The Water We Swim In, Part 2

38 min readMay 19, 2021

*Carney explains the Predator/Prey dynamics: “Exuding a sense of superiority, a gold fish looks down on a green (with envy) fish.”*

“What civilization is, is a very complex arrangement in which we have used symbols — that is to say words, numbers, figures, concepts to represent the real world of nature, like we use money to represent wealth, and like we measure energy with the clock. Or like we measure with yards or with inches. These are very useful measures. But you can … so easily confuse the measure with what you are measuring; the money with the wealth; or even the menu with the dinner. And at a certain point, you can become so enchanted with the symbols that you entirely confuse them with the reality. And this is the disease from which almost all civilized people are suffering.” Alan Watts

“… clearly, money and goods are not the same thing but are, on the contrary, exactly opposite things. Most confusion in economic thinking arises from failure to recognize this fact. Goods are wealth which you have, while money is a claim on wealth which you do not have. Thus goods are an asset; money is a debt. If goods are wealth; money is not wealth, or negative wealth, or even anti-wealth. They always behave in opposite ways, just as they usually move in opposite directions. If the value of one goes up, the value of the other goes down, and in the same proportion. The value of goods, expressed in money, is called “prices,” while the value of money, expressed in goods, is called “value.”” Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time

Is the above because the entire concept of Economics is anchored on Scarcity even as competing “legal fictions” aka corporate persons normalize how they manufacture artificial Scarcity?

Benchmarked against symbols embedded into the invisible underlying (distributed and decentralized) operating Accounting system, these “legal fictions” have to have no greater god than growth to survive:

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” Gregory Bateson

In Tragedy and Hope, Quigley outlines how powered by “self-interests” and Scarcity, the water we swim in orients us to maximizing profits for institutional rent-seekers as our default way of life:

“Capitalism provides very powerful motivations for economic activity because it associates economic motivations so closely with self-interest … Each individual … so powerfully motivated by self-interest, easily loses sight of the role which his own activities play in the economic system as a whole, and tends to act as if his activities were the whole, with inevitable injury to that whole.

Eventually, … commercial capitalism became institutionalized into a restrictive system, sometimes called “mercantilism,” in which merchants sought to gain profits, not from the movements of goods but from restricting the movements of goods. Thus the pursuit of profits, which had earlier led to increased prosperity by increasing trade and production, became a restriction on both trade and production, because profit became an end in itself rather than an accessory mechanism in the economic system as a whole.

The control of financial capitalism was used to integrate the industrial system into ever-larger units with interlinking financial controls. This made possible a reduction of competition with a resulting increase in profits. As a result, the industrial system soon found that it was again able to finance its own expansion from its own profits, and, with this achievement, financial controls were weakened, and the stage of monopoly capitalism arrived.

In sum, specialization of economic activities, by breaking up the economic process, had made it possible for people to concentrate on one portion of the process and, by maximizing that portion, to jeopardize the rest. The process was not only broken up into producers, exchangers, and consumers but there were also two kinds of exchangers (one concerned with goods, the other with money), with almost antithetical, short-term, aims. The problems which inevitably arose could be solved and the system reformed only by reference to the system as a whole.

Unfortunately, however, three parts of the system, concerned with the production, transfer, and consumption of goods, were concrete and clearly visible so that almost anyone could grasp them simply by examining them, while the operations of banking and finance were concealed, scattered, and abstract so that they appeared to many to be difficult … bankers themselves did everything they could to make their activities more secret and more esoteric. Their activities were reflected in mysterious marks in ledgers which were never opened to the curious outsider.

This relationship, the price system, depended upon five things: the supply and the demand for goods, the supply and the demand for money, and the speed of exchange between money and goods.

Essentially what it did was to take the old disorganized and localized methods of handling money and credit and organize them into an integrated system, on an international basis, which worked with incredible and well-oiled facility for many decades.

In time they (the merchant bankers of London) brought into their financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other.

Deposits on the upper level of the pyramid were called by this name, with typical bankers’ ambiguity, in spite of the fact that they consisted of two utterly different kinds of relationships: (1) “lodged deposits,” which were real claims left by a depositor in a bank, on which the depositor might receive interest, since such deposits were debts owed by the bank to the depositor; and (2) “created deposits,” which were claims created by the bank out of nothing as loans from the bank to “depositors” who had to pay interest on them, since these represented debt from them to the bank.

In both cases, of course, checks could be drawn against such deposits to make payments to third parties, which is why both were called by the same name. Both form part of the money supply. Lodged deposits as a form of savings are deflationary, while created deposits, being an addition to the money supply, are inflationary. The volume of the latter depends on a number of factors of which the chief are the rate of interest and the demand for such credit.

These two play a very significant role in determining the volume of money in the community, since a large portion of that volume, in an advanced economic community, is made up of checks drawn against deposits. The volume of deposits banks can create, like the amount of notes they can issue, depends upon the volume of reserves available to pay whatever fraction of checks are cashed rather than deposited.

