Capitalism and “The Universal Religion”

[논둑길맨발로]

Capitalism and “The Universal Religion”

By Peter Dudink

Global Research, May 20, 2014

Region: USA

Theme: Culture, Society & History, Global Economy

 Almost everyone belongs to the universal religion. Some call it capitalism, or the global economy, or—still more preposterously—the “real world.” A more fitting name is American Dreamism. Today, corporate symbols like McDonald’s golden arches are more widely recognized than the Christian cross, but what goes on in our corporate world is virtually identical to what goes on in our holy places: superstition, deception, and profiteering.

People sacrifice their time, their health and ultimately their lives to the American Dream, and the American Dream gives them nothing but empty hopes, empty symbols of wealth, bloody crusades, myths, lies, and the daily media mass. Of course, American Dreamism isn’t a recognized religion, and it has no official scriptures, but in fact its scriptures are our national anthems, constitutions, amendments and bills of rights—and its idols and holy icons are our celebrities, advertisements and brand names. Capitalists want everyone to think capitalism is rational and intelligent, but in fact it is the ultimate and universal religion.

A New Definition of Government

Never mind the absolute myth that capitalism is a recent ‘development’ in economic relations. Capitalism is as old as greed. Ancient kings and emperors were the earliest capitalists. Theycapitalized on any opportunity to conquer foreign markets—I mean foreign peoples. Perhaps they used more violence and less cunning than modern capitalists, but that is hardly a positive development.

Kings and conquerors were the first businessmen. They made profits through violence, deception and exploitation. Often they struck deals and allowed the conquered people to live if and only if they agreed to pay a regular tax or tithe. That was the first business interaction: the profiteer granted you the right to live in return for profits.

But over time, conquerors developed new, more subtle but equally immoral methods. Consider the methods employed by the British Crown chartered Hudson’s Bay Company in the North American fur trade. When it traded British pots and knives for local furs, you can be sure the company profited enormously by underpaying the laborers who produced, shipped and traded pots and knives; and made still more profit by taking advantage of the indigenous people’s ignorance of the true value of their furs in the European market. Thus the company profited, and of course some of those profits went to the supreme authority over all business dealings, the British government, so the government was and is a business.

In fact, all monarchs are capitalists and all governments are businesses. They are businesses because they are constantly expanding and capitalizing on opportunities to extract wealth from people and resources. They are the world’s top economic predators. Governments and nations are the most successful business models ever invented. Over the last hundred years, they have expanded their services beyond conquering, policing, legislating and mailing. Today governments provide almost every imaginable service and resource: prisons, pensions, healthcare, housing, water, and electricity are just a few. And they offer these services in return for handsome profits as mandated taxes pour into the pockets of civil servants, or as taxes pour through the government and into the pockets of its taxpaying and favored corporations.

Perhaps the main difference between a traditional business and a government is that governments charge for most of their services whether you want their services or not.

Like any business, governments become powerful by conquering competitors. This is traditionally done through violence. Even when land and/or resources are taken by stealth, intimidation or corruption, the threat of military confrontation usually lurks in the background. The recent business deals in the Ukraine, for example, between the Ukrainian government and American corporations like Exxon and Monsanto, were made possible only after various branches of the U.S. government helped violent revolutionaries overthrow a government unwilling to do business with the West. Similarly, Chinese politicians are usually covert businessmen—which is another way of saying that they are capitalists. Granted, such politicians are corrupt, but my point is that governing is always a form of profiting at the expense of the governed. That, to me, is obvious. No government would ever be established if it were not profitable.

Of course, much has changed since the old days of the old conquer and pillage strategy. Even the early Roman conquerors had to invent excuses to appease nobles who might not be keen to send their sons into another warzone. And, thanks in part to the spread of shipping, mail, and the printing press, people became increasingly aware of their government’s actions, and they grew hostile and critical of the Church and of the aristocrats who wielded supreme political power. So, the ruling elites invented representative democracy in order to give people the illusion of justice, freedom and self-determination while the government continued to extract profits from citizens who remained stuck in a system that extorted money from them through taxation and dependency on landlords.

The creation of the U.S. government is quite similar. Because early white, male, American settlers enjoyed freedom and access to firearms, the founders of the U.S. government wisely decided to appease such citizens by installing an electoral system. This system gave the settlers the illusion of freedom and co-governance. Of course, initially taxes were kept low in order to avoid comparisons to the defeated British colonial government, but even then, the U.S. government devised ways to profit, and gradually more and more taxes were deployed and defended as necessary for maintaining peace and economic order.

One of the challenges to perpetuating this system of business through governance is that, thanks to technology, if the government is not careful to spread lies and propaganda, people can become increasingly informed and critical.

In medieval times, laborers protested against their exploitation, but they understood little about how their governments and banks exploited them through financial schemes or how they waged wars for profit in foreign lands. The Roman Catholic Church was already in the business of using its network of churches, scribes and priests to spread propaganda and rally crusades for profit. This system of spreading propaganda for profit was not surpassed until the dawn of the 20th century. Before that, Western governments cared little about what the public thought about its foreign ‘adventures.’ Thus, without holding a referendum, without even poling the public, Western governments unilaterally and militarily squashed the Boxer Rebellion in China in order to defend their business interests there.

 Now that the media has developed the ability to report quickly to the masses, governments and media outlets controlled by capitalists are busily spinning their greedy conquests into righteous crusades. We have progressed from a world in which the Church told gullible Europeans that foreign wars were righteous and God’s will, to a world in which Western governments and media tell gullible Westerners that their foreign ‘interventions’ are righteous and humanitarian. Of course, we know it’s really all about the money.

If the world’s most powerful nations sincerely wanted to bring freedom and democracy to the world, and knew how to do it, then the world would now be free of prisons and tyrants. Instead, the U.S. government’s most favored allies include totalitarian monarchs and rulers of sham-democracies.

The West’s efforts to ‘civilize’ the world is a profit strategy. Here civilizing means forcing countries to play by their business rules: to open their borders to Western corporations, to sell their resources cheaply, to buy overpriced military hardware, and to let cheap agricultural imports from the West destroy small farm economies so that bankrupt farmers are forced to leave their land and work like slaves in Western-owned factories.

But don’t get me wrong; to some extent, our governments are not coercive bullies and sometimes compete fairly for profit. Just consider the arms trade. Here our governments truly shine, as they compete amongst each other for profit. Government funded research and marketing experts in the arms industry must compete with others working just as hard to sell death and destruction to foreign governments. Of course, sometimes our governments try to wash their hands of this filth and they outsource the production of military hardware to corporations, but even then, government remain in charge of peddling the weapons and signing the contracts for profit.

Now, I think you will agree that for libertarian capitalists to argue that governments should shrink and meddle less in business affairs is nonsense because governments are businesses.

In fact, governments even compete for good ‘employees’ and customers—just like any other business. The difference is that governments call their customers and employees ‘citizens.’ In order to keep wages low, and in order to offset low birth rates, Western governments aggressively recruit ‘good’ citizens—just as any profitable company must recruit good employees.

What can you do if you don’t approve of your government-corporate world? Well, you can take your shopping and your talents elsewhere, to some lesser or smaller evil. Similarly, you can emigrate, but that means you will pay taxes to another degrading and blood-sucking government. And yes, you can refuse to pay your taxes, but then you will ‘pay’ more in prison. In short, in a world monopolized by nation states and mega-corporations, we are all hostages.

How can we tolerate this state of affairs? Isn’t it time we abolished the government-corporate prison state? Isn’t it time we establish a new world order devoted to sharing, play, timelessness and goddamned idleness? Isn’t it time we applied the principles of the revolution?

America’s Totalitarian God

Not only are governments essentially businesses, but the traditional distinction between religion and business is arbitrary and imaginary. Some of the first ‘great’ conquerors considered themselves immortal gods, and today our governments are so powerful they seem to be incarnations of God on Earth who reign supported by hosts of angels—corporate leaders and business elites.

Why are God and the State so similar? They both trace their roots to the same moment in history. The first all-powerful governments were ruled by kings and pharaohs, and, not coincidentally, while those all-powerful kings and pharaohs reigned, humanity invented the first all-powerful gods. These imaginary gods simply reflected the reality on the ground. In fact, the religious world always evolves to reflect the political reality, especially when political rulers are in charge of religions, as they were in ancient and medieval times.

Older, more ‘primitive’ societies were ruled by no one; therefore, they did not believe in a god or gods who ruled over everyone. But, wherever people believe in all-powerful ruling gods, wherever religion is monotheistic, you can be sure the people are living under a monarchy or under some other form of political tyranny that centralizes power in the hands of one or more godlike men.Monotheistic religions always reflect a world controlled by political and economic monopolists, and kings are the oldest monopolists.

The ancient Egyptians were perhaps the first to invent the totalitarian god, and this simply reflects the fact that in Egypt political power was concentrated in one man, the pharaoh.

Muslims, Jews and Christians also created and embraced a belief in an all-powerful god becausethey were ruled by all-powerful Shahs, Czars, Kaisers, Emperors, Sultans, and so on.

Religion mirrors reality. According to the West’s dominant religion, if you do not please your imaginary all-powerful God you go to an imaginary Hell of pain and suffering; and according to Western governments, if you break their laws you deserve to suffer in their prisons andpenitentiaries. The real and the imaginary are mirror images.

Modern, technologically advanced corporations and fascist states are more God-like than any king or czar. Every year their power increases—and the only obstacle they face is the growing public awareness that ‘civilization’ always creates a world of gods and ‘angels’ ruling over a powerless majority.

Every government and every corporation wants to become an all-powerful god. Absolute market dominance is the goal of every corporation and government; therefore, our leaders rarely grant any group, province or territory the right to secede or declare independence. They insist on keeping everyone hostage in their web of profit.

Wherever people are forbidden from separating, a monopoly exists, and wherever a monopoly exists, an all-powerful, godlike tyrant dominates.

The United States of America is a monopoly created by monopolistic men who wrested power away from British monopolists. The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution were aspiring monopolists. They were slave owners and land owners motivated by the lure of profit to become the ruling gods of the New World. To promote war with Britain they spoke of winning freedom from British tyranny and taxation, but to deceive their fellow European settlers they hid their own desire to rule, tyrannize, and tax.

Today, the U.S. government boasts of separating religion from politics, and yet it is also an incarnation of God. It is as omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient as any god ever imagined.

