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Posts Tagged ‘Academia Iluministă’
Academia Iluministă (82)
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:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” –H.L. Mencken
“Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.” –Paul Valéry
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” –George Orwell
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The Movement:
A number of people have expressed an interest in joining the Illuminati, but, by and large, they have been turned down even though they are bright, capable people. The Illuminati’s recruitment policy is, and has been for over a thousand years, connected with the core religious secrets of the society. For obvious reasons, these cannot be divulged.
Illumination, the religion of the Illuminati, is a “mystery” religion akin to those of ancient Greece, and the inner secrets are revealed only to those who have attained the highest mystery degrees. Those who are recruited by the Illuminati are those who have been identified as having the requisite readiness for the final revelations. “Readiness” is not connected to someone’s intelligence, dedication, moral worth, status, wealth, background, or anything of that kind, but only whether that person is already exhibiting a strong, intuitive grasp of “gnosis”.
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The Illuminati Order:
There are only 6,000 members of the Illuminati: fewer than one in a million in a world population of some seven billion people. In a city like London, there are only eight members. Many people, when they imagine a secret society, picture something along the lines of Freemasonry, with Masonic lodges in every major town and regular meetings involving a large number of people. The Illuminati offer nothing of that kind. Meetings are infrequent. Special locations are selected for small gatherings and these change every year (they are always connected with locations across the world that have played critical and fateful parts in the history of the Illuminati). Many members have to expend a great effort in terms of travel, expense and their time to get to the chosen meeting place. The occasions are highly dramatic and spine tingling, as they must be when great religious mysteries are revealed.
The Illuminati Order is not something you “join” for the sake of joining, not something that exists to give you status or a secret identity to make you feel good about yourself, or to allow you to solve the “puzzle of life” in the manner of an amateur mathematician or a detective. Joining the Illuminati is a transformative experience. Neither money, status, celebrity, fame, prestige, nor any other of the “golden” attributes of our shallow, materialistic and consumerist society can secure a person admission to the Illuminati. Equally, many good and honourable people who have many of the right qualities we look for are also unable to join since they are simply not ready in terms of the criteria we apply.
This means that the Illuminati miss out on many talented people. The Illuminati have always got round this problem in the past by creating new secret societies and orders that are based on many, but not all, of the principles of the Illuminati. These other organisations have less restrictive admission criteria, recruit many more members and evolve in their own way. Although they have an association with the Illuminati, they are not appendages of the Illuminati or puppet organisations.
Freemasonry was the creation of the Illuminati, but it must be emphasised that the Illuminati did not run Freemasonry. A few of the original Grand Masters were members of the Illuminati but because the number of Freemasons rapidly outstripped the total membership of the Illuminati, Freemasonry soon changed in character. “Undesirables” infiltrated it and the Illuminati lost control, with the disastrous consequences that are now all too apparent.
Contemporary Freemasonry is an obscenity, a grotesque insult to the ideals on which it was founded. Whereas the original Freemasons were anti-establishment, determined to work against false religions, arrogant nobles and tyrannical kings, modern Masons are the central pillars of the oppressive regimes they once opposed. Freemasonry has been turned on its head.
The Illuminati have thought long and hard about why Freemasonry failed so spectacularly and became the primary weapon of the Old World Order to maintain its power, wealth and privileges indefinitely. Can something along the lines of the original vision of Freemasonry be reborn, without falling victim to the same dismal fate?
The Illuminati have decided that the time has come for a new attempt, an addition to the historical “Illuminati Network”, one that has learned from all the problems and flaws of the past, one that, most importantly of all, relies on you. This is your chance to be part of the great chain of history, part of the age-old resistance to the Old World Order, part of the great endeavour to build the utopia humanity has always craved. The Old World Order is not vast. Like the Illuminati, it has only about 6,000 members – that’s all that stands between the world and freedom.
The new secret society will be given the simplest and broadest possible name: The Movement. This will be a secret society like no other because you will be responsible for its creation and even its secrets. It will be an internet-based, grassroots movement designed to demonstrate the incredible creativity and brilliance of ordinary people.
It will be based on the concept of “crowdsourcing”: using an army of volunteers, interacting and cooperating with one another, to provide the answer to a problem, or some great enterprise. Wikipedia is a classic example. Crowdsourcing can unleash the power of the people. Men and women from all walks of life and all disciplines can collaborate to solve seemingly intractable problems. More often than not, they pour their hearts, souls and time into solving the problems that fire their imaginations. They show remarkable creativity and innovation. Wondrous, unexpected results can emerge the most powerful alchemy imaginable.
Many people on YouTube spend days and weeks perfecting humorous little projects to entertain their friends. Instead of “having a laugh”, why don’t they put the same energy and passion into changing the world and overthrowing the Power Elite?
Above all else, the Illuminati wish to release the limitless potential of the people in a huge outpouring of breathtaking creativity. And from that process, humanity’s collective divine spark will be liberated and ignited into the most brilliant fire of the human spirit.
The Movement consists of four interrelated elements covering religion, politics, activism and psychology.
1) A New Religion
Imagine a clean slate for religion. No bearded prophets, no holy texts, no brainwashing going back hundreds and thousands of years, no commandments, no saints, no angels, no rituals, no sacraments, no places of worship, no priests and preachers, no traditional practices and observances, no holy days, no popes, no rules regarding diet, clothes or appearance, no prohibitions, no sermons.
How would you go about creating a religion from scratch? It should be a religion that does the following:
a) Wakes up humanity and brings about a spiritual renaissance.
b) Frees humanity from the materialistic, zombie consumer culture of shopping malls.
c) Appeals to theists, deists, gnostics, agnostics and even atheists.
d) Promotes mystery, secrecy and wonder, and provides a transformative experience for its initiates.
It’s up to you to build it. Create the perfect religion with no historical baggage and then bring it alive. Start on the drawing board then invoke crowdsourcing to perfect it. Can you do it? Can you become a new-style prophet of the internet age, without any of the fanaticism and dogmatism of the old breed?
This new religion will be called Illuminism (rather than Illumination). The aim is for it to be so inspiring that it will consign all other religions to oblivion, and will allow agnostics and atheists to participate. For all of its triumphs, science, the bedrock of atheism, is full of holes and contradictions (it’s amazing how many critical flaws in science are glossed over as if they didn’t exist), and, above all, science can’t answer the most basic question of all: what is the meaning of life? This isn’t a scientific question, it’s a philosophical one, and atheists are as interested in it as much as everyone else.
So, can you collaborate with others to produce a religion that will inspire the world and save us all from the horrors of the current dominant religions?
It should be a religion that costs nothing, requires no priests, rabbis, or imams, no churches, mosques, synagogues or temples, no baptisms, no “holy” days; a religion that has no need of “saints” interceding on our behalf, nor of “sacraments” that bestow “grace” upon us, nor ancient texts that we are supposed to take literally, nor fierce prophets ordering us what to do. No one and no organisation stands between you and God. God is within you.
The qualities attributed to Jesus Christ are those possessed by each person if they did but know it. As with Christ, God and man are united in each and every one of us; two natures existing within each person.
Christians are willing to believe this of Christ, but not of ordinary men and women. Gnostics accept it as true of everyone. This radically opposite view makes all the difference in the world.
Christianity or Gnosticism? – God incarnate in one person (Christ), or the divine spark incarnate in everyone? Which offers the most glorious and hopeful vision for humanity? There is no possible doubt. Had Christianity evolved slightly differently (and it had many opportunities to become unrecognisable from the way it turned out), it could have been the Gnostic version of Christianity, with Christ as in Everyman – a shining example to all Gnostics, a model for everyone to emulate, the perfect blend of humanness and the divine spark. (Some Gnostics regarded Christ as a divine messenger sent by the True God to enlighten us. He had a phantom body, they said, rather than a real one because no being from the realm of light would ever fully enter into the Satanic material world. Other Gnostics regarded him as indeed taking on a physical reality so that he could act as the perfect example to everyone of how to escape Satan’s material hell. His life, they said, was about an ordinary man – a carpenter – going on an incredible journey to release his divine spark and become God. He was so successful that billions now worship him as though he were a unique being rather than an exemplar that anyone can emulate.)
The Illuminati, knowing the true identity of Jesus Christ, revile him, but the “image” of Jesus Christ rather than the reality could certainly have been the foundation of great things if it had evolved along Gnostic lines. The archons – the ultimate puppetmasters and agents of the Demiurge – ensured that this did not happen.
Nothing is more important than the idea that God (or a “higher self” to placate atheists) resides within you, because this ensures that no one is alienated from God. He is no longer separate and distant from us, and it gives every person’s life infinite value. It ensures that everyone has the highest self-esteem and self-confidence. Kings of old claimed to be divinely appointed and thus to have the absolute right to dominate everyone else.
Illuminism should teach that we are all divinely appointed and no one has the right to dominate anyone.
Illuminism should promote humanity’s highest aspirations, the feeling of well-being and contentment, the feeling that everyone is precious and to be treated as such.
Illuminism should abolish churches and formal buildings of worship. Religion should return to nature, to the outdoors: to groves and forests, rivers and lakes, mountains and fields, caves and grottoes. It should contain mystery and magic to kindle the human imagination. There should be no power hierarchy.
Ecstasy means standing outside of oneself. Enthusiasm means being possessed or inspired by a god. Inspiration means breathing in the divine essence. These words are all related to the quest for the divine spark and attaining your higher self.
Illuminism should be full of ecstatic experiences, enthusiasm and inspiration.
A long-running joke in The Simpsons is the incredible tedium of the Reverend Lovejoy’s services. The Simpsons, like most Christians, regard religion as a chore that needs to be endured every Sunday. There’s nothing uplifting about it, nothing transcendent.
Religion is supposed to be the core of the mystery of life, and yet for most people it’s something that sends them to sleep. Modern religion is either a bore or leads to the psychopathic fanaticism of suicide bombers. The majority of people these days are numb, “comfortably” numb. Isn’t it time to come out of your numbness, to feel the exhilaration that true religion brings? The world is crying out for a new religion.
Can you create symbols and initiation degrees for Illuminism? Can you create a structure for an underground religion? Can you create secret and mystical ceremonies? Can you create a religion that allows people to feel like gods?
Perhaps the ancient and historical red Phrygian cap should be worn? This is the famous liberty cap of the American and French Revolutions.
Perhaps you can find inspiration in the following texts:
The Emerald Tablet
The Kybalion
The Corpus Hermeticum
The Rosicrucian Manifestos
1. Fama Fraternitatis
2. Confessio Fraternitatis
3. Chymical Wedding
The Holy Grail romances:
1. Perceval, The Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes
2. Joseph of Arimithea, or the Novel of the History of the Grail by Robert de Boron
3. Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Faust by Goethe
Or from the following spiritual films:
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)
(The quest for a modern Grail.)
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)
(An encounter with reified dreams and the deep contents of the unconscious.)
Excalibur (John Boorman)
(The quest for the original Grail.)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
(Journey into the heart of darkness for an encounter with your higher self, only to discover that it has become corrupt. You must “kill” your higher self, allowing it to be reborn in a purified state.)
Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis)
(A man finding his higher self through eternal recurrence and reincarnation.)
The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers)
(A man transforming into his divine self.)
