In my very young days, I lived in a fourth-floor apartment in a five-story, pre-war, walk-up building. On the second floor, you’d find an older Italian couple: Mr. and Mrs. Larucci. (I say “older” because that’s how they appeared to me at the time. I’m probably older now than they were then.)
Anyway, the two Laruccis were the first cat people I had ever encountered. They religiously fed the local strays — rain or shine, in sickness and in health — in an alcove behind the building. Their diligence, effectiveness, and focus clearly inspired my mother and sister to become cat ladies/animal lovers for life. To a slightly lesser degree, both me and my Dad were influenced by witnessing all this animal-based altruism.
It was while dwelling in that building that I first showed signs of Early Onset Activist Syndrome. To follow are but two of many symptoms.
Even as a very young child, I understood:
1. The war in Vietnam was becoming increasingly unpopular
2. Being on TV is a really big deal to most people
So, it was while hanging out on the stoop with my grade school friends — not far from the 59th Street Bridge, connecting Queens to the east side of Manhattan — that I hatched a cynical scheme to allegedly capitalize on the above two facts.
About six of us staged our very own anti-war protest amidst the high volume of motor vehicles streaming down Crescent Street on their way to the city (Queens may be one of New York’s five boroughs but for us, only Manhattan is and will ever be “the city”).
Mimicking the images we saw nightly on our black-and-white TV sets, we made rudimentary signs and posters. One of my fellow subversives wasn’t a regular on the block. He was a little older than me, perhaps a classmate of my big sister. I can’t remember his full name but I do recall that his last name was Castro and that he later became notorious for ending up in the hospital after attempting to ride a motorized mini-bike down a flight of concrete steps.
By the time I was in my teens, I heard a rumor that Castro had died during the commission of a crime. Considering how many of my childhood friends ended up in jail or dying young, this was a rumor to be taken at face value.
Anyway, I can still see Castro’s chastened expression when I scolded him for a misspelling on his sign: “SPOT THE WAR!” it read. I insisted that he correct it.
With or without proofreading, we enthusiastically held up our protest posters to passing cars and trucks and yelled “stop the war” until our pre-pubescent voices grew hoarse. “Someone will call the news,” I promised, “and we’ll all be on TV tonight.”
Our children’s crusade lasted maybe 20 minutes. When it neither ended the war nor landed us on TV, we got bored. One by one, we heard our mothers’ voices calling us to dinner from different windows of the tenement buildings looming above us. Hunger trumped revolution, and the experiment was over. I don’t believe any of us ever mentioned it again.
Today, that same anti-war demo or rally or protest or march or whatever would’ve had its own social media event page. It would’ve been live-streamed. And it would’ve been deemed a “success” if it garnered even just one of us a kick-ass Facebook profile pic for which we could use the caption: #warrior.
Speaking of “anti-war,” a few years after I organized that futile demonstration, I first saw Duck Soup on TV. Instantly, I was hooked on the Marx Brothers… but I had a problem. You see, this was long before YouTube and free streaming services. It was also before VHS players and video stores.
To see more of the Marx Brothers, I had to hope that one of the local NYC channels (5, 9, 11) would randomly show one of their 13 films (12 actually, because Animal Crackers was in the midst of a legal battle at that time).
After catching a couple more of the Marxster’s movies, I grew tired of waiting for the rest so I hatched a plan. With help from my Mom, I found the names and addresses of the directors of programming of the local channels (easier said than done in the pre-Google days of yore).
I hand-wrote three passionate petitions — requesting/demanding more Marx Brothers movies be shown on their stations — and brought the documents to my Catholic grammar school.
I was popular enough and cool enough to convince, cajole, or coerce all my classmates to sign. Feeling mighty proud of myself, I mailed off all three petitions and sat back to wait for a steady supply of Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, and Groucho.
The weeks and months passed with a) no change in local programming and b) no reply from any of the stations. All the necessary lessons about “activism” were right there in front of me, but I wasn’t yet ready to learn. Not even close.
Nope, that part would only happen after decades had passed, and — through personal experience — I could finally recognize activism for what it is. And what it could potentially be.
This brings me back to Mr. and Mrs. Larucci. While I was trying to “spot” the war and spread “Marxism” on TV, my cat-loving neighbors just kept feeding and caring for the local strays. Regardless of weather or personal issues, they fulfilled their chosen mission.
Cat ladies get results.
A cat lady understands urgency when she encounters it. She also accepts her limitations and works around them. From there, she basically behaves like a triage nurse. As a result, she gets results. Day after day, felines within her reach are fed and have safe havens in which to hide. If they fall ill or are injured, they will be promptly cared for with dignity.
When others in the general area see a hungry, sick, injured, or threatened cat, they know who to contact: the local cat lady. No delusions of grandeur about shifting global conditions or ‘changing the conversation.’ No social media fame. Just results.
Finally, lessons learned.
So, to all the #woke activists still out there virtue signaling their way onto my news feed, I have this message from a song by Groucho:
Since the dawn of human civilization 5,000 years ago, ordinary people like you and me have been engaged in an endless struggle to resist efforts by elites, whether local, national, international or global, to assert complete control over us and the resources around us.
And for 5,000 years, with some wins and a great many losses, we have managed to stave off the worst.
Finally, in January 2020, the World Economic Forum launched its ‘Great Reset’: The final assault in the Elite’s long war against humankind and nature itself.
As we pass the third anniversary since this final battle was launched, it is well worth evaluating the progress of our resistance.
Is our resistance being effective? Are we succeeding?
Unfortunately, as is obvious from any serious evaluation, we are being smashed. Let me explain why.
[While they are not addressed in this article, I wish to acknowledge the range of other profound threats that pose a serious risk to any worthwhile human future, most notably the threat of nuclear war which arguably stands greater than at any previous time in human history.]
Evaluating Progress
Any strategy to resolve a conflict of this nature must begin with a sound analysis of what is happening:
Who is driving it (which answers the question ‘Who benefits?’) What do they intend? Why are they doing it? And how?
Only once these questions have been clearly answered is it possible to develop a strategy that will be adequate to the challenge posed by the threat.
So who is doing what?
Whatever we have been told by such organizations as the World Health Organization, national governments and the corporate media during the past three years, the most cursory investigation reveals that the World Economic Forum has been just behind the scenes effectively directing the response of governments to the threat supposedly posed by a ‘pathogenic virus’ labeled SARS-CoV-2.
However, any serious investigation will reveal that even the World Economic Forum is simply another ‘front’ for more powerful individuals and their organizations, which I call ‘the Global Elite’
And if you want to watch or read other accounts carefully explaining why no ‘pathogenic virus’ has ever been isolated, here is a token sample of the extensive documentation of this point:
In parallel with monumental efforts to convince us that we are living under enormous medical threat, and must submit to an onerous series of restrictions on our freedom, including multiple injections of a gene-altering bioweapon, a great deal has been going on that has been deliberately obscured from public view.
However, while information about this program is readily available to those who investigate – see, for example, the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ – the reality is that few people have investigated because they were terrorized into believing the cover story: Their life was threatened by a ‘virus’.
But if we spend time investigating the material presented on the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ website and reading critiques of it offered by well-informed researchers, one has no difficulty discovering that, on behalf of the Global Elite, the WEF is now implementing the Elite’s long-planned changes to 200 areas of human life.
To briefly elaborate just one set of changes being imposed as part of this program, consider the prospect of our technological imprisonment as transhuman slaves in ‘smart cities’.
What does this mean?
In essence: the Elite is rapidly building a complete technocracy based on surveillance and control technologies.