The U.S. government is omnipresent: its laws dictate every aspect of life, including where you can loiter, what you can build, what you can grow on your property, what can women do with their pregnancies, how we should raise our children, and so on.

The U.S. government is omniscient: its ears and eyes are everywhere. It hears, it watches and it reads everything without your knowledge. It knows everything but it understands nothing, just like God.

Finally, today the U.S. government is omnipotent: it has the power to do any evil it wants, and it only restrains itself when it fears losing the people’s support. Within and beyond its borders, it assassinates citizens extra-judicially. It feeds poisons to its citizens and it takes their wealth by stealth and by taxation. It has granted itself a license to steal and kill. What can’t it do? It cannot create peace, it cannot feed itself, and it lacks the power to do any good. How God-like is that?

How long before people wake up and abolish all their gods and masters?

The Holy Mirrors

Religion is a rose colored mirror for capitalism. The Bible glorifies wars by portraying them as acts of divine justice; it excuses prostitution by refusing to condemn the causes of it, and it ignores unjust class and caste systems that enrich the 1% and impoverish the 99%. But older religions like Confucianism are only half as shameless and corrupt, which suggests that they reflect less corrupt worlds.

All our religions are as unoriginal as the images in our mirrors. Their morals, values, gods, angels and saints are always glorified reflections of the real world. If they preached that a modest poverty is good, they does so only because the authors knew that poverty was common and that people had to be persuaded to love it or, at least to accept it.

Why didn’t our Paleolithic, Stone Age ancestors have hierarchies of gods and gods who gave commands? They did not have such gods because they lived in a world without hierarchies, without ruling, god-like tyrants who issued commands to their equals, to their fellow human beings. Our Paleolithic ancestors worshipped spirits that represented elements of the natural world.

But, once tyrants created political power for their benefit, miraculously new religions arose that reflected this unnatural reality. These religions came with supreme gods who ruled over other gods and demigods. Thus these religions made injustice seem divine.

After the greedy, power-mad psychopaths rose up and declared war on nature and on the forests inhabited by free, forest-dwelling peoples, they invented gods who inhabited the clouds and lived apart from nature.

The Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Hindu empires were ruled by leaders; therefore, their people believed that one almighty god ruled over all other gods and all living beings. Again, their religious beliefs mirrored their political reality.

The Hindu pantheon was ruled by Vishnu, the Greek by Zeus, the Roman by Jupiter and the Egyptian by Aten and at other times others gods—all because this reflected the reality that the people in these empires were ruled by tyrants.

Other socio-economic realities are also reflected in our religions. The Egyptian god of writing, Thoth, mirrored the existence of a class of scribes; Brahma, the Hindu god responsible for dictating the Veda scriptures, is a reflection of the literate Brahmin caste; Hermes, the Greek messenger god, reflected the Hellenic tradition of using messengers to communicate between oracles and political leaders.

Greeks, Romans, and early Christians all had many gods, demigods, angels and saints whose duties were tied to economic and political functions. Ganymede, the cup-bearer of the Greek gods, for he was a merely a glorified slave and table servant. Saint Nicholas was a Christian patron saint of sailors and merchants, and this historical function is still evident in modern times, as Saint Nicholas, now largely known as Santa Claus, travels by boat in the Dutch legend and by sled in the Anglo-Saxon legend, and in the widely celebrated Christmas season, he is still associated with merchants and merchandize buying and selling.

Political hierarchies are also reflected in the Christian and Jewish religions, where angels and archangels have specific functions and are ranked in a complex class-system. However, as power became increasingly concentrated in the hands of totalitarian rulers, state-sponsored religions become increasingly monotheistic or ruled by one dominant deity to the exclusion of all others.

Again and again, we see that our religions are creatively bankrupt mirrors of the economic and political world.

 The world of capitalism has high priests, gods, rituals, scams, and superstitions—therefore capitalism is a sacred religion and therefore we can never keep religion out of politics or economics.

Modern governments are religious institutions: they do not preach the gospel of immortality, but they certainly praise people who forget their mortality and sacrifice their lives in the name of theirprofits.

Modern corporations are religious institutions: they do not preach the gospel of immortality, but good corporate leaders encourage everyone to live as if mortality did not exist. Yes, they gave us seatbelts, but they did not give us soft cars that run on non-toxic food and water.

Our religious leaders used to claim a monopoly on morality, but now our governments are our churches. They think they represent morality, but like the priests before them, they do nothing substantial to stop poverty, unemployment, landlessness, corruption, runaway greenhouse gas emissions, or usury, and they do nothing to promote the arts, improve national diets, or defend small businesses. Now, everything has to be sacrificed and crucified to our god, Profit.

Like our governments, the high priests of the business world and their marketers boldly tell us that they know what is good for us and good generally. They say competition is good, buying their shit is good, and so on and on.*

The evolution of our religions mirrors the rise of hierarchies and of gods that possess absolute power. This evolutionary fact reflects the reality that over the past 10,000 years society has evolved to create an increasingly powerless majority that is subject to the supreme authority of a few totalitarian rulers.

To my horror and disgust, the growing concentration of power in the hands of the few is continuing into the present ‘democratic’ age.

The U.S. government and its formidable military power is not a democratic institution; it in no way protects or serves its citizens. Instead it provokes others to attack it in order to have excuses to go to war. And, almost every U.S. citizen wants to cut funding to the military, but the funding continues because the military serves the interests of a few wealthy elites who control the government and use its military and economic power to promote their economic interests.

Likewise, NATO is not a democratic institution; it only responds to the economic interests of the capitalist goons who operate above the law and beyond democracy. Wherever a nation refuses to bow to the capitalist agenda, Western elites decide to corrupt or destabilize its government, and if that does not work, NATO comes, or the US military comes alone. Every military organization wants people to perceive it as a godlike force for justice and life, but in reality they always serve the political and economic interests of the ruling capitalists.

Finally, the ridiculous and frankly laughable international peace keeping force known as the United Nations is about as effective at peace-keeping as the filthy-rich Popes have been at stopping poverty.

The UN wants the world to consider it a well-organized team of holy angels of peace, but in reality it has done almost nothing to create peace anywhere. Even if such a pack of idiots knew anything about peace, they would not be permitted to establish peace anywhere because peace is not good for business.

The kind of peace that our rulers call peace is peace enforced by guns and unjust laws. This kind of peace is good for business. True peace is terrible for business because it would require a good conscience, and a good conscience would require that we share the planet’s land and resources. This, however, is precisely what the gods of the world do not want.

Everything in this world mirrors or serves the economic interests of the gods of capitalism, but the revolution abandons the universal religion of profit, and it rejects the global economy of misery and environmental suicide; instead, it establishes what people are hardly able to imagine.

God’s Robots

Unquestioning obedience to one’s master or god is the message of the Universal Religion. Defying and questioning religious and secular authority is never encouraged—even though any authority that imposes the authority of one adult on another is tyranny.

God, as his dreamers envision him, is the ‘good’ tyrant who only tells you to do what’s good for you, and yet someone he never encourages you to seek your independence from your human masters. Instead, he encourages obedience to authority and trust in authority, or, as is the case with all religions, the believer is never encouraged to even think about the injustice that all ‘authority’ represents, whether political, economic or military—though these three always work together, as an unholy trinity.

Blind obedience is cultivated, and when our schools boast of promoting critical thinking, they are lying. The only critical thinking happening in our schools is directed at spelling and addition errors. Never will they encourage the children to criticize how we spell words or what purpose all our numbers serve.

Blind obedience is what all imperial cultures seek. They domesticated animals because they want blind obedience. They attempt to domesticate humans by killing independent-minded people and by ‘training’ our children.

Now, to liberate humanity from mind-numbing labor and degrading obedience, our engineers are building robots! Hurrah! They will replace human robots with artificial robots, leaving the millions of people unemployed and redundant. What will we do? Will we, perhaps, find something else to do?

God would be proud of our robots, both human and mechanical, for he loves his sheep. But even sheep can turn into lions, and lions into children of laughter.

The Daily Mass

In centuries past, the most devout well-to-do Christians attended church services every day and many, many Christians understood nothing because church services were conducted in Latin. Well, nothing has changed. The well-to-do are still drowning themselves in what they do not understand. We encourage our children to recite national anthems, read books and watch shows and movies they do not understand. If they did, they would know that they are being polluted with stupid vanity, irrational fear, and thoughtless hope and imagery.

Once upon a time Europe celebrated the death and resurrection of its hero each and every day, in churches and houses. Today, we worship a new religion, the religion of religions. Today, a million people and a billion characters die on our screens and pages. The fictional ones virtually resurrect. They miraculously survive mortal wounds and rise up to star in another movie or to play another game.

As in the past, the new faithful do not know the meaning of our mortality.

What’s the difference between a poor North Korean and a supposedly wealthy North American? North Americans spend more money and more time brainwashing themselves. And the danger of being wealthy—I mean industrially developed—is that people who possess this wealth usually consider everyone else ignorant. Thus they bow and kneel before their own reflections.

In the media-rich environments of developed countries, children have little chance to think for themselves, and the great celebration of capitalism never ends as shopping is a holy ritual, consumerism is a religion, cultural narcissism spells salvation and our sugar-coated news and movies wash away our guilt.

The revolution will end the daily destruction of our intelligence. It will decentralize communication and stop psychopaths and idiots from colonizing and monopolizing our minds. The revolution will turn all of us into the greatest entertainers, teachers and reporters the world has ever seen.

Of Priests and Presidents

More than any other religion, Christianity is a form of hero-worship. Unlike other religious sages, demigods and prophets, Jesus is billed as a one-man world saviour. With this in mind, we can hardly be surprised to find that Christians generally love hero-worship. They have a long history of idolizing saints, conquerors, celebrities, politicians, athletes and superheroes. This manifest idiocy is nowhere more pronounced than in Europe and the Americas, continents dominated by the holy hero worship of Christianity.

A culture that teaches children to idolize and frankly worship heroes is a culture that forgets the common people, forgets the children, the elders, and the unfortunate.

What all religions have in common: none of them dared to promote democracy—let alone true democracy: anarchy. Thus far not one leader, not one president or prime minister, has represented the people, for none of them have even dreamed of destroying the land monopolists and giving everyone their own land to live on.

The world will not be saved until it is freed of leaders, and the best leaders are those that serve to destroy the world’s dependence on leaders. President Barack Obama is doing his part by destroying what little faith Americans have left in politicians.

