Special kudos to Katherine Bosiacki for input and editing. Castle photo by Barion McQueen on Pexels

A Fairy Tale BAU Model?

(A Preamble to Part II)

46 min readDec 23, 2022

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago … Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood.

He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia.” John Maynard Keynes on Newton, The Man

Once upon a long time ago, did a few people realize that to build a forever empire of power, the best way was to cast a “Scarcity” spell by equipping “legal fictions”/artificial persons with a “philosopher’s stone” so human beings will fight tooth and nail to collectively trade whatever we have with them to live?

This spell has us living a “Business-as-usual” (BAU) fairy tale where if you work hard enough, you can be rich and famous, so you and I self-organize to grow their mini fiefdoms into an artificial and opaque rent-seeking system we are now co-dependent on:

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin

At its core is the “philosopher’s stone” — an invisible value exchange mechanism — that fuels a “no greater god than greed” culture so favored artificial middlemen like nation-states and (especially financial) oligarchies ultimately control all raw resources, economies, people, territories, and information.

“The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it.” John Ruskin

“A culture is a collection of shared beliefs about how things are. These beliefs are associated with myths and histories that form a self-reinforcing loop, and the collection of these beliefs and histories form the stories that define a culture. Usually unnoticed, like the air we breathe, these stories are rarely questioned. Yet their impact can be enormous.” Thom Hartmann

“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing.” Sir Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England from the 1920’s

“Money is not real. What made it seem real for so long was its scarcity. Since money is supposed to be spent on things, its scarcity can truly reflect reality only when that reality is made up of a general scarcity of things. It no longer is, except mostly by intention. Since the scarcity of money no longer mirrors the scarcity of things, and since money that is not scarce is not exactly money, the whole meaning of the symbol has changed profoundly …” David T. Bazelon

“The State is a European invention, but little by little, over the centuries, this political structure has spread throughout the world, which is why the State system has become a global system.” Orlando Kempf

In Money for Nothing, Fred S. McChesney, Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, explained the basic notion of rent extraction: Since the state can legally take wealth from its citizens, politicians can extort from private parties payments not to expropriate private wealth. In that sense, rent (i.e. wealth) extraction is “money for nothing” — money paid in exchange for politicians’ inaction.

It is said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but can we really understand context when there is no transparency for how “the whole” came to be or what “the whole” is/does when everyone is siloed to compete to accept and evolve different forms of control?

Over time, the quest for immortality has emerged as the masses appear willing to do anything to survive, if not become rich and famous. Perhaps even to be guinea pigs in experiments to be transhumans. As hyper-normalized rent-seeking experiments continue unabated from behind artificially legal persons, descendants of the few now aspire to live forever as “gods.”

Does history repeat itself because decisions that impact our lives were made long ago and only the names, labels, players, forms, etc. have changed but never the direction of extracting our real value?

“Oligarchies date back to the 600s BCE when the Greek city-states of Sparta and Athens were ruled by an elite group of educated aristocrats. During the 14th century, the city-state of Venice was controlled by rich nobles called ‘patricians’.” Robert Longley

“Oligarchia” (Oλιγαρχία), the Greek word for oligarchy, is made up of two Greek words:

“Oligo” (Ολιγο) as in “few”

“Archi” (Αρχή) as in “authority” (i.e. the start/beginning since authority is “the point where everything starts”)

A person is an oligarch (Ολιγάρχης) whereas “Oligarkhes” (Ολιγάρχες) is the plural for people.

An oligarchy is the power structure controlled by “the few governing.” This small group of elite individuals, families, or corporations are related by their wealth, family ties, nobility, corporate interests, religion, politics, and/or military power.

“Corporate personhood is the story that a group of people can get together and organize a legal fiction (that’s the actual legal term for it) called a corporation — and that agreement could then have the rights and powers given to living, breathing humans by modern democratic governments.

Corporate personhood tracks back in small form to Roman times when groups of people authorized by the Caesars organized to engage in trade. It took a leap around the year 1500 with the development of the first Dutch and then other European trading corporations, and then underwent a series of transformations in the United States of America in the 19th century, whose implications were every bit as world-changing as the institutionalization of slavery and the oppression of women in the holy books had been thousands of years earlier. And in a similar fashion to the Biblical endorsement of slavery and oppression of women, this story of corporate personhood — which only came fully alive in the 1800s — was highly contagious: It has spread across most of the world in just the past half-century. It has — literally — caused some sovereign nations to rewrite their constitutions, and led others to sign treaties overriding previous constitutional protections of their human citizens.” Thom Hartmann

In the B.C. era, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero were among the first to write about “the common good.”

In the second century, Church Father Irenaeus — Bishop of Lyon in Gaul (now France) — defined “the common good” as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.”

As the invisible hand of competition automatically transforms self-interests into “the common good,” was Adam Smith the first in more recent times to get traction for what has since become our BAU fairy tale?

Where if you work hard enough, you can be rich and famous.

George Joseph Stigler was best known for developing the Economic Theory of Regulation (1971), aka capture, that says interest groups and other political participants will use the regulatory and coercive powers of government to shape laws and regulations in a way that is beneficial to them:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Lord Acton

The 1982 laureate in Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and a key leader of the Chicago school of economics had observed: “Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interests under conditions of competition.”

“The Idea of Competition (not the occasional fact) is one of the most mindless notions ever to dominate the supposed thinking of a society of grown men.” David T. Bazelon

Spellbound to focus on symptoms instead of root causes for the systemic mess we find our world in, the financialization of our lives behind closed doors continues and this includes money creation, value exchange, legal code of capital and secret treaties/deals.

Are we Greater fools in a spell to trust “legal fictions”/artificial persons more than most fellow humans?

Because the more you invest time, energy, attention, money, self, etc. to live/grow this corporate-state model of control, the greater your skin in the addictive BAU game becomes. This blinds you to what’s happening in plain sight:

“Never expect anyone to understand anything when their livelihood depends on not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair, paraphrased

We will also never know the sources of people who got traction for writing history because in 1919 — the year of the Treaty of Versailles — John D. Rockefeller, Jr. funded the Oriental Institute as a laboratory for the study of the rise and development of ancient civilization.

