SUBVERSION FROM WITHIN: How the Freeloaders Gerrymandered Their Way to the Top

In an eye-opening article by Robert Bregman entitled “Why Society’s Biggest Freeloaders Are at the Top”, I began to make some sense of the nonsense of the official mainstream narratives that were being peddled about in the economic and political spheres. As stated in the first paragraph:

“This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state.”

With regards to the freeloaders, this is what he had to say:

“It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I’ll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole….

…Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion. Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim, earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell, who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent…

…“The world’s most powerful investment bank,” wrote the journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs, “is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker. He goes to great lengths to present himself as a “job creator” and an “investor” who “earns” his income by virtue of his high “productivity”. Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation”.

And then I read an article by the economist Jefferey Sacks entitled Big Data and Big Money have subverted our democracy, which shows inter alia how they may have colluded to gerrymander Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 elections.

(Please see earlier articles explaining what gerrymandering is all about and how it can be viewed as occurring at several levels, both at the socioeconomic and geopolitical levels: Constitutional boundary changes – only the tip of the gerrymandering iceberg and Trust but Verify: A ground/bottom-up approach to evidence-based politics)

He wrote:

“In American politics today, corporations reign supreme. Powerful corporations control American politics through Big Money and Big Data. Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress represent the ultimate corporate play, with the powers of the executive and legislative branches turned over to the most destructive corporate special interests…

…The other major economic news this week was the continuing profit surge of Big Data, with the combined market cap of Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft topping $3.2 trillion. We are gradually coming to understand how these Big Data companies earn mega-fortunes and mega-power through the processing and sale of the personal data they collect on all of us without our knowledge or real consent. Our private data, suitably processed through machine learning algorithms, are used to micro-target consumers and voters to manipulate both markets and elections. Consumers in this case, as has often been pointed out, are not the customers of Big Data, but the product.

The most powerful people in the United States are the billionaire corporate owners of these companies, who finance political campaigns, deploy lobbyists, and threaten members of Congress who fall out of line. They warn members of Congress that a “wrong” (anti-corporate) vote will lead to negative ads and a primary challenger, thereby making automatons of most members of Congress, especially the Republican Party. Those who buck the tide, such as Arizona’s Senator Jeff Flake, survive politically only long enough to resign.

The power of Big Money combined with Big Data is still only dimly understood. Trump’s leading billionaire backer, right-wing hedge fund owner Robert Mercer, together with Steve Bannon, backed the Big Data operation Cambridge Analytica, which claims to have private data on more than 230 million Americans. How did the company amass this vast data trove of personal information? Did it buy it? Did it benefit from hackers? Did it use the data to help Vladimir Putin’s agents to target their fake news via Facebook, Google, and Twitter? Will we ever know?

Some of the most powerful companies are privately owned, and therefore especially secretive. That is true of Purdue Pharma and Cambridge Analytica, and of Koch Industries, the notorious oil and gas firm owned by the right-wing brothers David and Charles Koch, who have used their $100 billion combined net worth to buy up university departments, fund libertarian think tanks, and finance the PACs of politicians like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator majority leader Mitch McConnell.

The ability of companies to hide their tracks was grotesquely abetted by the notorious Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which permits unlimited secret corporate and individual giving to political action committees. We have no comprehensive accounts of the political machinations of billionaires like Mercer, the Koch brothers, and Sheldon Adelson. Yet we do know that total campaign spending now adds up to several billion dollars each political cycle, and we also see the effects clearly in our politics. On every key issue, corporate interests now dominate the public interests…”

There is much more in the article, which I would advise you to read in its entirety, but for sake of highlighting the subversion, the above exhibit should suffice.

Then, fortuitously, I was sent a paper for comments by a family member of a friend whom I met last Christmas. He is a Masters’ student in Philosophy with a keen interest in deciphering the evolutionary basis for altruism at the group level of selection. He was kind enough to allow me to republish it here: “Explaining Altruism: A New Defence of Group Selection” By Keyana C. Sapp.