V for Vendetta (James McTeigue)
(A masked hero fights back against an oppressive, totalitarian regime.)
Network (Sidney Lumet)
(The cynicism and evil of corporations and the media are spectacularly exposed.)
Objective: for Illuminism to replace all established religions.
2) A New Politics
The Meritocracy Party is the political wing of the Illuminati. Meritocracy is the system that will replace the Old World Order’s rancid democracy – government of the people by the Elite for the Elite.
Can you help to improve the meritocratic model? Can you devise a political constitution; a political vision that will astound the world?
The Old World Order’s democracy is accompanied by free market capitalism as its economic implementation – designed to ensure that a small number of people control the vast bulk of the world’s wealth and power. Meritocracy will be based on an entirely new economic system where no one can become disproportionately wealthy. It will rely on the new field of behavioural economics i.e. economics based on human psychology rather than on abstract equations divorced from human behaviour. Many ideas are suggested on the Meritocracy section of the Illuminati’s website. Can you provide new, fresh thinking?
The Venus Project described in Zeitgeist: Addendum is a utopian, transformational vision of society that seeks to leave behind profit-driven capitalist economics. Can you produce something to rival it?
http://
http://
Zeitgeist: http://www.youtube.com/
Zeitgeist Addendum: http://www.youtube.com/
Zeitgeist Moving Forward: http://www.youtube.com/
Meritocracy, like Illuminism, is about treating everyone as infinitely precious. Everything should be done to ensure that each and every person is treated with respect and afforded the best possible chance in life. Meritocracy seeks to identify what every individual is good at and passionate about, and actively steer them in the direction where their merits shine the brightest. At the moment, most of us are left to rot. We come out of school, college and university with little sense of what we are best at and what makes us tick. Why? Because the Power Elites couldn’t care less about us and what we do or don’t like and what talents we do or don’t have. All they care about is that we should comply with their system and pose no threat to them.
The basic family unit should be extended to a greater “community” family – where local communities are responsible for ensuring that every child, no matter if it’s from a privileged or dysfunctional family, is given full community support, is nurtured and afforded the fullest opportunity to maximise its potential.
Anyone who supports the current family model is effectively saying that the elite dynastic families, those that comprise the Power Elite, those taking maximum advantage of privilege, should be allowed to dictate the shape and leaders of the future. That can never be right.
Every generation should be as free as possible from the influence of previous generations. Every generation, as far as possible, should start afresh. It is always wrong for financial advantages to be passed on by the rich to their offspring, and simultaneously denied to the offspring of ordinary families.
Life should be a level playing field. Everyone should start from the same starting line. No one should be permitted to rig the game of life in their favour. The Old World Order’s entire game plan is to ensure that they manipulate the system to allow their descendants and them to rule in perpetuity.
Objective: for Meritocracy to replace Democracy.
3) A New Psychology
The great unspoken truth of the world is that it is entirely based on psychology. The current dominant psychological paradigm of the world is the one devised by the Old World Order to legitimise and facilitate their rule. It is a master-slave psychology where everyone is fitted into a power and status hierarchy, and those at the top dominate everyone below. It’s a pyramid structure. An entirely new psychology is needed, one founded on a Round Table where no one dominates anyone else.
The world should be managed according to a psychological paradigm where self-esteem, happiness, aspiration, and personal fulfilment are given primacy, rather than the current economic one where money, materialism and consumerism constitute the dominant ideology of our age. Capitalist economics is a master-slave ideology – those with most capital dominate the enormous number who have little or no capital.
While the masters are human subjects, the slaves are mere objects, dehumanised and depersonalised. Non persons. The Round Table paradigm is about treating everyone as an individual worthy of the highest respect, and where there are no masters and no slaves. The most meritorious rise to the top in society, but they are not driven by the need to dominate others and they do not seek excessive and disproportionate rewards.
Can you flesh out the Round Table psychological paradigm? Instead of favouring the Old World Order, is must be designed to ensure that each and every person is given the maximum opportunity to find personal fulfilment.
The new paradigm should be informed by the well-known psychological models for categorising different types of people such as Myers-Briggs personality types, Enneagrams (deriving from the Ancient Egyptians and Pythagoras), the Four Humours of Hippocrates, Sheldon’s Somatypes, and the Belbin team roles.
More information about Myers-Briggs can be found here: http://
Most members of the Illuminati fall into the Myers-Briggs categories of “INTJ” or “INTP”. Few people appreciate the power of this methodology. Everything can be interpreted according to Myers-Briggs personality types: history, nations, philosophy, advertising, political parties, art, religion.)
This wing of the Movement will be referred to as the “Psy” Faction and its purpose is to bring about the psychological transformation of the world.
The Psy Faction should be concerned with carrying out the programme of Illuminism and Meritocracy: treating us all as priceless individuals and finding exactly what motivates us and what we’re best at.
The Old World Order are the masters of the psychology of the lowest common denominator but we can attain that of a higher truth: the highest common factor. Let’s soar to the top rather than race for the bottom.
Objective: to replace the Old World Order’s master-slave pyramid psychology with Meritocracy’s Round Table psychology.
4) A New Radicalism
In the internet age, how to do you create new forms of radicalism to electrify the world, to motivate the people, to panic the Old World Order, to promote the Movement’s radical, transformative agenda, to outflank the slick election machines of political parties?
The Movement’s radical faction for activists will be known as the “R” Faction. You will be like those brave seekers in The Matrix who choose to take the red pill and challenge the power of the sinister controllers that seek to deceive and enslave us all. As Morpheus says to Neo, “Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”
It’s time to join the Resistance.
It’s up to you. You can change the world. Are you radical enough?
Objective: for the Movement’s radicals to energise the world with the Movement’s message.
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The Movement seeks to introduce a new global religion, a new global political system, a new global economic model, a new global psychology, a new global radicalisin short, a New World Order.
The future comes in the shape of a society that resembles that of Star Trek: a meritocracy where technology has brought an end to the traditional economics of the Old World Order. There is no money in Star Trek – no one needs it. There are no super-rich people. There is no mindless celebrity culture and no consumerist mentality.
Each person strives to be personally fulfilled, and society is set up to help everyone achieve their personal goals. There is no religious fanaticism, no people bowing, kneeling, praying and demanding that all the infidels who disagree with them should be consigned to hell.
Isn’t that a future worth striving for? Isn’t that the real human race?
You can help to make it happen. You have the power, the intelligence, the creativity, the energy. You have probably always wanted to do something great, to make a difference. This is your chance. The Movement is not a fixed entity set in stone. It is something that you yourself can shape. You can create it in your image if you have the will, the merit, the ability to charm and persuade others. Your time has come. There are no excuses left.
First step: Make contact with people in your vicinity. Create the seeds of a secret society in your local town.
We recommend that people place a message on Craigslist, Gumtree, Facebook etc.
It could be worded as:
Transforming ourselves and the world – a secret project for seekers. Are you fascinated by the Holy Grail, interested in conspiracy theories and secret societies, disillusioned with conventional religions and governments? Are you seeking a higher truth? I’m looking to meet people who are on quest to improve themselves and the world. If we all do nothing, nothing will change. If we all do something, everything will change. Get in touch if you’re interested.
Or come up with your own message.
In an ideal world, the Movement would spring up in towns and cities all over the world, each “cell” doing its own thing. Eventually different cells could link up and compare their different ways of doing things. Would cells in Texas be different from ones in New England, ones in America be different from ones in Britain, ones in the West be different from ones in the East? The Movement should evolve and grow ever more refined – like base metal being gradually being turned into gold.
This is a grassroots movement. No money is involved. You can be part of changing the world. One day the Old World Order will wake up and realise that they are too late to save themselves. They will discover that the Movement has arisen everywhere, and they are surrounded with no escape routes. Their tyranny and reign of terror will at last be over and humanity can become what it always had it in it to be: the True God’s dazzling reflection.
The Last Bling King by Mike Hockney describes a popular uprising to overthrow the super rich and celebrities. It’s a direct response to Ayn Rand’s notorious and poisonous novel Atlas Shrugged in which the super rich go on strike to force the ordinary people to worship them and give them everything they want without any interference or regulation (precisely the mentality that created the current financial disaster). In The Last Bling King, the ordinary people refuse to do anything on behalf of the super rich and celebrities to show these arrogant monsters once and for all that they have nothing and they are nothing without the cooperation of ordinary men and women. A secret group called The League for the Liberation of Nobodies leads the people’s resistance.
The Millionaires’ Death Club by Mike Hockney provides an insight into the workings of an elite, English, OWO secret society similar to the Skull and Bones in America.
Prohibition A by Mike Hockney describes a brainwashing programme run by the American intelligence services, designed to extend their power to every corner of the world. It involves a secret society that is recruited in a luxury Manhattan nightclub dedicated to exploring the sexual secrets of Dante’s Inferno.
Ideas can be taken from all of these regarding how to shape your own secret society – a benign and altruistic one – to change the world for the better.
The Movement can transform the world. The Movement is the voice of the people, expressed via crowdsourcing. The Power Elite will play no part in it. The Movement will replace the Old World Order with a New World Order based on values that the people have chosen.
The Movement will be a meritocracy. The most effective cells of the Movement will spread virally, while the least effective will wither and die. The Movement is evolution in action. Can the Movement reach an earthly Omega Point where humanity has reached perfect understanding of itself?
Humanity is being held back by the greed and selfishness of the Old World Order. The current “purpose” of the world is to serve their needs. The human race is crying out for something higher, nobler, and more meaningful.
The Movement can deliver the very best of which humanity is capable, and of which you are personally capable. Change yourself, change the world and change the future via the Movement.
And those who prove the most creative and meritorious members of the Movement are the ones who are likely to be invited to join the Illuminati, as was always done in the past with all of the other groups founded by the Illuminati. But it is a process that typically takes years. The Illuminati is in no rush to make mistakes.
This is your chance. Will you take it?
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Tags: Academia Iluministă
Academia Iluministă (81)
Jiren Gray a adăugat 8 fotografii în albumul The Movement: The Revolution Will Be Televised.
by Adam Weishaupt – Book 1/7
The Movement: The Revolution Will Be Televised by Adam Weishaupt:
The Anti-Elite Series – Book 1/7:
Blurb:
Throughout history, the Illuminati have resisted the Old World Order: the network of elite families that have directed the course of human history since the dawn of civilization. The aim of the Power Elite has always been the same – to maintain themselves in power and privilege in perpetuity, at the expense of everyone else. In the past, they used brute force to subjugate the servile masses. Now they use something far more subtle and effective: psychological manipulation. They know what buttons to push on the ordinary man and woman. They know what makes them tick, what they want and what they fear. Armed with that information, they have the opportunity to rule forever.
Can they be stopped? Yes they can. The Movement is a new organization committed to the overthrow of the Power Elite. The Movement seeks to bring true power to the people, to smash the networks of privilege, nepotism and cronyism that strangle the opportunities of ordinary people.
Discover the philosophy, aims, strategy and tactics of the Movement.
The Revolution WILL be televised. Will you feature in the historic pictures being beamed around the globe? Or will you watch from home in your comfy seat? Your choice.
