By TLB Contributor: Steve Cook.
Throughout history, one of the major survival problems humanity has wrestled with is this: how do we coordinate and organize the survival efforts of large numbers of human beings so as to maximize cooperation and team effort in order to achieve the optimum level of survival potential possible?
One of the most common “solutions” to that problem has been to place a small number of human beings in an elite position from which they can lord it over the majority, formulate all the policies, make all the decisions, give the orders and have the majority simply do as they are told, put their shoulders to the wheel and produce all the wealth of the civilization.
Unfortunately this has not proven entirely workable and almost always degenerates into a situation in which the elite start solving survival problems from their own viewpoint and for their own benefit and without consideration for the survival problems of the many. And any such elite position, providing as it does a broad spectrum of opportunity for personal advantage and immunity from consequences, inevitably attracts criminal personalities – if indeed criminal personalities did not dream up the idea in the first place.
Once criminal personalities have infiltrated those elite positions and seized the reins of governance and policy-making, the rest of humanity is in serious trouble.
The Christian religion is a classic example. It started off with Jesus and wound up some time later with a Vatican as a control operation run by the Borgia and milking its parishioners for everything they are worth.
Any elite operation is virtually certain to attract criminals to it like flies to dung or hijackers to an unguarded flight loaded with gold bullion. Indeed, every elite operation ever foisted upon man was probably dreamed up by criminals in the first place. Any system of governance that set out to do things differently by seeking to establish equitable justice for all and inviting the broad participation of all men in the game called civilization, sooner or later wound up being infiltrated and turned into yet another elite operation more conducive to criminal advantage. The American Revolution is a case in point.
Once we have an elite operation, the problem the elite have is how to get the majority to keep playing the game according to the rules the elite have established. This becomes more problematic in direct ratio to the degree that whatever it is the elite are up to is perceived by the many to inhibit their survival efforts.
One of the various tactics used to maintain control over the many has been to hijack their religion and, through a suborned priesthood, control the many through their belief system. Thus, for instance, we had the “divine right of kings” in which it became perfectly all right for some criminal with a crown on his head to kill anybody who offended him, steal the products of their labour, rape their daughters and so forth because “God said he could.” God, as far as I know, said no such thing but once the idea had taken hold, and had been promulgated with great authority by some criminals dressed as Popes, Cardinals and Bishops, we had a population willing to put up with the most extreme criminality in the name of a God who must be pretty fed up with folk forging his signature on every dodgy pronunciamento dreamed up by men with less true spirituality than rodents.
Once people stopped believing that lie, that particular control operation crumbled and was replaced by others but the common pattern of all such elite set-ups has been to control and inhibit the knowledge available to the many: to keep the many in some state of ignorance, in other words.
This is done by denying them education whilst feeding them falsehoods through whatever the prevalent channels happen to be. Yesterday it was a hijacked religion and a suborned priesthood. Today it is a hijacked and suborned media and a booby-trapped education system. To that the elite have now added drugs and psychiatry: the effort to directly impair the minds of people.
So when we see before us the so-called “sheeple” – a misinformed and cowed majority – we are looking at nothing new. We are looking at the same pattern: an elite which maintains control of the majority by, among other things, denying them truth and by feeding them “information” doctored to the elite’s advantage by the “authorities” of the day, in our case the high priests and “experts” of the media, education, economics and psychiatry.
At the time of the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution and so on, I doubt the ordinary citizen was any better equipped with knowledge and understanding than people are today. While he was, I admit, less drugged or fixated upon that mass-hypnosis device, television, he nevertheless had little scope for reflection, fixated as he was upon a twelve-hour day just making sure his kids had bread on the table.
Yet this did not stop the revolution happening and the incumbent elite from being overthrown. The fact of the matter is that a little bit of truth goes a long way and it can penetrate untruth like an armor-piercing shell through steel plate.
So a valuable strategy is the education in which so many people in the freedom movement are doing extremely well. It is the effort to put truth on the line, to make it go in wherever it can be made to go in and to keep supplanting with the truth the myriad lies people are fed. It seeks, in other words, to raise understanding and knowledge at the grass roots and to keep on raising it and broadening its sweep.
In the old days we had Thomas Paine and his fellow pamphleteers risking life and limb on the streets of London, distributing the written word to a not-very-literate population and making the elite so uncomfortable he fled to America and France from whence he made them even more uncomfortable. Pamphleteering was a successful action and in the modern world we have our digital pamphleteers, such as the men and women of the Liberty Beacon, doing much the same thing. I wonder if Thomas Paine ever dreamed, when he published his first pamphlet and placed it in the hands of his first passerby, he would wind up playing such an important role in both the American and French revolutions?
Be all that as it may, if the elite wish to hold the position from which they get to shove the rest of humanity around and grow fat upon the labours of honest men, they rely heavily upon the majority remaining in ignorance, in an uneducated and befuddled state. But what if the majority became less and less befuddled, what if we could raise understanding at the grass roots to higher and higher levels so that fewer and fewer people can have to wool pulled over their eyes? What if many people understood the underlying, simple principles hidden behind all the complexity and waffle?
