Tag: rulership

6,000 Years on the Hamster Wheel

HamsterWheel

Modern man is trained to think in certain ways and to turn away from anything that differs… to give authority the benefit of every doubt, instinctively and forever.

Nearly all of us have been pushed (nay, shoved) in that direction, and we’ve instinctively feared to break our inertia: “But I’ll be poor.” “Girls (or boys) will think I’m weird and won’t want me.” “Only crazy people step off the path.”

That path, however, has no end and kills us by inches. It was paved by our abusers and it is, in effect, a hamster wheel we never leave.

Back to 4000 BC

Between 5400 BC and 3800 BC, the model of rulership we know formed in Mesopotamia, beginning in a city called Eridu. With a few sags, breaks, and occasional exceptions, the basic pattern has held ever since.

The pattern, as we well know, features one group of men dominating all other people. This small group orders the others around, takes a large share of their earnings, punishes them if they fail to obey, sends their children to kill people they’ve never met (or to be killed by them), and is held to be righteous while doing so.

There are other parts of the model, and they’ve been consistent over the millennia as well: mandatory accounting, state-aligned intellectuals, surveillance, monuments, and the glorification of order. (Fear has always played a major role, but mainly because it’s the best way to make people stupid.)

None of those parts are our subject for today, however. As ridiculous as they are – and as horrifying as it is that they’ve continued since the Early Bronze Age – today I want to focus on the more intimate aspects of our abuse.

Like the Sumerians Before Us

I’ve written before on the obsession with status: It’s irrational and devolutionary, but it’s encoded in human cultures and was clearly involved in the model from 4000 BC. The great assyriologist, Samuel Noah Kramer, held it to be a fundamental part of the rulership model and described it as an “ambitious, competitive… drive for pre-eminence and prestige.”

And why was it made a fundamental part of the system? Because it distracted people from the fact that they were repeatedly being robbed.

The cultivation of status was used to drive men, even as the fruits of their labors were stripped away. It trained them to strive for a cheap imitation of actual rewards.

This scam began for the Sumerians in the same way it does for us: in school. “May you rank the highest among the school graduates,” is found among Sumerian inscriptions, just as it is among ours. Kramer describes the situation:

[T]he drive for superiority and prestige deeply colored the Sumerian outlook on life and played an important role in their education, politics, and economics.

The bosses from 4000 BC built hierarchical structures, each level of which gave its occupants a certain level of status – status they fought for all their lives. They could never be as high as the ruler, but they could at least be higher than their neighbor… and they learned to trade that for actual prosperity and self-determinacy.

What This Means

This means that all the times we ignored the small group of men stealing from us… and all the times we scrambled to be better than our neighbors… we were being suckers. (Sorry, but that’s the truth.)

Sure, we were born into it and were trained in it all our lives, but no matter how much we excuse ourselves (and we can, to a large extent), we were still playing the role of the sucker.

Which is more sensible, to work endlessly to convince people that you’re better than the guy across the street or across the hill, or to actually make yourself better?

Think about this: It’s more work to appear better than the other guy than it is to simply be better. So why do it the hard way? Why care about the other guy so much? Why not care about you – what’s in you, what you can develop, what makes you happy – rather than what impresses other people?

The Truth of It…

The truth of this is that all the status crap we’ve been immersed in – that we see 24/7 on Facebook and TV – is a huge, old scam. It tears us away from creating actual benefit for ourselves and our families and focuses us on the mere opinions of others… opinions that are subject to change at any time.

To work for real, concrete benefits is not only more rational than life on the hamster wheel, but it’s a far more efficient way to live.

Still, the ramp down from the hamster wheel is marked off with bright red tape, saying, “If You Cross, Everyone Will Hate You.” That can be scary.

Getting off the hamster wheel requires us to transcend our fears and even to suffer the slanders of those who remain on the wheel. In other words, it requires us to be heretics.

But if becoming a heretic sounds frightening, remember that the other choice is to yield your very life to your abusers.

Living as a heretic strikes me as far better than living as a hamster on a wheel.

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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

Banning Cash: Serfdom in Our Time

Over the last few months a stream of articles have crossed my screen, all proclaiming the need of governments and banks to eliminate cash. I’m sure you’ve noticed them too.
It is terrorists and other assorted madmen, we are told, who use cash. And so, to protect us from being blown up and dismembered on our very own street corners, governments will have to ban it.

BanningCash

Over the last few months a stream of articles have crossed my screen, all proclaiming the need of governments and banks to eliminate cash. I’m sure you’ve noticed them too.

It is terrorists and other assorted madmen, we are told, who use cash. And so, to protect us from being blown up and dismembered on our very own street corners, governments will have to ban it.

It would actually take some effort to imagine a more obvious, naked attempt at fearmongering. Cash – in daily use for centuries if not millennia – is now, suddenly, the agent of spring-loaded, instant death? And we’re supposed to just accept that line?

