What is money except a form of loot, and loot is any portable form of wealth which can and will be taken from someone who has kept it up to that point? What is it except some sort of value in some sort of context? Not all values can be taken from a person, but what can is, in this world, coveted by those who do not have it. That's a fact
Throughout history, loot has been among the chief rewards to those who attack and slaughter others, whether killing them outright or else first brutally abusing and enslaving them after wiping out their former, perhaps not-too-virtuous rulers. In fact, the main problem in a lot of history's massive wars was the availability of portable loot! If only the people had converted their resources into something more akin to personal virtue, distributed the collective gains more fairly so that it wasn't concentrated in any one big treasury, and also spent more time as individuals developing their martial virtues as well as their industrial ones. Perhaps their governments, their neighbors, surrounding peoples whether friend or foe would have all been more wary of attacking and robbing them in the first place, whether by force or the threat of it.
But the accumulation of concentrated forms of wealth, of LOOT really, has been a great pleasure for the upper classes. It's their ticket to luxury, and the more convertible it is into various values, the better. Money doesn't just round out the rough edges of barter, but it allows a few hands to hold a lot of economic power.
None of this undermines the utility of money for the wage slaves inside cities and surrounding areas, but it just says that this utility is a subset of a different sort of utility which people ought to be more familiar with by now, which is the concentration of total wealth in a society into the hands and coffers of the fewer and fewer. But what is the meaning of all this except for collective, systemic robbery under the color of authority and law?
Looking back at the original opportunists of the earliest days of agrarian civilization, their city-based secret societies and clubs have always been and still are the de facto rulers of the "civilized world". They do have marvelous tricks up their sleeve for making sure that they and theirs are always the best paid, and their methods are no secret. Unfair wealth distribution within a company, for example, is the prerogative of those who founded the company, no matter how little of the work they do and no matter how much of the profit would only have been possible by no matter how many more willing and industrious workers. As one fellow worker once said to me about the company boss "It ain't like that son of bitch can cut himself up into 4 of him and do these jobs himself". This was in reference to how much money he kept from those of us who were working split shifts most days of the week, over 55 hours on average, and yet not getting overtime. There were some rules about split shifts which made overtime what was worked after 60 hours instead of 40, or something to that effect.
Loopholes in the system of work which passes for an "economy" are easily provided to those who give the proper kickbacks to those protection racketeers which are still with us since ancient times. It helps when the company is in fact controlled by people who are members of secret societies who have also infiltrated all sectors of government and the economy. It makes it easier for these secret groups to make all conflicts, all agreements, all benefits accrue to their benefit, no matter how they originate or seem to publicly occur.
Look at the biggest fraud that is plainly visible to all in the world, to all in the land: The Federal Reserve System. First of all, it is a private 'bank' which is contracted with the government. Basically, and it will never be explained to you this way, nor in a basic way as to what it actually does, this bank launders wealth from the public and provides a legalistic means of transferring said wealth from the many to the few. It is a massive system of robbery. The private holders of the bank, because it is a non-stock corporation, are the ones who profit directly from its activities. The country of American people does not. Yet, it is this currency which is supposedly backed by the good faith and credit of the American people, and which is simply a necessary tool, an economic utility for its already extant and growing productive value!!!
It basically provides the money which is found in circulation in our economy. But of course that money could be printed by our own Congress by empowering the Treasury Department, with no need to deal with an outside entity of any kind, let alone pay it interest (our economic growth and prosperity is the interest). But why would the American economy need a loan to begin with? This is an artificially inflated subject, pun intended. But in order to even begin to put this issue into a proper context, the one with which we have already been working, I must enlarge on the way that the already-described forces of corruption have co-evolved with economic advancements. This so that it can be better-understood how some of their mechanisms, however plainly visible to so many of us, yet persist as if part of the fundament!
Goods and services are of a certain value to people who need them, and likewise, these goods and services represent time, energy, materiel, and other factors which are of some value to the people who offer them to others (who already have them). When was the last time you saw a banker or "holder of money" do anything? Exactly. But if you want to get a car, it must be built first. All its parts must be fashioned before it can be put together. All that metal must be refined from ore. All that ore must be mined from the earth. That takes a certain amount of work. That takes a certain amount of time from each man involved, each work day, every month, in order to produce x number of cars. This effort is distributed all along the chain.