I write this “Hacking mindsets” series to try to spark your interest so you will hack your own mindset to “see” the root causes happening in plain sight:

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.” Marilyn Ferguson

In Part I of this article, I explored the run-up to and the aftermath of the Nixon shock and how our lives gradually became legally centralized (normalized) around rent-seeking corporations as legal tender fiat currencies instill the habit of voluntarily paying for whatever you and I need to survive/want. Essentially how we develop Stockholm Syndrome for an unnatural way of life driven by such artificial persons:

“The supra-national corporations exercise economic control through a global network of international agreements and enforcement bodies, like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, which are unelected, undemocratic, and have more power than any national government.” Lenny Flank, World, Incorporated: The History of the Supra-National Corporation and Its Global Stranglehold on Freedom and Democracy

While I figure out Part II, this is a preamble to whether we are in the first truly centuries-old experiment that has globally folded us into living a “cradle to grave” fairy tale. Let’s explore with an open mind …

Legal tender as Value exchange; Legal fictions as Scarcity engines

“Money is a tool. It’s a financial system. Think of it as a toolkit and it’s part of the governance system and the power is in the governance system but there’s no doubt that the financial system is used for a variety of purposes including incentivizing and controlling people. It’s a management tool and you use it to optimize resources and manage resources and you use it to incentivize.” Catherine Austin Fitts

In What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire, Noam Yuran shared how money has become an object of desire because its endless exchangeability depends on every other commodity (e.g. what we need to survive) NOT being so.

“The name of the game is the creation of world banks, regional currencies, multinational trusts, giant foundations, land expropriations, and massive transfers of natural resources — the cartelization of the world’s natural resources — which will ultimately evolve into transfers of national sovereignty.” Larry Abraham and Franklin Sanderss

In his 1911 book, Political Parties, Robert Michels argued how by their very nature and design — all complex organizations, no matter how democratic at the start, eventually evolve into oligarchies — where power ends up in the hands of the very few.

The oligarchy will use all means necessary to preserve and further increase their power so anything of value that can be monopolized will be. Over time, as the Iron Law of Oligarchy tunnel-visions you on psychologically surviving only for yourself — doing your job — anything or anyone that can be monetized/ commoditized/datatized eventually is.

Particularly since the Nixon shock, have the Bretton Woods trio been orchestrating the use of legal tender currencies to shift humanity from what’s real and authentic in ourselves and each other to embracing unnatural decentralized forms (e.g. money/all sorts of derivatives, artificial persons/”legal fictions,” nation-states)?

Has the iron law of oligarchy addicted us to unnaturally living a lifelong “cradle to grave” business plan of value extraction so everything we have can be taken away from us — with our full consent?

Did Newton’s Alchemy Link the Ancient and Modern Worlds?

Two years after the 1694 founding of the Bank of England as a joint stock company for purchasing government debt, Isaac Newton was made warden of the Royal Mint. That year, he exercised his authority to reform the Great Recoinage by relentlessly persecuting counterfeiters. When Thomas Neale died three years later, Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint, a position he held for the last 30 years of his life.

Centuries later, the world came to know that alchemy was more vital to Newton than physics or mathematics ever was. In Isaac Newton, James Gleick acknowledged Newton as “the peerless alchemist of Europe.”

Alchemy is the process of transforming one form of substance into another.

Like how you willingly exchange what’s real (e.g. your blood, sweat and tears in the form of time, ideas, skills, knowledge, experience, energy, passion, rights, assets, etc.) for fiat, often to an artificial person legally modeled on the original corporate raiders to have no greater god than greed.

Gleick described the man who wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica:

“the chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He established principles, and they are called his laws.”

According to Venetian historian, Webster Griffin Tarpley:

“During the 1600’s, the Venetian fondi were transferred north, often to the Bank of Amsterdam, and later to the newly founded Bank of England. During the reign of ‘Bloody Mary,’ the Stuart period, the civil war in England, the dictatorship of Cromwell, the Stuart Restoration, and the 1688 installation of William of Orange as King of England by the pro-Venetian English oligarchy, the Venetian Party of England grew in power.

During the first half of the 1700’s, the most important activities of Venetian intelligence were directed by … Antonio Schinella Conti. Conti was a Venetian nobleman, originally a follower of Descartes, who lived for a time in Paris, where he was close to Malebranche. Conti went to London where he became a friend of Sir Isaac Newton. Conti directed the operations that made Newton an international celebrity, including especially the creation of a pro-Newton party of French Anglophiles and Anglomaniacs who came to be known as the French Enlightenment. Conti’s agents in this effort included Montesquieu and Voltaire.”

In The Last Magician | Sir Isaac Newton and the Quest for Immortality, Noel Joshua Hadley shared that “Isaac Newton was a mystic and occultist. When nobody else was looking, he exhumed rotting flesh from Alexandria, and that corpse was Hermes Trismegistus.”

“Few realize that his occult work, his alchemical studies, gave him the keys to the biggest breakthrough in his life. Alchemy insists that there are unseen, invisible forces at work in the universe, capable of acting on objects at a distance. An apple may (or may not) have dropped on Newton’s head, but beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was alchemy which prompted Newton to formulate the notion of gravity — alchemy which had been rendered into a coherent and communicable, if secret, code in Alexandria.” Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind

On 13 and 14 July 1936, a metal chest full of Newton’s private papers and lab books were auctioned at Sotheby’s in London. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, managed to buy most of his work on alchemy and eventually concluded that Newton “stands as a legitimate priest of the Babylonian whore religion.”

Four years after his purchase, Keynes published How to Pay for the War.

He went on to become the key architect of the original Bretton Woods agreement. As the leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, Keynes was heavily involved in the mid-1944 negotiations to establish the post-war system of Scarcity based on perpetual debts and perpetual wars:

“The United States was born in debt. Wars have been fought with borrowed money at least since Rome instituted the practice.” John Steele Gordon, Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt

Did reading Newton’s documents somehow inspire Keynes to cast a spell over humanity so our default mode becomes to willingly give away what’s ours to grow the umbrella rent-seeking empire of control through debt?

“If you wish to keep slaves, you must have all kinds of guards. The cheapest way to have guards is to have the slaves pay taxes to finance their own guards. To fool the slaves, you tell them that they are not slaves and that they have Freedom. You tell them they need Law and Order to protect them against bad slaves. Then you tell them to elect a Government. Give them Freedom to vote and they will vote for their own guards and pay their salary. They will then believe they are Free persons. Then give them money to earn, count and spend and they will be too busy to notice the slavery they are in.” Alexander Warbucks

It is super ironic that after setting up our opaque top-down casino culture of anything goes, Keynes wrote in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

Stephen Lendman explained the groomed trend of nonsense: “When corporate bosses ask financial executives how profits look in any quarter, they, in turn, ask how much do you want, then manipulate things to oblige when told.”