If American politicians are so great, why aren’t international scouts recruiting them? Why aren’t they leading other nations to greatness and why haven’t they volunteered to do so? Former British prime minister Tony Blair is not an exception; he merely specializes in advising foreign tyrants on how to profit.

Well, at least President Obama recognized the fact that “millions of Americans” who courageously fight against poverty “have not yet been rewarded…. for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged.” That’s quite an admission, even if it is an understatement. But what kind of rewards should every American expect? The president was not clear about this, so let me clarify: everyone can expect more cancer, more tornados, more Crone’s disease, more Alzheimer’s, more hurricanes, more drugs, more gangs, more corruption… But good Christians and Muslims love their latest hero—especially if they think he—like Christ—has come to save them.

President Obama was right about one thing, America is an experiment. America is an experiment in insanity. It’s an experiment that tests the world’s tolerance for hypocrisy, injustice and meddling. This experiment has been committed many times before. Fiat money, staggering debts, military expansionism, and the wholesale deregulation of economic predators—this is an old experiment that has provoked violent protests and revolutions in the past.

If President Obama is the 44th president devoted to helping Americans pursue happiness, why do Americans spend so little time being happy? Do they think their neurotic little fits of excitement qualify as happiness?

Imagine Obama talking about his nation’s pursuit of smiles and laughter and you’ll understand the absurdity of America’s claim to pursuing happiness.

America does not lead the world in producing happiness and laughter. Its biggest clowns aren’t funny: they get their kicks cheating, defrauding and killing.

After Martin Luther declared that Rome’s priests were useless, priests merely transformed into pastors and ministers, so the West put the old problem in new robes. Neither did the shift from monarchy to democracy change reality for the common man. All our democratically elected heroes promote policies that increase our dependency on them and on all the pricey goods and services we think we must have. Democracy was always window dressing for imperialism, and now that Western imperialists are running out of foreign markets to conquer, they are turning their teeth with renewed wrath on their own populations and devouring the middle class, civil rights, and the free press. Former president Jimmy Carter has already announced that democracy is dead in the U.S.

Something must be done, but I’m not running for the presidency. Indeed, I’m running from the presidency. I have no interest in national politics. I am overqualified—and we are all overqualified for a post that demands heartlessness and ignorance. Besides, I don’t have a New Deal for any country; I have a New Deal for the world. Millions of people want this new deal. Millions of tax-rejecters, communitarians, subsistence farmers, homesteaders, urban squatters, illegal gardeners and environmentalists have already voted for the revolution.

Let us all begin the work of creating a world in which we are our own presidents—presidents of a planet of gardens. Our elected and unelected heroes can have their bloody streets and capitals; we will go off road, like wild savages, straight into the backyards and backwoods of the world where humanity can still enjoy life, liberty and land.

The Profit Center

Slowly, the lords of (the) capital conquer the world. With every generation, the inequality between the poor and the rich grows more extreme. Over the millennia, hundreds of millions of people have traded their land for a state of landlessness and debt, polluted air, water scarcity and urban slavery. Presently, the 85 richest men in the world own as much as 3.5 billion people—and that is a conservative estimate that fails to consider that the bottom 3.5 million people own nothing but the shirts on their backs. At the current pace, the whole world will belong to one man by the year 2041.

Wealth centralization is the logic of capitalism (imperialism). It is relentless. But we are living in a time of falling profits. Former colonies and hostage states are rejecting their exploitation, and the planet’s resources are growing scarce. So, over the past 40 years Western leaders have begun squeezing their formerly privileged workers for more profits. Orwell’s 1984 predicted this much.

How do the structures of our economies centralize wealth? Modern banking practices are crucial. They are some of the most cunning mechanisms for centralizing wealth away from workers and taxpayers. Nearly all central banks, as well as the Fed, the BIS, the IMF and the WB centralize profits by dumping debt onto taxpayers and handing wealth over to a few bondholders and banksters.

For centuries worker productivity has increased, and what is the worker’s reward? Home ownership is declining. Lifespans are declining. And the price of American bread has multiplied a hundredfold over the span of a century, outstripping the pace of wage increases. Now husbands and wives must work for employers in order to keep their families afloat. Thus, more and more people are stripped of their time and energy. Human beings are being mined for the profits of the few.

Industrialization and mechanization also rob people and centralize wealth. Cars have helped millions of people transcend the limits of their legs and lungs, and I’m sure people appreciate that, but the car’s primary purpose is to centralize labor and to bring labor to managers and overlords.

To understand the disturbing power of technology, consider the horse. Once upon a time horses provided transportation, and although they were not cheap, anyone who had a bit of land could feed one for free. And if you possessed a female horse, you could easily get her pregnant and have yourself a second horse. Now, when you switch from horse to car, the industrial model places the power of reproduction in the hands of a few wealthy car manufacturing barons, and feeding your cars means you must make wealthy oil barons wealthier. Consequently the power to create new wealth is now centralized and the profits flow into the pockets of a few industrialists.

The miraculous cell phone also centralizes wealth. Before the age of the phone, no one made money from anyone’s need to communicate by voice, but the few people who own the telephone lines, radio waves and the microchip factories are now fabulously rich. So, while phones help us transcend the limits of our voices, they centralize wealth.

More evidence of centralization is the fact that today we have fewer newspapers in America than we did a century ago. And even the much-celebrated democratizing power of the Internet has not revived small businesses. Instead, small bookstores and small publishers have perished, and larger ones have become enormous. Newspapers of all sorts are dying, but internet giant Google and other search engines are thriving. Before the age of mass production, musicians and other artists were common in every village, but the internet can make one musician available to the whole world, so technology again causes wealth to collect in the hands of a few.

In defense of economic insanity, American businessman Peter Schiff argued that civilization stops working if business leaders don’t have a profit motive. According to his reasoning, since most people are cowards, brave business leaders must take all the risks involved in starting a business, and for their bravery they should be rewarded. Excuse me, employees also take plenty of risks: they are not protected from losing their jobs and homes when profits fall and lays offs begin. In contrast, wealthy business owners have a million tricks to avoid risk and personal bankruptcy. Schiff would have us believe that when a company loses money the wealthy owner bravely suffers the loss, but in the real world falling profits usually result in salary reductions and dismissals for hapless employees. So, who needs more courage and who faces more risk, the employer or the employee?

And I dislike the premise of Schiff’s argument. Why must we assume that we need a culture that rewards risk taking? People who understand neither morality nor mortality think taking risks is heroic. Today they are heroically risking the liveability of the whole planet in return for profits siphoned from customers across the planet.

Economic hierarchies also serve to centralize profits. Fair-trade coffee will never exist because capitalists never trade, not if trading implies that we exchange items of equal value and no one makes a profit. The capitalist always wants to give you less than what you give him. From field to store, workers in the coffee business always ‘trade’ their time and energy for rewards that free indigenous peoples would have mocked and avoided. In fact, the more civilization progresses, the more we sacrifice. What evidence do I have for this tragic conclusion? Look for yourself! Year by year, the parents and children enjoys less time together and less political power. Year by year, our health and environment deteriorate because we are trading them for illusory profits.

Trade, hierarchies and technological developments all serve to centralize profits and impoverish citizens, workers and consumers. The Mennonites and the Amish understood a part of this when, four hundred years ago, they vowed not to use advanced technologies. By refusing to use advanced technologies and by working on the land, they avoided unemployment and all the debts, fees and taxes that technology incurs.

Well, I may not be ready to join the Mennonites, however, I’m losing track of all the reasons to abandon civilization. If you think that makes me a quack, please reread some old American classics such as Tom Sawyer and To Kill a Mockingbird and look for their revolutionary message, if you dare. Both novels praise the spirit of rebellion and freedom. So, you can be a communitarian anarchist or you can be an obedient cog in giant wealth centralization scheme. The choice is yours.

Economic Crusades

The more corrupt a religion is the greater the enemy that it imagines, and Christianity is the religion most obsessed with devils, Satan, and other enemies. This fundamental psychopathy reflects the attitude of most Christians, but also that of Jews and Muslims, who likewise believe in Satan, though to a lesser extent. The Judeo-Christian obsession with enemies is reflected in America’s movies, which teach the world to look for enemies everywhere.

The sheep ignores the facts and imagines everyone is his friendly shepherd; the psychopath ignores the facts and imagines enemies everywhere. Today, no nation state imagines more‘enemies’ than the U.S. First, the indigenous peoples of North America were the enemies of America’s white imperialists, then Spain and Britain were its enemy, then Mexico, then slave owners, then Canada, then Communist and now terrorists. The psychopaths in power have a manifest destiny to create enemies, avoid peace and kill anyone who opposes their empire.

Perhaps Communism was the most powerful enemy western imperialism has thus far faced. While indigenous peoples were not opposed to trading with wealthy capitalists, Communism spells death for wealth centralization lovers. Communism mandates wealth distribution—making it a close ally of indigenous cultures and an appealing alternative model for millions of educated and uneducated people from South America to North America, from Cuba to Russia, from Egypt to China.

A tidal wave of interest in Communism swept Europe in the first half of the 20th century, and western elites were terrified. In response, they began massive campaigns to censor and suppress Communism and persecute Communists. Thanks to censorship, the concept of class war, which is crucial to understanding Communism, was eliminated from our schools, from the media, and from most of our heads.

When Communism was stamped out, westerners turned to liberalism and civil rights, to women’s rights, gay rights, and rights for minorities. Sadly, this meant that everyone fought for their right to be treated fairly in a system that is inherently unfair and destructive. But on the fringes of capitalism, a new class of enemies arose, the environmentalists.

Every capitalist is a ruthless economic warrior. Capitalists conquer markets by lowering prices, by lowering wages, by underpaying suppliers and by compromising the environment. Fair play is not really relevant in business or in war.

Economic war has become so refined and so insidious that the victims rarely understand that they are being raped. The West’s great lending institutions, the IMF, BIS and the World Bank, are victimizing billions of people, most of whom hardly know what is happening. These financial engines of economic warfare have degraded the living conditions of billions of people from Canada to Uganda.

Capitalism is a state of perpetual war. Someone is always being conquered, recruited into a new ‘company’ or ‘killed’ by bankruptcy and unemployment. The slaughter is relentless. Its end game is a world in which one victor rulers the monopoly board of the global economy. And if absolute monopoly isn’t possible, conspirators will create an oligopoly.

