Construction begins soon on an eighty-story apartment tower in Dubai, a location increasingly chosen by the planetary glitterati because of the local government’s total dedication to their needs, desires and overall safety and comfort. This, of course, includes a relaxed attitude towards the enforcement of laws regarding human slavery, pedophilia, and drug use. In Dubai the armies of cooks, groundskeepers, security forces, prostitutes, personal trainers, and servants of every other kind are there, yet mostly unseen. It’s a curious feature of the place. Perhaps there are underground caverns where the wails of the damned can’t be heard. What the visitor does see is ostentatious wealth wherever one looks, expended in every conceivable manner, from the beautiful to the garish, from the sublime to the vulgar.
Lower floors of this soaring phallus will be divided into two or more separate apartments. The much sought after upper floors are each an entire separate living space. Each floor of this monstrosity rotates independently, relieving the owners of invidious resentments about any neighbor whose view of the Dubai skyline might have been superior in a stationary structure. Drive-in elevators carry residents’ cars directly to their own door. Apartment prices range from three to thirty million dollars at present, with those figures expected to rise dramatically. One final feature of this modern marvel illustrates an incredibly morbid humor on the part of the architect or his clients: between each floor are positioned wind turbines and solar panels to provide a substantial portion of the residents’ electrical needs. This getaway for the pond scum of humanity, who could scarcely have done more in their lifetimes to destroy global ecosystems, is earth friendly.
Much of the wealth of the planet is held in secrecy. Tangled webs of corporate subsidiaries, thousands of banks and holding companies, shell entities intermixed with real industry, operating both within and outside of law and across national borders are scattered across the world. Countries exist whose sole purpose is to hide money. A dedicated phalanx of forensic accountants could labor for years and still not be able to tell us who owns what in this shadowy, shifting underworld. The freedoms to own unlimited amounts of private property and to keep one’s affairs from public view have been so abused and distorted for the purposes of a parasitic minority that we can only guess at who are the major players among the ruling elite at any given moment.
As the world economy collapses and food shortages loom, the waiting list for these 200 apartments in Dubai is at around 1100 and rising. Nero will indeed continue to fiddle while Rome burns.
What goes under the heading of conspiracy theory is a huge body of analysis and documentation assembled by thousands of researcher/writers over more than a century. This unmanageable and undisciplined conglomeration of opinion, fact, thesis and speculation is varyingly familiar to a small but substantial global population, numbering in some unknown tens of millions.
A sane and moral individual (and perhaps one of those adjectives is redundant) who has seriously considered even a small fragment of this literature cannot help but be shaken by its content and attendant ramifications. In the not-too-distant past the basic premises of conspiracy research were too easily dismissed by the average person as implausible, not because of a dearth of factual proofs of sufficient quality and quantity, but because of the enormity of the implications that this body of work points toward. An ongoing, ubiquitous and tireless propaganda effort by the status quo offers us the tempting soma of a well-meaning government which has the best intents towards the common man. In the fantasy land so created, most citizens maintain emotional stability by becoming the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. In the eyes of the state and a populace desperate to believe that all will be well in the end, the monkey who sees evil and speaks of it becomes the internal enemy—a blasphemous potential saboteur to be routed out. Beyond this very real hazard, escaping the insidious dreamland that most live in and accepting the dour probabilities of reality requires from the individual a radical revamping of his worldview of the most painful kind. It’s not mere hyperbole to describe the effects of such a profound shift of mindset as devastating. The human tendency to avoid uncomfortable truths prevents most people from taking the needed step towards a more accurate holistic view of reality. That tendency has never been a more tragic, dangerous and ultimately suicidal element in the makeup of the human species as a whole.
In stating the basic thrust of conspiracy theory as it applies to current and near-future events one need not be too specific. It is all too easy to lose a hard-won focus if the case for historic conspiracy and its present manifestation is not made strongly and succinctly. Briefly, the following seems a minimal and trenchant statement of what lies before us:
The current set of political elites across the world are knowingly creating conditions that will lead to the premature death of a billion or more people over the next three decades. This will happen together with the emergence of increasingly brutal and totalitarian governments and the disappearance of most of what people have known as freedom. It is already too late, even granting the best of outcomes, to prevent either of these disasters from largely coming to pass.
There can be few current facts of existence, if these are facts, that can be more vitally important in the individual life of any of the existing six and one half billion human beings.
The individual who accepts these possibilities is obliged to deal with this enormity in terms emotional, mental, spiritual, psychological and physical. Within my own internal dialogue, by physical I once meant “Is there anything to be done?” I’ve lately come to understand that this is the wrong question. To ask that question presupposes that there might, indeed, be nothing to be done. In this case I believe living in hope that there are things to be done is a prerequisite for existing as a moral person. If we were to accept the inevitability of it all, we would be, if not choosing evil, at the least letting it roam free and unfettered without protest. Even supposing that the universe is so constructed that the law of the jungle really must win in the end, there is no reason for human beings, collectively or in solitude, to surrender to that supposed inevitability. We are, after all, a species who compulsively and habitually alters the environment around us. That includes the moral environment, certainly.