But there are good reasons why the insiders are promoting these stories now. The first of them, perhaps, is simply that they can: After 9/11, a massive wave of compliance surged through the West. It may not last forever, but it’s still rolling, and if the entertainment corporations can pump enough fear into minds that want to believe, they may just get them to buy it.

The second reason, however, is the real driver:

Negative Interest Rates

The urgency of their move to ban one of the longest-lasting pillars of daily life means that the backroom elites think it will be necessary soon. It would appear that the central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, the BIS, and all their backers, see the elimination of cash as a central survival strategy.

The reason is simple: cash would allow people to escape from the one thing that could save their larcenous currency system: negative interest rates.

To make this clear, I like to paraphrase a famous (and good) quote from Alan Greenspan, back from 1966, during his Ayn Randian days: The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

That was a true statement, and with a slight modification, it succinctly explains the new war on cash:

The preservation of an insolvent currency system requires that the owners of currency have no way to protect it.

Cash is currency that you hold in your own hands, that stands more or less alone. It is primarily external to bank control. Electronic money – bank balances, credit, etc. – remains inside the banking system and fully subject to bank control.

A combination of no cash and negative interest rates would be a quiet, permanent version of what was done in Cyprus, where the government simply shut down everything, allowed only the smallest deductions via ATMs, and then stole money from thousands of bank accounts at once.

The Cypriot spectacle was fairly large, however, and that tends to undermine the legitimacy of rulership. So, it is much better to have no ATMs and no cash at all. There would be no lines of angry people talking to each other, only isolated losers with no recourse, licking their wounds while the talking heads on television tell them to stay calm and watch the flashing images.

Negative interest rates would give the banks 100% control over your purchases. They could, even in the worst pinch, allow you to purchase food while freezing the rest of your money. The average person would have no recourse and would simply be robbed… but very smoothly and with no human face to blame on.

Negative interest rates mean that your bank account shrinks day by day, automatically. Your $1000 in January becomes $950 by December. And where does that money go? To the banks, of course, and to the government. They syphon your money away, drip by drip, and there’s nothing you can do about it. This accomplishes several things for them at once:

  • It finances government, limitlessly and automatically. Forget tax filings; they can just take as they please.

  • It pays off the bad debt of the big banks. (And there are oceans of debt.)

  • It forces you to spend everything you’ve got, as soon as you get it. (Otherwise it will shrink.)

  • It gives the system full control over your financial life. Everything is monitored, everything is tracked, and every single transaction must be approved by them (or not). If they decide they don’t like you, you’re instantly reduced to begging.

In short, this is a direct return to serfdom.

I suggest that you start talking to your friends and neighbors about this now, before it’s too late. Don’t let them comply without a fight.

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

What Rulers Believe

I’ve been working on collections of quotes lately, and I have one more that I’d like to present… this one on the thoughts of rulers. For a number of years I’ve been telling people that the incentives faced by productive people and the incentives facing rulers (of whatever stripe) are very, very different. This list, I believe, will make that point.

RulersBelieve

I’ve been working on collections of quotes lately, and I have one more that I’d like to present… this one on the thoughts of rulers.

For a number of years I’ve been telling people that the incentives faced by productive people and the incentives facing rulers (of whatever stripe) are very, very different. This list, I believe, will make that point.

You’ll find quotes from ‘bad’ rulers on this list, of course, but also some from the ‘good’ rulers. And please note that the ‘bad’ ones are very often held in high regard in their times. Joseph Stalin, for example – the #2 most prolific killer in all of human history – was the ‘great ally’ of the US in World War II and was routinely presented to the American public as “Uncle Joe.”

So, beginning with Uncle Joe, here are the things that rulers believe:

Joseph Stalin

  • Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

  • Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

  • Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.

Mao Zedong

  • The cult of xenophobia is the cheapest and surest method of obtaining from the masses the ignorant and savage patriotism, which puts the blame for every political folly or social misfortune upon the foreigner.

Adolf Hitler

  • Terrorism is the best political weapon, for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.

  • I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.

  • What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.

  • I have sympathy for Mr. Roosevelt, because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies and bureaucracy.

  • [I]n the simplicity of their minds, [people] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie… It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and continue to think that there may be some other explanation.

Hermann Göring

  • Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece… But… the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Winston Churchill

  • What a man! I have lost my heart! (referring to Benito Mussolini, 1927)

  • One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.

Franklin Roosevelt

  • There seems to be no question that [Mussolini] is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy.

  • The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson. (to Colonel Edward House)

Vladimir Lenin

  • Our power does not know liberty or justice. It is established on the destruction of the individual will.
  • The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

Leon Trotsky

  • The real criminals hide under the cloak of the accusers.

Napoleon Bonaparte

  • Of all our institutions public education is the most important… we must be able to cast a whole generation in the same mould.

  • A man becomes a creature of his uniform.

  • The life of a citizen is the property of his country.

Charles Maurice Talleyrand

  • We were given speech to hide our thoughts.