The lower ranks are tired of leaping into an economic war that rewards the generals and commanders who condemn them to die in the trenches of exhaustion and cower with fear of unemployment.

We blithely call our economic war mere “competition.” But it is not euphemistic enough for me. I know quite well that competition does not improve life for human beings. Competition is a source of stress and strife.

Do you need competition to become a good human being? Millions of parents are excellent parents without ever competing. We take care of our children, and we give them the best possible lives we can simply because we love them. Millions of artisans and artists create excellent workbecause they love their work, not because they love competing.

The revolution has no time for war, competition or conflict. The revolution is contentment, abundance and generosity incarnate.

Hope for Change

The more hopeless life seems, the more hopes we invent. Traditionally, to the extent that economic and political reality appears hopeless, our religions have invented hopes. Today, as our religions cease to be the primary sources of hope, the state has become the primary purveyor of all hope-inspiring lies.

All empires create feelings of hope because they destroy happiness, and that makes hope necessary. Citizens of the most developed countries experience the highest levels of stress. We invented nervous breakdowns, midlife crises and heart attacks. But—we live with the false hope that the world will improve, or we live with the false hope that our leaders will do the right thing, or that the economy will improve, or we just grow cynical, careless and even proud of our own stupidity.

Why don’t pre-imperial religions—the religions of indigenous peoples—show any concern with hope? Because they suffered too little fear, stress, and worry.

Hopes and hope-inspiring promises are endemic to imperialism. Promises create and reinforce hope. Hope is rampant in our politics, economics, and sciences. The poorer, sadder, greedier and blinder you are, the more susceptible you are to feeling hope.

In an age without a rational plan, blind hope infects everything. So long as hope exists, knowledge is lacking.

In the past, hope was rare. But as empires extended their brutal power over free peoples, poverty grew and militarily-imposed social orders became widespread and people quelled their despair with hope.

Pre-imperial tribes certainly feared war and violence, but these problems were always short-lived and not traumatic enough to inspire a lifetime obsession with hope. Wherever so-called advanced civilizations imposed permanent or long-term slavery, crushing taxation, ruinous usury, and a permanent class system all meant almost endless suffering for victims. So, in Europe and Asia, where slavery and class and caste systems were well established by the Middle Ages, religions became obsessed with hope.

The creators of the Confucian religion never developed the opium of Hope, but when life became unbearable, Taoism’s magical thinking came to the rescue. I refer to the Yellow Turban Rebellion of 184-205, during which a rebel Taoist general swore he would lead everyone to Heaven, and instead hundreds of thousands died. Almost two thousand years later, the leaders of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) gave oppressed Chinese people the hope that they could fight, with their bare hands, all the bullets and cannonballs of their European oppressors. The consequences were gruesome. It is the wages of hope.

Today the preachers of hope are politicians, economists, technophiles and a variety of so-called experts. State funded economists give exhausted people the hope they need to continue committing suicide while enduring another year of being swindled.

Central bankers and economic planners never weary of encouraging people to invest hope that the economy will improve. They ignore the reality that the economy is designed to create poverty through rents, interest rates, fractional reserve banking and currency inflation.

Millions of people invest their hope in savings, real estate, stocks and other assets whose dollar value is often manipulated by white collar thieves.

Today billions of people depend for their survival on the industrial economy that pollutes the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the water they drink. But they hope it won’t kill them. This is stupid. This is hope at its most suicidal.

As Jesus offered hope in the kingdom of God in order to pacify the ruled, so every U.S. president extends the wreath of hope to those who believe in democracy and in America’s power to reward hard work with prosperity. Now, at this late stage in the Empire of Death, when a double dose of hope is needed to buttress the crumbling psyche, Barack Obama has made hope his slogan, his motto and his rallying cry. With hope he won the election, with hope he was resurrected, and with hope (and a dash of fear) he hopes to prevent citizens from losing hope in him, in America, even in civilization.

But hopeful people cannot be reasoned with. Hope knows no limits. It can be used in vain by rebels fighting against their imperial masters, or it can be used by imperialists to pacify the oppressed. Recently, Obama’s Hope for Change campaign appealed to everyone—that is, it appealed to human weaknesses, to ignorance and to desperation.

Barack’s first presidential election campaign motto was Hope for Change. How clever! How seductive! No plan, just empty promises and hopes.

Forget Hope for Change! The reality is that change will happen whether you hope for it or not. You’ll see it in the mirror as you age, and you’ll see it in your health as air quality and soil (food) quality declines, and you’ll see it in your wallet as prices and taxes mysteriously rise. You might even see the value of your money collapse, as it’s collapsing in Iran, Turkey, Argentina, India, Poland, South Africa, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Historians predict that the U.S. dollar will not survive the decade. Other changes are not hard to notice either: welfare and healthcare systems are shrinking around us, consumer prices are rising, debts are deepening, big banks are bloating and weakening, unemployment rates are worsening and real estate and stock markets are tottering. And more menacing changes loom on the horizon. But, we have hope. Hoorah!

In 2004 Barack, the nation’s premiere hope pusher, gave the following rallying cry, “Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”

Excuse me, what do you know of difficulty? Please, tell us about your childhood. Tell us how it was stolen from you. Tell us about the difficulty of living with your pain and your guilt. And keep your opium to yourself! Your hope only keeps Americans happy to pay taxes to the biggest war-mongering nation the world has ever seen. And, at home Barack gives the nation’s wealth to the military, to industrial farms, to pharmaceutical giants and to America’s banks. Under such conditions, Americans need an enormous amount of hope.

Forget all your hopes! Hope in the face of difficulty is the enemy of the revolution. The revolution dispenses with hope and despair. The revolution redeems knowledge and action.

Hope in the face of uncertainty is nothing but ignorance. There is no uncertainty about America’s status as an imperial monstrosity. And, there is no uncertainty that the revolution is the solution.

If you’re disappointed with your politicians, let me tell you a little secret: the American Dream was never designed to satisfy everyone’s pursuit of happiness, it was only designed to profit the gods of capitalism, the demigods of the capitals and the ruling criminals. Fortunately, it was not designed to last. It is always crumbling. It always leads humanity towards the unnegotiable death and catastrophe.

Still, people are clinging to hope. Five years after Barack’s auspicious first election, in his February 12, 2013 State of the Union Address, he once again sold his ratty old hope to a slightly disillusioned populace. And voters fell for it again. A public without knowledge of the revolution will always be helpless to resist hope.

The whole 2013 speech—which he did not write—is an amazing example of motivational speaking and cheerleading. But, after investing a little intellectual effort I was able to summarize it as follows: “I can do it! You can do it! Together we can do it! America can do it! America is doing it!”

Bullshit. That’s an even better summary. The only thing the U.S. is doing is sinking into debt, bloodshed, and corruption while it deceives, intimidates and bribes (with its counterfeit crap) a world of fools into being its victims and mercenaries.

Isn’t it time we put hope to rest?

The revolutionary has no hope. Wherever the revolution begins, hope vanishes and the celebration begins. Therefore, I have no hope for the revolution. What I have is a will and a rational plan.

Imaginary Love

Religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism offer everyone imaginary love and divine compassion because, at the time these religions were invented, the ruling elites had already created a world without love or compassion—a world of prostitution, rape, sex slavery, labor slavery and violence.

Religious love and actual cruelty are two sides of the same sick coin.

Imperialism annihilates warmth, compassion and friendship. Friendship is an endangered luxury. People with a hundred Facebook friends have few real friends, and in developed countries many people have no friends, and the average is decreasing and in some places the average number of friends per person is approaching less than two. So, what do you do? Fill the void with TV characters and romantic novels?

Today, women in the rich West remain the largest consumers of imaginary love. The romance genre has remained the most popular genre among women of the upper and middle classes—especially wherever the influence of religion and its cocktail of religious love and hope is absent or weakening.

The United States is by far the largest consumer of imaginary romance. This isn’t surprising, since love is usually absent in the wealthiest places. The author of The Great Gatsby testified to this.

Exactly how sick is America? Consider that its most popular genre is the romantic novel and that over 65% of its music for teens and adults is obsessed with romantic or sexual love. This is depressing—because it proves that American’s are not getting enough love. Worse yet, judging from their novels, movies and songs, they no longer know what love is. Their artists merely cater to shameless vanity, wallow in lovesickness, put lust in the robes of music, and create the great illusion that happiness lies in finding that special someone.

Ugh!

Equally revealing is the fact that of the remaining 35% of pop songs, perhaps only 1% deals with parental love, and most of them deal with child abuse and child neglect. In a healthy culture, songs would never express an unsatisfied need for love of any kind. So, in the revolutionary community, because real love is abundant, our love songs and romantic stories will only inspire laughter. Healthy and rational artists don’t bleed the heart; instead, they fill consciousness with the power to love and laugh. 

Imaginary Freedom

The degree to which people obsess with freedom is always proportional to the degree to which they lack freedom.

During the Roman Empire, freedom was crushed and Latin speaking rulers enslaved much of Europe. The natural response was to create a cult of imaginary freedom. Christianity was that freedom cult. Christ was the redeemer, and a redeemer literally meant a freer of slaves. So, Jesus brought freedom—but only imaginary freedom. Obviously Jesus could not free slaves, so a meaningless sort of freeing had to be invented, and the Church said that Jesus freed sinners from their guilt.

Today, the word freedom is most commonly abused by Americans. Who do they think they are kidding? They have less freedom then King George’s subjects had in 1776. They are hemmed in by a million laws, and their leaders pursue liberty by creating more laws. They sign over 40,000 new laws per year, and even 35 years ago they already had 23,000 pages of federal law in 50 volumes of criminal code. Plus, the Internal Revenue Code is nearly 74,000 pages long. With so many obscure and ill-written laws, no one knows what their rights or freedoms are—and that is in part the intention of the lawyers and rulers who know what suckers and loopholes to exploit. And yet, Americans stunningly imagine that they are the world’s freest people! How sad and laughable.

Freedom should mean the right to do whatever agrees with a rational and sustainable culture—and without needing to have permission from so-called authorities. Where does such freedom exist? Nowhere! In some countries, I won’t name names, children are force-fed public education fortwelve years and children must be injected with state-approved drugs, and every newborn must be registered, and no one may have an abortion, and no woman may have two husbands, and no one may have a chicken in their back yard or grow corn and bamboo in their front yard, and no one may use harmless cannabis under any circumstances, and no one may walk naked in public, and no one may bury a loved one on private property, and no one may build an unconventional home, and no one may leave one damned country for a slightly better damned country without the authorization of some idiotic bureaucrat.