These technologies include (among many others) 5G, 6G, the Internet of Things (which will be connected to artificial intelligence [AI] programs that monitor the network of ‘smart’ devices you were deceived into implanting in your body and installing in your home),
geofencing (which will technologically confine you to five kilometres from where you live),
smart street poles and lights (which will gather data via facial recognition cameras and environmental sensors,
display digital signage and use speakers to instruct the immediate population how to behave), digital identity (which will be used to control your access to ‘approved’ activities),
central bank digital currencies (that will be used to control what you can buy,
how much of it and where),
surveillance and (3D) facial recognition cameras deployed in all public spaces (to monitor your movements and control your access), license plate readers, vehicle kill switches,
drones (used as aerial police), robots (including as a ‘deadly force option’) as well as autonomous and electromagnetic weapons. Beyond this, transhuman slaves will become ancilliary ‘workers’ in an increasingly robotized workforce.
To reiterate, these technologies will be used to monitor your every movement and completely control your behaviour, including by using the utterly transformed model of AI policing by drones and robots armed with electromagnetic weapons, as just touched upon.
In case it is not already obvious, this Elite-controlled technocratic prison will subvert human identity, human dignity, human volition, human privacy and human freedom.
Everything that makes human life worth living will be taken from you.
Why is the Elite doing this?
In brief, using a variety of means, this program based on a reduction of a substantial proportion of the human population, as is now happening, imprison those left alive as transhuman slaves in technocratic ‘smart cities’, enclose the Commons forever and deliver all remaining wealth into Elite hands.
Hence, according to the WEF, by 2030 ‘You’ll Own Nothing. And You’ll Be Happy.
And how is the Elite implementing this heinous program?
While the brief discussion above highlights the responsibility of the Global Elite for planning this program and then having it implemented through Elite agents including the World Economic Forum, relevant international organizations such as the WHO, national governments, pharmaceutical corporations and national medical associations, a critically important role has long been played by education systems, the corporate entertainment industry as well as the corporate media in ensuring that what most people regard as ‘knowledge’ and what most people believe is ‘true’ is always consistent with the Elite-promoted narrative.
Hence, in the current context, government media channels and most corporate newspapers, television and radio news programs as well as corporate social media giants have heavily promoted the Elite-driven narrative and routinely censored those telling the truth in exposing the Elite program.
As a result, while some people resisted the onerous restrictions on human freedom, few of these people understood the genuine threat that we faced from the elite plan concealed behind the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative. Consequently, most resistance has been focused on the wrong people, using ineffective means and with negligible understanding of what is taking place.
Hence, we are three years into this crisis that portends profound changes to human society, including the death of billions of people and the transhuman enslavement of virtually all those left alive, with only negligible progress in resisting this long-planned and sophisticated Elite program.
Let me elaborate.
We Are Being Smashed Politically
With the vast bulk of the human population trapped in the delusion that governments make the important decisions that shape our lives, virtually all effort to halt the substantial encroachments on our identity, dignity, volition, rights and freedom, including the injection mandates, has been directed at protest demonstrations, lobbying politicians (or voting for them) and petition-signing with those mobilized demanding that governments withdraw the restrictions and mandates.
This has meant that three years of efforts to mobilize people to resist have been misdirected and the resulting demonstrations, lobbying/voting and petitions have absorbed and dissipated the dissent, as those who truly govern intend.
As has been systematically documented, Elites of a local, regional, national, international and, most recently, global reach have controlled the political destiny of the population over which they exercised jurisdiction making the word ‘government’ a meaningless term. For a brief elaboration of this point, see
Beyond this, however, since World War II there has been an ongoing series of developments to create global infrastructure that subverts any remaining national sovereignty while shifting power to the Global Elite.
Among many initiatives, for example, the Global Public-Private Partnership has been presented by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham, on behalf of the World Economic Forum.
So what is it? According to Davis, the Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P) is a worldwide network of stakeholder capitalists and their partners:
the Bank for International Settlements,
central banks, global (including media) corporations,
the ‘philanthropic’ foundations of multi-billionaires,
policy think tanks,
governments (and their agencies),
key non-governmental organizations and global charities,
selected academic and scientific institutions, labour unions and other chosen ‘thought leaders’. (You can see an instructive diagram in the article cited below.)
The G3P controls the world economy and global finance.
‘It sets world, national and local policy (via global governance) and then promotes those policies using the mainstream media’, typically distributes the policies through an intermediary such as the IMF, WHO or IPCC and uses governments to transform G3P global governance into hard policy, legislation and law at the national level. ‘In this way, the G3P controls many nations at once without having to resort to legislation.
This has the added advantage of making any legal challenge to the decisions made by the most senior partners in the G3P (an authoritarian hierarchy) extremely difficult.’ In short: global governance has already superseded the national sovereignty of states: ‘National governments had been relegated to creating the G3P’s enabling environment by taxing the public and increasing government borrowing debt.’ See ‘What Is the Global Public-Private Partnership?’
As Davis notes:
We are supposed to believe that a G3P-led system of global governance is beneficial for us and to accept that global corporations are committed to putting humanitarian and environmental causes before profit, when the conflict of interest is obvious. ‘Believing this requires a considerable degree of naïveté.’
Davis clearly perceives ‘an emergent global, corporate dictatorship that cares not one whit about truly stewarding the planet.
The G3P will determine the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons. There is no opportunity for any of us to participate in either their project or the subsequent formation of policy.’ Davis goes on:
‘in theory, governments do not have to implement G3P policy, in reality they do. Global policies have been an increasing facet of our lives in the post-WW2 era…. It doesn’t matter who you elect, the policy trajectory is set at the global governance level. This is the dictatorial nature of the G3P and nothing could be less democratic.’
But, as explained previously and despite the claim by Davis of ‘an emergent global, corporate dictatorship’, this is just one of the more recent manifestations of national sovereignty being usurped by a Global Elite intent on removing even the delusion of any form of citizen engagement in policy determination and implementation. See ‘Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until “You’ll Own Nothing.”’
But, obviously, it doesn’t usually get to this. The Elite has a multitude of measures that enable it to control what most people like to believe are ‘democratic’ processes. For example, have you heard of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Young Global Leaders’ program in which the Forum indoctrinates carefully recruited young people to play their lifetime part in implementing Elite initiatives. You don’t get chosen for this program, or graduate from it, if you don’t have impeccable credentials. Just ask people as ‘diverse’ as President Emmanuel Macron, President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
As WEF head Klaus Schwab boasted at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2017:
But the YGL isn’t the only program of this nature. Have you heard of Schwarzman Scholars?
And if you think that we have legal redress to defend all those rights and freedoms supposedly guaranteed by a plethora of treaties, conventions, national constitutions and human rights laws, then you haven’t been paying attention while these have long been systematically ignored, if not simply wiped out. After all, legal systems exist to defend Elite power, profit and privilege, as the record demonstrates. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.
Next time you hear of a legal ruling that appears to favour ‘ordinary’ people, check back some months and years later to see if it survived the usual appeal processes and was ever actually implemented. And, if it was, did it actually change anything or simply lead to more of the same, as happens, for example, when a corporation is occasionally fined for some outrageous behaviour but absorbs the fine as a ‘cost of doing business’.
In summary, if you believe that international or national legal processes will hold the Global Elite (and not just the occasional scapegoated minion) to account, strike down vaccine mandates and a vast range of other violations of human rights, or even allow some of us to get some form of genuine compensation for the vast death, injury and damage inflicted historically or even just during the last three years, then I simply encourage you to read some history to see if you can find any evidence to support your belief.
