Does History Teach Us That Democracy Is About To End?
History teaches us many lessons. If we compare current events with lessons from the past, we might conclude that the era of democracy as the dominant form of global governance is reaching its denouement.
I believe that we’re living through an attack on our democratic states. Whether thats a covert attack, or one that is happening in plain sight is a matter of perspective.
In the 1940’s our population stormed machine gun lined beaches to fight for democracy. Eighty years later, my feeling is that the average person not only would not fight for it, but is actually of the belief that this form of governance no longer serves them.
This essay aims to give a quick history lesson on the power battles that have shaped our last 5,000 years, showing how various forms of authoritarianism have been far more prevalent than democracies. Most of what we value today is a result of the democratic system we’ve been lucky enough to be born into, but the trends suggest that might soon change.
The suggestion that we might be going through a regime change gets labelled a conspiracy theory, a side effect of most humans natural inclination to believe that recent history and the status quo are set in stone. But power battles and regime changes have been a staple element of all recorded history.
The world as we know it will eventually change. The time will come where Western Democracies revert back to the trends of previous eras and gets replaced by some form of authoritarianism. But we shouldn’t let that change happen easily, we need to fight against the trend and hold on to democracy for as long as we possibly can.
Human beings have one distinguishing feature from all other animals — our ability to create what Yuval Noah Harari described as imagined realities.
Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers.
The story of mankind is a story of power battles. And every one of those power battles has been built around one imagined reality or another.
Nothing has been more constant than change through the last five millennia — countless ideas, ideologies, empires, wars, technologies, innovations. But theres been one constant — human psychology. Because our brain structure and biology is largely fixed, human behaviour has generally followed familiar and identifiable patterns.
It’s the reason why the idea of no heaven or hell below us, nothing to kill or die for and all the people sharing all the world has never existed outside of John Lennon’s imagination. Desire and greed are fundamental emotions that ensure that power battles remain a core tenet of humanity. There is always one person or group who believes they can do a better job of leading than the incumbents and though sometimes that transition is peaceful, it’s nearly always out of the barrel of a gun. No single empire or ideology has ever lasted more than a few hundred years — it’s always been replaced with something better, stronger or some combination of both.
The lengths that humans have gone to in order to either maintain or gain power are extreme. Because our last major attempt at a power shift was 80 years ago, it’s easy to underestimate this point.
During Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958, millions of its own citizens were buried alive or clubbed to death in an attempt to purge the country of its capitalist traits and restore the communist values of the party. Old habits die hard for Mao’s current day CCP, the worlds foremost example of what authoritarianism can do to solve problems, with an estimated one million plus Uyghur’s being held captive in re-education camps still today.
When the British Empire took control of Australian lands from its local indigenous people in the late 18th Century, officers were all too happy to engage in random killings or organised massacres of the Aboriginal people to make sure the locals knew who the new sheriff in town was.
Hitler’s Nazi’s started out by segregating Jew’s from daily activities, a decade later they sent them to concentration camps to be gassed.
Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution, the movement supposedly representing the Russian proletariats in their fight against the upper class capitalists, had a particular penchant for genocide and torture as a necessary tool to eliminate undesirable social groups.
Atrocities aren’t always just about gaining power, they’re quite often just as important to maintain it. In 1962 the US Department of Defence proposed Operation Northwood to President Kennedy, a plan to engage the CIA to commit acts of domestic terrorism on its own citizens and military. “The desired result from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.”
As an aside, Kennedy shut the Operation Northwood plan down. Less than 12 months later he was assassinated by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. When some people questioned this official narrative, the CIA & media came up with a new term to label them & discredit their ideas — the conspiracy theorists.
The point to be made here is that to believe that humans are motivated by power and willing to go to extreme levels to maintain or gain it is not cynical, it’s just reality.
The assertion of power in a group setting with just a handful of people is difficult enough. Once you get to thousands, let alone millions or billions of people, you need very clear systems in place to maintain power. Recorded history goes back around 5,000 years and even then, the world had around seven million inhabitants, so we’ve got no shortage of evidence to learn about the pros and cons of different forms of governance.
