The overlords are not a monolithic group. Though they all participate in a sociopathic economic system, they are not all sociopaths. The overarching character of the economic system gives the impression that its principal actors are in collusion with each other. They see themselves as masters of the world, but there are different expressions of this megalomania. The fundamentalist religious and eugenicist expressions are heinous on their faces. Less obviously reprehensible, and therefore more insidious, is the technocratic vision.
The technocrats are scientific and well-intentioned and, under the spell of hyper-rationality, they believe they are endowed with the resources and skill to manage our planet. Speculation on those management efforts are often dismissed out of hand as wild “conspiracy theories”, often glibly and in the service of a particular weltanschauung.The subject is deserving of more open-minded and dispassionate consideration.
In nature, when a population exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, there is a die-off. Why should we expect humans to be exempt from this process? It’s entirely plausible to characterize the human dilemma this way. In this context, it is conceivable that a substantial bloc of the technocratic overlords have come to the conclusion that the only avenue for human survival is to substantially reduce the population, in which case a program of controlled and relatively painless euthanasia would be humane. If we can engineer a painless death for the expendable portion of the population who are fated to suffer and die anyway, wouldn’t that be the right thing to do?
Let that sink in for a moment. There is at least a strong probability that our current trajectory entails massive human suffering. While some may place their hope in technological solutions and the political will to implement them, it is reasonable to assume that some portion of the technocratic elite ae resigned to imminent catastrophe.
I hope I don’t have to convince anyone that the overlords, who have aggressively thwarted our ability to protect ourselves from such products of theirs as lead, cigarettes, opiods, glyphosate … the list goes on, are capable of mass killing.
By their lights, the ends justiify the means. Lying to people and manipulating them is justified for the sake of the greater good. People who seem decent and thoughtful and compassionate could very well believe they are living in those qualities while they execute a program for thinning the human herd.
The mass media would ridicule any evidence of such a program, controlled, as it is, by the very people who would be engineering the program. Most of us were reared with the mythology of an America that is dedicated to the common good. We viscerally resist accepting a more nefarious reality, despite the evidence that throughout our history the overlords have been ruthless in their domination and oppression of the populace. Despite the evidence that power is and has been concentrated in a ruling class.
The root meaning of conspiracy is “breathing together”. Most of the world, and certainly most of the powerful in the world, breathe together in the air of domination and accumulation. This common ethos engenders predictable and consistent behaviors, and it is this consistency of behavior that constitutes a conspiracy. In this sense, there is, in fact, a vast and tightly woven conspiracy in action in the world.
The instruments of power are not so diverse and multifaceted as to be beyond the grasp of our observation. The same people who control finance control the media. The same people who control industry control government. It is not too difficult to see how these different instruments can be yoked to a common purpose. (I like the label “Autocracy, Inc.” that Anne Applebaum recently ascribed to this cabal.)
Death after a few weeks of illness entails far less suffering than months of starvation or the terror and butchery of internecine warfare. Unleashing a pandemic might be considered an act of compassion. Seemingly horrible at first, but for the best.
Take another breath. Let’s examine our visceral response to this postulation.
Trump and Fauci were adversaries, therefore Fauci is our guy. The Republican governors are against masking and vaccines, therefore we are for it. I will never throw in my lot with those anti-vax maskholes.
In its ardent defense of masking and vaccines, liberals and progressives have drifted into the same uncritical tribalism that they perceive in the MAGA crowd. There may be valid reasons to question the government’s pandemic policies, reasons that are different from those of the right-wing. However, pitting one side against the other makes for better television.
In the broader view, this is part of a scheme in which the political contest has been narrowed to the playing field of electoral competition fueled by partisan media narratives. Whether or not you believe this situation has been orchestrated by the overlords, it certainly serves their purpose. They have us at each other’s throats while they continue to plunder. Divide and conquer.
Again, when I say that the situation has been orchestrated, I am not implying that a group of men sat in a room and plotted each move. Instead, these are more or less natural outcomes of the ethos of domination and the actions taken by the powerful to sustain that ethos as a cultural norm. The efforts to preserve the autonomy of corporations led to the promulgation of an ideology of freedom and individualism that, as it seeps through the layers of society, is transmuted into asocial attitudes, which in turn distract the populace from recognizing the economic actors who are oppressing them. The system perpetuates itself, as every system does, until it breaks down.
We must come to grips to the extent to which we have been captured by this cabal of ruthless industry that Anne Applebaum has so aptly termed “Autocracy, Inc.”.
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