By Steven Yates
June 1, 2024
The only “us versus them” that matters. The values that matter.
[Author’s disclaimer: the opinions and conclusions expressed in this two-part series are solely mine, the author, and not necessarily the opinions and conclusions of NewsWithViews.com, its editors, staff, or other writers.]
Pt 1 Fallout.
The Substack version of Part 1 cost me a subscriber. I suppose it’s a plus that I only lost one; most readers drawn there seem open to unpopular ideas. I’m not writing the usual lovefests for Israel that afflict a lot of Christians as well as neocon and neoliberal secularists. I hope they don’t ever encounter anything about the U.S.S. Liberty. Their heads will explode. I’m open to hearing from anyone who believes he/she has evidence that present-day Israel has something to do with the Biblical Israel.
Zionism, a modern political-economic (not religious!) movement dating at least to the late 1800s, aimed to create and unconditionally protect a special nation for (Ashkenazi) Jews alone, under the premise that (Ashkenazi) Jews aren’t safe anywhere else, and is just one side-current of the globalism I oppose. It is secular to its core.
This is not something I will pursue further here. Many things are happening at once. At home, there’s the ongoing crisis caused by over 15 million illegal aliens having flooded into America since the Bidenista era began. There’s the ongoing collapse of higher education, courtesy of the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) intellectual vacuum and other misplaced priorities. There’s the rising cost of living for everyone, courtesy of the systemic debauching of the currency (thank you, Federal Reserve). Tensions are rising over the upcoming election between those who want a second Trump term and those who hate everything Trump stands for.
We must pick and choose our fights. As a “big ideas” writer, I’m trying to isolate the Real Fight, underlying all others. Fighting it successfully will open a path to sustainable freedom. This means defeating the Real Enemy.
Who is the Real Enemy, against which we wage the Real Fight? What is the latter’s real nature?
The most obvious candidate for Real Enemy is what I’ve variously called the superelite, globalism, GloboCorps, or most recently, the Global Corporatocracy.
We’re not going to be fighting the Global Corporatocracy directly any time soon. It doesn’t offer many visible targets. We’d not only lose hands down, but probably get killed in the process and our very existence memory-holed so that no one would even know we were here.
There’s a second candidate for Real Enemy I’ll discuss at the end. An Enemy we can defeat with a second Real Fight.
So what is this Fight?
The First Real Fight: Reiteration and Expansion.
As stated in Pt 1, there are those who desire to live as they see fit, participating in traditions of their choosing (probably because they grew up with these traditions) and otherwise be left alone if they aren’t bothering anyone else.
Then there are those who, in one way or another, won’t allow them to live as they see fit because in one way or another they are drawn to power.
The latter have always existed. We’ve always had warlords, kings, tyrants, etc., and today we have dictators and would-be global soft-totalitarians. Technology has enabled those drawn to power to pursue it on a planetary scale, invoking “global problems” they claim call for “global solutions” and this “global governance.”
The former are content with family, occupation, church, community, locality, circumscribing what they know and care about: God, spouse, children, work, those they interact with on a regular basis. Few are systematic thinkers, though some are intelligent, carefully consider their opinions, and vote. Their “philosophy” could be described as a kind of native realism. The world is what it is, and as Edie Brickell sang in that 1989 hit, “I know what I know if you know what I mean.”
There are right ways versus wrong ways of doing things. This is reality. One’s first obligation to one’s spouse is love, kindness, support. One’s obligation to one’s children is to school them in what is right, as well as love, kindness, support. This may mean the right way to handle workaday situations such as growing food, or in the moral sense: it is wrong to hit people, or lie to them, or break promises. Money is a tool — for acquiring and maintaining the necessities of life. These folks don’t expect to get rich doing whatever they are doing but if your relationships to God and to loved ones are solid and nurturing this is okay! Implicitly the common people understand that relationships are what is important.
Their relations are built on trust, typically longstanding. They favor working with (or for), and doing business with, people they know, like, and trust. This explains the suspicion of outsiders some gripe about when they pass through small towns. Outsiders, by definition, aren’t known quantities. The natural tendency of locals is to watch them carefully, however disconcerting this may be to the outsiders. But trust is earned, not given away for free. Keep going back, behave yourself, be honorable, be useful, and it’s possible.
