"
…the whole so-called Libertarian ideology …. may sound nice on the
surface but if you think it through, it's just a call for corporate
tyranny. It takes away any barrier to corporate tyranny." - Noam Chomsky
"
Rats
and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It
is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and
mercy." - Wendell Berry
This essay examines what would really
happen if conspiracy theorists got their way. It is an examination of a
splintered pseudo-religious cult and its dangerous ideas and how - if
such ideas were ever to gain ground - society as we know it would would
be severely affected. Their far-right libertarian view of revolution
is fueled by a conspiratorial paranoia whose consequences are readily
obvious. The problem right from the start, of course, is that the
conspiracy theories are false, and their adherents ideas for changing
the world are based on an incorrect and often downright delusional view
of reality. That means that their post-revolution solutions would have
very severe unintended consequences because their solutions aren't aimed
at solving real problems in the real world, but rather solving false
problems that exist only in their fantasy world.
The vision I present here of a post-revolution conspiracist dominated
world is, by definition, speculative. But then again, so is George
Orwell’s
1984, a book that many conspiracy theorists cite as
prescient gospel truth, and which many believe is literally coming to
pass now (or already has). This essay is not a prediction of what I
think
will come to pass, just as Orwell’s wasn't either. This article is a profile of what
may
come to pass if conspiracy theorists of the sort who support Alex
Jones, David Icke and the rest of the conspiratuality gurus had free
reign to build the world that they say they want. So close your eyes if
you will and imagine the revolution has just taken place, the
governments are toppled and the conspiracists are in control. What will
come next?
The first step on this journey would probably be the gallows. Those
deemed traitors to the 'cause' would be rounded up and strung up. I
myself have been told twice (on the David Icke forum) that when the
revolution comes I will be standing on the gallows with the other
'traitors'. This talk of gallows (among other ways of execution
including burning people alive) appears all too common among
conspiracists and examples are not hard to find:
9/11 Truthers:
https://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/semiliterateparanoiacswhofantasizeaboutt
http://www.vice.com/read/the-conspiracy-theory-community-are-dangerous-enemies-to-make
Chemtrailers:
This reasoning, which is (like most things conspiracy theorists believe
in) not fully thought out, assumes that there will be some sort of
'revolution' where presumably the current political order will be
undone, the conspiracies that these people believe in will be halted,
and those who supported them will be punished.
So now what? The
government is toppled, the traitors are swinging from their ropes and
society has more or less come to a halt. Here we find the vacuum that
is so common with all revolutions. How will it be filled? Examining
just one of these group's ideas it is quickly understood that the
post-revolution philosophy found in most conspiratuality is centered
around a far-right libertarian agenda.
Thrive is a movie and
movement centered around conspiracies and New Age ideas which has
quickly developed into a movement. It was set up by Foster Gamble and
you can see their site here:
http://www.thrivemovement.com/
The website's Liberty page for example is a real shocker:
http://www.thrivemovement.com/solutions-liberty
Peppered with quotes from Ayn Rand, Ron Paul and Stefan Molyneux, the
page even includes an attack on democracy. Gamble lumps democracy in
with bigotry, imperialism, socialism, and fascism, and claims all of
these - including democracy! - violate the "intrinsic freedom of
others." Although Gamble thinks he is creating a political center
where the right and left can join together - in part because he
interviews progressives throughout his film - most of the actual
solutions he proposes are strictly libertarian.
The political center to which Gamble refers is a myth. George Lakoff, author of
The Political Mind,
explains why there is no such thing as an established 'moderate' or
'centrist' worldview - i.e., no single set of ideas characterizes a
center or moderate political position. Consequently, different people
will describe 'the center' in different ways, depending on their
particular beliefs about what defines a political center. Moreover, the
'center' will also be defined by the prevailing political narrative. If
libertarians, conservatives, and ultra right wing factions are debating
liberal Democrats, the center will always be on the right. However, if
socialists and communists were added to the debate, the center would
move toward the left. So, identifying who is allowed into the discussion
is a determining factor in defining the 'center.'
Lakoff's
discovery is an important contribution to understanding how and why
people vote the way they do. It explains the role of emotions,
metaphors, and psychological history, all of which determine which
buttons we push in the voting booth as well as which buttons have been
pushed by the manipulators who know how to influence our behavior.
But I fear we are diverting too much into discussion here so let me quickly return you to that post-revolution world.
Show Me the Money.
