The biggest mistake the elites made with the scamdemic was to let us see what good buddies they really are, because this instantly and inadvertently presented the 99.9% with a shocking and previously quite carefully hidden reality about the true nature of power and geopolitics.
Horizontal conflict narratives have for centuries been a major part of how elites control their populations. Catholic v Protestant, Moslem v Christian, black v white, male v female, gay v straight etc etc. It’s a tried and trusted method of channeling frustrations, shaping minds and keeping people’s minds off the real authors of their misfortunes.
Behind the facade of conflict the elites have always shared a common bond of mutual interest. Kings (mostly) knew to honor the divinity of other kings even in defeat. Even when they killed each other they did it reluctantly and in the guise of “natural causes”. They knew their own populations were the real common enemies against which they knew to make common cause.
War was just another method of achieving this as well as gratifying some degree of personal pride.
Nothing much has changed in the modern era. And a great deal of the legacy media’s energy has long been devoted to helping to conceal the reality of the “big (supranational) club” that we ain’t in.
Until, that is, the recent huge error of judgement by the world’s leaders when they chose to abandon the carefully maintained “horizontal divisions” narrative in favor of some New Age, New Normal narrative of “international solidarity and co-operation to beat the virus”.
They were clearly going for some “Independence Day” type hug-fest psychic effect. Humanity falling into each other’s arms and deciding to work together in WHO-created mutual New Normal benevolence to defeat an invisible enemy that will, of course, never be defeated.
It did not go over as planned.
They just tried to sell it too hard too fast. And they blew it.
Gordon Brown reacting to a few hundred “COVID” deaths by saying we needed a world government (not yet, Gordon, too soon!).
Goldfinger Schwab and his stupid book of “happy peasant” delusional raving.
Insane overkill on the “nothing will ever be the same” meme based on a few flu cases.
All pushing their own magically produced untested toxic concoctions, all unctuously mouthing the same lies in a hundred different languages.
They goofed and made it just too obvious how closely in sync they are.
Sure they did also seed a few “alternative” deadly virus narratives that halfheartedly muddied the waters by blaming China, or maybe the US, but it wasn’t enough to counter the truly stunning images of international elite solidarity. Most particularly east-west solidarity.
Why were the Chinese elites spearheading this lie? Why were the Russian elites promoting it?
This was a big wake up moment for many many people all over the world.
Not for the majority, of course. For the majority there was nothing but zombified lockstep, absolute obedience, bizarre levels of willing self-destruction.
But for a large and growing minority the very opposite began to happen.
This growing minority began realizing, not only that the pandemic was a massive lie, but also began to discern that most carefully hidden and most explosive truth — that the elites of the world – all the world – owe allegiance to each other above and beyond any trapping of national identity.
And that convincing us this is not true had heretofore been a huge part of retaining their power.
Faced with this awakening some people began to see they had no choice but to take control of their own destiny rather than wait for their governments to save them.
Small grass roots and spontaneous rebellions began sprouting. First it was just a very few but then more and more people began challenging the pandemic lie. There were mass marches in cities across the globe and small local “stand in the park” protests. People were speaking out, reaching out. The truckers began their convoy.
Suddenly from a place of darkness there was real hope. Not invested in some phony hero politician or some noisy celebrity populist, but in ourselves. Groups of ordinary people began realizing they could take back their lives.
And simultaneously the pandemic narrative began to falter.
Vaccine uptake was not meeting expectations. Even people who had one jab were getting reluctant to have another. Some of those who had once been compliant began to feel they’d had enough.
By autumn 2021 the New Normal – and, more importantly, the system promoting it – were actually in some trouble. The worst trouble they had known for a while.
Faced with overwhelming resistance the “Independence Day hug-fest”, and indeed the whole pandemic narrative, began to go into panic-reverse. Mask mandates began to be canceled. Quarantines abandoned. QR codes likewise.
And the elites began to recall the benefits of those good old tried and true horizontal conflict narratives.
The US began accusing Russia, China began accusing the US. Israel began bombing everyone again.
But not because they wanted to distract you from that awkward realization about how chummy they really are behind the scenes!
No. Never. Not at all.
It was because Russia suddenly got extra scary. And those Nazis in Ukraine suddenly became seriously worrying. And Israel got all worried about terrorists and Iran again. And Taiwan….yada yada.
And, obviously, those elites who can all agree to tell the same lies in the same words at the same time and produce the same “response” and promote the same “solutions” in lockstep over covid just can’t agree at all over anything else.
Because deep seated ideological and strategical differences make it impossible.
Oops.
So, the US had no option but to start provocations in the China Sea and flood Ukraine with weapons and advisors, and Russia had no option but to invade Ukraine.
It was all inevitable. Like death and taxes. Just something that wise people know had to happen.
And the fact it rescued the power structure from a dicey little moment is absolutely and totally a coincidence.
Yes, it did reinstate all the old conflict narratives and allow the media to make a lot of noise and distract people while the embarrassing “Independence Day co-operation” narrative snuck out the room.
And yes, it did rescue the New Normal and provide a lovely new reason for potential rationing, belt-tightening, forever shortages, travel restrictions and all the other things Goldfinger Schwab and his billionaire supranational globalist chums really like.
But coincidences are like that.
Coincidental. Convenient. And no need to look any further.
I mean – would your favourite world leader really start or provoke a war just for convenience or profit? Would they really sacrifice lives just to benefit themselves?
Ok, maybe the Americans would, because Imperialism.
But Russia? China? They’re more moral, right. Higher ethical plain.
I mean sure, they are all equally happy to let their citizens get injected with untested toxic sludge, and sure they just worked with the West to joint-perpetrate an unprecedented global scam that may have killed or maimed millions.
And sure there is quite a lot to be gained from “winning” in Ukraine, aside from defeating Nazis. Fat rebuilding contracts. Access to a lot of resources.
And of course the same convenient distraction equally serves West and East.
But no, come on. Sure they were all in lockstep in 2020. And, ok they still are in lockstep in 2022 – but only over the pandemic lie!
They are absolutely opposed and forced into conflict about everything else, and we need to take a side, support the good guys who are rooting for a better world.
The only alternative is to recognize that horizontal divisions benefit them not us. That neither side is good, or rooting for anything but their own advantage, and that fundamentally, as ever, the global 0.1% take care of their own interests while striving hard to deter and divert us from doing the same.
I suggest we stop being diverted and deterred, remember the lesson of 2020 and continue on the path of personal and collective awakening they are doing their best to lure us from.
The US financial sector has long looted other countries. A number of participants have described the process. First a country is enticed with bribes to the leaders to take out loans that cannot be serviced or repaid. Then in comes the IMF. Austerity is imposed on the population. Public services and employment are cut to free resources for debt service, and public assets are sold to repay the loan. Living standards fall, and US corporations take over the country’s economy.
As foreign governments, having experienced or witnessed the economic carnage and fearing accountability, are less willing to be bribed into indebting their countries, American finance is now applying this technique to Americans. Contrary to the narrative in the financial press, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates in order to fight inflation. It is ludicrous to think that a three-quarters of one percent rise in a very low interest rate is going to have any impact on a 9.1% rate of consumer inflation or that speculation that the Federal Reserve has in mind another three-quarters of one percent possibly followed by one half of one percent comprise an anti-inflation policy. If all these increases occur, it still leaves the interest rate below the inflation rate.
Moreover, as I have previously explained, the inflation is not monetary. The higher prices are the result of supply disruptions caused by Washington’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions. Production was stopped and supply chains are broken.
The Federal Reserve’s rise in interest rates is just a continuation of its policy of concentrating income and wealth in the hands of the One Percent. Quantitative Easing was the cloak for the Federal Reserve to print $8.2 trillion in new money which was directed or found its way into the prices of stocks and bonds, thus enriching the small number who own most of these financial instruments. Having maxed out this avenue of wealth concentration, the Federal Reserve is now raising interest rates in order to drive up mortgage costs to aspiring home owners. The Federal Reserve is driving individuals out of the housing market in order to free up properties for “private equity” firms to purchase homes for their rental values. That private equity firms see rental income from the existing stock of houses as the best investment opportunity tells us that the US economy has played out. When investment goes into existing assets, not into producing new assets, the economy ceases to grow.
The Obama regimes policy of bailing out the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 crash while foreclosing on their victims, reduced American homeownership from 70% to 63 percent. The Urban Institute predicts further declines. Today homeowners’ equity has declined from 85% after World War II to one-third, leaving two-thirds of homeowner equity in the hands of creditors. This makes it completely clear that a financialized economy indebts the people for the sake of rentier income to the One Percent. Indeed, the financialized economy created by the Federal Reserve has reimposed a class system akin to the landed British aristocracy that was overthrown. Indeed, we have an economically far worst class system. The landed British aristocrats produced food that fed the nation. The American class system produces interest and fees for the financial system.