We Are Being Smashed Economically
While many people have noted the damage done to the world economy by a series of measures supposedly carried out in response to the threat posed by the ‘virus’, ranging from lockdowns (which shuttered vast areas of the economy by disrupting all parts of the global supply chain and stopped most people from working) to vaccine mandates, the fact is that these measures were just the latest and most visible in a 5,000-year history of Elite action to secure and consolidate economic control, progressively enclose the Commons, enslave the human population in work to achieve Elite ends and capture all wealth, among other outcomes explained elsewhere in this article.
But the essence of this report is simple: Building on millennia of effort, since the late C19th a small group of extraordinarily politically powerful and wealthy families, that I call the Global Elite, has accelerated previous efforts to create a global political, economic and legal infrastructure that facilitates the unending concentration of Elite power. This includes effective ownership and control of all key components of the economy including the banking, asset management, weapons, energy, technology, agrochemical, food, mining, pharmaceutical and media industries.
In this world order, neither international governmental organizations such as the United Nations nor national organizations such as governments have any significant say in what takes place. And you don’t either.
We Are Being Smashed Medically
As noted above, there is no documented scientific proof that any such thing as a ‘pathogenic virus’ has ever been isolated, including in the instance of SARS-CoV-2.
But underlying this fact is a very lengthy story about how many long-standing traditional natural healing methods that are very powerful and were used for millennia were systematically discredited and destroyed, as well as how a conflict of ideas about how to approach the maintenance of human health – characterised by the opposing views of Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur in the C19th – culminated in the success of the latter’s ideas, because they enabled a rapid advance in the development of the centralized control desired by Elites, thus replacing long-standing and effective systems of health with one designed to attack human health and kill the patient or precipitate their (highly profitable) lifetime dependency on drugs.
Beyond this, however, ongoing strenuous efforts have consistently been made since the late C19th to control the health, medical and pharmaceutical information available to the public to ensure the suppression of effective treatments for various illnesses, including cancer – see Gerson Therapy – and thus ensure the profitability of the lethal medical, pharmaceutical, processed (including junk) food and confectionery industries, among others, as well as to endlessly consolidate the ever-tightening control over the human population exercised through medical means including through the latest manifestation of this effort, the Covid-19 scam.
However, like many subjects of this nature, much of the documentation in relation to this history has been carefully suppressed or eliminated, one way or another. Nevertheless you can read a sample of books that document it here:
In any case, as we discovered during the period supposedly marked by the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ and, as noted above, despite the complete absence of any scientific evidence of the existence of any such thing as a ‘pathogenic virus’, including in the instance of SARS-CoV-2, we were nevertheless subjected to a wide range of measures that constituted martial law and violated a wide range of our human and constitutional rights.
Notably, for example, James Roguski characterized the proposed changes to the International Health Regulations as amounting to ‘medical martial law’ and, out of a list of 100 reasons he compiled for opposing the proposed changes, he highlighted ten that were particularly offensive. These included the facts that the proposed changes would alter the status of the WHO from an advisory body to one that made proclamations that are binding on governments; remove from Article 3 a provision requiring ‘respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people’; give the WHO the power to mandate medical examination, proof of prophylaxis, proof of vaccine, contact tracing, quarantine and treatment; institute an intrusive system of digital (or paper) health certificates; and greatly expand the WHO’s capacity to censor what they believe to be misinformation or disinformation, among many other onerous provisions. See ‘A World-Wide Call to Take Immediate and Massive Action’.
Given that these proposed changes to the draft Regulations violate long-standing laws, implemented following the Nuremberg trials of Nazi doctors – see ‘The Nuremberg Code, 1947’ – protecting people’s right to choose whether or not to seek the form of medical treatment of their choice, it is clear that the Elite interests that have exercised ever-deepening control of human society are intent on continuing to use the pharmaceutical and medical industries as key tools in their armory to kill off significant numbers of people and control those left alive.
As an aside, while Katherine Watt carefully details the ongoing militarization of public health since the 1960s and the use of US military ‘kill box’ planning and tactics in relation to Covid-19 – see ‘Kill Box: Multi-Service Tactics, Techniques and Procedures for Kill Box Planning and Employment’ – she attributes this approach to the ‘globalist central bankers’ realizing that pharmaceutical killing enabled a more credible ‘plausible deniability’ and more reliable basis for legal impunity, compared to some of its other measures – such as orchestrated wars, famines and financial crises – for killing off substantial human populations. See ‘Katherine Watt presentation’.
But, in fact, the Global Elite is well aware that there is no prospect of it being held accountable, legally or otherwise, just as its predecessor Elites have never been held accountable for their millennia-long rampage to kill off substantial human populations through wars, imperialism, colonialism, acts of genocide against indigenous and other peoples, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, precipitated famines, the functioning of capitalism, precipitation of depressions and other financial crises, as well as other measures. Why won’t the Global Elite be held accountable now? For the same reason Elites have never been held accountable, as illustrated above: A range of measures give it control over governments and legal systems, as well as control of the narrative (via ownership of the corporate media). See ‘Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until “You’ll Own Nothing.”’
And, just briefly on another initiative, Leo Hohmann has drawn attention to a new category added to the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases: a code specifically for those who are unvaxxed in relation to Covid-19 and another for those who have had inadequate booster shots. In short, your doctor will be required to advise your ‘disease’ if you have not been vaccinated.
As the past three years have demonstrated, after more than a century of harm and killing on a prodigious scale, with ‘medical error’ ranking third on the list of causes of death in the USA, the pharmaceutical-medical complex has been let loose to wreak havoc on humanity. And it is not over yet. See ‘Who’s Driving the Pandemic Express?’ and watch the plan for the next ‘pandemic’, already available: ‘Catastrophic Contagion’.
So if you think the threat to our health from the pharmaceutical-medical industry is over, the reality is that we have simply had the first, ‘warm-up’ round of what must be a very long fight.
We Are Being Smashed Technologically
While most people embrace any new technology without question, the most casual investigation soon reveals that most technologies being made now can be used to surveil and control us and/or to harm or kill us outright. And given that this is the explicit intention behind ‘smart’ technologies, the long-planned and incredibly detailed Elite program to kill off many of us and build a technocracy in which we are permanently enslaved is proceeding at a breathtaking pace.
If you doubt this, have a look at the extensive range of videos and ‘Transformation Maps’ accessible from the World Economic Forum’s ‘Strategic Intelligence’ website.
Among the critically important technologies that are making this transhuman enslavement possible, the deployment of 5G, introduction of Digital Identity and the shift to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are vital and are being rapidly rolled out around the world as you read this article. As a matter of interest, were you consulted about any of this? Were you shown the extensive documentation of the dangers of the electromagnetic radiation from 5G? See ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’
Were you informed that your Digital ID will make your freedom and privacy a thing of the past, especially when your social credit score has been determined? See ‘Digitizing Your Identity is the Fast-Track to Slavery: How Can You Defend Your Freedom?’ And have you been told that, based on your social credit score, the CBDCs will be used to control where you can spend your ‘money’, on what it can be spent and how much you can spend at any one time in any one place?
Beyond this, have you been consulted about the facial recognition (which record and store a 3D representation of your face) and surveillance cameras being installed everywhere?
With some 20 billion cameras already installed, there will be plenty to keep an eye on you, wherever you are.
And did you know these cameras will be linked to artificial intelligence that will be keeping exact track of your movements. Of course, your phone, other smart household devices, along with the license plate readers and vehicle kill switches will make sure that you are kept within the 5 kilometres you are allowed to travel from your home, once you are technologically imprisoned in one of the Elite’s ‘smart’ (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) cities. With geofencing, that is simple.