Just
as everywhere today, the key factor in the world that conspiracy
theorists have built is money. The problem, however, is that there isn't
any. In a post-conspiracy world there are no banks or formal financial
institutions. In the past 50 years, conspiracy theories regarding banks,
finance and currency - infused with libertarian propaganda - became so
prevalent that the banks either collapsed, were outlawed, or were driven
out of business. Needless to say in America the U.S. Federal Reserve
was the first to go. 'Fiat currency' is the ultimate evil, the tool of
the Illuminati for world domination, so the very appearance of it is
social taboo. Just as libertarians and conspiracy theorists today
demand, the U.S. is back on the gold standard: all currency is backed by
gold. However, early in the revolution, large corporations quickly
purchased all of the gold bullion in the United States from the failing
banks. All of this gold is still held in their vaults, heavily guarded.
It never enters circulation. Gold and gold-backed currency are still
traded by the large corporations, but in purely theoretical transactions
that take place on balance sheets and in computer programs.
Looking
at the situation in America alone as a result of this situation, there
is no currency in circulation. The U.S. Treasury stopped printing money.
In fact, due to massive de-funding of government, the U.S. Treasury no
longer exists. No one has seen a piece of paper currency or coin except
in a museum. But because the amount of gold bullion in the United
States is only a tiny fraction of the amount of money needed to keep the
economy moving, and because the gold reserves are under effective
control of private corporations, America has become a land of barter
economies. Corporations who wish to do business with each other trade
favors, contractual obligations and customers; this form of barter has
been unofficially institutionalized in the form of 'credits,' which are
not backed by any precious metals. Ironically, credits exactly mimic
most of the features of 'fiat currency' that has been supposedly
outlawed and socially stigmatized. In rural areas, as we will see, the
chief form of currency is ammunition. Needless to say, the ideals of a
conspiracist economy and the realities do not match up.
The Cities: Corporate Feudalism.
The
supplanting of democracy by conspiracist thinking and libertarian
ideology had the effect, during the revolution, of dismantling
government at all levels. Because there is no effective law and the
economy collapsed, the result was large-scale anarchy. Major cities are
the only islands of calm in a sea of violence and lawlessness.
These
major cities are all run by an interlocking coalition of corporations -
the same ones that control all the gold and all the wealth. The major
function of these corporations is to sell social services to city
residents, and they are all monopolies. The Law Enforcement Corporation
sells physical security. The Habitation Corporation sells housing. The
Food Corporation sells food. The Justice Corporation sells access to the
wholly-privatized court system. There is no economic competition. There
is also no regulation. Prices are fixed, but in this environment prices
don't matter, as we'll see.
The cities are walled
enclaves, heavily guarded by military personnel, where residents have at
least a chance at a life above the anarchy and poverty of the outside
world - but at a huge cost. The price for a house alone in one of the
cities is far beyond the amount of gold, credits or barter that any
ordinary person could ever possess in a lifetime. Nevertheless, the
corporations waive their prices and admit new residents in exchange for
lifetime commitments to work for them - commitments secured by immense
debt loads. This form of indentured servitude is essentially feudalism:
the workers cannot quit, cannot lobby, cannot organize, and can be fired
and expelled from the city for any reason or no reason. Social mobility
is unknown. It is impossible for a common worker—one who cleans the
streets, works in the restaurants, drives the bus, provides childcare,
etc.- to rise above his or her station; the debt load that the common
person has taken on in exchange for living in the city is insurmountable
in a dozen lifetimes. In fact, the corporations have begun to tack the
balance of peoples' unpaid debts on to the debts of their children in
exchange for agreeing to let their children continue to live in the city
after they reach the age of majority. In this way, the corporations
acquire an underclass of hereditary serfs, bound to the land and the
lord, just like medieval feudalism. These serf-like customers are often
traded between corporations as a form of barter.
The corporations
have no incentive to treat the workers well. So many more people want
to get into the cities than the number of slots available. Consequently
the labor supply is cheap and inexhaustible, so any concessions to
workers are an unnecessary drain on efficiency. Workers toil 14 hours a
day, seven days a week. If they get sick, they are fired and sent out of
the city. Although they live better than anyone else in the society,
the directors and managers of the corporations don't live without fear.
The influence of conspiracist thinking at all levels of society makes a
stable existence very precarious. All it takes is one errant accusation
that a person is working for the Illuminati, or even sympathizes with
the Illuminati, and the person will be ostracized from society, fired
from his job, possibly expelled from the city itself or hung from the
same gallows as the 'traitors'.
Evidence is irrelevant, and
legal process is unnecessary; an accusation, even an implausible one, is
tantamount to guilt. Savvy businessmen routinely accuse their rivals of
being Illuminati agents. Promotion and demotion within corporations is
due far less often to merit and hard work than it is personnel shifts as
a result of firings and expulsions from the city, most of them
reactions to conspiracy allegations. Consequently, the corporations are
poorly-run, grotesquely wasteful and rife with incompetence. Because
they have a captive base of indentured customers, however, and
competence and efficiency have no economic value, the ineptitude of the
corporate managers has no effect on profits.