As Michael Hudson has shown us, a no-growth economy is the end result of a financialized economy. A financialized economy is one in which consumer income is diverted by debt expansion away from the purchase of new goods and services into debt service and fees–interest on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loan debt. With such a large share of household income spent on debt service, little is left for driving the economy forward.
If American economists were capable of escaping from their neoliberal junk economics, they would realize that “the world’s largest economy” they attribute to the United States is total fiction. The fact is that the United States does not have an economy. Corporations driven by Wall Street located American manufacturing in Asia so that the One Percent could benefit from higher profits from lower labor costs, while the deserted city and states had to sell their income streams, such as Chicago’s parking meter revenues for 75 years, to foreigners for one lump sum payment to solve one year’s budget crisis.
The offshoring of American production, carried out under the cloak of “globalism,” destroyed the American economy and the tax bases of cities and states. While the real economy declines, the Democrat Party, seeking permanent power, has imposed a policy of open borders for immigrant-invaders. How are these millions of peoples to support themselves in an economy whose manufacturing has been moved abroad? How can a population, deserted by American corporations, that is experiencing debt deflation absorb the costs of support and social infrastructure for tens of millions of third world immigrant-invaders?
You will never hear it from the whores in the financial press, but the United States is on the precipice of economic and social collapse. And what are the fools in Washington doing? The idiots are ginning up wars with Russia, China, and Iran.
These are not good times for Joe Biden. When the U.S. economy is performing well whoever is in the White House is going to get most of the credit. Likewise, when the U.S. economy is performing poorly whoever is in the White House is going to get most of the blame. That is just the way that it is, and that is one of the primary reasons why most Americans are quite displeased with Joe Biden right now. Things are not going well at all, and the outlook for the months ahead is even worse. The American people are becoming increasingly frustrated, and a new Gallup poll that was just released discovered that “confidence” in the presidency has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded…
President Joe Biden has pushed the presidency to a place it hasn’t been in nearly 50 years.
In the latest Gallup poll, less than a quarter of those surveyed have “confidence” in the presidency, worse than during the Trump presidency and nearly as bad as the end of the George W. Bush presidency.
Going back to 1975, Gallup has never recorded a confidence reading as low as Biden’s 23%.
Other polls have come up with similarly stunning results. For example, a different survey that was just released discovered that a whopping 88 percent of all Americans believe that the nation is heading in the wrong direction…
The White House was faced with another dire poll Tuesday that found that 54 percent of Americans believe the middle class hasn’t benefited ‘at all’ from President Joe Biden’s policies.
On top of that, the new Monmouth University Poll found that 88 percent of Americans surveyed said the country was headed in the wrong direction – with just 10 percent saying it’s headed the right way – a record low.
Just think about that.
88 percent.
In this day and age, it is difficult to get 88 percent of Americans to agree on anything.
But almost all of us seem to agree that the country is going downhill, and according to that same survey Americans are currently more concerned about economic matters than anything else…
Nearly half those surveyed said inflation and gas were the biggest concerns currently facing their families, with 33 percent saying inflation and 15 percent pointing to fuel costs.
A lot of people out there don’t really care much about what is going on in the world until it starts affecting their personal finances.
And these days the American people are feeling a tremendous amount of pain.
In fact, the consumer confidence index that is put out by the University of Michigan just fell to an all-time record low…
The University of Michigan’s gauge of consumer sentiment fell sharply to a record-low reading of 50.2, down from a May reading of 58.4. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal had expected an June reading of 59.
The level is comparable to the low point reached in the middle of the 1980 recession, the university said.
The American people have never been more pessimistic about the economy.
Ever.
And we have a guy in the White House that has a really difficult time even putting a coherent sentence together at this point.
As you celebrate the 4th tomorrow, remember our President's inspiring words about this great nation. pic.twitter.com/EcNoXNuY8l
Of course the team around Biden is not exactly competent either.
Time after time, the Biden administration has made colossal blunders. This week, we learned that someone in the Biden administration apparently thought that it would be a good idea to send oil from our strategic petroleum reserve to China…
Because he hates Americans, President Joe Biden is shipping much-needed American oil to foreign countries, including… China.
The whole idea of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is owned by the U.S. government, specifically the U.S. Department of Energy, is to hold on to about 700 million barrels of oil in the event of an emergency or disruption.
I was floored when I first read that.
Who would be stupid enough to do such a thing?
Someday we are going to need the oil in the strategic petroleum reserve, and hopefully there will be some left when that moment finally arrives.
This week we have also been getting more numbers that indicate that the economic slowdown in the United States appears to be picking up speed.
LinkedIn, a unit of Microsoft, saw its hiring rate fall 5.4% month over month in June on a seasonally adjusted basis, the lowest level since December 2021, according to new data released on Friday. On an annual basis, the employment platform’s hiring rate tumbled 11.9% in June.
LinkedIn’s hiring rate is calculated based on the percentage of the platform’s members who added a new employer to their profile in the same month the new job began divided by the total number of LinkedIn members in the United States.
And we just learned that new vehicle sales during the month of June were depressingly low…
Automakers have now reported their June new vehicle sales, or their Q2 new vehicle sales, for the US, except Tesla, which doesn’t report US sales but only global sales. All automakers, even Toyota, and now even Tesla, are struggling with the ongoing semiconductor shortages, and they started the month of June with desperately low inventories on dealer lots and in transit.
And so new vehicle sales in June plunged by 13.5% from the already horribly beaten-down June 2021, to 1.127 million vehicles, and collapsed by 25% from June 2019, the last decent year in the industry, according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis today
It appears that a recession is already here, and the months ahead are going to be really tough.
So I would encourage you to get out of debt.
And I would also encourage you to build up your emergency fund.
This is not a time to fritter away your money on unnecessary things. You want to put yourself in the best position possible to weather the “perfect storm” that is ahead, because things certainly aren’t going to be getting easier from here.
As the economy deteriorates, the frustration of the American people is going to get deeper and deeper.
Needless to say, that isn’t good news for Joe Biden.
“And thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the working class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in the capitalistic system itself.” Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) (preface to the English Edition, p.36)
The IMF and World Bank have for decades pushed a policy agenda based on cuts to public services, increases in taxes paid by the poorest and moves to undermine labour rights and protections.
In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies.The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.
Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI) have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.
According to Prof Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization, the closure of the world economy (March 11, 2020 Lockdown imposed on more than 190 countries) has triggered an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Governments are now under the control of global creditors in the post-COVID era.
What we are seeing is a de facto privatisation of the state as governments capitulate to the needs of Western financial institutions.
Moreover, these debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.
It raises the question: what was COVID really about?
Millions have been asking that question since lockdowns and restrictions began in early 2020. If it was indeed about public health, why close down the bulk of health services and the global economy knowing full well what the massive health, economic and debt implications would be?
Why mount a military-style propaganda campaign to censor world-renowned scientists and terrorise entire populations and use the full force and brutality of the police to ensure compliance?
These actions were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.
Prof Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University implies we should have been suspicious from the start when the usually “unscrupulous ruling elites” froze the global economy in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (the over 80s).
COVID was a crisis of capitalism masquerading as a public health emergency.
Capitalism
Capitalism needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall. The capitalist needs to accumulate capital (wealth) to be able to reinvest it and make further profits. By placing downward pressure on workers’ wages, the capitalist extracts sufficient surplus value to be able to do this.
But when the capitalist is unable to sufficiently reinvest (due to declining demand for commodities, a lack of investment opportunities and markets, etc), wealth (capital) over accumulates, devalues and the system goes into crisis. To avoid crisis, capitalism requires constant growth, markets and sufficient demand.
According to writer Ted Reese, the capitalist rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. Although wages and corporate taxes have been slashed, the exploitability of labour was increasingly insufficient to meet the demands of capital accumulation.
By late 2019, many companies could not generate sufficient profit. Falling turnover, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.
Economic growth was weakening in the run up to the massive stock market crash in February 2020, which saw trillions more pumped into the system in the guise of ‘COVID relief’.
To stave off crisis up until that point, various tactics had been employed.
Credit markets were expanded and personal debt increased to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages were squeezed. Financial deregulation occurred and speculative capital was allowed to exploit new areas and investment opportunities. At the same time, stock buy backs, the student debt economy, quantitative easing and massive bail outs and subsidies and an expansion of militarism helped to maintain economic growth.
There was also a ramping up of an imperialist strategy that has seen indigenous systems of production abroad being displaced by global corporations and states pressurised to withdraw from areas of economic activity, leaving transnational players to occupy the space left open.