From the first Mesopotamian civilisation in 2,500 BC until the early 20th Century, the most common form of governance was one where a small group of people set and enforced the rules of the society. Sometimes these rulers gained power by their divine rights or class (a Monarchy or Aristocracy). Sometimes it was gained by their expertise or ability to yield a sword (Oligarchy or Autocracy).
The Romans had a form of democracy, though only those from the wealthy class could hold office and eventually the rigmarole of answering to the people led a shift to a centralised imperial authority with its Emperor gaining absolute power.
Governance that relies on absolute power can be an efficient system for decision making, but its weakness is how to deal with a citizen who disagrees with the supreme ruler. The efficient way to deal with it is to simply behead the dissident, which is why most of recorded history is a story of brutal violence. We should remember that the Kings and Emperors of old were biologically the same creatures as us today — the main difference is the democratic form of governance thats become the norm for the past century, which gives the individual enough rights that they can usually keep their head when they disagree with state policies.
Of course, the world still has some countries that retain an authoritarian form of government and the violence against its people is much the same as it was before. We hear most of these stories from its former citizens who fled in search of a life where their individual freedom would be a right, not a privilege. Their chosen destinations are largely a result of a particular document that was signed 250 years ago.
In 1776 the world ushered in a new system of governance, when thirteen independent colonies of America signed the Declaration of Independence.
The language within this document might not seem revolutionary today, but it certainly was for the Kings and Emperors that had ruled the world for the thousands of years before it. The idea that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness would’ve been unfathomable. To give such power to the individual would’ve put their own rule not only at risk, but led to a certain demise.
The Declaration of Independence led to the establishment of the United States Constitution just over a decade later, which to this day remains the oldest surviving government constitution. Beginning with the words we the people, the document provided a major change in the history of governance in that the objective of this government would be to serve its people. A fundamental difference to an autocracy or totalitarian empire, where the people exist to serve the government.
A little over a century went by before the United States of America would become the global hegemony, taking over from the empires of the French, Dutch and British before them. The rate of progress achieved since this new form of governance came into play was perhaps summed up no better than by JFK during his famous speech at Rice University in 1962. Condensing 50,000 years into just 50, he revered that “only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.”
Now even the most vocal patriot couldn’t disagree that the United States of America has its fair share of problems. Democratic governance is not without its flaws, of which there are many. It’s just that as Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
In a democracy, a misfit and troublemaker with no respect for the status quo is Steve Jobs. In an autocracy, it’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Andrei Sakharov. And they’re just the lucky ones who got out. Others like Sophie Magdalena Scholl had her stories told in memoriam.
The American inspired Western Democratic system lives and dies with the ability of its citizens to express their own individual ideas and beliefs, as much as we might vehemently disagree with what we hear. It allows creativity. It allows divergence of thought. It allows disagreement.
America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms.
Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.
– The American President, 1995
Allowing individualism means that your blood will boil when you hear someone who holds an opposing view to yours. But you must always consider what the situation is when you’re that other person. How do you want the rules to play when you have a view that’s opposed to the majority?
Only in retrospect can we see how important this is. There was a time that the 42 year old Rosa Parks decided to fight for her fringe view that she, a black woman, had the right to sit on any bus seat. Same story for Emmeline Pankhurst, who led a movement that earned women the right to vote in elections. Or more recently, when gay people finally earned the right to get married.
When you’re with the mob, it’s easy to hate individualism. But put yourself in the shoes of someone like the aforementioned for just one second and you realise just how important it is that we protect it at all costs.
I sense that not only are we less willing to fight for Western Democracies, but we’ve slowly lost faith in their value over the past few decades. What I will argue is that it has not actually been the implementation of democratic governance, but rather the slow breakdown of those institutions. When we consider the sheer influence that certain classes have on those institutions, we realise that the Western world has slowly turned into a plutocracy. We should consider the key trends that are influencing this.
At the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. That date marked the point where the world entered a new era of hyper globalisation — the first time in recorded history where we’ve truly had a globally integrated system. Without establishing a position on whether globalisation has been a net positive or negative, nearly all could agree that it’s fundamentally changed the world.