Born into a paradigm where we still need money for most everything we need to survive, doesn’t (money) scarcity weaponize behaviors so we self-organize to create and accept how:

“Everything we think we know about the world is a model … Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.” Donella Meadows

As money transforms human value into exchange value, corporate “artificial persons” are legally obliged to have no greater god than greed. Once they take over our means of survival, are we not held hostage? Money lets them increase prices at their whims and fancy, including outsourcing their risks to jack up their bottom lines, and to do whatever else they want with us.

Manufactured scarcity and fear hijack what it means to be human. Since this systemically brings out our worst insecurities, is that for the “common good” or simply a way to divide us so we will keep fighting to live this fairy tale to grow a global empire for the few?

Before dipping into earlier centuries below (more chronologically in Part II), let’s briefly mull over whether the turn of the last century and beyond had laid the foundation for humans to compete to live a BAU fairy tale, growing a global casino model of derivatives …

From Real and Authentic to the Derivatives of Anything and Everything

“They don’t want your money — they want your land, your gold and your kids.” Catherine Austin Fitts

1860s: John D. Rockefeller entered the oil industry and in 1870, he founded Standard Oil with some business partners. To expand his empire, he bought out his competitors:

“Standard Oil’s headquarters in New York City was known as ‘a cave for pirates’.” Patricia Brennan

1865: Founded as the International Telegraph Union, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has always been an intergovernmental public–private partnership organization. Headquartered next to the main United Nations (UN) campus in Geneva, ITU took its present name in 1934 and became a specialized agency of the UN in 1947.

Early 1870s: The term “robber baron” surfaced to describe a class of extremely wealthy businessmen who used ruthless and unethical business tactics to dominate vital industries. With virtually no regulation of business, industries like railroads, steel, and petroleum became monopolies as consumers and workers were exploited.

1873: Elizur Wright III, an American mathematician and abolitionist sometimes described in the United States as “the father of life insurance” or “the father of insurance regulation” published Politics and Mysteries of Life Insurance. He was an insurance commissioner for the State of Massachusetts:

“I became persuaded that life-insurance was the most available, convenient, and permanent nidus for rogues that civilization had ever presented.” Elizur Wright III

1874: Established by the Treaty of Bern, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) is another of UN’s specialized agencies. It coordinates policies for the worldwide postal system. Headquartered in Bern, Switzerland, UPU also oversees the Telematics and Express Mail Service (EMS) cooperatives. Each nation member agrees to the same terms for conducting international postal duties.

1882: Rockefeller and partners created the Standard Oil Trust to control a large number of companies. Through Standard, they controlled refining, distribution, marketing, and other aspects of the oil industry. At its peak, this first major industrial monopoly gained control of nearly 90 percent of America’s oil production.

“In the late 1800s, Rockefeller came up with an idea to use coal tar, a petroleum derivative, to make substances that affect the body and nervous system. This was not a new idea; his father Old Bill Rockefeller sold bottles of raw petroleum mixed with a little opium as a cure for cancer. Young Rockefeller just needed a vehicle to extend and capitalize on petroleum derivatives as medicines.” Tigger Montague, Down the Rabbit Hole: The rise of Western Medicine

As robber barons sought to dominate markets by creating monopolies, manipulating stock and bond prices, and disrupting one another’s businesses for competitive advantage, they required advice from an entire legal team.

Final years of the 19th century: Lawyers began to assume a prominent place in American business and public life. They did so most notably in New York among graduates of Ivy League colleges where white-shoe lawyers moved in the same social circles, joined the same clubs, and sent their children to the same prep schools:

“In the thirty years between 1890 and 1920, the steering of a middle course between unchecked capitalism and state socialism owed much to the elite Wall Street lawyers and their firms.” John Oller, White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century

As Rockefeller recognized the need for professional advice in his ever expanding investments and real estate holdings, he formed a four-member committee, later including his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., to manage his empire. Frederick Taylor Gates was its head and his senior business adviser. In this capacity, Gates steered Rockefeller money predominantly to syndicates arranged by the investment houses of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and of J. P. Morgan.

1889: The oldest governmental organization was formed the same year that Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie wrote his Gospel of Wealth epic to champion wealthy families on becoming stewards of our future. Even if you have never heard of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, it still exists. Its role as an international institution linking governments likely influenced the creation of the League of Nations (LoN) and the UN.

1899: Ten years later, management theory came to life as Frederick Winslow Taylor, founding father of the management business, wrapped his formula to exploit people — one person at a time — around:

“How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?”

“The first thing many observers noted about scientific management was that there was almost no science to it. The most significant variable in Taylor’s pig iron calculation was the 40 percent “adjustment” he made in extrapolating from a fourteen-minute sample to a full workday.

At the end of the day, his “method” amounted to a set of exhortations: Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch!

Notwithstanding the ostentatious use of stopwatches, Taylor’s pig iron case was not a description of some aspect of physical reality — how many tons can a worker lift? It was a prescription — how many tons should a worker lift?

Taylorism, like much of management theory to come, is at its core a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies).” Matthew Stewart

1900: As scientists discovered petrochemicals — chemicals that could be created from oil — the first Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature were awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Peace Prize in what is now Oslo, Norway.

A new type of lawyer was also born — one who understood business as well as law. Working with their clients, these New York City “white shoe” lawyers devised and implemented legal strategies that would drive the business world throughout the 20th century. As architects of the monopolistic new corporations, they acted as guardians who helped the kings of industry fend off government overreach and a “public be damned” attitude.

On January 22, 1900, the Verdict published a caricature of John D. Rockefeller holding White House and President McKinley in the palm of his hand; Capitol and Treasury Dept. in background as “Standard Oil Refinery.”

1901: Standard Oil was America’s largest corporation; and on January 22, Queen Victoria died:

“The Committee of 300 is the ultimate secret society made up of an untouchable ruling class, which includes the Queen of the United Kingdom (Elizabeth II), the Queen of the Netherlands, the Queen of Denmark and the royal families of Europe. These aristocrats decided at the death of Queen Victoria, the matriarch of the Venetian Black Guelphs that, in order to gain world-wide control, it would be necessary for its aristocratic members to “go into business” with the non-aristocratic but extremely powerful leaders of corporate business on a global scale, and so the doors to ultimate power were opened to what the Queen of England likes to refer to as ‘the commoners’. Through their illicit banking cartel, they own the stock of the Federal Reserve, which is a private for profit corporation that violates U.S. Constitution and is a ROOT of the problem.” Dr. John Coleman

That year, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was founded and headed by Simon Flexner.

