Friends,
My goal isn’t to criticize capitalism. If it was, I’d just say it brought us Bill Gates and end the discussion there. Rather, the intent is to clarify, as clarity is empowering. You can’t address what you can’t see. But this isn’t a vote for communism or any of the other failed systems of modern society, either. Indeed, the current state of the world implies that none of the available systems work. Perhaps, then, we need some new choices altogether. But we mustn’t jump to the conclusion that the systems are at fault when they’ve been run by corrupt leaders. You can’t give a drunk the keys and then blame the car for the crash. But by scrutinizing these systems more closely—capitalism in this article—we may discover that, and how, we’ve been misled to support a system that serves the corrupt elite while believing that it supports us.
First, a quick overview. Most of the world’s people believe their country’s system is superior to that of all other countries. Why? For starters, everyone’s indoctrinated from a young age to believe that. This serves those benefiting from the current power structure. Notably, everyone has strong, rational arguments supporting their self-affirming position. This is not because the rationales are objectively true. For one thing, as noted above, we don’t have demonstrations of these systems run by ethical people. Additionally—and this may sound counterintuitive, but stay with me—those logical arguments are the direct result of the indoctrination. A complete introduction to the underlying psychology is beyond the scope of this article, but in brief, the appearance of “logical” stems from subconscious emotions that are the target of psychological manipulation. “Logical,” it turns out, isn’t something that’s outside of us, objective, and the same for everyone. If it was, we’d all have the same beliefs about everything. The appearance of “logical” depends on each person’s perceptions as to any given matter at any given point in time; and perception is what indoctrination, and psychological manipulation more generally, targets and affects. (See Fear vs. Knowledge for an introduction to how manipulation psychology works equally well in both sleeper and aware communities.)
So, the capitalism vs. communism (or any other system) debate is a ruse, an orchestrated device that, by design, can’t be resolved intellectually under current conditions. Everyone’s view is logical to them, and if one were to end up ruling the world, it would “win” by a force (except none of them will for reasons explained below). Thus, the “system debate battles” are kept perpetually alive, something that’s orchestrated to serve each system’s elite rulers and/or behind-the-scenes controllers. So how does capitalism and our unwitting, manipulated support for it serve the elite?
Capitalism, which makes ever-increasing profits the top priority, rests on some powerfully persuasive yet ultimately erroneous assumptions. These include such beliefs as competition breeds innovation; a free market floats the best products and services to the top; and consumers will, by and large, gravitate to the best bang for the buck, thereby forcing inferior products to improve or fall by the wayside. Finally, capitalism’s fundamental goal is to continually increase profits. But a little scrutiny brings their falsity quickly into focus.
For starters, savvy players quickly recognize that maximizing profits is usually more dependent on the quality of marketing than the quality of the product or service being marketed. And the most effective marketing (as to maximizing profits) comes from the application of covert psychological manipulation to get consumers to experience a want or need for things they didn’t want or need prior to being exposed to the marketing. Ads are designed with carefully crafted words, music, and images that, together with repetition, reprogram us on a subconscious level to shift our conscious perception of a product or service in a way that makes us more likely to purchase it. And since psychological manipulation targets the subconscious, consumers don’t know they’re being manipulated and have no choice about whether to participate in that game, other than to choose to avoid exposure to advertising altogether. (Good luck trying to pull that one off).
I am compelled to point out that being smart provides no barrier to manipulation, as it completely bypasses the intellect to target our subconscious minds. So, if you think you’re too smart to be manipulated, congratulations: you just demonstrated how powerful manipulation is, because implanting such belief is the first goal of manipulation. If victims knew they were being manipulated, it wouldn’t work very well, would it?
But ultimately, marketing is a numbers game. Everyone doesn’t spend money in response to every ad campaign. Yet, effective advertising increases profits overall through the covert manipulation of people’s minds—all of us—to increase sales. So: Capitalism floats the best marketing to the top considerably more so than the best products, as marketing is the single most important driver of sales. This means that capitalism drives the development of ever-more-effect-and-powerful covert manipulation. This is not to say that product quality is irrelevant; it’s just secondary to mind control with respect to maximizing profits.
What is the long-term effect of this?