And yet, this world dares to brag that it has given people unprecedented rights and freedoms? ­

Damn all your laws and regulations! A single page of life-giving principles can do infinitely more good than all of this world’s suffocating laws.

The revolution offers true freedom: freedom from authorities and freedom from onerous work. Never mind the fools who boast of freedom; the day we cease to talk of freedom, then freedom will be as free as the air we breathe.

Divine Plans

Many religious people imagined that life is determined by stars, constellations, and other astronomical and mundane omens. Early Christianity rejected these mythologies and insisted that humans were free to determine their own fates. While partly true, this was an attractive lie that served to distract Christians from the fact that their lives were determined by extremely oppressive social, political and economic orders.

Then came Protestantism, and it revived the old belief in predestination, It emphasized providence, or God’s plan, a concept that had always competed with the notion of freedom in Christian theology. Providence, or God’s plan, was an attractive idea because it created the illusion that however badly the world was managed by its leaders, one could take consolation in thinking that God had a plan.

The concept of providence also mirrored the political reality that governments were increasingly in the business of planning everything. Even as more Europeans became citizens and considered themselves free, the reality is that citizens are subject to much more planning and control than slaves.

Today, governments plan and control almost everything we do in order to extract wealth from us. Thanks to government that will not share the land with the people they claim to represent, we live in rented and mortgages homes for their profit—for the first governments were always ruled by landowners.

In China, the national birthrate is planned. Around the world, governments plan population growth through immigration policies and family incentives. Next, they plan and they require all children to attend schools in which we learn to obey and work for their profit.

When they plan secretly, we say they conspire, and if you like conspiracies, study American history. President Lincoln sometimes blushed over his nation’s ways, and while he planned its future, more powerful (I mean insane) people planned his assassination and determined the future. His assassination wasn’t personal; it was a business decision.

Here is another conspiracy of planners and profiteers: the Civil War was planned for profit. When industrialists in the North couldn’t get enough slaves in their factories to compete with those who had lots of slaves, they decided to make slavery illegal. They did not think slavery was immoral, they merely considered slavery unfair to them because they didn’t have enough slaves. So, slavery was abolished. This is why they invited a flood of European immigrant laborers to work in America’s dehumanizing factories.

But European immigrants were not interested in picking cotton and receiving miniscule wages for their field labor, so abolishing slavery was not popular in the south. The problem of labor forced secession-loving, slave-owning plantation moguls to lose their businesses and to submit to the authority of the suddenly almighty federal government, which soon collected higher taxes and tariffs to pay for the war.

Why didn’t the North and South end slavery peacefully, as other nations did? War was needed because war was and war remains profitable for the weapons makers and financiers. Slavery—or formal slavery—is easy to abolish without war; landowners simply need to pay their former slaves a little money for their labor, and they can get all their money back by charging their ‘free’ slaves for food and living quarters. You see how easy it can be to abolish slavery and leapfrog into the ‘free’ world of mortgages, rents, and taxes?

 Anyway, the war planners destroyed the formal slave economy and created the clandestine slave economy otherwise known as the employment economy.

To believe America’s leaders actually went to war because they cared about human beings—is to be absurd. It’s like believing the U.S. went to war against Iraq’s leader because they cared about Iraqis. The U.S. created Saddam Hussein, but when he defended his country from U.S. profiteers, the U.S. turned against him. Every war is planned for profit; the only difference between now and antiquity is that nowadays our governments invest more effort into whitewashing their wars.

Was America’s Revolutionary War fought for liberty—liberty from British taxation tyranny? That’s how the planners sold it to the public, but in reality the leaders wanted Britain’s freedom for themselves. That is, they wanted to be the taxation tyrants and they wanted to be the top economic predator. So, they sent young men to war so that they could establish their empire. 

Shortly before the Revolutionary War, America’s elites were busy conquering the western half of the continent, and to the southeast they were busy annexing Florida in the so-called Seminole Wars. Of course, to call those wars “wars” is rather dishonest. The enemy was hardly armed and organized, and the enemy was largely comprised of Native American refugees and African-slave refugees and other people who just wanted to be left alone by America’s white psychopaths. But, the psychopaths had other plans.

Florida at the time belonged to Spain, and Spain had tried to create a presence in Florida by offering generous land grants to settlers of any color, a thing unheard of among the British and American elites. Those elites even resisted giving free land to fellow European settlers. In any case, Florida was settled by refugees who came there for freedom, so America’s annexation of Florida destroyed one of the few places where people still found freedom. And yet, historians treat the Seminole Wars as fulfilling God’s plan and America’s manifest destiny!

The psychopaths are still planning our lives for us. They plan what we buy and what price we pay. And wars are still being planned; wars on every inhabited continent have been deliberately planned and provoked by American and European psychopaths and their various inhuman departments, ministries, NGOs, foreign tyrants, mercenaries and secret operatives. Since before the 20th century, U.S. elites have had their eyes on ruling a global empire, and this ‘plan’ has made steady progress that has hardly slowed.

What else have the world’s masters planned? The Gulf of Tonkin incident and the bombing of Pearl Harbor were planned. They were planned by the war mongers who needed excuses and public support for another war.

The 9/11 attacks were planned and staged for a host of reasons. The planners wanted to destroy documents in Building Seven, they wanted to kill critics in the Pentagon, and they mostly wanted an excuse to start a war in the Middle East and force Americans to give up what little freedom they still had. Is it a conspiracy? No, it’s almost careful planning.

Country after country has been invaded and destabilized to profit a few. The recent coup d’etat in Ukraine was aided by Washington’s money, and its motivations are not hard to detect, The new Ukranian president has already accepted an IMF loan that will profit the people behind the IMF and further devastate the country. And U.S. agricultural behemoth Monsanto has already signed agreements to begin profiting from Ukraine, and the son of the U.S. Vice President has already found a profitable chair in Ukraine’s largest gas company. Do you think, perhaps, these people had motives for funding the recent coup?

Local municipal governments and their civil engineers are also masters of divine planning. They design wonderfully unsustainable infrastructures that will require taxpayers to pay for flushing their own shit down municipal pipes! Can you think of anything more degrading? Ha-ha-ha! ­No—what could be more degrading?

Of course, corporations have plenty of their own divine plans. And, many of their strategies and techniques are ‘business secrets,’ so they are masters of conspiracy. The ex-governor of Minnesota recently revealed evidence that BP’s eco-catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was planned—planned for profit—because the people behind BP were also in the business of accepting government moneys to clean up after oil spills. Aren’t they clever? If they could make money selling swords to their executioner, they would do it.

Well, honestly, all capitalism is a stupid conspiracy to profit at your expense and ultimately at the expense of the profiteers, too. They make money by slowly poisoning themselves—figuratively and literally. When their scientists produced too much fluoride in their labs, they decided fluoride was healthy and good for teeth, but instead of taking the trouble to sell fluoride to consumers, they persuaded municipal governments to buy their chemical and dump it into people’s drinking waterwithout asking the people for permission! How infinitely civilized!

The human body has been finely engineered by Nature. Over millions of years, she designed us to eat the ‘food’ Nature produces. Millions of years perfected our teeth, eyes, hands, minds, and digestive systems. But now scientists think they can do better—for their profits. Nature does not profit them, so they are planning and engineering foods and medicines that Nature would never create, and people—especially Americans—are lapping it up with little concern for their declining health.

Now, even the weather is secretly being planned—geo-engineered for short-term profits. Does anyone notice the strange cloud patterns in our skies? Eighty years ago, did any German wonder where to the Jews packed in trains were going? If someone had told them the truth, they might have called him a paranoid conspiracy nut. But, you’d have to be crazy not to be a little paranoid in this day and age.

What is God’s divine plan to profit? First, he makes people unable to feed, house, clothe and entertain themselves, and then he sells them everything they must have and much they don’t need. That is God’s plan. As for God’s intelligent design—well, you can see it for yourself: he put tails on donkeys so they could swat flies, he put psychopaths among us so we could learn to love one another, and he gave us the power to create Hell. 

Fortunately, some of us have a plan to create Heaven, and we are not alone, we are (or will be?) the majority.

The Myth of Equality

I believe in equality! I believe that a black, homosexual woman can rule with the same iron fist used by any white, heterosexual male tyrant. True, the man’s fist can be harder, but when power is expressed politically, through armies, prisons, taxes, debts and legislation all founded on a system of land theft, the woman’s fist can be equally hard.

Equality? Will women, blacks, Hispanics as well as the physically and mentally disadvantaged ever achieve equal success in the capitalists, dog-eat-dog system? Excuse my stupid question! Let’s be serious: being mentally disadvantaged is a prerequisite to succeeding in this system! The system was invented and refined by psychopaths over thousands of years, and we merely inherit it. But perhaps I oversimplify. Perhaps they weren’t all psychopaths. Perhaps the history of inequality all began with ignorance, as humanity accidentally overexploited its environment, made agriculture necessary, and producing food became so onerous and exhausting that nice people just felt compelled to create inequality by forcing slaves to do the work. Yes, perhaps that’s how it went. Some idiots painted themselves into a corner and they merely needed others to help them.

Ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

So, this system of inequality has evolved very nicely. Today billions of people must pay others for the right to live and die on this planet! And in our most civilized countries, this fundamental inequality is never challenged. Instead, people are supposed to imagine that the system can be improved and prisons made more humane. They are dreaming of the day when everyone plays nice in the sandbox of capitalism when everyone has a castle and equality wins the day. Imagine the day when even the single black, amputee (a war vet) mother will have her own poison-spewing car and a lovely adjustable rate compound interest mortgage. Oh, magnificent vision! Magnificent dream!

What kind of idiotic idea of equality are we pursuing? Ha-ha-ha! We want political and economic equality! With all respect to the suffragettes and the civil rights fighters, there’s no dignity in having the equal right to elect ignoramuses and criminals to be your rulers you’re your unequals. There’s no dignity, either, in hoping that a fair and just political system will reward you with the opportunity to own as much trash as anyone else.

But maybe you do want refrigerators, computers, telephones and cars for everyone on the planet. I know our corporations would like that. But look, your lungs, your heart, your physical and mental health and your children might abhor it.

