COUNTER-MOVEs

... finding victory in the war the

rich are making upon the poor ...

by Joel A. Wendt

social philosopher and occasional fool

INTRODUCTION

This essay makes a very large assumption, which is a bit complicated, but which can be stated as follows ... (several paragraphs) ...

Much that happens in the world today is strongly influenced by certain groups of human beings who look upon the life conditions of most of the people in the world with a great deal of callous indifference, ... i.e. they could care less what happens to us (economic and social collateral damage) as they battle among themselves for dominance.  All the same, some, who don't think very clearly, might consider that what is to be said in the long essay that follows is the work of a conspiracy nut job.  The only problem with this point of view is that it is history itself that teaches of conspiracies, and someone who insists there are no such groups at work in the social-political world of humanity is living in a fantasy world.

Conspiracies have always existed where power was to be fought over and where great wealth could be obtained through temporary cooperation.   Most members of a conspiracy don't need to always have the shared ideology often thought, but in fact can share only the historical understanding that a momentary association of power and wealth hungry individuals and small groups can dominate for a time, those who do not consciously combine their forces.   Conspiracies of this kind only require similar goals, and a willingness to divide the spoils.  Japan, Germany and Italy cooperated to a degree during World War Two, not because of a shared political ideology, but simply because it was useful for their own goals.  Russia, under Stalin, wouldn't cooperate and became an enemy of the Axis powers for that reason.

On a smaller scale illegal and secret collusion were common during the time of the robber barons in America, on the bridge from the 19th to the 20th Century; and, recently such collusion appeared in the cooperation among five major investment banks, who worked together in an effort to dominate the still mostly unknown derivative markets, where they bought and sold  various speculative instruments in the top end of the ponzi scheme that the tame press keeps mislabeling the sub-prime loan crisis.  In all cases these activities were illegal (one of the reasons such conspiracies hide their activities - if it was legal they would do it right in front of everyone).  That they don't get prosecuted for such activities comes mostly from the corrupting effect and influence large wealth has on government.

The difficulty with what might be called most kinds of conspiracy theory is that those who try to prove such things exist, basically try to be too specific in the details, as if it was possible to penetrate to the inner workings of something that was set up in the first place to carefully hide itself.  We don't have to go into the specifics in order to perceive the conspiracy.   We only have to read the signs as it were, the tracks such activity leaves in various actions taken by individuals, governments and businesses.  It is the same as when we observe patterns in the weather - this enables us to anticipate a coming storm front.  In a like fashion then patterns in various social and political events reveals that hidden associations,  temporarily sharing common goals, are at work behind the scenes.

There is also a kind of thinking of which we are aware today, which can help us with this need we have to see behind the scenes and deeper into the minds of those who with such callous indifference can act so selfishly in the face of the suffering that is caused others.   A typical example of this callous indifference was the recent crisis in Myanmar, where the ruling military leaders (an obvious conspiracy of lawless individuals) cared only for their own interests and let hundreds of thousands of their people suffer and perish.  We live in a world where this is happening on a very large scale, with quite significant amounts of power and wealth at stake.   We need then to get inside the minds of such groups, and the science that has explored this on a very small scale is the kind of work that the behavioral science people in the FBI do - that which is engaged in by those we call today profilers.  This is dangerous work, by the way, for the soul that lets itself think like such inhuman willful lovers of evil, exposes itself to all kinds of problems.

Yet, it is essential that such a process be enacted, in spite of personal cost, for this is one of the keys to learning how to perceive the patterns.  If we think (momentarily and carefully) with the same callous indifference as those who would rule us from hidden places, we then develop a greater ability to discern among the many detailed phenomena of modern life, the trail left behind by those who would harm so many for such disgustingly selfish purposes.

In the long essay that follows I will tell the story of what can be perceived, that is I will profile the dominant conspiracy actors who are willing to sacrifice so many for so few.  I do this not to identify them as individuals, however.  I do this so that we can see the detailed nature of the war being waged upon ordinary people in the world today, and from this understanding of the nature of this war, how we then may make the Counter-Moves that limit the effects of those who would so easily harm so many.

Certainly in this effort I will not be perfect.  I don't even expect to get it all right.  I do, however, very much want to do something that most conspiracy theorists do not do, namely to offer solutions, not just a lot of negative hand wringing.  It isn't enough to perceive that lovers of evil seek to harm us, but we have to understand that we don't have to stand passively by, and can in fact engage in actions which limit and contain this harm. 

At the same time, we need to realize that we cannot do this with the idea in mind of achieving total victory of any kind.   A perfect world is not ours to obtain - that's a fantasy.   We can, however, ameliorate a great deal of what comes toward us, by all kinds of activities, many of which are already in place.  By this I mean to suggest that we already make all kinds of socially healthy instinctive choices, which protect us from this evil-loving callous indifference.   We are not to be overwhelmed, especially if we learn to perceive - to appreciate the profile - and form our own counter-associations, our own communities and groups from which we draw the necessary spiritual and psychological strength out of which our survival can be created (in spite of what the dominant holders of wealth and power seek to achieve).

Those familiar with my other writings will know that there are a number of different ways this can be approached, and here in this long essay I am just coming at the situation of modern existence from a particular point of view.  There are many other points of view from which our contemporary existence can be approached, and I hope as we progress into the next years, people will seek out the many other voices of wisdom that have much to offer to the shared trials of humanity.
 

In my books, the Way of the Fool and American Anthroposophy for example, I discuss how we deal with such problems as individuals and communities, from inside our own soul and spiritual  life.   In my book Uncommon Sense I discuss what can be done in a more macro-social sense following the legal potentials hidden and unrecognized in the U. S. Constitution (in which this essay will be included in the appendix).  I do the same in the book called: On the Nature of Public Life.  Below I am going at this situation from again another direction, through the process of elaborating in great detail the patterns in our shared social and political existence left by those who want to dominate, and what these patterns can tell us that might be useful in support of our need to respond.   The reader will get a clearer picture of what I mean here when we get into the actual details.

 

Joel A. Wendt, Summer 2008

ENTERING THE LOOKING GLASS

We need to begin with simple observations of various phenomena.  It is no use to immediately judge them or already assume such phenomena "prove" the existence of any government and business conspiracy.  Let us just begin to assemble various facts, and see if a pattern emerges all on its own.

For example, we could start anywhere, but I'd like to start with something that was a detail of the 9/11 catastrophe, and which precisely because it is still unresolved, could be very important to note.   This is the anthrax scare/panic that began, according to reports, a week after September 11, 2001, supposedly on September 18th.   This attack was directed right at Congress and was ongoing up to the time of the passage of the Patriot Act (passed and signed into law by October 26th, 2001).  Five people were killed, and as many as two dozen injured, all mostly postal workers or office workers.   So we have 9/11, then a week later the beginning of a bio-terrorism attack on Congress, during which the Patriot Act is offered and then enacted into law.

The Patriot Act, at over 300 pages, could not have been written following 9/11, but had to have substantial portions of it already on the shelf, as it were, well before 9/11.   Later, as the Country more and more woke up to the reality of the Patriot Act, legislators began to confess to never having read it.  All of this is carefully analyzed elsewhere on the Internet, but I do think it is an interesting kind of fingerprint as it were, of a certain kind of careful thinking, if we take the view that this whole scenario was engineered in advance.  Suppose you wanted to get certain laws enacted that you wanted in place later for larger purposes in the near future.  Can you think of a better method for achieving this?  The law is ready, the time is right [9/11], and the final pressure to be applied to Congress - a direct deadly attack - is commenced.

Eventually (seven years later), the main person of interest in the anthrax attack was exonerated in a civil judgment, which awarded him substantial funds (a payment for his willing collaboration in the attack and for being a suspect?).   Following this award, another supposed person of interest committed suicide, and then in the press was leaked all kinds of facts supposedly in support his guilt.  Now if I was the case manager of this problem for the extremely wealthy and power hungry, I would be glad to keep the public following one trail (certain to eventually dead end) of explanation for the anthrax attacks, but not so stupid as to think that would suffice.  I'd have a back up plan, and even better, a stooge.  Thus, when the first person of interest was finally exonerated, I'd be able to not only substitute a new one, but conveniently have him kill himself (right, if you believe in the tooth fairy).  At which point, the not very bright press and mainstream media, after an appropriate flood of news stories designed to convince the public, will consider the situation ended.