Without getting into the many details which are otherwise worthy of inspection, we'll stick to a rougher outline. So all those workers make the car, and if you think about it, we are back to land ownership again, but now we have the question of who owns the equipment and tools needed to get that work done at the rate at which it is currently done. And what of the material when it is brought out of the ground, refined, worked, all the way to the finished product? It boils down to a system of laws which enable a few people to "own" the land, to "own" the structures built on it, and to "own" the tools and equipment which are used to produce things with human labor.
Without going back to the rules which were set up to create massive disparity of wealth and land entitlement among people since "feudal" times and before, we can just shorten all that by saying that it is owned by the protection racket and those loyal to it. You don't get into that stratum of power, economic or political or of any other kind, unless you are loyal to or otherwise useful to that already long-established power elite. That means that the "bases of production" are claimed for profit by a small group of people, and in such a way that if they decide, they can make the cost of living in all sectors of civil society high enough that when they are all added up, when all necessities for those who work are paid for (food, shelter, water, utilities, clothing, etc), that there is barely enough money paid to them for their work, barely enough to allow them to meet those necessities.
Now we know that people all want to have things, but only so many can have so much, because the way that money is paid, you can only buy what is available and it is predicted how much will be available because it is known how much is created and put on market, and it is known how much money has been paid to how many laborers out there. This system is arranged so that some will always be paid only enough to have the basics, some can have more, and some more than that, but most will not have the nicest kinds of things available because those will be assigned a higher price, whether or not the production and "value added" is proportional to that price. It has to do with making these higher end items into being rewards for being the loyal members of the upper classes in the control system. It is not truly about making the value of things reflected in their prices.
It serves to make disloyalty, and the punishment of demotion offered for it, tangibly unrewarding. So the possibility of falling into the situations reserved for the lower strata of society is itself the great persuader, and creates an atmosphere of natural-appearing systems of reward and punishment which seem logical on the outside appearances, and will be accepted as such by most without too much suspicion of any systematic corruption beyond some sort of opportunistic and occasional kind. This when in fact, and ironically, the systemic corruption is pervasive, cuts out the freelancers entirely except to be useful scapegoats or recruits, and is the structural norm of the arrangement! Further, even for the person who is "used to" his higher station, these persuasions can be revivified or made more vivid than they already are, so that they are felt as significantly punishing even after desensitization to upper crust comforts is acquired. This is partly because new kinds of rewards, and more severe kinds of punishments are also prepared for the higher strata of this control system, just as there are those special routes of persuasion for the more ambitious and talented, or just more ambitious and corrupt of the lower strata. But those are details that are comparatively esoteric, as the means of their execution and the elements involved are "unconventional" in a spectrum of ways, and also quite covert in their main operations (except for the surface, which is PR'd to seem nothing out of the ordinary, or else to fit into some other public script for a secret control-freak agenda). For those who would know more about it I will mention some resources in later essays, ones which will give some idea of how that "occult" system works by reference to artistic renderings or other forms of "unconventional" analysis.
Suffice it to say here that this system helps keep the protection racket going indefinitely. By extending the basic mechanisms of fraud which were connived into being in the early days of agrarian development, and converting their forms into mechanisms which take advantage of all new technological achievements and scientific advances, every sector of society is turned into a little facet of a grandiose, "hidden in plain sight" banana republic.
So again, x number of desirable things are put on the market using y amount of human labor, involving z amounts of materiel, over a dynamic constant of Γ, which is a relatively fixed quantity and quality of capital. So a certain amount of food can be produced using the labor of a certain number of farmers, employing a certain amount of seed, fertilizer, water, soil, land area, and so on, while they will be operating with a certain amount and quality of tools such a plows, harvesters, irrigation systems, etc. x, y, z and Γ combine to form the basic structure of the economy's production base. This scales all the way down to the craftsman, artisan, farmer, hunter, trapper, blacksmith, smelter, etc. All of these capabilities can be fully transparent to the public but will not be ubiquitous nor arbitrarily distributed or manifested. Everyone might know who the blacksmith is and how he works and with what, but not everyone will work as a blacksmith, nor will he operate just anywhere because of the nature of his work giving off various forms of pollution, and requiring ready access to certain commodities, as well as being within range of customers who will typically need his services. All of these features are rather specialized compared to farming due to the different scale of technology needed to produce food versus what is needed to produce metal tools and parts. The talent pool for the former is wider than the later, as is the skill set simpler, while the need for the product is also wider, and the nature of the product far more primitive.
