Millions of decent people are spending their time and energy, trying to identify the secret bad guys of the world, then to prove that they’re right.
This is a serious problem, especially because monster hunts divert people with strong ethics from building new and better things.
So, here are the five reasons why I’m not interested in secret bad guys:
#1: It targets critical people.
I have no doubt that bad guys and even evil groups exist. After all, a non-trivial percentage of the human populace is sociopathic, and such people are drawn directly to power; to positions that permit them to abuse people and to be rewarded at the same time. Bad guys are massively incented under the model of “the few ruling the many” that has persisted since the Bronze Age.
“Find the hidden bad guys” is, to put it simply, catnip for ethical types. These efforts effectively neuter the most important members of any populace: those who are innately biased toward ethics and action.
If you’ve been involved in any of the quests for hidden bad guys, try to count the number of hours you’ve spent in those pursuits, and especially how many hours you’ve spent thinking about the details and possibilities.
Please notice two things about this: First that you could have done a lot of useful things with all that time and energy. Second, that the thought of dropping the quest makes you feel a void… a much larger void than it should.
#2: There’s no end to them.
Have you ever noticed that the secret bad guys keep coming and going? The Freemasons, the Illuminatti, the Jews, the Catholic Church, the 400 families, the Black Nobility and many more not only come and go, but come again. There’s almost a rotation.
As soon as the bad guys du jour decline in utility, another is inserted. How and by whom? I don’t know. But I do know they keep coming.
So, what sense is there devoting your life to a group of bad guys who will be replaced by even more important villains in a couple of years?
#3: They shield the systems that directly abuse us.
Paychecks are not skimmed to secret, underground lairs, they’re skimmed to national capitols and the Byzantine bureaucracies that fill them. It is those systems which directly abuse us, and the search for hidden bad guys diverts our attention from them.
The deeper issue here is a hard one to say, but I suppose it needs to be said: To go after the hidden bad guys is less scary than rejecting those who employ standing armies to enforce their decrees.
#4: There’s no reasonable plan of action.
So, what happens after you find your bad guys? Well… you have to “convince the people to rise up.” And that, as Captain Mal said, is “a long wait for a train that doesn’t come.”
And would you really want to exterminate some group of bad guys? That’s a horrible plan in multiple ways. Plus, it doesn’t work; just look at the guys who kicked-off World War I.
#5: They won’t be gone any faster by knowing.
The bad guys of the world, whether hidden or open to view, won’t be gone until the support system that keeps them in power is gone.
So long as masses of humans respond to promises of something for nothing, so long as they look for systems to take refuge in, so long as they panic in response to imagined evils…
So long as these things continue, sociopaths will find vulnerabilities to exploit, and bad guys will thrive. Identifying the faces will solve almost nothing.
The Answer
So, if finding the hidden bad guys doesn’t work, and if we still want an ethical world to live in, what are we to do?
The answer is simple: We’ll have to build it ourselves. Here’s a brilliant passage from Buckminster Fuller that cuts to the core of this:
You never change anything by fighting the existing. To change something, build a new model and make the existing obsolete.
This is what we need to do. How? There are dozens of ways, but you already know a lot of them:
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- Raise a healthy family. Protect them from the abuse the world wants to force upon them.
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- Homeschool your kids, or grandkids, or neighbor kids… or variations on this theme.
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- Use silver and gold for commerce.
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- Expand the Bitcoin economy. Accept it for payment and use it for purchases. Use Lightning, Monero, taproot assets, FediMint and so on.
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- Stop hiding your feelings. Start talking openly about how much better the world could be. Don’t expect people to convert to anything, but do express yourself. Let the loudmouths say bad things about you. Suffer for this if you must.
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- Help one another. Don’t wait for “state aid.” Get up and help your neighbors directly.
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- Show your appreciation. Tell a good man or woman that you recognize what they are. Better still, perhaps, tell their spouse and kids. Gratitude is massively under-rated and under-used.
Finally, please understand that one way or another we’re going to succeed, and that a better way of life is forming already. On this point I will leave you with one more passage from Buckminster Fuller:
Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.
Believe this good news, my friends, and start acting like it.
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Paul Rosenberg
freemansperspective.com