In his thoughtful article on ‘smart’ cities, technocracy expert Patrick Wood briefly explains why smart cities are central to Elite plans: Because cities don’t have the physical resources – the land which makes it possible to farm, mine resources, harvest timber and so on – found in rural areas, the technocrats devised a strategy to force people from rural to urban settings and then imprison them there. See ‘Day 9: Technocracy And Smart Cities’.
And remember when you gave a voice recording as biometric evidence that it was your bank account? How safe was that, do you think? See
While much more could be written about the technological hell that is being built around us, a little time reading about the Metaverse is well worth the effort if you want a clearer understanding of the technocratic dystopia in which we might soon live. See ‘Virtual Beauty, Virtual Freedom, Virtual Love: Is the Matrix Metaverse Our Future?’
If you still doubt the technological threat we face, the good news is that key Elite agents in this context are happy to spell it out. For example, consider reading this original World Government Summit report written in 2018 with Elite projections for 2071: ‘Government in 2071: Guidebook. Preparing for new frontiers’.
At the latest World Government Summit just held in Dubai from 13-15 February 2023, Klaus Schwab was his usual, straightforward self: ‘Our life 10 years from now will be completely different, very much affected, and who masters [fourth industrial revolution] technologies, in some way, will be the masters of the world’. He also warns that failure to master these advanced technologies could mean that people like you and me ‘escape our power’. Watch ‘Klaus Schwab Calls For Global Government To “Master” AI Technologies’.
So unless you see yourself in the category of those who will master and control these technologies, and hence the rest of us, you will not be one of the ‘masters of the world’. You can read another critique of the recent conference, outlining more of the horrors being planned for us, here:
To summarize: Virtually all of us have been surrendering our personal data for decades and most of it is still stored on a government or corporate computer in a databank (referred to, misleadingly, as ‘the cloud’) where it can be accessed to determine your future social credit score (and everything that this score will, and will not, allow). Combined with the substantial range of technologies now available that are able to use this data in a multiplicity of ways, you will soon be imprisoned in a technocratic slave city, subject to the arbitrary rule of our ‘masters’, with escape virtually impossible.
In essence, we are endlessly being promised greater privacy, security and convenience. But all the evidence suggests that your data makes it very convenient for the Elite to invade your privacy and deny you security. And, of course, freedom simply won’t exist.
Why Fear Is Preventing Humanity from Resisting the Elite Program Strategically
As parents, teachers and religious figures, we are told we are responsible for socializing our children. In practice, as everyone unconsciously understands this, it means that we terrorize children into being submissively obedient.
How do we do this? We inflict an unending stream of violence – in three categories I have labeled ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – on the children in our lives. The sophistication of this program of terrorizing children is obscured from public view because the bulk of the everyday violence we adults inflict is, literally, ‘invisible’ or even ‘utterly invisible’; that is, the behaviour is not perceived or acknowledged as violent even though that is how it is perceived by children who are on the receiving end of it. Moreover, it was perceived by us as violent when we were children but we were terrorized into suppressing our awareness of this reality. For a full explanation, see
So while other supposedly psychological explanations of what has transpired historically (the causes of war, imperialism, colonialism, genocide, slavery and a host of other heinous elements of human history) or even during the past three years, are routinely promulgated – see, for example, Mattias Desmet’s theory of ‘mass formation’:
One needs courage to face the truth, and to respond to it powerfully, and courage is not an attribute that can be genuinely ascribed to many people.
It is difficult to investigate the truth when a childhood of being terrorized into obediently believing and doing what you are told stands in the way.
Hence, human history proceeds in a simple linear fashion: We use violence to terrorize children into submissive obedience while using more (particularly ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’) violence to force them to suppress awareness of that fact. The child grows up having unconsciously ‘learned’ to use violence to achieve many outcomes, but particularly how to use violence against their own children to make them obedient. So violence is endlessly recycled: wars and violence of all kinds – against ourselves, other people and nature in an infinite variety of ways and settings – repeat endlessly.
Because it is not the violence we end up being too terrorized to confront. It is our own fear. Again, see ‘Why Violence?’
So we are rapidly entering a world in which all of that terrorizing of children has left us with a world of submissively obedient adults who are doing what they are told by international agencies, their government and the corporate media: Get injected four, six, eight… times; remain ‘locked down’ or, soon, in your ‘smart’ city prison; submit your data for a digital ID and a social credit score; accept the surveillance and control technologies without question (although they will tell you it is for your convenience, privacy and security just as your parents told you obedience ‘was for your own good’ when you were a child), and accept the delusional symbols of ‘freedom’ represented by your ability to travel up to 5 kilometres from your home to do one of the approved activities and to wear a metaverse mask to delude yourself that you are in a place you would prefer to be.
So while most people will fearfully delude themselves that ‘the worst is behind us’, those who are paying attention know that this fight has barely begun and that the Elite has a 50-year timeframe to impose their full program upon us, even if the worst will happen by 2030.
This means that if we are to survive not only the current onslaught but also maintain our commitment and capacity to sustain our struggle for years and, possibly, decades, we need to ensure that we are paying careful attention to our own emotional health and that of our family members and the people in our community too.
A long-planned, vast range and parallel sequence of measures is being rapidly implemented to capture political, social, economic, medical and technological control of the human population. The intention is to kill off a substantial proportion of humanity and imprison those left alive as transhuman slaves in the Elite’s technocratic (surveillance and control) ‘smart’ cities, which will be policed by a range of current and emerging technologies.
And, as I have explained previously and above, because the Global Elite controls conventional political, economic, financial, technological, medical, educational, media and other important levers of society, the Elite has control of how events unfold while simultaneously giving it control of the narrative about what is taking place. As a result, the truth about the Elite plan is easily concealed. Consequently, effective resistance to this complex and sophisticated program requires a response based on a full understanding of the Elite’s deeper agenda and that is equally sophisticated.
This means that we cannot rely on any conventional channel, political, legal or otherwise.
It also means that those campaigns based on a disintegrated set of actions that lack strategic focus can achieve nothing, although they mislead those resisting into wasting their effort: a rapid path to disempowerment and disenchantment for those deceived by people deluding themselves that they understand strategy.
The only way we can defeat this long-planned, complex and multifaceted threat, is to mobilize sufficient people all over the world who are willing to nonviolently noncooperate with its foundational components, that is, those elements that make the entire Elite program possible.
So if you are interested in being strategic in your resistance to 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 the one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.
If this strategic resistance to 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 to organize a mass mobilization, such as a rally, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.
If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.
In parallel with our resistance, we must create the political, economic and social structures that serve our needs, not those of the Elite. That is why long-standing efforts to encourage and support people to grow their own food – see ‘23 Reasons You Should Start a Garden in 2023’ – participate in local trading schemes (involving the exchange of knowledge, skills, services and products with or without a local medium of exchange) and develop structures for cooperation, governance, nonviolent defence and networking with other communities are so important.
Of course, indigenous peoples still have many of these capacities – lost to vast numbers of humans as civilization has expanded over the past five millennia – but many people are now engaged in renewed efforts to create local communities, such as ecovillages, and local trading schemes, including Community Exchange Systems. Obviously, we must initiate/expand these forms of individual and community engagement in city neighbourhoods too. And we must learn to defend them as well.
In addition, to reiterate, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.
Conclusion
We are currently living in the final phase of a 5,000 year effort to impose total control over the human population. There are many reasons why it has reached this point. Some key reasons are explained above. And despite the comfortable delusion that the most obvious and onerous restrictions that we have experienced over the past three years have temporarily receded, the fact remains that a vast range of political, economic, medical and technological measures are being implemented as you read these words and we have only just ended the first round of what must be, if we are to be successful, a protracted fight.
In essence, what we do between now and 2030 will determine the fate of humanity. If we can mobilize enough people to resist strategically, we will succeed. But there is little sign of that so far.