******
A Book Review:
“This is one out of a series of excellent books by the Pythagorean Illuminati. If you are at all interested in the greatest mysteries of life and would like to begin changing this world for the betterment of all species you need to read these books. You should also check out the Illuminati’s websitewww.armageddonconspiracy.c
All of the Illuminati’s books explore a myriad of interesting and challenging subjects such as philosophy, mathematics, science, psychology, politics and many others. They bring all these subjects together into nothing less then a grand unified theory of everything. The three authors of these books and the website write in an easy to read style that makes these subjects easier to understand.
The book “The Movement: The Revolution Will Be Televised” explains many of the hows and whys of creating a grassroots social justice movement based on Illumination and Meritocracy. This is a much needed book that everyone needs to read but social justice activists especially need to read it. My wife and I have been teaching self defense to as many of the social justice activists and community members as we can for the last four years. Having been to different protests with these brave and caring people I have seen first hand the threat that activists face from angry right wing racists and other oppressive, fascist groups of people. That is why we started offering self defense training to any community members and activists who wanted to participate. Having been around many of the different groups that are associated with the left I have seen first hand the lack of cohesion between the different groups. These are people that ostensibly have the same goals yet can’t get along with each other long enough to see the goals through. We as social justice activists are constantly bickering with each other over the most minor of issues. We need to see that as long as we keep this nit picking up we will never pose a threat to the elite and that is exactly the way the elite want it. It is even to the point that social justice activists are turning their own supposed allies over to authorities when said ally might get too rowdy at a protest. The authorities don’t even have to do anything anymore. They just let us police ourselves. This is unacceptable and needs to change immediately.
We as people fighting to change this world for the betterment of all need a strategy and political ideology that we can all get behind. We need to not be afraid of upsetting the elite. I thought the point of protesting was to not only upset the elite but bring their whole selfish system down. That is where this book comes in. This book gives any person or group of people that wants to get involved in changing the world specific religious, political, and psychological goals to accomplish this great task. I believe that activists need to unite so we no longer have left wing anarchists arguing with socialists, and socialists bickering with environmentalists, and communists fighting with animal rights activists and so on and on. Meanwhile nothing gets done and impoverished people, the environment, and non-humans throughout the world suffer gravely.
We as social justice activists all have the same basic goals so why don’t we cooperate with each other? Because we don’t have a system that we can all agree on. We are letting our minor differences separate us. Once again this is what the elite want and I don’t doubt that they helped cause this separation. Illumination and Meritocracy give us an ideology to unite behind and a laser like focus to what we need to accomplish. I believe Meritocracy gives us the best opportunity to accomplish all of our goals for for a better, more equal and just society. These books need to be read as soon as possible because our chance for an improved world is rapidly slipping by.” –BG
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Tags: Academia Iluministă
Academia Iluministă (80)
“Playing World of Warcraft makes me feel godlike. I have ultimate control and can do what I want with few real repercussions. The real world makes me feel impotent … a computer malfunction, a sobbing child, a suddenly dead cellphone battery – the littlest hitch in daily living feels profoundly disempowering.” –Ryan van Cleave, US author and academic
In the gaming world, players receive constant rewards (making them feel high), constant realtime positive feedback and can see themselves making tangible progress (within the game). In real life, they rarely get rewards, pleasurable highs or see any signs of meaningful progress. Real life is drudgery for most people. So which world would you rather inhabit? But if you immerse yourself in hyperreality, you have ensured you will never succeed in reality. So, what’s it be?
Real heroism and real success – or success and heroism based on make-believe. YOUR CHOICE.
The tale of Ryan van Cleave provides a warning to all gamers. His addiction to World of Warcraft (WoW) was so extreme that he became uninterested in real life. He lost his enthusiasm for his wife, children, and his job as an English professor. He played WoW for some 60 hours a week, including before classes and at night while his family slept, leaving him exhausted. He often ate while at the computer – only things that needed one hand, leaving the other free for gaming. He argued constantly with his wife about the excessive time he spent on the computer. He sometimes zoned out of reality and thought he was inside the game.
His wife felt abandoned. “I couldn’t believe that someone could choose a virtual family over a real one,” she said.
Why do many people own dogs? It’s because they can have control over their dog. If you don’t feel in control of your life, you find something that gives you the control you crave. Gamers have total control in their virtual reality. The more out of control they are in real life, the more they retreat to games (just as other addicts retreat to drugs or alcohol or whatever).
Depressingly, the virtual world soon seems to become a lot like the real world. Van Cleave said, “You can never have enough in-game money, enough armour, enough support. You’ve got to keep up with the virtual Joneses.” Keeping up with the VIRTUAL Joneses?!! Is that not the supreme definition of futility?
Needless to say, Van Cleave’s life started to fall apart. His career disintegrated, his marriage was on the rocks and he contemplated suicide. At last, he drew himself back from the abyss, got rid of the game and put his life back on track.
What is “virtual reality”? It’s where people HIDE from real reality. What is the spectacular society? It’s where people watch other people having the spectacular life of which they dream. Why don’t they try to make it happen FOR REAL? There’s no high higher than REAL highs. There’s nothing better than being a real hero, not a fantasy hero. Ironically, all the spectacular people are a crashing disappointment in real life. They don’t have their scriptwriters with them to give then something clever and witty to say. They don’t have their make-up artists with them or the air brushers or digital image enhancers that make them look so good on screen.
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The Latest Bulletin from David Icke’s Fantasy World:
“His most staggering revelation is that the Earth and the collective human mind is manipulated from the Moon, which, he says, is not a ‘heavenly body’, but an artificial construct – a gigantic ‘spacecraft’ (probably a hollowed-out ‘planetoid’) – which is home to the extra-terrestrial group that has been manipulating humanity for aeons. He describes what he calls the ‘Moon Matrix’, a fake reality broadcast from the Moon which is decoded by the human body/mind in much the same way as portrayed in the Matrix movie trilogy. The Moon Matrix has ‘hacked’ into the human ‘body-computer’ system, he says, and it is feeding us a manipulated sense of self and the world 24/7.”
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Are you convinced yet? Has Icke finally nailed it? Will we soon be under attack from the men on the moon, joining the Illuminati lizard kings in their assault on humanity?
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The 400:
400 Americans have as much wealth as 150 million Americans. WTF! How is such a thing possible? The 150 million could crush the 400 in a trice. So why don’t they? Why do 150 million people permit themselves to be starved of the resources needed to provide a productive life while 400 selfish individuals are allowed to live like gods?
The 400, to keep their position, have had to wage an astonishingly effective propaganda war to justify their wealth, power, status and position. The reason the 150 million do nothing is that they have been manipulated into thinking that it’s right and proper that the 400 are so rich. They have had a false consciousness constructed for them by the elite. They think that their interests are directly connected to those of the rich when in fact the opposite is true.
The elite say that if there were no rich people in America it would be a communist state under a brutal dictator, with concentration camps for all troublemakers. People would have no freedom. America would be Godless and all of its people soulless and grey, with no hope for the future and at the mercy of the State. The conspiracy theories regarding the “New World Order” promote an identical message (in fact, conspiracy theorists unintentionally work in tandem with the right wing, rich elite since their analysis of the world is often identical – with socialist atheists being blamed for everything).
Of course, the nightmare presented by the elite to terrify the masses is the opposite of the truth. The elite themselves are the nightmare. If all of the assets of the rich were seized, the debts of the world could be paid off and the world could start again. So why don’t we do exactly that? Wasn’t it the elite that brought us to the precipice of financial meltdown? It certainly wasn’t any of the ordinary people who had no decision-making input at all. Therefore shouldn’t the elite be held accountable for the disaster they themselves created? Shouldn’t they pay? Why are the people paying? Why are the people SO STUPID?!
The elite have got it made. Even in the midst of financial catastrophe, they are still paying themselves enormous salaries, with massive pay rises and bonuses, while all the debts they ran up are dumped on the dumb taxpayers. Isn’t that GENIUS?! When you can rob someone blind and they even help you put your hands in their pockets to remove every last cent, you know you are indestructible, that your propaganda is so deeply ingrained that the people can no longer think. The people do not know how to pursue their own self-interest. If they did, they would destroy the super-rich. If the super-rich aren’t responsible for fucking the world then who is? If we don’t know where to attach blame and punishment, how can we ever move forward?
The super-rich have made our world the shit place it is. They control the world and its assets. How can anyone analyse the state of the world and do anything other than conclude that its woes are caused by the rich?
The rich pursue an extremely simple twin-track policy: 1) To selfishly and ruthlessly enrich themselves at every opportunity, and 2) To do everything to ensure that the masses take no action against them. So, their policy is one of aggressive acquisition and one of equally aggressive propaganda to inhibit the masses from pursuing their own self-interest. As long as the masses believe their interests are aligned with those of the elite, they will never challenge the elite. Revolutions occur whenever the people wake up and they realise that their interests are the opposite of those of the elite, hence the elite must be destroyed.
Make no mistake, the world is now in a Revolutionary phase because the elite have committed catastrophic blunders and the masses are beginning to comprehend that the elite are actually incompetent at everything other than feathering their own nests (at which they are geniuses). The rich are not your friends. They are your enemies. They must be overthrown. Meritocrats devoted to the welfare and improvement of the whole population must be in charge. All systems of privilege must be abolished.
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Oiling Up:
The UK’s Eton College, the most elite private school in the world, promotes an activity called “oiling up”, designed to develop “a mixture of ambition, self-confidence and bloody-mindedness”. There’s certainly not much “oiling up” going on in the public education sector.
More like “greasing down” – a mixture of zero ambition, low self-esteem, cowardice and submissiveness. Etonians are trained to regard themselves as an elite, and that’s what they become. Most people are trained to be failures, and they do a splendid job of it.
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St Pauli Football Club:
Fußball-Club St. Pauli is a German football team based in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg and has a close relationship with Celtic Football Club in Glasgow in Scotland. St. Pauli’s flag is the same as the Illuminati’s – the skull and crossbones. The Illuminati are fans of this team because St. Pauli is left wing, punk, anti-corporate and rebellious. The Wikipedia entry on St. Pauli says:
“It was in the mid-1980s that St. Pauli’s transition from a traditional club into a ‘Kult’ club began. The club was also able to turn the location of its ground in the dock area part of town, near Hamburg’s famous Reeperbahn – centre of the city’s nightlife and its red-light district – to its advantage. An alternative fan scene emerged, built around left-leaning politics and the ‘event’ and party atmosphere of the club’s matches. Supporters adopted the skull and crossbones as their own unofficial emblem. St. Pauli became the first team in Germany to officially ban right-wing nationalist activities and displays in its stadium in an era when fascist-inspired football hooliganism threatened the game across Europe. In 1981, the team was averaging crowds of only 1,600 spectators: by the late 1990s they were frequently selling out their entire 20,000-capacity ground.
“It was also during the 1980s when the club first became associated with the Skull and Crossbones symbol. The symbol had always been associated with St Pauli in one way or another. Hamburg fostered the most famous pirate of Germany Klaus Störtebeker and the symbol had been used by the house occupants at Hafenstrasse, but the one who should be credited with bringing the symbol to the club is probably Doc Mabuse, the singer of a Hamburg punk band, and as the legend tells, he first grabbed the flag from a stall while passing drunk through the Dom on his way to the Millerntor-Stadion.