What piqued my interest was his reference to and my discovery of the concept of ‘subversion from within.’ He writes:

“The pursuit of understanding human cooperative behaviour is fraught with semantic inconsistency. As a result, it is especially important to clarify some definitions. To help maintain regularity, I will employ the explanatory framework described by Lehmann & Keller (2006. 1365-1376). I shall describe any behaviour which increases the relative fitness of a recipient as helping behaviour. Existing within the set of helping is cooperation, which refers to any behaviour that improves the fitness of another individual as well as the focal individual (FI) herself. In this sense, all cooperative behaviour can be considered a form of mutualism, whereby both parties benefit. Altruism, on the other hand, refers to behaviour that improves the fitness of another individual, at a detriment to the FI’s own fitness. Therefore, altruistic behaviour can be thought of as a subset of helping behaviour, but distinct from cooperation. There are two kinds of benefits gained from cooperative behaviour. They are direct and indirect benefits. When an action benefits the FI directly, that is to say the benefit is gained immediately. When an action benefits the FI indirectly, we are describing expected future benefits that come as a result of a present behaviour through repeated interactions. Applying the three selective pressures for cooperation to the categorical definitions above, we will find that cooperation is parsable into direct benefits and reciprocation, while altruism reduces to kin selection. With the fundamental principles clarified, we move onto the problem of altruism.

“He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.”

– Charles Darwin
The Descent of Man, p. 163.

The problem of altruism has posed issues for Darwinian theory since its original conception. Given what we know about natural selection and the importance of individual competition, it seems impossible for evolution to favour cooperative behaviour over selfish, exploitative behaviour. However, examples of cooperative behaviour are abundant in nature. Sterile worker bees, blood-sharing vampire bats, human social institutions and many others, all serve as evidence of this fact. If evolution operates solely at the level of the individual, then the operative evolutionary pressure must be for self preservation, and pro-social behaviours would be selected against. But they are too prevalent for this to be plausible.

The first attempt to deal with the problem was a provisional form of group selection. This position suggested that whilst altruistic behaviour is detrimental to the fitness of the individual, it improves the relative fitness of the group as a whole. This higher level increase in fitness is said to displace the individual selective pressures to act selfishly. Cooperative behaviour, according to early group selectionists, evolved in this way. However, this kind of explanation has been dismissed for two main reasons. First, is the free-rider problem. This is the claim that in a group containing exclusively altruists, it would take only one selfish mutant to infiltrate the ranks to be at a huge fitness advantage relative to the rest of the group. Should a mutant arise, then selection will favour her reproduction over the rest of the group, and the altruistic condition would slowly cease to exist. This criticism of early group selection was made famous by Richard Dawkins, dubbing the problem ‘subversion from within’ (Dawkins, 1976. 72). Second, mathematical models have shown that selection at the level of groups is a relatively weak evolutionary force in comparison to selection at the level of the individual (Maynard Smith, 1964. 1145-1147). As a consequence, the idea of group selection as a significant evolutionary force fell out of fashion in mainstream biology. Even today, the consensus is largely that group selection is too weak an evolutionary pressure to be a realistic explanation of altruistic behaviour (see Earnshaw, 2015. and Jeler, 2016)…

…In order for altruism to be a trait favoured by selection at the level of the group, altruists within a group must be able to choose to associate with other altruists. As discussed above, this is to ensure that the group is not at risk of subversion from within. When employing mathematical models to understand the evolution of specific traits, it is helpful to assume that the trait arose by random mutation, and as a result, the trait must have existed with very limited frequency when it first appeared. A difficulty arises. Altruists do very poorly when modelled at very low frequencies. This is because they are rarely in contact with other altruists to form cooperative groups with. This is what Wilson and Dugatkin refer to as the problem of origination (Wilson & Dugatkin, 1997. 336-338). The problem is further complicated when we consider the mechanisms by which altruistic tendencies might be recognised by other altruists. Critics of group selection have argued the problem of origination in addition to worries about the ability of altruists to recognise other altruists within large populations requires that we look elsewhere for answers about the origins of altruism. Typically, the alternative explanation is kin selection. This is because kin selection does not suffer from the problem of origination. An altruistic mutant who mates with a non-altruist creates a kin group made up of 50% altruists. Furthermore, kin groups are obviously not vulnerable to the same issues of recognition as larger population groups…