These matters may be regulated by laws, by bankers’ rules, or simply by local customs …to a considerable extent (this) explains the inflationary aspect of a depression, the combination helping to form the so-called “business cycle.”

To grasp how we are self-organized to be the Greater fools, mull over how Scarcity works — generally, the more people, the greater the demand and the higher the price. Because there’s “never enough” of something and price is what buyers and sellers agree on for the exchange of real goods and services, are not outcomes like persistent shortages and competition for resources inevitable?

Evolved from the original corporate raider model, the survival strategy for today’s corporations remains having no greater god than growth. Quigley again:

“(They) restrict the flow of goods, so that an equal volume of money flowed for a reduced volume of goods. In this way, shipments were decreased, costs were reduced, but profits were maintained.”

These “legal fictions” manufacture artificial Scarcity to have us fight one another — chasing after “scarcity” — as they compete to be the top dog at making us part with our money and whatever’s ours.

Fundamentally, Business-as-usual (BAU) perpetuates Scarcity thinking and doing so an elite minority can privately own and control the means of producing wealth, accrued from the rising productivity of what we all do to survive:

“The real estate, financial system, monopolies, and other rent-extracting ‘tollbooth’ privileges are not valued in terms of their contribution to production or living standards, but by how much they can extract from the economy. By classical definition, these rentier payments are not technologically necessary for production, distribution, and consumption. They are not investments in the economy’s productive capacity, but extraction from the surplus it produces.” Michael Hudson

“Banking is rent-seeking of industrial proportions.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Part 1 of this two-part article explores how in just over a hundred years, the massive BAU Operating System of Control — driven by oligarchs running a powerfully opaque Accounting program of Scarcity — has evolved.

In this excerpt from From Time to Eternity, let’s ponder over Watts’ take on the Great Depression:

“One day everything was going on all right. Everybody was pretty wealthy and had plenty to eat. The next day everybody was in poverty. What had happened? Had the fields disappeared, had the dairy vanished into thin air, had the fish of the sea ceased to exist, had human beings lost their energy, their skills and their brains? No.

But on the morning after the Depression a man came to work building a house, and the foreman said to him “Sorry chum you can’t work today,. there ain’t no inches.” He said “What do you mean there ain’t no inches?” “Yeah” he said, “Yeah, we got lumber, we got metal, we even got tape measures.”

The foreman said “The trouble with you is you don’t understand business. There are no inches. We have been using too many of them and not enough to go around.”

Because what happened in the Great Depression was … a slump in money. And human beings are so unbelievably stupid, that they confused money with wealth. And they don’t realize that money is a measure of wealth, in exactly the same way that meters are a measure of length. They think it is something that is valuable in and of itself. And as a result of that get into unbelievable trouble, in exactly the same way time is nothing but an abstract measure of motion.”

Is money scarce because the value of all kinds of goods and services is priced in monetary terms?

Has living out Henry Ford’s factory assembly line legacy predisposed you to seeing only “What’s in it for you?” (clocks) so you overlook how the BAU system/paradigm (cloud) aggregates collective behaviors?

Let’s continue exploring, including how dominant patterns of “Scarcity” behavior emerge from being self-organized to habitually feed ourselves and each other to the insatiable BAU beast.

Setting the modern stage for BAU to mold unnatural behaviors

“The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction.” Charles Kettering, Director of Research at General Motors (1920–1947)

Does common sense tell you that mass production and efficiency will lead to supply exceeding demand?

Instead, “The New Economic Gospel of Consumption” happened — title of a 1927 article written by an economist who had advised corporations on their management and industrial relations policies.

According to G. William Domhoff, Edward S. Cowdrick was a former journalist who became a personal Rockefeller employee after writing a favorable article on the Employee Representation Plan. From 1922 until his death in 1951, Cowdrick was the secretary of the Special Conference Committee, an informal and off-the-record meeting group created in 1919 by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and top executives at Standard Oil of New Jersey (now known as ExxonMobil). By facilitating presidents of the largest corporations of that era and their industrial relations vice-presidents to bond over major labor relations and social insurance issues, they also pitched Rockefeller’s Employee Representation Plan whenever possible. By 1926, nine of the largest industrial companies in America and one bank were in the group: U.S. Steel, General Motors, General Electric, AT&T, DuPont, Bethlehem Steel, International Harvester, U.S. Rubber, Goodyear, Westinghouse, and Irving Trust.

“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

A critic of “Consumptionism” quips in the November 1924 issue of The Atlantic Monthly:

“Through the centuries, the problem has been how to produce enough of the things men wanted; the problem now is how to make men want and use more than enough things, the ‘science of plenty,’ it has been called. Formerly the task was to supply the things men wanted; the new necessity is to make men want the things which machinery must turn out if this civilization is not to perish.

The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers. Consumptionism is the science of compelling men to use more and more things. Consumptionism is bringing it about that the … citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.” Samuel Strauss

Despite capitalism and socialism being different, Strauss further observes how both were moving society in the same damnable direction, both competing to see “which can ensure the distribution of the most goods to the people.”