Equality without quality—that’s the best this civilization can provide and only if it imposes a socialist or communist model. But most nations are too corrupted to be capable of even that kind of second-rate revolution.

So, where do we go from here? Even if I had the answer, I wouldn’t tell you. I’m not malicious; I just don’t want to deny you the chance to enjoy the search equally as much as I did.

The Myth of Progress

If you’re concerned about discrimination, consider the discrimination our ancestors suffer. Sometimes we think our parents or grandparents were luckier than we, but generally speaking we think our ancestors, I mean our medieval, ancient and prehistoric ancestors were barbarians and ignorant cavemen. We actually imagine that our public schools and computers make us better human beings! Please, stop me from laughing!

This prejudice against our ancestors is the oldest of all prejudices. All the major religions insist that their rituals and gods represent progress over the religions they overthrew and displaced. Today, when religions are mere hobbies, the lie of progress is mostly trumpeted in the political and economic realm. Thus, today the myth of material progress is nearly universal.

But let us consider a few facts. Over the last 10,000 years we have learned to work more and more, and machines multiply the amount of work we do a hundredfold, and yet, the greatest wealth of all—free time—is scarcer than ever, and even though more people than ever are rich in false wealth, sadly real wealth—land and resources—is quickly being destroyed and claimed by an ever shrinking percentage of people.

The belief that we are becoming wealthier is an old superstition. Presently, America, long considered the wealthiest nation on Earth, is in fact the most indebted nation on Earth, and its real wealth pales beside the wealth of ‘poorer’ nations. America has only a fraction of the biological wealth of more southern nations and has some of the worst weather on the planet. Plus, its diet is atrocious, its soils are rapidly being degraded and its homes and clothes are poisonous. Who dares to go there looking for wealth?

Moreover, much of the false wealth of the world is created through monetary fraud. America’s dollars are the world’s reserve currency, which means everyone is trading real wealth for mere toilet paper promises. But foreigners respect U.S. toilet paper because they are coerced, intimidated and gullible.

Progress?

Go to China and see the people suffocating on their own pollution.

Go to India’s slums and weep at the sight of more misery than India has ever seen.

Go to Brazil and weep over the man-made fires and droughts destroying the world’s largest herbal and botanical resource, the Amazon rainforest.

Go to the oceans and add another toxic tear to their dying waters.

Go to any city in the developed world and weep at the sight of mothers preparing children for miserable jobs.

Go anywhere and weep at the sight of families that gave up their land to live in servitude paying landlords and banks for the right to live.

Go to any city and weep at the sight of children, once free to roam and play like Huckleberry, now marching off to schools that stuff their heads with war dates and numeracy skills that will help them pay their bills.

But why worry about any of this if you believe in progress? Why worry about the state of the world if you believe a good God or President is in control? Politicians, like some of religions, will even swear that war is a temporary necessity, and that the age of peace will soon be established. This lie serves to pacify people and to prevent violent and peaceful revolutions.

Ours can be the peaceful revolution, the revolution that terminates our history of regress by installing awareness of death and the principles of rational living.

The New Heaven and Hell

 Have you been to New York? To Paris? To Libreville? Oh—they’re Heavens for people who care for towers and merchandise. Our cities are so shiny and geometric and inorganic they seem to be on another planet. And they are full of imaginary gods, flying vehicles and no place for children, no place for life. Even their life-destroying foods and fashions must be shipped in from Hell’s factories and fields to be consumed by the fires of Capitalism.

Excuse me for asking a stupid question, but why did the gods replace horses with two-ton boxes of metal that travel at ten times the speed of a trotting horse? Do you think their divine inventors were interested in safety? Even seatbelts were not required until decades after cars ruled the roads. Did the inventors think about what they were starting? Were they rational and caring people, or were they greedy, stupid psychopaths intent on creating a profitable Hell on Earth? I know, horses can kill a man too, but cars globally and annually harvest over a million lives, and that’s only counting human lives, and that’s only counting human lives lost to collisions. We’re not counting deaths by emissions.

Of course, pedestrians are even safer than horses, and the health benefits of walking are still being discovered by scientists.

What do I think of making pedestrian-friendly cities? This is such a quaint idea! It’s like putting dancing shoes on a dragon.

The primary problem is not that cities are car-centered or lacking public places; the problem is that cities are cities.

So, after you remove the cars, please also remove the office towers that block my morning and evening sunlight, and fill in all the rat-filled sewers that pollute our waterways, and don’t forget to shut down the electric grid and the natural gas pipelines that impoverish the many, pollute everything, and generally give the dragon life.

Paradise could not be less like your cities.

Symbolic Wealth

All religions speak of imaginary spiritual wealth and all empires promise false material wealth. Real wealth has hardly been discovered—because there is too little money in providing it.

Money is not wealth. All currencies gradually or suddenly lose their value. Even if you trade your money for goods or for capital, you cannot buy real wealth.

Mansions, money, fast cars and nearly every product in our shops and showrooms are forms of imaginary wealth. A Ferrari does not represent wealth; it represents your power to destroy the real wealth of the world. It fuels destroy the environment when they are produced and after they are burned, and the car puts you on the road to obesity, doctor’s appointments and, if you’re disciplined, your car forces you to get regular exercise. Every high-tech product can likewise be exposed and demolished.

Perhaps you think Christmas is the season of wealth and abundance, but look at them—all their short-lived smiles and nervous excitement betrays the poverty of their wealth.

Some people imagine that presents and full closets make happiness. Who still knows how to make happiness with their own bodies and minds? A good laugh and a little orgasm are priceless.

Midas and Rothschild think they possess real wealth, but listen to them speak and you will hear the desert winds howling. How could they taste happiness when their minds are rotting from a lifetime of fear and greed? To be truly happy, they would need to overcome their fear of losing everything, and that would mean learning to give everything away.

What kind of happiness does our false wealth produce? It makes those who possess it feel superior to others. But all the pride, contempt and sneers does not happiness make.

The thrill of driving fast is the thrill of a suicidal psychopath. Neither a private jet nor a helicopter can provide the deep, calming pleasure and health benefits our legs provide.

And look, their mansions are toxic and flammable; their toxic rugs are ruinous to health; their balustrades, stairs and corners are hazards for children; their attics and nooks and crannies welcome rodents; and their landscaping is only for show. The modern estate could not be more unlike the true wealth of the revolution.

 ‘Beautiful’ partners are more symbols of wealth, especially when they are decorated like Christmas trees with jewelry, shiny watches and designer labels. The fact is that such dolls and suits are vapid shells of human beings.

Art collectors are garbage collectors; they spend less time thinking about their art than about their suits and boots. A painting by Hoffman is a jewel in their crowns and nothing more.

Art should consume us in extended moments of solitude. Great art is a playground for creative minds able to find and make complex patterns where none appear to exist.

Great art is always invisible, as great music is always silent. They come from the visible and audible, but they are not visible and audible.

The revolution makes real wealth abundant, and the human body is real wealth, a treasure of pleasure we need very little education to enjoy, and with a little practice we could all be sharing more good humor and joy than we have ever possessed.

God’s Disease

 Every advanced imperial culture believes in a creator god that makes the world in his image, and that is precisely what the psychopaths who rule the world have done.

Ten thousand years ago, the world was populated with imperfect but largely free peoples whomostly shared and mostly lived in peace. Then God’s disease began to infect the population. People—I mean psychopaths—began to rule with bronze and iron over others. They did not share; they took, pillaged, exploited, raped and killed. Originally, these were isolated disasters, but gradually these disasters became self-perpetuating and passed down from generation to generation. By force of arms and violence they expanded their influence. They established dynasties, oligarchies, monarchies and so-called republics.

But, not content with seizing wealth by pure violence, they also found ways to corrupt the great tradition of giving and that lesser tradition of trading. With the help of many slaves who sacrificed their lives in their gold and silver mines, they made shiny coins that people really didn’t want until the tyrants commanded farmers, tradesmen and landlords to accept their coins as fair payment. Thus, with the help of money, the tyrants turned the fine tradition of trading goods between honest people into a tradition of trading honest goods for corrupt and essentially worthless fiat money (indeed, all money is fiat money).

Thanks to money, civilization created the illusion of a good and rational civilization that had no connection to the millions of poor slaves and serfs upon whose backs the business world was actually founded. Today, nearly the whole world has been infected and drawn into this imperial system of deception and illusion. Now every man and woman is a conqueror who seeks to conquer or exploit others for profit. The millions of poor and miserable people who work in the world’s mines, factories, fields and so on are out of sight and out of mind. More skilled or fortunate laborers compete against each other for promotions, salaries and bonuses. And the owners of capital and companies are no longer interested in trading; they only seek to extract maximum profits from clients, customers, employees and taxpayers.

Now we are all rabid dogs and vampires biting each other and biting and grinding everything between our teeth, forcing the mountains themselves to give us their blood. Thus, over time, humanity has been transformed, reshaped in the image of the first master and slave—our true Adam and our Eve.

Do I want to create humanity in my image? Ah, but it is already striving to become like me and, hopefully, much better than me.

The Daily Sacrifice

Our religions have become quite a bit more civilized since the age when human sacrifices were offered on altars on every inhabited continent. Several millennia ago, such sacrifices were replaced by penal codes and justice systems. Instead of sacrificing to imaginary gods because one needed a good harvest or a victory over enemies, now sacrifice was always tendered to the state. Rebel slaves and serfs were executed—sacrificed in order to preserve the system of exploitation.

Clever Catholic priests pretended that the Roman cross of state violence represented progress over ritualistic sacrifice, but this is not progress, state violence merely replaces religious superstition with state superstition.

Now, instead of imagining that we appease the gods, we imagine that we create justice by punishing anyone who refuses to follow the rules of a civilization designed to produce civilized slaves and slave masters. Today the myth of civilization is so complete that the daily sacrifices we endure are considered good, normal and necessary. Of course, they are none of these.

Granted, we do not sacrifice fellow human beings on bloody altars; instead, we sacrifice our own lives. We sacrifice our time, our family time, our freedom, our health and finally our capacity to imagine and reason. We live in a world in which all the thinking and imagining is done by a few leaders, script writers and game designers. The vast majority can go through life without thinking or imagining. Thus we sacrifice our minds on the altar of specialization.

Capitalism is always a system of decapitating.