1902: When Cecil Rhodes died, Nathaniel Rothschild was an executor of his will and instrumental in creating the Rhodes Scholarships from the estate.

1903: Yale Divinity School established a number of schools and hospitals throughout China known collectively as “Yale in China.”

1904: The American Medical Association (AMA) created the Council on Medical Education (CME) to restructure/standardize American medical education.

“At the height of their popularity in the 1900s, tontines represented almost two-thirds of the insurance market in the United States and accounted for more than 7.5% of the nation’s wealth. By 1905, there were an estimated nine million active tontine policies in the U.S., in a country of only 18 million households.” Carla Tardi on Investopedia

1906: Irving Fisher published The Nature of Capital and Income, since hailed as “the first economic theory of accounting” because it was the first move toward the colonization of accounting by economics.

To a large extent, the mechanistic character of our behaviors governed by numbers is his legacy:

Fisher, who “rarely met a social problem he did not put a price on,” was “arguing for why people needed to be treated as ‘money-making machines’.” Eli Cook, How Money Became the Measure of Everything

1907: Bakelite, the first plastic, was created from oil.

1908: After Taylor met with several Harvard professors, Harvard opened its first graduate school to offer a master’s business degree on scientific management.

(Between 1909 to 1914, Taylor visited Cambridge every winter to lecture on “a set of scriptures for a new and highly motivated cult of management experts” — pitching “the notion that management is a distinct function best handled by a distinct group of people — people characterized by a particular kind of education, way of speaking, and fashion sensibility.” Matthew Stewart)

1910: A January 30th New York Times article pondered: “What the baby is worth as a national asset: Last year’s crop reached a value estimated at $6,960,000,000”:

“An eight-pound baby is worth, at birth, $362 a pound. That is a child’s value as a potential wealth-producer. If he lives out the normal term of years, he can produce $2,900 more wealth than it costs to rear him and maintain him as an adult.”

Carnegie established the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) with industrialists and financiers on board as trustees.

(After persuading Carnegie to provide the initial $10 million funding, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler became head of international education and communication, founded the European branch of the Endowment headquartered in Paris, and was President of the Endowment from 1925 to 1945 while also being President of the elite Pilgrims Society between 1928 and 1946.)

Many were linked to the J.P. Morgan controlled American International Corporation (AIC) to be founded by Frank A. Vanderlip of the Stillman-Rockefeller-controlled National City Bank in 1915. It had a $50 million capital investment fund drawn from top establishment names as Morgan, Schiff, Winthrop, Grace, and Armour. At 120 Broadway, a complex of firms were also trading and investing in Russian raw materials.

Also in 1910, Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation, chose Simon Flexner’s brother, operator of a for-profit school, to survey medical schools throughout America under AMA. The Abraham Flexner report “helped destroy the credibility and funding sources for nearly all schools using non-drug based medicine.”

The AMA began in 1847 and was a small, weak organization until John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie took on a “philanthropic mission” to help it, marking the point when allopathic (Western) medicine took a huge turn. As there were many types of doctors and healing methods, Rockefeller wanted to eliminate competitors so drugs would be the main course of treatment. These capitalists “embraced scientific medicine as an ideological weapon in their struggle to formulate a new culture appropriate to and supportive of industrial capitalism.” Richard E Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men

November 20–30, 1910: A secret gathering on the secluded Jekyll Island laid the foundations for the Federal Reserve System, the most powerful single actor in the American economy.

The Principia Mathematica, the landmark work by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, was first published in 1910, 1912 and 1913 where the authors attempted to reduce all of mathematics to pure logic.

(Besides being instrumental in developing and popularizing modern mathematical logic, the book also served as a major impetus for research in the foundations of mathematics throughout the last century. Along with Aristotle’s Organon and Gottlob Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic, it remains one of the most influential books on logic ever written.)

May 15, 1911: “… the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Standard Oil Company, ruling it was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act … The court’s decision forced Standard to break into 34 independent companies spread across the country and abroad. Many of these companies have since split, folded or merged; today, the primary descendents of Standard include ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.” The Learning Network in NYT, May 15, 2012

“The court order turned out to be a financial windfall for Rockefeller, who still held a quarter of Standard Oil’s stock after his retirement. The individual pieces of the company were worth more than the whole, and as shares of the individual companies doubled and tripled in value in their early years, Rockefeller became the country’s first billionaire with a fortune worth nearly 2 percent of the entire American economy.” Christopher Klein on history.com

1913: Founding of the US Federal Reserve, the US Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), and the launch of Henry Ford’s opaque factory assembly line model piloted on how the factory assembly line concept worked in slaughterhouses in the Midwest to augment Taylor’s vision to increase the work rate and reduce wages:

“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management

Was this how our forefathers were collectively folded into “Me” bubbles of Scarcity? Geared up to fight one another to be hired/promoted for money — oblivious to how they were giving away what’s theirs and ours and real to the hidden controllers behind the corporate-state driven debt model?

“This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress … The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government.” Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. (1859–1924) Congressman (R-MN)

(In 1913, a $20 bill was equal to one ounce of gold and had been for many years. Twenty years later (1933), the US government demanded that people turned in their gold for $20.67 by executive order. The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement subsequently pegged US dollar to gold at $35 per ounce, a whopping rent-seeking profit of $14.33 per ounce.)

Abraham Flexner became Secretary of the General Education Board (GEB). On his recommendation, the first grants towards the improvement of medical education went to Johns Hopkins University.

(The School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins was founded in 1916 with funding from the RF. As the first of its kind in the United States, it became enormously influential.)

1914: From its earliest years, the RF took particular interest in China. The same year that World War I broke out, the China Medical Board (CMB) was created as one of its first operating divisions.

(Provided with a $12 million endowment and separately incorporated as CMB, Inc., the Foundation was reorganized in 1928 to modernize medical education and to improve the practice of medicine in China.)

Western Union introduced the “Metal Money,” one of the first consumer credit cards.

(Since its founding as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in 1851, and a name change after merging with several other telegraph companies five years later, Western Union had dominated the American telegraphy industry from the 1860s to the 1980s.)

Also in 1914: John Scott Haldane, a Scottish physiologist famous for intrepid self-experimenting which led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases, published Mechanism, Life and Personality; An Examination of the Mechanistic Theory of Life and Mind.