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.”

With Bernays’ help, US President Calvin Coolidge even won the 1924 election:

“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, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.”

In Volume I of The Crisis of the Old Order, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr portrays the United States from the end of the Great War to the beginning of the Great Depression and opines:

“for Coolidge, business was more than business; it was a religion; and to it he committed all the passion of his arid nature … He felt these things with a fierce intensity. William Allen White, who knew him well, called him a mystic, a whirling dervish of business, as persuaded of the divine character of wealth as Lincoln had been of the divine character of man, “crazy about it, sincerely, genuinely, terribly crazy.”

“Business leaders were revered as prophets of the new dispensation. Even Jesus Christ was drafted; Bruce Barton, the advertising man, praised the Son of God because He had “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business, and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”

Did Coolidge spearhead how we collectively surrender our real value to “legal fictions” so they now addict us to living “a cradle to grave” business plan?

“Never expect someone to understand change when their livelihood depends on not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

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.”

In The Importance of Samuel Strauss: 1924 — Private Life, Bernays even paid a tribute to Strauss for his signature essay — Things Are in the Saddle:

“For anyone to point it out as he did, in that age and time, that America was paying too much attention to things and too little to basic truths was iconoclastic advice … warning his readers they would regret the loss of value and morals. His piece was a powerful indictment in an era of liberty and licence.”

Excerpt from Social movements powering the future of money:

“Business-as-usual very narrowly focuses you on how money is for your self-preservation — at your individual level — preoccupying you with surviving/competing in a silo. As money buys you stuff, pays your bills or you may receive some as a reward for being a super money-chasing machine, are you even cognizant of the system of how money influences your behavior?

Essentially, the systemic role of money and its creation. Can that be how our means of survival has increasingly been vested with corporations (aka ‘artificial persons’) that exist solely to maximize shareholder value/profit? Is that how the corporatocracy has been able to take over our lives?

John Kenneth Galbraith, the late Harvard economics professor, provides this systemic insight:

Twenty-three years after the Bretton Woods Conference (officially known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference), he published The New Industrial State to share how capitalism had shifted from a market society to a hierarchical “industrial system” owned by a cartel of corporations he called the “technostructure.”

More than half a century ago, Galbraith had observed that instead of being markets-driven ground-up, the economy was organizations-driven, top-down. Dominated by large industrial firms controlling around two-thirds of output in key sectors of the economy then, he saw how a global elite was usurping markets, fixing prices and controlling demand for long-term production planning.

Galbraith had further disdained the scientific pretensions and formal apparatus of modern economics, believing all that math and numbers-crunching missed the point.”

A year after the release of Galbraith’s book, Robert Kennedy gave his speech at the University of Kansas.

Setting up Central Control

“Governance is not government — it is the framework of rules, institutions, and practices that set limits on the behavior of individuals, organizations and companies.” U.N. Human Development Report, 1999

“The most fundamental lesson of our study {is that} ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” Stanley Milgram

By 1945, the world had been devastated by two world wars (World War I from July 1914 to November 1918 and World War II from 1939 to 1945) and people wanted peace.

In July 1944, a new international monetary system was forged by delegates from forty-four nations. The United Nations (UN) took over from the failed League of Nations to establish the Bretton Woods system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate our world around trade. The first international standard system of national accounts was published in 1953.

In States and the Reemergence of Global Finance, Eric Helleiner highlights the role advanced industrial states played to a restrictive international financial order. He outlines five sets of episodes for the growing political support for the globalization of financial markets:

· The creation of the Euromarket in the 1960s, “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.”

· Failed cooperation in the early 70s to reregulate global financial markets,

· Four aborted initiatives in the late 70s/early 1980s to implement effective controls on financial movements,

· Liberalization of capital controls in the 1980s, and

· Weathering international financial crises in the 70s/80s.

Helleiner concluded that states had increasingly embraced an open, liberal international financial order in an era of considerable trade protectionism.

Because once war reconstruction began, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) enabled salaries to be institutionalized globally — transforming our predecessors into numbers-chasing machines. The second world war also catalyzed GDP’s political acceptance as a measure of national development and progress.

By the mid-twentieth century, it was the most powerful Business-as-usual metric. The US Commerce Department even recognized GDP as “one of the great inventions” of the last century.

From Producers to Consumers

“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

“BlackRock is an asset manager that helps pension funds and retirees manage their savings through “passive” investments that track the stock market … It is the world’s largest asset manager and “shadow bank,” larger than the world’s largest bank (which is in China), with over $7 trillion in assets under direct management and another $20 trillion managed through its Aladdin risk-monitoring software. Despite its size and global power, BlackRock is not even regulated as a “Systemically Important Financial Institution” under the Dodd-Frank Act, thanks to pressure from its CEO Larry Fink, who has long had “cozy” relationships with government officials.” Ellen Brown

In Consuming Life, Zygmunt Bauman shares how the mid-twentieth century’s transition from production to consumption began as most of the production base in America was moved overseas.

