Big Brother Award
Most people are terribly confused when it comes to understanding our leaders, whether corporate or political.
They think that the sort of ethical or moral constraints which hold them back, hold back leaders.
But being a leader in our society is about “extracting value” from ordinary people.
Raising the price of insulin to $300, for example. Or launching a war against a country which is no threat to you. Or throwing people in jail for 20 years for minor drug offenses.
Our leaders don’t think the same way we do. Their function isn’t to make our lives better, their function is to make their lives better–along with the lives of those people who can help them or the few people they care about. Biden, for example, goes on and on about how much he loves his family. Boo hoo. Then he supports policies like the bankruptcy bill or three strikes laws which destroy other families.
Obama and Geithner quite deliberately created a relief program for homeowners which relieved almost no one and instead made sure that they went bankrupt, so the banks would get their homes. The policy was intended, and this has been admitted, to help the banks, not ordinary people. (See David Dayen’s Chain of Title if you need the tedious proof.)
To elites, we are tools at best, useless eaters at worse. They are trained to look at us and figure out how much value they can extract: as consumers, workers, voters, and soldiers.
Then they extract the value, and if some of us wind up dead, homeless, sick, or crippled, well, they don’t lose one second of sleep over it.
Because to them, we aren’t people.
The great problem of being a member of an elite is keeping the Praetorian guard happy; this doesn’t just mean the core soldiers and cops, but the key retainers who execute policy at the highest level.
The next great problem is the mob: The tools and useless eaters sometimes get uppity, and revolt and you need to be sure you can put them down–hence the Praetorian guard.
But they’re working on this problem. Modern surveillance makes it so much easier to keep us down. Modern education trains us to be obedient (if you don’t think that’s what school, which is “Sit down, shut up, speak only when spoken to, and give me the answer I want, the way I want it,” does, you are either stupid or haven’t thought about it. Or it’s really, really worked on you.)
Meanwhile, we’re not so far out from the military bots. Get bots that can make bots and they won’t need us.
And that’s good, for them, because, man, having so many of us around is causing them huge problems. Once they don’t need us any more, once they have bots who will do what they want, don’t talk back, and don’t mind being scrapped or mistreated, well, the easiest way to deal with climate change is to get rid of six billion people or so, isn’t it?
I mean, they won’t need us. We’ll be a problem. They’ll have a solution: Climate change will kill some, the bots will deal with the rest, and they have the perfect servant class.
Dystopian fiction? Lunacy?
Well, maybe. But tell me, given that they are accelerating climate change, even though they’ve known about it since the 70s (we have the papers, we know they knew), and given their proven willingness to do anything nasty to us they want if they think it’s in their interest and they can get away with it, what would they be doing differently if this wasn’t true?
More reasonably, of course, some of them are planning this and the rest are just willing to go along when push comes to shove.
Remember, $300 insulin. You do that, you know people will die. You’re OK with it.
And your fellow elites haven’t stopped you. (And yes, yes, they could.)
Killing us for money or other benefits is one of the things our leaders do.
And that isn’t going to change until they’re more scared of us than we are of them.
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We live in a stupid, perverse world where people don’t understand that there has to be a balance between debtors and creditors. Creditors are making a bet, and if they lend to the wrong entity, and that entity eventually can’t pay back the debt, they should have to eat their losses. Don’t lend to people who can’t pay you back. Everyone knew that Argentina was going to have debt problems, every time, but they took the chance because they wanted high returns.