Category: All in the Mind

Do the ruling classes engineer rapid social transformation, or do they just react to it?

Nobody denies other groups of human beings can and do conspire to exploit, rob, maim or otherwise harm other people to further their own selfish ends. However, when such groups are large corporations or states, the mainstream media will usually only expose their misdemeanours if they are either official enemies or convenient scapegoats.

We are somehow supposed to believe that any mishaps that affect the livelihoods of millions of ordinary citizens are the fault of a few bad apples, external enemies, natural disasters or our own misbehaviour. We can rest assured it’s never the fault of the world’s most powerful organisations, who presumably all have our best interests at heart. The abiding message that neurolinguistic programming practitioners and behavioural scientists have implanted in our brains is that we must not only trust the experts, but also distrust anyone who challenges them. But who are these experts? Who decides which functionaries may determine scientific truth and constrain public policy options? When media talking heads lectured us on foreign policy, many switched off or opted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Endless internecine and religious conflicts in far-flung corners of the world only concern a minority of Westerners. Most opted to believe that such military adventures, while often counterproductive, aimed to spread liberal democracy and that opponents of humanitarian interventions supported despotic regimes. While most people enjoyed comfortable living standards at home, dissent remained a minority sport. All that changed in early 2020. Well-paid propagandists did not just flood the airwaves to promote resource wars or raise awareness about mental health, they sought to shame anyone who failed to follow a new set of bizarre rules that fundamentally changed the way we interact with each other. All of a sudden, each physical encounter with another human being posed a potential bio-hazard, unless we adhered to a new bio-security protocol. TV experts could thus blame excess mortality not on medical malpractice, but on our failure to abide by their rules.

As the narrative began to crumble, some observers asked why so many people complied with absurd regulations that did more harm than good. For every elderly person who may not have caught a seasonal infection because of lack of physical proximity with other unmasked people, many more died of neglect and isolation. If you see an elderly lady struggling to cross a busy road with a walking frame, she runs a tiny risk of catching a nasty disease from you if you help her, but a much bigger risk of being run over or stumbling on a pothole. Common sense often goes out of the window when another perceived threat looms large. The question is who persuaded hundreds of millions of people in different countries to change their behaviour? Did the stealthy elites plan this operation years in advance or did people just succumb to the madness of crowds genuinely frightened by the prospect of painful early death due to a scary virus? Honestly, I’m quite happy to believe the events of the last two and half years could be a result of both.

Dr Peter Breggin first came to my attention in the early 2000s as I researched the relentless growth of the mental health industry and the concomitant rise in psychoactive drug prescriptions. My concern was then, as it still is today, not with modern medicine, which has helped save many lives, but with the steady drift towards technocratic control of every aspect of natural human behaviour. Technology should always serve us as human beings and not the other way around. Dr Breggin has long been an outspoken critic of antipsychotics and antidepressants. I read the first edition of Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why To Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications, which seemed very much in the same mould of other books that came out in the same era such as Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America. Yet I later learned Dr Breggin often appeared on the notorious Savage Nation radio show. Its host, Michael Savage, had gained a reputation as a rightwing shock jock who not only supported gun rights and opposed mass immigration, but also generally backed US military adventurism and, of course, Israeli exceptionalism. While I agreed with Dr Breggin on psychiatry, I grew suspicious of the company he kept. I came from a left-leaning libertarian perspective critical of any form of authoritarianism, embracing Rousseau’s idea of the fundamentally peace-loving nature of humanity once liberated from all forms of oppression. To my dismay, many on the cultural left welcomed the expansion of mental healthcare with pro-active screening of personality disorders rather than addressing the psycho-social causes of people’s emotional challenges. The authoritarian drift of what we once called the liberal left predates the covid era, but I hoped the tide would turn and the left would once again seek to empower natural humanity rather than re-educate the underclasses in a forlorn quest to engineer a perfect society. The pursuit of perfection, while advantageous in many technical tasks, almost always leads to tyranny when applied to the management of human behaviour.

