Why do we do what we do? aka the world we collectively create to live

38 min readMay 4, 2022

Most grateful to the amazing Katherine Bosiacki for her incredible support and brilliant editing

“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, “father of the third wave of the industrial revolution”

“In the business world, the price of things is a more substantial fact than the things themselves.” Thorstein Veblen on the function of credit for what he called “the price system”

“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

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” Thomas L. Friedman

Is the Business-as-usual (BAU) casino of control really in the best interest of society?

“The invisible hand is a metaphor for the unseen forces that move the free market economy. Through individual self-interest and freedom of production and consumption, the best interest of society, as a whole, are fulfilled. The constant interplay of individual pressures on market supply and demand causes the natural movement of prices and the flow of trade.” Investopedia

“The greater fool is actually an economic term. It’s a patsy. For the rest of us to profit, we need a greater fool — someone who will buy long and sell short. … The greater fool is someone with the perfect blend of self-delusion and ego to think that he can succeed where others have failed. This whole country was made by greater fools.” Aaron Sorkin

When Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, England was on the brink of the world’s greatest economic expansion ever. As the first industrial revolution blanketed the country with factories and mills, the various chartered company-states (the East India Companies) also competed to roll out a global framework for the “invisible hand” behind them to weaponize human behaviors:

“Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North America, Africa, and the South Pacific.” J C Sharman and Professor Andrew Phillips, Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World

Following the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, the British Empire was at its peak — its dominion covering one quarter of the entire surface of the world. However:

“by 1949, the British Empire was disintegrating in every region, as demands for colonial independence were made against the oppressive mother country. The British Empire was in the throes of the largest upheaval of perhaps any Kingdom in history … The long-discussed new concept of Empire, first introduced in the early years before World War I by Lord Lothian, Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes and the Round Table circle … was rapidly becoming reality.

Britain after 1945 would exert global influence indirectly, through developing and deepening a ‘special relationship’ with the United States. The seeds of this ‘special relationship’ had been carefully planted following Versailles, with the simultaneous establishment of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the New York Council on Foreign Relations, as conduits of strategic policy debate.” William Engdahl, Oil and the New World Order of Bretton Woods

At the twilight of the British Empire, bankers, lawyers and accountants from the City of London had set up a spider’s web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and funneled it to London. The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire

The ultimate dream of domination: Having the dominated exploit one another, peer-to-peer

Over the centuries, the two key evolving tools of control the “invisible hand” has used to hijack our natural way of being are money and legal fictions (aka “corporate/artificial persons”) modeled on the original corporate raider.

From the turn of the last century, the system we depend on started to be institutionalized by people competing to do their jobs, albeit like blind men on Henry Ford’s factory assembly line:

On December 1, 1913 — the same month as the founding of the Federal Reserve half a year before World War I started — Ford launched his “elephant” anchored on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management to increase the work rate and reduce wages:

”In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”

“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which … are all performed by distinct hands.” Adam Smith’s Pin factory

(aka working in isolation on a really very tiny part of an elephant, the elephant being this opaque BAU factory assembly line system?)

Taylor’s “better, faster, cheaper” methodology has always been at the core of management science.

Using the world’s most imitated country as a base, Ford’s “elephant” was then piloted globally:

“the logic of scientific management required the extension of planning from the single factory to the industry and then to the whole economy. “We needed a Taylor now for the economic system as a whole.”” Rexford Guy Tugwell, one of three Columbia University academics who helped develop policy recommendations for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal

(Did FDR’s New Deal enable the US federal government to legally underwrite the entire functioning of its economy so Big Business could privatize profits and socialize losses?)

Since World War II ended, the “invisible hand” behind the different layers of distributed corporations — governing in stealth with numbers — has humanity constantly at war to survive. With the greater powers vested in the Bretton Woods institutions, the invisible social contract we live — earning money and buying goods and services from “artificial persons” with no greater god than greed — is a system we are all complicit in creating.