Our religions mirror this system. I ask you, did any religion ever promote a culture of free speech and imagination? Ha-ha-ha! I’m sorry, but that was a comedian’s question!

Does capitalism promote free-speech and imagination? Or, let us ask an even more absurd question: does Disneyland stimulate your imagination? Ha-ha-ha! It is a cultural wasteland full of fake TV laughter, well-rehearsed lines and hollow smiles. You can leave your imagination at the gates—all the imagining has been done for you. And so it is with all our books and shows: their creators had some imagination, but their consumers need only see and listen.

Please, feel free to laugh at this next comical question: Do any of our religions encourage artists, musicians and poets to develop those forms that produce optimal intellectual health?

Shouldn’t someone apologize to the world for drowning generations of children in a wasteland of boredom, kitsch and thoughtless awe?

Today the destruction begun by priests and pompous emperors is done by the state, by advertisers, by music execs, and by the pompous promoters of our oh-so-serious art. We lock serious art in cathedral-like galleries to be worshipped on special occasions and forgotten as we march back into the real world, forgotten—just as all our holy teachings are the soap with which we wash away the blood, guilt and misery of the day.

All our fine art, symphonies and literatures are frivolously worshipped by students, professors, and pompous connoisseurs who get only marginally more or less intellectual stimulation from their high culture than the churchgoer gets from visiting a hocus-pocus temple.

I would rather be a child giggling in a circus than a child visiting a temple or museum, and better yet to be a child running free in a meadow among the birds and the bees.

Today, pop culture is nearly omnipresent. It stimulates emotions and hormones and sensory receptors, but it avoids knowledge of the world and all its prepackaged images and thoughts do nothing to stimulate anyone to imagine anything for themselves. Thus, the mind rots on the altar of pop culture.

Thanks to pop culture and public education, we are all consumers of other people’s thoughts and images and we do not think beyond our shopping carts or imagine more than a new outfit. Indeed, we are now so intellectually unfit that discussing serious topics leads to anger, cruelty and flying saucers. As for our imaginations, they are so un-developed that we can’t imagine being dead, living differently, or being wrong.

America might be the world’s most intellectually and culturally bankrupt country, but foreigners still love its junk, its junk foods, its junk justice, and its junk entertainment and junk education. Fortunately, a careful prospector can find a cultural treasure or two buried in the global cultural wasteland. Unfortunately, the wasteland is spreading. Even as the revolutionary finds a foothold and creates a little paradise for the mind, the emperors of civilization doggedly promote everyone’s degradation.

Can we even imagine what a healthy culture looks and sounds like? In a healthy culture, we are not decapitated. In the revolutionary culture, everyone is at least the equal of Picasso and Plato—indeed, far more vibrant, creative and honest than they ever were.

Idiotic Miracles

Creation was the first miracle … and whatever God created, he declared to be good; yes, of coursehe praised his own work, all psychopaths are narcissists. And the authors of the Bible understood so little about real work that their God created the whole universe in a few days, without trial and error, editing and revising! But could God create a pizza? Maybe he could, but could he create an ethical pizza, an environmentally friendly pizza? Of course not! Only a miracle could create an ethical pizza.

But seriously, do you know what it would cost to create ethical pizzas? Such pizzas would need to be grown, harvested, shipped and prepared without spewing and craping more pollution into nature than nature knows what to do with. Plus, the workers would need to receive wages with which they could buy property and send children to university. In short, a moral pizza would cost hundreds if not millions of dollars.

The top five world religions all promote belief in miracles—because their creators were idiots!Jesus cured a few sick people, but like a true idiot, he forgot to remove the causes of sickness. Did he banish those nasty little organisms that cause leprosy and plague? He did not—because if he eliminated all sicknesses and diseases, how would he become famous and how would priests earn money selling sham cures? Our scientists are compromised by the same profit motive. Thus, they will never attempt to eliminate the causes of cancer and Alzheimer’s because that would mean starting the revolution, and there is no money in the revolution.

Every day a new miracle product is pushed on the unsuspecting consumer, and all along these products serve to bring us nearer to ruination. But the universal religion claims that it is a ticket to a Heaven on Earth, and the dream lives on. To this day, people still believe that railways, cars, rockets and bubble gum and other miracle products can make them happy.

To preserve independence and life, the revolutionary avoids dependency on the Church of Goods and Services. We divest from the system that turns our body and blood into another’s profits and turns life-sustaining Nature into money and capital.

If you want ethical food you must first build an ethical economy, and that means building an economy based on revolutionary principles. If you want to eliminate the need for miracles and expensive medical treatments (they are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S.), simply start the revolution.

Beyond sAynt Rand

Ayn Rand was an ice and brimstone prophet of Capitalism. She was also blind, like Tiresias, to beauty in our children, and blind to imperialism, blind to the dangers of industrialization, and blind to the environmental suicide. She was so blind to her own mortality that—like Marx—she smoked most of her life, but unlike Marx she had lung surgery and died of a heart attack. That’s a fair warning to the apostles of the smokestack.

Ayn Rand understood little about the plague of banking and money and even less about agriculture, the most environmentally destructive industry of all. Thus it is with almost all our academics and prophets: they know their little ‘fields’ and books, but what do they know of the fields that feed them and of the money they receive in exchange for their ‘work’?

Ayn thought so highly of herself she named herself Ayn—pronounced Eyn, in German means one, though she was too cowardly to admit this origin of her little creativity. One is certainly a suitable pseudonym for a woman who thought herself the one and never believed in community, children, garden or being one with the world. She was in all respects the bewitching tyrant.

And, she was fundamentally a coward. Fearful of being recognized as a Russian Jew and identified with Communism, she changed her name. Since she feared discrimination in her beloved America, perhaps she could have written a few words against discrimination, but she didn’t have the moral fiber to help people who, unlike herself, cannot hide behind a name.

Ayn Rand baptized herself into the religion of Capitalism and gave herself a good Capitalist name.

How did this prophet and preacher of Capitalism defend her religion? She did as any other one-eyed prophet: she whitewashed imperial aggression and blamed any ‘excess’ on a few bad apples. Well, that’s a funny metaphor, isn’t it? Thanks to Capitalism, all our apples are bad and getting worse.

Oh, Aynie really cracks me up. She does. She was so creative (or funny) she even imagined that genius and industry made happy bedfellows. If that were the case, you’d expect the Koch brothers to write profound novels or musical compositions, and you’d expect artists and composers to write panegyrics and odes to smelters and telephones, but they don’t, and for good reason. Indeed, for all his interest in technology, if Leonardo da Vinci were alive today, he would be horrified at what technology has meant for humanity.

Ayn Rand became a one-woman propaganda mill for a breed of naive optimists who call themselves libertarians and patriots of the land of the free slaves. The promise of fame and success lured her to pose as the nation’s foremost preacher, and since her parents had said she would become famous in America, she took the easiest route and became America’s premiere flatterer. Her legions of followers happily embrace her portraits of boring, greedy, inhuman, industrialists and entrepreneurs. Let us thank her for illuminating the fact that the world’s shakers and movers are people who do not know how to be parents, how to love, how to enjoy the arts, how to enjoy nature, how to make others laugh, and how to profit from an honest recognition of our mortality.

Who stands beyond Saint Rand? Already millions of people are objecting to Capitalism, Materialism, and the Universal Religion of the One.

Beyond Parker and King

I love and respect Martin Luther King for opposing Satan and for accepting death at his hands. With courage Martin defied the most powerful psychopaths of his time: the U.S. government and its military-industrial complex. He defied them and refused to desist even when he knew his assassination was being plotted. But for all his sacrifice, the racism and the wars did not stop; instead, racism became discreet and the wars became discreet, secretive, ‘economical’ and global.

Dorothy Parker and many other brave souls won civil rights for all, but winning the right to sit on buses as an equal among Caucasians is an absurd victory when that bus is serves to transport underpaid workers to exploitative employers, kills pedestrians, pollutes the air and destroys the climate.

We can fight for equal opportunity and we can fight for decent wages, but why demand respect from a civilization designed to lead everyone to ruin?

The revolutionary prophet does not want a seat on the bus or to jostle with cops on the streets. He calls the world’s gods and goddesses down from their towers and clouds and invites them to join him in the countryside, where a New Paradise is waiting for creative feet, hands and minds.

Religion and Public Education

The following parallels demonstrate that all the basic problems present in religion are also present in secular public education, and this supports, once again, the argument that no fundamental difference exists between our supposedly secular culture and our traditional religions.

First Mirror

Religions are profoundly life-threatening and dangerous because they teach people to believe in immortality. This belief tempts us to live recklessly, wage wars, build nuclear power plants, defy death on the roads, seek out extreme sports, consume harmful drugs, refuse to stop climate change, and so on. The belief in immortality, augmented with the belief that justice comes afterdeath, tempts and indeed persuades many to tolerate far too much injustice in this life.

Although schools don’t teach children to believe in immortality or in post-mortem justice, schools certainly avoid acknowledging mortality. Students might learn how many people died in this or that war, but they never think what it means to be dead or mortal. Ignorance of mortality exists in education despite widespread paranoia about child safety. Although schools avoid lawsuits by monitoring child safety on school properties, schools happily teach children to participate in a culture of recklessness. Even when schools preach environmentalism and draw a child’s attention to other life-endangering issues, children can hardly understand the gravity of our situation because they do not understand that they are mortals.

Second Mirror

Religions and schools are dangerous because they promote trust and faith in all authorities, which is precisely the kind of attitude that sets us up to be exploited by governments, bankers, advertisers, employers, and so on. Religions and schools have an obligation to teach everyone to study and understand the real world, not to trust it. They should teach us the truth about fractional reserve banking, fiat currencies, the history of taxation, the arms trade, the causes of cancer, and other leading causes of misery and death. Instead of being taught to trust leaders, we should be taught how to live without rulers, politicians, bosses, and without all the luxuries we cannot make independently.

To be practical and truly critical, our schools and religions must teach children to think critically about our religions and our schools, as well as about all our irrational fears and taboos and all the basic components of our civilization.

Third Mirror

Religions and schools are dangerous because they are boring. Billions of faithful Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Christians are so bored by their religions that they daily supplement religious practices with bouts of shopping, collecting, possessing, hoarding, competing, controlling and other unhealthy and destructive pleasures.