Many emotive causes that once delineated rival camps posing on the left or right now seem mere side shows. Your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, abortion rights or smacking once served as litmus tests in the fictitious left-right divide. What matters much more is the contrast between greater concentration of power versus greater decentralisation or rather top-down versus bottom-up control structures. The current ethos that beseeches us to trust the experts is the hallmark of the top-down model.

In the Western World, radical critiques of psychiatry appealed most to the antiauthoritarian left. The liberal left opposed militarism and championed the emancipation of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups within society. The notorious Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1974. Early 21^st century psychiatrists are much more concerned with symptoms of right-wing radicalisation that may include homophobia and transphobia. By rebranding psychiatry as mental health advocacy and extending its remit to a wide range of emotional problems, the corporate-state system has vastly expanded the behavioural surveillance industry with its armies of social workers, teachers and support workers liaising closely with the health and police services. The covid scare empowered the people management sector to apply the same behavioural insights techniques pioneered with vulnerable children and adults to the wider population. All of a sudden, everyone needed to heed official advice on how to go about their everyday activities. The mainstream media normalised an irrational fear of nanoscopic genetic sequences encouraging behaviours that would have until recently justified a clinical diagnosis of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). At the same time, restrictions on informal socialisation, dehumanising mask mandates in schools and an engineered fear of people outside your bubble promoted autistic behavioural patterns in normal children.

While other American intellectuals I had once admired such as Noam Chomsky failed to challenge the covid narrative, Dr Breggin reappeared on my radar as a brave dissident voice in a new era of worldwide groupthink. In a recent interview with the German Corona Investigative Committee (Corona-Ausschuss), Peter Breggin pointed out something I should have noticed about one of the superstars of the covid truth movement, for a want of a better term, Prof. Mattias Desmet. He did not question the criminality of a tiny clique, but rather sought to blame the madness of the crowds, something he likes to call mass formation. While his thesis has its superficial appeals, his recent book on The Psychology of Totalitarianism fails to identify a criminal cabal responsible for engendering collective compliance, but rather lays the blame on lazy thinking and our innate desire to fit in. It is almost as if the ruling classes did not want to roll out Draconian lockdowns and censor dissent, but only reacted to overwhelming public calls for urgent action to combat the virus. Indeed, unlike Robert F Kennedy Junior, Prof. Desmet fails to mention decades of pandemic planning and the inexorable drift to technocracy. It’s as if we acted in unison without any undue coercion by the same power-hungry elites who also happen to own the media and run most NGOs. While most wild conjecture about secret plots to control the whole of humanity may be wrong, much of verifiable modern history would have to be radically revised if we discounted all theories about corruption and crimes against humanity. High-profile gatekeepers serve an important role in providing ready-packaged explanations for obvious contradictions in the web of deceit emanating from the mainstream media. Yet they deny the criminality at the heart of our ruling classes, passing the buck onto rival ruling classes, incompetent middle managers or workers who followed orders unaware of their consequences. They are organised crime deniers.

Revisiting sustainability and the population paradox.

Have you noticed that every problem, whether real, perceived or fabricated, now demands the same solution: more technocracy for the common good of public health and environmental sustainability. Whether it’s digital health passports in the guise of smart apps, universal basic income with social credits, fact-checkers acting as electronic Ministries of Truth, online safety bills, mental health or the endless promotion of alternatives to traditional mother and father families, all trends lead us to greater dependence on the biotech industrial complex.