Is that because people in positions of power understand that to keep us addicted and/or powerless and poor (e.g., as psychopathic control freaks or debt slaves) and to mass produce/buy into whatever they want built for themselves, they need to centrally orchestrate that without you realizing it?

The end of slavery in the US, and the entrenchment of European colonial power in Africa, Asia, everywhere (roots of the present North-South divide) saw the rise of global multinational industrial corporations (not connected with specific nation-states) that have us fighting to grow their empires — normalizing how we transform human/real value into exchange value for money.

An example: How we turn debt into money — as money becomes more real than the things it buys, you are allowed to get into debt if you have some kind of collateral.

“The distinguishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and to be bought for it …” “Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.” John Ruskin

The move to systemically fold our lives into mechanically growing and supporting “legal (artificial) fictions” around numbers coincided with mass schooling (the factory model to indoctrinate all children) and the rise of consumerism and consumptionism propaganda by media and governments:

“Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines, ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized in two separate subjects. We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group … These are essentially about conformity … it’s about standardization.” Ken Robinson

“Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.” Alfie Kohn

Are transnational corporations not a continuation of this power system at an international level? Instead of the betterment of society, isn’t their goal immortality through an uninterrupted stream of earnings?

Today, don’t BlackRock and Vanguard coordinate the control of all the corporations that impact our lives?

In his 1889 Gospel of Wealth essay, Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie had called on wealthy families to become stewards of our future.

During the first four decades of the twentieth century, family foundations that were created included those from Carnegie (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1905, and the Carnegie Corporation, 1912); Rockefeller (Rockefeller Foundation, 1913); Harkness (Commonwealth Fund, 1918); Duke (the Duke Endowment, 1924); Kresge (the Kresge Foundation, 1924); Kellog (W.K. Kellog Child Welfare Foundation, 1930); Sloan (Alfred Sloan Foundation, 1934); Ford (Ford Foundation, 1936); du Pont (the Nemours Foundation, 1936); and Lilly (Lilly Endowment Inc., 1937).

Napoleon Hill, the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of, published The Law of Success in 1928 — the year before the world’s first longest, deepest and most widespread depression. In it, Hill acknowledged “it was Andrew Carnegie who suggested the writing [of the book] … and Henry Ford whose life-work supplied much of the material.”

That same year, Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations,” published Propaganda. Through “the engineering of consent,” Sigmund Freud’s nephew provided leaders with the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.”

In In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign against Competition, 1918–1938, Butler Shaffer — economist and professor of law — explored the attitudes of business leaders toward competition during that period. He found them to be hostile to “free markets” and aggressively in favor of restrictions that protected their interests.

Real stuff is not gross domestic product (GDP) statistics, housing prices, retail sales, the stock market or any other incumbent yardsticks or indices, but when millionaire capitalists such as John Rockefeller Jr. and J.P. Morgan came to recognize the power of financial metrics in their era, they began to plan for a private research bureau that would focus on the pricing of everyday life.

Founded in 1920, the corporate-funded National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) went on to play a major role in inventing official measurements of the gross national product (GNP) and other related indices of economic activity.

A 1953 NBER study found 1.04 per cent of the total US population (1,658,795 top wealth-holders) had held 30 per cent of total personal wealth. They owned at least 80 per cent of the corporate stock held in the personal sector, virtually all of the state and local government bonds, nearly 90 per cent of corporate bonds, and between 10 and 35 per cent of every other type of property.

However, spread across the rest of the population, this top group held only 12.5 per cent of real estate, only 5 per cent of America’s pension and retirement funds, and 11.5 per cent of the insurance equity.

“The markets in which giants and satellites trade are structured and dominated by the giants: it is somewhat gratuitous to call them markets at all, and considerably less than candid to call these dubious markets ‘free.’”