...I admit that the scope of group selection within the context of a multi-level selection theory is limited. In order for it to apply legitimately, three primary conditions must be satisfied. First, there must be significant variation amongst groups as a result of a specific trait. Second, cognitive capacities within the group must be high enough to regulate behaviour within the group. This is to ensure a relatively uniform distribution of the adaptive trait within the population. Third, the adaptive trait in question must be continuous. This has led me to the conclusion that selection at the level of the group is the best method for explaining altruistic behaviour at the level of human beings. The propagation of linguistic mechanisms aided cooperation to such an extent that variation amongst the level of fitness of human groups was hugely significant. The resultant ability for human groups to adapt to their environments especially quickly only served to catalyse this effect. Furthermore, punishment mechanisms based in the heightened cognitive capacities discussed above prevented these altruistic groups from being infiltrated by cheaters. This meant that human groups were especially homogenous with respect to the trait of altruism, thus strengthening the case for the application of group selection in explaining altruistic behaviour. Finally, phenotypic plasticity amongst human beings requires that selective variation amongst altruistic behaviours must be continuous rather than discrete. As a result group selectionist reasoning with respect to the origins of human altruism does not fall foul of the common criticism of the problem of origination. All of this leads me to the conclusion that the common explanatory mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation in nature do not satisfactorily account for cooperation at the level of human beings, and that group selection within the context of a multi-level selection framework is where we must look for its best explanation.”

This immediately brought to mind the two articles cited above and these were some of my responses:

“I have completed your paper and it is superb. Our research are converging and you have given me more food for thought. I agree with your conclusion about the three primary conditions for altruism to work at the group level. The reason why we do not appear to be altruists culturally is that there are cultural institutions like religion, schooling and political power that dictate conformity rather than variability, and selects against this selection at the group level. It is like subversion from within by the elite ruling classes, to ensure that they are more fit than the masses; a form of imposed reversed altruism. [By the masses “helping” the elites to become fitter at the expense of their own individual and collective fitness, this appears to be a form of atruism imposed from the top, rather than it evolving spontaneously form the ground-bottom up (note added here for clarification)]. You are correct that our creative imagination provides the plasticity for super-cooperation, but it is being blinkered out by the dominant ideologies to promote their fake ideology of (our human nature being) competition and survival of the fittest individual, rather than survival of the cooperative group which is what gave us a selective advantage (as a species) in the first place. The last 10,000 years has been hijacked by the ruling classes and it is time to set the record straight for once and all for one and all. Keep up the good work…

…By the way, the ruling elites have captured our rule creating and credit creating and narrative creating institutions and are able to drive selection in their vested interests, hence the cultural anomalies we see. A total inversion of the natural order of things. That is the cultural DNA that we have inherited up to this day.”

Then I set off to find a conceptual and mathematical model to explain this capture of our cultural sphere by the gerrymandering of the rules of conduct by the ruling classes that would enable them to become free-riders/freeloaders without our knowing what had hit us. I came across two obscure articles which I republished here: Selected articles on how a memetic understanding of altruism can lead to cultural transformation.  The one that provided the mathematical model entitled A JUSTIFICATION OF SOCIETAL ALTRUISM ACCORDING TO THE MEMETIC APPLICATION OF HAMILTON’S RULE, opined:

“Charles Darwin described the sterility of certain castes of social insects, and more generally, the reproductive self-sacrifice such organisms represented, as “one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory.”[1] In the 1960’s, W.D. Hamilton “inaugurated” the theory of “kin selection,” which offered a brilliantly simple explanation for such altruistic behavior.[2] As Holldobler and Wilson explain, “Hamilton recognized the importance of a measure he called inclusive fitness, which incorporates both the individual’s personal reproduction (classical fitness) and its influence on the reproduction of collateral relatives.”[3]

The essentials of kin selection and inclusive fitness are summarized according to a simple equation, called “Hamilton’s Rule,” which is expressed: C/B < b. “This says that the cost C (which is the loss in expected personal reproductive success through the self-sacrificing behavior) divided by the benefit B (the increase in the relatives’ expected reproductive success) must be less than b, the probability that the relatives have the same allele,”[4]if the altruist gene is to survive natural selection…