There are limits to what can be accomplished given the number of people in society and their talents, the materiel available, and the technology and tools available for production. But because of the conditions of early living in warring and criminal-infested social environments, both internal and external to society, and because of a very early-developed and long-reinforced system of protection racketeering which was developed parasitically upon the productive capacity of early agriculture, later developments in all areas of technology and art, in all of culture as well, were subordinated to the control of the power elite which were already in established control.
Any of the agrarian societies which were less militarized and yet whose peasantry were more likely to be capable as fighters in battle were also more likely to put up stiff resistance to the corrupt actors in the upper strata of society and as well against those who were in the institutions of government which wielded the power of law and of the violence used to enforce it against the masses while protecting mainly those who were deemed to have special exemptions from that law. These often took the form of protracted defense against invading forces, even entire empires, or else the overthrowing of the ruling elite by rebellions from within their domains. But as these resistances and rebellions were often led by ambitious and power-hungry individuals and groups, and as the power structures of those they conquered were still extant in some form and had to be commandeered before being disposed, they often found themselves sucked into the power vacuum which they themselves created. Examples of this are found in the history of the empires of the world, such as the Greek, Roman, Persian, Chinese, and the British Empires, both in terms of invading, being invaded, and also in the form of rebellions. These among many others (Turkish, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Scythian, Frankish, and so on).
Therefore the corruption persisted because the conditions which evolved with those structures of power entailed an intricate web of adaptations between the class structures of society with the already extant structures of power which were fully entrenched in that society's midst. The manner in which these corrupt systems first developed, outlined thematically in the essay on "famine" which was the second essay before this one, were continued in the stream of dynamic power struggles which ensued over time since their origin until later on when their systematic expansion entailed structural extensions and functional elaborations that were rooted in that original corrupt origin, and so continued to manifest the same depraved clinging to power and disregard for the proper virtues of a productive and decent person, and added to their criminality a penchant for treating their moral and ethical betters as their lessers, as well as of accruing to themselves all the trappings of excellence in both lifestyle and representation in the public which then garnered for them an unjust and overbearing inflation of importance, worth, esteem, honor, dignity, and all other reputable attributes.
Where such window dressing were ever properly to be questioned, even against the grain of tradition, loud and fancy heralds, corrupt lackeys and turnkey minions in all strata of society, and the ignorant opinion of society in general, then there the disputant would find himself opposed by every form of danger to his well-being and safety. Whether being arbitrarily hated by peasants who feared being lured into a punishable plot, or else just found to be an outlaw because of their views, such people rarely piped up in any form which could be traced to them directly or which could be incontrovertibly proven to be an action of explicit defiance.
So naturally, by the time metal working improved society into the iron age, it was already co-opted into the arts of war, and in the reinforcement of the positions of entrenched power. Chemistry and its technological advantages were also immediately reigned in, as was physics, biology, and psychology and all their derivative technologies. This tight control of the oligarchical powers over everything productive doers and thinkers were busy creating and inventing was already the norm, and it continued without letup ever since until today.
So since the need to control the bases of production was already understood by those who held power and wished to maintain it forever, they found ways to advance their societies up to a point, but to simultaneously limit that advancement so that it could not be readily used against them. From keeping serfs as farmer-slaves, to driving people to work in factories so as to grind them up as fodder there, to marching the strong and brave, the wise and clever out into battle so they can be used up against neighboring powers plotting this same evil scheme against them and their own populations, these powerful parasites on top of human advancement steadily drained the public's capacity to do anything outside the limits of a politico-economic structure that was already designed to maximally repress the public into a state of perpetual indentured servitude.
All manner of propaganda, from church and state, to the well-controlled patsies of academia, were blasted at the populace for centuries on end, propaganda which made dying for the power elite, and in any way serving and flattering them, the highest honor which a person could receive! All the while those who were advanced in that sort of "social cult of the ennobled bully" could only have gotten their positions by proving their loyalty to it, sometimes by being involved in it directly, by being brainwashed into it through "education" or "good breeding", submitting to it and accepting the petty bribes of honor or special pay given for serving well in various capacities in the political and civil bureaucracy, the military, the police forces, the guilds and professions, and so forth. Likewise, there was no way to advance in any career except by being promoted under the watchful eye of the secret society of thugs, who by this point had a dual aspect: the public and reputable image, and the private and secretly foul, covert substance. Basically the 'front' was kept propped up by the well-trained public, while the back was the real executor and beneficiary of the aggregate conduct which took place in the publicized domain of this social structure.