The historical purpose of big corporations is to organize markets. In a sense, that is all corporations are — organized markets. Professor Edward S. Mason of Harvard says: “As a firm grows, transactions that could conceivably be organized through the market price mechanism are transferred to the administrative organization of the firm.” … “And these corporations, by ‘owning’ part of the market, can dominate much more of it.” David T. Bazelon in late 1962

“When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity.” David Korten

On Why leaders lie: The truth about lying in international politics, John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, opined:

“When I began this study, I expected to find abundant evidence of statesmen and diplomats lying to each other. But that initial assumption turned out to be wrong. Instead, I had to work hard to find the cases of international lying … Leaders do lie to other countries on occasion, but much less often than one might think … [They are] more likely to lie to their own people about foreign policy issues than to other countries. That certainly seems to be true for democracies that pursue ambitious foreign policies and are inclined to initiate wars of choice, i.e., when there is not a clear and imminent danger to a country’s vital interests that can only be dealt with by force.”

Is top-down control really in the best interest of society?

Since the system we depend on seems intentionally opaque, are we not like blind men trying to describe a tiny part of the elephant, believing that to be our reality?

Let’s connect some dots to explore how the “invisible hand” molds how we collectively create a world that’s legally more pro corporate greed than human lives to live (aka the root causes for the mess our world is in):

Have our self-interests been systemically weaponized so we fight one another to live a “cradle to grave” business plan, building an opaque control structure for “artificial persons” to legally control us with money?

Are we perpetually at war from the fear of missing out (FOMO) because these “artificial persons” manufacture scarcity since legally, they can have no greater god than greed?

(We will fast forward past the Enlightenment age when social contracts were bandied about through to the 19th-century lie that came to recognize corporations as people and dip into what happened at the turn of the last century.)

Systematically laying the Control Grid for our Lives

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” US President Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, (1913)

“Let’s set up a game of Monopoly and you want to buy Park Place. What I can continually do is just print money, give myself more money, lower the value of your money by printing more. No matter how hard-working you are or how successful you are, I can always end up buying you for free.” Catherine Austin Fitts on the fractional reserve scheme

Amid the bank runs, bankruptcies and financial chaos in 1907, John Pierpont Morgan — then America’s leading banker — started to spearhead the 1913 creation of America’s central bank.

That year, Yale professor Irving Fisher published The Nature of Capital and Income, since hailed as 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.

In How Money Became the Measure of Everything, Eli Cook shared that 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.”

He 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.

Eighty-eight years later — in 1995 in Beijing — the Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics (IFC) was established at the International Statistical Institute (ISI) session. The internationally renowned economist and statistician’s 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). Click to explore if the House of Rothschild is the hidden sovereign power behind BIS.

In 1983, Harper’s Magazine published Ruling the World of Money by Edward Jay Epstein about “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.”

In Why Central Banks AIM For BOOM BUST cycles, author of Princes of the Yen quipped: “the measure of success of the central bank is whether we have boom bust cycles.” Richard Werner attributed the boom bust cycles to banks being “the creators of the money supply.”

(Won’t the pricing mechanism in boom bust cycles focus greater fools on trading their real assets for money? Typically buying high and selling low.)

Also in 1995, governments reached a new consensus on the need to put people at the center of development. The World Summit for Social Development was at the time the largest gathering ever of world leaders. Held in Copenhagen that March, it pledged to make the conquest of poverty, the goal of full employment and the fostering of social integration overriding objectives of development.

At the 4th World Conference on Women also held in Beijing in 1995, Catherine Bertini, Executive director of the UN World Food Program had declared, “Food is power. We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize.”

Was that why the following year, long before the still unknown Satoshi Nakamoto surfaced, the NSA released the ‘How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash’ paper?

Corralling us into a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society”?

At the second Earth Summit (the UN Conference on Environment and Development) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the United Nations launched Agenda 21 (since evolved as Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals, Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Great Reset and other names) as a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”

On the eve of the said Summit, the (Second) Most Important Bank You’ve Never Heard Of was established. According to the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) website, it is “to help tackle our planet’s most pressing environmental problems.”