In the heady years of unparalleled consumer growth, hundreds of millions of us imagined a bright future of ever-expanding horizons with new freedoms and opportunities for the next generation. As inexpensive telecommunication and paved roads spread to regions we once disparagingly called the developing world, for a few short decades, we witnessed the apparent globalisation of the American Dream. While the big multinational brands began to dominate the urban landscape in cities as diverse as Bogotá, Bengaluru, Boston, Berlin, Beijing or Brazzaville, laissez-faire free-market capitalism gave way to public private partnerships that transferred power away from smallholder farmers and local traders to subsidiaries of a global network. Health and safety regulations had once protected local communities and workers against greedy corporations, eager to profit from the exploitation of natural resources and human labour. Now in the age of smart automation, big corporations often lobby governments to introduce tougher environmental regulations to put their leaner and meaner local competitors out of business, leaving only light ancillary services to small businesses. The open highways of 1960s North America have slowly but surely morphed into a corporate control grid with the commoditisation of privacy and unspoilt countryside.

In the years of plenty, opinion leaders successfully swept all talk of overpopulation and eugenics under the carpet. Only maverick academics and stealthy think tanks dared tackle these issues head on. Others only skirted around these controversies with platitudes about sustainability, climate change and resource depletion. Multinationals seemed happy to attract new consumers swarming to the burgeoning metropolises of the misnamed third world. Once they had abandoned their subsistence farms, these new human resources would soon become dependent, whether directly or indirectly, on global banks with NGOs managing their transition to our concept of modernity. Optimists forecast that a blend of technological innovation and lifestyle changes would help us avert resource wars. By the dawn of the 21^st century, earlier fears of widescale famines in countries with high birth rates faded as more efficient farming methods with irrigation and fertilisers could easily feed a forecast peak population of ten to eleven billion. Ever since fertility rates have dropped in most of Asia. China, Japan, Korea and much of South America now have below-replacement fertility rates. India has now stabilised at around replacement level. Only Sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt and a few Muslim Asian and Middle Eastern countries (Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan) retain a strong preference for large families (with fertility rates > 3.0). However, as millions move to burgeoning towns and cities and abandon their rural lifestyles, we can only expect prolific countries like Nigeria and Tanzania, with fertility rates respectively of 5.3 and 4.8, to follow in the footsteps of South Africa at just 2.4 and declining.

While we can easily feed the world without exploiting more arable land, we should ask if ten billion human beings can drive 5 billion vehicles, requiring a vast expansion of existing road infrastructure. More pertinently, should Europeans and North Americans, expect to keep their high-consumption lifestyle? French President, Emanuel Macron, has warned his people that the age of abundance is over (or fin de l'abondance).

There are certainly dangerous extremes in the population debate. On the one hand, endless expansion of aggregate consumption will require more advanced technology controlled by Big Tech leading to greater dependence on remote organisations with more surveillance and top-down social engineering. On the other, the kind of swift population decline that some power brokers such as Bill Gates, Prince Charles or Yuval Noah Harari would like to see may, depending on its speed, only be achievable through higher death rates and/or strict birth controls with grave consequences for basic human rights. Over the last two decades, Western policy makers have worried that people are living too long placing an unsustainable burden on both the state and private pension funds. Historically, two main methods have brought about rapid depopulation of undesirables, wars and land seizures. The latter is by far the most effective. By simply denying people the means to sustain their families or forcing people to adapt quickly to an alien society with very different rules, colonial powers could engender collective despondency and attribute excess mortality to primitive culture or perceived intellectual inferiority. Today, the whole world lives under the colonial rule of a few big banks and corporations, something we might call the Global Mafia.

We face two divergent propositions. One views most of humanity, unable to contribute to the development of a new eco-friendly technotopia, as pathogens wasting valuable resources, polluting our waterways and denying other species of their natural habitats. It’s easy to see the attractions of a more sparsely populated planet with more wilderness and more space for its surviving inhabitants to thrive. Some would perversely argue that a less populated world would be a freer world. There may well be eight billion people alive today, but only a few million can truly fulfil their dreams. Even if such a panacea were desirable, who would decide who will survive and who will be slowly euthanised?