“In the early 1990s, the media in Germany started to work on the Kult-image of the club, focusing on the punk part of the fan-base in TV broadcasts of the matches. By this time, the media also started to establish nicknames like ‘Freibeuter der Liga’ (buccaneers of the league) as well as das Freudenhaus der Liga (‘Brothel of the League’ but Freudenhaus also literally means ‘House of Fun’).”
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The Futurists:
Futurism was an art movement founded in 1909 by Italian poet F.T. Marinetti. He called upon artists to embrace kinetic art – art obsessed with the motion inherent in modern technology, such as the car and the plane. Show “courage, audacity and revolt,” he declared, “celebrate a new beauty, the beauty of speed.” The Futurists tried to capture and reflect speed and movement in all of their works. They combined bright, bold colours, sharp angles, Cubist planes and intense lines of force. Rather than show a freeze-frame snapshot, they wanted to somehow fit an entire movie into a single frame; to portray cinematic flux.
The Futurists were great self-publicists. In one stunt (or “happening” as they liked to say), they climbed the bell tower of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. As the congregation came out, they showered them with propaganda pamphlets advocating demolishing the city, burning the gondolas, and filling “the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing, and leprous palaces.” They described Venice as, “this putrescent city … this bath adorned with jewels for cosmopolitan whores”, with its “stinking little canals … its shady little businesses”. Using megaphones, they bellowed outrageous slogans: “Burn the museums! Drain the canals! Burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins! Kill the moonlight!”
The more they were abused by the crowd, the more the crowd hurled rotten fruit and old spaghetti at them, the more the Futurists defined their happening as a great success. They were opposed to the past, to sentimentality and nostalgia, conservatism and tradition, the infatuation with the past. Shouldn’t humanity be forward looking?
The Futurists were fans of provocative manifestos that proclaimed their position. The movement began with Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto.
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The Futurist Manifesto.
We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.
Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.
Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.
Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.
“Come, my friends!” I said. “Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendour of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.”
We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel – a guillotine knife – which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there, unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. “Smell,” I exclaimed, “smell is good enough for wild beasts!”
And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.
And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!
We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron, the watchdogs on the steps of the houses.
Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws giving me velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.
“Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!”
As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself – vlan! – head over heels in a ditch.
Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savoured a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!
As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red-hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists crowded terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care they raised high enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast shark that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.
We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a single caress of its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its fins.
Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with metal scratches, useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid fishermen and angry naturalists, we dictated our first will and testament to all the living men on earth.
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MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM.
1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-collared and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries. Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.
Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and colour. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves?
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Do you want to rot?:
What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?
To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?
Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with their own talent and ambition.
For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!
Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!
The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.
But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter’s night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures. They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.
The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath. Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? It is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!
Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know just what our beautiful false intelligence affirms: “We are only the sum and the prolongation of our ancestors,” it says. Perhaps! All right! What does it matter? But we will not listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous words! Instead, lift up your head! Standing on the world’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!
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We like the energy of the Futurists, if not many of their sentiments. We also like the tool of the manifesto and the call to action. Where’s your manifesto?
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The Meritocracy Party:
THE MERITOCRACY PARTY campaigns to replace democracy with meritocracy. Democracy has become the single biggest obstacle to the rise of the most meritorious. In the USA, no matter your talents, you cannot become President unless you have access to vast wealth to fund your campaign. In Great Britain, social mobility – the opportunity to improve your social standing – has gone into reverse. If you are born into a poor family, you are statistically almost certain to remain poor, regardless of your merits. If your parents are rich, you can start looking forward to a prosperous future, again regardless of your merits.
The Meritocracy Party seeks to remove the link between parental wealth and children’s outcomes in life, and to eradicate nepotism and cronyism, the dual drivers of privilege. The Meritocracy Party is “viral”. You don’t need to join anything, seek anyone’s permission, go to any meetings or pay any money. If you’re broadly in tune with the meritocratic ethos, all you have to do is go out and spread the word.
The world can be changed: conversation by conversation amongst intelligent people.
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The following material concentrates on the British political system, but the same arguments apply in every country. The idea is to have a Meritocracy Party in every country of the world, all of which are affiliated to create the first global political Party. With global capital relentlessly forcing down costs (people’s pay) while increasing their own profits, only a global political response will suffice. Whatever country you are in, start building the meritocratic future.
The Meritocratic Aims.
The Meritocracy Party aims to replace consumerism with high culture. We wish to place ideas above money, aesthetics above shopping, community over the “I’m all right, Jack” ideology. Private property leads to private lives, dislocated communities, suspicion and competition between neighbours. We are not allies, we are enemies. How do we heal the rifts between us? We have to reduce the importance of the main focus of division between us: lust for money.
The Five Meritocratic Principles.
1) NO NEPOTISM
It’s not who your parents are, it’s who YOU are.
2) NO CRONYISM
It’s not what others can do for you, it’s what YOU can do.
3) NO DISCRIMINATION
Sex, race, religion, age, background are irrelevant. Talent is everything.
4) EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES
You start from the same point as everyone else, and you go as far as your talents take you.
5) REWARDING MERIT
The highest rewards for the highest achievers.
Goals.
1) To implement the five Meritocratic Principles.
2) To abolish the monarchy since it contradicts the first Meritocratic Principle. In a monarchy, the only thing that matter is the identity of your parents. In a meritocracy, your parents are irrelevant. The advent of meritocracy is accompanied by the automatic abolition of the monarchy. No meritocrat would seek the ‘permission’ of a monarch to govern.
3) To abolish the House of Lords (the House of Cronyism), which contradicts the second Meritocratic Principle since it’s the product of patronage. In a properly constituted meritocratic system, there is no requirement for a second House.
4) To abolish Party Politics. Political parties are irrelevant in a meritocratic system. Parliament will be populated entirely by independent, meritocratic MPs with no set political affiliations (other than their commitment to meritocracy).
5) Each independent MP is selected on the basis of their merit relating to their field of expertise. So, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is selected from amongst practising economists (and will be elected only by other economists). The Secretary of State for Health will be someone who works in the health field (and is elected only by health workers); the Secretary for Defence will be from the armed forces; the Foreign Secretary a serving official in the Foreign Office; the Secretary of State for Education a serving teacher/headmaster/
6) The Prime Minister will be elected by the MPs from amongst their number. Every five years, there will be a general election in which every MP has to seek the endorsement of their voters, or be replaced.
7) To abolish Cabinet Collective Responsibility. The principle that people should promote views with which they privately disagree is absurd and ipso facto brings politicians into disrepute. Why haven’t they resigned if they disagree with a policy? How can they defend a position that they themselves don’t believe in? If they publicly support a policy they privately reject, they are hypocrites.
8) Critiques of government policy will be provided by select committees of MPs. Special committees comprising scientists and philosophers may also be used, chosen because of their critical-thinking abilities and their expertise in challenging assumptions. Committees of artists, entrepreneurs and designers may also be called upon. Pressure groups will be given a prominent voice too since meritocracy welcomes close scrutiny.
9) To abolish the ‘moralising’ approach to politics (what’s ‘right’ and what’s ‘wrong’ – the politics of principle) in favour of the scientific method (what works and what doesn’t – the politics of pragmatism).
10) To increase Inheritance Tax to 100%. No one should be able to posthumously transfer an advantage to another person of their choosing. The state should acquire all of the assets of the deceased and should reinvest them to advance the public good, particularly via education.
11) Education is the bedrock of merit, and should be accorded the highest importance in the meritocratic state. The current education system is a demonstrable failure and should be overhauled in every respect. Our education system is designed to produce shoppers (these being what capitalist democracies require to sustain their economic model). True education is the opposite of shopping. It liberates the mind, not the credit card.
12) To promote the ideas of the most radical, freethinking, independently minded philosophers e.g. Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Rousseau, Diogenes, Camus, the Situationist International.
13) To provide community-based alternatives to the family (based, for example, on the Kibbutz model) so that if a family fails, its members can be nurtured in a different, constructive and productive environment of psychological and educational well-being.
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The Decline of Social Mobility:
The last few years have seen a marked decline in social mobility in the UK, accompanied by an equally steep rise in the number of the super-rich. The two trends are of course connected. Social mobility is directly proportional to the extent to which ‘markets’ (in the widest sense) are unrigged (read meritocratic markets). Social mobility declines when cronyism and nepotism are allowed to flourish. Cronyism and nepotism (drivers of rigged markets) allow the gilded few to pay themselves whatever they like (since there are no meritocratic mechanisms to increase competition and make inappropriate payments impossible). Hence we see the emergence of an increasingly powerful class of super rich – the extreme beneficiaries of cronyism and nepotism.
Meritocracy is the antidote.
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The Incompetence of Privileged Institutions:
“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”–George Orwell
“Success has always been the greatest liar.”–Nietzsche
“One must push what is collapsing.”–Nietzsche
All empires fall. Success creates complacency. Empires become arrogant. They lose the ability to criticise themselves, to see their inevitable flaws. They believe their own propaganda. The same is true of institutions. They are inept at self-renewal, of re-energising themselves. They are never associated with radical change. How telling is Orwell’s remark? – the very success of Eton becomes the cause of subsequent calamity.
If we wish to avoid the disaster of privileged institutions that have grown fat and tired, we must promote ferocious competition that pushes over anything that carries too much weight. Meritocracy is the mechanism. It’s a permanent challenge to privilege; the sword of Damocles hanging over the bloated, the smug, those wallowing in their own imagined success. The greater the competition, the greater the merit of the winners.
In the UK, a few institutions have become untouchable, and the nation has stagnated as a consequence. The British never achieve anything great and inspirational. Privilege kills talent and vision. It seeks only to maintain itself in its decadent comfort.
There should be no sacred cows. Survival is not compulsory. Meritocracy will sweep away the incompetent institutions that are holding back the nation and its people.
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The Charity Con:
In a nation of appallingly selfish people who’d do anything to get ahead, there’s an absolute need for TV charity shows like Children in Need. People who spend 364.5 days a year contemplating property prices, how they can get their children into the best schools at the expense of other children, and who they can shaft at work to get a promotion, need their half a day a year when they can pretend to be interested in the welfare of others. Pretend to be human, perhaps.
Charity events are the obscene means by which the uncharitable masses worship their shameless pretence of altruism. Such events are playgrounds for nauseating extraverts to inflict themselves like the worst bullies on hordes of introverts, forcing them to have ‘fun’.
Vain, egomaniacal celebrities are permitted to feign that they have some interest in the lives of those less fortunate (as if!). And it’s so good for their media profile, of course. Their publicists and agents never tire of telling them to get their faces in front of the dumb public, and these are the opportunities par excellence. And did you see the sales rocket of all those bands that took part in Live Aid? You can’t manufacture ‘selling’ events as good as big charity shows (and isn’t that the real purpose of charity?) Even debutantes (or whatever it is they call themselves nowadays), get in on the act with their swanky charity balls – the places where you must be seen if you’re anyone. God only knows what any of these events has to do with charity.
Next year, keep your collection cans and fancy dress costumes. Go out to Africa and actually do something charitable, or face the fact that you’re totally selfish, and a hypocrite into the bargain. Anything that’s worthwhile should be funded by the State. If it’s not worthwhile, it shouldn’t be funded at all. So what’s the point of charity?