About those assumed convincing stories, let me just give one example.  Recently it was reported that the FBI has discovered the container in which traces of the exact matching anthrax spores could be found.  Here comes the kicker though, and the reader should keep in mind the subtle nuance of the FBI report.  The container was found to have been in the suicide's possession.  Note the word possession, and recognize that they do not say they found his fingerprints on the container - that is they have no evidence he actually handled this container (anyone could have planted it in his office or home or wherever).

Recently a new law was offered to Congress, and seems to be well on its way to being passed.   It advances an idea contained in the Patriot Act, which basically so loosely and carelessly defines domestic terrorism that what we have for years accepted as honorable civil disobedience would be now criminalized to a high degree, including giving the State extra power to investigate and prosecute outside previous rules limiting the power of the State under our Constitution.  (HR 1955 titled the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007).

Another recent news story explains that the FBI is to be given authority to open case files (and thus investigate with all their powers) any American citizen at all, whether there are any facts suggesting we should be suspicious.  No evidence at all.  Just a desire in an investigating arm of the Government to investigate someone.

In fact, if we look at the legislative history of the last 30 or 40 years, especially when Republicans controlled Congress and/or the White House, the State has more and more intruded into our lives.  This slow accretion, of the power of the State at the expense of the citizen, has been noted by many.   Some of the deeper thinkers on this problem have compared this situation to the story of the frog in the boiling water, who sitting in the very slowly rising temperature never jumped out of the pot.  We, to this thinking, are that frog, and the boiling water is the slow erosion of our civil rights.  When we do eventually realize what has been going on, it may well be to late.

Lets ask the question: Who, and for what reasons, might want to achieve such an end?  Who has something to gain if American civil liberties are slowly dissolved, and replaced with more and more central authority?  Who could do this regardless of which Party controlled the White House or Congress?   Why would they do this?

Lets take up another thread...

In recent years the problem called global warming has become a popular political issue.  Environmental degradation is nothing new, it was noticed many decades ago in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, as well as other places.  Acid rain was another clue.   The original Clean Air and Clean Water acts were efforts to notice that the industrial revolution was out of control and was having all manner of side-effects that were dangerous to the future.  Is there anyone who also might have known about this, but for seemingly obscure reasons wanted to just let it continue (perhaps knew it couldn't be stopped), but saw some way to take advantage of this situation?

We are also today more and more waking up to the reality of banking and money, because of the ongoing economic crash.  The veil is being lifted, and many are starting to understand that the real nature of the economy is not what we are told.  More and more people are looking at the creation of the Federal Reserve.  Others are noticing the meetings in Davros Switzerland, where elites of all kinds gather.  Google Bilderberger for a big can of worms going on right in front of us.   People of power and wealth meet, and their collusion is becoming more and more obvious.

In my book, Uncommon Sense, I write of what I call The Lords of Finance, who are a loose association of the very very rich who sit at the top of the ponzi scheme that is modern debt-money banking (Google Money as Debt for details).  When you have a huge amount of wealth, you can hire the very best for-hire minds, which we know of today as think tanks, of which the  earliest versions (that still exist today) were called: the Trilateral Commission (Rockefeller banking money, mostly American in nature) and the Council on Foreign Relations (Cecil Rhodes wealth, and English banking money).  There is a lot of research available on the Internet on these institutions as well.

An image out of history is important here: bread and circuses.   The Roman Emperors, in the late (declining) stages of their empire, knew that to keep the masses more or less satisfied the Emperors had to provide minimal food, and significant distractions (bread and circuses).  We have that today in America.  Plenty of things, lots of food (denatured and unhealthy, but those in charge don't actually care), and multiple distractions (TV, movies, video games, shopping).  What they don't want is a culture, or a people, that is awake.

At the same time, many today are becoming aware that what we are told about how the economy works is more like the dogmas of a religion than the principles of a science.  For example, how money actually works has basically been completely hidden from the general public knowledge.  While we were told over and over again to have faith in free markets (the prime economic religious mantra), the rulers of the financial world knew that debt-money effectively enabled the bankers to become parasites on the workers in all those economies where central banks were the norm.   The truth was that almost all the money in circulation comes into existence as a debt on the spender.  It not only has no value, it really has a kind of negative value, because every time the financial elites took out their very large blood surplus for their own benefit, the debt on the rest of us increased.

Through complex misdirection, which had to be intentional (why our economics teachers and scientists didn't notice this is a quite remarkable unanswered question), it has never really been explained to people in the Western Democracies just how money works, what banks do, how they make money and dozens of other questions that would have caused ordinary people to demand extraordinary controls over the financial institutions on which we all depend.  On a colossal scale we've had the economic wool pulled over our eyes.

Now this was not always the case.  Our Founders and even Lincoln completely mistrusted the bankers (and the banks own higher ups in the food chain of concentrated wealth), and battle lines had been drawn as long ago as the very beginning of the Nation (see my Uncommon Sense for details).  Who would do this?  Why would they do this?   Some of these questions are also addressed there.

Let me summarize: One can have a fun ride getting at this information by reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle - 6 novels in three books for a total of 2700 pages, which is, among other marvelous things, an adventure saga covering the period in time in Europe from about 1670 to 1730, during which the basic directions of banking and finance were determined, as well as the basic directions of natural science..   During this period an understandable conflict arose between the aristocracies of blood (Kings and Queens etc.) and the emerging class of bankers and merchants.   Kings and Queens kept ruining bankers and economies by their undisciplined impulses to start wars, borrow money they could not repay, and live high on the hog (so to speak).  Great political and social power resided in hereditary blood.   It was the dominant way the world was run in the West.

The bankers didn't like watching their wealth disappear down the appetites of these elites of blood.  When human beings eventually began to throw over the elites of hereditary blood (the American and French Revolutions), the arrangements of political power became more fluid for a time, and thus it happened that as the U.S. Constitution was formed, the banking elites worked hard to maintain a place at the table of power.  Hamilton was one of their main representatives.

A second large battle between the impulses for a truly free government of the people, by the people and for the people, occurred during Lincoln's presidency.  The bankers were reluctant to loan money to the North for the Civil War (they want over 30% interest).   They had kept their ability under the Constitution to issue specie (bank notes), but Lincoln understood the danger to a point, and confounded them by issuing for the first time government money (Lincoln Greenbacks) to finance the War.

Even so, the battle had been lost all the way back during the time before even Stephenson's novel, when banks established the right (by practice, more than by law) to lend more money than they had on deposit.  Understanding this is why runs on banks occur even today.  We know their actual current cash on hand resources don't cover all their deposit obligations as these exist on paper.

With the Federal Reserve Act in the early part of the 20th Century, the banks finally won the main political battle, and private Central Banks now became not only responsible for the money supply and control of interest rates, but taxpayers had to pay all the costs of the newly printed money in circulation.  During this period was already put in place the fake religion-like ideas about money and banking, and this effort at illusion creation was intensified.   What would be kept secret in the cold hearts of bankers, could be managed in a democracy as long as people falsely believed they lived in a free society, and were taught to worship the dark gods of the imaginary free market and to accept the rights of wealth to take profit and property at the expense of persons.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, an elite now stood well poised to control major macro economic decisions world wide.  These powers most strongly arose in Western Civilization, which cultural influence was also the most adept at natural science.  Much of history in the last 120 years can be explained by a conscious decision among the super elites of wealth and power in the West to control the whole world economically (recall the Colonial and Trading Empires).  For example (a few among many possible examples), English wealth helped the Russian Revolution start, in part to give a second front in WWI, but for other reasons as well.  America, to continue the example, has sponsored a dictator in Iraq (and other dictators) for years.  Why?