After America entered World War I: An innovative government propaganda service hired Edward Bernays to mold public opinion in support of American intervention in Europe as key to bringing democracy there.

Considered the father of public relations and propaganda, Sigmund Freud’s nephew subsequently realized his work for the Committee on Public Information was applicable to peacetime:

“When I got back from the war, I realized that ideas could be as important weapons as anything.”

1919: At the end of the First World War, did the Peace Treaty of Versailles pave the way for systemically standardizing humans, as Fisher’s “money-making machines?”

The establishment of artificial persons like the International Labor Organization, the International Organization for Standardization, the LoN, Chatham House aka the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and others following the Bretton Woods agreement — all likely funded by people hidden behind “legal fictions” to build the framework for a centralized global casino model where corporate middlemen require you to pay with yourself before you can access (most of) what you need to survive.

(That year, AIC become the giant American International Group (AIG) — the too-big-to-fail entity bailed out by the US government in 2008.)

“Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.” Rutger Bregman

Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers’ pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers?” Aaron Swartz

CORPORATION: “An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.” Ambrose Bierce

“institutions are the principle means by which conflict is produced and managed in society.” Butler Shaffer

“The chief business of the American people is business and the religion of business permeated and dominated the society. The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there.” US President Calvin Coolidge in 1925

“by the turn of the 20th century, several large corporations began to grow and offer pensions. These included Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, AT&T, Eastman Kodak, Goodyear, and General Electric. All of these companies had adopted pension plans before 1930.” Melissa Phipps

1921: Without us buying into this BAU fairy tale, Ford understood nothing happens. Aware energy is the operating currency of his factory assembly line model, he urged countries to build “the world’s greatest power plant” backed by their “imperishable natural wealth” of energy resources to create a new “energy currency” system based on “units of power” … “the standard would be a certain amount of energy exerted for one hour that would be equal to one dollar.” New-York Tribune, 1921

1928: The year before the world’s first longest, deepest and most widespread depression, Bernays published his book on propaganda, public relations, and manipulating public opinion. Through “the engineering of consent,” Bernays provided leaders with the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it” because

“Mass production is only profitable if its rhythm can be maintained — that is, if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity. The result is that while, under the handicraft or small-unit system of production that was typical a century ago, demand created the supply, to-day supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand. A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable. This entails a vastly more complex system of distribution than formerly. To make customers is the new problem. One must understand not only his own business — the manufacture of a particular product — but also the structure, the personality, the prejudices, of a potentially universal public.”

Instead of appealing to the rational mind, he had targeted the unconscious. Hired by corporations and governments to exploit human emotions, Bernays concluded:

“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of … It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”

February 11, 1929: The Lateran Treaty/Pact was signed at the Lateran Palace in Rome by Italy and the Holy See to recognize the Vatican City as a sovereign and independent papal state. Benito Mussolini represented the government and cardinal secretary of state Pietro Gasparri, the Holy See. Immediately after, the Vatican state joined the UPU and then used it to acquire international influence. This treaty allows popes to travel round the world as heads of state and to address diplomatic delegations.

Late 1920s and early 1930s: Anthropologist Gregory Bateson, observing the Iatmul tribe in New Guinea, said his reflections of that experience took him to the “edge of what later became cybernetics.” He coined the term, “Schismogenesis” to describe the study of how societies become divisive and dysfunctional, aka the strategy of “divide and conquer.” How interactions between individuals or groups (i.e., feedback loops) in which A’s behavior elicits a particular reaction from B which then reinforces and amplifies A’s behavior and ultimately leads to a breakdown in the system.

In The Birth of Central Intelligence, Arthur B. Darling shared that Bateson had provided the rationale for the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a letter to his boss, Bill Donavan.

“It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms.” John Stockwell, former CIA official

Rexford Guy Tugwell was an economist who had championed central planning and prided himself on being a disciple of Taylor’s studies in efficiency. His dislike of the misallocation of resources under capitalism led him to expose the “myths” of laissez-faire:

“The jig is up. There is no invisible hand. There never was.”

“Tugwell believed that the logic of scientific management required the extension of planning from the single factory to the industry and then to the entire economy.”

“We needed a Taylor now for the economic system as a whole.”

By the late 1920s: Tugwell’s reputation had spread and he was sought as a consultant by politicians — first by the Republican governor of Illinois, Frank Lowden, then by Al Smith, and finally in 1932 by Democratic presidential aspirant Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Columbia colleague, Raymond Moley, recruited Tugwell, along with Adolph Berle Jr., also of Columbia, as campaign advisers and speechwriters for FDR. Their work with Roosevelt soon became known and publicized, and they became tagged the “Brain Trust.”

1930’s: According to Walter B. Wriston, the first major step the United States took toward merging government and industry, and the total abandonment of the free-market system was:

“the enactment of the legislation that created the National Recovery Administration. The NRA with its famous Blue Eagle symbol soon began grinding out hundreds of “codes” repealing economic freedom and arbitrarily fixing wages, prices and hours.”

Initially:

“ … many businessmen welcomed the idea of controls and were openly pleased with the idea of an escape from competition. ‘Codes’ in the 1930s were the equivalent of the current euphemism ‘guidelines.’ These ‘codes’ ultimately affected some 22 million workers.

Like all schemes which require people to behave in a way they would not act of their own free will, force eventually has to be used against the populace. Since the NRA codes required citizens to make decisions which were contrary to their own economic interests, penalties for noncompliance had to be severe.

Tailors were arrested, indicted, convicted and sentenced because their prices for pressing a pair of pants were a nickel below the relevant NRA code. Farmers were fined for planting wheat that they themselves ate on their own farms. Barbers who charged less than the code rate for a shave and a haircut were subject to fines of up to $500. Even the village handyman was prosecuted, since he did not fit in under the multiple wage-and hour scale set up by the codes.

The complexity of the codes soon antagonized labor as well as management. The average factory worker who had been earning $25 a week was cut back to $18.60 under NRA codes.”

1939: Fred Rodell, a professor at Yale Law School who studied law to try to make sense of what lawyers said, published Woe Unto You Lawyers to explain how the whole legal profession, its works and its ways was a “high-class racket.”

1940s: Norbert Wiener, a Professor of Mathematics at MIT, borrowing from the ancient Greek word “cyber” — the idea of government or governing — coined the term “Cybernetics” to describe the entire field of control and communication theory for governing the machine or animal:

“Governance is the art of governing without government.” Susan George

Cybernetics had evolved from the intersection of mathematics and engineering in US military research (cybernetics, information theory, computer theory).