The Countryside: Mad Max With Pogroms.
If
life is bad in the cities, it's even worse in the countryside.
Government - feared and vilified by conspiracy theorists as the root of
all evil - simply does not exist. Outside the cities, there are no
police, no local or state officials, and no organization of any kind.
There are no courts. There are no hospitals. There are no schools. Roads
crumbled into dust decades ago because no one was around to maintain
them. No one provides any private social services. For one thing, the
big corporations have nothing to gain by selling their services outside
the city; the rural population has no money to pay for them anyway. For
another, they don't need the business; they've got more customers than
they can serve within the walls of the cities. Outside those walls,
people manage to survive - barely - by tilling their own tiny farms at a
subsistence level.
The level of violence in the
countryside is shocking. During the revolution, the only personal
liberty that was even remotely respected was the right to bear arms, and
out in the country you can't survive without heavy firepower. Family
farms are defended by minefields, barbed-wire fences and kids toting
automatic weapons. In many areas, warlords have managed to take over the
more productive farms, resulting in irregular patchworks of fiefdoms
that are constantly fighting with each other. In addition to outright
barter, ammunition is the chief
de facto currency in these
areas. Heavy weaponry looted from abandoned military bases is the chief
source of power. Life in this libertarian paradise is, in the famous
words of Thomas Hobbes, "nasty, brutish and short."
Disease
takes a terrible toll on all sectors of society, including the rich in
the cities, but out in the countryside it's particularly bad. Vaccines
of any kind are distrusted as tools of the Illuminati. As a result,
diseases that are easily preventable - polio, measles, rubella, chicken
pox, etc. - kill and cripple tens of thousands every year, especially
children. Infant mortality is frightful. There are no doctors in these
outlying areas. They too were denounced long ago as tools of
conspirators; during the revolution many doctors, accused of hiding
cancer cures and collaborating with Illuminati-controlled pharmaceutical
companies, were massacred or driven out of business. Even medical
knowledge itself is dying out since all the medical schools were closed
long ago.
The people who fare the worst in this society
are Jews. Universally blamed for the imaginary conspiracies that
supposedly brought society to the brink of ruin, Jews are refused entry
to the cities, and in the countryside they are ruthlessly persecuted and
massacred with regularity in horrific pogroms that resemble those of
medieval Europe - except with automatic weapons. What few Jews remain
have walled themselves up in heavily-armed ghettos with even worse
conditions than the countryside whose virulently anti-Semitic (and
heavily-armed) population they are hiding from. Nevertheless, as much as
they hate Jews, the common people and the more powerful warlords of the
countryside cannot organize any collective efforts to exterminate them,
as much as they would like to. This inability is the only thing that
allows the insular Jewish communities that still exist to carry on,
hopeful that someday conditions will change and the world will come to
its senses.
Knowledge—Forbidden Fruit.
The
revolution that brought the conspiracy order to power was profoundly
anti-intellectual. Experts on anything - especially scientists,
economists (who argued against the economic changes), historians (who
explained how the past had really occurred) and doctors (who were
accused of suppressing cancer cures and tainting vaccines) - were
mercilessly persecuted and massacred. In the revolution, all the
universities were closed. Many libraries were burned or destroyed, their
books distrusted as tools of the Illuminati. The Internet was regarded
as a much more pure and reliable source of knowledge, because the
Internet contained 'the truth' about conspiracies and books did not. As a
result, in this conspiracist order, systemized education barely exists,
libraries are virtually nonexistent, and most books are locked away and
forgotten in vaults owned by the major city corporations - similar to
the way books in the Middle Ages were locked up in monasteries.
If
you think this is an exaggeration you should look at some of the
Chemtrail conspiracy theories which allege that all the science books in
the world (along with old films, WWII photos, and newspaper archives)
have been tampered with to make it look like contrails have always been
persistent, when in fact it only started around 1997. See for example
here:
http://tankerenemy.blogspot.com/2009/01/contrailsciencecom-fake-books.html
The corporate managers of the cities, understanding that their power
rests upon the perpetuation of conspiracy theories, carefully control
what knowledge gets out to the common people. Any book or document that
even remotely refutes or even questions conspiracy theories has been
destroyed or altered after the fact to support conspiracy explanations.