Understanding how power works in the world system as well as who, precisely, is driving what is happening, what they are doing, why, and how they are doing it are crucial prerequisites for developing an effective strategy to resist the current Elite program to kill off a substantial proportion of humanity, enslave those left alive in a technocratic prison, enclose the Commons forever and consolidate all wealth in Elite hands.
It is the failure to understand these crucial points that accounts for the ineffective ‘resistance’ that has characterized the past three years.
And this is complicated by the fact that fear makes most people unable to learn either from their own failed experience or to seriously investigate what is happening and how to resist it most effectively. So they fearfully repeat what is familiar, without even asking if it has worked in the past.
So each passing day we still witness fruitless attempts to convince one elite agent or another – a politician, a judge, a corporate media executive… – to take action that will turn the tide in our favour. But none of these individuals can help us.
The reality is simple: If we do not act strategically ourselves, and mobilize sufficient others to do so too, then human identity and freedom will be lost forever.
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?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
I would prefer not to relay the following very strange story given to me by a fellow sociologist, but he had done me a number of favors, and since he asked me to do him a favor in return, I feel obligated. I don’t know what to make of the whole thing. Following this brief introduction, you will find the manuscript he handed me. I realize you are getting this third hand, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t know his friend. When he asked me to print it for him, I told him I would prefer not to, but then guilt got the best of me, so here it is.
This is one of those stories hard to believe. When I first heard it, I thought it was a joke, some sort of parable, and my friend who was telling it to me had had too much to drink or was just pulling my leg. I’m not sure. Like so much in today’s world, the difference between fiction and fact has become very blurry.
Let me call him Sean, since these days holding a strong dissenting opinion can cost you your job. He is a professor who, like the character David in John Fowles’ story, “The Ebony Tower,” teaches art history. And like Fowles’ character he is a very frustrated academic. In Sean’s case, he has had to contend with the transformation of his college from a place of learning to a place where “Woke” ideology stifles dissent. Perhaps more importantly, he has suffered from extreme writer’s block. He had just been telling me how, after years of writing copiously in his private journals, he had grown nauseated by it because it seemed so self-involved, concerning self and family stuff he was sick of. He wanted to write articles and books, yet when he tried, he couldn’t. All his energy had been going into his futile daily journals, where he felt trapped by family matters. Until one recent day at the bar where we regularly meet, he heard this strange story. It jolted him.
Here is what he told me over beer at the tavern. I am paraphrasing, but because his tale was so startling, I know I have the essentials right. He said:
“It was late in the afternoon last Wednesday when I came in here for a beer. I was feeling very tired that day, though depressed would be more accurate. The teaching routine seemed absurd to me. I wasn’t writing. I felt at a dead end. I guess I was. Anyway, you know that guy Tom whom we’ve talked to here before? Well, he was here and we got talking. The place was empty. It turns out his last name is Finn – Tom Finn. His father was Russell Finn, the famous painter, you know, the one the mainstream media gush over. A realistic sentimentalist is the way I’ve heard him described, although I would say he was a sick fabulist trying to repaint history for Hallmark Cards. Anyway, so this Tom Finn had had a few beers, and as he got talking, the both of us had a few more. It became obvious that he was obsessed with his father. He didn’t say that exactly, but I could guess it from the snide remarks about him he’d laugh out of the side of his mouth. I asked him about a big traveling exhibit of his father’s paintings which I had recently read about in the newspapers; had he seen it? ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t go to that kind of crap. That’s his bag of marbles.’ Things like that.
“It turns out the son is also a painter, but he said nothing about his own work, just that he painted. He talked all about his father’s work, how his father stole ideas, wasn’t very good, etc. I told him I agreed that his father’s work was overhyped and mediocre, but that my experience studying art taught me that was true for every era. I was trying to be nice, something I tend to overdo. I got the impression he turned to painting by default, it being some kind of knee-jerk reaction to his father, some kind of Oedipal contest.
“It turns out his real obsession is toys, no shit, and he got very animated as he talked about them. He wanted me to come over to his house to see his vast toy collection. The invitation was so weird, and with the beer’s effects, I couldn’t refuse. It was nearly dinner time, so I called Sara and told her I’d be late. I was actually interested in what made him tick. I mean, why would a grown man – I’d say he is in his mid-forties – collect fucking toys? And weirder still, he said his specialty was tiny plastic figures of all sorts. Of these he had more than 25,000 – for some reason he emphasized that number – that he’d periodically put on display at local libraries.
“So I followed him over to his house which is on that street adjoining the university where a number of art history professors live. Oak Terrace, I think it is. I couldn’t help laughing when I saw all those abstract sculptures decorating their lawns. It was getting dark and they were spotlighted. What a juxtaposition – so perfect – so-called realism and cerebral abstraction side-by-side. And both utter bullshit. I was reminded of a description of Russell Finn’s paintings that I once read: Cute wallpaper for readers of Reader’s Digest.
“Actually, Finn’s house is quite cute itself. When we were going in, I had to restrain myself from saying to him, ‘Life’s cute, isn’t it?’ I don’t think he would have appreciated that, although it’s very possible that he wouldn’t have known what the hell I was getting at. He’s a toy collector after all and what’s cuter than that.
“I’ll tell you this. I wasn’t prepared for what he showed me. He took me down to his finished basement, which he called ‘the laboratory.’ When he switched on the lights the room was empty except for the walls. They were covered with shelves about six inches apart that ran from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. It gave the large room this incredibly bizarre look as though it were a prison cell. There were even spotlights that illuminated the shelves, upon which, right along the outer edges looking out, he had lined up his collection of little figures. As we stood in the middle of the room, it was as though thousands of little people were staring at us, the giants. I felt as though I was hallucinating. Finn just chuckled when I said, ‘Pretty fucking amazing!” Then he said, ‘I like the perspective, don’t you?’ I knew he didn’t expect an answer and I could only chuckle in response, even as I felt a chill on the back of my neck. It was so eerie that I had to contain a shudder. For a brief moment I had the feeling that the door we had entered was going to shut and be bolted and that something terrifying was about to unfold.
“But at that moment he gestured to me to follow him to another door, over which a sign read, ‘The Family Fun Room.’ ‘This is my favorite,’ he said with a smile.
“In the middle of this pink painted room there was a cage that extended from floor to ceiling, and in the cage, sitting on stools, were two life-sized and very realistic figures of a man and a woman. They were both dressed in those black and white stripped prison uniforms you’ve seen in old movies. The woman was facing away from the man. I couldn’t tell who the woman was, but I immediately recognized the man. It was Finn’s father, down to the most realistic detail. He was holding a small toy figurine and was looking into its face. The door to the cell was padlocked shut. ‘That’s to make sure they can’t escape,’ Finn said with a straight face. ‘Now that I got them where I want them, I can’t take any chances. They’re dangerous and can cause me a lot of grief.’
“He then closed the door and we went upstairs. Neither of us said a word. He offered me a beer, but I declined. I felt spooked, some dreadful feeling in my gut. I told him I had to be leaving, which I did. On the way out I noticed a framed photograph in the foyer. It was a picture of Finn at about the age of nine or ten with his parents and sister. They are sitting together on a couch, the two kids caught between the parents. No one is smiling. Behind them on the wall is the father’s famous painting of a family of four sitting on a couch. In that one, everyone is smiling and the father in the painting is Finn’s father. As you probably know, that was one of his father’s favorite techniques – to put himself in his paintings. Such a cute double-message: I did it, of course, but how could I have done it when I’m in it. You’re left wondering: who really did it? Who executed the painting of these happy people. But since it’s all supposed to be so amusing, you’re left to chuckle, to think, how cute, how tricky. You’re supposed to smile. But no one was smiling in the picture on the wall. It seemed like a house of smoke and mirrors and I was damn glad to leave.