While these strategies produced speculative bubbles and led to an overevaluation of assets and increased both personal and government debt, they helped to continue to secure viable profits and returns on investment.
But come 2019, former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences. He argued that the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression.
King concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.
That is precisely what happened as key players, including BlackRock, the world’s most powerful investment fund, got together to work out a strategy going forward. This took place in the lead up to COVID.
Aside from deepening the dependency of poorer countries on Western capital, Fabio Vighi says lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions allowed the US Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation. Lockdowns suspended business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion.
COVID provided cover for a multi-trillion-dollar bailout for the capitalist economy that was in meltdown prior to COVID. Despite a decade or more of ‘quantitative easing’, this new bailout came in the form of trillions of dollars pumped into financial markets by the US Fed (in the months prior to March 2020) and subsequent ‘COVID relief’.
The IMF, World bank and global leaders knew full well what the impact on the world’s poor would be of closing down the world economy through COVID-related lockdowns.
Yet they sanctioned it and there is now the prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people worldwide will fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone.
In addition to helping to reboot the financial system, closing down the global economy deliberately deepened poorer countries’ dependency on Western global conglomerates and financial interests.
Lockdowns also helped accelerate the restructuring of capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for Big Tech, the digital payments giants and global online corporations like Meta and Amazon and the eradication of millions of jobs.
Although the effects of the conflict in Ukraine cannot be dismissed, with the global economy now open again, inflation is rising and causing a ‘cost of living’ crisis. With a debt-ridden economy, there is limited scope for rising interest rates to control inflation.
But this crisis is not inevitable: current inflation is not only induced by the liquidity injected into the financial system but also being fuelled by speculation in food commodity markets and corporate greed as energy and food corporations continue to rake in vast profits at the expense of ordinary people.
Resistance
However, resistance is fertile.
Aside from the many anti-restriction/pro-freedom rallies during COVID, we are now seeing a more strident trade unionism coming to the fore – in Britain at least – led by media savvy leaders like Mick Lynch, general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), who know how to appeal to the public and tap into widely held resentment against soaring cost of living rises.
Teachers, health workers and others could follow the RMT into taking strike action.
Lynch says that millions of people in Britain face lower living standards and the stripping out of occupational pensions. He adds:
“COVID has been a smokescreen for the rich and powerful in this country to drive down wages as far as they can.”
Just like a decade of imposed ‘austerity’ was used to achieve similar results in the lead up to COVID.
The trade union movement should now be taking a leading role in resisting the attack on living standards and further attempts to run-down state-provided welfare and privatise what remains.
The strategy to wholly dismantle and privatise health and welfare services seems increasingly likely given the need to rein in (COVID-related) public debt and the trend towards AI, workplace automisation and worklessness.
This is a real concern because, following the logic of capitalism, work is a condition for the existence of the labouring classes. So, if a mass labour force is no longer deemed necessary, there is no need for mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.
In 2019, Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused British government ministers of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population” in the decade following the 2008 financial crash.
Alston stated:
“As Thomas Hobbes observed long ago, such an approach condemns the least well off to lives that are ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. As the British social contract slowly evaporates, Hobbes’ prediction risks becoming the new reality.”
Post-COVID, Alston’s words carry even more weight.
As this article draws to a close, news is breaking that Boris Johnson has resigned as prime minister. A remarkable PM if only for his criminality, lack of moral foundation and double standards – also applicable to many of his cronies in government.
With this in mind, let’s finish where we began.
“I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie…
For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold.
In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted.”Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), p.275
Who controls the food supply controls the people. Who controls the energy can control whole continues. Who controls money can control the whole world. – Henry Kissinger
Around 1868, the Indian Wars had briefly paused and the soon to be butchered treaties remained in force. However, the US Federal government and private interests were well aware that the “Indian Question” and “problem of the savages” was still unanswered. In other words, the “problem of the savages” was that the savages still existed. Those “savages” had been beaten back for years by the US regular army but they were not completely vanquished. In fact, despite being outmanned and outgunned and with little to no competition for the advancements in weaponry of the US Army, the Native Americans routinely routed the American military, at times slaughtering whole detachments.
But now that the secessionists had been dealt with, it became apparent that it was now time to remove the gloves from the iron fist of the coming settlements and that the Native Americans had to be annihilated, subjugated, or displaced from their native lands. Railroads, telegraphs, mines, and the like were all being hampered by the very existence of Native Americans.
Enter William Sherman, the general famous for his brutal March to the Sea, the burning of Atlanta, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure in the US Civil War. Say what you want about Sherman, the man knew how to win a war. He knew that breaking the backs of the civilian population and the ability of the society as well as military to sustain itself was a successful method of warfare. He also knew that the Native Americans relied upon buffalo for food and shelter and indeed their very survival. In a letter penned in 1868, he wrote that as long as the buffalo were alive, “Indians will go there. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all.”
And so it became unofficial Federal policy that the buffalo had to be extinguished in order to solve the vexing “Indian problem.” Over the next ten years, the buffalo were hunted by privateers, highly encouraged by the US government, to the point of near extinction. Where buffalo once numbered about 30 million, by the end of the 1800s, that number had been reduced to just a few hundred.
In Andrew C. Isenberg’s book, The Destruction Of The Bison, Isenberg writes of a reporter who asks a railroad worker, “Do the Indians make a living gathering these bones?’ Yes, replied a railroad inspector, ‘but it is a mercy that they can’t eat bones. We were never able to control the savages until their supply of meat was cut off.”
Fast forward to 2022. After nearly three years of COVID hysteria, lockdowns, economic disruptions, and schizophrenic government responses, the United States as a whole, as well as the rest of the world, is facing a food shortage. Claims that once belonged only to “preppers” and “conspiracy theorists” are now mainstream news items, with corporate media outlets reporting that some items may be in short supply or simply not available at all. All that is necessary is a brief internet search to see a myriad of mainstream reports of shortages of meat, vegetables, baby formula and many other staple items. Just a cursory walk around the local grocery store will reveal a fairly obvious shortage of many items though the pain is now mostly at the point of being an inconvenience moreso than a reason for panic. For now.
But talk of a food shortage is more than scattered news reports. Even the United Nations is warning of one, but not just in the United States. The UN is warning of a global food shortage. As ABC News reports,
The head of the United Nations warned Friday that the world faces “catastrophe” because of the growing shortage of food around the globe.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the war in Ukraine has added to the disruptions caused by climate change, the coronavirus pandemic and inequality to produce an “unprecedented global hunger crisis” already affecting hundreds of millions of people.
“There is a real risk that multiple famines will be declared in 2022,” he said in a video message to officials from dozens of rich and developing countries gathered in Berlin. “And 2023 could be even worse.”
Guterres noted that harvests across Asia, Africa and the Americas will take a hit as farmers around the world struggle to cope with rising fertilizer and energy prices.
“This year’s food access issues could become next year’s global food shortage,” he said. “No country will be immune to the social and economic repercussions of such a catastrophe.”
Notice that Gueterres also mentions the rising prices of fuel and fertilizer. This is something else that is being experienced worldwide, not just in the United States. Of course, Western media and the ruling party would have the population believe that Vladmir Putin is hoarding all the world’s gas via Ukraine, imposing restrictions and taxes on the vulnerable people of the United States who were on their way to energy independence just three short years. Now, however, they somehow woke up begging other countries for fuel, licking the boots of the Saudis, and blaming Vlad for the doubling of the price at the pump. Clearly, it has nothing to do with intentionally shutting off oil pipelines and punishing businesses and working people on behalf of the climate and faulty notion that man-made CO2 is causing temperatures to rise and the planet to reach a point of irreversible calamity.
Again, however, fuel prices aren’t just rising in the United States. They are rising across the world along with fertilizer and food costs and along with the price of just about any consumer good. Inflation, too – the hidden tax that is making itself well known in the United States – is popping up in the majority of countries across the globe. Who knew printing large amounts of money would cause that money to be worth less and thus cause prices to rise to compensate?
Living standards, too, are dropping all across the world with polio now rearing its head in the UK again for the first time since the 1980s. Polio, of course, is a disease that thrives on the low living standards and poor sanitation of the third world, a world which was partially imported to the UK all the while the standards of living (healthcare, sanitation, nutrition, etc.) have been gradually eroded. It’s not just the UK either. Living standards have been falling in the US for decades but accelerating recently. That is, of course, unless one chooses to believe silly “happiness indexes” repeated out of the UN to promote globalism and Free Trade policies.
Even basic services are falling apart. Labor shortages from pilots to the service industry are causing disruptions in the economy, rising prices, and chaos at airports. All happening globally.
