What I'm about to write may seem incomprehensible to many of you, but it is true. I will do my best to explain the situation using a variety of viewpoints, but the basic summary is still the same. In its essence, it is how war was co-opted as a tool by the financial class, and then underwent a final corruption to where those who now remain as the heads of the financial class are opposed to life itself. This process did not occur through conscious intent, but a slow degenerative descent marked by mankind's baser desires of greed, lust, hatred and fear. Though it may not have started with malicious intent, remember the old missive, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Originally in human history, war was the purview of the aristocracy. Wealth and the merchant class did not exist as it does now, and the only actors capable of initiating conflict were those in charge of tribes and kingdoms. In a sense, the aristocracy was the combination of both the martial class and the merchant class. They were the only ones with both wealth and military power.
As humankind evolved, there was a slow division, where an independent merchant class came into existence. Though for many millennia and centuries they remained less powerful than the aristocracy, eventually the power of the aristocracy, based on a traditional power structure of heredity or religious validation, waned, while the merchant class ascended in power, not only gaining the ability to influence the aristocracy, but also able to garner military and political power themselves. The waning of the aristocracy was partially due to overexpenditure of its own power, inability to recognize the ascendance of the merchant class, and inability to project its power through religious or hereditary mandate more effectively than the power projected through the purchasing power of wealth, which continued to transfer increasingly to the merchant class.
Neither the aristocracy nor the merchant class can be said to be composed of saints. Despite trying desperately to appear as servants, or even anointed representatives of an almighty God and morality, the fact is that both groups had many examples of evil, selfish, and cruel individuals. The aristocracy, during its reign, pursued goals that served their self-enrichment, earthly glory, and personal desires. Evil however does not necessarily cooperate with evil; when there exists two groups of selfish individuals, the result is conflict. The result is war.
At a certain point, the merchant class learned that it could engage in war just as the aristocracy had. In fact, it learned that it could engage in war more effectively than the aristocracy, because it could wage war on another level; via financial methods, the merchant class could conquer territory through influencing the aristocracy, through buying out the political class, and even directly through using their purchasing power to obtain resources, industries, and territory. Because this method of warfare was not recognized as warfare, it could be done without encountering direct resistance, and without having to engage in military conflict in many cases.
Eventually, the merchant class split again, yielding a new arm that is both subset and distinct; the financial class. Engaged directly with the acquisition and distribution of money, the financial class did not have to deal even as the merchant class in obtaining and subverting markets. They could simply buy out the merchant class, which like them, operated on the currency of money.
By the time of the Twentieth Century, the financial class and the merchant class were able to affect more aspects of human life than any previous time in human history. Business was in human health, military industry, transportation, politics, food, water, communication, housing, education, and entertainment. This meant that all these aspects of human existence could be purchased, and thus control could be consolidated under a single source. Although no one individual could, in the beginning of the century, control every aspect, each category was fought over by an increasingly small and consolidated group. This was monopoly.
Although this stranglehold was temporarily dispersed after the Gilded Age and the Great Depression, those of the financial and merchant class quickly continued their attempts at domination, for the simple human motive of greed and desire. Nothing more complicated need to be impugned at them, nor conspiracy leveled. However, by this time the extent of businesses control over the basics of human existence had simply increased. Simply put, more facets of human life were available for sale than ever before, and thus the financial and merchant classes were able to achieve control over even more of the populace through their efforts at consolidation. These are the basics of capitalism.
The problem is by this time, almost every aspect of human existence, including the supposed safeguards of the judicial system and the political system, could be purchased, and the financial class had amassed wealth beyond that which could have been comprehended in previous centuries. Additionally, those who were best at gaming the system, to wit, cheating, to wit, committing crimes, had grown even better at doing so, and had even more tools at their disposal to do so. And ultimately, those best at committing crimes were unapprehendable, and because they could "cheat" while their rivals who were more lawbound were unable to, they could cut down their rivals using extralegal methods. Indeed, through influencing the political class and judiciary, they could write laws that favored themselves, and be immune to laws that otherwise would constrain them. Thus, those at the top became even more criminal, and even more powerful. They could distribute propaganda through entertainment to affect and alter popular opinion and perspective, they could purchase news outlets to influence coverage, they could indirectly and directly control the political class, through either supporting those they favored or blocking the rise of those they did not, they could inject themselves into religion and education through monetary influence, thus affecting the ensuing generations of humanity in their formative stages. They could stifle communities, buy out land, purchase key industries, gain control of vital resources. All without being recognized for what they were in fact doing; conquering the world.