In that the cult of the thug had been long-entrenched and had acquired much prestige over the brow beaten and thoroughly subjected and abused masses, and in that all the language and tools of the apparent world of human affairs was already polarized and controlled in their favor and dictated wherever possible to be in their interests, it was always easy to keep track of any new talent that would threaten to radically free up human time and resources in such a way as might weaken the powerful chains wrapped around the people, or which might in any way cause them to awaken to their absurdly delimited status as free and moral beings. They had been chained, and were not free, they were demoralized, and not expressive of their true nature. They were abused, shackled and twisted versions of people, and would be kept that way.
So any Newton, any Maxwell, and for that matter any Tesla would one way or another be brought under wraps, either willingly or unwillingly. All that any such minds could develop would be confiscated, and only what is permitted to the public would be released, the rest guarded over by elite societies whose already ancient task was to acquire all knowledge and hoard it. We by now could easily spot all the usual culprits and better understand the historical events which are partly owing to their nefarious exploits.
So if these aspects of technological development, their origination, development, application and dissemination, could all be strictly controlled by the oligarchs, and yet if this could be properly disguised or camouflaged in other ways, then naturally what people understood to be "proper working conditions" could be much more easily controlled as well. There are vast areas where you already cannot go without being noticed, supervised, and quite likely obstructed and derailed, up to the point of being put to some unsavory end, and this has to do with the matters of fact and logically developed theory about what exists and how it works in nature! And this creates gaps in the formation of the professions which grow in light of developments in those areas as they progress and are brought to public use. So those professions are developed under the pressure of these enforced "lacunae" in what is allowed for the public to know and use, and what is not. And it is to be assured that intellect and a few other virtues will not be sufficient, in most cases, to hearten a member of any of these professions to find the courage to take on all the rest of their profession so as to overcome some dastardly cover up of what should be known scientific fact, of what should be publicly available technology. They prefer to keep the rewards of their social stratum and avoid the penalties. Besides, the majority of these cretins are just clever thugs themselves, happy to be the brains which backs the brawn. Cowards whose motto would be "can't beat 'em, so join 'em". The few who were exceptions to this rule are the ones who have proved it, and their fates are a matter of public, historical record.
So aside from all the sophistry that the professional class, the "intelligentsia", have produced, which allows the oligarchic power elite to thrive on the backs of the public, there is also the matter of the steady pressure to keep a roof over one's head, keep one's stomach fed, and seek medical assistance for diseases and injuries which the elite are happy to have around for the purpose of keeping their bloated army of professional toadies well-supplied with "something to do", and so as to give themselves outlets of moral and ethical catharsis to stabilize the massive infrastructure of hypocrisy that needs such a public counterbalance for both practical and psychological reasons.
These keep the lower classes concentrated on their bodies, and the middle classes mentally absorbed in the professional concern with the needs of those bodies, and little else. The system is kept broken in the ways that stabilize the parasitic entrenchment of the power elite, and they are only improved when it is unavoidable to maintain that same stability, especially when it makes them look good. When this is all not enough they can engineer failures which are custom designed to give them the maximum benefit in their efforts at maintaining and improving their power by means of their already prepared "solutions". That's the famous "problem-reaction-solution" methodology of control by the corrupt, morally and spiritually worthless despotic powers. But that is just a more dynamic engineering feature of an already evil, collective, and almost inconceivably stupendous "foot binding" practice which they've already long perfected upon the dignity and respectability of the common human being, and which they tailored to any of his less common manifestations so as to either corrupt, destroy, or otherwise neutralize any of his abilities and traits which might go against the grain of the agenda of the by now sheerly demonic class of despots.
It is in this context that the meanings of "wealth" and "poverty" must be understood, or else we are liable to be talking to no purpose, since this context of already steady-state corruption is the basis in which norms are stabilized, and this includes norms of experience in which we develop the capacity to feel, to think, to develop capacities to act and express, and so in the end it is the situation which will be found to spare no effort to destroy any of these human developments whenever and wherever they attempt to breech beyond the assigned limits of understanding and judgment, which limits have been fixed upon people who are not destined, invited, or willing to become one of the parts of this gigantic machine of deceptively enhanced coercion. By this system, the wise are made to appear foolish, and the foolish wise; the noble are made to appear wicked and petty, and the base and wretched are elevated into admirals of cultural and other distinctions. That is why the industrious break their backs and barely have shelter and food, barely have health, endure all manner of poisoning and abuse in their sometimes willful but always coerced ignorance, and breed yet more offspring into this condition. And that is why the worthless and evil command society instead of the truly great and good.