…As currently applied, Hamilton’s Rule is based solely on the static nature of genetic identity: because an organism’s genetic makeup is fixed for the duration of the organism’s lifespan, any two organisms will either share a copy of a gene or they will not, and this objective fact is measured according to probability and familial relation. However, since memes are capable of horizontal reproduction (whether through imitation or linguistic communication), it is possible that any meme, including an altruist meme, could express itself in favor of (and, therefore, presumably in the presence of) a non-carrier competitor and thereby copy itself into the memetic (i.e., neuronal) structure of the competitor. In short, a competitor directly experiencing the benefits of another’s self-sacrifice might subsequently imitate such altruistic behavior for no other reason than having experienced such behavior first-hand. Consequently, one should expect various factors (whether genetically encoded, memetically encoded, or both) to evolve throughout a population which would enhance or detract from the probability of such imitation (e.g., empathy, admiration, so-called “open-” or “close-mindedness,” etc.).[17] Any given meme or set of memes could likewise evolve various mechanisms to increase the probability of such imitation (e.g., cognitive or psychological appeal, etc.).[18] Hence, it is conceivable that some factor or set of factors could be delineated that would determine the relative rate of conversion (from non-carrier-competitor to carrier-clone) for any given meme within a certain population.

This rate of conversion shall be expressed as a new variable, to be added to the right side of Hamilton’s Rule since it will operate to increase the likelihood that the beneficiary organism(s) will carry a copy of the same altruistic meme (following the altruistic encounter). Because the rate of conversion will have no application where a beneficiary already carries a copy of the altruist meme, it will only modify the probability that a beneficiary does not carry a copy of the altruist meme, which is described by (1-b). Therefore, the memetically adapted Rule is: C/B = b + c(1-b), where the rate of conversion [c] measures the likelihood that expression of a meme will “infect” a non-carrier and thereby convert the non-carrier into a carrier.

According to the memetic application of Hamilton’s Rule, the key factor to success for altruistic behavior is not a high probability of clone status (with regard to the altruistic gene) based on genetic familial relation, but a high probability of clone status (with regard to the altruistic meme), based on a population’s horizontal reproductive fertility. Indeed, a highly infectious, altruistic meme (e.g., 80% conversion rate) existing in a small fraction (e.g., 10%) of the population would still enjoy a very high probability (72%) that expression of any copy, in favor of any random member of the population, would serve to benefit that meme’s (growing) copy-set (all other things being equal). Assuming acceptable criteria and empirical data can be established to give real meaning to the “rate of conversion” for any given meme, the memetic application of Hamilton’s Rule offers a comprehensive justification for general (intra-societal, or intra-cultural) altruism. Meanwhile, it can be said with newfound certainty that purely altruistic behavior is possible within any memetically fertile population.”

The conceptual article which was also pivotal What makes a meme successful? Selection criteria for cultural evolution opined:

“Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underlie biological evolution (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981). This implies a shift from genes as (replicating) units of biological information to a new type of (replicating) units of cultural information: memes (Dawkins, 1976). A meme can be defined as an information pattern, held in an individual’s memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual’s memory. This includes anything that can be learned or remembered: ideas, knowledge, habits, beliefs, skills, images, etc. Memetics can then be defined as the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes (Moritz, 1990).

To be replicated, a meme must pass successfully through four subsequent stages: 1) assimilation by an individual, who thereby becomes a host of the meme; 2) retention in that individual’s memory; 3) expression by the individual in language, behavior or another form that can be perceived by others; 4) transmission of the thus created message or meme vehicle to one or more other individuals. This last stage is followed again by stage 1, thus closing the replication loop. At each stage there is selection, meaning that some memes will be eliminated. The present paper will look in more detail at the mechanisms governing these four stages, and present a list of selection criteria that allow us to estimate the fitness of a meme relative to its competitors.

Meme fitness

The overall survival rate of a meme m can be expressed as the meme fitness F(m), which measures the average number of memes at moment t divided by the average number of memes at the previous time step or “generation” t – 1. This fitness can be expressed in a simplified model as the product of the fitnesses or survival rates for each of the four stages, respectively assimilation A, retention R, expression E and transmission T:

F(m) = A(m) . R(m) . E(m) . T(m)…

…Which memes will most successfully pass all these stages can be modelled by a series of selection criteria. These criteria are discussed in more detail in earlier papers (Heylighen, 1993, 1997). I will here basically situate them with respect to the four replication stages. The criteria can be grouped into different families, distinguished by the system responsible for the selection. At present, we have no method to derive the value of the fitness components from the degree to which a meme fulfils the different criteria. This does not mean that no predictions can be made, though. All other things being equal, a meme that scores better on one of these criteria is predicted to become more numerous in the population than a meme that scores worse.

stages\selectors	Objective	Subjective	Inter-subjective	Meme-centered
Assimilation	distinctiveness	novelty simplicity coherence	authority formality	self-justification
Retention	invariance controllability	coherence utility	conformity	self-reinforcement intolerance
Expression			expressivity	proselytism
Transmission			publicity	proselytism

Table 1: a summary of the main selection criteria for memes, classified according to the stage during which they are most active, and the system responsible for the selection.