Today, more than ever, raising the next generation requires a high investment strategy. Future adults need a sense of belonging and purpose that they can only learn through past generations. We are rootless nobodies without cultural connections to our biological ancestors. It may no longer make sense for most women to have four, five or six children, but a future without naturally born offspring would hasten the eclipse of humanity as it has evolved gradually over millennia. It will also mark the end of equal opportunities. Genetic engineering and augmented intelligence will empower a master race to downgrade the rest of humanity to the status of zoo animals. We are at a crossroads. We can either adapt to our natural environment by living more humbly or we can let the technocrats take over and deny us the freedom to shape our future.

Until the early 2000s I had taken it for granted that only outwardly autocratic dictatorships such as the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, Nazi Germany or North Korea required their citizens to think alike. As a cultural lefty, I’ve always prided myself on independence of mind, but also hoped humanity would converge on a more caring and sharing society. Could socialism ever come about without suppressing either people’s individuality or the true cultural diversity of communities with different interpretations of morality? Let us just consider that one section of American society believes life begins at conception, but gun ownership is a God-given right, while another believes only the state-authorised agencies can be trusted with guns, but a woman’s emotional wellbeing trumps the rights of the unborn. Perversely, many who support a woman’s right to choose over the survival of a foetus in her womb, do not support her right to choose which pharmaceutical drugs are injected into her body or have any meaningful say over her child’s education. If we cannot reconcile conflicting worldviews, we can at least agree to have different jurisdictions that enforce different laws reflecting the will of local peoples. That’s called democracy, but it only works when commoners can override the will of the ruling elites who do not necessarily have their best interests at heart. Increasingly, our rulers treat us like zoo animals who have to be tamed and kept in captivity for our own good.

The greatest shock over the last couple of years has not just been the overall tyrannical drift, but the acquiescence of the liberal professional classes, who have long vaunted their tolerance and philanthropy. The biggest cheerleaders for lockdowns, mask mandates and jab coercion were not old-fashioned conservatives or intolerant ethno-nationalists, but trendy progressives who see themselves as heirs to the hippies of the 1960s and 70s or the later new-age movement. We have somehow progressed from smoking pot at rock concerts, growing organic vegetables and skinny-dipping in pristine lakes in search of a greater connection with mother nature to embracing an obsessive bio-security regime that exploits our fear of contagions and environmental Armageddon only to empower technocrats to confine most of us to compact human habitation zones.

As I write, Dutch farmers have blocked their country’s highways and byways to protest against their government’s radical nitrogen-reduction measures. Their government wants to cut dairy and livestock farming in favour of the kind of genetically engineered crops and food processing plants favoured by big food startups such as the Dutch supermarket chain Picnic. The country’s prime minister, Mark Rutte, has openly boasted about his plans to transform the Netherlands into a high-tech food hub, run by engineers and artificially intelligent robots rather than by families who have farmed the land for generations. By sheer coincidence, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian administration is rolling out a variant of the same policies by letting soaring fertiliser prices force farmers to sell their land to the same predatory biotech multinationals that have gained the most from the last two years of top-down crisis management.

Yet the mainstream media keeps alive the myth of democracy with controlled opposition groups who indulge in identity politics, while ignoring the greatest power grab ever in human history. The Italian election campaign may provide the temporary illusion of choice between advocates of national sovereignty and progressive antiracists. Only a year ago all major parties in the government of national unity under the former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, agreed to roll out WEF-inspired green pass (digital health passport) schemes to police biotech compliance at great public expense while squandering hundreds of billions more on UBI trials, racking up unstainable debts. The same politicians who wanted to keep the unvaccinated under house arrest now accuse the opposition, mildly critical of medical apartheid, of fascism. The media seizes the tragic murder of a Nigerian immigrant by a jealous Italian husband to guilt-trip indigenous Italians critical of uncontrolled mass immigration. The trendy managerial classes can virtue-signal their racial tolerance, while native Italian doctors and nurses are still on unpaid leave because they refused to cooperate with Pfizer and Moderna.