In 1987, Edmund de Rothschild had glowingly announced the GEF project under another name at the 4th World Wilderness Congress:

“This International Conservation Bank must know no frontiers, no boundaries. Its funds must be used constructively … not to be channeled into greedy hands or weapons of destruction. I hesitate to link this bank with World Wilderness; but I would like to link it with our survival, as a human race. This, our generation, must not be cursed by our descendants — if we have any — as to the greatest destructors and squanderers of the world’s resources.”

Put under the umbrella of the World Bank, the World Conservation Bank was formally established as the GEF in 1991. Its 18 “implementing partners” included the Rockefeller-funded Food and Agricultural Organization, the foundation-funded and corporate-friendly International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the Maurice Strong-created United Nations Environment Programme, and the Prince Bernhard/Prince Philip-founded World Wildlife Fund.

The 1988 Economist cover then pitched us on getting ready for a single unified currency.

That was also the year that BlackRock was founded:

“Since 1988 the company has put itself in a position to de facto control the Federal Reserve, most Wall Street mega-banks, including Goldman Sachs, the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset, the Biden Administration and, if left unchecked, the economic future of our world. BlackRock is the epitome of what Mussolini called Corporatism, where an unelected corporate elite dictates top down to the population.” F William Engdahl

Towards the end of 2020, Oilprice.com shared that BlackRock was looking to fuel a $120 trillion transformation on Wall Street. In his 2021 letter to CEOs, Larry Fink had decreed “a net zero economy” by 2050 or sooner: “I have great optimism about the future of capitalism and the future health of the economy — not in spite of the energy transition, but because of it.”

Then in April 2021, wire service Dow Jones heralded:

“If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund.”

Interesting coincidences or a deliberate, planned and sustained effort by the people behind the “invisible hand” for the corporate takeover of our lives?

Living “the institutionalizing of conflicting interests” legacy

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frederic Bastiat

In 1910, Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) with industrialists and financiers on board as trustees. Many were linked to the J.P. Morgan controlled American International Corporation (AIC) that became the giant American International Group (AIG) in 1919 (the too-big-to-fail entity that was bailed out by the US government in 2008):

That January, a New York Times article heralded: “What the baby is worth as a national asset: Last year’s crop reached a value estimated at $6,960,000,000.”

Robert Michels published Political Parties in 1911 to define how “the iron law of oligarchy” is “A tendency for large organizations to be run by a small number of people committed to maintaining their leadership.” “Oligarchy” comes from the Greek word oligarchia, meaning “few governing.”

The US Bureau of Internal Revenue was established in 1913 to impose a tax on income for the masses.

“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

The Revenue Act of 1917 subsequently made foundations “tax exempt” in the US as “charitable” organizations to enable the wealthiest people to fund their various social engineering projects without having to pay income tax.

“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

Was the “invisible hand” behind Carnegie’s CEIP and other foundations covertly at work?

With close links to the US State Department and more than a century of involvement with the US political establishment, the CEIP is perceived as a force for peace through promoting international cooperation. It was formed with the specific purpose to influence US foreign policy:

“… dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States.”

However, in 1953, the year the US Bureau of Internal Revenue was renamed the Internal Revenue Service, Norman Dodd served as chief investigator for the US Congress Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations.

Given access to the CEIP records, Dodd discovered its real agenda.

Testifying to the Reece Committee, he shared that from the outset, the CEIP had established how war would be profit-making as well as a catalyst for social change:

“The trustees of the Foundation [CEIP] brought up a single question. If it is desirable to alter the life of an entire people, is there any means more efficient than war … They discussed this question … for a year and came up with an answer: There are no known means more efficient than war, assuming the objective is altering the life of an entire people. That leads them to a question: How do we involve the United States in a war?”

By appearing to be benevolent, corporate entities like the CEIP could work behind closed doors to achieve their societal geopolitical aims:

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” H. L. Mencken

The most prominent bankers in the US even informed Dodd that since the end of World War I, they had been responsible for “the institutionalizing of conflicting interests.”