Post-Second World War, the USA took over from the British Empire as the key base for this BAU experiment:

The U.S.A. “is the highest expression thus far of the development of the modern sovereign nation-state republic, which originated from Europe between the time of the Council of Florence in 1438–39 and the establishment of the first modern nation-states: Louis XI’s France and Henry VII’s England, during the later Fifteenth century. In fact, the idea for the colonization of the Americas, as a way of outflanking the enemies of the Fifteenth-century Golden Renaissance, was first developed as a global strategy by the circles of Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa during the Council of Florence.” William F. Wertz, Jr., The Birth of the Sovereign Nation-State: How the Platonic-Christian revolution of the Fifteenth century created the modern world

The Cybernetics Group also began exploring how to develop a science that made it possible to predict and control human behavior.

1946–1953: The Macy conferences took place in New York, soon after the founding of the Bretton Woods institutions and amid the UN adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Known as the most important meetings of minds for understanding the control of human behavior, the ten meetings were initiated and organized by Warren McCulloch and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.

According to Frances Stonor Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War (1999), the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation had close links with the RF and had served as a front for the CIA.

(Founded in 1930 by Kate Macy Ladd in honor of her father, much of the family firm known as Josiah Macy and Sons was ultimately bought by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Corporation.)

1947: US President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Group under the direction of a Director of Central Intelligence by presidential directive on January 22, 1946. By implementing the National Security Act of 1947, this group became the CIA.

In Mafia of the Powerful, Catherine Austin Fitts shared that for 500 years, a central banking warfare model has organized us around a governance structure where the First World is strategically subsidized by the Third World.

She believes a mistake Eisenhower made was creating the 49 Act, which turned the CIA into the world’s most powerful banker — the iron bank with the ability to keep everything secret, to kill with impunity and to live outside the law:

“The CIA are bankers because they control the largest pools of secret money in the world working with the central bankers. If I have a hundred percent intelligence of what’s going to happen and why and when and I have access to money that I can print out of thin air and I can kill with impunity, then I don’t need money to make money. I can make all the money I want … it’s the ultimate insider trading machine.”

1948: Nobel Prize-winning economist, Wassily Leontief began the Harvard Economic Research Project as an extension of Second World War Operations Research:

“Its purpose was to discover the science of controlling an economy; at first the American economy, and then the world economy. It was felt that with sufficient mathematical foundation and data, it would be nearly as easy to predict and control the trend of an economy as to predict and control the trajectory of a projectile. Such as [sic] proven to be the case. Moreover, the economy has been transformed into a guided missile on target.” Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars: An Introductory Programming Manual

“The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished and then eliminated.” Wassily Leontief

Late 1940s: The US Congress adopted a series of laws renaming (and reorganizing) the American national military establishment — the Department of War became the Department of Defense. Other countries subsequently followed this example.

1950s: Abraham Maslow was a driving force behind humanistic psychology. Known for his (untested) theories on the hierarchy of needs, self-actualization, and peak experiences, Maslow even advocated:

“Proper management of the work lives of human beings, of the way in which they earn their living, can improve them and improve the world and in this sense be a utopian or revolutionary technique.”

He published Motivation and Personality in 1954, Toward a Psychology of Being in 1962 and coined the term, “Eupsychian” management — to seed how companies should become places to nurture self-actualizing employees. As work becomes a temple of self-actualization (i.e. for the market to replace religion), he even envisioned that a “biological elite” be given power.

Did the 1960’s prepare financial markets for the Nixon shock as they legally started to globalize into a casino of anything goes?

“With the creation of the Euromarket, bankers in both countries [United States and Britain] ambled on a solution to the problem of how to reconstruct the London-New York financial axis that had been prominent in the 1920s.” Eric Helleiner, Treasure islands

Explore: The Whole World in Debt: Cui Bono?

Based on the same “no greater god than greed” direction to extract our value — as data becomes the future of no/(programmable) money — is the “Great Reset” baton now being tossed to any legal fiction to form public–private partnerships with each other and to evolve a new form of “philosopher’s stone” for an absolute form of control?

Is that why in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff has warned: “You are not the product, you are the abandoned carcass.”

Fisher had also formed and chaired The Committee of One Hundred to promote the establishment of a national bureau of health. An early report, National Vitality, Its Wastes and Conservation, had deemed public health a natural resource.

“Treating society as an income-generating investment and workers as human capital, Fisher and other Progressive Era efficiency experts used such price points in the first two decades of the twentieth century in order to calculate the annual cost or benefit of such varying things as tuberculosis ($1.1 billion), government health insurance ($3 billion), prohibition ($2 billion) skunks ($3 million) or Niagara Falls ($122.5 million).” Eli Cook

In 1995, the Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics (IFC) was established at the International Statistical Institute (ISI) session in Beijing. His name was adopted because of his work on economic measurement and other topics related to monetary and financial stability of interest to central banks.

As a member of the International Association for Official Statistics (IAOS), the IFC is governed by the international central banking community. The IFC operates under the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) whose chief has already decreed:

“… key difference in the CBDC is that central banks will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that.” Agustin Carstens

Hasn’t our surrender of our real value to fiat already mightily fueled the power of financial oligarchs like central banks and other oligarchical bullies?

Richard Werner on Why Central Banks AIM For BOOM BUST Cycles:

“The main dominant problem of the 20th century has been concentration of power in the hands of the few and the more you do that, the more you’ll get … once we get the next banking crisis, they will do all the wrong things because after each crisis, the regulators get more powers. That’s the wrong way. Then we get more crises. We have regulatory moral hazard and each crisis makes them more powerful. They have an incentive to have another crisis. they get even more powerful. The measure of success of the central bank is whether we have boom bust cycles and ultimately, that can be much more painful and costly if you have big boom bust cycles. Big unemployment. Big dislocation. Great depression.”

Do all Roads Lead to Rome/Babylonia?

“An entity capable of legal rights and duties: an entity that can own, buy, sell, enter into contracts and sue for legal breach of contract, or otherwise have standing as a plaintiff or defendant in the courts. This legal sense of personhood focuses on what persons do rather than what they are. It allows that an entity may be a legal person without being a natural person like an individual human being. To be a person on this conception, does not depend on the stuff out of which one is made but only on one’s performance, specifically one’s performance in the space of social norms.” María Dueñas, Corporate Social Responsibility for Valorization of Organizations

In the Middle Ages, Roman law had defined a legal person (note the emphasis on performance in the quote above) as separate from their shareholders and directors. Since that dates to ancient Rome, were the first “corporations” of the modern global “company” and “corporate” business system evolved from the old Roman Catholic dioceses in 11th-century England? (To be explored in Part II.)

