Deal or No Deal
Slaves. Profits.
Cunning as foxes,
In a hen house.
Sweet deal.
There’s a ruse going on. It’s part of what makes the plot so exciting, fascinating,
creepy.
And the ruse is not so elaborate. It’s simple:
Flash a light in their faces while you round them up for labour. Keep them distracted
while you steal the land out from underneath them. Justify the acquisition in a foreign
dialect. Take by stealth, not siege, capture the people intact and have them do your
work. Sabotage those who resist, kill ‘em if you have to.
It’s in the killing where things get really interesting.
“The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses,
mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power
over the material world.”
– George Orwell, 1984
“When you close your heart, then you close your mind.”
– Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror.
Let’s not give anyone credit they don’t deserve. You can’t give it all to the guys in the boardroom. But you can
bet your bottom dollar that there are boardrooms inhabited by obscenely wealthy collectives who play the
wacky game of planning grand destinies for us all. Deluded as they may be; they have the best analysts
money can buy, pinpointing, isolating and exacerbating our weaknesses—projecting them into the future,
using them to pin us to the butcher board. They may not have created this turbulent state that we have
arrived in (we did all the work), but they are most certainly diabolically clever in maintaining, fuelling and
plotting elements within our demise. Yes they have conspired against the many. It’s not personal; they’re
doing it for the money. Perhaps we all would do the same in the same situation. But we’re not.
Money is turf and most people don’t have any. We’ve allowed it to be syphoned off dollar by dollar, inch by
inch, and now it’s gone.
There are very few free spaces left, absent any doublethink. This is analogous with very little freedom.
Almost everything comes under deed and title. You can’t sleep if you don’t own the land beneath you, unless
you’re paying. We labour as individuals to produce offerings to the banks and landowners, in exchange for
permission to live in territories which do not belong to us. Failure to produce offerings will result in eviction
from our borrowed territory. Failure to comply with eviction will result in weaponised extraction and
incarceration. The best we can do is come up with our offerings.
Our territories do not belong to us, and whatever game is being played on top of them is not of our design.
We simply go along with it all in the hopes that we can stay safe and live. But many can’t stay safe, because
there is no safe place for them to be. Industrialised human trafficking is one such example. It is the
exploitation of an ecological niche, perhaps cultivating itself within the near on complete disenfranchisement
of the masses. It is in the homogenisation of landscapes. It is in the lack of alternatives.
How did we let everything slip out of our hands, and how can we get it back?
Our governments no longer belong to us, because we can’t afford to influence them…the money elite have
been more than willing to subsidise funding/influence—implanting whoever they choose; openly knocking
off any elected members of parliament who mistakenly think they have a job to represent the common good
of people. Local councils can just shut their pie holes as far as corporate planning is concerned. You don’t
want high rises? Have some high rises. You don’t want uniformed gunmen patrolling your trains? Here’s
gunmen. Worried about your kids stabbing people? There are companies already taking care of building
more places to lock them up. Every critical issue is another money making opportunity so long the problems
stay chronic. And that is the point.
We have managed to get here precisely by ignoring our emotions—those perfectly tuned environmental
indicators that have been screaming at us all along: Wrong way, go back. Understandably, because the robber
barrens have wasted no time co-opting science, as they did religion—in order to induce us to understand that
our feelings are feeble—inducing us to ignore and drug them.
Feelings have no credible traction, only the scientific method may permeate our wisdom, and then—only
once it has been bastardised by corporate self interest. Peer reviewed emotion doesn’t mean shit, nor the
logic and reason it took to get you there. It doesn’t matter what you feel if you can’t buy the qualifications to
feel it. It doesn’t even matter what your science says if it isn’t paid for by the companies who orchestrate the
results.
* * *
‘Globalisation’ has emerged as an ideological destiny, where all creatures shall come under the one physical
territory, dictated by economic policy, guarded by lunatics. Many obscenely wealthy lunatics no doubt suffer
delusions of grandeur—if you want to have a profound effect on the world, destruction is the quickest route,
and plenty of people will pay you. It takes so much more thought, care and effort to do something beautiful.