Food shortages are happening globally. Food prices are rising globally. Fuel and fertilizer are rising globally. Living standards are falling globally. Inflation is rising globally. Labor shortages are global. Transportation is falling apart globally. See a pattern yet?
Everything disruption happening nationally is also happening globally. Are we expected to believe that every government across the world simply made the same stupid decisions at the same time? That none of them could figure out the source of the problem? Shouldn’t at least one of them have stumbled on the right path forward and lead the others through the mist? Or should we assume that there are more factors at play here and remember that anytime we see the same thing happening across the world at the same time agendas that are global in nature and have no respect for national boundaries are marching forward? I would argue the latter.
Keep in mind, all of these “global crises” came to be out of the “global pandemic,” itself at best an opportunity that was not allowed to go to waste. At worst, a global hoax designed to usher in the Great Reset. COVID, after all, is still a virus that has yet to be fully identified in a lab, yet the entire world was locked down at the same time, a prison planet brought in to being, upon this dubious evidence and weak justifications. Regardless, COVID’s biggest casualty was freedom.
None of the current crises have arisen on the basis of a chain of befuddled reactionaries acting in ignorant unison across the globe to an emerging “pandemic.” In fact, the only ones ignorant of the pandemic and coming responses were the unsuspecting civilians who willingly gave up their most basic rights over fear of a virus that has never been isolated in a lab and still is not able to be accurately tested for.
Still think COVID just surprised everyone in power as much as it did the unsuspecting citizens? Consider briefly how, in the months before the alleged pandemic arose, a simulation exercise was held at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in concert with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation regarding the emergence of a global coronavirus pandemic that results in mass disruption of life and culture as we know it, economic chaos, and disruption of basic services.
On May 15, 2018, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted the “Clade X” pandemic exercise in partnership with the WEF.
The Clade X exercise included mock video footage of actors giving scripted news reports about a fake pandemic scenario
. . . . .
The Clade X event also included discussion panels with real policymakers who assessed that governments and industry were not adequately prepared for the fictitious global pandemic.
“In the end, the outcome was tragic: the most catastrophic pandemic in history with hundreds of millions of deaths, economic collapse and societal upheaval,” according to a WEF report on Clade X.
“There are major unmet global vulnerabilities and international system challenges posed by pandemics that will require new robust forms of public-private cooperation to address” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
Then on October 18, 2019, in partnership with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WEF ran Event 201.
During the scenario, the entire global economy was shaken, there were riots on the streets, and high-tech surveillance measures were needed to “stop the spread.”
. . . . .
Two fake pandemics were simulated in the two years leading up to the real coronavirus crisis.
“Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security issued a public statement on January 24, 2020, explicitly addressing that Event 201 wasn’t meant to predict the future.
“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic.”
Intentional or not, Event 201 “highlighted” the “fictional” challenges of a pandemic, along with recommendations that go hand-in-hand with the great reset agenda that has set up camp in the nefarious “new normal.”
“The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
Together, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation submitted seven recommendations for governments, international organizations, and global business to follow in the event of a pandemic.
The Event 201 recommendations call for greater collaboration between the public and private sectors while emphasizing the importance of establishing partnerships with un-elected, global institutions such as the WHO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Air Transport Organization, to carry out a centralized response.
. . . . .
One of the recommendations calls for governments to partner with social media companies and news organization to censor content and control the flow of information.
“Media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though [sic] the use of technology” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
According to the report, “Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation.
“National public health agencies should work in close collaboration with WHO to create the capability to rapidly develop and release consistent health messages.
“For their part, media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though [sic] the use of technology.”
Sound familiar?
Throughout 2020, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been censoring, suppressing, and flagging any coronavirus-related information that goes against WHO recommendations as a matter of policy, just as Event 201 had recommended.
Only the last two are yet to have checkmarks beside them, though mainstream economists are pointing toward September as a possible date for the mass unemployment. Surely, unless there is some inflationary printing by governments, the riots will then follow.
At the core of the COVID scam as well as the subsequent crises mentioned above is the ushering in of an entirely new society, that depicted by UN Agenda 21 and the Great Reset, itself the beginning of a global society reminiscent of that depicted in the The Hunger Games.
So what is the Great Reset? Essentially, the term comes from both a June 3, 2020 event sponsored by the WEF entitled The Great Reset which featured statements from leaders of the IMF, World Bank, and members of the corporate and banking sectors of the United States and UK as well as book written by Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF, entitled COVID19: The Great Reset. Both the book and the event echoed the same sentiment, i.e. that the world economy must be shut down and “reset” in order to usher in a new economy based upon the ideals of Agenda 21 and the Green New Deal.
The overall goal of the WEF’s so-called great reset agenda has always been to reshape the global economy and revamp every aspect of society, with or without COVID.
Another concern is whether to believe that the lockdowns, the limited mobility, the destruction of small businesses, the crashing of the economy, the home evictions, and the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world are all necessary to stop an “invisible enemy,” along with the subsequent curtailing of freedom that hasn’t been seen in the free world since the beginning of the so-called War on Terror.
“This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us” — WEF report
According to Schwab, the post-COVID fourth industrial revolution will lead to “a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities.”
In his books, “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” (2020) and “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” (2017), Schwab envisioned a future of tracking and tracing every individual through digital identities connected to the Internet of Bodies (IoB) ecosystem.
For example, in “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Schwab noted:
Any package, pallet or container can now be equipped with a sensor, transmitter or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that allows a company to track where it is as it moves through the supply chain—how it is performing, how it is being used, and so on.
In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people.
. . . . .
The digital identity agenda picked-up speed throughout 2020, starting with contact tracing and continuing with immunity passports to monitor and control citizen mobility for the greater good.
After attempting to justify mass surveillance in the interest of public health and safety, Schwab wrote in “COVID-19: The Great Reset” that in the post-pandemic era “the genie of tech surveillance will not be put back in the bottle,” and that “dystopian scenarios are not a fatality.”
Below are just a few quotes from “COVID19: The Great Reset:”
Now that information and communication technologies permeate almost every aspect of our lives and forms of social participation, any digital experience that we have can be turned into a “product” destined to monitor and anticipate our behavior.
. . . . .
The pandemic could open an era of active health surveillance made possible by location-detecting smartphones, facial-recognition cameras and other technologies that identify sources of infection and track the spread of a disease in quasi real time.
. . . . .
Dystopian scenarios are not a fatality. It is true that in the post-pandemic era, personal health and wellbeing will become a much greater priority for society, which is why the genie of tech surveillance will not be put back into the bottle.
. . . . .
The combination of AI, the IoT and sensors and wearable technology will produce new insights into personal well-being. They will monitor how we are and feel, and will progressively blur the boundaries between public healthcare systems and personalized health creation systems – a distinction that will eventually break down.
Hinchcliffe also writes:
Between 2014 and 2017, the WEF called to reshape, restart, reboot, and reset the global order every single year, each aimed at solving various “crises.”
2014: WEF publishes meeting agenda entitled “The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business.”
2016: WEF holds panel called “How to reboot the global economy.”
2017: WEF publishes article saying “Our world needs a reset in how we operate.”
In 2020, the coronavirus was the catalyst needed to enact the great reset plan that had been bubbling under the surface for years, and immunity passports are just another step in the overall plan to track and trace every citizen through their digital identity.
One of the few statements made by the WEF related to its future goals was a bizarre article published by Forbes entitled, “ Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better,” where the WEF contributor describes a futuristic society (eight years away) that resembles a feudalist communist utopia where there is no such thing as privacy or private property and AI runs society. The article is so bizarre because, while it attempts to paint a utopia, even the fictional narrator can’t seem to keep from sounding like a brainwashed cult member. It reads
My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.
Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.
All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.
Combined with the Social Credit System, UBI, and digital passports, UN Agenda 21, mentioned above, the next step after the world’s economic and cultural systems are “reset,” will be implemented, creating what is essentially a global version of the Soviet Union, gulags and all. For those who are unaware, UN Agenda 21 is an established and published plan developed by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Affairs. The plan, according to the UN website, is a “comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations system, government, and major groups, in every area in which humans have impact on the environment.”
The plan essentially calls for government control of all land, where human and animal lifestyle and activity is strictly limited and controlled, humans rounded up into “habitat areas,” and individual rights are a thing of the past. Travel will be restricted to essential vehicles only and diet will be mandated by the dictates of the “needs” of the environment.
This is precisely why we are seeing chaos at airports for lack of pilots, why the supply chain is broken and why food is becoming scarce. This is not by accident. In fact, food-processing facilities have been burned,vandalized, and rendered inoperable all across the United States in seemingly random acts. But how random are they? Did a sudden mass psychosis take hold which prodded people into carrying out attacks against food-processing facilities? Or, again, is there an agenda afoot?