The superelite, driven by their fascination with power, may have a vision of global domination, a Utopia. Among their number are enough systematic thinkers to suggest that this is an occupational hazard. Others are driven by an inner compulsion to be larger than life even if this means controlling the lives of strangers they will never know, much less value as unique persons. The money bug has bitten them. They see how money enables control. So they want more of it. The more the better. Money is more than just a tool. It is a means to power. It enables creating systems to control those whose beliefs, low-tech occupations, guns, and God, are in the way.
The superelite collectively believe themselves most fit to rule. They believe themselves authorized to make decisions — usually exchanges with like-minded others — because they can (and because the results make money) even if their decisions bring harm to tens of thousands to millions of people. They rationalize these beliefs and actions with bromides about “free trade.”
Professional relationships among elites are based on such abstract factors as credential power. This guy has a PhD from Harvard. He’s smart and his judgment can be relied upon. She held a position in such-and-such corporation (or federal agency). Or: she’s written such-and-such. So she’s one of us. They can be family people, or not. What should be clear is that anything as traditional as family is not what motivates them. I can’t help but suspect that many elites are emotionally isolated.
That first group, the common people, we noted, are the majority. They have ways of dealing with any psychopaths in their midst. Those who aren’t honest with others find themselves excluded at best, and at worst, they run afoul of the law by harming others and end up jailed. Or they figure their best bet is just to leave and move to a big city where the anonymity of most interactions protects them.
The elites, drawn to globalism, amount to a tiny fraction of any human population as we also noted. Psychopaths and sociopaths may thrive in its midst nevertheless. Birds of a feather, and all that. Borderline cases may consolidate in urban power centers among the “well educated” (government, corporations, so-called intellectual centers, and everywhere in between). These relationships are also built on a certain degree of trust. Those who prove themselves reliable in furthering official agendas rise in any large organization. A reasonably intelligent sociopath figures this out and acts accordingly.
The common people are interested primarily in what affects them and their loved ones directly, or in what they can affect. What’s not in that purview, might as well not exist. This will work against them, because what they’ve not foreseen will affect them. As when a “free trade” deal closes the factory they work for, all the small businesses that depended on that factory also close, city streets are soon boarded up, and a once-thriving community turns into a ghost town.
Strategists among the elites instinctively apply the divide-and-conquer principle. They hijacked race relations long ago, because the last thing they wanted was working class blacks and working class whites talking to one another and comparing notes. If the peasants, whatever their ethnicity, observe enough and learn enough, their attention will eventually turn to the elites.
This also holds true of the hijacking of feminism of the 1960s understood as equal pay for men and women of equal experience doing an equal amount of work in the same job. All fair-minded people supported this. The elites have been very effective at driving men and women apart. The number of single-never-marrieds of both sexes, growing older alone, testifies to this.
The “free trade” deals, of course, accompanied by the diminished purchasing power of the debauched currency, accentuate the biggest and worsening divide, which is between the haves and the have-nots.
It is easy to envision the Real Fight, then, as between these two mindsets: the only “us versus them” that matters!
Making matters tougher is realizing further that this is not an absolute dichotomy. There are all manner of shades of gray — many people who come from one background adopt traits of the other. Those with an elite mindset can hijack small towns. They aren’t exactly oligarchs, but neither are they poor. Most live in reasonable comfort. They identify with authority and don’t mind it being imposed on others, including the “commoners” they look down their noses at.
Can we fight this fight?
Much of my work, dating at least to the late 1980s, has involved trying to “wake people up.” Most do not respond, of course. G.I. Gurdjieff, whom I mentioned in Pt 1, believed most people exist in a kind of “waking sleep” that subjects them to control.
Most in that first category above are in comfort zones and won’t leave their comfort zones voluntarily.
Scottish philosopher David Hume said it back in the 1700s: reason is the slave of the passions. Emotions rule us more than reason. The emotion here is fear. By and large, people are afraid of what I’m talking about. They’d rather remain pleasantly asleep and dreaming than face unpleasant truths.