Conclusion

This simple four stage model helps us to analyse the mechanics of meme replication, and the different requirements a meme must satisfy to spread successfully. It moreover helps us to situate and to systematize a more intuitively developed list of objective, subjective, intersubjective and meme-centered selection criteria. Although the four stage model suggests a formula for calculating memetic fitness, the theory is as yet insufficiently developed to unambiguously determine the parameters of the equation. However, the list of selection criteria does produce a range of qualitative predictions, which can be empirically tested.”

(Please review Susan Blackmore – From Genes to Memes to T(r)emes and the resource links attached for more information on memes and memetics.)

Both articles which put a memetic understanding of cultural evolution at the core are connected if we equate the rate of conversion of meme ‘infection’ with the meme fitness given by the dimensions of rates of assimilation, retention, expression and transmission of the meme under consideration. This thus becomes the Achilles’ heel of cultural evolution that has been captured, colonized, domesticated and capitalized by the scribes (the cultural soldiers) of the ruling classes (cultural kings/queens) over the ages to gerrymander the rules of conduct of the masses (the cultural workers) so that they can free-load and free-ride roughshod over everyone else. This gerrymandering has been institutionalized and has been given normative names like public relations, advertising and marketing, propaganda and spin, and now being called out for what it is, FAKE NEWS! They have even gone to the jugular of our very social being by capturing the most vulnerable, impressionable and formative individuals (our children and other marginalized adults) in all of our pedagogy and academic institutions to boot. Regrettably this most vulnerable demographic is where most of our rates of conversion via the programming of every stage of memetic assimilation, retention, expression and transmission occur during our individual and collective cultural evolution and destabilizations. (Please see: It has been accomplished! Violence = Acquired Life Destabilisation Syndrome (ALDS), and The Malignant Normality of Childhood Terrorism.)

This was above all cultural selection being conflated as “natural” selection, where even our best philosophical ideas and scientific theories have been selected and gerrymandered by the ruling class freeloaders to leverage their financing so as to again amplify advantages in their favour and disadvantages to everyone else. It is now clear that our best evolutionary theories were not immune to this insincere gerrymandering effort and that the “problem of altruism” was misplaced, and only became a “problem” for the officialy narrated gerrymandered evolution theory in the first place – we falsely assumed that our human nature was “naturally” competitive, selfish and self-maximizing rather than the true default state of human nature over 99% of human evolution which was altruistic and cooperative and giving of self to others in the first place. (Please see: 1) Narvaez, D. (2013). The 99%–Development and socialization within an evolutionary context: Growing up to become  “A good and useful human being.” and 2) Selfishness, warfare, and economics; or integration, cooperation, and biology by Emiliano Salvucci for more details of the causes and consequences of the this gerrymandered fake image of human nature).

Interestingly, a groundbreaking missive last week by Prof Richard Wrangham entitled Two types of aggression in human evolution looked at human aggression, which can be viewed as a form of imposed reversed altruism, where the fitness of the victim is decreased for the benefit of the victimiser over time of repeated and sustained divide and rule aggression.

“Two major types of aggression, proactive and reactive, are associated with contrasting expression, eliciting factors, neural pathways, development, and function. The distinction is useful for understanding the nature and evolution of human aggression. Compared with many primates, humans have a high propensity for proactive aggression, a trait shared with chimpanzees but not bonobos. By contrast, humans have a low propensity for reactive aggression compared with chimpanzees, and in this respect humans are more bonobo-like. The bimodal classification of human aggression helps solve two important puzzles. First, a long-standing debate about the significance of aggression in human nature is misconceived, because both positions are partly correct. The Hobbes–Huxley position rightly recognizes the high potential for proactive violence, while the Rousseau–Kropotkin position correctly notes the low frequency of reactive aggression. Second, the occurrence of two major types of human aggression solves the execution paradox, concerned with the hypothesized effects of capital punishment on self-domestication in the Pleistocene. The puzzle is that the propensity for aggressive behavior was supposedly reduced as a result of being selected against by capital punishment, but capital punishment is itself an aggressive behavior. Since the aggression used by executioners is proactive, the execution paradox is solved to the extent that the aggressive behavior of which victims were accused was frequently reactive, as has been reported. Both types of killing are important in humans, although proactive killing appears to be typically more frequent in war. The biology of proactive aggression is less well known and merits increased attention.“

It appears to me that the reason why the biology of proactive aggression is less well known may because they are not looking in the right place for its determinants, which from information I have presented thus far appears to be less biological and more cultural in nature.

