Hard times. Emerging from an apparently engineered pandemic, now in another war for ephemeral reasons, a resultant economic crisis that is exacerbating unmanageable debt, we find ethnic cleansing and inter-ethnic hatred are increasingly back in vogue. 

It’s easy to imagine a nefarious program is being orchestrated by a nasty and entrenched elite, aiming to plunder and enslave the rest of us. Such an idea is clearly not baseless, but nonetheless completely misleading in the solutions it suggests. ‘If only we could jail them, or have a Nuremberg Two, things would be better…’

However, Nuremberg One did not stop ethnic cleansing, targeting of religious groups, wars and mass death based on straight-out lies, or mass medical coercion for power and money. A couple of obvious reasons stand out for this. 

Firstly, high-level societal corruption is so deep and pervasive that it simply cannot be rooted out by force or law–the judges and armies and arms manufacturers are likely to be part of this behemoth already and have no interest in self-harm, while politicians are simply paid by them. 

Secondly, if those deepest in this cesspit of child sacrifice and share market-dictated slaughter were taken out of the picture, some of us would simply replace them. We know this because none of what we are seeing now is new. Ask any late Roman, Chinese peasant, or victim of the Inquisition. We need to be honest with ourselves regarding human behavior if we are going to change direction.

There was, arguably, a period after World War Two when the West had a bit of a reset and the direction did seem better. Eisenhower was ignored, and so were the obvious risks of growing inequality as software entrepreneurs and financial houses accumulated riches greater than whole nations. Faced with a choice of recognizing the obvious or believing the public relations they funded, the propaganda proved more popular. We all, as a society, opted for a future rooted more in feudal inequality than egalitarianism. We regressed, because it is always easier than standing tall.

So, here we are, back again, deep in the mire. To address it, we should first recognize the enormity of what is going on. We have allowed a corporate-authoritarian behemoth to arise, a monster of our own dereliction. We removed the brakes on greed and human stupidity, giving a free hand to a few to accumulate enormous wealth and power and, most importantly, to dispense with empathy. We empowered people shallow enough to believe in their own superiority, even omnipotence, by ignoring the wisdom of thousands of years of humanity.

We are all capable of becoming similarly corrupted, if we receive an opportunity and elect to succumb to it. There is nothing special about leaders of the big financial houses, the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, the redactions of the Epstein files, nor the peons of old wealthy families that helped stoke, and profited from, former wars. They are all expressions of what the rest of us can become, given the resources and a willingness to empty ourselves of a more meaningful but harder existence.

Therefore, we should not blame a ‘they’ or a ‘them.’ It is our own tolerance of the worst of human nature that gets us into trouble. Obsessing with specific people – railing against ‘elites’ – will at best result in their replacement. 

Alternatively, we can start thinking through the codes of conduct that are necessary in any society, and in ourselves, to stop people going that way. Stop enabling the worst of human greed and self-delusion that drives sponsored politicians to advocate for war, unknown insiders to trade shares on human lives, and oligarchs to dream of corralling whole populations into their digital prison and plying them with pharmaceuticals. We need to recognize the system we all built, within which they operate.

Human nature is driven by greed. We know greed is bad, yet it is not unrelated to protecting and benefiting one’s own (e.g. family, child, spouse), so we can readily veil it in virtue. The ‘selfish gene’ is an imperative for reproduction of life, and we each have tens of thousands of them. Historically, we have managed this problem through social sanction, regulatory systems, and national constitutions. 

When these were written or implemented by a few rich and powerful people – nobility or the Party – they primarily benefited those who wrote them. It generally took violent civil wars and revolutions to change that – the United States Constitution and its early amendments empowering people over oligarchy were an exception – until the Party reformed under a new banner.

Multinational corporations now take this inherent feudalism a step further, owned or controlled by even larger financial houses unhindered by borders and national legal systems. Orchestrating mass mobility through wars and sanctions breaks down cultures and coherence – leaving only the orchestrators to wield power. We have enabled them to grow sufficiently large that they now demand and receive freedom from liability, dictating terms to politicians. 

Pharma essentially regulates itself with agency capture, and banks are too big to fail. A new Medieval nobility – the Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock and Vanguard – now control States rather than rule under them. They can do this because we, as a society, have chosen the easy path of fooling ourselves that they are a pinnacle of civilized life. 

Most nobility, like ourselves, do not set out to be evil. But, being driven to look after themselves and their own, they become destructive to others. Sufficiently removed from the worst consequences of their decisions by wealth and power, the deaths of thousands become abstract. The deeper you descend into the pit, the less relevant the sunshine becomes. Politicians start salivating in front of cameras calling for the bombing or erasure of whole populations, while those running the politicians need not even raise emotion.

By allowing unbridled greed to prosper, we have allowed this behemoth to control our armies, our food, communications, energy, healthcare, and banking. Because of whom we are – tending toward comfort and the easy road rather than pain and risk – we need little encouragement to acquiesce. 

A few very wealthy people with a court of sycophants and hangers-on can get the rest of us to do, as the past few years have demonstrated, almost anything. A vaccine we don’t believe in to go on holiday, or self-censoring to save our social media profile. 

Banning hate speech to save democracy, because war is needed by the Board of Peace. They can make us as absurd as they like, to the point of masking when we stand and unmasking when we sit. Mourning the deaths of small businesses whilst ordering from Amazon. We are who we are.

In past times, whole populations accepted, facilitated, and excused the importation of African slaves to America or European slaves to North Africa. They supported the Inquisition, the tearing out of children’s hearts in sacrifice, the mass killing of Jews and Gypsies and the transformation of Middle Eastern cities to rubble over other children’s bodies. There is nothing new under the sun. The US First and Second Amendments exist because wiser people noticed that human societies, left to run naturally, have always gone down this road. 

So, where is hope and how can we respond to our normal, corrupted human condition? One option would be to join in (if you have been holding back). If you work in public health, take the money by saying pandemics may kill us all. If your town is struggling, buy everything online. If you’re in journalism, ask your sponsors what to write. Or just vote for every benefit you can on the tab to be paid by your children.

The second would be to rail against a few select parts of this behemoth. Target the WHO as an existential threat, or chemtrails, or whatever else this monster finds to distract you with. Waving flags may not change the wind but it provides a sense of camaraderie. At least we are doing something, far easier and less dangerous than confronting ourselves.

A third would be to recognize the behemoth for what it is, a reflection of ourselves and our own willingness to fail. Stakeholder capitalism, international fascism, globalism, or whatever label we wish is, in the end, just an amoral monster grown from the common desire for self-gratification. It is nothing we cannot readily understand if we are honest. It only seems overwhelming if we see its perpetrators as somehow different, somehow special. They are not. We just enable them to use opportunity and riches to give expression to the corruption we are all capable of.

Once we recognize ourselves in those who oppress us, we have a chance to rein them in. We are not dealing with psychopaths or demons, but with people who share the same potential for right and wrong as us. They may have allowed a demon to settle on their shoulder, but we allowed it into the room.

Once we cut the behemoth down to human size, we can see that nothing is new, and defeating it is not impossible. It will take perseverance, hope, and a reckoning with ourselves. We have never been very successful at living together, but we have sometimes managed to curb the worst in us. It takes a refusal to compromise and follow the easy path. 

Reversing the perverse leadership of our current world may seem overwhelming, but a camel can, we are assured, pass through the eye of a needle. The key is knowing that the ‘they’ are not special. They are, essentially, us.

© Eurasia Review