Consider for a moment the conscienceless soul of a serial killer - what is usually the subject of profiling.  Imagine that same conscienceless impulse coming awake in the blood lines of bankers.  Over time, this conscienceless impulse (moving in secret) rises to the top of the successor aristocracy.    An aristocracy of wealth then covertly replaces the aristocracies of blood at the table of real financial power, while the illusion of control among the people of the Western Democracies becomes the main teaching element in civics and other cultural influences that are subject to manipulation and which create our world views.  

If you look into the broad creation of public schools, during those 120 or more years, you will discover that a prime goal was to control urban youth, who otherwise (having little to do) tended to lawlessness.  Rural youth were excluded from the laws requiring school attendance when needed on the farms, but in the cities the truant officer was meant to be an agent of great social control.  Public schools were not really intended to educate (the elites had their own private academies, many of which still exist all over New England), but to give workers basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic.

We are fed a dream about how our social life is ruled (we're a democracy we are told, after all we vote), and half asleep we become the serfs and peasants of an aristocracy of wealth able to purchase all the clever minds it needs in order to rule from secret.

Is there more?

- its for the greater good -

Where did this gentleman get these ideas: "its for the greater good" (whatever that means), and that he was "doing God's work"?

Any evil seeks a self justification.   The pedophile believes he loves the child he rapes and abuses.  Of his own satisfaction he makes a kind of personal religion.  This isn't because of a need to salve conscience, but rather because each individual world view has to have some degree of internal consistency.  Too large a paradox in the fundamentals of our personal world view, and an uncontrolled insanity can be the result. 

The callous indifference of the elites and super elites of wealth needs a similar justification.  We get glimpses of this justification process when we recognize that there is some purpose to such social forms as the Skull and Bones Society (Yale's elite fraternity), or to the annual gatherings at the Bohemian Grove in California (a gathering of already co-opted politicians, business leaders and others).  What we find out about these events is that frequently there is a religious or rite-like ceremony as part of them.   Is there some psychological principle being applied here?

Most of us are familiar today with cults, and how a cult works at brainwashing someone.  Suppose that very very very smart people were to do something similar, but far more sophisticated.  Not so much mind control, but nevertheless something that lets them entice others with inducements that bring a needed degree of submission to the will of those at the top, yet doesn't disturb to openly (many so seduced like to be half asleep as well) the sense of rightness of those who consent and agree.

Imagine, for example, potential future American business and political leaders being awarded Rhodes Scholarships, and then going to England, to Oxford, for advanced education.  These individuals are themselves then profiled, and their weaknesses and strengths cataloged.  Those with the right psychological disposition are then drawn further into the inner circles of extreme wealth and power.   Tempted with various kinds of addictions, some sexual, they are shown that they can be princes of the world of the elites, and satisfy any indulgence at will.   Should they fall, or otherwise act in such a way that they are noticed by the press, the elites then show the ease with which they can kill any story, or otherwise make their proteges immune from consequences.

Lets pause and consider the idea of addiction for a moment.  The greatest addiction is power.  The addictions of the senses - of the mind and of the feelings (heroin dreams, nicotine, sex etc.) are small compared to addictions of the will - of unlimited power to do whatever you want.  A secondary aspect is, oddly, a kind of love.  Our culture of celebrity celebrates special people.  They too get what they want.  Think now of Dick Chaney.  Enormous secret power.  Can help his friends in the circles of wealth do almost anything they want in government.  He's not alone of course, but lets just focus our profiling imagination of one person.

When he goes to the private homes of the elites, in perhaps Virginia or at Aspen in Colorado, what is his experience when he walks into a room.  The most powerfully and secretive man on the planet is adored by his surroundings as if he was a god and a great hero.

To return to the process by which one joins this worshiped and powerful elite...

At some point a special few are even made aware of the slight of hand involved in the making of a fake economic religion, with enough truth in it to explain much, but with the real effects and benefits for the super elites still carefully hidden until the neophyte inductee has so committed themselves that it would be suicidal to leave the group.  As many of these individuals will have intact consciences (which like all of us, we can be induced to ignore it), something has to be given to them that lets them believe in the Way of Wealth and Power.

We don't have to know exactly what was given.  The details are not important.  I'll sketch some possibilities, but at the same time will focus on religion-like social processes, because as we all know, Western Civilization is strongly influenced by Christianity, and so most people raised from their youth in Western Culture will have certain values.  They must be given a justification for accepting their roles as princes who lie, without too far disturbing their early church experiences and ideals.  While the super elites of the aristocracies of wealth will produce their share of conscienceless individuals, most members of these groups will need to become true believers in a religion-like world view that seems itself to be superior, just as their life is to be superior as a member of these high elites.  This is the secret written in the phenomena of the Skull and Bones rituals and the annual rituals enacted at Bohemian Grove in California.

Extreme wealth is able to purchase anything that is for sale, whether the price is wealth, or power or something perhaps even more addictive - a kind of religious enlightenment or initiation ecstasy which brings either true or illusory direct spiritual experience.   I want to emphasize that it is not significant (from one point of view) to decide whether or not what is offered to the princes of elite power and wealth is a true or false spiritual achievement.  We just have to appreciate how, for some, such enticements will be quite powerful.

Here I want to take a small side trip, to make an as if argument.  Lets assume (for the moment) that the spiritual is real, and that spiritual initiation is real.  Lets also assume that such spiritual Ways have both a left hand path and a right hand path.  In spiritual literature this is already well known, so I am not so much speculating, as borrowing what already is discussed among those who consider the spiritual real.

For example, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) taught what he called Spiritual Science, and among his teachings one can find material about what he called Occult Brotherhoods.  He taught that behind much that arose in England and American that led to WWI, and also was certain to influence our time, there existed, from behind the scenes, systems of spiritual enlightenment or initiation that already had long traditions in the West.  To make things simple (a bit dangerous, but not too much so), I'll make some distinctions.  There appear to be many Occult Lodges of perhaps centuries hidden existence, and rumors have been everywhere for years (the Illuminati, for example).

There are (to my mind) three main Ways: the Blacks, the Whites and the Grays.  The Blacks serve the Dark and get involved in black magic and powers, and also get lost thereby in a kind of spiritual cul de sac.   The Whites serve the Good, and believe personal individual free choice of all human beings is the highest value, which is why (for example) Steiner gave 6000 lectures in which he revealed all the secrets which had been kept for years by the Grays, who coveted worldly power, and used their secret spiritual knowledge to win a kind of dominance even more secret and powerful than that of the super elites of wealth.

The view of the Gray Occult Lodges is that the world order is fundamentally spiritual, and includes the belief that those, who understand the spiritual rules behind existence, have an advantage, and a responsibility.  Basically the Grays succumb to a characteristic of Lucifer's Rebellion, and believe that ordinary human beings can't be trusted to manage macro-human affairs.   Only a privileged elite can do so, and by this message, and a demonstration of unusual psychic powers (clairvoyance of various kinds) the Lodges of Grays seduce certain of the potential princes of England and America (as well as some Europeans) into their spiritual ideology, which works from one basic idea.

Someone, with the appropriate skills, must lead.   They are told: You have been selected to be part of this unique community of world leaders, and you are engaged in a battle with the East, which would bury the Christian West under its false views and inhuman values.   As a consequence, to participate in the establishment of elaborate lies is necessary in order to make the world safe for true Christian initiation and enlightenment, thus some special few must make hard choices for the greater good.

Ordinary people can't be trusted, which is why we (the Grays and the super elites) let them have their vain dreams and dogmatic Christian religions.  We, the spiritual elite, who serve the Light Bringer (Lucifer, who in their spiritual ideology is painted differently from typical Christian theology), know better.  We will take care of those who are less competent, and for the sacrifices this requires of us, we need to live the good life, for we have to have the same financial standing and power as the rulers of the decadent Middle-East and Far East.  With such great responsibility over the true destiny of humanity, one has to have access to great financial and political power, and there must also be equally great rewards.

Getting a sense of the necessary ideology?  It doesn't have to be exactly like this in its details.  I am only sketching (profiling) a general picture.