“Well, primarily they did it by securing control of what is known as the money supply of the people of this country … By working out a system of banking (Federal Reserve) which was foreign in concept but which enabled debt to be monetized; transforming of the bank deposits … By having at their disposal unlimited quantities of this newly created money and being able to reward the personnel who were active in the world of education and administratively as well as academically. They were able to see that textbooks were almost produced on order. And assuring the publishers of textbooks of the funds necessary to make publication of those books profitable.” Norman Dodd

To enable oligarchical collectivism, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Endowment were using funds excessively on projects at Columbia, Harvard, University of California and the University of Chicago.

Click here to listen to Dodd share how foundations instigate conflicts by influencing and manipulating the education and morals of countries globally.

Following the end of World War I, the core US and British delegations to Versailles convened to create the system of international “think tanks” to enable them to rule from the shadows — with funding from J. D. Rockefeller.

Our self-interests WEDDED to this Control model of Empire building

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.” Adam Smith

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

“It was the slave’s continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master.” Francis Fukuyama, non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development, The End of History and the Last Man

In The Social Construction of Energy, Ivan Illich shared that scarcity is inherently economistic and capitalistically constructed:

“Once the universe itself is placed under the regime of scarcity, homo is no longer born under the stars but under the axioms of economics …” “Through the imputation of energy, nature was recast in the image of the newly constituted human as worker.”

Instead of how the “invisible hand” behind “legal fictions” creates a culture where scarcity marketing primes us to buy way more than we need and grooms us to chase away our dissatisfaction with money, the cornerstone of economics is that resources are scarce, we have unlimited wants and needs and therefore, we must make choices:

“We have been trained for a world of scarcity and we have developed an image of man under the psychology of scarcity.” David Riesman in 1960
“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.” John Kenneth Galbraith

Joel Bakan, law professor and filmmaker, on how capitalism works:

“the entire system is supposed to be oriented to the production of capital” — “if that system is working properly, it will produce as much capital as it possibly can … you need to extract labor from individuals so that’s how you create capital and when that system is working well, it’s built in. That it will be destroying, it will be exploiting, it will be harming in the name of creating capital and when you put corporations into that, you put a very powerful legal tool into sort of massively magnifying the capital production process and when it’s working properly, it is not paying attention to social and environmental goals. It’s producing capital … it’s a race to cut down the trees before somebody else does.”

Bakan observed: “In a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will eventually be.”

“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

After World War II, didn’t the Bretton Woods institutions centrally signal nation-states to fold our self-interests into supporting the first fully negotiated monetary order to govern monetary relations among independent states (aka “the institutionalizing of conflicting interests”)?

Yes, particularly since the Nixon shock in August 1971, when money — national currencies — became “legal tender.” By harnessing our energy, the system has us pour our everything into chasing after it. Initially to pay bills/survive but over time, such habits become an addiction:

“Rewards and punishments are the lowest forms of education.” Lao Tzu

By having us systemically transform human/real value into exchange value, has the “invisible hand” ensured the people behind “artificial persons” amass global power through our incurring debt with legal tender currencies — and for us to become debt slaves?

Wasn’t this how BAU ushered in a new phase of globalization tethered to neoliberal policies? The movement of capital unleashed, the rich and powerful (including institutional investors) speculated — using money to make money — the world, their global casino.

John Pilger calls the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), “weapons of war.”

According to John Perkins, money from the WB, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other foreign “aid” organizations are funneled into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources.

“The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.” Eric Walberg, 2011

In War and Empire: The American Way of Life, Paul Atwood showed how America’s leaders have always picked their battles to increase their influence and power with little regard for American soldiers and “enemy” civilians killed or made to suffer in the process.

Scarcity narrowly focuses you on fighting each other for anything/everything so you forget that its real price is the amount of life you exchange for it. Isn’t that why you take things personally and want life your way while fighting for money/status/ego to build this massive empire of distributed corporate raiders?

Dualistic thinking, or the egoic operating system, is how we read reality from behind our self-interests. “What’s in it for me/my loved ones?” “How will I look if I do this?”

