“[Our Epstein Class dictators tell us] it’s not that we live in a highly controlled oligarchy where both parties inflict war, ecocide, injustice and tyranny upon the rest of humanity on behalf of their wealthy donors — the problem is that you haven’t been voting for the correct candidates.” — Caitlin Johnstone (sarcastically)
The news is constantly full of analyses and opinions to the effect that our “democracy” is under threat or no longer exists. But rarely do the writers then go on to articulate what is taking or has taken its place, the presumption being that if “we all do” the appropriate things, that this situation can be rescued and things will return to ‘normal’.
But there is no power vacuum in the modern world. Simply stated, we are all living under a permanent dictatorship of corporate billionaires, lobbyists, and interest groups. This dictatorship remains firmly in place no matter who wins elections. It completely ignores the clearly-expressed will of citizens. It spends billions to systematically propagandize, terrorize and oppress those citizens, and simultaneously to persuade them to believe that their voice counts, and that their real enemy is ‘other’ citizens (or, increasingly, non-citizens). And it controls the political, economic, financial and tax systems and machinery to constantly funnel almost all wealth from the citizenry and the public sphere to itself, and then uses that wealth to cement its control over these systems and over the citizens.
The vast majority of citizens do not want war and genocide. They do not want anyone to be treated cruelly, incarcerated illegally, censored or prosecuted for their beliefs, or deprived of due process or the right to free speech and assembly or control over their bodies. They do not want deregulation that precludes any possibility of stemming massive corporate corruption, grift and graft, and runaway economic and ecological collapse. They do not want foreign agents like the CIA and AIPAC directing their government’s activities and flooding their country with disinformation. They do not want to be hate-mongered and fear-mongered.
But what citizens want does not matter. Beyond enabling the dictatorship to fine-tune its scripted messages for its compliant media, design its meaningless acts of performative theatre, and refine its revolving cast of interchangeable actors it displays in front of us as a recurring beauty pageant, what we want is irrelevant to them. What we want and what we say is merely used against us to help them control us, keep us fighting each other, and keep us obedient and oblivious to what they are actually doing.
This is not a new phenomenon, but two things have combined to make it, at last, somewhat visible to us, its victims. The first is the internet and the connections and information it enabled citizens to access for the first time, before it was enshittified and brought back under the dictatorship’s control through its tech bro handmaidens. And the second is the staggering acceleration of that wealth transfer to the dictatorship from the rest of us, which is now too obvious to hide behind walls, fences, foreign tax shelters and numbered companies.
Just as no system lasts forever, and all systems collapse (and usually the largest ones collapse most spectacularly), no dictatorship lasts forever. People will put up with despotism until it becomes too unbearable to put up with. Dictatorships and despots will use propaganda and coercion to forestall resistance, rebellion, and revolt, and to pit its oppressed subjects against each other, but ultimately everyone has a breaking point beyond which they will do whatever it takes, win or lose, to at least try to defeat their oppressor.
The dictatorships will, of course, suppress the learning of history’s lessons, which are replete with stories of when, why, and how dictatorships and despots were finally overthrown. And replete with explanations of the methods they used to sustain their power.
Writers about power often lament the failure of movements to overthrow despots, due to the lack of an organized, competent replacement to fill the power vacuum, without which the ensuing anarchy is too often ended by another opportunistic despotic dictatorship seizing power, leaving the discouraged populace no better off than before they rose up.
But while an organized, competent replacement is much to be desired to minimize the inevitable chaos and suffering of any revolution, even in its absence there will come a time when the citizens have nothing left to lose, and they will rise up anyway. The results of such revolutions historically are often ghastly, violent and enduring, and rather than producing a new power bloc, produce instead a fracturing of power and a devolution of centralized political systems into many small decentralized political societies, more or less autonomous, and much less powerful than what they replaced. There is a name for this fracturing process: Political collapse.
As I have written so often on this blog, our unsustainable and overwrought civilization culture and all its interconnected systems are in the process of rapidly coming apart, at an accelerating rate. There is already not enough to go around. And no idealistic system can ‘fix’ these broken, crumbling, dysfunctional systems.
The dictatorship is completely aware of this happening, and, like all alpha animals in times of extreme collapse, they are hoarding. Buying up islands and land in New Zealand, moving assets offshore, building walled compounds, trying to ratchet up the global economy to delay the inevitable, disastrous financial collapse that will wipe out most of their wealth. As with any dictatorship, their brutal actions do not stem from their being ‘evil’ — quadruply incompetent, yes, and Epstein Class cloistered, surely, but not ‘evil’. Rather, their actions stem from completely justifiable fear that as collapse accelerates, they will lose everything, and be demonized and pursued for their actions and inactions. They know what happens to tsars.
David Ehrenfeld wrote presciently about this in his remarkable 1993(!) book Beginning Again in which he skewered bureaucracy and hierarchy as twin evils of the modern era, lamented the loss of the critical skills of craftsmanship and maintenance, insisted that there is no adapting to catastrophes in complex systems (so we must learn to prevent them), championed generalists over narrow specialists, urged adoption of sustainable polyculture and permaculture to replace catastrophic agriculture, and warned of the looming crisis created by the “bottomless pit of debt” in the US.
This, he warned, is what happens when you try to replace an effective complex natural system, which has great resilience and redundancy evolved over hundreds of millennia, with an ‘efficient’ complicated, man-made system, fragile, over-extended, unforgiving of any failure in any of its moving parts. The big losers when it comes apart, he warned, will be the poor and the young. The rich and old, who have hoarded what they hope will pull them through, will increasingly closet themselves away from the masses as the cascading crises wreak havoc on everyone else:
It is like a massive flywheel, spinning too fast for its size and construction, coming apart in chunks as it spins.
There goes a chunk — the sick and aged along with the huge apparatus of doctors, social workers, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and manufacturers of sophisticated medical equipment, which service their clients at enormous cost but don’t help them very much.
There go the college students along with the VPs, provosts, deans and professors who have nor prepared them for life in a changing world after formal schooling is over. There go the high school and elementary school students, along with the parents, administrators and frustrated teachers who have turned the majority of schools into costly, stagnant and violent babysitting services.
There go the lawyers and their hapless clients in a dust cloud of the ten billion codes, rules and regulations that were produced to organize and control an increasingly intricate, unorganizable and uncontrollable society.
There go the economists with their worthless pretentious predictions and systems, along with the unemployed, the impoverished and the displaced who reaped the consequences of theories and schemes with faulty premises and indecent objectives. There go the engineers, designers and technologists, along with the people stuck with the deadly buildings, roads, power plants, dams and machinery that are the experts’ monuments.
There go the advertising hucksters with their consumer goods, and there go the consumers, consumed with their consumption. And there go the media pundits and pollsters, along with all those unfortunates who wasted precious time listening to them explain why the flywheel could never come apart, or tell how to patch it even while increasing its crazy rate of spin.
The most terrifying thing about this disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic violence will include not only desperate ruthless struggles over the wealth that remains, but the last great rape of nature. What will make it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a cloud of denial and cynical reassurances.
Yep. Sounds about right.
