One of the primary faults in the way our societies function is that the systems in place have all been designed to operate under the assumption that the essential cogs behave both morally and ethically. This is true for both the micro and macro levels, and is a consequence of the general illusion—or self-deluded wishful thinking—that we all live in a relatively ‘high trust’ society.
Take America. Everywhere you look around you, systems are designed to work under the assumption that they will not be misused by members of the privileged classes. Sure, there’s a smattering of symbolic ‘fail safes’, designed more as token deterrences than any real mechanisms for accountability. The micro level fares better, because the average citizen is far more attuned to the natural savage state of Man. The higher up the food chain you go, to the corporo-governmental level, you find the pressure valves appear deliberately set to “loose”; it’s like a corrupt jail warden leaving the backdoor ostensibly ‘closed’, but unlocked, to allow illicit activity to slip past in the murk of night.
Someone famously said:
"If you want to understand how the world works, imagine that every action is the result of a conspiracy by your enemies."
This may seem cynical on its face, even nihilistic when you really chase the thought down, but we increasingly find today that it is unfortunately a realist perspective. When it comes to analyzing the actions of government, political, and bureaucratic figures, one must always prudently start from the position that they are acting in an unethical, conspiratorial way against the best interests of the populace. It is a kind of tautology: corporate and governmental figures are corrupt because their goals and objectives conflict with those of the people, forcing them to pursue those goals in underhanded fashion; and they invariably counterpose the people in such a way because they are corrupt.
We see time and time again a kind of ‘theater’ when corporate or governmental officials are called to task. Whether it’s a Congressional grilling of Dr. Fauci, where soft balls are pitched and his answers taken to record at face value, or like recently, Visa and Mastercard execs being raked by a ‘fiery’ Josh Hawley:
In each case, the same sordid and immiserating reality is revealed: that we’re witnessing a kind of theater consisting of secret handshakes, or more accurately, kayfabe in the form of wrestlers who whisper moves to each other as they pretend to drop anvil-arms on one another’s heaving bulks. The problem is, it’s not always a strictly deliberate kayfabe, but rather the illusion of one wrought of a system morally designed to function only at its most responsible.
Nature scorns the responsible. Instead, nature favors savage primacy.
What we get is a system without the proper brakes in place, a system easily cozened and manipulated, taken advantage of by people to whom such things are second nature. Like a form of insurance, a properly designed system should always assume the worst case scenario; its rules and catches should operate on the premise that society’s predatory worst are intent on bypassing them.
Instead, we have a veritably credulous system—one which assumes an ethical operator, in a game-theoretic sense, at the highest rungs of social status and power, continuing to offer indulgences and benefits of the doubt.
It’s not simply how our officials respond to adversarial corporate figures, it’s how the rules and regulations of the system itself are constructed. They require little oversight, which itself assumes any conflicts of interest between subject and overseer to be benign, with no safeguard in place to filter or vet such things. When FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb joined Pfizer’s Board of Directors literally two months after his FDA tenure, the presumption of innocence was a given, allowing for no mechanism to question—let alone actually act on—this inappropriate example of revolving-doorism. Countless others can be listed ad nauseam, like the well-established revolving door relationship between intel agencies and social media Big Tech firms.
The exact origins of this fatal flaw are difficult to pinpoint; whether it was the country’s deeply-rooted Protestant historical meta-frame, which inflicted a kind of moral gullibility on the architects of the systems now presiding over us, cursing us with this saintly aversion to cynicism; or perhaps it’s just some ambiguously-sourced toxic optimism, as byproduct of the magnanimity of the ‘American Spirit’, itself the evaporating effluent of once-strong industry and post-war identity, which instilled in us this noble virtue that all humans are fundamentally good, and that some aberrant ‘trauma’ may one day turn a mere handful of them bad. Or perhaps it is the intentional rigging of our civic and social systems by powerful interests to reflect the ‘innocent naivete’ which stands to serve them so well. Recall that at the bottom rung of the food chain, no such leeway in presumption of innocence is ever extended. Commit the pettiest crime—like pocketing a Snickers bar from a store—and find yourself hauled off and spared no pardon. One concedes this may not be the case for San Francisco, Seattle, or other of the lawless ‘Blue Zones’—anomalies of nature which have broken out of the continuum into a kind of Salvador-Dalian mutation, an Area X of the Annihilation fold, full of pulsating oddities and other dread phenomena; these can be discounted.