Is it any coincidence that the very goals set forth by Agenda 21 and the Great Reset have been met one by one in the last two years?
Economic shutdown and “reset” – COVID Lockdowns and furloughs, artificial labor shortages.
Food shortages – disruption of supply chain by lockdowns, labor shortage, “random” attacks on food facilities, destruction of crops, culling of farm animals, rising fuel prices.
Restriction of travel – rising fuel prices, fewer cars functional due to trade disruption, harder to find parts, COVID travel restrictions, vaccine passports, digital monitoring of travel, pilot shortages.
Loss of individual rights – slow burn for decades but COVID lockdowns, vaccine passports, travel restrictions, right to gather all drastically infringed upon under “emergency measures” have eviscerated the concept of individual rights.
Unemployment – global economy already struggling before COVID, after the “pandemic,” however, many businesses simply disappeared.
But there is some light in all this. Where many people simply panicked at the outset of the “pandemic” and willingly gave up their rights and their critical thinking skills, the subsequent infringement upon their daily lives for such a sustained amount of time with little to no logical standards for actually preventing disease, many eventually began opening their eyes to the fact that another agenda was being put in place. In fact, more people than ever before have begun to openly question and oppose what their governments are doing in the name of keeping them safe and healthy.
So, after two years of having their most basic rights shredded and destroyed, the savages have become restless. They’ve started to realize that the treaties of the status quo between themselves and the global ruling glass were not being honored and so they began to question the legitimacy of that ruling class. They voted, they protested, they demonstrated, and refused to comply.
And what is the response of the ruling class? “We were never able to fully control the savages until their supply of meat was cut off.” It’s not very inventive but it is effective. So the question dear reader is, if you are a savage and your meat supply is being cut off, what should you do? Well, ask yourself what should the native Americans have done? I’ll leave that up to you but, I think you already know the answer.
When is the last time you were outside in the morning to experience a glorious dawn? Or sat watching the sun set across the ocean horizon?
How do you feel when you touch the skin of someone you love? A grandparent, parent, lover or child?
Have you ever seen a spider’s web full of morning dew, or after the rain, when the sun is shining through the droplets in the web to reveal the flashing diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds hidden within?
Have you ever stood in a natural environment – a beach, desert, rainforest… – far from a city and noticed that strange and subtle feeling of freedom tremor through your body?
Have you ever marveled at the breath of wind that cools your face on a hot Summer’s day? Or been intoxicated by the smell of blossom in Spring?
Have you gaped in wonder at the birth of new life: a chick pecking out of its shell, a seed germinating or a baby being born?
Or paused to ponder the sheer magic of being alive yourself?
Or do you find life in the real physical world too constricting, painful, frightening and demanding: something from which you seek to escape, with some distraction or another (work, television, sport, a novel, a drug…), as often as you can?
Well, very soon now, we are promised, you will be able to escape reality far more effectively than those primitive means of distraction made possible previously. And far more effectively than even the outcomes promised in those dystopian novels.
So the fundamental questions we must ask ourselves are simple: Do you want real life, with all of the pains, sorrows, fear and fury that go along with beauty, freedom and love? Or do you believe what they tell us and want everything unpleasant to go away? Permanently. And to live in delusion thereafter, given synthetic versions of all of the pleasant feelings and experiences described above?
Remember the dialogue between the Savage and Mustapha Mond during the closing stages of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World?
‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’
There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.
Well, after nearly one hundred years, the dystopian future described by Huxley is almost upon us and, if we are to defeat it, we need a lot more ‘savages’ willing to forego the promised ‘comforts’.
Because if those who see themselves as our global masters get their way, we are about to enter a virtual world that will become more complete by the day and from which there will be no escape.
The Metaverse
Based on many years of effort, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has recently launched its plan to create our new all-digital world, called the ‘metaverse’. See ‘Defining and Building the Metaverse’.
So if you find natural phenomena – ranging from rainforests, beaches and weather variations to ill-health, danger and unhappiness – annoying, you will soon be able to escape them, compliments of the metaverse. Or so we are promised. And you won’t be troubled by anything resembling what might be called ‘free will’ either. You will be content to do as you are told, even more than you are content to do already. See ‘Terrified of Freedom: Why Most Human Beings are Embracing the Global Elite’s Technotyranny’.
After all, your mind will no longer be your own. And while the usual descriptions, written by elite agents, fail to mention it, a quick flash of metaverse-induced fear will make sure that you comply, whatever you are required to do. The point is this: You won’t be escaping all of those unpleasant feelings after all. They can just be used to control you more directly, to fulfill an elite-determined purpose. But that is a fact they are not advertising.
In their iconic hit song ‘In the Year 2525’, written in 1964 by Rick Evans and later recorded by he and Denny Zager to become a No.1. hit around the world in 1969, Evans captured key elements of what is already upon us somewhat ahead of the schedule mapped out in the song.
[Chorus 2] In the year 3535 Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies Everything you think, do, and say Is in the pills you took today
[Chorus 3] In the year 4545 Ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes You won’t find a thing to chew Nobody’s gonna look at you
[Chorus 4] In the year 5555 Your arms are hanging limp at your sides Your legs got nothing to do Some machine’s doing that for you
[Chorus 5] In the year 6565 Ain’t gonna need no husband, won’t need no wife You’ll pick your sons, pick your daughters too From the bottom of a long glass tube Whoa-oh-oh
So what is the Metaverse?
According to the WEF: ‘The metaverse is a future persistent and interconnected virtual environment where social and economic elements mirror reality. Users can interact with it and each other simultaneously across devices and immersive technologies while engaging with digital assets and property.’ See ‘Defining and Building the Metaverse’.
Moreover, ‘if technologists are right that 2022 will separate thinkers from builders, then last years’ technical advances will produce this year’s first steps towards making the metaverse a reality….
‘But from the perspective of the human experience, one development stands out above all others: extended reality (XR) technologies. These include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and brain-computer interfaces (BCI), which together position themselves as the next computing platforms in their own right.’
Having written that, here is one definition elaborated in the article above that reveals just how far some of those heavily involved in this work have become disconnected from any sense of themselves and, hence, reality: ‘Specifically, the metaverse is the moment at which our digital lives – our online identities, experiences, relationships, and assets – become more meaningful to us than our physical lives.’ The original quotation can be read here: ‘Spheres of Self: Performativity and Parasociality in the Metaverse’.
And, as Cathy Li describes it, the metaverse is ‘most useful as a lens through which to view ongoing digital transformation. The belief is that virtual worlds, incorporating connected devices, blockchain and other tech, will be so commonplace that the metaverse will become an extension of reality itself.’ See ‘Who will govern the metaverse?’
Let me reiterate two points from the paragraphs immediately above: ‘our digital lives… become more meaningful to us than our physical lives.’ And ‘the metaverse will become an extension of reality itself.’
Really?
While statements such as these reveal the breathtaking level of insanity that underpins this entire enterprise – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – it does not mean that we are not under enormous threat. Just as vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, by some insane ‘logic’, are supposed to provide us with ‘security’ while actually threatening the existence of all life on Earth, the metaverse is part of a substantial package of measures that will reduce human life to one not worth living.
Why? Well, as noted by authors such as Tom Valovic: The metaverse is one element in the path to implementing technocratic governance over all of humanity.
‘As Planet Earth and our physical world continue to experience massive biospheric degradation and disruption, the elites that are now in many cases pulling the strings of governance at the country level are heading for the exit doors. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are exploring the realm of space and Musk has a Mars mission planned. Globally oriented elites… looked out for themselves which is what they do best….
‘Paralleling the notion of space flight as a form of existential escapism is the metaverse. So what if our cities are crumbling, infrastructures falling apart, and the biosphere is seriously degrading? So what if our wasteful consumer-driven lifestyle has created unprecedented levels of pollution so extensive that it’s now the number one cause of health problems globally? No problem… we’ll just kick back and don our Meta headsets (or worse get a brain implant) and escape into an artificially fabricated world that lets us turn our back on the massive ecological and environmental problems we now face.’ See ‘Why We Should Reject Mark Zuckerberg’s Dehumanizing Vision of a “Metaverse”’.
‘Education’ in the Metaverse
Of course, the metaverse is deeply interwoven with other components of their plan, such as those in relation to what they call ‘education’, which is more accurately described as the process by which young transhuman slaves are programmed to perform their function in the technocratic economy that is being imposed upon us. Of course, ‘education’ sounds better than ‘virtual programming of young transhuman slaves’ so, in the interests of not raising obvious concerns, the word ‘education’ has been used.