Wealthy asset owners and middle class workers went two separate ways some time around the early ‘90’s. Globalisation has played a big part, but it’s not the only reason. Technology has destroyed the value of labour relative to capital. Easy monetary policy from Central Banks has boosted asset prices with very little influence on real economic growth.
It’s been a simply incredible three decades for billionaires and multinationals. Not so great for the small business owner or proletariats. The charts below tell this story better than what any words can do.
The Cantillon Effect explained the phenomenon that the closer you are to the king, the more you benefitted, and the further away you were, the more you were harmed.
Globalisation has created challenges for our existing systems of governance. How does a Western government tax and regulate a locally domiciled multi national corporation who sells goods or services to users in 190 countries, with a supply chain that spans across every continent and a complicated corporate structure thats been created and maintained by a global accounting firm for tens of millions of dollars per annum in order to reduce their legal liabilities & get their effective tax rate to less than 10%?
Or what about Goldman Sachs creating US dollar liabilities by offering currency swaps on a market in Singapore, which Deutsche Bank then relends to Siemens in Berlin, that then gets repoed out to the China Construction Bank so that CIMC in Shenzhen can purchase iron ore futures contracts from BHP Billiton via some other other investment bank out of Hong Kong?
Then there’s the tech giants Facebook & Google, who literally own the digital lives of at least two thirds of the adult population with a range of products that are completely free for the end users. Almost every message we send someone, every piece of news or information we consume, every location we visit is tracked and monitored by these two behemoths.
The answer on how governments control them – they can’t. Power has shifted from democratically elected governments to stateless institutions. That power shift has monumental consequences for the way our world is governed.
Of all the various actors in this global system, the ones whose behaviour is the easiest to predict is the politicians. They’ve got one objective: get elected and stay elected. Maintain this power balance for long enough and you’ll eventually see what we’ve got now — parliaments filled with politicians who do what they’re told and take their orders. Is what we see today a collection of the most impressive leaders in the world, or an utterly unimpressive group of chess pieces?
The single most powerful group in the world today are the key players in this global system, the global elites. They represent no citizens. They have no flag. The best representation we have of this global elite is the World Economic Forum (WEF) — The Klaus Schwab led group who are to the 1%ers what the 1%ers are to the 99%ers. They are the elite of the elite.
The WEF host the annual Davos Event, held in the Swiss Alps that “brings together some 3,000 paying members and selected participants — among which are business leaders, political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists — for up to five days to discuss global issues across 500 sessions…The Davos Agenda is a pioneering mobilization of global leaders to shape the principles, policies and partnerships needed in this challenging new context.”
World Economic Forum Founder, Klaus Schwab.
In Plato’s The Republic, he puts forth that the ideal form of governance is a system where the ruler is a Philosopher King. A philosopher king is a ruler who possesses a love of wisdom, as well as intelligence, reliability, and a willingness to live a simple life.
If you look at the WEF website, most of their content promotes a positive future. Better care for the environment, more inclusivity, better access to healthcare for the poorest people in the world. Many of these ideas are in line with Plato’s vision for a Philosopher King and it’s easy to think that the world they’re trying to create is a utopian on. But there’s a problem with that and it’s a lesson that history has taught us many times over. Margaret Atwood reminds us that “The Communist regime in Russia and the Nazi takeover of Germany both began as utopian visions” too.
Vladimir Lenin truly believed himself to be a Philosopher King, as did his successor Joseph Stalin. Same story for Adolph Hitler, or more recently for China’s new forever ruler, Xi Jinping. Plato’s idea has proven to be a failed method of governance because even in the very rare event that a King starts out as truly just, they are unable to remain this way because power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A “Defend the Soviet Union” rally in New York, 1920s. | People’s World / Daily Worker archive
Another challenge is how the Philosopher King might be tempted to engage in social engineering in the name of the greater good. If we treat the world like a software program and make cold hard decisions that optimise our outcomes, we can easily come to some very inhumane conclusions. The elderly, the unhealthy, the lesser races, the outcasts, the few billion too many people that are draining food and energy resources — what decisions might be made of them? We know the direction previous Philosopher Kings have taken.