So the right question is not "Is there anything to be done?" There may be a hundred indicators proving there is nothing to be done. The right questions are of the sort “What shall we do?” or “How do we wish our world to be?” On a personal note, writing on these topics is a gut wrenching, frustrating, fearful experience for me, akin to facing a gauntlet of dentists, traffic policemen, proctologists and internet talk show hosts. Part of the reason for that is I feel a great obligation to say encouraging things. Finding those things to say and still telling the truth is difficult. But better and braver have broken these trails, and if I can clarify any issues for another person or add my bit of esprit de corps, I welcome the opportunity.
At any given time, broadly speaking, the people have always had just as many rights as it took to preserve the illusion among them that they have any rights at all. Let's not speak of rights as if the universe hands them out to the deserving. It will always be the case that force prevails in the granting or preserving of rights, whether that force be exercised by an insane oligarchical minority or a more or less inept democratic majority, for, after parsing out all political experience and theory of the last five thousand years, these are the essential choices left to us.
We must indeed choose between not very good democratic government and truly evil government of another sort. There will be no benevolent dictatorship on this planet, ever, save metaphysical intervention. There will be no benign rule by any self-chosen minority. The central obstacles to the formation and persistence of preferred democratic governments are an intertwined set.
Before describing these obstacles, it can’t be stressed too much that, even though such cultures of hierarchical dominance are now the norm and have been so historically, they are entirely artificial. Such social structures are and have always been impressed upon us for the purposes of the psychotic few and have nothing of the natural about them. We have inadequate examples of the possibilities of a society not poisoned by a demonic and twisted Darwinianism and it’s not my main purpose here to paint pictures of various possible Edens. It’s sufficient to state the obvious: that man’s worst enemy need not be the society which he is born into. A little further on I’ll briefly describe one version of many such possible societies.
Here are the main reasons why governments grow malevolent:
Firstly, unless there are specific methods in place to prevent it, power in a society tends to devolve to those who desire it most. Upon the briefest reflection, this is as self-evident and as glaringly true as any proven dictum of physics, yet the fact generally sits in isolation, is rarely included as a primary causative factor in theoretical thinking, and does not cause many to alter their preconceived notions of preferred solutions to the problem of human government. That power goes to those that want it, and the obvious corollary that these are the worst people to have it, are facts which are seldom allowed for or acted upon.
There are reasons why the idea meets with resistance. It is difficult for the average person to discard their internalized cosmologically dramatic scenarios of good men versus bad men. This scenario plays out in the average mind in some manner such as this: If we could only get rid of the current set of villains in government and put in place good leaders, then things might be saved. This is a gestalt that has been imprinted on the populace from birth and its purpose is to prevent us from thinking in terms of process and think exclusively in terms of personality. This fantastical drama of heroes and villains begins in the waking-dream life of the individual and ends in the real world where our heroes create hell on earth. The sociopath is a skilled actor and will always be ready to step into the role of hero, while the populace continues to be entranced by what has been for centuries merely a stage play.
There is no contradiction here in stating that the sociopaths are in charge, but that the solution to that state of affairs is a de-emphasis on personality and a single-minded concentration on process. Acknowledging that the bad are in control is basic. It is the continual and total rejection of experience by the masses of men (and when I speak of men I of course mean both men and women) who allow the idea to persist that there is any way by which the good may replace the bad in the current system of political parties and elections. Sociopaths do not tell us who they are. Placing all men under severe constraints regarding the degree of power they may exercise is the best way to include the sociopath in that body of men so constrained.
Endemic in any population is an obstinate strain of neurosis which pushes us individually to seek power over others. An adolescent tendency to prefer the triumph of heroes and great men is stubbornly entrenched in the mass of men of all classes, while the study of political systems and the mechanics by which leaders are chosen is seen to be tedious and banal. Among the majority of the common man this quest for power may define a larger or smaller part of the personality. If such desired power is not achieved in an individual’s real life, it is experienced in fantasy or by the vicarious sharing of it as a subordinate of someone who has achieved it. However illusory, in essence, this vicarious sharing of power is, this phenomenon accounts for the puzzle of otherwise moral people aligning themselves with obviously malevolent foci of power. The degree that any individual is preoccupied with power over others varies greatly with the particular time and culture and that individual. In this area, what is considered morally acceptable or psychologically normal will also vary with that time and that culture.
Secondly, the other main obstacle to the formation of a democratic society is the tendency of people to either reflexively trust government as ultimately benevolent on the one hand, or else consider it as immovably powerful and malevolent on the other. This is characteristic of the majority. These seemingly opposite attitudes are held in tandem by a great many people. As paradoxical as this seems on superficial examination, there is a sad sort of consistency to be observed here. Both attitudes preclude an active skepticism towards power—active being the operant word here. Both attitudes excuse non-participation in government by the individual. Both attitudes justify a passivity and inactivity towards injustice. Each is used alternately to escape the moral imperative of resisting evil. The mass of people can become quite adept at ignoring the inherent and attendant moral contradictions that are continually generated by allowing government to do what it will.
This would seem to leave advocates of democracy in a quandary. How does one promote a political system where the majority of people must become active in ruling themselves when the percentage of people desiring such a system or even imagining that it is possible is nowhere near a majority? I’ll take up this question again towards the end of this essay.