As noted by Dr. Michael Nevradakis, discussions on this subject at the recent gathering of the World Economic Forum emphasized the importance of virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with participants touting the purported educational and economic benefits that would derive from use of these technologies in the classroom by helping, according to Dr. Ali Saeed Bin Harmal Al Dhaheri & Dr. Mohamad Ali Hamade, to ‘increase accessibility, enhance quality and improve the affordability of education globally’. See ‘Experiential learning and VR will reshape the future of education’.
Of course, there is no need for concern about the ‘early-life experiences’ of those young transhumans who are being programmed for decades of servitude prior to being terminated when they are no longer functional.
Beyond claimed educational and economic benefits, however, some authors argue that digitalizing education can play a role in easing pressures on the environment and climate. How so? Nevradakis again: ‘Indeed, the WEF said the use of “textbooks, notebooks and pencils as critical learning tools” is on the way out, due to “environmental pressures and COP26 goals (from the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference),” which “will drive the digitalizing of education streams.”’ See ‘Future of Education? WEF’s Vision – Heavy on Virtual Reality and AI Technologies, Light on Privacy Concerns’
But it is clearly delusional to suggest that the use of textbooks, notebooks and pencils has greater adverse impact on the environment and climate than the environmental cost and climate impact of producing sophisticated technology for each student. And despite claims of ‘improved affordability’ it is equally delusional to ignore the economic and social cost, for example, to the child ‘laborers’ in the Congo working in appalling conditions to extract strategic minerals to produce this technology. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.
Besides, as touched on below, education is already a monstrous experience, destroying the Selfhood of the child so that they become submissively obedient. Removing the bulk of education’s remaining social component by technologizing it can only make it even worse.
Babies in the Metaverse
Then again, maybe ‘children’ will no longer be put through school. It simply won’t be necessary because children, for transhuman slaves at least, will no longer exist.
By 2070, the metaverse will offer you virtual babies, ‘environmentally-friendly digital children’, according to UK artificial intelligence (AI) expert Catriona Campbell. ‘Parents will see and interact with their offspring through next-generation AR [augmented reality] glasses and haptic gloves.’ The latter devices enable users to experience ‘a realistic sense of touch when handling virtual or holographic objects’. As a bonus, these children take up no space, cost nothing to feed and remain healthy, if that is what you want, for as long as they are programmed to ‘live’. A subscription might cost as little as $25 each month.
And if this seems like a monumental leap out of reality to you, Campbell also believes that ‘within 50 years technology will have advanced to such an extent that babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world…. As the metaverse evolves, I can see virtual children becoming an accepted and fully embraced part of society in much of the developed world.’ See ‘“Virtual babies” who grow up in real time will be commonplace by 2070, expert predicts’.
That’s right, Campbell is claiming that ‘within 50 years… babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world’! Pause a moment. How does that sound to you?
Beyond the criticisms already noted above, there are a great many other criticisms of the metaverse and the role it will play in the overall elite program being implemented under what the WEF calls its ‘Great Reset’. This comprehensive program will transform human society and human life for those people left alive after the eugenics component has been fully implemented. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.
If you like, you can read a little more about what the masters of this metaverse intend for us, as well as critiques of it, by authors such as these.
Derrick Broze: While some people ‘may not intend for The Metaverse to become an all encompassing reality that supersedes physical reality, for the Zuckerbergs, Microsofts, and WEFs of the world, that is exactly what they intend for The Metaverse…. For the billionaire class and their puppet organizations, such as the WEF and the United Nations, the Metaverse offers up the potential to commandeer all life into digital prisons where the people can be charged for services and products in the digital realm…. With the people of the world safely tucked into their digital beds, the Technocrats could complete their total takeover of natural resources, the economy, and humanity itself.’ See ‘The Great Narrative And The Metaverse, Part 2: Will The Metaverse End Human Freedom?’
Dr. Michael Nevradakis: ‘Who will govern the “metaverse”?… According to the WEF, “real-world governance models” represent one possible option for metaverse governance. However, far from referring to constitutionally defined institutions of governance, with checks and balances, the WEF cites Facebook’s “Oversight Board” as an example of such a “real-world governance model.”’ See ‘WEF Launches “Metaverse” Initiative, Predicts Digital Lives Will Become “More Meaningful to Us Than Our Physical Lives”’.
So if you believe that you and I are destined to have a say in the metaverse that is unfolding, you would be wise to keep investigating. Elite proposals are invariably very distant from the type of governance models usually considered by ‘ordinary’ people in a multiplicity of contexts, where the emphasis is on facilitating widespread grassroots participation, not rule by technocrats.
And here’s another simple issue to ponder. Remember how I mentioned above that a quick flash of metaverse-induced fear would ensure that you complied with an elite-determined directive, how does the idea of eating bugs, processed sewage and human flesh appeal? Well, given that your mind will no longer be your own, what appeals now, or doesn’t, will be irrelevant once the metaverse is determining how you perceive things. See ‘Canadian Company Pledges To Produce TWO BILLION BUGS Per Year For Human Consumption’ and ‘Will You Eat Cultured Meat Grown From Human Cells?’
You will eat ‘Soylent Green’ because that is what the program tells you.
So why are people embracing the Metaverse?
In a recent article in which he described taking his son to watch a film through 3D glasses, Charles Eisenstein noted ‘The on-screen reality was so vivid, stimulating and intense that it made the real world seem boring by comparison.’ See ‘Transhumanism and the Metaverse’.
Fundamentally, this terrorization works because it compels our children into suppressing awareness of how they feel. As a result, only the most intense experiences register emotionally: The capacity to experience a subtle feeling has been lost. And without this capacity, they cannot develop into the powerful, courageous Self-willed individuals that evolution intended. They are human relics. Ready and willing to be turned into a transhuman slave in the unconscious hope they will be finally able to experience, in the metaverse, what was taken from them in the real world as a child.
But they won’t get that experience, even in the metaverse. It is not what the elite has in mind for us.
Resisting the Metaverse
Of course, the metaverse is just one feature of the Global Elite agenda that is being imposed upon us. And it is not enough to resist individual features of the ‘Great Reset’ program. We must strategically resist its most fundamental elements so that the entire agenda is defeated.
If you are inclined to join those strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.
In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 17 languages (Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.
If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).
And if you want a child who is powerfully able to perceive the dysfunctional lure of the metaverse, and is able to join you in resisting it, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.
CONCLUSION
So, for just a little longer, the choice is yours.
You can live your life with all its challenges and problems, joys and achievements. Or you can live the virtual life that someone else programmed for you, including whatever comes with it that they didn’t tell you about.
In short, like Neo in the film ‘The Matrix’, you have a choice. You can choose the Blue Pill and proceed to live in a synthesized, fictional, computer-generated world. Or you take the Red Pill and, in this case, join the fight with those of us determined to defend the real world and avert descent into the metaverse.
But you must make that choice while you still have free will.
So you must make that choice soon.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
The idea of the Great Reset derives from the New World Order which is still alive in the minds of the establishment or who we can call the globalists from people like Henry Kissinger to the current US president, Joe Biden. Of course there are many others on the top levels of the pyramid whose ideas range from establishing a police state, to implanting microchips the day we are born to track and trace us, to depopulating the planet. I know it all sounds insane but that’s what the globalists have planned for us for a very long time. Klaus Schwab’s protégé, Yuval Noah Harari, is an Israeli born intellectual who authored a popular bestseller titled ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ and is also a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harari once asked a disturbing question, “what to do with all these useless people?” Harari is an intelligent man, there is no doubt about that, but his intelligence has led him to the level of insanity. Harari is an influential member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) who supports the idea of creating a dystopian society managed by a handful of globalists who will rule over every human being on earth from the day they are born. According to Harari, planet earth is overpopulated:
Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people? The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless?
My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening…In under different titles, different headings you see more and more people spending more and more time or solving the inner problems with the drugs and computer games both legal drugs and illegal drugs…
They also want people to stay home connected to the Metaverse world, a virtual reality simulation and at the same time get them addicted to all sorts of drugs. The kind of world they are trying to create for us is pure lunacy. Wired, a monthly magazine describes the metaverses as a combination of the digital and physical worlds that creates a virtual reality as in the Hollywood film, ‘Ready Player One,’ The article ‘What is the Metaverse, Exactly?’answers that question, “Broadly speaking, the technologies companies refer to when they talk about “the metaverse” can include virtual reality—characterized by persistent virtual worlds that continue to exist even when you’re not playing—as well as augmented reality that combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds.”
