#title MONEY, LIES AND POWER
#author Paul Cudenec
#date 2020
#source Retrieved Fall 2022 from https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/05/21/money-lies-and-power/
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-10-24T13:16:24
#topics money, fourth industrial revolution, industrial revolution, COVID-19, Green New Deal, Winter Oak



We all know that money is what makes this commercial world go round.

The cult of money has swept away the traditional ethical codes of humankind and become the sole indicator of “value”.

If something makes money, it is good. If it doesn’t, it is useless. If someone accumulates money, by whatever means, they are “successful”. If they don’t, they are a “failure”.

But we also all know that money is not real. It consists of nothing more than pieces of paper, or electronic figures, which are universally agreed to represent something.

For most of us, money is the whip that keeps us in line. Because we need it in order to survive, we are forced to spend the best decades of our lives working for money.

Most work does not directly give us what we need or want. It is merely a means to another means, a way of earning money so we can buy various goods and services.

The vast majority of people use money to pay for food and drink, shelter, clothing, leisure activities and whatever little luxuries are affordable in the part of the world in which they live.

What about the really “successful” people, though, the people who have accumulated unimaginably vast amounts of money, at the expense of the rest of us? What does money do for them?

It provides them with their lavish lifestyles of course – all their mansions and private jets and designer clothes and furniture and cars and plastic surgery. Money can buy people too, whether to work for their interests, massage their egos or satisfy their sexual desires.

But most of all, and most worryingly for the rest of us, it brings them power.

Lies are another important part of their domination.

There is the lie that they “deserve” their wealth because they are somehow better than the rest of us – a total inversion of the truth since the obsessive pursuit of money speaks only of ruthless and sociopathic greed.

There is the lie that all of this is somehow normal, that it is right and proper that a tiny elite are sitting smugly at the top of a pyramid of global exploitation which sees those at the bottom condemned to lives of abject misery.

And there is the lie that this world of theirs is “democratic”, that we have the freedom to collectively determine the way we live.

Anyone who is the slightest bit awake will have noticed that today this last lie is looking hollower than ever.

With the totalitarian measures being introduced on the back of the Covid panic, it looks as if the ruling class have decided to finally ditch the pretence of “liberal democracy” and its illusion of freedom.

As Frank Zappa warned: “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater”.

I am beginning to wonder if money will be the next illusion that is ditched by the ruling class.

This is not going to happen quite yet, of course. The Covid crisis promises to be a bonanza for the richest of the rich, who will be greedily hoovering up all the wealth previously in the hands of small-scale businesses and individuals, as well as ramping up their relentless robbery of the working classes.

Not only will the ultrarich benefit from “emergency” spending by the world’s governments, but their banking branch will be happily harvesting the interest on the debts run up to pay for it all.

And, of course, there is all the Fourth Industrial Revolution technology in which they have invested, which will now be forced on us under the pretext of public health, and the planned monetisation of everything alive through the so-called “New Deal for Nature“.

But, as we have seen, money is just a means to an end. It is the key to the door of power and, after a few more years of what we are seeing now, the ultrarich and their vitaphobic death-cult will have all the power that they crave.

This would no longer have to be gained by <em>buying</em> anything, whether resources, land, infrastructure, institutions or people, because the elite would already <em>own</em> them.

All they would have to do is to <em>maintain</em> that power, by using all the totalitarian techniques of surveillance and control that are currently being rolled out at such an alarming speed.

George Orwell’s <em>Nineteen Eighty-Four</em> merits regular re-reading and every time I do so, my eyes are opened to a new level of this extraordinarily prophetic warning.

During the torture session towards the end of the book, O’Brien asks Winston Smith why he thinks the Big Brother regime wants power.

Smith starts by telling O’Brien the lie he thinks his torturer wants to hear, that the Party is ruling people for their own good because “you believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves”.

He receives a hefty electric shock for this mistake and O’Brien puts him straight, explaining: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power”.

He adds: “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end… The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power”.

For centuries now, the ruling class have been stealing everything from us. They have thrown us off our land, destroyed our communities and our cultures, deprived us of our precious days of living by forcing us to work for their fake money just to survive. They have stolen our very sense of who we are, our connection to nature, to each other, to our own bodies.

And now, in 2020, they are trying to take this a step further. Just look at everything happening on the back of the Covid hysteria!

People are being forced to wear masks, symbolising their silent submission to authority, are told they now have to be bound in electronic chains and be injected with whatever toxic substances our rulers see fit.

We are not allowed to go outside unless Big Brother says so, not allowed to socialise with our friends, not allowed to ask any questions or express any dissent.

We are being stripped of our dignity, our freedom, our privacy, our autonomy, of everything that makes us human.

This is psychotic megalomania, deliberate humiliation, sadistic mistreatment amounting to torture, carried out on a global scale. We are being whipped and beaten and pissed upon, while our ruling class prison guards laugh in our faces.

And why? Because the ultrarich have utter contempt for us and want to lock us permanently down into a condition of cowed slavery.

That, for them, is the ultimate power-trip, the ultimate confirmation that they are “successful” and “superior” to us. The object of power is power. The object of domination is domination.

They have obviously calculated that they can get away with this, that their wealth, power and lies are now so all-conquering, and the majority of humankind so supine, gutless and malleable, that they will simply be able to trample all over us, for ever.

It is up to us to prove them wrong.