China’s totalitarian CCP leadership provides us a modern insight into how this system works. It relies on absolute power and the leadership controlling one version of the truth — the Great Chinese Firewall. For most citizens, they not only come to love it, but actually live completely unaware that they’re under complete mind control. If a Westerner tells them they are being brainwashed, they will staunchly defend their ruling parties version of the truth. This is what a propaganda department with an estimated $10–20 billion annual budget gets you.
It’s provided Chinese leadership with the ability to do many things. They’ve moved their nation of 1.5 billion people from a nation of poverty to the worlds second largest economy. They’ll continue their march forward with decisions made at the top level for the greater good, like their latest social credit scoring system that ensures its citizens all do the right thing. If Chinese leadership tells its people that they must do or think something, they will do it.
Black Mirror’s Nosedive Episode shows the perils of a social scoring system.
China has got to the position they are in today because of their ability to run a dictatorship. Despite the ideological values of Westerners and certainly those published on the WEF website, we’ve largely turned a blind eye to the humanitarian issues. Yes there’s some posturing and yes there’s some trade wars here and there, but if the Western world was really ready to stand for humanitarian causes then we’d have stopped doing business with China years ago.
The trouble is, when it comes to China, money talks. China’s entry into the global economy has provided a bonanza for globalists. CrossBorder Capital, a research firm that tracks global liquidity, estimates that in 20 years China has gone from being responsible for 6% of total global liquidity to 30% today. Take that liquidity pool out of global markets and it’s not hard to guess what asset prices do. China’s removal from the global economy would do wonders for carbon emissions, human rights and the middle class westerner. It would be a disaster for just about every member of the WEF, however.
We might easily conclude that the global elites at the WEF are guilty of acting in their own self-interest, but the truly concerning issue is the use of language and belief system that is so typical of a Philosopher King. Just a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic, Klaus Schwab released his manifesto The Great Reset. In releasing this manifesto that found its way into the hands of every important decision maker across the globe, Schwab prophesied that “there is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”
This passage from The Spectator sums up the challenges with Schwab’s philosophy:
Some real life examples of the Davos Man are the Microsoft Founder Bill Gates, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Salesforce Founder Mark Benioff, Carlisle Group Co-Founder David Rubinstein and the Central Bankers Mark Carney & Christine Lagarde. These people are certainly intelligent and reliable, though I’m not so sure they satisfy Plato’s final criteria of a willingness to lead a simple life.
I think the truth is that these Western Elites have been watching the Chinese totalitarian experiment and rather than fighting it, they’ve fallen in love with it.
There’s a threat to the globalists — nationalism & democracies. Dani Rodrik formulated a trilemma that states that “it is impossible to attain economic hyper-globalisation, national sovereignty and democracy simultaneously, because only two of these things can be achieved at any one time.”
I would take this theory one step further and suggest that hyper-globalisation cannot exist with either of the bottom two, because national sovereignty without democracy isn’t really national sovereignty at all. Are countries like America, United Kingdom, Canada & Australia actually recognisable on any measure other than name if they’re operating without democratic institutions in place?
Hyper-globalisation isn’t just the idea of open borders and free trade, it’s the idea that we need truly integrated systems for any single thing that’s global in nature. That’s Facebook or Google doing what it does with every single global citizen having access to it’s platform. It is Goldman Sachs having the ability to create a unit of fungible currency in one country and then turning it into thousands of different transactions across borders. It’s Apple building supply chains that span across 43 countries and 6 continents.
But it’s also more than just economics — it’s ideas and other global problems. It is global cooperation to solve climate change. It is solving global poverty by giving global citizens access to a universal basic income. It is solving health inequality by giving universal access to vaccines to solve global health crises.
Try forming a global consensus on climate change, universal basic income or healthcare with 180 nations each representing the best interests of their own local citizens. And there’s the rub, if you’re anti any one of those causes then you are labelled an anti-humanitarian. The Philosopher Kings not only have the level of hubris required to believe that they can solve these problems, but they also know that they can get the masses behind their hyper-globalisation campaigns because anyone against it is an uneducated bigot.