Many other Hollywood films that are based on virtual reality in the future includes Jumanji, Source Code, The Matrix, Total Recall, Inception, and many others. The globalists want you to believe that a dystopic society is in the works for us, but no worries, you will be completely happy at least according to Klaus Schwab. In my opinion, the notion that the human species will be living their lives through virtual reality is far-fetched, it’s an illusion that will take decades even centuries to accomplish and that would only happen if we allowed it to happen. Harari is saying that under a scientific, technocratic world order, the state will be your sole provider for everything, so basically, he says that families are not needed in this new world they are creating for us, in other words, having a family will be a thing of the past:
After millions of years of evolution suddenly within 200 years the family and the intimate community break, that they collapse most of the roles filled by the family for thousands and tens of thousands of years are transferred very quickly to new networks provided by the state and the market, you don’t need children, you can have a pension fund, you don’t need somebody to take care of you, you don’t need neighbors and sisters or brothers to take care of you if you’re sick, the state takes care of you, the states provide you with police, with education, with help with everything
Listen to Harari’s own words in this video:
The World in Crisis: A Stakeholder Economy, the Green Agenda and Covid-19
Rahm Emanuel worked for US presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama under various titles, but one quote he will always be remembered for was when he said “you never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” That is exactly what happened under the Covid-19 global health emergency. Klaus Schwab, who is the original founder, and executive chairman of the WEF published an article that outlines three basic components of the Great Reset titled ‘Now is the Time for a ‘Great Reset,’ in the first component, they would help steer or “improve coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy), upgrade trade arrangements, and create the conditions for a “stakeholder economy.” How would this work? There are more than 195 countries in the world meaning that all these countries would have to establish a “unified” tax, regulatory and fiscal policy, all in sync, all with the same laws and that would be impossible even if they tried because all countries have different tax systems, different economies and cultures and that will not change because of a handful of globalists with outlandish ideas of a unified financial system they want to control for their own benefit. It’s a ridicules idea. In fact, more countries today are more open to imposing less taxes and regulations to attract foreign investments to grow their economies, so the WEF ‘s recommendations will never work, in fact its dead-on arrival.
Then there is the looming financial crisis that can ultimately force the world into a Federal Reserve Bank “Digital Currency” known as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that will be tracked by the government on how you spend your money. What can go wrong with this idea? If in any case, you are not politically aligned with a particular party or refuse an experimental injection, then the government may block your transactions. In other words, they can literally control when and how you spend your money and that is something most people will not accept. An article published by Stefan Gleason who is an investor, political strategist, and grassroots activist wrote an interesting analysis last year for fxstreet.com titled ‘The Great Reset is Coming for the Currency’asks what will be the next major issue for a Global Reset? “As the Great Reset proceeds from globalist think tanks and technology billionaires to allied media elites, governments, schools, and Woke corporations, what will be “reset” next? The next reset will most likely take place in the financial sector as “Supporters of the World Economic Forum’s all-encompassing Great Reset agenda are eyeing BIG changes for the global monetary system.” Biden’s Treasury Secretary and former Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen wants to end the use of various cryptocurrencies and have the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issue CBDC’s. “Yellen derided Bitcoin as “an extremely inefficient way to conduct transactions” because “the amount of energy consumed in processing those transactions is staggering.” Gleason says that Yellen and her colleagues are planning to have the public use digitized tokens issued by the central bank. The bottom line is that “They just want to make sure those digits are issued and controlled by governments and central banks.”
The best way to avoid the Federal Reserve bank’s control over your finances is to own gold, silver, and other safe-haven assets. “Anyone who is concerned about the prospect of being herded into a new digital currency regime should make it a high priority to own tangible money that exists outside the financial system.” Gleason makes the case for owning gold and silver, “No technology or government mandate can change the fact that gold and silver have universally recognized, inflation-resistant value.” At some point, the public will reject the Federal Reserve and its ‘digital currency’ if they can avoid it. However, the best way to bypass CBDC’s in the future is to buy gold, silver, and other metals that that can maintain value and become resistant to inflationary pressures. An important note to consider is that all US silver coins that were produced before 1964 were minted with 90% silver and 10% copper, so keep an eye on your pocket-change just in case you come across some silver coins with value.
The second component “would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability. Here, the large-scale spending programs that many governments are implementing represent a major opportunity for progress.” Which means that governments will be required to print an unlimited money supply to support their agenda that will eventually lead to inflationary pressures which can devastate their respective economies. “Here, the large-scale spending programs that many governments are implementing represent a major opportunity for progress. The European Commission, for one, has unveiled plans for a €750 billion ($826 billion) recovery fund. The US, China, and Japan also have ambitious economic-stimulus plans.” They are pushing for an expensive Green Agenda which is part of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that will change how the world operates when it comes to using traditional energy resources such as coal, oil, and natural gas:
Rather than using these funds, as well as investments from private entities and pension funds, to fill cracks in the old system, we should use them to create a new one that is more resilient, equitable, and sustainable in the long run. This means, for example, building “green” urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics
The vast majority of human beings want high rather than low economic growth, and so politicians ultimately choose policies that make energy cheap, not expensive.
And the limitations of weather-dependent renewables are more visible than ever. If California’s large wind energy project is built, it will provide less than half of the energy of California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant Newsom is planning to close in 2025, and it will be unreliable. During the heatwave-driven blackouts last summer, there was little wind in California or other Western states, meaning we can’t count on wind energy when we need it most.
In other words, the Democrats’ climate change and renewable energy agenda is rapidly falling apart, and the reasons have far more to do with physics than with politics
Schwab proposes that the third component is basically the innovations that will lead to centralized control of the world’s health policies by the World Health Organization (WHO) However, the innovations began the moment WHO officials declared a global Public Health Emergency more than 2 years ago. Schwab mentioned the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ which is described on the World Economic Forum’s website as a new system that “shapes new policies and strategies in areas such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and digital assets, the internet of things or autonomous vehicles, and enables agile implementation and iteration via its fast-growing network of national and sub-national centres.” Regarding Covid-19 or any other declared public health emergency in the future, the new system will be able “to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges. During the COVID-19 crisis, companies, universities, and others have joined forces to develop diagnostics, therapeutics, and possible vaccines; establish testing centers; create mechanisms for tracing infections; and deliver telemedicine.”
However, there was a unified response put forward by a several nations including Brazil, India, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa, Malaysia and the practically the entire continent of Africa that rejected a pandemic treaty developed by the World Health Organization. They all agreed that the treaty would allow authorities from the WHO to gain control of their health policies bypassing their rights as sovereign nations. As the spirit of Tanzania’s late President, John Magufuli lives on, Reuters published the positive move on behalf of the African continent ‘Africa objects to U.S. push to reform health rules at WHO assembly’regarding Africa’s 47 nations who rejected the treaty “African countries raised an objection on Tuesday to a U.S.-led proposal to reform the International Health Regulations (IHR), a move delegates say might prevent passage at the World Health Organization’s annual assembly.” The treaty brought forward by the WHO and the US government was technically defeated which is a positive outcome considering what’s at stake:
If Africa continues to withhold support, it could block one of the only concrete reforms expected from the meeting, fraying hopes that members will unite on reforms to strengthen the U.N. health agency’s rules as it seeks a central role for itself in global health policy.
The IHR set out WHO members’ legally binding obligations around outbreaks. The United States has proposed 13 IHR reforms which seek to authorise the deployment of expert teams to contamination sites and the creation of a new compliance committee to monitor implementation of the rules.
But the African group expressed reservations about even this narrow change, saying all reforms should be tackled together as part of a “holistic package” at a later stage
Great news just came out of Geneva. We informed you about a meeting of the World Health Organisation that took place this past week in Geneva from the 22-28 May 2022 where some legally binding US Amendments to the International Health Regulations were to be signed.
The 198 countries that belong to the World Health Assembly were asked to sign the legally binding US Amendments into International Law which in essence would have robbed nations their sovereignty. The @A_C_D_P objected & drew a petition against it. The good news is that it failed
Western powers along with top level WHO officials will try to persuade or blackmail sovereign nations who originally rejected the IHR treaty to reverse their decision with a new modified version in hopes of centralized control of any future pandemic, but the current decision made by those nations who rejected the treaty is welcoming news indeed.
Just imagine the concept of a group of mostly unelected bureaucrats with the power to oversee a centralized control grid to rule over a global pandemic is Orwellian, in fact, the Great Reset kind of reminds me of the 1973 classic Hollywood film, Soylent Green with Charlton Heston based on the 1966 science fiction novel ‘Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison based on a dystopian society. The story is about a police investigation into the murder of a wealthy businessman while the world is experiencing a slow death from “greenhouse gases” that produced a variety of problems for humanity including overpopulation, pollution, poverty, crime, and the concept of enforced euthanasia by the state.