Through the might of the Roman Republic, Latin — the language of the Romans — became the dominant language in Italy and, then throughout the Western Roman Empire. It has since shaped the English language. Are you aware that “Government” is derived from the Latin verb Guverno?

Guvernare means “to control” and the Latin noun Men, Mentis means “mind,” so “Government” means to control the mind.

With no change in direction, do evolved forms of these legally govern us today?

Around 1780 BC, Hammurabi, the sixth King of Babylon, created the oldest collection of codified law known to exist and that included the maxim, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The Code of Hammurabi covered family life, property, and trade; provided information on social and economic conditions in ancient Babylonia and recognized modern concepts as that of corporate personality.

During his reign, King Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 BC) — the greatest King of ancient Babylon — divided the city into ten distinct regions or districts ruled by princes, under whom were mayoral governors, captains, judges, treasurers, councilors and sheriffs.

“One of the best governments in English history was that of King Alfred the Great, who ruled from 871 to 899. Alfred pursued a policy of literacy, education, and nation-building, and stands as a founder of Old English literature. The Byzantine Empire saw in Alfred a flare-up of the Platonic Christian humanism of the Irish monks and Alcuin of York, the principal adviser to Charlemagne a century earlier. Byzantium accordingly incited Vikings and Varangians, who had been defeated by Alfred the Great, to renew their attacks on England.” Webster G.Tarpley, How the Venetian System Was Transplanted Into England

Names, labels, players, forms, etc. may change but is the direction for our living this BAU fairy tale also built on what Nimrod, Noah’s great-grandson, did?

Known for his military exploits (Genesis 10:9 — “a mighty hunter before the LORD”), many stories abound about this ancient king of Babylon. One was that he had rebelled against God to establish the very first “New World Order” to fundamentally change the course of our history. After he passed away, Nimrod was worshipped as a sun god, under a whole host of names like Marduk, Osiris and Apollo.

History also tells us of a seemingly never-ending power struggle between various emperors and popes who could never agree who was more superior: Pope or Emperor.

For instance, during the 11th and 12th centuries, as church leaders tried to assert more power, some church leaders and reformers began to challenge the practice of investiture. Some nobles sided with the church, often for political reasons as they wanted the secular authorities who ruled over them to have less power. For about 50 years, there were armed conflicts between supporters of the pope and supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Do you also confuse the Holy Roman Empire with the Roman Empire of the New Testament period?

27 BC — AD 476 (5th century): The Roman Empire was based in Rome and had controlled nations around the Mediterranean rim, including Israel.

4th century: Christianity was embraced by the emperor and pronounced the official religion of the Roman Empire. This blending of religion and government led to an uneasy but powerful mix of doctrine and politics. Eventually, power was centralized in the Roman Catholic Church, the major social institution throughout the Middle Ages.

5th century: After the Western Roman Empire fell in approximately 476, the Roman Empire was reduced to its eastern half. From then to 1453, their capital was the ethnically Greek city of Constantinople. Modern historians refer to this phase as the “Byzantine Empire.” Before falling to an Ottoman Turkish onslaught in the 15th century, it was a leading civilization.

“Venice was a branch of the Byzantine Empire which became powerful enough to capture Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, shortly after 1200. Venice, like Byzantium, saw religion as a tool of state power, with new cults to be concocted as the need arose.” Webster G.Tarpley

Church offices were appointed by the secular rulers or nominated by them and then approved or “rubber stamped” by church leadership. Even the Pope was often nominated by the king or emperor.

Secular authorities often intervened to solve church disputes. In many cases, bishops (who oversee a diocese, a large territory of many parishes) and abbots (who oversee a monastery) were appointed directly by secular rulers. These positions usually came with access to land and wealth, and often, the appointee was a younger son or relative of the secular ruler.

Church offices were simply a favor that the ruler could bestow or a position that he could sell to the highest bidder who would be loyal to him. The process of conferring these positions is called the Investiture Controversy, aka the Investiture Contest or the Investiture Dispute. This involved a disagreement over whether secular rulers or the pope had the authority to appoint bishops and abbots.

“The ancient Roman Catholic tradition dealt with the issue of royal absolutism with the doctrine of the “Two Swords,” promulgated by Pope Gelasius I (late fifth century). Gelasius held that both the royal and priestly powers were bestowed by God, but that the pope’s power was ultimately more important:

There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power… You are also aware, dear son, that while you are permitted honorably to rule over humankind, yet in things divine you bow your head humbly before the leaders of the clergy and await from their hands the means of your salvation.

In theory, divine law, natural law, and customary and constitutional law still held sway over the king. However, absent a superior spiritual power, such concepts could not be enforced, since the king could not be tried by any of his own courts, nor did the influence of the pope hold any sway by this point.” Matthew A. McIntosh

8th century: The Donation of Constantine (Donatio Constantini) is purported to be an original 4th-century document in which Constantine the Great had supposedly granted supreme temporal and spiritual power to the Church. Claiming Pope Sylvester I had miraculously cured him of leprosy, Constantine, in an act of gratitude, had transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope and the Pope then generously gave that power back, allowing the emperor his reign.

It was thought to be created at the behest of Pope Stephen II to aid his negotiations with Pippin III (also spelled Pepin), the father of Charlemagne.

“The idea was that the Pope approved the transfer of the great central European crown from the Merovingian dynasty to the Carolingians, and in return, Pepin would not just give the Papacy the rights to Italian lands, but would actually ‘restore’ what had been given long before by Constantine.” Robert Wilde

9th century: Pope Leo III laid the foundation for the Holy Roman Empire in 800 when he crowned Charlemagne, the Frankish king “Emperor of the Roman Empire.” As the imperial title was transferred from east back to west, this act set a precedent for the next 700 years. It was a direct continuation from ancient Rome as popes claimed the right to select and install the most powerful rulers on the continent.

1054 (11th century): To justify the Church’s supremacy and involvement in temporal affairs, Pope Leo IX made the most dramatic use of the Donation of Constantine. The Eastern Orthodox Church separated from the Western (Roman) Church, in part due to Rome’s centralized leadership under the Pope.

962–1806: In an attempt to resurrect the western empire of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire officially began when Pope John XII crowned King Otto I of Germany and gave him the title of “emperor” over a loosely joined union of smaller kingdoms in western and central Europe.