Excuse me for a moment while I retire from writing and let my mind work free from its necessary swim in this degenerate anti-Christian and immoral insanity.

just how far are they willing to go

Some of the ideas that can be part of this religious-like (but fundamentally irreligious) ideology concern the problems of death and suffering.  Among the kinds of knowledge, the Grays believe they have access to, are ideas of reincarnation and the immortality of the spirit.  Other ideas include detailed matters concerning the afterlife - that is what happens in between death and a new birth.  These views were seen historically as heretical (to institutional Christian churches), and this justified as well the secrecy involved.   The Occult Lodges are old.

Since the human spirit is, from this point of view, immortal, then death is seen (for this ideology) as simply a transition to another state of existence for a time (until the next incarnation).  In addition, a version of the processes in the afterlife are also taught in some of these circles, so that a bastardized view of divine justice is presented.  I suspect that what is taught suggests that those who take this on the responsibility will receive their rewards in heaven (as well as on earth) for such sacrifice (just like the Islamist idea of virgins in heaven for suicide bombers, only far more sophisticated).  

Suffering and death are taught then to be a part of existence as ordained by the Gods, and the ruler-ship on the Earth of the Grays (the Occult Brotherhoods or Lodges - keep in mind this is still mostly male and patriarchal) is also part of the Divine Plan.  Its a tough job, but someone has to do it.  For pointing out the holes in such views, Steiner was eventually poisoned, after his main Temple to the Truth (the original Goetheanum in Switzerland) was burned to the ground.

 

In any event, many of these super elites belong to various cults espousing allegedly superior religious views that paint them as the morally just holders of worldly power.  They have little need to worry about the death and suffering of the masses, for the immortal spirit will have a just afterlife and then be returned to another earthly life. What matters is that the West dominate the East, otherwise the true values of this superior and occult based Christendom, will be lost.  The world is the scene of a great battle between the truly Godly and the Godless heathens.

In this battle any lie, and almost any act, is justifiable, because it is clearly needed to win (for the greater good).   The world must be Christianized, but not in the outer religious sense so many fundamentalists and Zionists and Islamists believe, but from a secret brotherhood that has come into incarnation just to deal with these battles.

Two such battles occurred in the first half of the 20th Century: World War One and World War Two.   A very significant theater of these battles in the earthly realm was Central Europe, especially Germany.   Like the United States is being painted today (by these same powers) as the author of horrible deeds in the world, so Central European culture, with its remarkable spiritual potentials (it gave us after all, in the 19th Century, the complete basis for modern natural science), had to carry its own Cross - to become viewed, not as a source of truth and initiation in the mysteries, but as decadent and uncaring, as well as capable of any unspeakable crime (the holocaust).   For similar reasons it was important to these powers that America openly take up torture (and other grossly immoral acts), for there is coming a third great war, again to be fought mostly in the Center, between East and West.  America too is to now carry a Cross.

The world is a giant game of Risk (a military board game), and if you are a Nixon or a Kissinger or a Clinton or a Rockefeller or a - pick any family name from the elites, you must use the productive might of America to make a powerful war machine, provide fodder for armies from the poor, and rule (for a time) from the Executive Branch, as the world goes through a well understood and predictable (by all those well-paid and seduced fine minds) transition in the West from Nation States to feudal-like independent Corporate Trade Empires.

The world will go through a time of great chaos, flirt with a new ice age (global warming is just a prelude), and many will die (be recycled through reincarnation), while the Corporation as an Entity (read the first six novels of William Gibson, who gave us the term cyberspace) free of human control (but needing to be well taken care of by human servant management) becomes the dominate social form all over the world (the free and wanton capitalism of the West is to consume the East, both from the outside and the inside - China and India, for example, in their headlong rush into free market capitalism don't really yet recognize their peril).  A hierarchical social form (all structure and no heart) is to be set free, and there combined with the numeric powers of more and more advanced computers.

The fear of the Grays has some reality behind it.  For if the East were to triumph, the Christianized West would likewise be consumed (a process already begun due to the many in America who have taken undisciplined* ideas of Buddhism into their naturally Christianized souls (see my book: the Natural Christian).  An imagination of this possibility (control of the world by decadent culture from the East) is contained in the eight remarkable novels of the Chung Kuo Series, written by David Wingrove.

*[Just being spiritual may satisfy a curious soul, but we also have to be awake to the long term cultural implications of differences between Occidental and Oriental philosophies.  There are profound reasons why there is a cultural East and West.]

As these developments unfold, however, many in the West will wake up (also predictable), so it was necessary to bring into play a complete degeneration of civil rights, particularly in America, in order to control and imprison any and all dissent against the terrible social processes that must be allowed to freely occur (in the world view of the Grays).  Long in planning, certain final callous and indifferent moves were made during the Bush II administration, with Karl Rove as the master overseer (the one with the most callous mind of all - a genius unique in world history, known to be coming into incarnation by the Brotherhoods, and thus helped at every turn to eventually sit inside the web of political power in the United States).  Now he has moved into the Media, where with the help of Rupert Murdoch he works both for Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, enabling him to provide for the laity of the elites of wealth all the self-centered moral justification needed during this transition through social chaos to the new world order of free Corporate Entities and number driven computer social controls (just think today about all the software that exists allowing management to intrude right into the work stations of the modern office worker).

Of course, the scientific materialism of the West, helps foster great disbelief in such an understanding.  What better way to keep secret a ruler-ship of the world, than mask it with a world view (scientific materialism) that casts doubt on all possible religious understanding.  The work of the Lodges has been well thought out over centuries of time.  Keep in mind, however, that they are not unopposed (e.g. Rudolf Steiner - and of course many others, including this author).

As just pointed out, there is another difficulty in this.   Some in the East are not asleep either.   There are those in the  East who seek the same victory, but they lag behind the stream of events, and also are always catching up to technological advances.  Their advantage is untapped natural resources, a willingness to pollute to the max, and huge expendable populations (both India and China, as well as Russia to a certain extent).  They are also more obviously callous in opposing dissent.

From this picture it can seem as if those of us below the elites in the social commons are to be toast (everyone is aware that in the present the middle class in America is disappearing).  Well there would be little point to this essay if this was truly the case, so now let us move from these too too dark thoughts and find some light and warmth.

One more point, however.  In reading the above we can't just skip over the process by which the spiritual gifts of Central Europe were intentionally scourged and had set upon its genius a crown of thorns.  Now this genius (a part of the natural genius of the whole world - see Teilhard de-Cardin's idea of the noosphere) must be resurrected.   While a similar scourging and crowning with thorns is being applied today with regard to the genius of the American Spirit, that genius would do well to recognize that in going through its own cross bearing, crucifixion, death and resurrection, that it will serve the Good in the best way, by helping restore the cultural health of the Center and the East as well.  The world is a whole, and we serve ourselves best, when we serve the whole (wash the feet).

Let us repeat what Maureen Dowd wrote above:

Civil Society, the Wise-Earth, Blessed Unrest* and the Mystery of America

*special thanks to Paul Hawken for this insight

Probably the primary thing to first realize is that those who build a wall to keep others out, also build a prison for themselves.   The Berlin Wall kept communists in as much as it kept the West out.   The Wall in Israel dividing Israelis from Palestinians does the same.  It appears in place as an effort to contain and control something, and at the same time is a trap for those who impose it. The elites of wealth (and their priests in the Occult Lodges) suffer the same error of focus.  The more they try to control and dominate the more they are trapped in the narrowness of vision of that methodology.  Each seeming effort at controlling by the application of top down hierarchical social power ties the manager to more and more limited opportunities and consequences.  The box they seek to use to contain us, just as much contains them, albeit in a different way.

Our main strategy is then to think outside the box.  I know, it is an awful pun in a way, but a truth as well.

There is another strategy that helps.  The martial art known as Aikido: "the way of unifying (with) life energy" or "the way of harmonious spirit" gives a hint.  When an aggressor comes toward you, you move in such a way that the energy of the aggressor moves through and around you as if you weren't there.

To give another really strange hint here - consider the possibility of not moving toward dissent at all.  A system expecting rebellion in masses of dissatisfied people through protest, doesn't know what to do if you do something else, something entirely off the wall so to speak.  Suppose all that was needed was to elaborate the truth of the subterfuge placed in the world by the super elites and their priests (expose it) and then declare victory.