The issue extends to everything from regulatory compliance and oversight, down to taxes. At the personal level, scrutiny is maximized: you will be hard-pressed to escape with leniency from committing the smallest tax transgression, be it inadvertent or mistaken. Corporations on the other hand are presumed to always behave uprightly because their putative ‘long legacy’ and ‘prestige’ grants them a blanket immunity, or at least a much greater tolerance for their ‘mistakes’. Because their representatives wear sleek suits and appear refined, have glossy teeth and moneyed mannerisms, the system’s psychological presumption always tends toward forgiveness; “too big to fail,” one example of many.
The Covid era saw some of the most egregious examples of this high tolerance and assumption of ‘high trust’ operators. A man potentially responsible for the murder of millions was given tribune before Congress, and allowed to openly scoff at sitting members, verifiably lying and flouting the entire system. Yet each time, owing to the apparent cachet of his office, his perjurious statements were written off or given the pass. Example: it was undeniable to honest observers that his attempts to extemporaneously redefine the well-established norms of ‘gain of function’ were a travesty of trust, fit to immediately revoke his credibility. But instead, a bizarre kind of esoteric deferment was granted, as if no amount of open misconduct could possibly tip the scales against this insidiously in-built presumption of ‘high trust’.
Another more recent example is the Palestinian conflict. It is merely ‘accepted’ prima facie at our institutional level that Israel means well, has no ulterior motives whatsoever in prosecuting their grisly offensive against Gaza, and now Lebanon. There is no systemic architecture in place that treats such barbarous developments from a standpoint of skepticism. Everything is taken at face value, all ‘official’ declarations from the Israeli side accepted without argument or push back; the notorious example being the US allowing Israel to ‘investigate itself’, and then in dewy-eyed fashion, accepting the results without compunction.
Or take, for instance, current societal developments when it comes to Big Tech or the Davos demimonde’s global designs. Nowhere within our system are valves and checks in place with the appropriate scrutiny to offer even a cursory challenge to these exogenous proposals from unelected vampires. Nowhere is it enshrined in the blueprints of our social compacts or civic structures that large cartels of business and financial interests are almost certain to scheme in ways that benefit them at our expense. Similarly, when an unelected bureau of global technocrats assembles to discuss social changes for which they have no civil mandate, our systems lack fail-safes or safeguards to at least throw up a red flag. They should be designed to trigger warning as a rule, when convocations like Davos assemble, given the assumed likelihood—based on rudimentary logic—that power elite do not simply convene for their health, or—even more absurdly—for the benefit of the underclass beneath them. This has never in history been the case, and never will be.
This issue exists because to so much as suggest that cabals conspire in the shadows is to be labeled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by the very forces who stake their interest in protecting the secret history of the dynastic rulership behind the globe’s institutions. It is they who maintain the favorable dual tenets of innocence and ‘basic goodness’ central to the great ‘High Trust’ conspiracy.
The foregoing may sound quaint on paper—but surely it’s just a kind of nebulous wishful thinking, or juvenile optimism to suggest such a world could exist where a culture of suspicion and circumspection against powerful interests is an embedded societal norm? But that’s not the case at all. Our pharisaical elites divert us from directly witnessing existing alternatives.
There are countries whose civil institutions are built to be suspicious of, and adversarial to, the robber baron class. In the grand granularization and compartmentalization of the post-‘Great Society’ managerialism and post-WTO era’s globalization, a kind of mechanized model of the State and its appendages was formed. A deep opaqueness set in around the unaccountable overlap between business, finance, special interests, and governmental institutions alike—a skein increasingly difficult to untangle. The revolving-doorism phenomenon thereby became evermore commonplace, since the Machine had become impossibly indecipherable, such that the common man could not be bothered to exhaust himself with its extrication. And since the Fourth Estate was entwined as well, the media could not be counted on to ask the tough questions, level the probing eye onto this thickening morass; which led to the rhetorical: who watches the watchmen?
This poll found that 1964 was the last year that the country could actually be called a ‘high trust’ society:
Marc Andreessen wrote of the above:
1964: Peak trust, peak centralization, peak technological development, peak competence. The last year of a lost civilization.
Isn’t it fascinating that Johnson’s Great Society and seminal Civil Rights Act were both passed in 1964?
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 followed a year later, spurring a deluge of migration from Latin America, and particularly Mexico, with millions flooding in per year:
Over the course of the following two decades, society was indelibly reshaped.
Modern America often touts itself as a secular, free-thinking cosmopolis. But religion was simply replaced by new worshipful institutions, the questioning of which was made into heretical pronouncement. That’s because in some ways, America’s overwhelming ‘success’ of the twentieth century itself enshrined a kind of mythic scope to the foundational pillars of that ‘miracle’: capitalism, liberalism, exceptionalism, consumerism, which have become litanies whose profaning was deemed deeply ‘unAmerican’.