As Americans became consumers, the economy shifted to retail and the provision of services, information and all forms of consumption that centered around one’s job.

Activities and relationships became all about consuming. For instance, having meals, going to the movie/gym or shopping at the mall. Gifts to express our feelings became customary especially during festive seasons as was/is buying expensive rings to propose marriage.

As value came to be defined by numbers, people began to lose sight of what’s meaningful.

As long as one’s occupation legally grows the bottom line of an employer, it was/is seen to be creating value that gets rewarded. Deeply identifying with one’s work led to jobs becoming careers and careers a calling even as manufacturing evolved into services and services into “making money with money.”

Because this is what a transaction is: an atom in a procedure, in an algorithm. This includes the fact that transactions are designed, according to a certain business, operational, strategic, marketing model. This means that when our relationships, emotions, expressions, knowledge, communication and everything become transactions, they also become atoms of those business models whose forms, allowances, degrees of freedoms and liberty are established by those models.” Salvatore Iaconesi

But before the 1970’s, currencies were not yet legal tender and as American businesses grappled with the initial impact of globalization, Milton Friedman’s NYT article clumsily rallying their key drivers to make profit their social responsibility did not appear till September 1970.

The BAU paradigm of Control through Fear and Scarcity

“I believe that the reason people typically miss the big moments of evolution coming at them in life is that we each experience only tiny pieces of what’s happening. We are like ants preoccupied with our jobs of carrying crumbs in our minuscule lifetimes instead of having a broader perspective of the big-picture patterns and cycles, the important interrelated things driving them, and where we are within the cycles and what’s likely to transpire.” Ray Dalio

“The modern spirit is a hesitant one. Spontaneity has given way to cautious legalisms, and the age of heroes has been superseded by a cult of specialization. We have no more giants; only obedient ants.” Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

Apparently, until the 1960’s, businesses drew up plans without understanding the underlying dynamics of “systemically putting together all the elements that determined their corporate fate.”

According to Walter Kiechel, author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World, four men — “each obsessed with pinpointing how companies achieve competitive advantage over others” — were key to inventing what we call “corporate strategy” today.

As these four men set in motion the modern, multibillion-dollar consulting industry in the 60’s, they kickstarted “the bit-by-bit creation of the first comprehensive paradigm that pulled together all the elements most vital for a company to take into account if it is to compete, win, and survive” aka how our lives today revolve around growing Big Business and being centrally self-governed by numbers:

Fred Gluck, longtime Managing Director of McKinsey & Company

A rocket scientist turned missionary/visionary, this poor kid from a tough Brooklyn neighborhood turned McKinsey, probably the world’s most white-shoe consulting firm, into a knowledge factory. Widely considered as the gold standard in management consultancy, McKinsey is the juggernaut firm the world’s most powerful executives call when they have a problem they cannot solve. In the late 90s, secret meetings took place in London where the blueprint for Vision 2020 was envisioned — the brainchild of McKinsey for “the return of the East India Company.” “The firm also encouraged the banks to fund their balance sheets with debt, driving down their equity safety buffers in order to juice profits:” How McKinsey always gets away

Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group

In his obituary notice, the Financial Times wrote that Henderson “did more to change the way business is done in the United States than any other man in American business history.” Willfuly blind to how the system is man-made and steered by management consultants, Henderson saw companies as living, growing organisms and how competition in the economy’s market niches was akin to competition in nature’s ecologic niches. In the late 1960’s, he even divided BCG “into three minifirms within the firm … and set them to competing with one another.” BCG is involved in designing Vision 2030, the economic blueprint for Saudi Arabia.

Bill Bain, Creator of Bain & Company

With no MBA and no particular business background, he was Henderson’s best salesman and alter ego till he founded his own firm. Bain & Co. grew wildly through the 70’s and 80’s, skittered close to bankruptcy before re-inventing itself. Along the way, Bain helped invent Greater Taylorism, the sharp-penciled means by which companies crawl over every aspect of their own operations and their competitors’ looking for an edge.

Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professor

To upend Harvard’s notion of strategy, Porter fought off faculty elders who sought to squelch his career and eventually earned a reputation as the world’s most famous business-school professor. Also became the leading academic expert on strategy, co-founding his own consulting outfit, and in 2011, co-authoring Creating Shared Value with Mark R. Kramer to reinvent capitalism.

According to David G. White Jr., since the mid-1970s, Doug McGregor at MIT had suggested that the role of management was to create the right environment for people to do their best work. If managers did that, profits would follow. Suddenly culture was the solution, and a fad was born:

“The urban legend of leaders singularly and causally shaping their cultures is an invention of business schools and consultants at the service of CEOs seeking competitive advantage.”

McGregor was a student of Abraham Maslow.

In a 2011 interview, Kiechel explains how “the wizards of finance disclose strategy’s true purpose:”

“One surprise about the first two decades of the strategy revolution was that it didn’t focus much on building wealth for shareholders, but rather on achieving competitive advantage.