I also found it very puzzling that he did not cite any of the work of the father of affective neuroscience Jack Panksepp, especially, his 2004 paper entitled Towards A Neurobiologically Based Unified Theory of Aggression, and his last book (2012) entitled The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (especially Chapter 4).

Based on the full range of his expertise in the field, Panksepp postulated that the reactive aggression occurs as a result of arousal of the primary emotional RAGE neural circuits when the SEEKING behaviour of the organism becomes frustrated and is defensive in nature. And proactive or appetitive aggression occurs when there is arousal of the primary emotional SEEKING neural circuits when the organism is hungry and prepares to stalk its prey for food. This proactive aggression is the the natural expression of a predatory feeding behaviour which evolved to provide for the sustenance and maintainance and ultimately survival of the organism.

(Please see From Life-Blind Mindedness to Life-Grounded Heartfulness: Our Emotional GPS Revealed and  An illustrated guide to our long forsaken Emotional GPS for more information on these primary emotional circuits).

What I now realize, having reflected on what I have learnt so far, is that these life-enabling ancestral circuits have become co-opted and gerrymandered for enabling predatory life-dysfunctional behaviours in our cultural spheres of money-maximising with life-depreciating perverse incentives and rewards, and which has, truth be told, culturally regressed us as we became indoctrinated and conditioned to be no longer homo sapiens sapiens but become homo economicus. This is captured succinctly in the now legitimized predatory maxim of “Greed is GOOD” and has fostered the justifications of manufactured “exuberant irrationalities” of fake financial asset bubbles in the market, be they tulips, real estate, stock, bonds, equity and now cryptocurrencies.

The ultimate aim was to create a herd mentality of the masses to satisfy the predatory now-biologically imprinted, culturally manufactured whims and fancies of the ruling class. So the life-dysfunctional proactive aggression of premedititated homocides at the group level (aka wars) may not at all be inborn errors in our biology and thus not our defining human nature, but may have been forged in the crucible of “civilized”  ‘subversion from within’ gerrymandering by the ruling class of the political and economic cultural constructs of their time that has survived up to this day. (Please see: Why You’re Likely to Ignore the Experts Who Are Trying to Warn People About Bitcoin, and Yanis Varoufakis: ‘Bitcoin is the perfect bubble, but blockchain is a remarkable solution’.)

As a matter of fact all of our social and cultural global problems we face today are all man-made. They have all been scripted in the past and in the present to favour the continued power and privilege of the vested interests of the ruling class and to regulate and control us as cannon fodder in their life-and-death war against the majority of ‘their’ Peoples over the eons and ‘their’ Planet to do as they please.

George Orwell was very prescient in being able to decipher all this out in the 1940s. He summarized beautifully the cultural distortion of our full human potential when he wrote:

“Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.”

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“Big Brother is Watching You.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

― George Orwell, 1984

So the freeloaders have captured 1) the modes of production, distribution and communications (universal human life necessities, be they concrete or conceptual), and have gerrymandered 2) the rules of conduct and engagement “enshrined” in all of our narratives (scriptures, treaties and constitutions), and have also gerrymandered 3) the rules of credit creation and guidance (banking and financing).  In order to maintain their monopolistic, hegemonic, domination system at little cost to them, and at great (imposed reversed) altrusitic cost to the majority of people and life forms on the planet, they have gerrymandered the 4) cognitive, affective, behavioural and social mindscapes of the masses, hence the irrational apathy-tolerance-acquiescence to the blatant and rampant escalating poverty, wealth inequality and corruption we see in our local, regional and international arenas.