Similarly, Hollywood as an institution managed to embed itself into this ‘cathedral’—or ‘blue church’ as Jordan Hall fashions it—so as to enjoy the fruits of being a golden ‘pillar’. What benefits does this confer, exactly? Take the Weinsteins and Epsteins, the Roman Polanskis—and the many others like them. Virtually everyone in their orbit was aware of their predilections and misdeeds. But because they represented these intrinsically American ‘icons’ of business and culture, the acolytes feared being outcast as iconoclasts in naming and shaming them. These figures had taken on the vestments and habits of the new ecumenical body.
The same goes for the Davos structure on the world stage. It remains unassailable for the very reason that this global body has built up a moat of reverence around itself. To challenge the cabal is to be tarnished as a ‘conspiracy theorist’. The same applies to the body of legacy media, which too has clung desperately to the divinized status of ‘essential institution’, even now skirmishing with Musk over his revolutionary proclamation that: we’re all the media now.
Legacy media has operated for decades under the nimbus of being some arche component of the quasi-mystical shibboleth of ‘democracy’. They did everything to instill in us the belief that the institution was incapable of erring, presenting as some exalted ‘scales’ of impartial truth.
The assumption built into the system remains: that the media’s operators are both ethical and moral, with no strong falsification mechanism in place to challenge them; as always, the system is self-policing and unassailable.
One of the reasons these bodies are able to plunge themselves into the mystic stream of essentiality seems partly to do with humanity’s secret longing for the past: where the nobility presided over us like a kind of collective spiritual buttress, or lodestone. We still instinctively treat public officials and institutions like the FBI with an atavistic deference, paying them our pious ‘thank you, sirs’, rather than acknowledging them as the public servants that they are. As such, the bodies they inhabit tend to resonate with a temple-like solemnity, leaving us passive to the willful blindness of culpability inherent in the institutions meant to act as bulwarks against them.
And that’s the problem: the incalculable grandeur of the ‘American experiment’s’ success has led to the ordaining of these fixtures as roots and stems of the same sacred tree. When these institutions speak, they do so through the booming voice of consecrated figures of the American Hagiography. They are Roosevelt and Hearst and Vanderbilt in one, pillars of this collective marvel of world history, which spawned unmatched fortune and prosperity, or so the fable goes. Media figures themselves ride the coattails of this royal treatment, cavorting with beltway barons and Capitol Hill boyars, privileged with a permanent seat at the table. It’s why they react with such affronted shock at the smallest push back, as now seen in the Musk feud: they consider themselves to be anointed, the haute monde, the crowns on the pillars holding this ineffably deific machine up; in their minds, they’re the prodigal courtiers of the modern technocourt—in reality, more like courtesans. They are moral and ethical by simple virtue of their station. For them morality is no briar patch, but a primrose path; their very actions define it for the rest of us.
The crux is that these things cannot be left to the changing mores of our times, but must be encoded into the very Constitution as an update to the types of institutional synergies of power even the founding fathers could not have foreseen. The assumption of conspiracy behind the gestures of any body of power must be codified to be presumed, as the chief load-bearing palladium against the nexus of unopposed tyrannies which now threaten us.
Reprise:
"If you want to understand how the world works, imagine that every action is the result of a conspiracy by your enemies."
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1964 - Peak Trust and everything goes down from there. 1964 was also the first full year of Jewish power over America with the slaying of JFK and the ascent to power of LBJ, a committed zionist. Since then, the American government has descended into cheap politics, criminal behaviour at the national policy level, and the slow but steady rise to political power of the Jewish lobby, exacerbated by an increasingly corrupt MIC, media, multinational corporate and academic power structure draining the country of its morals, civil rights and culture.
Indeed, 1963, the year of the American coup. I lived through it all - I remember. Many of us remember. We remember days when a family could go on holiday without even locking the door of their home. We remember when you could park your car and leave the windows open. We remember when you would be ashamed to say the word "damn!" in public conversation. We remember when marriage was held in sanctity. We remember when homosexuality, cross-dressing, transgender and other sexual perversities were not accepted in polite company but hidden behind doors. We remember when there was such a thing as honour, ethics, and moral behaviour. We remember when the future looked bright and exciting, and opportunities seemed to abound if you worked for it.
And because we remember, it just means so much more personal pain and sense of loss to those of us who lived in those times.
And yet, instead of learning from past decades, just a small pretense of push-back from the likes of Musk and Trump is enough for the people who don't trust the system, to put these two on a high pedestal, almost turning them into the new demigods such that their open declarations of their bias is brushed off as some 5d chess moves 😀
The system is indeed rotten and hollow, but so are the masses...hollow and hypnotized to be the perfect sheep, whoever be the master.