The Future of Power

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At some point in my childhood, I came to believe that all of the world's problems were rooted in ignorance. Into my twenties, I imagined that people would fix the world if only they knew how to do it. Then I discovered that the solutions to many of society's problems had been well understood for decades or longer. And some of these problems had, in fact, been engineered deliberately.

Ignorance is easily dispelled by enlightenment. But what is the cure for a society gone mad? I don't think there is a cure. And I'm suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.

Meeting ignorance with true information makes sense, but enlightenment isn't always the outcome thereby produced. A surprising number of people seem completely impervious to facts. Some passionately believe untrue things. Others twist reality for politics or profit. They're not ignorant, they're just wrong. I think the majority of our population is wrong, in many different ways, about even the most important things.

Partisan Radicalization

We don't have a political left and a political right in the US. We have blue team and red team, both of which support policies guaranteed to worsen inequality and a host of other economic and social issues. One of the more troubling new trends in the endless contest between these two teams is the blue team's attempts to further radicalize the red team by financially supporting fascist candidates in Republican primaries.

When I first learned of this trend, I thought it must be a joke. But no. The Democrats are literally funding fascists. Here's a quote from a Washington Post article about it:

"Democrats have spent nearly $19 million across eight states in primaries this year amplifying far-right Republican candidates. ... Total Democratic spending rises to roughly $53 million when a ninth state, Illinois, is added. There, the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) and the campaign of Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) spent a combined $34.5 million successfully elevating a GOP candidate who has said it was “appalling” that party leaders in Illinois wanted Trump to concede the 2020 election."

A Guardian opinion piece comments on the folly of this strategy:

"Spending money to try to dupe hapless Republican voters into backing the goofiest fascist is not just stupid; it goes against justice. Tricking people is not part of organizing. These sophisticated Democratic strategists are pouring poison into the well that we all, sooner or later, will have to drink from."

It seems important to note that there is no radical left in the traditional sense. Blue team radicals favor a totalitarian nanny state and endless corporate subsidies, not Universal Basic Income and genuine corporate responsibility. No one on the red team is funding radical leftist candidates. By funding reactionary reds, the blues are altering the total political landscape in a way that legitimizes the worst sorts of politics while driving everything that used to be called 'progressive' further into the wilderness.

The Future of Power

The question of how so many people could be so wrong about so many important things is vexing. Honest answers to this question lower my opinion of my fellow human beings. The media is obviously culpable. So are the corporate and political machines that determine public opinion. But the deeper truth here is that most Americans believe things that fundamentally conflict with my understanding of the world. So even if everybody voted and we had fair elections instead of the screwy nonsense we've grown accustomed to, no candidate that I'd support could ever possibly rise to power.

Now the blue team is funding red team fascists, which makes sense because we live in a dystopia. Reasonable responses to this level of nonsense are difficult to formulate. There may be no reasonable political response to it. Where I see hope is in the social and economic spheres. The social networks we build have the potential to get us through the series of disasters on the horizon as a result of our bad politics. The blockchain economy is already weakening the banking cartels' stranglehold on our lives.

The future of power isn't political. It's technological. And it doesn't belong to the popular majority of deeply wrong individuals. Instead, the future belongs to those best able to harness technological advancement. Politics are little more than a sideshow against this backdrop.

(Pictured above: my siblings and I by Lake Superior.)

Read my novels:

See my NFTs:

  • Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
  • History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
  • Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.
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(Edited)

Wow, fascinating Guardian article. I'm in agreement with much of what you're saying. I remember reading about psychologist and organization development expert Edgar Schein when I was getting my master's degree. His initial research was done during the Korean war where he studied how American prisoners of war had been brainwashed by their captors. What he found was that in the prison camps, 80% of the people survived the ordeal by being passive. The other percentage were people that were either resistors or collaborators. After the war, when the military reflected on which POWs had resisted to a radical degree and which had collaborated with their captors enough to warrant a possible court martial, they found that roughly 5% to 10% of American soldiers fell in either category. Both groups were made up of individuals who felt they needed to take action in any situation. Together, they differed from the remaining 80% or so of prisoners who survived by remaining passive.

So there's always going to be a large group of people who are willing to pay a high price for stability. In the end, most people rationalize the pain and simply learn what they’re supposed to learn. So I think change always comes from a small percentage of people waking up to the superficial and false constructs that most of the public buys into. I very much agree that the only way we can create change that actually matters (vs. elections or protests as an example) is to identify with new stories and systems that promote decentralization. Because the financial elite and their global control systems need our dependency to achieve their goals. Blockchain economy, homesteading movement, all forms of community cooperatives, sharing economy principles, etc. Anything that taps into the naturally occurring self-organizing capacity of the collective, along with using the best of what technology can be. Ok I'm done now lol

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Thanks for the thoughtful reply: ) Staying passive is indeed a winning strategy in many situations. Oftentimes, the best thing to do is nothing.

Talking about the advantages of decentralization is tricky. Most people are unfamiliar with the subject and they distrust the unfamiliar. So I try to work it into my fiction, with varying degrees of success.

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Right, and most people will say "well we know the government is dysfunctional and there is lots of corruption, but it's for the best and this is just how the cookie crumbles." So I'm increasingly very curious about how to talk about decentralization in a way that most people can get it. But maybe it's really about creating these new systems with the help of technology. People will be more likely to follow when they see a clear alternative that makes sense. So we need to hop on this Doing Nothing app, Mark

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Oh and btw, that's a slick photo of you and your siblings. Looks like an album cover of a band that I'd listen to all day.

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