Our corporate dictators are not friendly—liberated as they are from any sense of guilt or empathy—they are
genuine psychopaths. They have created a psychopathic system in their image, which pays itself to destroy
things—so it should be no surprise then that good things are being ruined.
We have monetised destruction, and critically failed to effectively monetise creation. Our systems produce
money so that a person can chop down a tree but not to protect it. Our systems produce the funds to pay a
person to rape a child but not to parent him. A person has no soil upon which to protect children and trees,
but they are welcome to the temporary illusion, so long as they continue to provide their offerings.
Any persons volunteering outside of our corrupt money systems are by that very virtue—denied territory.
Without wages, any who gain territory will have to do so with social capital, and by creating autonomous
communities in which to float that capital…seizing land upon which to exist. Autonomous communities are
not welcome in the territory, seeking as they do, self governance. These communities are easily monitored
and dispatched of by intelligence agencies. Those that remain are in the process of being dismantled. Others
are in the process of putting themselves together, because liberty is an idea, and ideas never die.
People must come to understand that no central leadership is actually protecting them—in fact those who
they have elected to lead and protect them, are funnelling them into profit. The borders have all shifted and
we are no longer dealing with criminal networks hiding behind countries and flags, but criminal networks
hiding behind companies and logos. Our media, courts, police, armies, intelligence agencies and government
have all been co-opted as enforcers.
There is no room for civic representation in the new deal. In the new territory, the civic majority is overtly
irrelevant—except as a working colony. The work is of utmost importance. Nothing else matters. Whatever
the work is, it doesn’t matter. Just so long as people are doing it and giving up their offerings. The
spectacularly inane is rigorously promoted as a substitute for civil responsibility.
We are the sum total of all the numbers we have laboured to produce, we are the lonely remainder of the
scant few numbers having thus far escaped their inevitable theft and relocation into off shore tax havens.
They are the last numbers standing.
The accumulative effect of all this work is the literal meltdown of all the natural systems upon which we
depend for survival. Climate instability is only the beginning. Our leaders have no intention to get us out of
here. They are not leading us at all. They are insane, or they’re just trying to stay safe and fed, like the rest of
us, just going along with it.
People will first come to grips with the necessity to lead and protect themselves, before they embark on an
intrepid yet essential journey towards social sanity and independence. They will allow themselves to feel and
they will feel shit, and then they will do something about it.
Any centralised uprising could swiftly deliver us into fascism, so it’s not highly recommended. When we
refuse to subjugate ourselves, those who have the weapons will make it clear for us that we have already
completed the job. The services for imprisoning ourselves are no longer needed—the fences are erect. We’ll
have to leave the way we came and we didn’t get here overnight. It’s going to take time.
How did we get here? Deals. Zillions and zillions of deals. How will we get out? Deals. Better deals.
Start now. Let every deal you make—count. Let every deal take yourself and someone else one step closer to
dignity. Whether that means putting $75 into Grameen Bank instead of using it to pay for dark sex—do it.
Whether it means claiming at least the territory of your own bed—refrain from sticking the tyranny
in—make love! Whether it means going into the brothel to get your girlfriend out and having your head
beaten in with an iron bar. Whatever it takes.
Whether it’s caring for chickens and getting to know them, sharing eggs. Whether it’s blowing up TVs or
choosing a search engine that doesn’t leave cookies. If it’s annexing and cultivating land, or harvesting your
own electricity… Whether it’s teaching your daughters and sons self defence, if it’s teaching children what
heroes are, whatever it is—do it. Use your imagination. Centre your imagination in honour. Start now. Create
safer spaces around you. Set out on a hero’s path in pursuit of freedom. Trust that you will influence others
to make better transactions.
Zillions and zillions of transactions.