Another off the wall strange idea: the movie War Games (if you don't know it, rent it).  A computer hacker discovers a war games computer run by the military is about to launch a nuclear war.   He makes the computer play tic tac toe over and over again, so as to learn this lesson: the only way to win is not to play the game at all.

By creating a game (gaming the world) the super elites are bound up in that game (the box that confines them).  By understanding their defect (their lame thinking), we don't play that game, but create another.  Instead of either/or, we do what happens in a both/and solution - something not on the table yet, emerges.  They make war on us, we make peace on them.

This won't be easy.  Consider the impulse to activism so common today, such as Green politics, environmental protest, PETA, move-on.org and so forth.   In a lot of this activity life energy is spent trying to fix the system - trying to induce changes in a macro social structure which isn't actually capable of change.  It is too old and too rigid, and as we expend our life energy trying to change it, we avoid doing as much as possible to change ourselves.  By the way, don't think they don't promote this.  Remember all those smart minds they can buy?   You can bet they have people (who don't even know the elites support them) just to lead this activist dissent activity, which misdirects us from what we can actually do (keeps us busy in the game, when not being in the game at all is what we need to do instead).

Blessed Unrest (see Paul Hawken's book of the same name) is a first stage of perception by the ordinary people of the world, living in the social below - the social commons - of their shared trials.  We are waking up to each other, as much as we are waking up to the gamesmanship of the super elites of wealth, and their priests in the Occult Brotherhoods.

Think of the school yard.  One pushes the other, the other pushes back.  Each push energizes the other, until war breaks out.   All the time we spend trying to force the high elites (and their political surrogates) to change, only has the effect of giving them strength to resist.   The '60's and '70's in America actually invigorated and entrenched conservative thinking as a push back in reaction to the push from the left.  Today, they once more are expecting our resistance.   If we don't resist (if we aren't there in a kind of way) they will overbalance and fall.  They shove, we move gracefully aside, keeping our center through our Wise Earth communities, and then overbalanced by their aggression, they fall.

It will be hard to understand, but there is a wise governance to the world that is itself superior to anything the super elites and their priests can imagine.  Some of them know they are living in this wise world, but still want earthly power and perhaps even believe they can game the perceivable and true spiritual order of human existence.  Their problem is that this wisdom is a distributed system (check this out with regard to computers if you want to understand it in a coarse way).  The way the wise guidance of the world works, as a distributed system, is that the main factors in its unfolding are ordinary human beings.

While the Grays worship Lucifer, the Light Bringer, the White Brotherhoods trust individual human freedom and marvel at what ordinary human beings do and accomplish, because in them lives the Christ Impulse (like the Buddha Nature described in the cultural East, there is a Christ Impulse - a non-institutional spiritual instinct for moral self sacrifice and wisdom in most all human beings) (again see my book: the Natural Christian*).  Don't we hear many people say today: I'm not religious, but I am spiritual.  The ego or I of ordinary human beings is collectively (in communities) a kind of genius far superior to whatever the elites seek and produce, because the real authority in the world is moral.  The meek shall inherit the Earth.

*[See also Ben-Aharon's America's Global Responsibility: individuation, initiation and threefolding.   As well as Steiner's: The Threefold Social Organism.]

This is what lives, and has so far manifested, in Civil Society etc.  Moral human action.  In the wise guidance of humanity and the world, the elites actually suffer the consequences of their personal out of balance appetites for power and wealth, only to end up by this activity serving the distributed moral intelligence of the world (the noosphere) by creating just enough chaos to goad it into waking action.  We can legitimately declare victory because in waking up to the truth of our situation we have already won (the creators of the movie The Dark Knight instinctively understood this).  Yes, there are agents of chaos, but the effect of that is to prompt into action something wonderful (yet dreaming) in the soul and spirit of individuals.

The rest is details, and as these are important, I will next begin relating those thoughts which I can offer as my contribution to our shared distributed wisdom - Blessed Unrest and the Wise-Earth.

counter-moves - some examples

Great wisdom is obvious in: think globally, act locally.  Because the real wisdom, that is superior to the lost-in-illusion super elites, is a distributed system based upon individual moral action, the work is always where we are.  Right in front of us in our biographies.   This is one of the reasons we can let go a lot of vain activity which seeks to coerce a system that if left to its own inner nature will collapse in on itself. 

A characteristic of this old system is that it is hierarchical (top down) and mostly male dominated (patriarchal).  The emerging new system is circle like (based on sharing) and returns once more the previously set aside matriarchal understandings (think the social ways of the Iroquois Federation).  An old social order is dying, whose inner dynamic is based on dominion over, to be replaced by a new social order whose inner dynamic is communion with.*

*[See my book: the Way of the Fool. for more details]

Of course, not everyone is going to understand the psychological Aikido of not playing the game by declaring victory.  Once the mob had been romanticized in the Godfather movies and the Sopranos, and corrupt cops in The Shield, no one should be surprised that Sons of Anarchy will soon romanticize biker gangs.  The world takes all kinds, and we each have choices that will lead to consequences.

For those willing to take on the tasks required, to be a wise earth spirit, unresisting (in only certain ways) in relationship to the overreaching of super elite aggression, there are certain basic tools, all of which are related to compassion (our individual Buddha Nature) and love (our individual Christ Impulse).   For the simple reason that I like the "l" sound at the beginning of the word love, I'll label these three tools: language; law, and liquidity.

Of these, the most powerful is language, so lets begin there:

the coming transformation to a new oral culture,

through the reinvigorating of our appreciation of

the hidden possibilities in Language and conversation

This next process I seek to illuminate has already began, and while often thought of as a flaw by many elites of culture, the move away from the cannons of Western literature, in the West (and perhaps elsewhere) is a hint of things to come.   As one of the places language is artistically displayed in is song, lets observe a cultural process that took place since the middle of the 20th Century, so as to see what this process can teach us of the coming future.  This is just one example of many that could be put forward.

In 1955 or thereabouts, Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll comes along.  He's not the cause of, or even really the leader of, but sometimes cultural changes have a fore-runner, someone who stands out as the wave of social change begins its more visible movements.  Anyway, Negro (today we say Black, but then we used other terms) blues music (which has a distinctly sexual aspect) gets united with Anglo (white) culture's pop love songs, and Rock and Roll charges into the world.  Being as English and American culture are deeply related, it isn't too long before the Beatles and others join in, and something comes out into the whole world that was never there before.

The world responds, in a lot of different ways.  Reggae music (Bob Marley etc.) sings back, and something that the awake DJ's start to call World Beat comes back toward America (Paul Simon catches some of it in his intriguingly named Graceland album).  Rock and Roll and World Beat have a kind of cultural intercourse, as the wise hearts of musicians and songwriters all over the world get involved in talking to each other through song and music (a lot of this never appears on commercial radio and TV in America, but it nevertheless took place).  Not to soon thereafter, out of the depths of certain northern city black ghettos, and in part in response to World Beat, Hip Hop is born (some of this later morphs into Rap).  Now Hip Hop is three things.  First it pares down the musical element to almost just rhythm - just the beat.  It also is poetry, but poetry as a story.  Oral stories you can dance to.  Basic.  Fundamental.  It is also, in its pure form, out of the social commons (a kind of instinctive communion with) and when it remains there it is free of the corruption of commercial interests.

Everyone now should be able to look at world-wide cultural developments among ordinary people and see there the wise earth transformations.

Schools have failed to keep up with the changes in the lives and nature of the human beings attending them.   The education system, having run out of ideas (old dying culture), can't really speak anymore to the real life in the big cities (much less elsewhere, for example, the story telling in Country Music speaks volumes about the ordinary life of a lot of people).   Time (in the sense of change) is speeding up and the history of popular culture from the '50's on tells this story in a big way (except in commercial radio - fake imitative culture, which driven by the profit motive and greed, doesn't get the true spirit of these changes at all).  But true new culture, such as Hip Hop, even thought it fits within what those who can't get over worshiping the past decry as the loss of interest in the written word - Hip Hop is genuinely new.