  • An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public.

Henry Kissinger

  • The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Cardinal Richelieu

  • Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I’ll find an excuse in them to hang him.

Joseph Goebbels

  • Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

  • The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Edgar Hoover

William H. Woodin (US Treasury secretary)

Benito Mussolini

  • The Truth Apparent, apparent to everyone’s eyes who are not blinded by dogmatism, is that men are perhaps weary of Liberty. They have a surfeit of it… we have buried the putrid corpse of liberty … the Italian people are a race of sheep.

Roman Emperor Caracalla

  • As long as we have this [pointing to his sword], we shall not run short of money.

Prince Phillip, duke of Edinburgh

  • I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.

Charles de Gaulle

  • In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

Our Future Has Been Commandeered

FutureCommandeered

We should be living in the time of humanity’s greatest flower. But we’re not. Instead, we’re stuck in a condition of permanent war, rising xenophobia, endless fear, perpetual distraction, and suffocating conformity. Worse, we’re living inside of a surveillance state that is morphing into something truly, truly evil.

I’m here to tell you that nearly all of this is artificial. We have more than enough technology to be living among the stars, to fill every hungry mouth on the planet, and to meet nearly every human need.

We already know how to do all those things… and this fact is demonstrably true.

And yet we sit immersed in fear, confusion, privation, and even hate. And why? Mainly because the elites of our civilization have demanded that we sacrifice our wills to theirs, and because most of us have silently complied.

We have space-age knowledge, yet we remain firmly under the domination of bronze-age rulership. And since these rulers would be wiped away by the spread of space-age technologies, they have carefully contained them.

“Thou Mayest Not Go There”

As I write this, we are at the end of the year 2015. Back in 1968 – almost two generations ago – men traveled to the moon. The next year, they landed there. This was well before microwaves, cell phones, and the Internet. It was even before personal calculators. But right there, space travel was stopped in its tracks. In fact, it was first pulled back and then stopped. No human has left Earth’s gravity since 1972.

Have we more technology than we did in 1968 – 47 years ago – or have we less?

Obviously we have far more and far better, but space technology has been commandeered and space has been locked shut. Our future has simply been cut off. Does any reasonable person believe that it would be harder to go to space now than it was before Kevlar and fiber optics and computers that didn’t fill an entire room?

And let’s be honest about this: That future was eliminated by the lords of our world because it would ruin their game. Letting the cows out of the barn would severely undercut their interests.

Many of you should be reading my posts as you sail among the stars, or at least among planets, moons, and asteroid belts. We have the technology… and we’ve have had it since the late 1960s. That’s not even debatable.

Requiem for the Internet

Before the Internet, nearly all information was forced to move through well controlled conduits. Exceptions to that rule were mainly print newsletters. But then came the Internet, which allowed anyone to speak to everyone; it allowed information to move from individual to individual with no gatekeeper. That was a very large and very significant change.

To be honest about it, we got the Internet mainly because the elites screwed up. They could have bottled it up, but they simply failed. (They are not smarter than we are.) Sure, other people would have written an Internet-type of communications protocol soon enough, but that kind of slow rollout would have given the bosses time to limit the technology and keep some bottlenecks in place.

Now, after a couple of decades, the Internet has been substantially retaken by the elites. Already, nearly everything is being funneled into Google and Facebook, both of whom have whored themselves out to the rulers. (See this, for example.) It will probably be a matter of a few years until unapproved content starts to be pushed out. Matt Drudge, for example, claimed recently that a Supreme Court justice told him so personally.

Putting information back into controlled channels is massively in the interest of the rulers, and there is no one to oppose them. Their populations are among the most compliant in all of human history.

On top of that, the Internet is already a surveillance system, with the aforesaid Google and Facebook being major components of it. Since Snowden, that’s not debatable either.

Worse, that surveillance system (that is, the Internet) is quickly being turned into the most effective manipulation system in all of human history. In other words, the Internet has been more than commandeered; it has been weaponized and turned against its users.

I could go on, but I won’t: More facts won’t change more minds. Opposition to these truths is psychological, not intellectual.

It’s All About Will

We can have our future back, but only if we stop laying our minds and wills at the feet of rulers… rulers whom most of us acknowledge to be liars and thieves, by the way.

So long as we reflexively obey the people who stole our future, they will never, ever give it back. And why should they? That future isn’t in their interests, and so long as everyone obeys them, why should they change?

In the end, it comes down to the issue of will: Do we believe that we have a right to live and act according to our own minds? Or do we simply evade such considerations?

The usual unexamined slogans (“We have to work through our democratic institutions.”) merely lock us into place as will-less cogs in a hierarchy that hasn’t changed in any of our lifetimes. Truthfully, it’s just obscured slavery: “Pay attention to the flashing lights and keep doing as we say.”

There are answers to all our problems, and we are more than capable of reclaiming our future. But that will never happen if we keep surrendering our wills to the same elites who took it from us.

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com