Out-competing one’s competitors requires “going places” your competitors can’t, don’t, or won’t go. As to “can’t” or “don’t,” competitors engage in ethical and legal activities that include developing the best products, finding the best materials and supplies for the lowest cost, devising the least expensive way to produce and deliver products, and finding the most efficient way to manage their businesses, all the while researching ways to continually improve all of these processes. As to “won’t,” when one has taken all available steps within ethical and legal boundaries, one is necessarily faced with the question of whether to cross those boundaries to outcompete the competition. Many won’t cross those boundaries, of course; in our society, we call them “losers,” because capitalism’s “winners”—they who make the most money—are they who dare to cross ethical and legal lines to do so. For those who do, the game becomes a contest to see who can go deepest into the murky waters of unethical and illegal behavior with the least accountability.
Here’s where things turn dark. Ethical and legal lines create a filter that weeds out ethical, law-abiding people. Capitalism’s top winners, then, are those who are the most brilliantly corrupt. Capitalism floats the most ambitious, brilliant, and ruthless psychopaths to the top. (Let that sink in…) But crossing those lines comes with risks. So, to win this level of the competition, competitors must employ business strategies to hide their unsavory behaviors and shield themselves from accountability. As to hiding bad behavior, they deploy image campaigns to create the illusion that they are wonderful people working for the benefit society, while in reality their illicit service-to-self behavior imposes ever-greater harm on everyone, increasingly over time as that’s required to keep their profits growing. The image campaigns employ powerful, psychological manipulation resulting in most people not merely failing to see what’s going on, but actively supporting the corrupt behavior believing they’re helping everyone. Vaccines come to mind. The masses believe Gates and vaccines are saving us while Bill’s wealth multiplies and ever-greater numbers of people are killed and disabled by vaccines.
Yet, the illusion of “benevolence from the mega-wealthy” is easily exposed by, for example, the fact that, on the one hand, multiple individuals on the planet have a net worth in the $100’s of billions or more, while on the other hand, the entire African continent could be lifted out of poverty by an estimated $4 to $6 billion. The top elite, together, could end poverty on the planet without feeling so much as a pinch to their personal wealth. Yet, they don’t do that. Is that simply because they are psychopaths?
In part, yes, but there’s more to it. You see, the quest for ever-greater profit presumes there’s an unlimited amount of resources for making ever more products and an infinite pool of potential consumers who all have infinite sums of money with which to buy that ever-growing number of products and services. (A rational system would have to have the goal of achieving balance and stabilization, not continual growth through ever-greater profits.) Given the fact that such things are finite, there necessarily comes a point where profits can only keep growing at the expense of others. Thus, for individuals at the top to continue growing their wealth, wealth must be transferred to them from everyone else. That means middle- and lower-class people have ever-diminishing quality of life, quality of healthcare, etc. This is not a theory; these conditions are continually reported by experts who monitor such conditions. And, of course, most of us as individuals experience this directly. By allowing—enabling—the mega-wealthy to keep increasing their wealth, capitalism drives a continual decrease in the quality of life for the masses (though individual results may vary ;-). We’ve had the technology and resources to end world hunger for decades, for example. It only persists because it’s required for the mega-wealthy to continually increase their wealth. This has to be hidden from everyone, of course, or there’d be mass demand for the redistribution of wealth to save millions of lives and increasing the quality of life for billions.
The (so-called) COVID pandemic took this to unprecedented heights with the largest, fastest transfer of wealth in recorded history, according to some reports. Within the first 2 years, U.S. billionaires reportedly increased their wealth by $3 to $4 trillion—that’s “trillion” with a ‘t’—while countless medium-to-small businesses went under, millions of people lost their jobs, and all but the top 1% took a lifestyle plunge. Increasing the wealth of the mega-wealthy requires harming countless millions of others. And this is a never-ending process. Over time, capitalism increasingly concentrates wealth in hands of fewer and fewer people while reducing the wealth and quality of life of more and more people to enable that. Wealth isn’t created out of nothing; it’s transferred—“stolen” would be a better word. Capitalism drives the emergence of a two-class polarized society: Those that have it all and those that have nothing. As Klaus Schwab puts it, “you’ll own nothing and be happy.” (I think he’s confusing himself with us on that last part, though.) Nor is this simply the result of opportunists being ready to jump when the opportunity arises. This incomprehensibly huge transfer of wealth was carefully orchestrated. Thus, in floating brilliant psychopaths to the top, capitalism leads to the increased suffering of the many to benefit the very few at the top.