Since arguing is pointless, one turns to popular culture (as I’ve sometimes done), i.e., to productions like The Matrix (1999), arguably the most important film of the past half-century. Morpheus explained in a crucial scene:
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.
This, dramatically, is the mindset that calls this a “conspiracy theory” and closes the case. The Matrix does much more, of course, depicting the looming dystopia by substituting for it an AI-generated artificial reality, which each “sleeping” person experiences while being plugged into the ruling entity which is actually using his/her life energies:
What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world, built to keep us under control, and turn a human being into this.
Morpheus is holding up an ordinary battery: symbolic of the life energy of everyone being drained doing meaningless tasks serving those in power.
Real money power is not hiding. World Economic Forum annual meetings are not hidden from us, even if they are invitation-only. Their projected Great Reset is not a conspiracy. It’s happening out in the open, though there are myriad distractions from it.
Here is a list of distractions: claims about “systemic racism,” “misogyny,” “homophobia and transphobia”; the struggle between Zionist forces and pro-Palestinian ones; the lawfare against Trump and the abject terror felt by Democrats over the possibility of a second Trump term; the demonizing of Putin over Ukraine; multiple elections around the world; doubtless more.
Obviously I’m not saying that these conflicts are, in some sense, unreal. They’re real and deadly! My claim is that none had to happen. They were fomented, and that they take attention off the Global Corporatocracy.
This bloblike entity is what is eroding not just freedom but hope itself as it uses the money political economy (degraded and devalued currencies) to encircle and transform us into computer-literate but medieval-minded serfs — owned not by the feudal lords of old but by the system itself, its specific agents being corporations (be they employers or suppliers of necessary goods and services).
The late political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called this system inverted totalitarianism. Totalitarianism without visible totalitarians, because the system itself is totalizing. Greek economist and former Syriza Party Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis calls it technofeudalism (a term I’ve used in the past). Interestingly, both these gents write from the Left, not the Right. Plenty of folks on the Right speak of being “red pilled” and urge people to “wake up.” Along these same lines, Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin penned The Great Awakening vs. the Great Reset (2021). Good luck finding it; the book has been “shadow banned” in the U.S. Amazon refuses to carry Dugin’s books. Wikipedia calls him “fascist or neofascist” because he is openly pro-Russia. This is typical. My response: read the book if you want to know what Dugin has to say. Look for copies on eBay.
There’s more to fighting the Real Fight than reading a few books, obviously. Although it helps.
A widespread belief holds that if the globalism of the Global Corporatocracy is sufficiently exposed to the light of day, especially in light of its many failures (“Globalization will make us all rich”), popular sentiment will reject it, and that this explains the upsurge of “populist” movements around the world.
There’s something to this. A few leaders labeled “populist” or “nationalist” have retained office despite globalist-controlled media hostility. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán comes to mind. Others, though, despite winning elections, were ousted (by means fair or foul; I’ll not get into that here): Donald Trump obviously, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile, “the Right” has been rising in Europe, with Giorgia Meloni becoming Italy’s prime minister, Geert Wilders having won the Netherlands’ recent election on a platform rejecting open borders, and political parties corporate media hysterically labels “far right” and “neofascist” making gains in France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere.
The plan-demic both should have, and did, “awaken” even more people despite the censorship, the deplatforming, the demonizing of criticisms of the official narratives and production of alternatives as “misinformation.”
Yet we’re still in the New Normal and wondering when the next shoe will drop.
For the fact remains: we’re up against something backed with oceanic-trench-deep pockets.
Atop the Global Corporatocracy is a group that would fit comfortably into a university lecture hall. This group, which regularly attends annual WEF confabs, commands more wealth and resources than the entire bottom 50 percent of the world’s population.
The Second Real Fight. And in sum….
What, then, are our options?
As stated above, opposing the Real Enemy openly is a road to nowhere. A far better strategy is to do what these articles attempt to do, which is reach as many people as possible with truthful information, counseling them to “wake up.” Some will respond; most won’t. Those who won’t, will reap the consequences of remaining “asleep” (or “plugged in” or “taking the blue pill”).
This brings me to the second candidate for Real Enemy I mentioned, against which we have a second Real Fight.
