Link to my original post on the topic
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lxpk recently convinced me to watch Zeitgeist, a web movie chock-full of conspiracy theories. It spends quite a bit of time on the big theory currently in vogue, that the 9/11 attacks were a "false-flag" operation by our own government, but the movie has an interesting way of describing it: apparently, the conspiracy was so ineptly executed that it should be obvious to anyone who looks, to the extent that several of the supposed hijackers are still alive! (Obvious explanation: the hijackers stole other people's identities.)
Anyway, this style of theorizing continues through the more interesting part of the movie, which describes "the men behind the curtain" not as secretive Masons or Illuminati but as people who are actually right out in the open, ruthlessly seeking power under the accepted rules of capitalism. Specifically, influential banking families supposedly created the Federal Reserve and pushed American into the three major wars of the Twentieth Century (counting Vietnam), both to increase their profits and to build their influence. The film predicts that this will eventually lead to a tyrannical world plutocracy with continuous surveillance of everybody, using RFID chips which are even now being implanted in people's arms (that last fact is in no dispute, as the linked Forbes article shows).
If this story or something like it is accurate, one might reasonably assume that the perpetrators, "wolves" if you will, are heartless villains with no sense of compassion. But I'd like to suggest that this isn't the case. The "wolves" are ordinary human beings following the imperatives of small-group loyalty that have served our species for millions of years; it's just that they don't know when to stop. There's a reason that business families like the Morgans and the Rockefellers are so cohesive: it's them against the world, just as if they were a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age, but on a vastly larger scale of power.
In this version of the metaphor, the "sheepdogs" are the relatively crazy people who think we can establish large-group dynamics, such as democracy or true Communism, where the people stand up and tell the leaders what we want, and the leaders listen. As the bumper sticker says, "If the people lead, the leaders will follow." We really have no idea how to make this work, because most of the "sheep" are too involved in their own lives and local communities to care much about global, national, or even state-level politics. But perhaps, thanks to the global store of news and information now available at the touch of a button to anyone with an Internet connection, we will see that start to change.
Even if we're not in time to prevent the world plutocracy, though, I honestly don't believe it can last long in times like these. As I observed in this post, rapid change will not be kind to organizations that try to set up any kind of New World Order. There are any number of forces that could bring down such a world government, including global warming, hackers, internecine warfare among the ruling families--and yes, terrorism.
lxpk recently convinced me to watch Zeitgeist, a web movie chock-full of conspiracy theories. It spends quite a bit of time on the big theory currently in vogue, that the 9/11 attacks were a "false-flag" operation by our own government, but the movie has an interesting way of describing it: apparently, the conspiracy was so ineptly executed that it should be obvious to anyone who looks, to the extent that several of the supposed hijackers are still alive! (Obvious explanation: the hijackers stole other people's identities.)Anyway, this style of theorizing continues through the more interesting part of the movie, which describes "the men behind the curtain" not as secretive Masons or Illuminati but as people who are actually right out in the open, ruthlessly seeking power under the accepted rules of capitalism. Specifically, influential banking families supposedly created the Federal Reserve and pushed American into the three major wars of the Twentieth Century (counting Vietnam), both to increase their profits and to build their influence. The film predicts that this will eventually lead to a tyrannical world plutocracy with continuous surveillance of everybody, using RFID chips which are even now being implanted in people's arms (that last fact is in no dispute, as the linked Forbes article shows).
If this story or something like it is accurate, one might reasonably assume that the perpetrators, "wolves" if you will, are heartless villains with no sense of compassion. But I'd like to suggest that this isn't the case. The "wolves" are ordinary human beings following the imperatives of small-group loyalty that have served our species for millions of years; it's just that they don't know when to stop. There's a reason that business families like the Morgans and the Rockefellers are so cohesive: it's them against the world, just as if they were a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age, but on a vastly larger scale of power.
In this version of the metaphor, the "sheepdogs" are the relatively crazy people who think we can establish large-group dynamics, such as democracy or true Communism, where the people stand up and tell the leaders what we want, and the leaders listen. As the bumper sticker says, "If the people lead, the leaders will follow." We really have no idea how to make this work, because most of the "sheep" are too involved in their own lives and local communities to care much about global, national, or even state-level politics. But perhaps, thanks to the global store of news and information now available at the touch of a button to anyone with an Internet connection, we will see that start to change.
Even if we're not in time to prevent the world plutocracy, though, I honestly don't believe it can last long in times like these. As I observed in this post, rapid change will not be kind to organizations that try to set up any kind of New World Order. There are any number of forces that could bring down such a world government, including global warming, hackers, internecine warfare among the ruling families--and yes, terrorism.