It was only in the 1980s, when the stock market took off, that people began to realize they could make a lot of money restructuring companies, buying them and selling them. Some call it the triumph of “shareholder capitalism” — the notion that creating wealth for shareholders, which usually means keeping the stock price moving ever upward, is the be-all and end-all for companies, and for their strategies.”

Today, all key decisions that govern our lives are made at the corporate/institutional/systemic level where everything is viewed as a resource to be commodified, managed and consumed for profit and then discarded when no longer of use. To achieve maximum profits, corporate persons rigidly control costs.

By driving performance to systemically optimize and legally control all of the world’s resources, isn’t that how corporate tyrannies legally control and manage everything that we need to survive? Doesn’t that normalize exploitation, plundering or even destroying the natural environment?

In 1996, Intel CEO Andy Grove published Only the Paranoid Survive to drill that a company in pursuit of a stronger competitive advantage never rests.

“What happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance.”

“The financial system does not, in fact, consist of ‘national monetary flows.’ Nor is it made up of a mass of tiny, anonymous, microscopic firms — the ideal of ‘perfect competition’ and the economic analogue to the individual citizen. The overwhelming majority of private credit creation is done by a tightly-knit corporate oligarchy. … At a global level twenty to thirty banks matter.” Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

Let’s speed past the dotcom bubble/burst (mid 1990’s to the early 2000’s) to 2011 when three systems theorists released a report of how only 147 corporations — a tiny handful of mega-corporations (mostly banks) — control everything i.e. they orchestrate events and control governments that impact our lives:

“We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic ‘super-entity’ that raises new important issues both for researches and policy makers.” James B. Glattfelder, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

Was that the consequence of how four “business intellectuals” half a century ago had developed a strategic framework on top of the “original corporate raider” and Ford’s factory assembly line models for companies to systemically integrate the three “C’s” of strategy — i.e. costs, customers and competitors?

Did they receive support from the Trilateral Commission founded in 1973? Its founder and primary financial angel was international financier, David Rockefeller, longtime chairman of the Rockefeller family-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank. Rockefeller’s idea for establishing the commission emerged after he read Between Two Ages by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor.

“Trilateralism is the creed of an international ruling class whose locus of power is the global corporation. The owners and managers of global corporations view the entire world as their factory, farm, supermarket, and playground. The Trilateral Commission is seeking to strengthen and rationalize the world economy in their interest.

Trilateral Commissioner George Ball (investment banker and former undersecretary of state) applauds the growing number of “cosmocorps” which are engaged in taking the raw materials produced in one group of countries, transforming these into manufacturing goods with the labor and plant facilities of another group, and selling the products in still a third group…[all] with the benefit of instant communications, quick transport, computers, and modern management techniques…

These corporations control vast amounts of natural resources; monopolize the production of commodities vital to our daily lives, such as food and energy;* and dominate the research and development of new technology…” Holly Sklar, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management

As “legal fictions” institutionalized turning human value into exchange value, did “Surviving for Self” Greater fools emerge in ever greater force — in the context of the bills/debt/reputation you have to pay/upkeep — to normalize Fear, Scarcity and competition?

Did the world wars simply become BAU as money (numeric targets) systemically self-organizes us on “I win, you lose”?

The Cult of BAU — Work Normalized Narcissism

“Just look at modern working environments: what are the priorities? Beating the competition, hitting ambitious targets, hard selling, finding out what rivals are doing and sometimes stealing their ideas. Those who are ruthless, resilient to others’ opinions and immune to the fear of failure are more likely to climb to the top.” Dr Cheryl Travers

In the 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, wilfully blind to:

“The “Iron Law of Oligarchy” states that any organization or society will eventually become an oligarchy. That’s because the people who learn how to succeed in the organization gain a competitive advantage. The larger and more complicated the organization becomes, the more advantages the elite gain. Oligarchs only associate with others who share those same traits. They become an organized minority, while average citizens remain an unorganized majority. The oligarchs groom protégés who share their values and goals. It becomes more difficult for the average person to break into the group of elites.” Kimberly Amadeo

Do you know any profit-maximizing CEO or top management who has self-actualized and/or turned his/her company into a center of self-actualization?

In Manufacturing Depression, psychotherapist Gary Greenberg shares how unhappiness is an illness that’s manufactured to sell the cure and why depression is more an industry than a mental illness.

Did Maslow somehow advance the idea that some people are more entitled to food, water and shelter (life’s most basic necessities) than others?

For instance:

“Food is power. We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize.” Catherine Bertini, Executive director U.N. World Food Program, U.N. 4th World Conference on Women, Beijing, China, September, 1995

Has misconceived utopianism transmuted itself into a perpetual quest for “personal growth?” Can persistent but unsuccessful attempts to self-actualize have universalized the cult of BAU?