It’s counterintuitive until we think about it, but this second Real Enemy is ourselves.
Our impatience, our frustration with “the sheeple,” our anger however justified.
All futile…. You cannot force anyone to agree with you!
This second Real Fight, therefore, is with ourselves: to control ourselves by circumventing all the above with mental systems of self-discipline, a quest for viable strategies of “opting out” as best we can, and of course turning to and relying on God, while patiently educating those who will listen.
Also read Epictetus the Stoic on focusing on what you can control: your mind and your actions. You can choose to value what is really important: your relationships with others. You can cultivate kindness to all those around you, whether they are on board with any of this or not. You can be patient with those who don’t “get it.”
Other, more visible actions are obvious. Don’t go into debt if you can avoid it. Don’t live in big cities. Steer clear of big universities. Learn a trade instead. You can do this at a community college, or through an apprenticeship if you can arrange one. Had I been born into Gen Z knowing what I know, I’d be doing the latter. Farmers, electricians, plumbers, etc., are “evergreen”: always needed to keep a community running. They will never be replaced by AI or other technology.
And then be doubly-patient.
Because the Global Corporatocracy is an Empire. If we study Empires historically, we learn one thing: all eventually fail. They fall from within.
The one being built now will not be an exception.
Those with hands-on skills will be the ones to build up something of value both during, and in the wake of, its fall into oblivion, however fast or slow this happens.
In ensuing material I hope to explore the nature of the Global Corporatocracy more, and this kind of response. I don’t wish to focus on details of the upcoming election. Ask me who is going to win, and I’m going to echo Tucker Carlson’s answer: I’ve no idea. I’m convinced that leftist agents of the Global Corporatocracy will pull out all stops to make sure it isn’t Trump. The rest is details. As I’ve stated previously, I have over a dozen scenarios in my back pocket. I’ve no idea which one(s) the elites will implement in their bid to maintain Empire power.
Of greater importance is the need to explore what we can do as persons to extricate ourselves and protect ourselves from the debacle likely to come. Focusing on what we can control.
The Global Corporatocracy is filled with sociopaths and psychopaths from top to bottom. How high do its layers go? I don’t know that either (but read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters!).
What I should note in closing: it is fundamentally corporate. Not governmental. Most freedom fighters get this wrong. Its primary institutions (e.g., central banks) are private, not public. It controls governments by buying easily-manipulated political classes and legions of bureaucratic underlings. It is probably behind every major political assassination of the past 70 years, with the CIA being its ever-reliable tool. It is behind a lot of what the Left condemns as colonialism, which destroyed indigenous cultures and pulled whatever was left into the money political economy of mass consumerism.
It is behind what the Right condemns as wokeness (bankrolled by the George Soroses of the world). This further undermines what was already on life support: liberal arts learning generally, and specific learning based on a Christian worldview. Wokeness — the DIE intellectual vacuum — demonizes those who have done the most to build Western civilization: straight Christian white males, or just those believing that physical science was serving up useful understanding of an objective reality. Many woke beliefs, e.g., in “gender fluidity,” reflect its departure from the kind of realism discussed above. That this is being pushed on impressionable children further indicates their psychopathy and penchant for destroying ordinary people’s lives.
The Global Corporatocracy was almost surely behind the covid catastrophe!
This does not mean that everyone with an elite mindset, or who starts a war is working for the Global Corporatocracy, or even knows about it. Most politicians probably don’t. I doubt that a Yahya Sinwar does, or that necessarily a Netanyahu does (though I could be wrong). In a divided, materialist world in which money talks and amorality prevails, there are bound to be political nihilists and independent mayhem-makers whose destructive actions prove useful.
The point has been, and still is, to the keep the industrial serfdom focused anywhere except on the very top.
We must realize that if we want to live free lives, we’re going to have to figure out how to do it ourselves. No one is going to do it for us. Fortunately, some are already doing what it takes.
That’s the Real Fight, in whichever variant, and the sooner we absorb all this into our worldview, the better.
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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A slightly different version of this article is available on Navigating the New Normal, on Substack. Please consider subscribing. It’s still free (for now).
Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2021 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.
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Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
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His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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