But wait—don’t we have laws to protect us from corrupt behavior? Yep! But we might as well not, because present conditions have been in the making for decades, getting steadily worse over time, at an accelerating rate. Clearly, then, the law doesn’t apply to the elite. If it did, we wouldn’t be where we are today. The reason is obvious when you think about it. You see, for businesses to cross ethical and legal lines successfully, they must immunize themselves from accountability. This is accomplished by seizing control of the accountability systems: the legislatures, courts, and law enforcement agencies. That’s accomplished by controlling these systems’ leaders, the decision-makers at the top whose orders all subordinates must follow. This is why rallies, petitions and the like never work. Corrupt decision-makers don’t serve us, the general public; they serve a corrupt agenda. That reality is hidden, however, by decision-makers pretending to care about our views, so we’ll keep asking them to help us while believing they can be persuaded by logic and compassion. The reality is that their decisions are predetermined in service to themselves and the advance of corrupt agendas. They already know the truth; they just don’t care about it because it doesn’t serve them. It’s just more profitable to be corrupt; and continually increasing profits for the mega-wealthy elite requires them to control the world’s most powerful decision-making positions—which they have done, increasingly over time. Make no mistake: He who can “suicide” with impunity anyone who gets in their way has the power to control governments, media, and others essential to hiding truth and escaping accountability, which opens the door for doing just about anything they can imagine. Maui and similar past events are more-than-sobering reality checks in this respect.
Enormous illegal acts must be well hidden, so the masses don’t revolt. That’s accomplished through control of the primary information delivery systems—mainstream media, social media giants, educational systems, and, like it or not, most alternative news as well. Then, they do two things: 1) Exclude any “annoying” truth that’s contrary to their ever-increasing profit/control agendas; and 2) Fill the resulting void with misleading and false information that’s brilliantly designed and deployed to psychologically manipulate perceptions, covertly—invisibly—to implant false narratives. Friends, this works every bit as well on the aware as with the sleepers. Yes, we see things the sleepers don’t, but we’ve been no more effective at stopping them with our activism work than they’ve been successful in saving humanity with vaccines. Manipulation is invisible and unreachable, operating in and from our subconscious minds. Information alone can’t free you from it; a psychological process is required to shift the manipulated perceptions, and that’s not an information process. Sadly, very few dare to explore this, because manipulation starts by causing us all to believe we aren’t, and can’t ever be, manipulated. That’s what keeps it firmly in place.
A few final points. Capitalism:
A. Is dehumanizing. Maximizing profits requires advertising to as many people as you can for the lowest cost possible. This objectifies the masses. We’re all “sales targets,” free range cows to be milked for all we’re worth. Large groups of people with unique personalities, lives, feelings, circumstances, and individualized real needs and wants are all treated the same.
Worse, maximizing profits requires minimizing costs. Some of those who cross ethical and legal boundaries resort to unethical extremes such as child labor, ecological destruction, and other harmful practices to minimize costs. It’s just cheaper to hide these behaviors than to avoid them. Capitalism fosters—drives—child abuse. At the extreme end of that, it has created booming international child sex and adrenochrome markets. Again, it’s far more profitable to commit and hide these activities than it is to avoid them. Capitalism turns children into chattel—mere, dispensable property to exploit as needed in the pursuit of ever more profit and power.
B. Abuses the masses. Maximizing profits requires maximizing our exposure to advertisements. We end up being continually harassed by advertising, something we tolerate not because there’s a benefit there for us (we can proactively search the internet for anything we really want or need), but because it maximizes profit for those doing the advertising. Increasingly, we must opt out of harassing emails and test ads instead of opting in. Escaping this is virtually impossible for the vast majority of us.
C. Makes liars out of businesses and suckers out of consumers. Women shave their armpits and legs today because 100 years ago, razor manufacturers realized they could double their market if woman had to shave, too. So, a “need” for that was literally invented. I guess that was easier than getting women to take hormones to grow beards (though if that would undermine reproduction, we’ll probably see it soon). Similarly, we consume excessive quantities of milk not because that’s healthy—milk is designed to cause rapid growth in baby cows—but because it’s profitable for the milk industry. Never mind that humans are the only species that regularly drinks other animals’ milk and that consumes milk long after being weaned; or that our excess milk consumption has contributed to generations of obese children, or that fast food undermines the health of millions. Profit is more important!