Many on the left still believe in the fairy tale of endless regeneration through immigration to wealthier countries with low birth rates. This would be fine if we had the technology not only to sustain a projected ten billion human beings with Western European living standards but could also let all young people be architects of their destiny, enjoying the kind of freedom and opportunities that once abounded in the prosperous West. The fourth industrial revolution is fast putting an end to that dream with the smart automation of most manual and clerical jobs that might sustain the livelihoods and personal independence of both the native and migrant working classes. Over the last twenty years we’ve seen a rapid shift away from long-term careers in practical trades to the gig economy of short-term contracts and extreme labour mobility. Uber drivers and Amazon delivery agents may earn a few quick bucks with only a standard driving licence, but their employers are busy investing in driverless vehicles and drones. Their jobs are temporary because their services will soon be superfluous to requirements. More disturbingly, the tech giants have abandoned the consumer growth model that favoured endless market expansion for disposable goods. With armies of drones and strict regulation of natural socialisation, Big Tech now needs people more as compliant guinea pigs than either as workers or consumers. Strong-willed and independent-minded workers pose a threat to their hegemony. Human beings may withdraw their labour and may not always follow orders. Robots may malfunction, but they are both dispensable and easily replaceable. Our tech overlords may need some engineers, marketers and middle managers, but they are phasing out their reliance on truckers, farmers, fishermen, builders or even on human nurses. The neoliberal dream successfully lured people away from traditional self-reliant communities to urban landscapes owned by controlled by big business and governments. Now with the advent of artificial intelligence, most humble human workers will be unable to compete and be lured instead into lifelong dependence on universal basic income with social credits for good behaviour.

The notional left no longer stands up for workers’ rights or challenges the extreme concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. Instead its leaders advocate paternalism for the largely workless masses with special privileges only for the compliant managerial and engineering classes. They champion identity politics around whimsical lifestyle choices and personality traits, while blaming the socially conservative working classes for the crimes of colonialism. They obsess with LGBTQ++ rights and mental health, while turning a blind eye to the plight of young families who want to earn a living and raise the next generation with the ethics and culture of their forebears. Today's fake left is not anti-establishment at all, it is the establishment. If you have BlackRock, Vanguard, Big Tech, CNN, the BBC and the leading NGO's on your side, you cannot claim any grassroots credentials. Progressivism, for want of a better term, hinges on the belief that an upper caste of scientific experts should be the only masters of our destiny. Unchallenged, they have the ultimate power of life and death over the rest of humanity.

How yesteryear's colonialists morphed into today's trendsetters

I’ve often struggled to find a concise and generally understood term for the ruling cabal that transcends national borders and nominally democratic institutions. Henceforth I will settle for the Sicilian word, Mafia. With all due respect to modern Italians, the mafiosi were mere amateurs compared to the extended Biotech Military Industrial Complex allied closely with banking cartels, mass media outlets, NGOs and colleges as well as being deeply embedded in almost any administration, major political party or charity. Postmodern Mafia bosses are responsible for much bigger crimes against humanity. These dark forces combine to suppress our free will and mould us into malleable team players. We need a succinct  collective noun to avoid listing all the organisations these control freaks have infiltrated. The Global Mafia or just the Mafia pretty much encapsulates the state of play in the early 21^st century.

Over the years I’ve read Marxists who blame capitalism for all our woes, libertarians who blame the state, anarchists who blame both, anti-imperialists who blame colonialists, nationalists who blame globalists, one-world-love idealists who blame both, free thinkers who blame psychiatry, naturopaths who blame big pharma, technology enthusiasts who blame luddites and environmentalists who blame overconsumption. I’ve learned a good deal from critical thinkers from all schools of thought.