In this world, Osama bin Laden is lauded as a martyr, on whom the
Illuminati unfairly blamed 9/11 and then assassinated him for this
imaginary crime. Books or websites about Adolf Hitler routinely omit the
Holocaust and instead laud his pro-free-market policies. American
history books are wildly inaccurate, and present the country’s history
as a relentless narrative of exploitation and conspiracies by the
Illuminati and the Jews. Even science books contain numerous errors and
omissions.
But, not many people read these books anyway; in fact,
literacy has declined greatly because education as we now know it has
ceased to exist. Most common people get all of their information from
the Internet, which is controlled by the Information Corporation. There
is very little written text on the Internet. Most material is either in
the form of pictograms or videos. Almost all are either pornography, or
simple morality plays dramatizing the evil and immorality of the
Illuminati and the Jews. Most of these videos are less than a minute
long and feature some hideously gory act of violence. Even very young
children are desensitized to the most horrible images of human
suffering, having been exposed to an unending stream of images of brutal
retributions carried out against Illuminati sympathizers.
As
the knowledge of true history, true science and critical thinking
gradually fades, society is rapidly losing any real sense of its past or
itself. Almost all events in history are reduced and simplified to a
one-note narrative of exploitation by the Illuminati followed by the
redemption of the revolution. Ancient history and the origins of man are
described as being the result of extraterrestrial visitation. No one in
this society knows that humans built the pyramids; even well-educated
elites accept and honestly believe that all prehistoric structures of
this nature were built by aliens.
The major religions are all
waning in practice. There are very few churches left. No one in this
society has read or even heard of Shakespeare, of Tolstoy or of Leonardo
Da Vinci. No one has ever been to an art museum or a music concert. In
100 years’ time, the collective store of human knowledge existing on
Earth will have been reduced by half or more. It is truly a new Dark
Age.
The Environment - A Rising Tide of Disaster.
Because
there is no government, no environmental regulation and the city
corporations have no incentive to be environmentally responsible, most
countries are a stinking cesspool of environmental degradation. The
corporation-run cities generate power through burning coal and oil - all
reserves privately owned and controlled, of course. The cities export
their garbage to the countryside where it sits in rotting heaps,
breeding diseases and cancer clusters among the semi-feral rural
population. Rural dwellers routinely build and furnish their own houses
from the refuse of the cities, much of it contaminated. Because the
corporate-run cities have no need for water treatment facilities—they
can simply pump their sewage into the rivers at zero cost - rivers
downstream of the major cities are indescribably foul. There are few
forests left, the rural residents having deforested their lands for
firewood.
The worst problem is global warming. Because the
conspiracist order denounced anthropogenic global warming as a scam and
a hoax by the Illuminati, even mentioning the existence of this problem
is absolutely forbidden. Absolutely nothing has been done to ameliorate
global warming - in fact, carbon emissions since the revolution have
increased, despite having much less industry, because the corporations
that run the cities have changed over to dirtier and more inefficient
means of energy production and industrial usage. Rising sea levels have
inundated coastlines. In the larger coastal cities like New York,
makeshift seawalls have been built to hold back the ocean (built by
slave labor of customer-serfs), but in rural coastal areas, the rising
sea levels have turned many areas into fetid swamps. These swamps breed
mosquitoes, which results in a high incidence of malaria in areas where
it had once been thought to be eradicated. Combined with society’s
distrust of doctors—thanks to conspiracy theories about suppressed
cancer cures and tainted vaccines—the mortality from tropical diseases
is much higher than it was before the revolution.
Global
warming has also made peoples' jobs of feeding themselves much harder.
Food crops are more difficult and costlier to raise, invasive and
parasite species are hardier and more difficult to kill, and erosion of
desiccated topsoil has turned vast areas into semi-arid wastelands
incapable of cultivation. The increased strength of hurricanes due to
global warming results in large swaths of the Atlantic coast being
decimated at regular intervals - and because there is no government
there are no relief agencies. No one pays any attention to these
problems. In the cities, even mentioning the words “global warming” will
mark you as an Illuminati sympathizer; in the countryside, the
scientific knowledge to explain what’s happening no longer exists. In
the meantime greenhouse gases continue to foul the atmosphere at an
ever-increasing rate. The disaster of global warming is now, fifty years
after the revolution, far beyond man's capacity to reverse it.
When
the sun sets on this bleak country, filled with pollution and decay,
its rays bleed through layers of carbon dioxide vapor and sulfuric acid.
It sets on mosquito-infested marshes that were comfortable beachfront
communities 60 years before. The clouds approaching on the horizon are
filled with acid rain. Their caustic drops fall on acres of landfills
and junkyards, oozing poison into a water table already contaminated
with toxic chemicals and human feces. This is the brave new world that
conspiracy ideology has built.
But there is worse yet to come...