Because rather than wealth or political and economic power, individual desire was democratized:

“The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratisation of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.” William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture

As Americans started feeling guilty for resting, did they place “busyness” above health and turned to consumerism to dull their pain, trauma and adversity?

“Instead of pursuing an abstract goal of discipline and self-denial, American society became more openly organized around competing and beating one another to the top … As society at home became more organized around corporate climbing, our lives became an endless, round-the-clock effort to “excite admiration or envy,” where everything from “assertiveness therapy” to jogging to est helped the individual be better armed in the struggle for personal advancement.” Matt Taibbi

As work evolved from a job into a calling defined by one’s identity, cultural historian Christopher Lasch observed by 1979 how post-war America essentially produced “pathological narcissists.”

In The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, he diagnoses a condition that originated in the 19th century. How the bureaucratization of business, life and the surrender of parental authority to “professionals” — anxious to justify their existence and reap the benefits of a general cultural and personal dependency — had normalized pathological narcissism and turned Americans into passive consumers:

“This hedonism is a fraud. The pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative… they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit.”

“Corporate bureaucracies put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.”

As receding household ideals weakened parental authority and hollowed out the family unit, children were increasingly influenced by the state and market. Mass production, political centralization, the ideology of endless growth and ever-increasing consumption also made psychological maturity difficult.

Lasch argues that Americans had developed a form of narcissism that required most people to seek constant external validation because “The narcissist feels consumed by his own appetites.”

“Modern capitalist society not only elevates narcissists to prominence, it elicits and reinforces narcissistic traits in everyone.”

Since narcissistic behavior is an outward manifestation of inner need and weakness, he found:

“people today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”

“Our society is narcissistic, then, in a double sense. People with narcissistic personalities…play a conspicuous part in contemporary life… these celebrities set the tone for public life and of private life as well … The beautiful people… live out the fantasy of narcissistic success.”

“The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory, encourage the common man to identify himself with the stars and to hate the ‘herd’ and make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence.”

“Today men seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes. They wish to be not so much esteemed as admired. They crave not fame but the glamour and excitement of celebrity. They want to be envied rather than respected … fame depends on the performance of notable deeds acclaimed in biography and works of history, celebrity — the reward of those who project a vivid or pleasing exterior or have otherwise attracted attention to themselves — is acclaimed in the news media, in gossip columns, on talk shows, in magazines devoted to “personalities.”

In this unnatural BAU paradigm, most of us just want to lead meaningful and peaceful lives but has a tiny “paranoid” minority emerged that wants to rule and control everyone and everything?

The “Intra-species Predators”

“The majority of people and therefore workplaces are easy prey, because we still want to believe that people are inherently good. We don’t really want to believe that such people exist.”

“Wherever you find money, prestige and power you will find them. The most important thing is to be aware you are working with a psychopath. Then you are in better position to deal with them.”

“Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings. Such morally incomprehensible behaviour, exhibited by a seemingly normal person, leaves us feeling bewildered and helpless.” Dr. Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us

Intraspecies predators are psychopaths who look human but operate more like animals as they use charm, manipulation and/or violence to satisfy their own selfish needs.

In The Mask of Sanity (1941), Hervey Milton Cleckley provides last century’s most influential clinical description of psychopathy — how a psychopath can appear engagingly normal as the “mask” conceals a mental disorder:

“Although they occasionally appear on casual inspection as successful members of the community, as able lawyers, executives, or physicians … [t]he true difference between them and the psychopaths who continually go to jails or to psychiatric hospitals is that they keep up a far better and more consistent outward appearance of being normal.”

“apparently sane, often dynamic . . . almost always seductive . . . impress others with their sincere motives and positive intentions and wind up causing great institutional and personal harm. With an unexplainable capacity to engender trust, even in experienced and cynical observers, these people create chaos … The single most powerful diagnostic test was his own willingness to cash their checks … Charm, a quick sensitivity to the unspoken needs of others, and a certain flexibility with the truth are woven into a personal charisma that entrances.”

“… These ‘qualities’ are fundamental in helping them [psychopaths] climb the corporate ladder: They can be manipulative, arrogant, callous, impatient, impulsive, unreliable, superficially charming and susceptible to flying into rages. Further redeeming features include a fondness for breaking promises and blaming colleagues when things go wrong. It is their single-minded focus, however, that helps them to achieve their corporate goals.” Henry Lloyd-Roberts on “How to Spot the Office Psychopath”

The problem with excessive competition (aka Scarcity) is that it systemically breeds deep insecurities — of never being (good) enough. This brings out the worst as the BAU paradigm hardwires the most addicted to their “Surviving for Self” belief bubbles so they disregard everything apart from “wanting to win at all costs.”

The ones most fearful are the ones at the top of the pecking order with too much to lose:

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” Aung San Suu Kyi

Scott London on Christopher Lasch’s observations of the rise of an elite class:

“But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch.

The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called “symbolic analysts” — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities.

Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens.

“They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies …and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life.”

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 in 1939 to explain how the whole legal profession, its works and its ways was a “high-class racket.”