It’s quite fascinating to see what this trend has done for the idea of the left-right political spectrum. The old left were deeply distrusting of governments or institutions and would literally sacrifice their own lives in the system, living off the grid in hippie communes to fight for what they believed were just humanitarian causes. They’ve been replaced today by the virtue signalling middle who are far more interested in conformity for their own self interest than they are for the humanitarian causes they supposedly represent.
Now if we truly are concerned about the state of the planet, we could probably solve any sort of climate change tomorrow by replicating the way indigenous cultures have lived for thousands of years before us. I’m not sure what role Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Goldman Sachs & the rest of the Philosopher Kings organisations would fare in that world, however.
Yet still, the trilemma shows the problem. The rise of populism in the mid 2010’s gives us an example of how democracy gets in the way of hyper-globalisation. I’m not even going to try and understand the true motives of Donald Trump, but one thing he did do was read the emotions of a fed up American middle class who had caught the short end of the hyper-globalisation stick. The blue collar family from the rust belt with no assets who’s been in and out of work for the better part of a decade isn’t drinking the kool-aid on the benefits of hyper-globalisation. So when a populist leader runs on a campaign that brings back jobs and protects the national interest first and foremost, there’s still enough uneducated bigots that will vote for them.
The question remains, how can the globalists solve the challenges of the trilemma?
The truth is, the globalists have already got most of the world to part with one of sovereignty or democracy. Nearly all of Europe have given up their sovereignty (and they’ve quickly found out democracy too) since they joined together to form the European Union, the regional organisation inspired by the Empire of Charlemagne whose Central Bank is led by the WEF Board Member & convicted fraud, Madame Lagarde.
The WEF have clearly shown they’ll turn a blind eye to things like totalitarianism & human slavery in China, in return for collaboration with President Xi. His speech at the WEF event earlier this year “calls for the world to work together to tackle global challenges, particularly COVID-19 and climate change”.
The biggest hurdle that remains is those card-carrying lovers of freedom and democracy in the United States of America. If they can find a way to get around the United States Constitution, then not only does American Democracy fall but so will the democratic governance of the few remaining advocates like Canada, Australia & the United Kingdom.
We can establish that there’s a new power, the stateless global elite, and we can establish that there’s a hurdle in their way, national sovereignty and democracy.
So just like we’ve seen over the last 5,000 years of recorded history, we simply have a new power battle in front of us. This is nothing new and to think otherwise shows a complete disregard for history. I think the mistake we’re making is to expect this power battle to look like all the other ones. Like WWI or WWII, where the power battle was primarily fought over territory using traditional means like guns and bombs. Why would a sophisticated group use such archaic methods when there’s far more powerful methods like cyber or biological warfare currently available?
Another method is information. This method has been used repeatedly throughout history, but the technology of today gives it powers that Lenin and Hitler could’ve only ever dreamed of.
Power has always hinged on your ability to convince enough followers on the merits of your ideas. The arrival of the printing press in the late 15th Century was a fascinating development for the power structures at the time. Pope Alexander, aware that the printing press could mean the distribution of ideas other than his own, promised excommunication for anyone who printed manuscripts without church approval.
“The art of printing can be of great service in so far as it furthers the circulation of useful and tested books; but it can bring about serious evils if it is permitted to widen the influence of pernicious works. It will, therefore, be necessary to maintain full control over the printers so that they may be prevented from bringing into print writings which are antagonistic to the Catholic faith, or which are likely to cause trouble to believers.” — Pope Alexander VI, 1501.
In 1995 a Washington Pastor by the name of Dr Bob Moorehead published The Paradox of Our Time, an essay often misattributed to the Dalai Lama.
This section regarding the paradox of information abundance seems particularly prescient.
More conveniences, but less time
We have more degrees, but less sense
More knowledge but less judgment
More experts but more problems
Now consider that these words were written almost a decade before the mainstream would start to see “a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols” (AKA The Internet).
In the years that followed, Google launched in 1998, the same year that Microsoft released a Windows update that included its first web browser. Facebook launched to the Harvard Community in 2004. Apple released the iPhone in 2007, then added 4G capability in 2010 which enabled the whole world to access this new thing the internet anywhere, everywhere and at all times.