Just to give an example that this change is a bit noticed, a poet laureate of England, when asked in an interview whether there were any voices out that that he thought special, said that people should pay careful attention to Eminem (Marshall Mathers), who he considered to be the new Bob Dylan (the poet-seer deeply in touch with his time).  There is no Eminem  (a shooting star whose time quickly passed) without the Eight Mile section of Detroit and Hip Hop.  That white culture still borrows from Black culture could be seen as a problem (and is by some), but is better appreciated for the fact that it represents a profound spiritual-cultural intercourse that is world-wide in scope.

The thing is that oral culture is more alive.  The word dies when it is rendered into print on a page.  It needs the reader to resurrect it.   But oral culture, in a social situation, jumps from one to the other, like a kind of electric arc.  It enlivens.  If we were to wander the hidden cultural byways of the world (and in America) we'd see that down in the social below, the social commons, story tellers are becoming important again.

In the colleges and the universities - the ivory tower - there is too much intellect and not enough heart (the organization is dominion over).  Especially when times get tough as they are doing now in a big way.  Now I am not saying no more written literature at all.   Just that like anything there is excess, and one of the nice things that happened to the world (as on odd kind of after effect) was when China began their take over of Tibet in 1949 and began shoving all those Lamas (teachers of deep Buddhist ways) out into the world.  Tibet, as a cultural source, had been a kind of slowly cooking wisdom soup pot, and now the genius of history kicked that pot over and sent its nourishment rushing all over the world.

In a similar kind of way, by wrecking (for a time through WWII) the cultural life of the Center (Central Europe), this forced certain cultural forces (including communities of spiritual beings for those willing to look at it that way) toward the East and the West, looking for incarnated individuals receptive to their wisdom.  This in a way has brought about the beginning of the fulfillment of an ancient American Indian Prophecy (the Hopi Prophecy).   This too will take an oral form, just as the Buddhist wisdom cooked slowly in Tibet is best rendered orally.

In Europe, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner mostly rested in lectures and in books, imitating the European ideal of the university (their center, in Switzerland in the Goetheanum, has something that is called: the School of Spiritual Science).   This modern Christian-like wisdom (heretical to the max when compared to the fake Christianity of most organized Christian religions) is itself waking up to its conversational or oral capacities in a new way.

I mention all this, the Hip Hop street poetry, the Buddhist soup pot from Tibet and the heretical Christian wisdom of Anthroposophy, to show that this change to oral culture is everywhere.   It takes a lot of different forms - just think about a Twelve Step meeting.  It consists, when best, of the oral representation of personal stories and mutual confession.   These are deeply powerful forces for change.  Books will still be important, but what is said from one person to another person will again outweigh all that.  In fact, the core of this little book is a story.  The profile is a story.  No one is required to believe it, nor will they be tested on this material like in a school, nor will they be part of a community that will shun them if they don't mouth the right dogmas.

Language* then is born, in its most vital way, in conversation and in story telling.  In ages long ago, in a galaxy far far away, ancient story tellers were everywhere (that's what George Lucas is, a story teller using the medium of modern film - also M. Night Shyamalan - remember modern  wisdom is distributed).  The Gospels were stories.  The fables of the Greeks were stories.   Buddhism was originally oral.  However, and this is a very important however, the inspiring genius behind these stories, which at one time tended to concentrate into a few (Virgil, Homer, etc.), is now diffuse and distributed.

*[See the poem The Gift of the Word in the appendix.]

Steiner, for example, in creating the Anthroposophical Society, created what he called Branches and Groups, and even pointed out that in the future this is where the real work was to be done.  The social commons, while collectively owned (as it were), is really just who is there at any given moment sharing in the conversation.   The wisdom source lives in us all now, in our individual thinking.  The Wise Earth - Civil Society - filled with Blessed Unrest.

While we have it (it can fail or become taken over) the Internet gives us wide ranging abilities to tell our stories.   Millions of blogs.   FaceBook pages.   Everyone has something to say.  The coming resurrection of new oral culture will be entirely unlike what oral culture was in the ancient world.

Here we will be challenged to craft, with each other, what the world means.  Will we tell a story of bad people in corporate office buildings who all must die and be blown up in order to save the rest, or will we tell the story of all the places in the world, whether they are a skyscraper in New York City, or a brothel in Thailand, such that we learn to see that all are temples to that which in that place is worshiped by those who are confused and lost and don't yet recognize their brothers and sisters?

Will we speak of the confusion between the impulse toward dominion over, and the impulse for communion with, or will we teach the children that those who are other, must be hated?  Will we be top down and hierarchical, or circle-like and sharing?

Will we spread harmful gossip, or will we illuminate each other with grace?   This is the fundamental question of the application of language - of the gift of the word - as a vehicle for new oral culture.

redesigning the organizational structure of societies

through our understanding of the real living nature of the Law

The law, that most of us know today (at least in America), has its roots in the time of the Roman Empire.  Many of its ideas are still couched in Latin (for example, res ipsa loquitur: the thing speaks for itself; or habeas corpus: show or bring the body).  Like anything else, a legal system can grow old, and as I have suggested elsewhere in my writings - that we live in a time of the End of Western Civilization, then no one should doubt for a moment that the law (as conceived centuries ago) has become socially exhausted and spent.

It is unwieldy and excessively detailed.   Its last towering ideal impulse was during the time of the Warren Court, when so many of our civil rights, originally recognized by the Constitution, became truly universal (it only took almost two hundred years?!?).  The coming descent into social chaos may produce pockets (some quite large) of anarchy.  We need only look to Africa and parts of Asia to see how large such pockets of anarchy can be.  Petty dictators seize governments and old tribal allegiances are borrowed by thugs as justification for murder and theft.  In America, we have a quite odd, yet remarkable tradition, the gun rule of the old West.  Cowboy justice, sometimes good, and often just another kind of mob rule, is likely to return - its true mission unfinished.

The Corporations have no real interest in justice, for they want to be a law unto themselves.  At the same time, they don't have an interest in controlling everything either.  William Gibson, in his future oriented novel Virtual Light, had this to say through his characters:

"You know," Sammy Sal said, pausing before a first shallow sip, " you shouldn't have this kind of a problem.   You don't need to.  There's only but two kinds of people.  People who can afford hotels like that, they're one kind.  We're the other.  Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between.  But not anymore.  How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on.  We get paid for it.  We try not to drip rain on the carpet.  And we get by, okay?   But what happens on the interface?  What happens when we touch?"

Chevette burned her mouth on espresso.

"Crime," Sammy Sal said, "sex. Maybe drugs.  He put his cup down on the wagon's plywood counter. "About covers it."

Where Corporate control wants it, there will be one kind of law.  Theirs.   Where they have no interest, in the communities that are truly separate, there will be another kind of law.  Ours.   In the middle, in the vague in between where the two kinds of order touch - something neither.  By theirs, by the way, I don't mean other people, but what is required by a social form that has freed itself from human control.  Lets look a little more closely at this.

Many readers will know that the lawnow (in its decadence) considers corporations to be persons.   There is a rather insane history in this, but the practice is too embedded in legal culture now.  Legal rules also require of management that they serve the stockholders over almost every other value (workers needs, environmental needs etc.).  The doctrine in its widest form is called due diligence.   So, the Corporation is a person, and its managers must serve, with due diligence, the interests of the owners (the stock holders) over every other value.   Many corporations own their own stock.   Can you see where this is going?  The legal structure of a Corporation is emancipating itself from human control.  Its technical ownership is diffuse.  Neither stock holders or the managementreally run the Corporation anymore, which has a great momentum as a social form.  A kind of idea incarnates in the Corporation, which as we know is kind of callous and indifferent to most others affected by that social form (uses the workers, lies to the consumers of its products, corrupts political processes, grossly enriches management and a few stock holders, etc.).  As Western Civilization dies, a decadent social form will live on for a time, a kind of ghost of some of the worst moral impulses of that Civilization.  The individuals living out these selfish and callously indifferent impulses will die, but the Social/Legal Creature created by this activity will continue.