“As I drove home, I sure as hell wasn’t smiling. There was something terribly disturbing about it all. I felt nauseated, disgusted, really disturbed. Maybe it seems obvious, but I felt there was a connection between this weird experience and myself. A double connection, actually. I won’t go into all the details now, and you know about my writer’s block, but this bizarre experience has left me with a new sense of freedom, some kind of opening to a new way to write that at the time I couldn’t put my finger on. I’ve come to think of it as writing beyond a cage of categories.
“I thought about all the stuff we talk about, the political propaganda about everything, the loss of a sense of reality, the illusions and delusions with the digital technology, the warmongering by the U.S against Russian, the covid bullshit, all of it, all the stuff we share over beers. Especially the disconnect between the private and the public and the two-faced nature of a way of living that is so fucking phony. I realized why I had been hiding in my notebooks, how they had become my cage.
“To top it all off, when I got home and told Sara about my experiences with Tom Finn, the cage and all, she didn’t believe me. She accused me of having drunk too much, which I had to admit I did. She said I was scaring her with such a ridiculous tale and that I was sounding like a deluded conspiracy nut.
“Anyway, I’ve told no one else about Finn. I’m afraid they wouldn’t believe me either. You’re a sociologist and know all about Max Weber’s prediction of a coming disenchanted world with its iron cage. Shit, I feel like I had a small glimpse of it. Do you think anyone would believe me if I told this story?
At the cutting edge of science and technology today is artificial intelligence and robotics, which are being driven by ever-increasing computational speeds made possible by quantum computing. When the capacity of technological computation rivals the speed of our capacity to think and process information as humans, then we will reach the singularity and a superintelligence will emerge in our society, triggering runaway technological growth.
While this is coming in the very near future, we are also now learning how this very type of quantum creative power is already at play in our world via the interplay of human consciousness and the material world. In the early 1900’s, the famous double-slit experiment demonstrated that material objects can actually change their composition based on what is being held in consciousness when said objects are observed.
In other words, the world around us is being created moment by moment, and our expectations of what the world should be is what gives it form. In order to alter its form or to change course, we can use the directed focus of the mind to envision and feel something different for ourselves, and in time and through repetition, this reality will eventually take form. The feeling is the key.
This is something we do all the time. The best example of this, perhaps, is the human body, which can by some measures be considered a projection of human consciousness. We see this everywhere. For example, just look at people’s bodies and consider their health, and you’ll be able to get a fair idea of what type of thought patterns and belief systems are at work in the everyday silence of their own minds.
The best example is someone with radiant health, high energy and intense vitality. This person didn’t get to be this way by happenstance. The patterns of thought in their mind support their belief that their body can be a radiant storehouse of health. This, in turn, supports the development of habits which create such well-being. This type of person engages in clean, clear thinking about their health and body, and the result is this very type of body. They intentionally feel how they want to feel.
On the other hand, a person with an out of shape, obese, or disease-ridden body undoubtedly engages in thought patterns and beliefs about health which support such poor health. They never believe that they can be disease free or of ideal weight, and so their thoughts reinforce habits which deteriorate their health. Inside this person’s mind is chaos, confusion, fear, self-loathing and other patterns which create dis-ease.
There is more to this, though, if we consider the possibilities unfolding in the realms of quantum physics and superintelligent technology. We are beginning to get a clear idea of what the quantum field actually is and what it can do. It appears to be waiting for us to purposefully interact with it.
The quantum world is waiting for us to make a decision so that it knows how to behave. That is why quantum physicists have such difficulties in dealing with, explaining, and defining the quantum world. We are truly, in every sense of the word, masters of creation because we decide what manifests out of the field of all-possibility and into form.
The thing is, the quantum level of reality isn’t a local and insignificant aspect of creation. It is all around us, and it is the most fundamental level of creation aside from the unified field itself. The human energy field is interacting and influencing the quantum field all around us at all times and the energy of our beliefs and intentions are infused into our energy field because they are defined by the energy of our thoughts and emotions. ~Brandon West
Final Thoughts
This may sound to some like a woo woo way of looking at the world, but there is immense practicality in this world view for improving your life, your health, your relationships, and your overall happiness. The takeaway here is that you must take control over your own mind, and plant thoughts that support the projection of a healthy body and life. As Dr. Joe Dispenza notes, you’ll need to decide what you want, then put your attention on creating that reality.
“Whatever it is that is your vision, you’re just going to have to be passionate enough to invest your attention and your energy into that future over and over again, till all of a sudden you start seeing feedback in your life.” ~Dr. Joe Dispenza
In a society this controlling, it’s no wonder so many people can’t let go of their grip on false realities, and pressure others to conform to their point of view. In my work as a self-mastery coach I help people see what false realities they’ve made for themselves, and help them let go of their grip on useless beliefs. ~Dylan Charles
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~J. Krishnamurti
Society is directed by a never-ending mainstream narrative which is always evolving, and always reaching new dramatic peaks in sensationalism and hype. They fill your mind with topics they select, they keep your attention on these topics, and they invite and encourage you to argue amongst each other about these topics. In this way our collective attention is permanently commandeered, preventing us from diving too deeply into matters which have more than a superficial impact on day-today life.
Free-thinking is the ability and willingness to explore of ideas and areas of the mind which are yet undiscovered or are off-limits. It is a vanishing art that is deliberately being stamped out by a control system which demands conformity, acquiescence and obedience of body, mind, and spirit.
For your consideration, here are three questions you’re not supposed to ask about life in our profoundly sick society.
1. Who owns the money supply, and the world’s debt?
Pretty much the entire world is in financial debt, an insidious form of slavery which enables the exploitation of human beings and of all things in nature. It’s maddening when you think about it. The United States alone supposedly owes some $20 trillion, while the world at large owes a shocking $215 trillion?
Money is just a medium of exchange which facilitates transactions between people. In and of itself it has no intrinsic value as we could just as easily use sea shells instead of dollar bills and still be able to get things done. But today’s money is the property of private third-parties who rent it out to national governments, who then use the labor of their citizens as collateral against these loans. This is a highly refined form of slavery, which has already put future unborn generations of human beings in debt.
But who, exactly does the human race owe? Who are our debt-slave masters?
2. Who owns your body?
Ownership means having the explicit right to use, control and dispose of something in the manner of your choosing. The one thing you are born with that you take with you to your death is your own body, but do you own it? If not you, then who does own your body?
If this question were already settled in our society then there wouldn’t be ever-increasing pressure on those who choose to refuse vaccines. Children battling cancer and other serious illnesses wouldn’t be forced to take chemo and radiation under penalty of law and under threat of being taken from their parents. Water wouldn’t be fluoridated without our consent. Natural medicines wouldn’t be outlawed under threat of fines and prison time.
We are rapidly approaching a time when people will be required by law to take psychotropic medications as citizens were in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic, Brave New World.
Do you own your body, or does it belong to the state?
3. Why is the exploration of consciousness restricted and illegal?
The most effective prisons are not material, but are constructed inside the mind. Perception, opinion and understanding are all dynamic concepts, not at all static. These can all change in the blink of an eye just because a new idea or experience resonates with you in a special way. Our evolution depends on our ability to expand the frontiers of what’s possible, and when the mind is held in confinement by an entrenched system and powerful cultural paradigm, progress, even happiness, is stunted.
In this societal trap you are given free rein to debase your consciousness and your spirit with alcohol, dangerous drugs, pharmaceuticals, television, pornography, theatrical violence, and then some, yet many natural medicines which elevate consciousness and provide a window into the soul are illegal.