So what of the "jobs" and the "money" and the "goods and services" if they are all confined into this system of corruption? What of the "titles", "merits", "distinctions"? What of the "knowledge", the "art", the "recreation"? What of the "family"? All of this is embedded in this anciently crafted and still enduring mockery of a real society. All that is excellent or mediocre, all that is exceptional or common, all that is desirable to be sought or relegated to refuse, all this is to be understood as a sideshow which exists inside a structure of manipulation and coercion, deception and debasement which ensures that all apparent norms, however reasonably similar to what might have "grown in the wild in some other world", one without corruption such as it is here, will be norms which are at root not genuinely expressed forms of the ideals they pretend to be approximate realizations made manifest. They are not practical expressions of any ideals, they are not natural exhibitions of undeformed human character, and corruption is not the exception, but is rather the rule.
Wherever the still-extant forces of nature and virtuous Spirit undeformed might be operative, they are allowed to manifest so long as they do not fundamentally upset the status quo of the regime of corrupt power that I have explained exists. That serves as excellent propaganda in every conceivable way, and is the "hostage" end of the Stockholm Syndrome condition within which the controlling power mongers are to be understood as the "captor" end. Likewise, the the productive power that they represent is always "on tap", and this is said by some to be far beyond the spectrum of mere physical or cultural forms of energy in its utility for the vampiric parasites who have society in their pale and dead clutches. And besides all this, what would they have to gain if they released their victims? Nothing. They are a new breed of monster which is long-dependent upon the evils they now do, and they must surely have resigned any notion of being forgiven in this world or any other, by man or by God. They have only to persist at their seemingly unbounded victory over their victims.
So the complex developments in science which have occurred since the Enlightenment have been kept for the most part secret, and are in the service of the controllers. Perfecting this layer of control, whilst keeping it as hidden as possible, in other words perfecting the illusion of normality while maximizing the extraction of energy and utility from the masses of the enslaved, has long been their highest art and science, and the aim to which all of their philosophy and religion have directed them. They are working on ways to take this to new levels of debasement, debauchery, and outlandishness, and every human being on the planet has been their guinea pig. Why not? They've already been their livestock, their cannon fodder, their personal chattel, their sacrificial victims, their playthings, their minions and servants, their underlings in every way. To become throwaway guinea pigs is just like being taken to the next level of utility, like becoming the most useful thing human beings can become under the modern, more scientific regime of their already sadistic masters. It is nothing more than the most efficient extension of all the previous abuses that have been developed to date, brought up to date. YOU are the commodity which has been made of the most service possible, now by becoming the test market for all the newest waves of manipulation and coercion which will be inflicted upon you, which are all nothing more than the logical successors to what has gone before since ancient times until now!
The old forms were more blatant, more crude, and much more inefficient and difficult to obtain and sustain. THOSE where the days when man should have fought tooth and nail, with every last drop of blood and every last puff of breath, dying rather than breeding in order to prevent this sort of evil from proceeding and progressing. Instead, he by and large sold out, and we've all inherited this last few pages in the last chapter of the book of horror stories which have ensued since. Now the final touches are prepared and the canvass is firmly steadied beyond any hope of being upset by any accidental forces short of something totally catastrophic. But these ramifications of the condition of man must be discussed in later essays. We are still here discussing the basic facets of his enslavement and abuse, and this in a way which firmly demonstrates his functional incapacity for freedom of will except insofar as he is willing to be corrupted, and in any event only insofar as his utility is sought by those "powers that be" who elect to use him. And the illusion of freedom, either as a willing and witting evil tool, or as a morally bereft and debasedly ignorant serf, is certainly not "freedom" as properly understood, not if even the most basic stories and examples of what man's best and highest character and achievements can be are understood as being even remotely achievable.
So since this essay was mainly a context for the continuing discussion, the meat of the topic of the policy of poverty will be explored in more detail in part two of this essay.
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