Soylent Green is an example of what a deranged group of globalists or in this case, government bureaucrats would do to humanity if we did nothing to stop them. In the film, Detective Thorn (played by Charlton Heston) warned his colleague Chief Hatcher (Brock Peters) “The ocean’s dying! Plankton’s dying! It’s people – Soylent Green is made out of people! They’re making our food out of people! Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food! You’ve gotta tell them, you’ve gotta tell them!” Although Soylent Green is obviously fictional, it’s a metaphor on how far globalists will be willing to go so that their agenda of world control and depopulation can succeed. In the film, the state strongly encouraged and even facilitated suicide which turned the people into food for the remaining population. It sounds insane but reading about the agenda of the Great Reset of you ‘owning nothing and being happy is the start of something more sinister in our future. I am not saying that they will try to turn people into food in the future, but they are certainly trying to push forward other outrages solutions to feed the world such as the possibility of people eating insects to survive. I wish this was a joke, but it’s not.
Globalists are calling for the world’s population to be completely vaccinated with their Covid-19 experimental injections, in other words, they want total control over the world’s healthcare policies to enforce the use of facemasks and endless vaccination schemes through government-imposed mandates on the population although Covid-19 experimental injections are injuring and even killing thousands of people around the world. Globalist plotters began their plan of action to implement their vaccine mandates as soon as the Public Health Emergency was announced, but there were governments who rejected the idea from the start. On December 3rd, 2020, Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ernesto Araujo clearly rejected the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset agenda by addressing the United Nations (UN) special session on COVID-19 by saying that “Those who dislike freedom always try to benefit from moments of crisis to preach the curtailing of freedom. Let’s not fall for that trap” In his conclusion, Araujo clearly states what is Brazil’s position on the idea of the Great Reset:
Fundamental freedoms are not an ideology. Human dignity requires freedom as much as it requires health and economic opportunities. Those who dislike freedom always try to benefit from moments of crisis to preach the curtailing of freedom. Let’s not fall for that trap. Totalitarian social control is not the remedy for any crisis. Let’s not make democracy and freedom one more victim of COVID-19
Is the World Ready to Embrace the Great Reset?
In the geopolitical spectrum, globalists are set on punishing sovereign countries who do not obey a rules-based order under the Great Reset agenda in partnership with the US-NATO alliance leading the world to some form of conflict or regime change against Russia, China, Iran, Belarus, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and any other nation who wants to remain sovereign at all costs. There are many who are vehemently opposed to such an idea, for example, on January 27th, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and basically rejected the idea of the Great Reset and gave a reasonable idea of humanity working together to achieve a prosperous future for all with “calls for inclusive growth and for creating decent standards of living for everyone are regularly made at various international forums. This is how it should be, and this is an absolutely correct view of our joint efforts” and that “It is clear that the world cannot continue creating an economy that will only benefit a million people, or even the golden billion. This is a destructive precept. This model is unbalanced by default.” Putin’s perception of the Great Reset or a unipolar world order is correct because it is destined for failure since the world is a complex place where nations have distinct cultures and history. Putin questions how nations would respond to a Great Reset with a rules-based order run by an elite group of psychopaths that expect a harmonious transition from all nations who are willing to comply:
We are open to the broadest international cooperation, while achieving our national goals, and we are confident that cooperation on matters of the global socioeconomic agenda would have a positive influence on the overall atmosphere in global affairs, and that interdependence in addressing acute current problems would also increase mutual trust which is particularly important and particularly topical today.
Obviously, the era linked with attempts to build a centralized and unipolar world order has ended. To be honest, this era did not even begin. A mere attempt was made in this direction, but this, too, is now history. The essence of this monopoly ran counter to our civilization’s cultural and historical diversity.
The reality is such that really different development centers with their distinctive models, political systems and public institutions have taken shape in the world. Today, it is very important to create mechanisms for harmonizing their interests to prevent the diversity and natural competition of the development poles from triggering anarchy and a series of protracted conflicts
The rejection of the Great Reset and its associated global institutions and industries such as the WHO, NATO and Big Pharma is a step in the right direction and the globalists are in panic. Brazil, Russia, the continent of Africa and others are proving that the Great Reset or that century’s old idea of a New World Order has become a failed project. Some people might disagree with my analysis because many are pessimistic about their future because they believe that a Great Reset is inevitable, that there is no escape from it because it seems that things are getting out of control with ongoing wars, coming food shortages and a growing danger of a global medical tyranny. However, I do believe that we are in the early stages of a great awakening, not a rules-based order managed by a group of globalists despite the endless propaganda on how the Great Reset will make the planet a better place for all of us.
People and certain governments are awakening to the fact that a group of globalists are working against them on every level, and they are starting to fight back. We do not want to be ruled by a centralized power telling us what to do or how to think. The concept of the Great Reset has failed in many ways, but there is still work to do.
Never give up, never allow a group of influential globalists whether they are billionaires or bankers, government bureaucrats or special interest groups, resist this ideology of a unipolar world order. We can win this war, there is still time, I believe that we will prevail if we just don’t comply with their goal of them trying to control us, the useless people.
It’s very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.
Today’s topic echoes Peter Turchin’s 2016 book, Ages of Discord, which I have often referenced in blog posts.
Turchin proposes repeating cycles of history of social integration (people finding reasons to cooperate) and disintegration (people finding reasons to not cooperate).
Clearly, we’re in a disintegrative stage.
Fischer proposed a repeating cycle of history in which humans expand their numbers and economy to consume all available resources.
Once all the low-hanging fruit has been consumed, scarcities arise, pushing prices above what commoners can afford, and the result is economic stagnation and social/political revolution.
Either humans exploit a new energy source at scale to provide for the larger population and higher consumption per person, or the population and consumption decline to fit available resources.
Parker covers the mutually reinforcing climate, political, social and economic crises of the 17th century. A long cycle of cold, wet summers reduced crop yields, leading to hunger and strife.
Parker also identifies another cause of the tumultuous, war-plagued 1600s: political leaders had consolidated too much power, enabling them to pursue disastrous wars without any restraint from competing domestic social-political interests.
Clearly, we’re in Fischer’s stage of overshoot and resource scarcity and Parker’s extremes of centralized power free to pursue catastrophic wars of choice.
In the 1600s, those launching wars reckoned a clean, decisive victory was within easy reach. In every case, the wars dragged on inconclusively or generated even wider conflicts.
In the end, all the wars were settled diplomatically, not by military victory. The military gains were nil while the destruction was widespread and devastating.
Fischer details how poorly humans respond to scarcity and higher prices, also known as inflation or more. accurately, as the decline in purchasing power of money and labor. As scarcities and higher prices take their toll, society unravels: crime and social disorder accelerate.
What we’re seeing in real time is a “circle the wagons” mentality of weeding out everyone but the True Believers in every movement. Litmus tests are handy for this test: answer wrong on any question and you’re cast out: heretic!
It’s not enough to tick one “progressive” or “conservative” box; you have to tick them all or you’re a heretic who cannot be trusted. If you leave one box unticked, you might untick a few more in the days ahead.
This puts pressure on everyone to declare their loyalty to the “party” even if the loyalty is just for show. This dishonesty pleases those demanding every box be ticked but this forced loyalty creates an illusion of solidarity that unravels under pressure.
Exacerbating this is social media, which rewards those promoting the most extreme and divisive positions and deranges the populace by substituting recognition online, which encourages disintegration, for real-world engagement, which encourages moderation and cooperation.
Online, it’s easy to be all-or-nothing: there should be no restrictions on social media, or we should just pull the plug and shut the whole mess down.
In the real world, these are knotty, nuanced problems. The Founding Fathers would not have tolerated sedition under the guise of free speech. The social order can only be maintained if every participant adheres to standards of civility and the common good.
When put under stress, humans harden their positions as a defensive measure. They become more argumentative and less tolerant, more strident in insisting that the One True Thing is the answer to our problems.
This leads to magical thinking, for example, that we can replace hydrocarbons with fusion or wind and solar. When the physical and cost limits of minerals are presented as impassable obstacles, people respond with denial: there must be a way to keep everything the same.
Humans have an easy time expanding their population and consumption per person and a hard time consuming less.
It’s very difficult to find common ground that supports cooperation in the disintegrative stage of scarcities, rising prices, catastrophically centralized power and social discord.
This requires accepting that we can cooperate with people on one issue even though all the other boxes of our group/party/movement are left unticked.
History suggests the disintegrative stage will run its course and consumption will realign with available resources one way or another, and the best we can do is preserve our own sanity, community and willingness to nurture small patches of common ground that support productive cooperation.
After the Crash 