Keep in mind that corporations have a culture - a Way.  Some are overt, some more secret.  These views in the future will become more and more religious-like (even cultish).  Human energy will design them.  The textural structure of the rule of the Occult Lodges will seek to seep into these cultures.

The separation between this creature of corporate control and communities of free individuals doesn't have to be physical, either.  Its not a question of place, but who you are with and what are the circumstances.  Nor will all corporate control, or all free communities, have the same laws and social rules.   A Corporate Entity that wants a longer future will take better care of its human servants.  A free community that wants a longer future will take greater care in creating its serving and hopefully living laws.

In a certain sense, the realm of law, or of expressed (perhaps written, perhaps oral) social order, is a middle realm between language and culture, and economics and money (liquidity).  It partakes of both (see Steiner's ideas on the Threefold Social Order here).   Laws after all are formed of words and ideas, while money and liquidity concerns things (objects), and the relationships of people to such objects.  In an economy, objects, even money, must be in movement (liquidity).  In a culture, ideas must be free and living (again in movement).  They can't come to rest in fixed words (dogmas).  In the middle realm, there needs to be that which is moving, that still somehow has the character of an object.

This is what a law is, in a living way, freed of the old barnacles of dead Roman thought.  In the arguments of the Supreme Court we hear echos of these conceptions of the law in the ideas of living meaning, versus original meaning.  Some want to fix the meaning in the 200 plus years old thought of the Founders (as can best be understood), while others want to free the meaning of laws to adapt to the reality of the human present.  This is why my book Uncommon Sense suggests we write a new Declaration of Independence and a new Constitution.  If we don't modernize the law during the death of Western Civilization (the transition from Nation States to feudal-like Corporate Entities, swimming in a vast disorganized sea of free functioning anarchies), the law will continue to crack and fracture until it falls down around our heads.

If, in fact, we want to participate in the process by which the Corporate Entity arises to a kind of independence (and it must for a time so arise - it can be a necessary and stabilizing historical force after a period of chaos), we have to participate in the law creation process as it is.  It is really very useless to protest that laws favor the rich, or stand with signs outside places where the elites and super elites gather.  Instead, those who would influence politics have to run for office, and get their hands dirty in all that troublesome mess, from local politics on up.   Can't be an idealist there.  Have to compromise.   Oh, a protester can be an idealist, but not someone in real politics.

At the same time, we can do politics better than those who do it now do it. Again - distributed wisdom.  Think globally, act locally.  As long as people have avoided the legislative halls, whether they are just a school board, or a city council or a state assembly, much less the Senate or the Congress, this has left the field of battle, over the meaning and processes of social order, abandoned to the super elites, or the smaller and sometimes more insideous religious fundamentalists, and they haven't been asleep at all.  There is sweat capital that is the equal of money capital.  Human energy.  Life energy.  Political Aikido as dance.  This kind of local polticial activity needs to be the locus of bottom up political capital.  Not the political capital of the elites, or the surrogates the political parties, but the common sense participation out of the social commons - the circle-like communion with.

If we really use the Wise Earth distributed wisdom born in Blessed Unrest politically, we can do a lot.   After all, politics is about story telling.  Sure it has a lot of lies, but there are lots of ways to tell a true story.   If Hip Hop and Country Music married each other, for example, in the production of political songs for individual candidates, distributed door to door by activists (bored with protesting), who know what might happen?  A protest sign is one thing, street entertainment another.  One is negative and against, the other is creative and for.

Think Jon Stewart.  It is possible to do parody that doesn't demean, but merely punctures what is over-inflated.  Variations are endless, and the amount of distributed creativity out there is already enormous.  Sweat political capital can equal money political capital in the present and coming political battles. People just have to get off their couches and from in front of their TVs, stop shopping and go participate.

The best way to learn about the law is to try to make new ones.  My Uncommon Sense has a lot of ideas along this line.   As the degree of social chaos increases (its actual depths can't be predicted, just its general shape), where anarchy is local (government ineffective), then so must law creation become local.  Think Katrina and the Super Dome - only lasting for months, perhaps years, instead of days and weeks.  In such circumstances we can't stand around waiting for help from a government that has proved itself actually incapable.   We have to organize our selves.  We have to work with each other instead of waiting for the big father in Washington to do the right thing.   Native Americans can well tell the story of that illusory promise.

Sharing the Earth: things, money, Liquidity and work.

There is a lot of good work out there already on the nature of debt-money.  We all need to understand it.  Just don't get one-sided.   Remember the wisdom is distributed, so use a lot of different resources.   Steiner wrote a book: World Economy.   There is the Small is Beautiful Schumacher Society.  There's the book Muddling Toward Frugality, by Warren Johnson.  People are creating community farms.   Co-ops are in a lot of places.   Credit Unions are better than banks.  There's the alternate currency movement.  Local barter centers in church parking lots.

The best debt-money material is by Richard Kotlarz, whose columns on A New View of Money can be found on the Internet here: http://www.concordresolution.org/column.htm  Nobody has the handle on it he has.  A couple of points that he makes are worth mentioning right here.

If we understood how money actually operates (in its true, but hidden, sense), we would know that when the bank loans money it creates it.  What actually happens is that when we write the check on that available credit (and also with a lot of other banking-related transactions) the money doesn't come into existence until that moment in time.  The loan based check allows the bank to create the money and charge the macro economic structure interest (thus, debt money).  The way this system works is that the amount of debt constantly increases, because it is never fully retired due to the interest payment hidden in the the bowels of the money transaction process.  We've reached a point today where the weight of this debt money interest is so huge, the world economy is falling apart.  The sub-prime mortgage crisis was just one of many places in the world economy where it began to fracture due to this mamouth excess of unpaid interest-debt.

The way out is for governments (and that is ultimately us) to issue the money, not the backs.  Read Richard for the details.  Knowledge of this is crucial to navigating the future.  Government issued money carries no debt and the consequences for our economic life are considerable.

In the War the rich are making upon the poor there are two kinds of approaches we can make from the social commons in terms of dealing with the problem of liquidity of money and other objects that we need.  Some are strategic and some are tactical.  Moving away from bank issued money to government issued money (remember we are the government) is a fundamental strategic approach.  It is large scale.  Other kinds of activities that need to accompany the coming changes are tactical - that is local, something like an IED (those roadside bombs in Iraq).  But these are social weapons, not physical weapons.

For example, the super elites think on the macro scale.   They are tied to old ideas of hierarchical organization and top down management styles.   Remember they took over from the aristocracies of blood, and just made themselves secret Kings and Queens.  But as our distributed wisdom tells us: all politics is local.   Try as the elites might (even with computers) there's a limit to the detail they'll be able to micro-manage.

Their influence dissipates - it spreads out and becomes less concentrated (and thus less effective  as it moves away from its top of the pyramid.  The computer gives it a tool to try to micro-manage, but all computers can be hacked.   The hacking intelligence of humanity is also distributed.  What happens to the software inside a corporation that tries to micro-manage all its office workers if a hacker gets in there, but not in a big obvious way?  Instead, a wise way.  Back doors, little code tricks like in computer games that let the office worker trick the system from his end.  Hide the code tricks in mnemonic stories, just as certain secrets were once embedded in nursery rhymes.

We don't confront these corporate wrongs directly.  We out think them.

For sure, one possibility (and a hard one at that) is that a lot of what ecology minded folks want may just come about through broad social collapse.  In worse case world-wide environmental chaos scenario, the industrial world dies.  In that case there isn't enough social order at the top to keep the big hierarchically managed systems running.   No electricity, no running water.  No trucks running all over America moving food.   No big farms to make all that overabundance of nutritionless food.  Lots of isolation and lots of anarchy.

What we need is skills.   As such a collapse looms (to whatever degree it actually manifests - think the precautionary principle), we need the distributed wisdom to appreciate the need to preserve knowledge and pass on skills.  Here's one idea.  Its strategic in conception and creation, but tactical in local application.