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Unacceptable:
It’s simply unacceptable in the 21st century for people to invoke ancient prophets and gurus. Although we proclaim Pythagoras to be a monumental genius, the fact remains that humanity has mathematical tools available now that he could only have dreamt of. The past geniuses have brought us where we are today, but where we are today is far more advanced than anything that has ever gone before. You are anti-evolutionary – retarded – if you turn to any ancient religious beliefs and regard them as better, wiser and more useful than mathematics, science and philosophy. That includes all people who look to Buddhism and Hinduism. Ontological mathematics has made all religions redundant. It has transformed religion from Mythos into Logos.
Reason is now the name of the game, not prayer, faith, meditation, revelation and mysticism. There is no longer any excuse at all for holding silly, irrational beliefs. Ontological mathematics has bridged the gap between atheistic scientific materialism on the one hand, and religion and spirituality on the other. Math explains the whole thing … rationally!!! This is the Age of Logos. Get off your knees. Uncross your legs. Stop praying and meditating and start thinking and reasoning. You are supremely unenlightened if you look to ancient beliefs that were in circulation thousands of years before Europe underwent the Enlightenment, when the grip of Christianity at last started to be released. Why abandon the nonsense of Abrahamism, only to embrace the equal nonsense of Karmism?
******
No Excuses:
If you believe in Hinduism or Buddhism, don’t kid yourself that you’re vastly superior to, and more rational than, Abrahamists. You’re as hostile to reason, logic and knowledge as they are, and every bit as mired in superstition, credulousness, faith, mysticism, revelation and Mythos.
Given the nihilism of atheistic scientific materialism, people had an excuse for looking to something to provide them with spiritual sustenance. But that excuse no longer exists. Illuminism and ontological mathematics allow scientific materialism and empiricism, which is incompatible with religion and spirituality, to be converted into scientific idealism and rationalism, which is fully compatible with religion and spirituality, and fully explains the eternal, dimensionless, immaterial, mental reality that underlies the observable world and gives it its meaning and purpose. With scientific idealism and rationalism, mind, not matter, becomes the basis of reality. All material things are transformed into mental things, and atheism becomes an absurd superstition wholly divorced from the facts of existence. It’s math, which lies at the core of science, that destroys materialism since mathematics is not material.
******
Either/Or:
You either keep on believing ancient old shit, or you wake up and try to understand the staggering amount of knowledge humanity has amassed in the last four hundred years. Anyone who spends any time at all on any Mythos religious system whatsoever has turned their back on human progress, and effectively declared useless all modern knowledge. Why are you going backwards rather than forwards, to unreason rather than reason? Why are you going back to ignorance and superstition? The answer is simple … you don’t understand modern knowledge whereas you’re perfectly happy with ancient mumbo jumbo and hocus pocus.You’re addicted to fantasy and illusion and despise reason and reality. Why would anyone seeking to be “enlightened”, study Buddhism or Hinduism rather than Gödel’s incompleteness theorems? Er, because Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are fucking hard, whereas any dumb ass can get some kind of hold on Buddhism or Hinduism. Talk about dumbing dowm and the race to the bottom! What’s the average IQ of the kind of person who studies Gödel’s incompleteness theorems compared with the average IQ of the type of person who gets involved with Abrahamism or Karmism? That tells you the whole story. Stupid people study stupid things, and smart people study smart things.
******
Scientific Materialism:
Even science has serious difficulties. Science can be regarded as mathematics allied to and modified by experiments. Mathematics reflects rationalism, while experiments reflect empiricism. Rationalism and empiricism are incommensurate. Science is thus the philosophy of empiricism (and materialism) imposed on rationalist mathematics, which has nothing at all to do with experiments. Science refuses to address this contradiction. It’s driven by pragmatism, not Truth. Science seeks to understand the world, and yet, bizarrely, can’t understand itself, and makes no attempt to do so. But science, for all of its lack of intellectual integrity, has applied mathematics to the world and been fantastically successful. Remove math from science and you would have nothing but augury. Why have so few failed to realise that it’s when you apply numbers (math) that you get to grips with reality, and when you use words, emotions, faith, mysticism, and so on, you get all the crazy religions and ideas that have defaced human history.
******
The Truth:
Words and numbers are incommensurate. Reality is based on either words or numbers. It can’t be a bit based on words, and a bit based on numbers, since numbers and words, like Cartesian mind and matter, have no basis for interaction. You have a very simple choice to make. Will you attempt to understand reality verbally, numerically, or via an incoherent combination of the two? There can only be one answer to existence, and if you choose the wrong means to address reality, you have failed automatically. So, we ask you a very simple question: Was Pythagoras right that all things are numbers, or will you contradict him and claim that all things are words? Your choice. Make the wrong choice and you have cut yourself off from Truth and are living in a fantasy world.
Conventional religion and spirituality are all about emotional and mystical words. Philosophy is about the careful examination of the meaning of words and what they imply about reality. Science is a mixture of philosophy and numbers, and math is all about numbers.
There can be no Cartesian dualism or pluralism. You can’t mix, match and combine incommensurates. There must be a monism, and the only coherent monism is the monism of numbers.
Scientific experiments are an artificial add-on to mathematics. They have the effect of force-fitting mathematics to the observable world and thus producing something that seems “real” (to the senses). However, they also have the disastrous effect of annihilating all mathematics that is not compatible with sensory observations. The whole point of ontological mathematics is to address both observable AND unobservable reality, and to unify them in a single system. “Dimensionless” mathematics concerns immaterial Fourier frequency (mental) functions outside space and time, while “dimensional” mathematics concerns Fourier spacetime (material) functions. The two interact via Fourier mathematics. And thus the whole of reality is explained. It’s all in the math. Do the math.
******
The Exam:
You’re in an exam – the exam of existence. Do you know how to pass it? To whom will you turn for advice? This is the strangest exam of all. You are presented with a blank sheet, and you yourself must provide both the questions and the answers. How well you do this will determine whether you pass or fail. Most people ask the wrong questions and give the wrong answers.
Know Thyself
Get Real
Keep it Real
This is the Dawn of the Coming Race, the Supermen, the Hyper-humans.
We are the Illuminati and this has been our gospel.
-AC
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The Cult of the Professional (Charlatan/Bullshitter):
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” –Baudrillard
In his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen lamented the opportunity the internet has afforded any Tom, Dick or Harry to place their thoughts, movies, music tracks, stories etc in the public arena. As more people access this free material, fewer pay the traditional content producers (newspapers, magazines, book publishers, film studios, record companies, TV and radio companies). Where will it all end? The collapse of civilisation? That appears to be Keen’s hypothesis.
Keen is in no doubt that the amateur efforts that abound on the internet are rubbish. The commercial material, on the other hand, is held up as something of the highest calibre. Who is this guy kidding? He obviously hasn’t watched many Hollywood movies, or much TV, or actually read any newspapers or magazines, or listened to the junk on the radio. Almost all commercial content is garbage to a quite extraordinary degree. And don’t forget – people are actually being paid, often ridiculously well, to produce it.
The vast majority of people in the media got their jobs through nepotism and cronyism. They’re not professional paragons: rather they’re professional charlatans, bullshitters and ass lickers. They have no talent at all, apart from managing to get someone to pay them for producing junk. Keen is a snob, a slavish worshipper of the myth of the “legitimate”, “professional” expert when virtually no one, outside the world of academics (and scientists in particular), is worthy of that description.
The Independent used to be a good newspaper, until it became a viewspaper. Why should anyone pay to read the views of some commentator in The Independent when he could just as easily freely read the blog of some person on the internet who may be much funnier, more controversial, more radical, more interesting, more intelligent – and a better writer? Newspaper commentators are simply bloggers who get paid: grandiose, self-deluded bloggers in other words.
Keen argues that the conventional producers of paid content are the gatekeepers to some Promised Land of standards, taste, and high quality. They filter good from bad, true from false. Yeah, right! All they do is promote their own agendas. Their “good” is nothing more than a reflection of their personal tastes. Their opinion that something is “good” doesn’t render it so. Equally, their ideas of true and false are simply perspectives from the viewpoints that prove most advantageous to them.
Try reading Nietzsche if you want the “truth”. Try reading Baudrillard. The last person you should go to is one of the chattering classes, one of the media gatekeepers.
Another obvious point to which Keen is astoundingly oblivious is that the internet merely reflects the culture that the “gatekeepers” created. The gatekeepers were the Frankensteins who gave life to the monster. If the gatekeepers had engineered an entirely different culture, one that lauds all the values that Keen claims to admire, then the internet would be a paradise.
That it isn’t is thanks to no one but the gatekeepers who pursued a relentless agenda of producing dumbed down content to chase ratings and higher profits. It’s old-fashioned justice that their monster has turned on them, and they surely deserve to perish. They chose to worship the Lowest Common Denominator, and they have reaped their moronic harvest.
It’s time to kill the spectacle. It’s time for the Revolution.
The End
******
The Armageddon Conspiracy: The Plot To Kill God
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http://www.amazon.com/
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5/5
Tags: Academia Iluministă
Academia Iluministă (79)
“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
Tags: Academia Iluministă
Academia Iluministă (78)
The Catholic versus Protestant Dialectic:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” –Isaac Asimov
CATHOLICISM AND PROTESTANTISM encapsulate two radically different attitudes towards “authority” and expertise. An ordinary Catholic believes that the Catholic Church stands between God and him and that the Church alone is qualified to hold that role of intermediary. Its ordained officials are experts in the Catholic religion and have attained all of the appropriate qualifications.
A priest is authorised to provide absolution after an authentic act of penance. A priest is qualified to transubstantiate bread and wine into the real body and blood of Jesus Christ. The Pope is the divinely appointed Vicar of Christ on earth. An ordinary Catholic knows that even though he himself may have a simple understanding of Catholicism, the experts know everything there is to know about the subject.
Protestantism, on the other hand, cuts out the middleman. Each person, regardless of their qualifications and knowledge, gets their own hotline to God. In fact, only one qualification is necessary – faith. One of the reasons why Protestantism flourished was that it pandered to the ordinary person’s vanity. Protestants regarded the many years that Catholic priests devoted to theological study as a complete waste of time. All that any Protestant has to do is say, “I believe” and he’s the match of any priest. Protestantism, when understood for what it really is, is a protest against expertise and merit. It’s a declaration that “intellectuals” have nothing more valid to say about life than someone who’s spent his whole life on a production line making baked beans. To a Protestant, books, learning and knowledge are a waste of time, if not actually Satanic. Not for nothing did Martin Luther declare reason the Devil’s whore. Luther’s message appeals to the legions of ignoramuses who think their ill-educated thoughts are as acute as those of professors.
The “conspiracy theorist” is almost invariably a Protestant. Not for a moment does he listen to any experts. Who are they to contradict him? He has absolute faith that he is right, and if he is right about God then he must be right about conspiracies. Of course, he’s entirely wrong about both, but that thought never enters his head. Many of the greatest intellectuals have declared that the more they know, the more they understand how much they don’t know. A Protestant has the opposite view. The less he knows the less he understands how much he doesn’t know. How can you know how ignorant you are unless you read lots of books? – but if you read lots of books then you won’t be ignorant, or at least you’ll be a lot less ignorant than when you began.