Pope Alexander saw the incredible power of the printing press in the 1500’s and it is no surprise that the global elite saw the power of the internet five centuries later. ICAAN, whose tagline is “One World, One Internet”, are the main group who govern the internet.
In a world of abundant information, the desire to find out what is fact and what is fiction becomes ever more challenging. This challenge has been exacerbated over the last 18 months, with the solution we seem to have agreed upon being a series of independent fact checkers.
Type “fact check” into your search browser and you’ll come across this as your first result: FactCheck.org A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center.
In addition to the ongoing support from the Annenberg Foundation, the biggest source of funding for FactCheck.org is from Facebook. This is the money they pay to receive the information that informs their in-built fact checker mechanism.
Consider that Facebook has 3.5 billion monthly users across its core platforms (Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp). That’s almost half of the worlds population relying on these platforms for their ‘truths’ or ‘facts’.
But there’s a problem with that. And it is summed up by none better than the brilliant mind of Friedrich Nietzsche.
So whose interpretations are most of the worlds population relying upon for their facts?
Well it’s the global elite, of course. And propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
The idea of ‘one truth’ or one set of facts and anything that opposes it being labelled misinformation is a truly worrying trend. It’s the tool used by any totalitarian rule because the achilles heel of that style of regime is any independent thought that challenges the official party line. Orwell said that “Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country”, which is why his fictional land of Oceania implemented its own Newspeak language that was “designed to diminish the range of thought” by its citizens.
Totalitarian propaganda is not just the big flags and flashy statements that we look at in retrospect and wonder how the people could be so stupid to fall for it. Joseph Goebbels, the man who convinced 60 million regular Germans that the solution to their problems was gassing Jews, put it best when he said that it “works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will”.
The Nuremberg Trials showed that there’s one human emotion that you need to evoke if propaganda is going to really work — fear.
“It was very easy, it has nothing to do with Nazism, it has something to do with human nature. You can do it in a Nazi, socialist, communist regime, in a monarchy and even in a democracy. The only thing that needs to be done to enslave people is to scare them. If you manage to find a way to scare people, you can make them do what you want.”
Human history is a story of power battles. A human being with a thirst for power is willing to commit incredible atrocities. There is a global elite class with incredible power. National sovereignty and democracy are a hurdle for hyper-globalisation. The combination of technology and centralisation provides a tool that could be used for unprecedented mind control and propaganda. It is difficult to control a large population without propaganda.
These should not be controversial ideas.
The theories that some people (nearly always ‘far right wing QAnon maniacs’) have concluded when connecting these dots are the controversial ones. A lot of those conspiracy theories do miss the mark, but at least they’re starting to ask some of the right questions.
Where the conspiracy theories fall down are the belief that what’s happening in the world right now is a coordinated plan by this entire class of global elites with the media, politicians and multinational corporations all in on it. My view is that not only would it be impossible to coordinate, but it fails to realise that no power battle or war in history occurred this way. A plan can be executed with less than a handful of people in the know, all you need to execute it successfully is to ensure that everyone else is in on the ideology.
The saying that it’s easier to fool someone than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled applies to party members just as much as it applies to a population. The Nazi’s, Soviets & CCP all had good men & women within their ranks who had been fooled by their leaders utopian visions.
Look at www.weforum.org. Look at the major political parties in every country, the media, the biggest corporations, the normal people. Look at the consequences for those who oppose these ideas.
Now ask the question on whether you think that everyone is in on the ideology?
And if everyone is in on the ideology, could a small inner faction be willing to go the distance and commit an atrocity to seize power?
A new system of centralised global governance where nation states & democracies cease to matter is the end game for humanity as we know it. It’s the system of governance envisaged in 1984, Brave New World, The Matrix, V For Vendetta, The Handmaid‘s Tale & just about every other dystopian sci-fi thats ever been made.
In 1961 the English philosopher Aldous Huxley put forward his idea on how we might get there. I’m petrified that he might’ve nailed it.
(Initially published on August 15th 2021)