Planet and PEOPLE

When Thich Nhat Hanh went to America during the Vietnam – American War, he was asked, ‘Do you come from North Vietnam or South Vietnam?’   To which he answered, ‘I come from the middle (of Vietnam) ‘ .   Both sides in the war regarded him as an enemy because he refused to take sides.    He spoke up for the ordinary Vietnamese people, being attacked with bombs, bullets, landmines and chemical weapons to ‘save’ them from Communism.  He found himself exiled from his country for over 40 years, by both the ‘losing’ US backed government of South Vietnam and the ‘winning’ Communists of the North.    Both believed in authoritarian, dictatorial power, even as they tried to justify it in different ways.   

Wealth and power corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.    Those addicted to dominating and exploiting people and planet will do anything, no matter how horrific, to feed their addiction, because (1) the can’t help themselves (2) ‘shock and awe’ is a way to demonstrate your invincibility and terrify any opposition – we are cautioned to surrender (3) they have made a whole conceptual framework, a sort of supportive philosophy, of their nihilism, to bury their own innate ethical instincts.   It reassures them that mass murder and planetary destruction are both necessary and inevitable.   They enforce this philosophy on everyone and call it ‘science’.  

Those addicted to wealth and power have always seen these things as their own justification.   The reality is that they are really driven by fear.  If life is an existential struggle between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, where the winners take all and the losers lose even their land, water, food, homes, health, lives, families and children,  choosing the ‘winning’ side seems a matter of common sense and basic survival.     However, the wealthy and powerful are completely incapable of sharing anything, they are never satisfied and they regard all others , including you and me, as mere resources to be exploited and discarded.  It is a form pf psychopathy. Your investments, your membership of a political party, your freemasonry, your contacts or service to the super-rich, will not protect you when they no longer need you.  

Modern economic and political theory is based on the ruthless pursuit of wealth and power.   We are told that benefits will ‘trickle down’, or that philanthropy is noble and selfless, but these are lies.

According to the prevailing ideology, the ‘ends’ ( always unlimited wealth and power for the already powerful) justify any ‘means’.   The means are always a variety of forms of violence – preferably psychological, since this is more effective at destroying opposition – but if ‘necessary’,  complete physical destruction of everything, even themselves.  It is the old psychopathic demand, ‘If I can’t have you, nobody will’.

This has brought us colonialism, industrialised slavery and warfare, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and behavioural psychology as a subject of research and development in itself.

Behavioural psychology is about hidden persuasion – getting people to do as you want them without being aware of it.     Psychological warfare has always been part of the armoury of the powerful, but generally not consciously so until the late the 19th c.   

In earlier centuries, religion was the ‘opium if the masses’.   The powerful had a divine right to rule:  their wealth and position was a mark of God’s favour.   As the hymn goes, ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, each to his own estate’.

The rise of an economy based on movable wealth and debt challenged traditional land-based power structures.   The rich man overspent his income and fell into debt; and the poor man, losing his land, had no way to pay his ‘dues’ to the rich other than by his labour.   Both found themselves borrowing money from the banker.   Debt slavery is the one ring to rule them all from behind the scenes.    The Rothschilds’ unimaginable fortune is said to have started when they funded both sides in the Napoleonic War, putting both winner and loser alike in their debt.   The opening up and exploitation of the American continent released huge resources, which through the creation and manipulation of debt poured into the bankers’ pockets.   Money was lent to settlers, then reclaimed with interest – in the form of all the backbreaking work they had put into establishing their farms and claims when the banks foreclosed on their mortgages.   

By the 20th c.,  ‘divide and rule’ has become a key strategy.   The old aristocracies were encouraged to fight each other to a standstill in the First World War, while America intervened in its own interest from its remarkably ‘safe’ continent.   The Second World War devastated Europe as a competitor economy, saddled with debt to the US, leaving the US to rule the planet with the threat of nuclear weapons and the control of that most essential commodity for industrialised societies -oil.  It was the ‘unipolar’ world, the ‘new American century’, and the continued existence of the Soviet Union merely provided a convenient enemy to unite against.   

The wealthy and powerful have always been terrified of the ‘mob’, but the bankers are well aware that the mob can be overcome when deprived of food and other basic needs.  It is how every revolution is ultimately reversed. ‘You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy’ is a threat that has been used for centuries.  Unfortunately the wealthy seem blind to the fact that if this were to come about, they would own everything and be miserable.   

Capitalism was based on rewarding the compliant with consumer goods, whose production and distribution created more wealth and power for the super-wealthy.   But it was a mirage of prosperity.   The new house, the car, the TV set, the computer, were all bought on credit and trapped people in a cycle of increasing dependence.   