Catholicism historically fitted in with aristocratic and monarchic societies i.e. those based on a hierarchy. Modern democracy is essentially a Protestant phenomenon since it reduces everyone to the same rank regardless of their merits. As Dean Inge said, “Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.” In democracies, no weight is attached to the opinions of experts hence expertise becomes devalued and anti-intellectualism is rife. In many Western countries, “intellectual” is a term of abuse. Not surprisingly, almost all intellectuals have loathed democracy. Nietzsche despised everything to do with democracy. He regarded it as an insult to life that elevated the mediocre and actively prevented the great from succeeding.
Protestant anti-intellectualism abounds in the Tea Party. One of their angles of attack on Obama is that he’s a sinister intellectual. In fact, they’ve obviously never met an intellectual if they think Obama is one. When does Obama ever say anything smart? Even so, in comparison with the likes of Sarah Palin he must seem like one of the Seven Sages.
The ordinary Protestant came to believe that if he read the Bible then he was as qualified as the Pope or anyone else to decide the meaning of Scripture. He failed to comprehend that the mere act of reading a book by no means makes you an expert on that book. Anyone picking up a book by Hegel is unlikely to be much the wiser hundreds of pages later. The reason for that is that in order to understand Hegel you need to be a highly intelligent person familiar with the philosophical tradition in which Hegel wrote. In other words, a particular book is just the tip of an iceberg. It is underpinned by an enormous number of unseen books to which the author is responding. You could never hope to grasp Hegel’s meaning while being ignorant of philosophy.
To understand Hegel you would first have to learn philosophy, which would disqualify about 99% of the population at a stroke. By exactly the same token, to understand the Bible, you need to do much more than read a single book. What was the historical context in which the book was written? What content was omitted and why; what content was changed and why? What did other religions say? Did the Bible borrow anything from other religions? Did they influence it? What coded messages were built into the Bible? What was the literary style of the day? What were the expectations of the people of Biblical days? Who were their enemies? What was the philosophy of the age? What did the heretics have to say?
In other words, only a total RETARD would think that reading the Bible makes him an expert in what the Bible says. But that’s what Protestants think. They say to themselves, “Fuck the Pope and the Catholic Church and all the so-called ‘experts’. I’ve read the Bible and no one can tell me that I don’t understand it. In fact, I understand it much better than any of those dumb asses. God has spoken directly TO ME!”
There are countless Protestant sects and only one Catholic Church. Why? Because Catholics believe that the Pope and the Church constitute the appropriate source of expertise regarding Catholicism. On the other hand, any Protestant can say he’s the expert on the Bible, and no other Protestant can contradict him because there is no formal Protestant truth. It’s all about faith, not reason and knowledge. If a Catholic rejects the Pope and the Catholic Church, he ceases to be a Catholic. If a Protestant disagrees with the teachings of a particular Protestant sect, he can start up a new Protestant sect to promote his own view. Thus there are no universally acknowledged Protestant experts. Any Protestant can call himself an expert and establish his own Church – the Church of ME!
In the Protestant way of thinking, a person can go into a bookshop, read a book on brain surgery then declare that he’s setting up a brain surgery practice because he now “knows” all about brain surgery. Would you be his first patient? Or would you prefer to have your surgery performed by a recognised expert who has studied and practised for many years?
The idea that reading the Bible, or indeed any book at all, makes you an expert on it is infantile and absurd. This attitude undermines the whole basis of education. It exhibits an astonishing degree of arrogance and self-delusion.
The Protestant attitude manifests itself to a ridiculous degree in the arena of conspiracy theories. Suddenly these “know-alls” (ignoramuses in other words) think they can pontificate on structural engineering, the properties of metals, aircraft technology, the modus operandi of the intelligence services and special forces, “secret government”, invisible, shape-shifting Reptilians and so on. Conspiracy theories should be renamed Protestant theories and indeed many of them actively accuse the Pope, the Vatican and the Jesuits of being behind almost everything.
Strangely, they rarely direct any bile towards evangelical Protestants. They never declare Protestant Fundamentalism to be a conspiracy against the world even though the vast majority of Freemasons are Protestants – WASPs.
We, the Illuminati, are Gnostics so we detest Catholicism and Protestantism, but we can’t help but notice how disproportionately Protestant the conspiracy theory world is. Conspiracy theorists are all self-appointed experts and just as Protestants won’t listen to anyone who tells them they know nothing about the Bible, neither will conspiracy theorists listen to anyone telling them that their views are ill-informed nonsense.
The Illuminati subscribe to the “Catholic” model i.e. it that of a hierarchy. The Grand Master is the equivalent of the Pope, the ruling council are the Cardinals, the lower degrees are archbishops, bishops and priests. The lowest degree is the laity. It would be unthinkable and preposterous for a first degree Illuminatus to say he knew more about the Illuminati than the Grand Master, and he would very quickly cease to be a member of the Illuminati since you can’t teach a fool anything.
Meritocracy is also “Catholic”. The most meritorious are at the top and the least meritorious at the bottom. No one is allowed to proclaim themselves an expert in the manner of Protestants. You have to demonstrate merit to the satisfaction of your peers. The Pope is elected by his peers, the “princes” of the Catholic Church, these being the best-qualified individuals within the Catholic Church. Within that context, the Pope is the most meritorious individual in Catholicism. In Protestantism, if you dislike someone’s opinion, you declare your own to be superior.
Everyone thinks he’s more meritorious than everyone else. In Catholicism, you need a priest (a qualified person) to forgive you and to mediate between God and you. In Protestantism, you forgive yourself and you communicate directly with God without any intermediaries.
In Gnosticism, you have to be an extremely special type of person to achieve gnosis. Only the people of the highest possible merit are eligible. In Protestantism, you just need to say, “I believe in my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” and you’re SAVED. You’re on your way to paradise just because you said, “I believe.” How ridiculous can you get? Protestantism is the Ship of Fools. The Protestant attitude is painfully visible in the moronic Tea Party where a bunch of nobrain Christian Fundamentalists imagine that their embarrassingly stupid analysis of a complex world should be adopted by the whole nation. If it were, America would be destroyed within a single presidential term.
We live a world in which merit is neither respected nor acknowledged. Merit is attacked from two deadly angles. Privilege (“who you know”) wipes the floor with merit (“what you know”). And the self-appointed expert (“I know best”) – the “Protestant” – ridicules merit. The highly qualified are labelled geeks, nerds and dorks.
Modern-style democracy is a Protestant ideology. People are allowed to vote on things they know nothing about. How many people could write a 10,000-word analysis of the economic system of their country? And, if they can’t, in what way are they qualified to vote on who should run their nation’s economic policy? Is it rational, is it sane, to give a vote to the ignorant? What must be the outcome of allowing the ignorant to vote? Are you likely to get the best government, the most meritorious – or the government best able to pander to and manipulate the delusions of the ignorant? Capitalists are brilliant at manipulating people because their whole purpose in life is to seduce people into parting with their money.
Protestantism and democracy provide an extremely attractive message to stupid people. “You are experts,” they are told. “You have a hotline to God,” they are told. “You are special people, the saved, the elect.” And all the morons fall for it. Why? Because they’re egotists and narcissists. They’re vain, arrogant, self-deluded. They think they’re clued-up about the world. They think no one can fool them, even though in truth they are fooled all the time. If you don’t KNOW, you will always be deceived. Knowledge, not self-delusion, is the antidote to deception.
America is the archetypal “Protestant” nation, both religiously and attitudinally. Every American is an “expert” on everything, or so they like to believe. America is the home of the conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy theorist is someone who thinks he’s much smarter than the experts. In fact, the experts are invariably in on it, whatever IT is. But the conspiracy theorists can see through it all with their preternatural laser vision. American is the home of rampant ego and narcissism. Like all anti-meritocracies, America imagines itself supremely meritocratic. All the non-experts consider themselves experts.
The world despises education. If it respected it, the best educated and most intelligent would be running the world. But instead the money men are in charge, and they’re the dumbest fucks on earth, good at only one thing – lining their own pockets. If you allow the equation money = power to form then what do you expect but inept government?
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What was the main problem with the Catholic approach to merit? It was the contempt that the Catholic elite had for the ordinary people. The elite kept the knowledge for themselves. They didn’t let the ordinary people join in. The monks, priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and popes were all smart people, but the Catholic laity were dumb asses because they received no education.
The founders of Protestantism saw a gap in the market. They gave the people the Bible in their own language rather than incomprehensible, elitist Latin (that no ordinary person understood). Of course, it was then necessary to teach the illiterate masses how to read and write.
So that’s what Protestantism did. And because the ordinary Protestants could now read and write, they became much smarter than the average illiterate Catholics. So although the Catholic elite were enormously smarter religiously and philosophically than the barbarian Protestants who despised philosophy and cared only for Scripture, the average Protestant soon became smarter than the average Catholic.
Meritocracy, unlike Catholicism, wants everyone to be as smart as possible. There can be no such thing as a meritocratic elite ruling over a dumb population. The meritocratic elite must be the crème de la crème, the best of a fully educated population.
What could be more sane and rational than having the smartest, most meritocratic people in charge of the world? So why has it never been tried? Money, faith, superstition, ignorance and violence have ruled our world, never merit.
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The Will:
America has traditionally been ruled by WASPs – White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, originating from England, Scotland, Wales, the North of Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany. Freemasonry – which was originally anti-Abrahamist – gradually became a bastion of elite WASPs and deeply hostile to Catholicism which had banned Catholics from becoming Masons. The Anglo-Saxon WASPs via, first, the British Empire and, secondly, the power of America have in essence ruled the world for some 250 years. Britain, with the world’s largest, most powerful and most skilled navy literally ruled the waves until the end of WWII.
Virtually no country suffered more economically from the two World Wars than Britain, even though it was on the winning side both times. The cost crippled the British Empire and led to its disintegration. Britain could simply no longer afford to run an empire and, with powerful nationalist groups demanding independence in all of its territories, it steadily granted them their wishes. Britain is now a minor nation still haunted by the huge power it once wielded and in denial about its rather pathetic status these days.
America, the rebellious child of the British Empire, has supplanted its frail father but now its glory days are slipping away too and it’s disturbingly easy to imagine America slipping much further than Britain. Without its financial and economic clout, it’s possible to imagine America as a Third World country, full of poorly paid people suffering worse conditions than the Chinese and Indians.
Globalisation has placed enormous downward pressure on salaries for unskilled labour. An American capitalist can just as easily set up shop in China as in America. He will only establish his business in America if it can generate higher profits than its Chinese equivalent and that means that low-paid Americans are now in competition with some of the cheapest labour in the world, despite living in a much more expensive nation. This is a catastrophic situation. America could easily go down the tubes. Its debts are mind-boggling. America is INSOLVENT. If America were a business and all of its debts were called in tomorrow by its creditors, America would be closed down, all of its workers fired, all of its assets seized and handed over to the creditors. That is the underlying reality of America today. Their capitalist leaders have no national loyalty and care about only maximising their return on investment.
You don’t get out of this situation by savagely cutting debt, which only serves to cripple economic growth and throw the nation into recession and even Depression. Nor do you get out of it by printing money and generating more debt, combined with deadly inflation. In fact, you’re pretty much screwed whatever you do. The real solution is to recognise that the system itself is rotten to the core and has failed. A whole new system is required.