In the process of doing this, they became even more estranged from the common people. The financial and merchant class could live beyond the means of the mightiest of ancient rulers, and this gave them a similar inflated self-worth only achievable through not having to interact with the world as most of the world's population was required to. Living in modern-day palaces, waited upon hand and foot by hired servants, they were easily able to see themselves as superior to the common people.
No one can claim these individuals to be stupid, although we like to denigrate those we see as opposed to us. Given the rate of consumption in their own lives, and of the system they'd created to empower them, they realized the world could not continue at this rate and still supply them with the lifestyle they felt their due. Capitalism, the very system of their empowerment, also had created its reflection in their captive populace; the American people. This was, and is their method of control. In providing some dregs of their lifestyle to the American people, in encouraging their consumption above a rate seen in any other country of the world, they had seduced and drugged them into being their willing accomplices. However, the resources of the world were finite, as they themselves had realized, and this system could not be maintained forever. When their chosen people could no longer be distracted nor supplied with the lifestyle to which they were accustomed, there would be a mighty blowback. And so they understood, and so they prepared, to complete the enslavement of the world. By now, they could influence every aspect of society, from the prisons and police to the highest politicians, to every major media conglomerate. Thus, a prison was planned for everyone else, guarded by the paid enforcers of the financial class, devoid of resources, thus ensuring conflict among the majority population, scrabbling over what was left for the very basics of survival.
You may ask, why and how could these individuals plan such a thing? The answer is simple, and based on game theory.
If one sees the entire world as finite, as short-game theory, inevitably the only two results is being the winner, or the losers. Philosophically, it comes down to seeing the world as a place where everything will eventually come to an end, and thus all one can do is get to a position of highest power, and enjoy the remainder of existence with every comfort and vice available through one's domination of all things, until the end comes. In a place devoid of higher purpose, of eternal existence, where life is short and ugly and devoid of beauty, what else is one to do but to screw over everyone else, and live the last of your finite existence indulging in every pleasure?
To express this perspective in another manner, it's seeing the world's totality as a temporary journey from 0 to 1. Nothing exists beyond the 1. Therefore, all one can do, to be "the winner", is be the person at the top. Also, all value is placed therefore on how high on the ladder one is. Everything else, every laudable aspect of humanity, from love to faith to art, music and beauty, to spirituality, kindness, compassion, empathy, is merely as dust, to be swept under the efficacy of brutality, greed, and the short-term physical and emotional rewards of vice.
I speak to you now, to cry out that another world is possible. It requires us rejecting these darker aspects, not in their entirety, for they are essential to our human nature, but as the governors of our lives. It is the world above the 1, to where infinity stretches. For through human cooperation and compassion, we can see all that we are capable of, and that is surmounting the problems we face as the human race. It is not through rejecting our individual identity, as these monsters would have us believe and fear, but through celebrating it, and understanding that we can in fact co-exist, through education, interaction, discussion, and finally through much effort, through facing our misplaced fears and terrors, to comprehension of the wonder and validity of our differences, and the recognizing of our common spirit. Those who would seek to enslave us are the source of the whispers of our fears and doubts, the magnifiers of terror in order to submit ourselves to their designs. It is the difference between night and day. It is breaking through their imposed isolation of all of us, to reaching across that short, terrifying divide, to touch another human heart. Franklin Roosevelt told us that all we have to fear is fear itself. We are still governed by fear, by terror, and it is only by these tools that those above can keep us enslaved. The world to come will be determined by our bravery in facing the darkness together.