“Winning” capitalism requires, ultimately, serving oneself to the detriment of others. But at lower levels, most businesses cross ethical lines in lesser degrees by rationalizing their behavior, not for the psychopathic entertainment of hurting others with impunity that occurs at the very top. “No one has to over-consume our milk,” milk producers may say. But this simply isn’t true. Psychologically manipulative marketing removes free choice from consumers by reprogramming us from a subconscious level, which means the effects are invisible. They occur without our knowledge or consent. If that seems dishonest, it is! But it’s legal, because corporations, in pursuit of ever-increasing profits, “buy” legislators to get laws enabling them to keep making more and more profit; and that requires pushing legal boundaries further and further out, which means ever-more-intrusive acts keep becoming “legal.” They also “buy” law enforcement leaders, to prevent being held accountable; and the mass media, to deploy ever-greater propaganda (psychological manipulation) to keep the masses asleep to their ever-worsening behavior in pursuit of ever-greater profits. Did I mention that this is always progressing? It’s never stagnant. Whatever you see going on now, it’s always worse than yesterday and better than tomorrow. Welcome to 21st century earth.
D. Makes the most critical products and services the least attainable to those most in need. Quality healthcare should be a right, not a privilege of the wealthy. So should legal services in our complex societies. But it’s worse than that. Not only is healthcare prohibitively expensive, the entire healthcare industry has been coopted to enable the world’s wealthiest people to create and perpetuate chronic illness throughout the population to—you guessed it—keep increasing their profits, along with the power required to keep doing that. Keeping those profits growing requires the active suppression of competing healing modalities that offer real healing that undermines profits from perpetuating ill health under a false pretense of “healthcare.” This situation isn’t stagnant, either; the alternative healthcare industry is being systematically disassembled, step by step as part of a larger strategy to continually increase mainstream healthcare profits. Remember, when you float psychopaths to the top, anything that creates a net gain in profits is fair game—anything.
E. Generates destructive rationalizations and behavior. Maximizing profits means minimizing expenses. So, for example, “managing pollution” becomes “the government’s problem,” because “if I act responsibly of my own accord, my profits will go down and my competitors will outdo me.” But even if laws require all businesses to take steps, some will be affected more than others; some will ignore the laws, find loopholes, or bribe or threaten the judges and law enforcement officials; etc. Rationalizing is a slippery slope (as, indeed, all of these problems are). Over time, such rationales progress, at the top at least, into the deliberate manipulation of legislation to evade accountability and the ever-greater manipulation of public perception to prevent us from rising up en masse to demand cessation of the undesirable behavior and accountability for those causing the harm. For example, some 70% of pollution comes from industry. Yet, the blame is always directed at consumers—not because experts are confused about where pollution comes from, but because it’s much more profitable than acting responsibly.
Hiding one’s illicit behavior in this respect requires silencing experts and suppressing their research findings. Hiding pollution facts from the masses is accomplished with the deployment of ever more sophisticated propaganda (psychological manipulation) throughout the primary information delivery systems: mainstream media, educational systems, etc. Capitalism, in the name of maximizing profits, is ultimately detrimental to the health and well-being of the planet and all living things on it. Yet, the problem and harm continually increase, because capitalism floats megalomaniacal psychopaths to the top income and power positions. It’s difficult for people with a conscience to comprehend the mental workings of those who lack a conscience, but we better get over that soon, as those ever-increasing profits are causing ever-greater harm to all planetary systems and beings, and we’re already arguably in the edges of some “point of no return” zones.
F. Erroneously presumes that competition is necessarily better than cooperation. Perhaps it depends on the specific situation, but our blind allegiance to capitalism’s “competition is best” is misplaced, a severely harmful misperception. A better system would allow us the flexibility to consider and apply what’s best in each situation, a holistic approach. (If anyone ever proposes “Holistic Capitalism,” you heard it here first!) But we should consider that capitalism—competition—separates us, pits us against one another, while cooperation unifies us, brings us together for a common cause. Curiously, we demonstrate our greatest humanity amidst the greatest tragedies. Ordinary people become heroes as all lines of separation disappear—race, politics, income—we do whatever we can in the moment to save others’ lives in cases of natural disasters, for example. (Well, not the elite psychopaths who create many of these tragedies, but most of the rest of us.) Perhaps if we saw the urgency in the need to maximize the health and wellbeing of all people on the planet, we’d come together like never before and completely transform society. Capitalism as we know it today would all but disappear (along with all of the other corruption-driven systems).
So, what’s the solution?