Most of our schooling is so boring that billions of children cannot focus on their studies and get more satisfaction bullying, fighting, smoking, drinking, car surfing, f-ing without protection and so on. Granted, part of the problem is that our dysfunctional civilization spoils and damages children so badly that their tolerance for boredom vanishes, but why should we expect them to tolerate boredom? Since the adults who run our schools and temples are themselves products of boredom, perhaps they will never recognize the problem, or perhaps they are afraid of what that recognition would mean for their world.

Conclusion

Presently, cowardice is the defining spirit of our civilization, and instead of making us safer it is making us more reckless. But I know that our children are full of untapped potential, and the human brain—however old and deluded it might be (some limits might apply)—always has the ability to become active and revolutionary.

A New Definition of Science

Today, science has turned into a new religion and yet claims to be utterly unlike a religion. But the people who worship science think science is a god: they think science and its products (technology) will solve all our problems and lead us to a heaven on Earth or on some other planet. But the reality is that that science is leading us deeper into a Hell on Earth

To debunk our religion of science, simply examine its long history. It was already in action when our clever ancestors discovered the laws or principles of fermenting plant matter to help improve digestion and to make beer. It existed thousands of years ago when our ancestors observed patterns in nature and used this understanding to make weapons and domesticate plants and animals.

Our ancestors were Paleolithic scientists. They watched bronze melt and drip out of the rocks and into their fires. With keen observation they discovered the scientific law that copper and tin drip out of rocks at high temperatures and harden into new shapes at cool temperatures. Using this natural and scientific law, they learned to forge metal swords and spear heads, and with these weapons they conquered less scientific ancestors.

The Romans were quite a bunch of scientists, too. They understood the natural law that adding lead acetate (a poison) to their wine (another poison) makes the wine taste sweeter. They understood this law and they applied it, which means they were also gastronomic engineers.

According to legend, a falling apple inspired Newton, a much later scientist, to discover the law of gravity. Now, thanks to Newton’s discovery, modern governments can launch rockets into space, missiles into the sky and satellites into orbit. So, now we can enjoy unparalleled military dominance, satellite TV, mobile phones and the Internet.

The discovery of each new law of nature is exploited by engineers to spread and strengthen the imperial pathology, but those who worship science think it is a form of divine intelligence. They admit that their science has a created a few problems, but they insist it’s nothing that their science cannot solve. The most deluded dreamers even imagine that once the next natural law is discovered, we will enjoy a third Industrial Revolution—as if the planet would survive that.

The high priest of science, theoretical physicists Michio Kaku, claims to possess the supreme law of nature, a law engineers he imagines engineers will one day exploit to everyone’s benefit. He calls his theory “the theory of everything.” He believes it could one day help humanity escape—not the threat of Climate Change, Poverty or Insanity—but the danger that millions of years from now the universe will collapse. Excuse me, but what kind of moron worries about an even that might happen in a billion years while we are ruining our little planet today? I’m all for long term planning, but can we deal with our immediate problems on Earth and leave the rest to the clowns?

Albert Einstein was and remains our most respected high priest of science. His work contributed to the creation of a weapon God would have envied, the atomic bomb, and afterwards he retreated from the world and wasted the last 30 years of his life chasing Kaku’s unified theory of everything. On this theme, he wrote, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction [to simplicity].” But, let us consider the facts: over the past thousand years science has made life overwhelmingly morecomplicated. In fact, science always finds ways to make simple things complicated. The old family horse could be set outside to feed, groom and relieve itself, but fueling and maintaining a car is much more complicated. Scientists need to recognize the fact that their ‘science’ never sets out to find simple solutions because simple solutions like the revolution would put them all out of business.

Besides making life more complicated, science and technology are also continually finding ways to make us consume more energy. Forget all our little energy-saving devices; generally the history of science shows that we are constantly developing new ways to use more energy, more human energy, more domestic animal energy and more fossil fuel or other elemental energies. Just consider how our ancestors, the great apes, invest little energy in feeding and sheltering themselves, and after them the first humans invested slightly more energy in hunting and gathering, and the first agricultural societies invested far more energy into surviving and even recruited the help of oxen and horses. Next, the Industrial Revolution added coal and other elemental energies to help humans profit. To summarize: our ancestors invested very little energy into feeding themselves, but now ten calories of fossil fuel energy are needed to produce one calorie of food energy. Is this line of progress sustainable and intelligent?

Fortunately, the revolution will make surviving for humans even easier than it is for the apes.

A few scientists insist that there’s no contradiction between religion and science, and I quite agree. Although scientists can be quite devoted atheists, most scientist have profoundly religious instincts. Many look with a sort of religious awe and wonder at the universe.

The priest thinks the universe is proof of God’s wisdom, and the scientist thinks the universe is proof of nature’s wisdom. Both men feel the same sense of awe.

Religious people pray to end world hunger, and scientific people develop new Frankensteins with which to fight hunger. But, after thousands of years, neither one has eradicated hunger, poverty and disease. In fact, they actually unwittingly promote them.

Science and religion are one—or two faces of the same god, Imperialism.

People worship their gods and gadgets equally. If a good god exists he should have saved all the children, and if science is good it would have stopped hunger, war, and cancer long ago. They have no excuses for failing. They have been around long enough.

What is the last word on religion and science? The people who believe in them think gods and technologies are needed to improve and save our minds and our bodies. They do not know how to pursue happiness, and they use reason and imagination to create suffering and to excuse or even glorify suffering.

Can we revolutionary thinkers salvage religion and science? Well, doesn’t the revolution represent their final unification and perfection?

Can you trust anything I’ve written or have I issued lies for profit? Of course you can trust me—a revolutionary never deceives others in order to take from them what belongs to Us. If I ever lie, you can be sure I only do so to entertain you.

Peter Dudink, has a Masters of Literature degree from the University of Waterloo. He has worked as a teacher, self-employed tutor and editor in Canada. He is the author of several books available on Amazon. 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/capitalism-and-the-universal-religion/5382947

The Corporate Gods of America

Post Categories: Canada

Robert Fantina | Sunday, May 18, 2014, 10:41 Beijing

Share on tumblrShare on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on printShare on gmailShare on stumbleuponMore Sharing Services1Print

Can anyone doubt that the United States is governed for the corporate good? The lofty concept of ‘for the people’ evaporated into mythical fairy dust generations ago.

In the new millennium, any pretense to serve the people, rather than the corporation, has been swept away; apparently, the elected, so-called representatives, and the corporations who own them, are convinced that the 99% are sufficiently lulled into a somnolent belief that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, and what’s good for business is good for them. Those with that bizarre belief overlook some very basic and rudimentary facts:

* Safety Laws. Opposed by corporations, lax or non-existent safety laws benefit the corporate bottom line at the expense of the individual. Cramming more workers into a factory may jeopardize their health in a number of ways, but more workers produce more goods, and that’s good for the corporation.

* Pollution Standards. Such standards allow millions of people to live in at least acceptable air quality, and to be comfortable drinking tap water. Yet requiring corporations to reduce the amount of waste they unleash into the air and/or water costs them money, without bringing any financial return. With no return on their investment, corporations oppose such standards.

* A Low Minimum Wage. Keeping the minimum wage low increases corporate profits while keeping countless individuals and families in poverty, another plus for corporations. It enables corporate executives to receive multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses, while their employees can barely afford food, let alone such luxuries as higher education for themselves or their children. Add to the exorbitant cost of a higher education the further disincentive of high-interest student loans, and an uneducated, desperate workforce will be happy to grab any minimum-wage job available, and will be hesitant to demand anything better.

* Off-shoring. The practice of many, if not most, large corporations of sending jobs to nations that pay nearly slave wages, with no safety standards, also helps profiteers, while depriving millions of U.S. citizens of employment. The damage to the health and well-being of the foreign workers is not even a consideration for the corporations whose work they do.

* Destroying or Weakening Unions. For generations, workers united were able to improve their lot through collective bargaining. Now, however, corporations, along with the government officials they have bought and paid for, strive to weaken or destroy unions. In Wisconsin, for example, during the 2012 recall election, about 66% of anti-union Governor Scott Walker’s funding came from out of state, much of it from conservative business groups, including the Koch brothers and Sheldon Anderson. Mr. Walker’s total contributions were $30.5 million. His opponent, Tom Barrett, received about 26% of his $4 million from outside groups.

* Corporate Control of the Media. As recently as 1983, about fifty companies owned 90% of the U.S. media. Today, 90% of the media is owned by only six companies. This means that 232 media executives control what 277,000,000 U.S. citizens see. Why wouldn’t they want the citizens to see only that ‘news’ and ‘information’ that will best enhance shareholder value, and thus, their own salaries?

The Supreme Court has been complicit in all this. Once regarded as the last bastion of Constitutional interpretation, the justices today, and for some time, appear to be hacks, worshipping at the corporate altars they support.

In 2010, in Citizens United v. The Federal Election Commission, the Court determined that the First Amendment prohibited governmental restrictions on political donations by ‘corporations, associations or labor unions’. This opened the financial floodgates of wealthy businesses to donate unlimited amounts of money to candidates who would support their causes, few of which benefit the average working individual.

Is all this not a major component of fascism? Is not holding corporate goals as the highest god, coupled with a fanatical preoccupation with national security, among the foundational pillars of a fascist state?

Yet nearly all politicians, left, right and center, wrap themselves in the American flag and proclaim the greatness of the U.S. Worse yet, it seems that so many of the citizen-lemmings, when they see the flag, grow teary-eyed and support policies and programs that serve the corporate good at the expense of their own basic needs.

The ‘Occupy’ movement takes a stand against this self-destructive mindset, but any movement depends on publicity, and corporate-owned media will not attend to causes that don’t serve its interests. Social media may be the last tool available, but corporations have not ignored its dollar value, or the potential impact it could have if ‘we the people’ are allowed to control it.

Net neutrality, the principle that every website, service and app is treated the same by the Internet service provider, has drawn the attention of those who seek to enrich their own, already-bulging coffers. Under new proposals by the U.S. government, websites would get service dependent on what they are willing to pay for it. Once again, the small, independent entrepreneur is at the mercy of the corporate competitor, and, in most cases, has no chance of success.

So, this is life today in the much-vaunted ‘land of opportunity’. If one is already wealthy, opportunity abounds. However, for the 99% that aren’t, scrambling to make ends meet may be the best one can do.

Robert Fantina’s latest book is Empire, Racism and Genocide: a History of US Foreign Policy (Red Dill Press).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/15/the-corporate-gods-of-america/