Think open source.  Open source computer people created on-line free software (such as Linux) that was better than what was being created by the corporations.   Windows sucks - its too open to being hacked.  Linux isn't, but is only slowly making its way in the world, replacing an operating system that is crap.  You know why Windows sucks?   Because they never delete any of the old code.  Its this huge fat pile of mostly old code that only works because processing speeds have increased enough to run through all the old code on the way to finding the new stuff (unless it balks somewhere in all that junk computer software dna, in which case you get the famous Blue Screen of Death - a Windows crash).

Open Source communities need to create a Library for the Future.  If the collapse gets too out of control (something the super elites are willing to risk, because with all their power and private armies they will survive), the knowledge generated by Western Civilization could be lost (along with all the other cultural treasures of East, Center and West).

If you are in an isolated community, experiencing a long period of anarchy, do you know how to recognize and treat dysentery, cholera etc.?  Can you, if you have a water source, build a water wheel?  If you have piles of old electronics, can you recycle them into something you need and can use?  Do you know how to make insulin from sheep?  What about sewing up a bad wound?

If you check out survivalist websites on the Internet, there is a lot of information.   There could be a lot more.   A DVD of the right storage capacity can store something like 20,000 books.  The Media Lab at MIT has created a tough cheap laptop that runs on a crank (you just turn the crank and make the electricity).  Such a laptop and such a DVD (with some appropriate yet unwritten search software) takes the knowledge and skills our society has concentrated in single individuals, and passes it on to the whole.   Distribute several million of these worldwide, in all kinds of languages (remember the Internet is this huge huge structure for sharing information, and if it gets its collective mind around a task, tens of thousands of people will do the grunt work for free).

One of the things you'll get is a variety of DVDs.  Or, a website (or a hundred websites) where you can create the DVD you want, selecting what knowledge you want, for your personally designed Library.  You don't have to use the crank laptop, but can keep the one you have, if you just find on the Internet where to get what you need from Radio Shack and the like, to turn your bicycle into a machine that will generate the right tickle of electricity when you pedal it.

Once, in America, there was the Whole Earth Catalog.  Guess what the Internet is?  It just needs some folks to fill in the gaps in the organizing of information, and showing how to distribute it to the local places that need it.  Think globally, act locally.

The same whole earth distributed wisdom resource can design new products for those people who want to plan ahead.  Could an alternate barter currency system come awake on the Internet?  In a functioning anarchy, what is the "government" the issues the currency?

Keep in mind that the super elites are no doubt planning to either crash the system (the Internet) or over control it, if it starts getting too rambunctious.  There will be a window of opportunity and then it will close.   At the same time, if a lot of people are acting, then a process we can call synergy happens.  We don't have to ourselves over-organize the same way an old tired hierarchical social form does.

The social commons we all share, with its distributed wisdom systems, will naturally form synergistic structures.   These will arise, and then pass away.   People will form associations that live for a time, and then dissolve.   Remember, the nature of the Sharing of the Earth can be captured in the idea of liquidity.  Life Energy in movement.  Money, ideas, goods, services, whatever.  We just be careful not to let it come to fixed conditions of rest.  The old pyramidal social form (dominion over) the Corporations seek to preserve won't continue very long, for it contains a constant urge to become more and more rigid, which eventually must lead to its death.

The circle form of new communities (communion with) is fluid enough to adapt, either within the Corporate structure, or outside it.  The Wise Earth is alive, and life (as was said in the movie Jurassic Park by the Jeff Goldblum character) will find a way.

One of Rudolf Steiner's ideas about money (in World Economy) is that it comes into being in relationship to the original transaction (such as selling produce), and then exists for a time, and then dies.  Money is like the spiritual blood stream of the economy, and just like the blood its substance lives for time and then dies to be replaced by new substance.  

Another of his ideas is that labor should not be treated as a commodity, nor should land.  Under a real appreciation of the nature of economic processes, to treat either as a commodity causes all kind of indirect social ruin.   For example, capital dies when it becomes invested in land.  In that place it can't continue to circulate.  Land is a kind of choke-point.   We saw this in the recent housing bubble collapse.  All kinds of value got locked in land, and the whole system kind of choked on it.

People's work (their labor) can't be a commodity either.  Labor is best viewed as a gift from one to another.  We don't work for ourselves, we work for each other.  The social organism under the ideas of Threefolding is meant to be seen as living (liquidity).  Think of what we call the division of labor.   In more ancient times if you had land, you could (in some circumstances) wrest your living from it.   Normally you didn't do this alone, but together with others.  Paying for labor is not universal, in a cultural sense.  Native Americans, true Cajuns etc., had a strong ethos of sharing.  Buying and selling labor is a by-product of economic confusion, rooted in a tradition of slavery, serfdom and peasantry.  Don't we call ourselves: wage slaves?

Recall our idea of distributed wisdom.  It is the nature of the division of labor that it is distributed as well.  You fix a car.  The dentist fixes your teeth.  Your neighbor fixes your dentist's toilet.  We are interdependent.  We already work for each other all the time, we just don't notice it.  If you treat the single parts of that process (the labor) as a thing, as a commodity that can be bought and sold, we mistake what needs to be honored essentially as a spiritual gift from one human being to another (our labor) the same way we treat a shirt. 

If you are getting the idea that this is all a bit strange and complicated, good.  Remember, we've been living in a fake religion of economic ideas, all designed to benefit one class - the class of aristocrats of wealth that succeeded the class of blood aristocrats before them.

Another of Steiner's unique ideas is that capital (which can function in a true economy) would be managed from what he called the cultural sphere (that area above were we talked about language).  People not necessarily involved directly in banks and financial institutions would evaluate the proposals of entrepreneurs seeking capital.  Their question would be how would the product serve the whole, not which small group is going to make the most profit making something people don't really need, by abusing workers and ruining the environment.

I can't here teach you everything about the Threefold Social Organism, or Richard Kotlarz's New View of Money, but with the ideas of language (cultural activity) and law (political-legal activity) and liquidity (economic activity) you've began to become acquainted with something much wiser than the fake religion of free markets and unrestrained capitalism.

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Lets return now to the beginning, in a way, to recall and complete the spiral movement of thought unveiled in this essay ...

We started with a quest.  How do we understand the world we live in?  What are the real dynamic forces working in human social life?   So much seems insane and crazy - is it possible it is not just accidental, but something various people do on purpose?

I proposed thinking about social and political life in the same way a profiler does.  Look at it from the same point of view of the people who don't care.  What might be that point of view?  How might they think?  Does history and our common knowledge of events and political realities justify our having truthful knowledge that such point of view exists?

For some readers, what was then discovered may have seemed to have gotten pretty out there.  Talk about a conspiracy theory!  All the same, we didn't stop there.   We looked at our own situation, at the reality of ordinary people in the social below - the social commons.  Are we helpless victims, or something else?

I believe I showed how this was not the case - we were not victims and not helpless.   We were in fact a step or two away from appreciating our real powers, powers (sweat capital or equity) equal to that of the super elites.  We gain much just by actually knowing how the world works.  They seek to game us, we see this and don't play at all.   We do our own thing.  We form communities within the social commons, using our incredible counter-force in the synergy of our own distributed wisdom.  We think globally (understand how the world actually works) and act locally.  We take our Blessed Unrest (our waking up to social reality) and use the already developing Civil Society and Wise Earth culture to be smarter and wiser than the elites who seek to rule.

We confound their seeking power and wealth (dominion over), with our ability to work with each other (communion with).   They fight and compete, we cooperate.  They tie themselves to social structures that can't do anything but get more and more rigid and then die.   We create living social forms, full of life and love.   We make peace and love, not war.  The meek will inherit the earth.*

Wake up.  Declare victory, and go find some local politics to get involved in.  Participate!  Trust the distributed wisdom and the principle of synergy. Think globally, act locally.  And, have fun doing it.  Dance, sing, and create art.  Work and play together. 

finis

*[Of course, this essay doesn't answer a lot of questions.  If you want a more general examination of some of the spiritual secrets of the world, read my the Way of the Fool, and New Wine.  For more on politics, read Uncommon Sense as well as On the Nature of Public Life.]