Behavioural psychology is a set of techniques developed to create and maintain demand, either for goods and services, or political support.   Psychological warfare techniques, based on Freud’s psychology and developed first by the British and Americans in the 1st World War, were adapted to peacetime uses, just as the manufacturers of explosives turn their attention to producing the artificial fertilisers farmers became so dependent on.

Edward Bernays and members of Freud’s family were instrumental in developing the techniques of behavioural psychology.   They were the ‘hidden persuaders’ who aimed to harness the power of the subconscious.   This is the basis of the modern marketing, public relations, and propaganda industries.     Their belief is that human nature ( the id) has no ethical comps, being a ruthless fight tor dominance, and that all ‘civilisation’, ethics, social interactions, are really just means to this end.   In short, life is about deception and ‘virtue signalling’.   If it grows your power and wealth, it works.  And that is all that matters.  The death of ‘God’, that is, of any sense of a higher power than individual human greed means that life has no meaning apart from a fight to dominate and control.   

This philosophy is a complete disaster for humanity and the planet as a whole, but the idea seems to be that if complete possession of the entire planet means its complete destruction, well, with enough money you can take off to Mars and start again there.   And take with you any willing to be your complete slaves. It is absolute madness.

Behavioural psychology’s recognised techniques include social pressure, the spiral of silence, complete control of the official narrative, ‘othering’ and silencing any dissent, and so on.   Instead of appealing to ‘God’ these days, they claim to ‘own the science’.   Humans, we are told, are just ‘hackable animals’.   There are too many poor people, unnecessary in an increasingly automated world to serve their greed.  So reduce the world population. The ‘poor’, (who include 99% of the world’s population in comparison to the super-rich) are just costs to be eliminated,  competition for resources that only the super-rich should have.

Digital technology was seized on as a further powerful tool in monitoring and shaping people’s thoughts and actions.   The Gestapo, the KGB, would have been delighted to see its ability to collect so much information about everyone, and then weaponise it.   As we see with the so-called ‘vaccinations’ and 5G, the only real object is to monitor, control and colonise – cementing private wealth and power.   The lives of people, animals, plants and minerals count for nothing.   And the ‘truth’ is alays just whatever suits their purpose, from one minute to the next.

So whatever your views, you will find yourself put in a camp, a silo, by association with others and then opposed and attacked.   You must be divided and ruled.  Are you from the North or the South?  The ‘right’ or the ‘left’? The climate deniers or the eco-fascists?   The American, Russian or Chinese ‘side’?   Are you a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or a conspirator?   A troll, a shill, ‘woke’, ‘transphobic’,   ‘anti-semitic’, an abuser, or a victim, or both ( no other relationships are possible)?   Are you a ‘vaxxer’ or an ‘anti-vaxxer’? A ‘techno-fascist’ or a ‘tinfoil hat’?   A Brexiteer or a Remainer?  It doesn’t really matter to the super-rich if it keeps you cowed, fearful and submissive.    The endless message of the behavioural psychologists is that you are inadequate, too poor too wee too stupid to matter at all.   And to belong somewhere, to be accepted and appreciated, even by your own family, you need to drink the kool aid.

We are ruled by fear.  Whether deliberately stoked (remember ‘Project Fear’ in 2014?) or not,  it is a fear that starts from the idea that we and others are controlled by an entirely selfish subconscious.   That life is a fight to the death against everyone and everything.   That this is just human nature and you are safest on the side of the (apparent) winners.  

It’s a fear that has more than anything seized those with the ‘most to lose’.  The 10% are the biggst real threat to the 1%. We all really need to wake up and remember that they and we have nothing to fear but fear itself.  

There is such a thing as the truth, however inconvenient.   It is that the world does not consist of competing individual entities struggling to dominate each other.  Ecosystems just do not work like that.    Humans are part of nature, not separate from it, and being interdependent we have to co-exist with each other and with all other species.   Human nature is not essentially exploitative, destructive or evil, or different from any other nature.   Like all other species, we were evolved for the benefit of the whole system.   The philosophy of nihilism is a sickness and it is the real cause of our planetary crisis.   We are not rulers of the world.  Our supposed uniqueness is a gift from nature, and it includes the intelligence to see that mutual aid is the only possible future.   We cannot fight violence with violence.   We just need to change our perception. 

Behavioural psychology is based on a false premise.  Its attempts to control people are therefore inevitably doomed.   Let’s reject the fake ‘fact checking’ websites and the official propaganda,  and the psychological and social pressure to comply, call it out,  and insist on making up our own minds.   And  learn from our hearts and their insights.  We are alive, with the power to heal and regenerate. But above all, we are not separate, competing individuals. It means we are much more powerful than we realise: everything we do and say has an effect on people and planet.