Control Shifting from Money to Data?

“We are running a 21st-century digital economy on a 13th Century printing-press era operating system.” Douglas Rushkoff

“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.” John Maynard Keynes

Since the second Earth Summit (the UN Conference on Environment and Development) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the UN has been advocating that Agenda 21 (since evolved as Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals, Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Great Reset and possibly other labels) is a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”

Based on BAU, won’t any new tech/change simply reinforce our living a “cradle to grave” business plan?

Rather than address how trust is systemically broken, the crypto/Blockchain people don’t even want you to trust people. Just trust their platform. The machine. Trust the algorithm. Trust their “trustless” technology for the new inventions hurtling our way.

After all, the Blockchain, tokens and smart contracts will enable us to outsource our value to codes and to mathematical algorithms formulated and tweaked for powerful interests. To accommodate digitally signed receipts on the Blockchain, Triple-entry accounting will likely replace double-entry accounting.

The BAU logic maintains that because the Blockchain is a public ledger and immutable, that alone will ensure that once you buy tokens, nobody can “erase” your ownership even if it is not registered with a government-run registry. However, if you upload titles and deeds to your (physical or intangible) assets to an online platform, doesn’t that mean that anything of value that you own can also be taken away from you with your (unwitting) consent?

Besides being another probability and statistical tool to manage the risk of systemic failure, are decentralized and distributed platforms replicating how (per Quigley) “the operations of banking and finance were concealed, scattered, and abstract” so we will never be able to “reference to the system as a whole”?

21st Century Feudalism?

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” W. Edwards Deming

“The economy is not here to serve human beings; human beings are here to serve the economy.” Douglas Rushkoff

“The World Economic Forum has developed and pushed for the privatization of global governance for decades. The ‘Great Reset’ is just the latest iteration of the gradual corporate takeover of global institutions, such as the UN and other international bodies, that take critical decisions over the governance of global common goods like food, water, health, internet and others.” The Transnational Institute

In June 2019, a new corporate and government marriage quietly took place between the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the UN. According to Harris Gleckman, that agreement turned the UN into a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) where “the Secretary-General of the UN is marginalizing the intergovernmental system in order to ‘save’ it.”

Does that mean multinational corporations can influence global governance although:

“firstly, the agreement circumvents the intergovernmental review process; secondly, the agreement elevates multistakeholderism as the solution to the problems with the current multilateral system; and thirdly the proposed multistakeholder partnerships are not governed by any formal democratic system. Were the Secretary-General convinced of the wisdom of a UN marriage with the WEF, he could have submitted the draft MOU for approval by the member states. Instead, the Secretary-General joined the WEF in declaring in effect that multistakeholder groups without any formal intergovernmental oversight are a better governance system than a one-country-one-vote system.”

Largely composed of a self-selected group of multinational corporations with organizations and individuals they want to work with, they will “work without any common internal rule book to protect the views of all who might be impacted by the group.”

In a world legally more pro “legal fictions” than real people, will governments globally adhere to the UN plan to let multinational corporations change the ways we live, eat, learn and communicate — for the common good?

Is that why the WEF is calling for a Great Reset — without a new way of thinking or a change of direction from Control to Empowerment — as “the international organization for Public-Private Cooperation?”

Does “Public-Private Cooperation” mean a merger of state (public) and corporate (private) power?

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini, the Italian Prime Minister who founded the National Fascist Party

From the horse’s mouth (WEF website): Data Collaboration for the Common Good: Enabling Trust and Innovation Through Public-Private Partnerships, a report done in collaboration with McKinsey and Company.

In The Development of the Public-Private Partnership Concept in Economic Theory, Alla Mostepaniuk shares:

“… the first who argued for cooperation between the state and private capital were mercantilists (XVI-XVII centuries). During that period, in Western countries trade capital needed the strong government to eliminate obsolete restrictions and to secure the international trade. On the other hand, the state was interested in the development of trade in order to meet the growing need for money to finance their expenditures. It is known, that a key feature of the economic policy of mercantilism was protectionism, aimed at supporting the expansion of commercial capital, protection and promotion of the national industries; increasing domestic production of goods for export; restricting the import of finished products; baring or limiting the export of raw materials and encouraging its import to support low export prices for finished products. Thus, the state interacted with the private sector through the implementation of mandatory control for all trading operations by charging for each transaction fee. The leading idea of mercantilism was the comprehensive cooperation between the state and national manufacturers to provide positive money balance (early mercantilists) or trade balance (later mercantilists) …

The founder of classical political economy in Britain, William Petty, considered the cooperation of state and private capital as a mechanism to regulate foreign trade, to build up trade and to expand the colonies of England, to implement protectionist policies aimed at supporting the domestic market. In the paper “Treatise of Taxes and Contributions” (1662) he explained the necessity to replace import duties with costs of public insurance, emphasizing and that this method of cooperation between the state and private business would contribute to achieving common benefits when a merchant’s own interests will make him more willing to obey and pay (Petty, 1662)”

In the 1990’s, with Vice President Al Gore at its helm, the Clinton-Gore Administration initiated the National Partnership for Reinventing Government to create a government that “works better, costs less, and gets results Americans care about.”