Germany had monstrous and terrifying problems in 1933 when Hitler came to power as the “strong man” to sort things out. Within six years, National Socialism had transformed Germany from a bankrupt nation in ruins to one of the greatest powers on earth. Just SIX years! Now, of course, no sane person would advocate that any modern nation should embrace Nazism. What we are saying is that a radically new political model with strong leadership can in an extremely short time transform a country’s fortunes.
Look at the hopeless muddle and deadlock in contemporary Washington D.C. Can any rational person regard that as EFFECTIVE government? It’s incapable of sorting out the mess. No one could succeed with that form of government. Its actual structure precludes strong leadership. It was designed that way, and now that feature, once such a virtue, has become a disaster.
Strong, decisive leadership is imperative in these dark days. You can be absolutely sure that Hitlers are waiting in the wings. If the world wishes to avoid a repetition of WWII, it must turn to strong but benevolent leadership dedicated not to war (as in Nazism) but to education (as in meritocracy).
It simply cannot be emphasized enough that there is only one way out of the world’s woes – much smarter, higher quality, more creative, more active, more ingenious citizens. There is only one way to create a new humanity – EDUCATION. Education must be the central preoccupation and defining condition of any modern nation. Education is the ultimate production line – for creating SMART HUMANITY.
Adolf Hitler was a man of immense will. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche brought the concept of the will to the heart of German thinking, but whereas those two men were intellectual and cultural giants, Hitler wasn’t. Hitler was a soldier, a racist, and an anti-intellectual – almost Protestant in his hatred of the intelligentsia. Any art he didn’t like he regarded as “degenerate”. He was infected by the Jewish idea of the “Chosen People”, which he converted into the “Master Race.” Like the Jews, he was obsessed with blood purity. Like the Jews, he was obsessed with the concept of one “God” – himself! – that everyone must worship and obey unswervingly. The greatest irony of history was that in terms of his attitudes, Hitler was the greatest Jew of all time. He subconsciously identified with Judaism so much that he wanted to BECOME Jehovah. You simply have to read the Torah to see that the Nazis were doing all the things advocated by the ancient Jews. Why is it that no one points out that Judaism has always been pure Nazism by another name?
Hitler associated the quality of the will with the quality of the blood. A race with tainted blood was ipso facto weakened and corrupted. It had inferior will and would inevitably be defeated by those of pure blood and pure will. Much of the Harry Potter saga is devoted to the idea that mixed bloods are “good” and can defeat pure bloods who are “bad”. Lord Voldemort is simply Hitler and much of the story is about presenting his supporters as menacing Nazi stormtroopers.
In their personal lives, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were both extreme individualists. In terms of his philosophy, Nietzsche practically made individualism a religion. He would have loathed the mind-controlled automata of the Nazi movement who had sacrificed all individuality in order to follow the leader. For Nietzsche, will belonged to the individual and expressed the individual’s inner nature. It had no racial dimension whatever. Hitler, on the other hand, made the will political, racial and militaristic, and Nazism was the expression of national rather than individual will.
The true antidote to Nazism is to have a population of strong-willed individuals i.e. a nation full of strong wills rather than a nation with a collective strong will but individually weak and submissive individuals. All Nazis, by making Hitler their God, were effectively submissives. No dominants would ever have embraced Hitler’s “divine” leadership. The Prussian elite class regarded Hitler as the “little Corporal” and mocked him, but unlike Hitler, they had no vision of how to lead Germany out of chaos, so in the end they all bowed to Hitler. The 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler was led by a Prussian and aristocratic elite. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg who planted the bomb that almost killed Hitler was from a Catholic aristocratic family on his father’s side, and the Prussian elite on his mother’s.
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The Same Old Story:
“Toughey” sent us the following message.
I am currently reviewing your webpage “Goldman Sucks”. You made an issue of the SEC finally “cracking down” on Goldman. To quote Matt Taiibi of Rolling Stone in his article, “At least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: it fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.” So they made at least $26 billion. The fines they paid the SEC equalled $550 million. That’s a pretty good return on your investment, showing that white-collar crime pays.
Another interesting fact, the head of the SEC is a former Goldman Sachs employee, as is the head of the Fed, Ben Bernanke as well as the Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner. Goldman also arranged the loans for Greece that they defaulted on. I think being hung, drawn, and quartered would be a “soft sentence” for these pirates.
Our Comment.
Toughey’s completely correct. The SEC turned out to be more interested in posturing than doing anything serious. Same old story. No one ever takes the steps that need to be taken. Goldman Sachs should be closed down or nationalised.
Along similar lines, a Bloomberg report stated that the Wall Street aristocracy got $1.2 trillion from the Fed:
Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits. By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress. “These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.” (By Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz)
According to an inspector general overseeing government bailouts, the U.S. so far has committed nearly $2.98 trillion toward stabilizing financial companies and rescuing domestic automakers. “This is a huge, unprecedented financial commitment…$2.9 trillion is just short of what the entire federal government spent in fiscal year 2008,” said Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus. “It’s like having a second United States government budget dedicated solely to saving the financial system, and that is truly surreal.”
Are you happy that you bailed out the rich? But if you hadn’t, the economy would have collapsed because the economy is actually a plutonomy and is all about serving the interests of the rich. Ever feel like you’ve been swindled? Isn’t it time for a new economic system that doesn’t pander to the rich?
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The Bankers:
In October 2008, the people of Britain were within TWO HOURS of being unable to withdraw money from British banks. The entire banking system was about to collapse. Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, described the bank chiefs that he was meeting with to avert disaster as “so arrogant and stupid that they might bring us all down.” Darling said of Sir Fred Goodwin, CEO of the enormous Royal Bank of Scotland, “[he behaved as if he was] off to play a game of golf.”
You have to wonder at a system that allows “stupid and arrogant” people, unelected and unaccountable, with a keen interest in golf, to be running a nation’s economy.
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The Tobacco Industry – pure poison:
A tobacco industry memo declared: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with ‘the body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
The tobacco industry, as a matter of policy, sows disinformation, encourages misinformation and seeks to personally undermine those who carry out anti-smoking research. They use expensive, high-powered lawyers to bully their enemies. Why are these crooks allowed to get away with it? Are their profits more important than ethics and the world’s health?
According to an academic report, smokers are heavily influenced by the glossy, colourful, stylish packaging of cigarettes. If cigarettes were instead presented in plain, brown packets, people would smoke less. Women in particular are influenced by the look and feel of a cigarette pack. A pack of cigarettes looks “cool” and seems sophisticated and rebellious. If presented in uncool packaging, cigarettes lose their allure. They become associated with losers, with people with no style, with the desperate, addicted underclass.
Capitalism relies heavily on packaging. Change the packaging and you change the perception of the product. It’s essential to make socially harmful activities uncool. Capitalism uses operant conditioning to hook people; reverse operant conditioning should be deployed by the government to unhook them. The same is true of religion.
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The “System”:
The rich – the plutocrats – run the nation. The desire of the plutocrats is to keep widening the gap between themselves and everyone else because they thereby massively enhance their power and influence. The plutocrats have an active interest in the erosion of the status of the middle class.
The plutocrats essentially want to make themselves an old-style aristocracy: a permanent, dynastic ruling elite, incapable of being challenged by anyone else. The last twenty years have seen an astonishing rise in just such a plutocratic aristocracy. With every passing year, it becomes more entrenched. The plutocrats, with the best accountants working for them, pay virtually no tax. The plutocrats prefer to have just two classes below them: a) the working class and b) the underclass.
The working class is designed to be full of people mortgaged to the hilt and with enormous credit card debts (i.e. they are to be defined by their indebtedness). Such people are cowed, servile and permanently anxious. They are terrified of losing their jobs and thus being unable to keep making their debt repayments. If they defy their plutocratic masters, they will be fired and plunged into the underclass.
The underclass is that ever-growing cesspool of humanity – the lumpenproletariat as the Marxists called them. They live in dysfunctional family units in ghettos. They are poorly educated and unfit to hold down any job i.e. they are unemployable and have no prospect of any prosperous future within the legal framework. They often join gangs for protection and status and become involved in criminality, especially drugs, prostitution, robbery and extortion.
The working class have this permanent spectre of horror in front of them – that one false move could plunge them into the underclass. The working class, unlike the plutocracy, are extremely heavily taxed, and most of their tax dollars go to “paying off” the underclass i.e. providing them with various welfare benefits so that they don’t go to war with the State.
So, the System consists of an arrogant, remote elite living in gated luxury communities who never come into physical contact with the other classes. They lead parallel lives that never intersect. Their children go to separate private schools and colleges. They receive medical treatment in private hospitals and they work in private corporations or top public jobs. They heavily tax the working class and they ensure that the workers are kept in a permanent state of fear involving a) debt and b) the presence of a sewer society where the losers and troublemakers in society end up. The taxes of the workers subsidise the gutter class just enough to prevent violence, but there is nevertheless constant criminality amongst the gutter folk (usually directed against each other!) and many do long stretches in jail, which makes them even more unemployable.
Does all of that sound horrifically familiar? That’s because we’re all living in the system, and it’s worse now than ever. The ultimate class traitors – the police and army – keep the plutocrats in power, brutalise the gutter class, and intimidate the workers.
Isn’t it time to change the system?
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The “Know Nothing” Party:
This Protestant Party was founded in America in 1845 and flourished for fifteen years. Its modern-day equivalent is the Tea Party. It was ferociously anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, anti-black, pro-temperance and pro-money: the usual sober, materialistic, money-grabbing racist attitude that we all know so well from modern right wing Americans and Christian Fundamentalists.
The Know Nothings’ particular hatred was reserved for Catholic immigrants from Ireland. These were fleeing the devastating Famine that killed one million people, despite the fact that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, then the richest and most powerful nation on Earth with a vast Empire. The Protestant British were perfectly happy to watch the Irish Catholics starve to death.
Catholic immigrants from Germany received a barely less hostile reception. Catholics were regarded as an alien army under the direct control of the Pope – yes, you really have heard it all before. Conspiracy theorist Benjamin Fulford is always talking about Satanists in the Vatican. We call Catholics Satanists too, but we also include all Protestants, all Jews and all Muslims amongst the Satan worshippers i.e. every person who believes in the evil God of Abraham who ordered a father to murder his son. If that isn’t the essence of evil, what is? If you don’t call the story of Abraham evil then it means you have no moral compass whatever. If it doesn’t occur to you that it’s impossible for the True God to order anyone’s death in a human sacrifice then it’s no wonder you worship the Devil.
So, 19th century Protestants created conspiracy theories about Catholic immigration. The materialistic Protestant mindset is that of a natural-born conspiracy theorist and the theories are all about “aliens” (whether Catholic, Black, Asian, Hispanic or Extra-terrestrial) coming to take away the material possessions of the Protestants and to stop them practising their “God-fearing” religion. Ironically, the Know Nothings referred to themselves as “Native Americans”, although the actual Native Americans might have had something pointed to say about that.