“This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with our own agreement. How will we be able to resist when so many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we may and may not explore, even what we may and may not experience, with this most precious, sapient, unique, and individual part of ourselves?
If we are willing to accept that then we can be persuaded to accept anything.” ~Graham Hancock
Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.
He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.
And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.
Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time
The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.
Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’
Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.
Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.
Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.
Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.
The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.
The importance of words
Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).
Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:
‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’
As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’
This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.
But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).
As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:
‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.
However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.
The intellectual turn against freedom
But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.
Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.
‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.
Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.
An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.
These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.
And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.
Orwell’s legacy
Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.
His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.
Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’
Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:
‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’
Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum. “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee. – Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass
Sometimes a trifling contretemps can open a window onto significant issues.
As a case in point, The New York Times, a newspaper that regularly publishes U.S. propaganda without a bit of shame or remorse, recently reported on a controversy involving Simon & Schuster and Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. The report with the same information was repeated across the media.
The publishing company had offered limited-edition, authenticated, hand-signed copies of the book for $600 each. Nine Hundred collectors and die-hard fans bought a copy, many, no doubt, caught in hero worship and the thought that a Dylan-penned signature would grant them a bit of his fame through the touch of his hand upon their lives.
The quest for immortality takes many forms, and the laying on of hands, even when done remotely through a signature, has long been a popular form of sleight-of-hand.
I once shook hands with an Elvis hologram impersonator and the thrill vibrated for days.
But these Dylan aficionados noticed something strange about the signatures: They didn’t seem to be actual signatures individually written with a pen by Dylan. As anyone knows from their own handwriting, no two signatures are the same, since the human hand is not a copy machine. These signatures were identical.
It turned out that those who smelled a deception were right. Under pressure from astute purchasers, Simon & Schuster had to come clean – sort of. They offered to refund all purchasers for the deception. They released the following statement:
To those who purchased The Philosophy of Modern Song limited edition, we want to apologize. As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form. We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.
This statement is a perfect example of double-talk, and more.
Then Dylan also apologized, saying that he used an auto-pen since he was suffering from vertigo and “during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help.” His apology seems sincere compared to the publisher’s double-talk, but then again, so did his signatures. And the controversy has spread to the limited edition prints of his artwork.
“Limited edition prints” – a deception in itself, as if limiting the number of copies of an original painting makes them more original. Ten dittos instead of eleven.
However, I am not primarily concerned with the nuances of this tempest in a teapot, which might disappear as fast as yesterday’s bluster, or it may forever tarnish Dylan’s reputation, which would be a shame if it also damaged the genuine greatness of his songs.
I would like to focus on the following matters that I have seen through its window: language usage, a society of copies, reading texts closely, and the degradation of literacy, all of which are tangled together with non-stop government propaganda disseminated by the corporate mass media to form a major social issue.
First, language. Note in the Simon & Schuster apology the words: “As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form.” This is a clear deception twice over. The books do not contain original signatures; they contain machine copies of it. Phrasing it that way allows the company to plead innocent while also apologizing for its innocence as if they consider themselves guilty. What exactly are they saying they are apologizing for? Deceptions dittoed?
And the phrase “As it turns out,” implies that Simon & Schuster was surprised that the signatures were machine generated, which is highly improbable. It also suggests they are not responsible; such verbiage approximates the common, passive introductory phrase “it so happens” or the equally non-literate “hopefully” to begin a sentence.
“It so happens” that I am writing these words and “it so happens” that you are reading them…as if we are victims of our own free choices. Passive language for victims of fate who have learned to write and talk this way to avoid responsibility even for their own hope, as in: “I hope.” Or maybe the widespread copycat use of “hopefully” is an unconscious attempt to deny pervasive hopelessness. No matter how many times you repeat something doesn’t make it true.
The use of such language is a reflection of an age in which determinism has for decades been repeatedly promulgated to extinguish people’s belief in freedom. Ditto: Saying “the exact same” doesn’t make the same more same through redundancy. You can’t get any more same than same since same means identical, or any more opposite than opposite even if you say “the exact opposite.” The English language is suffering.
To top it off, an esteemed book publishing company nearly a century old concludes with a sentence that a high school freshman – circa 1960 before all the dumbing-down of schooling – would realize was redundant with the words “immediately” (misplaced) and “immediate,” as if repetition would emphasize their contrition. “We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.” Ditto.
But who notices these things?
Discerning readers – whether of the examples above or of a subtle controlled- opposition media article suggesting one thing while meaning another – are becoming rarer and rarer. Ideology, political party allegiances, and plain stupidity block many from grasping propaganda and media claims made out of thin air.
Anonymous sources, subtle phrasing, real or imagined intelligence sources, the use of words such as may, might, possible, could be, etc., are a staple of so much writing and broadcast news that they fly by people used to the speed of the digital life with texting and internet browsing where repetition and copying are king. Yes, speed kills in so many ways. The repetition of talking points across the major corporate media, something carefully studied and confirmed years ago, has become so obvious to anyone who chooses to take the time to investigate. It’s not hard to do but few bother; they are too “busy.” Thus propaganda and gibberish pass unnoticed.
Just as “The Real McCoy” (see the opening “Refrain” of Hillel Schwartz’ The Culture of the Copy) was a fake and the phrase came to represent the genuine to supposedly confirm authenticity, we are now living in an era of the counterfeit everywhere. Counterfeits of counterfeits. Imposters. Actors playing actors. Counterfeit traitors. Fabricated reality and copies of copies. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. Lies about not lying. (See The New York Times’, The Guardian’s, etc. deceptive, hypocritical, and self-serving joint letter asking the U.S government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.)
The Dylan controversy is a very minor example of a major issue that is little appreciated for its devastating impact on society.
For another minor example, we may ask how many times does one have to see the replay of Christian Pulisic’s recent goal against Iran in the 2022 World Cup to grasp its brilliance and to see that he was injured? Two, three, five, ten? And this is a sporting event, not some mall shooting or serious issue of war. In a digital high-tech world repetition is the norm. What does repetition do to the mind?
What does repetition do to the mind?
Despite the great sportsmanship shown by the players from both the U.S. and Iran on the pitch, U.S. Men’s Soccer executives, by deleting the Islamic Republic emblem from Iran’s flag on its social media sites, and the U.S. media tried repeatedly to politicize the game into a battle between the good Americans and the evil Iranians, even while a U.S. regime change color revolution was being attempted on the streets of Iran.
What does repetitious propaganda do to the mind?
Technology has not just allowed for machine signatures but has made us in many ways machine people who need to be hammered over the head time and again – and to like it. To go back again and again for more. Everything but life has become repeatable.
Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby’s reply to Nick’s statement In The Great Gatsby – “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick tells Gatsby, who responds, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, off course you can!” – perfectly captures the “reality” of a digital screen culture of illusions in which many people have unconsciously come to believe that you can instantly replay life as well.
Indeed, to make people into machines is the goal of trans-humanists Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset and the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda. Artificial intelligence (AI) for artificial people. While there are innocent examples of repetition, the use of it is a fundamental tactic of propaganda, whether that be through words or images. And we are drowning in repeated media/government propaganda about the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine, Covid19, Iran, China, Syria, etc.
It’s as easy as pie to innocently repeat, as I learned recently when my wife asked me to use her cell phone to take a photograph. Bumpkin that I am who despises these machines, rather than briefly hitting the button I held it down for a few seconds and took the same photo 67 ½ times. It just so happened.
