By David Bell at Brownstone dot org. Hard times. Emerging from an apparently engineered pandemic, now in another war for ephemeral reasons, a resultant economic crisis that is exacerbating unmanageable debt, we find ethnic cleansing and inter-ethnic hatred are increasingly back in vogue. It's easy to imagine a nefarious program is being orchestrated by a nasty and entrenched elite, aiming to plunder and enslave the rest of us. Such an idea is clearly not baseless, but nonetheless completely misleading in the solutions it suggests. 'If only we could jail them, or have a Nuremberg Two, things would be better…' However, Nuremberg One did not stop ethnic cleansing, targeting of religious groups, wars and mass death based on straight-out lies, or mass medical coercion for power and money. A couple of obvious reasons stand out for this. Firstly, high-level societal corruption is so deep and pervasive that it simply cannot be rooted out by force or law–the judges and armies and arms manufacturers are likely to be part of this behemoth already and have no interest in self-harm, while politicians are simply paid by them. Secondly, if those deepest in this cesspit of child sacrifice and share market-dictated slaughter were taken out of the picture, some of us would simply replace them. We know this because none of what we are seeing now is new. Ask any late Roman, Chinese peasant, or victim of the Inquisition. We need to be honest with ourselves regarding human behavior if we are going to change direction. There was, arguably, a period after World War Two when the West had a bit of a reset and the direction did seem better. Eisenhower was ignored, and so were the obvious risks of growing inequality as software entrepreneurs and financial houses accumulated riches greater than whole nations. Faced with a choice of recognizing the obvious or believing the public relations they funded, the propaganda proved more popular. We all, as a society, opted for a future rooted more in feudal inequality than egalitarianism. We regressed, because it is always easier than standing tall. So, here we are, back again, deep in the mire. To address it, we should first recognize the enormity of what is going on. We have allowed a corporate-authoritarian behemoth to arise, a monster of our own dereliction. We removed the brakes on greed and human stupidity, giving a free hand to a few to accumulate enormous wealth and power and, most importantly, to dispense with empathy. We empowered people shallow enough to believe in their own superiority, even omnipotence, by ignoring the wisdom of thousands of years of humanity. We are all capable of becoming similarly corrupted, if we receive an opportunity and elect to succumb to it. There is nothing special about leaders of the big financial houses, the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, the redactions of the Epstein files, nor the peons of old wealthy families that helped stoke, and profited from, former wars. They are all expressions of what the rest of us can become, given the resources and a willingness to empty ourselves of a more meaningful but harder existence. Therefore, we should not blame a 'they' or a 'them.' It is our own tolerance of the worst of human nature that gets us into trouble. Obsessing with specific people – railing against 'elites' – will at best result in their replacement. Alternatively, we can start thinking through the codes of conduct that are necessary in any society, and in ourselves, to stop people going that way. Stop enabling the worst of human greed and self-delusion that drives sponsored politicians to advocate for war, unknown insiders to trade shares on human lives, and oligarchs to dream of corralling whole populations into their digital prison and plying them with pharmaceuticals. We need to recognize the system we all built, within which they operate. Human nature is driven by greed. We know greed is bad, yet it is not unrelated to protecting and benefiting on...
