and memes can spread astoundingly quickly. Viral contagion can infect the internet overnight. A person can go to bed unknown and wake up next morning known all around the globe if something he has done has gone viral.

There has never been a phenomenon like the internet. The world hasn’t even begun to wake up to its true power and the changes it is bringing to the world. It has brought to life Marshal McLuhan’s concept of the “Global Village”. Everything is now local. All boundaries are breached and annihilated. Everything is converging. The existence of different cultures is coming under threat – the world is heading relentlessly towards a single, global culture. The Muslims of the Arab Spring were heavily influenced by American and European ideas. Eventually, Islam itself may start to collapse as Muslims identify more with the global culture than with daily prayers and reading the Koran.

One thing that now seems sure to happen is the death of “tradition-directedness”: life guided by ancient books and ancient bearded leaders. The great weapon used by tradition-oriented societies was separation. Community elders could literally stop the young people from being contaminated by outside influences by using physical barriers. Now anyone with an internet connection has access to the whole world. WALLS DON’T MATTER ANYMORE. It’s no use parents denying their children internet access. All it takes is for one person to have access and all the rest will get access via that person. And if parents don’t allow access, they cut their children off from the world and make them backward.

What caused the Muslim uprisings? – the internet. Many of the Muslims spoke of “freedom”, their idea of freedom clearly being based on Western notions. To that extent, these Muslims are becoming more liberal. But on the other hand, Islamic jihadist extremism has also been massively accentuated by the internet. So we see another effect of the internet – the disappearance of the middle ground. People become more liberal or more extreme. The mid-ground is a position of compromise but on the internet all extremists can find many voices every bit as extreme as theirs, so they no longer feel any need to compromise.

The Tea Party is an internet phenomenon. So is the conspiracy theory world. Conspiracy theorists create more and more bizarre theories, being fed all the time by the crazy input from millions of fantasists. The 9/11 conspiracy theory nonsense could never have happened as it did in the absence of the internet. Immense numbers of half-baked opinions, factoids, misquotations, distortions and curious facts and oddities can be spun together to create immense webs of conspiracy. Viral transmission provides a rocket boost and the natural tendency of most people to ignore reason and analysis (Logos) in favour of exciting stories and fantasies (Mythos) means that billions fall under the spell of absolute nonsense. How is it that billions of people believe in the Torture God of Abraham if not by a complete suspension of rationality? Humans are extremely prone to believing what they want to believe and ignoring everything else.

A conspiracy theorist is someone who accepts as true everything that supports the conspiracy theory and rejects as false everything that contradicts it. Indeed the contradictions are deemed misinformation and disinformation put out by the conspirators to put people off the trail. A few factoids and anomalies can be combined with fantasy, wishful thinking and a political axe to grind to create something that takes on a life of its own. BULLSHIT can be magnified to a ridiculous degree, and, as Hitler observed, the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed. People believe what they want to believe and if lots of others believe it too then it becomes reinforced, socially acceptable and hence TRUE! The internet can therefore make eccentric but popular ideas mainstream and credible.

The internet is a magnifier, accelerator, exaggerator and reinforcer. It makes the world more extreme. A more extreme world is where unthinkable things become thinkable. All bets are off. Black swan events become commonplace rather than the exception.

We can think of the world being converted not into a single global village but several such villages, each belonging to an extremist tribe, each hating the others. Intolerance will grow in all directions. Even liberals will become more intolerant.

******

As we have noted, the death of communism had the unintended consequence of delivering a fatal blow to capitalism. Flushed with triumphalism, the leading capitalists bullied and manipulated the governments into removing all brakes from the capitalist greed machine. Capitalism went out of control and in 2008 the Western banking system became technically insolvent i.e. capitalism had died on the operating table, but no one was willing to “call it” and pronounce the time of death.

Instead, the capitalists did the most outrageous and hypocritical thing imaginable: they invoked socialism to save them. In effect, private businesses transferred all of their debts to the State, but without transferring any control. It was the WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME for the people.

They got all the debts dumped on them, with no formal ownership or control over anything. Why did the people get the debts but not the profits? “No taxation without representation!” the American Revolutionaries declared in the War of Independence. Yet now the American people have been swamped by enormous debt and taxation and they don’t have a single representative on the boards of any of the private institutions that needed to be bailed out. Is that not INSANE? The Americans have been betrayed by their leaders. They now have the constitutional right to remove the government from office, just as they had the right to remove the rule of the British Empire. It’s time for the American people to act.