But the propagandists’ repetitions are no accident. You can’t condemn Julian Assange year after year for posting U.S. war crimes – the Afghanistan War Logs – and then try to save your own ass after the man has been persecuted for more than a decade and counting. The media who did this and then wrote the recent letter are counterfeit traitors to the truth and agents of the war criminals. To call them journalists is to misuse language: They are imposters.
What does repetition do to the mind? asked Tweedledum to his identical twin Tweedledee.
“Yes, the world is an illusion. But Truth is always being shown there.” ~Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe.
It seems that we can talk about consciousness and consciousness studies so long as it remains within the ‘reality remit’ and does not push against the ‘barriers of perception.’ This is why so much of our modern societies and the media marketplace are filled with pop-spirituality as they function as cultural remedies rather than revolutions. That is, they provide a band aid plaster rather than seeking to find a permanent cure. Many easy ‘self-help’ practices offer a ‘false exit’ revolving door so that people are given the sensation of finding a way out of the ‘system’ only to be brought back into it again. Such teachings or offerings act as auto-tranquilizers – they act as auto-tranquilizing mechanisms to provide an alternative treatment, or pleasing sensation, that appears as fringe or ‘outside’ the system but is not. Rather, it is another sub-set within the overall program; but a subset that does not constitute a threat or provide a means to perceive through the programmed reality set. In other words, it is an allowed anomaly.
The ‘allowed anomalies’ are examples of mechanisms of mental anesthesia that soften or even dispel the original urge to seek for answers. They also serve as a quick satiation (fast food) to bring temporary satisfaction. Temporary satiation, or satisfaction, dulls down the real hunger so that afterwards the developmental urge remains in the ‘goldilocks zone’ of not too hungry or too full – just full enough to want to keep on with the spiritual pursuit yet not too hungry that they wish to seek beyond what is openly offered or available in the marketplace. The forces currently acting upon humanity are those that shall compel us to die away or die to become. The opportunity now available compels us to become something qualitatively new. This is now the perfect time for personal advancement and for the expansion of perception and awareness. It is no longer necessary to be clever – it is essential to be wise.
There has been a noticeable decline in what, in simple terms, may be called the ‘metaphysical quest’ (what has also been known as the ‘spiritual quest’). The inner impulse to seek beyond material-physical appearances has almost vanished from contemporary life. It was long ago co-opted into religious pursuits and fashioned into ritualistic ceremonies and dogma. And more recently, it has been ushered into what I have previously called ‘Ashram Avenues’ and ‘Guru Boulevards’ by people enticed with exotic interests. The glamour of ‘self-development’ has found a wanting marketplace within the glare of social media. The depth of inner longing is scratched at the surface and satisfied by sipping at the singing bowls of inner harmony and world peace.
It is all too easy to become stereotypes of ourselves, driven by platitudes of false mysticism and superficial attainment. There is so much within contemporary life that bears down upon us to make us forget ourselves that just the act of self-remembering becomes a force of rebellion and treason against the material world. We are led to forget those capacities that we bring with us from the metaphysical realm. We are here in this world as both guests and custodians; we inhabit our bodies during the life experience in the hope of making the most of those gifted lives. And yet, we rarely come to realize the truth of who we really are. We become entranced by the material realm and its systemic diversions. Our independent liberty and free will is dismantled by succumbing to set patterns, habits, and programmed behaviours. Generally, in our societies an individual is ‘permitted’ to access a form of ‘spirituality’ just enough to provide them with a taster smell of satisfaction. This is then carried around throughout life as a constant marker of ‘satisfied attainment’ – an outer recognized badge of honour. The individual then stops doing the Work – the critical seeking – and falls into line within the Game. The perennial memory starts to fade again. Yet … have we ever done enough?
Human civilization is infected with deviant distractions distributed through social, cultural, and also spiritual mischief. So much false gold within circulation creates a parallel economy. On the other side, however, true gold increases its value. The disintegration of metaphysical values, and the moral decay that accompanies this, are part of a deliberate projection into hyper-materialism. We have yet to fully realize that the fastest way to awaken is to become the cause of someone else’s awakening. By assisting and serving our fellow human beings we are simultaneously helping ourselves. Many people are already awake – they just don’t know it yet. Sounds contradictory? How many times have we known that something is the right thing to do and yet we fail to do it? Similarly, so many people instinctively feel the inner urge, and sense the inversion of the world, and yet choose not to act upon this. In the words of the sage and philosopher Sri Aurobindo:
At first the inner consciousness seems to be the dream and the outer the waking reality. Afterwards the inner consciousness becomes the reality and the outer is felt by many as a dream or delusion, or else as something superficial and external.[i]
Our current consensus reality is not an accurate portrayal of the life experience, and it is no longer where we need to be. We need to turn things around so that the outer world is recognized to be the dream state, or the lower perceptive level of reality. It is time to choose a different timeline – if that makes any sense?
If people continue to be fed by the dross of the external world – its media circus, entertainment absurdities, and directed propaganda – then the consensus reality gets continually imprinted (validated) by these inputs that people feed back into the system. A new template or consciousness field struggles to come into existence. The mass perceptive state remains low – very low. And as a collective species, humanity can no longer remain at this low level of perceptive awareness (ignorance) at a time when an advancement in awareness is vital. It is simply not sustainable in the long term. If this polarized state continues, then there is likely to be a splintering in humanity’s future, and not everyone will walk the same path going forward. What we choose today will become the reality we shall experience later. Now is the time for advancement in terms of perceptive awareness: it is time to EXPAND. It is time to grow out of the lens of infantile perception. It is time to walk each step with awareness, with conscious knowing, instead of stumbling through on autopilot.
Let us ponder on our predicament by concluding with the following tale:
The Fruit of the Tree
An ancient tale tells how a wise man once related a story about a remarkable tree which was to be found in India. People who ate of the fruit of this tree, as he told it, would neither grow old nor die. This legend was repeated, by a reliable person, to one of the Central Asian kings of long ago, and this monarch at once conceived a passionate desire for the fruit – the source of the Elixir of Life.
So the King sent a suitably resourceful representative to find and to bring back the fruit of that tree. For many years the emissary visited one city after another, travelled all over India, town and country, and diligently asked about the object of his search from anyone who might know about its nature and where it was to be found.
As you can imagine, some people told this man that such a search must obviously only be a madman’s quest; others questioned him closely to find out how a person of such evident intelligence could actually be involved in such an absurd adventure; their kindness in this respect, showing their consideration for him as a deluded dupe, hurt him even more than the physical blows which the ignorant had also rained upon him.
Many people, of course, told him false tales, sending him from one destination to another, claiming that they, too, had heard of the miraculous Tree. Years passed in this way, until the King’s representative lost all his hope of success, and made the decision to return to the royal court and confess his dismal failure. Now, there was also, luckily, a certain man of real wisdom in India – they do occasionally exist there – and the King’s man, having heard of him late in his search, thought; ‘I will at least go to him, desperate as I am, to seek his blessing on my journey homeward.’
He went to the wise man, and asked him for a blessing, and he explained how it was that he had got into such a distressed condition, a failure without hope. The sage laughed and explained:
‘You simpleton; you don’t need a blessing half as much as you need orientation. Wisdom is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Because you have taken images and form, secondary names for things, as your aim, you have not been able to find what lies beyond. It has thousands of names: it may be called the Water of Life, the Sun, an Ocean and even a Cloud … But the emblem is not the thing itself.’
Whoever, this Teacher continued, attaches himself to names and clings to concepts without being able to see that these derivative things are only stages, sometimes barriers, to understanding, will stay at the stage of secondary things. They create, and remain in a sub-culture of emotional stimulus, fantasy and quasi-religion.[ii]
References:
[i] Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga. Lotus Press (1993), p49
After the Crash 