By “coercing us” with our “tacit consent” to buy into their overpriced but fake snake-oil narratives of the justified survival of the fittest self-maximizing predatory competitors, the ruling elite class has sabotaged our cooperative individual human nature and stunted our collective other-serving, group-optimizing, altruistic and prosocial nature. They have in effect committed the ultimate “crime against humanity” by undermining our individual and collective human capital and capacity development and our intrinsic freedoms for individuation, self-actualization and self-determination of those capacities at the individual and collective levels. It is not surprising anymore that they veil their “dehumanizing and destabilising interventions” in wars for coveted resources and territories, regime change, invasions and occupation as “humanitarian interventions” and they use “human shields and props” as cannon fodder to further their nefarious agendas.

This ‘subversion from within’ by the elite ruling class free-riders explain the anomalous behaviour we have seen at the highest levels of government and diplomacy around the world today, and allows us to make sense of all the nonsense we see at play as they speak. This issue of veto power at our most austere UN body of diplomacy is very much part of the ‘subversion from within’ by the elite ruling class, who also control the diktats of other supranational collective entitites such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO, and central banks of the world through their BIS.

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to throw some light on the father of all contemporary ‘subversions from within’. The supreme authors of collusion and confusion of our present world disorder are the Christian, Wahabbi and Jewish Zionist elements that have provided the supreme straight-jacket financed narrative which served to consolidate their power and resource grab to divide the Semetic people of the Middle East Region. Interestingly they have managed with impunity to reframe any criticism against their Zionist ethnically cleansing agendas as anti-Semitic (a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black), when truth be told Zionism is foremost a political ideology with very deep-rooted exclusivist racist and religious undertones and overtones. This is the greatest challenge we as humanity faces right now. This is the ultimate ‘subversion from within’ as the Zionists as a group (be they of Christian, Wahabbi or Jewish persuasions) have used their financial, political and diplomatic hegemonic competitive advantage to destabilize, marginalize and undermine the solidarity and unity of the people in the Region and by extension all the Peoples of the world. By manufacturing discontent and malcontent in every sphere of human engagement, be it political, economical and financial, they have twisted the free-riding problem of group selection (by manufacturing “unatural” scarcity and insecurity and imposing hypercompetitive rules of engagment, thus over-riding our natural super-cooperative instinctual senses and sensibilities). In short, they have rigged the system to their own advantage and have used this manufactured weakness of group selection and made it their strength to undermine the integrity of group solidarity for everyone else.

This is the basis for the sayings, be it social (“Divide and Conquer to Rule”), be it political (“Might is Always Right”), be it economic (“Greed is Good), and when all else fails, use force and fear mongering (“When You are Wrong, You Have to be Strong”).

In the next few blogs, I will attempt to tie together many of the recent discoveries which I have posted on this blog site in the past few weeks, that provide us with hope at the end of the proverbial tunnel of despair and fear, so that we can get on with the Great Awakening and Great Turning and the Global Project of Writing the Wrongs of the Past and Repairing the Damages Done as we Reconcile the Truths to get our cultural evolution back on track after it has gone off course over the millennia.  This we must do and where we must go if everyone, including the freeloaders, are to deal effectively and in a timely manner with the multi-domain destabilizations in our midst.

These destabilizations are the unintended consequences of our dominant hegemonic life-dysfunctional cultural upbringing and so, as a group, moreso than ever before, we must all shoulder some of the blame and some of the burdens and some of the responsibilities. This must be so, as we have been unwitting agents, both victims and victimizers, inclusive of us and the freeloaders, by our thoughts, felt side of being and acts of commissions and omissions, as we have created untold damage and undermined the integrity of the life supporting systems of our bodies, and that of our societies and most important of all, that of our one and only planet.

Since these problems are not intrinsic to our biological human nature but are extrinsic and are symptoms and signs of our life-dysfunctional and life-destabilizing misguided cultural human nature, the problems we faced are all man-made and by this reasoning and logic, we can once again reclaim our homo sapiens sapiens human legacy and work together in solidarity as a group, as one humanity, to self-rehabilitate and to re-vision our way forward.

Please stay tune!!

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If you have not seen the previous post “George Orwell and 1984: How Freedom Dies”, I highly recommend you do so as it was the inspiration that catalysed the letter and spirit of this post.

Reproduced from: George Orwell and 1984: How Freedom Dies (academyofideas.com)

Also the two videos below use the power of art and storytelling to highlight this subversion from within our popular culture.

Reproduced from: IN-SHADOW – A Modern Odyssey – Animated Short Film – YouTube

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Reproduced from: The Case Against The Jedi Order – YouTube