The world has allowed the mad ideology of “free markets” to dominate economics. What is the aim of ALL of the participants in these free markets? TO MAKE MONEY! Generating profit is their sole preoccupation. A market does not care about reason, education, knowledge, quality, goodness, morality, virtue, moderation, caution, stability or any of the other qualities that we would expect to be exhibited by a benevolent government. It’s asking for disaster to harness government to an inherently unstable and irrational greed machine.

There’s a place for free markets but only within a carefully defined framework. The markets have to be subservient to government, not government to markets. We now know for a fact where free market economics leads us – CATASTROPHE. Free market economics is now as dead as communism. Just as every individual is free to do whatever they like within the LAW, markets should be allowed to operate freely within the legal framework that is imposed on them to ensure economic stability. The stability of the market is the main point, not its freedom, because unfettered freedom will sooner or later generate a catastrophe.

It always comes back to the same issue – who’s in charge? Should elected governments run a country, or private, unaccountable individuals in charge of banks and corporations? Should markets devoted solely to profit making (usually resulting in astonishing and deranged risk-taking and corporate immorality) be the economic engine of a nation rather than rational policies dedicated to stable growth and the improvement of the nation and its people? Isn’t it time the people were in charge rather than the rich?

All instabilities will now be massively and instantly magnified by the internet and global computer systems. Stock markets in every world have effectively merged to create a single stock market. All markets tend to go up or down at the same time because they are all reacting to each other. Any local rumour can become a global rumour in an instant. There are no firewalls separating systems any longer. In ships, to prevent them from sinking, it’s essential to have separate compartments in the hull. A breach to one compartment can result in localised flooding, but the ship continues safely on its way because all of the other compartments are unaffected. In the new global paradigm, we’ve lost all the safety compartments and firewalls. The situation is RADICALLY UNSTABLE. Any event can sink the ship or burn down the whole building.

It’s absolutely no coincidence that financial turmoil and excessive greed have reached unprecedented levels in the last twenty years. The scale of the gap between rich and poor that has appeared within this timescale is simply breathtaking. The number of major financial crashes that have occurred around the world in the last twenty years is without precedent. Yet no one in power has any idea of what’s really going on. They haven’t understood that we are perched over financial apocalypse because there are no safety mechanisms built into the global financial system. It’s like a nuclear reactor without a single control rod to moderate the chain reaction. And what happens to an uncontrolled nuclear process? – it explodes catastrophically. It’s a BOMB.

We are so close to Armageddon that it’s simply terrifying. And what’s even more terrifying is that the people charged with running the world are patently clueless about what’s going on. They are driven by the markets and the markets are the detonator for the biggest financial explosion of all time. Who will challenge the markets? Who will face down the rich? Who will build firewalls, watertight safety bulkheads and insert sufficient control rods in the financial reactors? Well, NO ONE AT ALL.

We’re on a runaway train and we’re rapidly running out of track. The buffers are now right ahead of us. Be in no doubt at all, the final dialectical crisis is almost upon us. It cannot be avoided. The current system will definitely fail. It cannot save itself because it doesn’t know how to. It doesn’t understand itself. It will perish through ignorance. In the end, stupidity is a terminal condition.

The real issue is what is to be done when the shitstorm arrives. Who will pick up the pieces? To whom will the world turn? If the world were sane, it would of course turn to its sanest, most rational, most talented people, but as we know all too well, the world is neither sane nor rational and anything could happen. We could get Fascist “strong man” dictators, or religious Messiahs. Fundamentalist Islam could sweep the world. All manner of nightmares are possible.

That’s why it’s critical for all sensible people to be ready to speak with a single voice and promote a single clear agenda. That’s why The Movement proved a monumental disappointment. Instead of preparing the agenda for a New Society, the members blabbered on about New Age bullshit, hippie crap and 9/11 garbage. In the end, several members of The Movement thought that their most important task was to investigate other members of The Movement and pronounce McCarthyite denunciations. What the fuck! When a group starts eating itself, you know it deserves to perish.

That’s the fast road to nowhere. We hoped people would write constitutions and declarations, that they would set up political groups and stand in elections, that they would seize the chance to prepare to implement a New World Order. Ho, ho, ho. No chance of that. It takes talented and smart people to do such things: a rare commodity within The Movement. Instead, there were legions of self-indulgent fantasists and bullshitters caught up in their own tiny, unimaginative worlds. How on earth could it serve anyone’s interests to open yet another thread on 9/11? Droning on about it will change nothing at all. Creating a New World Order will certainly change things…so why don’t you devote your time to that rather than to ludicrous, unproductive conspiracy theories?

“You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass.” –Nietzsche
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