Only the law differentiates organised crime syndicates from the unholy alliance of governments and large corporations. Just as we pay tax to avoid hefty penalties or jail, people in Mafia-controlled areas of Sicily pay il pizzo or protection money. If you cooperate with your local Mafia bosses and turn a blind eye to their immoral deeds, you may be granted some personal freedoms and lead a relatively untroubled life, as long as you don’t rock the boat and know your place. Historically, most modern states emerged from fiefdoms whose rulers won power through a mix of warcraft and leadership skills. All modern states and large corporations operate as legalised mafias with slick marketing operations. Now if you dare speak out against your captors, they tarnish your reputation and deny you access to social media or any other public platforms.

Only once the forebears of today’s ruling classes had consolidated power through various tiers of administration could they begin to win the trust and loyalty of their subjects through public consultations. However, before the commonfolk could vote in parliamentary elections, we had to be educated to identify with the socio-political system that had been imposed on us. While the British establishment may have prided itself on democracy at home, although universal franchise was only achieved in the 1920s (for most men over 21 in 1918 and most women in 1929), in Africa and Asia they considered most natives too unworldly to vote and preferred to consult tribal leaders instead. We may consider former Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, who delayed the former British colony ‘s transition to majority rule, an outmoded racialist, but his attitude to black Zimbabweans differed little from that of enlightened liberal thinkers of the late 19^th century. They believed the natives had to be tamed before the managerial classes could extend public consultations to them. By the early 1990s universal suffrage with multi-party elections had reached countries as diverse as South Africa, Russia and Brazil. Liberal democracy had seemingly won the day, while transnational corporations were busy expanding their empires and corrupting governments.

The last two years of pandemic madness should have at least taught us that our nominally elected politicians are just following orders. At best they can negotiate with our real rulers on how best to roll out policies that unaccountable remote entities have already decided. They act as mere intermediaries between us and our colonial masters, who project their power via their tight grip on all aspects of our socio-economic infrastructure. A handful of investment firms, such as Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street Corporation and Berkshire Hathaway, own most shares not only in IT giants but also in the world’s leading biotechnology companies, food processors, major retailers and arms manufacturers. Household names as diverse as Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple, Amazon, Tesco, Walmart (Asda in the UK), Carrefour, Aldi, Pfizer, Biontech, Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, BA Systems and Capgemini are all joined at the hip. They’re all different incarnations of the same monster.

It’s a tangled web of super-billionaires working in tandem with the big banks and the World Economic Forum to set the policy agendas that governments roll out. Some like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Michael Bloomberg may be high-profile but other wheelers and dealers, especially in hedge funds and asset management, remain much more elusive. Whichever way, big decisions float from the top down. Consent is only ever manufactured.

Before the covid scare hardly anyone would have supported the concept of digital health passports to gain access to public venues. Eighteen months of relentless fearmongering led millions of wishful thinkers to support medical apartheid. Formerly tolerant progressives began to support total surveillance and censorship for the common good. Their new enemies were not the banksters whose wealth has skyrocketed since the first lockdowns, but the spectre of free-thinking human beings making rational choices about what to do with their own bodies, namely nonconformists who fail to comply with woke officialdom. In the past, such people often fled to freer lands, but now many of the world’s wealthiest countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany and Italy, have some of the strictest biomedical security regimes.

For every member of the Davos Set, there are millions of privileged hangers-on in middle management and awareness raising. In the UK we may call this breed of affluent self-righteous fake do-gooders Guardian readers. They're on a mission to educate the great unwashed about the evils of climate change, transphobia, white supremacy, Putin and antivaxxers. Yet few see the bigger picture. They would rather blame the politically incorrect working classes than admit today's woke billionaires favour eugenics.

Today’s colonial masters have rebranded themselves as one-world-love idealists who care deeply about the planet and its diverse peoples. The truth is they consider most people alive today useless eaters. They are the true heirs of 18^th and 19^th century imperialists who treated the natives as exotic wildlife. Today they treat 99% of humanity as zoo animals. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Never has so much power been concentrated in so few people.