Holy Roman Emperors — usually Germanic kings — ruled from their homelands and oversaw local regions controlled by a variety of kings, dukes, and other officials.

As Catholic Popes wielded the most influence, and the papacy’s power reached its zenith, the Holy Roman Empire governed much of Europe for most of medieval history. The Roman Catholic Church, melded in a church-state alliance with the emperor, was the major religious entity.

During the Middle Ages, a wide variety of new church traditions became the official doctrine of the Church. Further, the church-state engaged in many military conflicts, including the Crusades.

Approximately between 1096 and 1291: There were eight major Crusades. The driving force were large feudal land owners who used their money and resources to raise armies for them.

The first crusade had “established the power of the Venetian Black Nobility and solidified the power of the wealthy ruling class. The Black Nobility aristocracy achieved complete control over Venice in 1171, when the appointment of the Doge was transferred to what was known as the Great Council, which consisted of members of the commercial aristocracy (among them the infamous de’Medici family). Venice has remained in their hands ever since, but the power and influence of the Venetian Black Nobility extends far beyond its borders, and today it is felt in every corner of the globe.” The Mythos Mafia The Papal Bloodlines Of The Jesuits )

In The Hour of Birth of the Sovereign State (English translation of Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates), Professor Friedrich von der Heydte documented that in the 10th and 11th centuries, the development of at least the first three of the following states was prepared by the Norman occupation. By the 13th and 14th centuries, these four kingdoms had already developed an identity distinct from the Holy Roman Empire:

England under Henry II (1154–1189),

France under Louis IX (1226–1270),

Sicily under Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1212–1250), and

Spain under Ferdinand (1217–1252) and his successor, Alfonse the Wise (1252–1258).

15th century: In the1400s, Dante Alighieri developed the concept of the modern sovereign nation-state against empire building amid:

“European power centers coalesced into two camps: the Ghibellines, who supported the Emperors Hohenstaufen family; and the Guelphs (the Welfs), from Welf, the German prince who competed with Frederick for control of the Holy Roman Empire. The Pope allied himself with the Guelphs.

All modern history stems directly from the struggle between these two powers. The Guelphs are also called the Neri, Black Guelphs, or Black Nobility, and supported William of Orange in his seizure of the throne of England, which eventually resulted in the formation of the Bank of England and the East India Company, which would rule the world from the 17th century.

The power of the Guelphs would extend through the Italian financial centers to the north of France in Lombardy (all Italian bankers were referred to as “Lombards”). Lombard in German means “deposit bank,” and the Lombards were bankers to the entire medieval world. They would later transfer operations north to Hamburg, then to Amsterdam and finally to London.

The Guelphs would start the slave trade to the colonies. The Guelphs, in order to aid their control of finance and politics, would perpetuate gnostic cults which eventually developed into the Rosicrucians, Unitarians, Fabian Society and the World Council of Churches. The East India company, together with John Stuart Mill, would finance the University of London.” Wes Penre, Venetian Black Nobility and Committee of 300

Between 1439 and 1440, Lorenzo Valla wrote De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamation while employed in the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, then engaged in a territorial conflict with Pope Eugene IV over the Papal States. Valla exposed the Donation of Constantine — an important document justifying the papacy’s claims to temporal rule — as a forgery.

Amid the power struggles and/or the use of the “good cop, bad cop” strategy aka Hegelian Dialectic between the church, royalty, nobility and the people, names, labels, forms change and they confuse but isn’t underlying all that wars, debts and fear to harness humanity into embracing new ways of control?

Is Feudalism the more Modern Label for Roman rule?

Since feudalism can broadly be defined as structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor, is this direction still intact?

In feudal systems, serfs were the lowest class of people in a hierarchical system and were slaves in many ways. They were bound to the land and the lords who owned the land, and had little-to-no rights. A serf could not marry, move somewhere else, or change occupation without permission from their lord.

Is the 21st century’s equivalent of lords, the hidden people with absolute power?

Money has been the key tool — the “philosopher’s stone” — for this idea of control.

Until 1666, all currencies were publicly controlled by the king and the pope in England but through the English Free Coinage Act, Charles II transferred the control of money creation to private banks, i.e. corporations.

“Our corporate-state world plunders, enslaves, controls and destroys us, all in the name of advancing our liberty and material well-being.” Butler Shaffer, Professor Emeritus at Southwestern University School of Law

“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” Frederic Bastiat, 19th-century French economist writer

“The corporation has become a vehicle by which good men and women cause harm to society because of the way the corporation is created and protected by the law … the law has created this artificial person and then it’s imbued it with a personality that says it’s only allowed to act in its own self-interest.” Joel Bakan, law professor and filmmaker

Since the first “corporations” of the modern global “company” and “corporate” business system had evolved from the old Roman Catholic dioceses, do all roads lead us back to the Holy Roman Empire?

Shall We Crowdsource Context?

Do we unwittingly co-create the mess we are in because Greater fools continue to live a global experiment of Scarcity set a long time ago? Is that why our world is now legally more pro corporate greed than human lives? If so, what are human rights? Does the rule of law protect what it means to be human or does it simply grow the power of the people hidden behind this umbrella corporate-state model?

If you view history and what’s happening as a series of isolated incidents, you will miss the pattern of how our BAU fairy tale came to be, or how we are stuck in the umbrella BAU model of control built on how “the system must be first.”

The focus of Part I and other articles in the Hacking mindsets series has largely been the last century. This Preamble connects dots for what had happened at the turn of the last century and more.

In Part II, I will attempt to chronologically outline some key dots over the earlier centuries but since no one person knows everything, can we crowdsource context for what had happened over the ages?

Because history favors the victors, hack your own mindset to TRY to understand root causes for the mess we find ourselves in. Embark on your voyage of self-discoveries to understand how this BAU spell has you readily give away what’s real and ours to “legal fictions” with no greater god than greed to live:

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets … The most valuable ‘currency’ of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members.” W. Edwards Deming, 20th-century “father of the third wave of the industrial revolution”

Let’s not forget how Scarcity is baked into the umbrella BAU model we are now co-dependent on and how that brings out our worst insecurities.

Without understanding root causes and context, will we really be able to tackle the mess we find our world in?

This article is a work in progress but if it resonates, DO share this link to help people hack their own mindsets, PLEASE.

To share context, please email your salient points (with references, please) to crowdpowers@gmail.com and if relevant, I’ll add to this and Part II which can keep evolving with your input.