Unfortunately, the question is moot because we don’t get to decide what system we live in—not under present conditions, anyway. That started with our life-long elite-serving capitalism indoctrination, but as the 2020 election revealed more openly than ever before, leaders are selected, not elected. (Bizarrely, even most aware people seem to have forgotten this as they pretend it’s possible for our deeply corrupt government to allow a real presidential election in 2024.) Power runs the world, not logic, the public, ethics, or anything else that would serve people instead of the elite to the people’s detriment. We’re tricked into believing we have a say so that we won’t question the reality that we actually don’t. So, fixing any of the world’s major problems requires first neutralizing or removing the massively corrupt ruling elite in both public and private sectors. That’s possible, but not with anything we’re doing now, because they control all of the accountability systems. He who controls the accountability systems is immune from their application. The law doesn’t apply to the elite. So, they can only be defeated by a powerful force operating outside of the systems they control, which happens to be all of the ones our activism work operates in presently. Then we may get to decide what kind of system we live in.
I saved the punchline for last. All of the above is about to become moot…
A.I. is progressing far more quickly than experts’ predictions. In a few short years it will likely render a majority of workers unnecessary, blue collar and white collar alike. Businesses are all on “maximize profits” autopilot. No one’s going to say, “I’m not using A.I., because it will eliminate all jobs.” Every business thinks and acts in its own self-interest, from a fear of being outcompeted or being driven out of business altogether. He who refuses to incorporate the latest technology—right now, that’s A.I.—gets left in the dust. The Great Irony is that this will inevitably lead to virtually all human workers being replaced in all fields, though some fields will be affected sooner than others. The pursuit of self-interest profit maximizing will cause business owners to rationalize that “it’s the government’s job to fix that.” But friends, governments are owned and controlled by the top mega-wealthy elite. So, we all know how that’s going to turn out.
Capitalism fails yet again. A.I. will vastly accelerate what’s already been happening for decades: The rich get richer while everyone else gets poorer. A.I. systems are already outperforming humans in top fields. And that’s just the part being leaked to the masses. Think about it: For governments and corporations to establish control and maintain that control over the long term, they must reserve the top technologies for themselves. Any tech we know about, then, is decades—perhaps centuries—behind what they have. (Maui demonstrated this, and the psychopathology driving it, in a most horrific manner.)
This raises the sobering prospect—indeed, the great likelihood—that what we know about any new technology is precisely what the elite want us to know. They’d have to control that to maximize their own profits and control over us. It should go without saying that the mega-wealthy elite will use A.I. to ensure their own ever-greater wealth and power and to impose ever-greater control over us—any contrary perceptions being one they covertly implant in us so that their further abuse of us goes undetected and unpunished. It will be used to surveil us and to deploy subliminal programming, for example, and will do both far more effectively than any previous human approach to date. We must expect the unexpected, and all be prepared to be ushered into a new reality the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Whether that’s ultimately a transhumanist dystopia where all resistance is eliminated (sorry, but aware people are poor candidates for reeducation—be sure to let that sink in) or an enlightened society built on ethics and compassion depends on whether we break open the Grand Deceptions and expose those controlling them in a way that causes them to lose control. None of our activism work is doing this, and that’s no accident. One project-in-the-works does address this, however.
Finally, the elite are likely not a single group of people who agree to share control of the world amongst themselves. Greed and the addiction to power don’t include that as a possible end-scenario. Brilliant megalomaniacal, psychopathic, mega-wealthy elite each aspire (rather by definition) to be the first king of the world. So, we can expect some major A.I. wars between competing A.I. systems and their owners. Who knows what that will look like, as it’s completely unprecedented. But these wars will likely be masked for as long as possible, while we, the public, remain expendable pawns in each one’s quest to become the top winner of all time.
Exciting times lie ahead…
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With gratitude,
Alan Phillips, J.D.
Vaccine Rights Legal Expert
Have a vaccine exemption question? Contact Alan at vaccinerights.com. Some questions may be addressed in future articles (with anonymity).
More Activism and Exemption Articles: vaccinerights.com/articles, vaccinerights.substack.com/archive
Alan Phillips, J.D., is the nation’s leading vaccine rights legal expert, the only person who’s ever been a fulltime attorney with exemptions and who’s worked in all of the over 60 exemption contexts and sub-contexts with clients, attorneys, legislators, and activists nationally over the past two decades. For exemption help, see vaccinerights.com.