Invisible Empire, Invisible Boot

How stimulating

Maybe I've been watching too much Alan Watt lately, but did anyone else notice they're advertising the new Xbox on TV as "The Stimulus Package"?
Pre-conditioning, anyone? Are we about to have another big "stimulus" (robbery)?

Cult ethic

Arbeit macht frei:

We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult.

This relates to my previous post about the ancient intertwining of the parasites: religion and politics. Without these, civilisation as we know it would never have come about. Were they inevitable? Unlikely - it seems they were more like a disease that spread from the Middle East.
Peter Drucker, who loves Calvinism and "management" - admitted that it was not certain that management was a good thing, or productive, or whatever. Well it isn't - the best "management" like "best government" is hands off. Which begs the question - why is it there at all? Because of organised violence, that's why. Giant protection rackets, all over the globe, born of politics and religion. The Invisible Boot.
There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.

Gods before grains

Only just found this, but it's massive. Evidence that religion predates agriculture - a new archaeological find, apparently an 11,500 year-old temple structure:

Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

All that followed. You mean, the bad stuff anyway.

Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that "the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture," and Göbekli may prove his case.

Absolutely. This is huge! Agriculture marks the shift away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, that is to say - freedom. If you grow crops and only crops, you can be extorted. It's the beginning of protection rackets (governments). And it's also, of course, the beginning of the decline in human health and vitality. Bear with me here.

Everything from food to flint had to be imported, so the site "was not a village," Schmidt says. Since the temples predate any known settlement anywhere, Schmidt concludes that man's first house was a house of worship: "First the temple, then the city," he insists.

Whatever mysterious rituals were conducted in the temples, they ended abruptly before 8000 B.C., when the entire site was buried, deliberately and all at once, Schmidt believes. The temples had been in decline for a thousand years—later circles are less than half the size of the early ones, indicating a lack of resources or motivation among the worshippers. This "clear digression" followed by a sudden burial marks "the end of a very strange culture," Schmidt says. But it was also the birth of a new, settled civilization, humanity having now exchanged the hilltops of hunters for the valleys of farmers and shepherds. New ways of life demand new religious practices, Schmidt suggests, and "when you have new gods, you have to get rid of the old ones."

Doesn't that give you hope? Not that I can wait 1000 years personally, nor would I want new gods. Why have any at all?
Now, of course religion came before agriculture. It had to. Why else do it?
By the way, I am more of an anarchist than a libertarian, mainly because I give no credence to the non-aggression principle. Why start with a principle that's going to be violated immediately in practice? Wishful thinking is not a sound base for a philosophy.
Now, religion would have come before agriculture because they would have now have a reason to pray to the gods - for a good crop. Because - and here's the thing -they will have been convinced by the unscrupulous ur-politicians that they ought to.
So religion is to blame. But what came before? Paganism. A more benign form of religion, that religion got all its symbolism from.
So are symbols, including speech, to blame for it all? Not speech, because it's cultural. and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes do it. But how about written words? The ability to think was then equated with fire. And the sun, which is fire, associated with life. Fire of course is crucial, because it enabled us to evolve at all, because we could then eat meat.
It would make sense then that the earliest politicians were those that sought the human race to devolve, by going back to eating vegetation. Just like today. Because God, or Gaia, demands it. I bet it turns out that the Turkish temple dates from a feminised era, ie no logic, only superstition. No strong men or warriors - only sophistry.
A time or place becomes feminised when there is a relative paucity of women, as observed by Roissy in a recent post. This means they become worth more, and can throw their weight around more. Men put them on pedestals, and become weaker. That is, there is a disarming of men, in reproductive terms.
All the ills of the world happen when people come together. When there is centralisation. When they "get on" (ie bitch behind backs) instead of sparring, playing or fighting. When they compromise. When they stay in one place and ossify, instead of moving around - and moving sloooowly, not dashing around like an idiot. When women are treated as more than trophies. When the outside is considered more important than the inside. When the collective good goes above the individual. When words mean more than actions.
Now the obvious retort to all this is - are you kidding? You think we should revert to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and be like all those half-naked people we see in Africa on the TV? What about all the progress we've made since then? Civilisation. The industrial revolution. Health care, consumer goods, education, the finer things in life, the abundant food, culture, music, cars, transport. Science, the amazing discoveries we've made. We've been to the moon, and the bottom of the ocean. We split the atom. Do you think we could have done all this without agriculture?
My answer: yes, and at least 1000 years earlier, and better.
Everything that has come from religion has slowed us down. You think the Church helped in all of this? The Romans? Governments? Even the industrial revolution - do people really believe that those slave factories were necessary? Those furnaces, resembling Dante's inferno? The mines, those hellish pits cratered in humanity?
We would have figured out the use of oil without priests and governments. It is absurd to think otherwise. But instead we have huge oil cartels propping up societies that would be better off dead, for all the joy and vigour they bring to the world. It's true that there's too many people on this planet, but that's because of agriculture, industrialisation and fascism. The thing about agriculture, of course, is that it allowed for an explosion in the quantity of people, at the expense of quality of people. I've met perfectly "normal" people these days who are all for compulsory sterilisation, and I guess that means we're getting close to another holocaust of some kind.
So yeah, let's kill a few million here, a few million there... A bit of sterilisation, bit of NHS style genocide, gas chambers, nuclear bomb here, machete gang there...
Except that the problem wouldn't go away, would it? And besides, it's you next. Does nobody fucking understand that?
So what is it that makes us susceptible to being tyrannised, and can we overcome it? And make no mistake about it - we need to overcome it. Life is not zero-sum. When a trade is made, both people benefit. That's true holistic activity - it's more than the sum of it's parts. That's how we grow - though self-interest, free trade and self-strengthening measures.
So where does the invisible boot originate? From a general disarming by deception.
Is it not inevitable that governments would arise? Rees-Mogg and Davidson
talk about the megapolitics of war, which is to say, nation states had to arise because industry gave way to economies of scale in warfare. To put it another way, it made sense now for countries to fight each other, because we now had planes, and machine guns, and bombs.
But, as I will discuss sometime, economies of scale (and monopolies) only ever arise because of government. And anyway - how about guerilla warfare? America hasn't won a single war since WW2. Unless you count Grenada, which you shouldn't. And then look closer - didn't the USA pretty much fund both sides of both World Wars? Didn't the UK also, for that matter? Aren't they doing the same thing now around the globe? Isn't something funny going on here?
There's no such thing as a nation state - they're for the little people. There's only been a snake-like global elite profiting from war for hundreds of years, without having to get their own hands dirty. Nothing is as it seems, we've all been enormously, hugely misled as to the nature of things. Our understanding of history is warped beyond any semblance of reality.
So we come back to deception. So perhaps its the difference between belief and non-belief. If you believe anything, you can be controlled. If you believe nothing, you can do anything.
From Might is Right:

Belief  is  a  flunkey,  a  feminine — Doubt  is  a creator,  a  master.  He  who  denies fundamentals  is  in  triple  armor  clad.  Indeed  he  is invulnerable. Strong men are not deterred from pursuing their aim by anything. They go straight to the goal, and  that goal  is Beauty, Wealth, and Material Power.

Can we learn not to believe? Or will we continue on the historically extraordinary path of being ruled by the weak and venal?

Pondering the right of might

I
Following on from my mention the other day of Might is Right (MIR), I was wondering what it all implied. The author seems to be saying that it is all very well that a proportion of the population is governed by leaders. But, and this is crucial, only if these leaders are the strong. That is, the warriors, the best and brightest. The brave and ruthless, those who pursue power, gold and women, who conquer.
We all know that we are not "ruled" by the best and brightest. As Celente says, they couldn't lead me across the street. And they are cowards. We haven't had a leader who's actually faced the heat of battle since Eisenhower and Churchill.
But these venal people may be the most ruthless, in a sociopathic sense. They use others, they use the power of religion and symbols and secret networks to get what they want. And what they want is everyone else dead, or controlled.
If you can't see the invisible hand, but only the invisible boot, then this is how you would think. That is, seeing the world in a zero sum way: if I take some pie, that's less for someone else.
Another word for ruthless yet cowardly people is bullies. Why are we allowing ourselves to be bullied?
II
Plato said: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
Now, I'm pretty suspicious of Plato, being as he was the one to come up with the idea of the philosopher king in the first place. But is he right here? I think he may have it backwards. Politics is a loathsome beast, and it mainly means sophistry and deceit - lies. It would strike many thinking people that one of the penalties for engaging in politics is that you end up being governed by your superiors. That is to say, democracy is a sham and a lie, as stated in MIR.
III
I wonder how this relates to women? They go for status, for sure, but what about when the elites are the weak and venal?
There's something interesting going on here. Because the elites, although they dominate in a sense, tend to inbreed and fuck themselves up, eventually. Then there's the fact that the men most likely to mate these days are convicts, serial killers and criminals. Especially with the welfare state as it is, so there's no need for beta males at all.
Perhaps the self-regulating thing, then. We're in a cycle. The beta male genes will be weeded out, so we'll have a planet of alphas who start to turn the world into what it ought to be, which is a world of conflict and the truest type of meritocracy - that is rising or falling by your true merits.

It's not a conspiracy

"I'm not inclined to believe in conspiracies. As anyone who's tried to get three friends to agree on a movie or a dinner knows, it's hard to get even such a small number of people on the same page on something as simple as that – much less hatching plans to take over the world."
Doug Casey

The 25 minutes or so spent interviewing John Perkins is probably the most eye-opening part of Zeitgeist: Addendum. Perkins denies the existence of a conspiracy, because he sees the US as a corporatocracy, in which there is no need for a plot, as politicians like Dick Cheney—who first was a self-professed "public servant" congressman, Secretary of Defense then served as the head of a construction company Halliburton before becoming Vice President—are alleged to be working under the same primary assumption as corporations: that maximization of profits is first priority, regardless of any social or environmental cost.

Yes - that's just it, and what so many miss who do see the wrongness going on. That's one of the things holding up public understanding of this mess: It's not a conspiracy, in the sense that its a deliberate machination of a small number of people, whether it's Jews, masons, the Bilderberg group, or whoever. It's simply the reverse of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" - an invisible fist, or boot, if you like. It's what happens when, instead of the free market or anarchy, you have government, or protection rackets, or myths, or obfuscation and widespread deceit. And these in turn come about when you disarm the mass of people. Turns out you can do it by deceit rather than violence - et voila! Snakes at the top, rather than great men and warriors.

How do we reverse the invisible boot? We re-arm, starting with information, health and strong networks. And the real biggie: courage. For standing aside and watching an evil go on, without intervening, is arguably a greater evil than that which is directly being acted out.