For example, some politician goes on TV and “explains” the government’s economic policy as regards raising taxes, borrowing another shed load of money so as to get out of debt (!), why the nation is getting “unavoidably” poorer and “living beyond its means” whilst people are being prevented from producing and CREATING the means we are supposed to be living beyond and so on and so forth. Hardly anybody understands what the heck he is talking about. We are none the wiser having heard his so-called explanation. And HE probably doesn’t understand what he is talking about either. But imagine if millions of people were raised to just a basic understanding of economics, could actually define the word “money” and were clued in on the mechanics of how the current system of creating money as debt provides the strings and levers by which the banking cartels are able to manipulate all economic life? A population thus educated would immediately be able to see through the aforementioned “explanation” and recognize it for what it is: technical-sounding waffle intended to baffle and not to convey understanding.
And what happens when it becomes very real and plain exactly how the corporate/banking elite have hijacked government and turned it into their minion, whilst behind the platitudes and more waffle lies a stark reality: that WE DO NOT HAVE a democracy. What we have is a con game ever-more-thinly veneered over the reality of a full-blown, honest-to-goodness oligarchy. If we want a democracy or a government that truly works for all the people, our struggle is not to preserve such a system but to ESTABLISH ONE because it doesn’t exist. Not yet.
Success in any endeavour requires a correct estimation of effort: the quantity of it and WHERE to apply it. While we fall for the sham and believe we have a democracy or accountable government and believe we are trying to preserve something that exists, we will continually be wrong-footed and faintly bewildered because what we should be doing is WORKING TO PUT A DEMOCRACY THERE, assuming that is what people actually want.
But in trying to raise the level of human understanding, we encounter another problem. If we wish to educate the ordinary guy on how, for example, his democracy has been hijacked, how our fraudulent “money” system works or some such thing, it often takes quite a bit of explaining.
The brutal truth of the matter is that many people are not going to read learned tomes or wade through article after article on the internet. Some will, but many won’t. For a start, the education system has been rigged to impair the ability of the citizen to assimilate and understand information. For another thing, not everybody is that way inclined in any case. Practical guys who are good with their hands, mothers with their hands full of children and all manner of people struggling with a rough universe in a beaten-up, malfunctioning economy are not necessarily going to take the time to study literature sufficiently to gain a good grasp of what is happening. This is not ideal and not desirable but it is one of the problems we have to overcome if we are to convey understanding broadly at the grass roots.
So is there another way to bring understanding swiftly to large numbers of people?
Yes there is. In fact it is already being done to a fair degree and has contributed to the wakening that is happening. It’s not therefore a new idea but it is something that we could perhaps think about and support and encourage as much as we can.
And it is the use of TV or movie drama.
I cite this example: a four-part British political thriller called “Secret State.”
It stars Gabriel Byrne, Douglas Hodge, Gina McKee, Charles Dance and Rupert Graves. It is directed by Ed Fraiman and is based on Chris Mullin’s novel, “A Very British Coup.” The story examines the relationship between a democratically elected government, the military and the markets.
In the run up to a general election, an accident on Teesside in the North east of England raises awkward questions about the safety procedures of a US petrochemical company, PetroFex. The British Prime Minister claims to have secured a compensation package from PetroFex, but on his return from the PetroFex HQ in the States, his plane crashes in the Atlantic under mysterious circumstances.
Deputy Prime Minister Tom Dawkins (Gabriel Byrne) takes over and during his quest to find justice and the truth for the victims on Teesside, he uncovers a conspiracy at the heart of the political system.
The story essentially pits a very rare bird, an honest politician, against the power elite that controls the government. Well acted and crisply written, it is a fine drama in itself but it has another strength: it makes very real in a way most people could understand just how the banking/corporate elite pull the strings and controls government, how politicians, honest or otherwise, are manipulated into acting as the elite’s proxies, and the horrendous difficulty any honest politician will encounter if he decides to do right by the people.
Almost anybody will come away from watching a drama of this caliber, with an enhanced grasp of the system we are ACTUALLY living under as opposed to the one we are conned into believing exists.
So you’ve got a guy who won’t or can’t read our articles or skips over our Facebook posts in the search for something more entertaining and less hard work. But many of such people WILL watch a good drama. And a good drama, honestly written, CAN educate.
If you get a chance get hold of this series. You can get it through Lovefilm for instance. Watch it and see what you think.
Doubtless there are other works like this, although few I suspect that are as good. The point however is that such works educate while they entertain and can be used to bridge the gap of apathy that still sprawls like the Grand Canyon between the horrible reality of our exhausted and disintegrating civilization and a new and better world of freedom and justice.
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BIO Steve Cook is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction. Find his books on monetary reform and a blueprint for ethical government at http://the-worm-in-the-apple.blogspot.co.uk/
Stephen Cook – Genghis Kant Blog
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