Only Protestant males over 21 with British ancestry were eligible to join the Know Nothings i.e. they were the archetypal WASP Party. The Know Nothings (what an entirely appropriate name!) demanded immigration curbs and many, but not all, were eager supporters of slavery. The Party’s origins lay in the American Republican Party (not the same as THE Republican Party) established in New York in 1843, and which then became known as the Native American Party. In 1845, it went national, and in 1855 it rebranded itself as the American Party. The Know Nothings employed the usual right-wing tactics of invoking patriotism, nationalism, wrapping oneself in the American flag and saying, “God bless America.” Attached to the Party was a Masonic secret society called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner.
“Know Nothing” was the name derisively applied to the American Party because members were encouraged never to discuss the Party with outsiders and the phrase they were instructed to use with any interrogators was, “I know nothing.”
The Irish Catholics gravitated towards the Democratic Party, meaning that WASPs then favoured the Republican Party. In many ways, the Democrat versus Republican divide in America is Catholics (Irish, Poles, Italians, Germans, Hispanics) and African Americans versus WASPs (of British, German Lutheran and Dutch ancestry). It’s no accident that America’s sole Catholic and Black presidents both belonged to the Democratic Party. Jews split both ways, although they have often been more associated with the Democrats, though that is starting to change. In recent years, Christian Fundamentalist right-wingers have eagerly embraced Zionism and mixed it in with theories of Armageddon and the Rapture.
The platform of the American Party comprised:
1) Severe restriction on immigration in general and from Catholic countries in particular.
2) Political office to be restricted to native-born Americans of British lineage and the Protestant persuasion.
3) An immigrant could gain citizenship only after 21 years.
4) Teachers in public schools must be Protestants.
5) The Bible must be read daily in public schools.
6) There must be severe restrictions on the sale of liquor.
7) Only English must be spoken.
Doesn’t that platform sound remarkably like that of modern-day American Christian Fundamentalists? America is traditionally associated with virulent racism towards blacks, but it has also been ferociously anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. In fact, America has proved itself one of the most hate-filled, intolerant nations on earth, and all of the hatred has emanated from a single source – WASPs. The WASPs of Britain and America have been one of the most evil forces in human history. Masonic WASPs entered into an unholy alliance with Zionist bankers to create the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” ultra-capitalist economic model, financed by Jewish money. The purpose of this model is to create a global dynastic WASP aristocracy and plutocracy that will always support Zionism and will rule the world in perpetuity. And it has done an astoundingly effective job. Go through a list of all the American billionaires and it’s virtually impossible to find anyone who isn’t a Jew or WASP Mason. Q.E.D.! This is the economic model and ideology that must be trampled into the ground and destroyed forever. It is utter anathema.
When are people going to wise up and realise the identity of the REAL enemy? It’s not Illuminati “lizards”; it’s WASP Masons and Zionist bankers. Tragically, because most conspiracy theorists are Protestants, they refuse to acknowledge Protestantism itself as one of the primary sources of the world’s ills. In fact, most Protestant conspiracy theorists are always looking to blame anyone OTHER than Protestants for anything that goes wrong. The “Illuminati” are the perfect fall guys because the version that exists in the minds of most conspiracy theorists doesn’t and has never existed – so it’s the perfect fantasy on which to project any old nonsense. And, of course, Grand Master Adam Weishaupt was from a Catholic background and had a Jesuit education. Could there be a better candidate upon whom to unload endless absurd theories? The fact that he was a law professor committed to the overthrow of monarchy and Christianity somehow permitted him to be described as a Jew, a socialist, a monarchist, an aristocrat, a banker, an international financier, a papal agent, a Jesuit agent yada yada yada. It’s complete insanity. To the Protestant mind, an intellectual from a Catholic/Jesuit background is the ultimate monster.
The Ku Klux Klan took much of their agenda from the Know Nothings. A leader of the American Party was depicted in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York in the memorable shape of William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), supposedly based on a Know Nothing called William Poole.
Karl Marx said, “Historical phenomena always happen twice – the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” In fact, the same historical phenomena happen not just twice but many times and in many guises. The Protestant Know Nothings and Ku Klux Klan have re-emerged as the Tea Party, Christian Fundamentalists, Republicans and conspiracy theorists. Any conspiracy theory that puts Catholics, Jesuits, the Illuminati, socialists, communists or atheists in the frame is unquestionably produced by Protestants. Any conspiracy theory that looks back to a golden age that has been “ruined” by some group or other is the product of the Protestant mind.
The reality is this. Those in power have ALWAYS conspired against those denied power. Power itself is tantamount to conspiracy. Those with power will do anything to keep it and will construct strategies to ensure that outcome i.e. they immediately engage in conduct designed to increase their advantages and decrease threats to them. To put it another way, they automatically conspire.
There is only one type of system where the powerful have no need or scope to conspire: a meritocracy. In a meritocracy, you’re at the top because you’re the best. But when someone else is best, they take over. In a genuinely constituted meritocracy where merit is objectively obvious, the system cannot be rigged. Anyone who subscribes to meritocracy is essentially signing up to recognising the objective merits of others, and if someone has superior merit then they are thereby entitled to greater power. They have earned it. In non-meritocratic power structures, heredity is the main organizing principle. You get power because your parents had it, not because of any merit inherent in you.
The next most common organising principle is cronyism. Power is awarded to you if you are a friend and ally of those in power, or you’re one of their sycophants. Unmeritorious cronies will always be favoured over meritorious outsiders. But that very fact sows the seed of destruction of anti-meritocratic systems. Invariably, they let complete idiots get to the top, who then exercise appalling judgment and bring about catastrophe.
Why did the Credit Crunch happen? Ultimately, it was because our society is led by unmeritorious individuals – by the beneficiaries of privilege and cronyism. Stupid leaders create stupid systems. If you want to avoid boom and bust, you must turn to meritocrats. The best possible world is the one that gives maximum power to the most talented individuals, to Plato’s Guardians and philosopher kings.
If you WANT a disaster, make sure privilege, heredity and cronyism are allowed to go unchecked. Why do successful corporations fail? It’s usually because a leader of merit retires and makes the mistake of allowing a son or crony to take over. Look at the Murdoch Empire. It’s now collapsing. Why? Because Rupert Murdoch, a ferociously ruthless business mogul, went down the catastrophic road of cronyism and nepotism. He surrounded himself with a gang of immoral individuals who brought his stinking empire into total disrepute. They were the only people an operator like him could trust. He would never have tolerated having someone smarter than him in his organisation.
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The Communards:
FOR A FEW GLORIOUS WEEKS IN 1871, the working class people of Paris established a left wing Commune, the members of which were known as the Communards. The authorities then destroyed the Commune with horrific violence. The climax of the struggle between the Paris Commune and the French government was called La Semaine Sanglante (“The Bloody Week”). At least 20,000 Communards died (and some estimates go as high as 50,000), many being executed by mass, indiscriminate firing by the French Army, and artillery bombardment. Summary executions of anyone suspected of being a Communard were rife. 40,000 Communards were temporarily imprisoned, of whom 12,500 were tried and 10,000 found guilty. The ringleaders were executed and 4,000 were deported to a French colony.
Isn’t it remarkable that critics of the French Revolution always mention the “Terror”, yet most people have never even heard of the destruction of the Paris Commune, which involved a similar scale of violence by the right wing authorities? Why is it that left-wing violence is always highlighted while violence by right-wing governments is ignored?
The Internationale by Eugène Pottier (one of the Communards of the Paris Commune).
Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!
Away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses, arise, arise!
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize!
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction,
On tyrants only we’ll make war!
The soldiers too will take strike action,
They’ll break ranks and fight no more!
And if those cannibals keep trying,
To sacrifice us to their pride,
They soon shall hear the bullets flying,
We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
No saviour from on high delivers,
No faith have we in prince or peer.
Our own right hand the chains must shiver,
Chains of hatred, greed and fear.
E’er the thieves will out with their booty,
And to all give a happier lot.
Each at his forge must do their duty,
And we’ll strike the iron while it’s hot.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
La Marseillaise (by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle).
Arise children of the fatherland
The day of glory has arrived
Against us tyranny’s
Bloody standard is raised
Listen to the sound in the fields
The howling of these fearsome soldiers
They are coming into our midst
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts
To arms citizens
Form your battalions
March, march
Let impure blood
Water our furrows
What do they want this horde of slaves
Of traitors and conspiratorial kings?
For whom these vile chains
These long-prepared irons?
Frenchmen, for us, ah! What outrage
What methods must be taken?
It is us they dare plan
To return to the old slavery!
What! These foreign cohorts!
They would make laws in our courts!
What! These mercenary phalanxes
Would cut down our warrior sons
Good Lord! By chained hands
Our brow would yield under the yoke
The vile despots would have themselves be
The masters of destiny
Tremble, tyrants and traitors
The shame of all good men
Tremble! Your parricidal schemes
Will receive their just reward
Against you we are all soldiers
If they fall, our young heroes
France will bear new ones
Ready to join the fight against you
Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors
Bear or hold back your blows
Spare these sad victims
That they regret taking up arms against us
But not these bloody despots
These accomplices of Bouillé
All these tigers who pitilessly
Ripped out their mothers’ wombs
We shall enter into the pit
When our elders will no longer be there
There we shall find their ashes
And the mark of their virtues
We are much less jealous of surviving them
Than of sharing their coffins
We shall have the sublime pride
Of avenging or joining them
Drive on sacred patriotism
Support our avenging arms
Liberty, cherished liberty
Join the struggle with your defenders
Under our flags, let victory
Hurry to your manly tone
So that in death your enemies
See your triumph and our glory!
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The Punk Revolution:
Arguably, the greatest band of all time is the Sex Pistols. The name itself is virtually perfect: the ideal combination of the modern preoccupation with sex and violence. The Pistols certainly weren’t the musically most talented, but they were the voice of authentic rebellion, the supreme anti-establishment band, preoccupied with themes of alienation, nihilism, and class war. They loathed the English monarchy and their slogan was NO FUTURE. They were the heroes of hordes of unemployed young people and their anarchist swagger energised the whole left wing of the UK. Those who witnessed the Sex Pistols at the peak of their powers thought their music could change Britain. They could literally musically reprogram the minds of British youth and inspire an uprising against the privileged elite. How many bands these days are associated with the concept of transformation and revolution? All contemporary bands are corporate.
The Sex Pistols were the antidote to tame, anodyne bands with nothing to say but with interminable, self-indulgent guitar solos to inflict on the world. Now we need a new Sex Pistols to save us from the MTV corporate packaging and capitalist commodification of music. Nirvana stepped in briefly and offered something glorious, but there was only one way that story was ever going to end. A few hip hop songs have hit the mark, but mainstream hip hop has largely chosen to define itself with regard to BLING, a monstrous parody of rich, white America. Is there any sadder sight than a black person dripping with gold and diamonds? You might as well get on your knees outside Goldman Sachs and say your prayers to Mammon. If bling were postmodern, a satire of vulgar wealth, it would be fantastic. But it’s not. The bling kings actually love wearing all that shit. They’re so feeble that they need their self-esteem propped up by the ostentatious display of gold. Sad fucks. “Street” hip hop – an urban politico-cultural movement – is much more interesting but much less popular.
No more plastic. We want reality. We want authenticity. Destroy the fake and phoney bands. Destroy the bling kings. Music should be the voice of the soul, not of the dollar.
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3/5
Tags: Academia Iluministă