Was PPPs how the US government initiated turning taxpayers into customers?

PPPs are long-term contracts underwritten by government guarantees where private companies build and (and sometimes runs) major infrastructure projects or services traditionally provided by the state but much of the financial risk remains with the public.

If so, is PPP a business transaction that secures private sector profits at the expense of taxpayers?

“Public services are massive pools of potential corporate profit, and PPPs serve to access them. The ‘clients’ are captive, the services are often a monopoly.” David Boys, PSI Deputy General Secretary

“PPPs often increase fees or charges for users of services. PPP contracts often undermine consumer, citizen and human rights, and the state’s obligation to regulate in the public interest. PPPs can limit government capacity to enact new policies — e.g., strengthened environmental or social regulations — that might affect certain projects.” Jomo Kwame Sundaram

“PPPs originated as an accounting trick, a way round the government’s own constraints on public borrowing. This remains the overwhelming attraction for governments and international institutions.

Just as companies like Enron had tried to conceal their true liabilities by moving them ‘off-balance-sheet’, so governments started using PPPs as ‘tricks… whereby public accounts imitate the creative accounting of some companies in the past.’

The information governments are getting on how PPPs work and why comes from the private sector itself. From PricewaterhouseCoopers Deloitte — and a range of other global consulting firms who make a fortune off of promoting PPPs but also from the Development Bank, from the World Bank, the IMF, the Regional Development Banks. Whether it’s the Asian Development Bank, the African the Inter-American Development Bank, even the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. These banks are very focused on bringing in its sector actors, bringing in privatization.

There’s a range of other actors including our NGO allies, civil society groups.

PPPs are used to conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies. Private sector corporations must maximise profits if they are to survive. This is fundamentally incompatible with protecting the environment and ensuring universal access to quality public services.” David Hall on Why Public-Private Partnerships Don’t Work

In 2018, Tom Groenfeldt asked if “Blended Finance” is the Lipstick on the PPP Pig to caution:

“PPPs present at least two major problems.

The bankers who arrange these “partnerships” are almost always smarter than the government officials who are signing the contracts, and that’s especially true in developing countries that don’t have the expertise to evaluate a complex contract that may call for re-negotiations, modifications and subsidies from the host country.

They also let politicians get an instant hit of cash now while leaving 20 to 75 years of payments, modification and contract enforcement to their successors. PPPs are also more expensive.”

Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram boldly call the World Bank’s ‘Maximizing Finance for Development’ (MFD) a hoax:

“Blended finance and public private partnerships (PPPs) are its two main instruments for such leveraging without offering evidence that either can and will deliver development projects much better than traditional public procurement. Both benefit private finance at the expense of the public interest, particularly by increasing the risks of government contingent liabilities. Increasing such exposure is presented as an unavoidable cost of raising additional finance.

The Bank has long claimed that private finance offers the best solution to pressing development and welfare concerns. Its MFD strategy urges using public money to leverage private finance, and capital markets to transform bankable projects into liquid securities.”

The (April 2019) study also reveals that blended finance has effectively transferred risk from the private to the public sector.

Blended finance — “a heady cocktail of public, private and charitable money,” according to The Economist — came into vogue following the 2015 UN Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa.

“The Economist called it a “honey trap,” noting that blended finance was “floated at all manner of gatherings, from the recent meetings of the IMF and the World Bank to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.” The WEF claimed that every dollar of public money invested typically attracted US$1~20 in private investment.”

The World Bank’s Public Private Partnership in Infrastructure Resource Center (PPPIRC) warned that “the cost has to be borne either by the customers or the government through subsidies”, and that the “private sector will do what it is paid to do and no more than that.”

So, More of the Same Ahead?

“The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” David Foster Wallace

No one person knows everything so please do your due diligence to further explore the water we swim in (aka how the paradigm/system molds behaviors:

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust

In a BAU paradigm legally more pro “legal fictions” than real people, will PPP, Artificial Intelligence and other digital tools improve everyone’s lives?

“In the early part of the twentieth century, humans and machines were constructed as parts of a single productive system, human traits were studied in order to increase their machine-like capacities, in the hope of creating a more efficient industrial economy. At the same time, fatigue associated with this industrial nation was constructing the older worker as subject to decline, hence opening the door to a linkage to physical and economic depreciation.” Darlene Himick, Human depreciation accounting and the emergence of industrial pensions: Linking human assets to the firm

Or will they simply expand social control to enrich a tiny elite and possibly, their pet KPI-addicted narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths?

“It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing — less hard labour needed — becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege.” Slavoj Žižek

“I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes … One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.” Ida Auken, former Minister for the Environment of Denmark and Davos elite

“You are not the product, you are the abandoned carcass.” Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

In case you have not read Part 1, click here.