Isn’t this how the system we depend on molds predictable patterns of behavior?

To transform human/real value into exchange value, manufactured scarcity and fear hijack what it means to be human. As this systemically brings out the worst in us, is that really in the best interest of society?

“The essence of organization is the new power it creates — power to accomplish the task which led to its establishment, and power over the individuals who make up the organization. But organizational power is not simple and does not rely much on direct physical force. Where, then, does the power of organizations come from? It is, simply and magically, made up of shared weakness.

In organized life, no single individual is permitted to do anything or control anything which by itself would keep him alive. The power thus abdicated individually is agglomerated into a centralized fund — the organization. But then the problem becomes to avoid making the individual so weak that he can no longer manage to accomplish his iota of organizational work; indeed, there is even a danger that he might cease being a viable individual altogether. To forestall this is the function of morale or ideology: having been destroyed as a physical unit capable of self-accomplished survival, the individual is resuscitated by the firm assurance that in return for surrendering his power to it, the Organization will assume the obligation to keep him alive.” David T. Bazelon, The Politics of the Paper Economy

“We live in a society that demands addiction. The person who is best adjusted to this society is not dead and not alive because if you were fully alive, you couldn’t support the system.” Anne Wilson Schaef

Legally obliged to pursue the bottom line, rapacious “artificial persons” have no higher god than growth. These corporate middlemen control access to our most basic necessities. As they take over our means of survival, we are 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 (is systemically working for free as debt slaves the direction we are being headed?):

“Every market is structured and managed. Every economy is a planned economy. The question is: Who is going to do it? Right now, instead of the government planning the economy, you have Wall Street planning the economy, and that’s more centralized than government planning.” Michael Hudson

Does Money Make It Easier to Sell Your Soul?

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

With money as reward, has doing your job wired you to put the system first — to keep your status/livelihood? Is that how self-interests systemically addict us to why we do what we do?

“The first thing you think is where’s the edge, where can I make a bit more money, how can I push, push the boundaries. But the point is, you are greedy, you want every little bit of money that you can possibly get because, like I say, that is how you are judged, that is your performance metric.” Tom Hayes on his job behind the LIBOR scandal

In the film Shadow World, a US weapons analyst and co-designer of the F-16 fighter jet explained the business of selling bribes:

“When an executive goes to bribe a foreign official, he says to himself, look, I’ve taken a lot of risks to take this five million dollars that I am paying to the Prime Minister of X, Y, Z. He makes an arrangement with Prime Minister of X, Y, Z: ‘I’ll hand over the five million but you take half of that five million and you send it to the following bank account in Switzerland. We’ll share in this largesse.’

The first time an executive does that and collects 2.5 million dollars, he says ‘Wow, this is a good business to be in.’ And within moments of that realization, he is now no longer in the business of selling airplanes, he is in the business of selling bribes. And he is now scouring the world for somebody to find to bribe.” Pierre Sprey

Let’s not forget Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmails.

On the Thom Hartmann Program in 2015, former US President Jimmy Carter shared:

“The United States is now an ‘oligarchy’ in which ‘unlimited political bribery’ has created ‘a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.’ Both Democrats and Republicans look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”

Shaping Predictable Behaviors to Govern

“It is actually not in the least surprising that nations are chronically in debt, governments have inadequate public resources, public services are underfunded and people are beset by mortgages and overdrafts. The reason for all this monetary scarcity and insolvency is that the financial system used by all national economies worldwide is actually founded on debt. To be direct and precise, modern money is created in parallel with debt.” Michael Rowbotham, The Grip of Death

Without us buying into this BAU cult, as Henry Ford understood, nothing happens.

Knowing energy to be the operating currency of his factory assembly line model, Ford urged countries in 1921 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

In the 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 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). After World War II, the Cybernetics Group met regularly to explore developing a science that made it possible to predict and control human behavior.

The Macy conferences took place in New York between 1946 and 1953, 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 Rockefeller Foundation 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.

In The Birth of Central Intelligence, Arthur B. Darling shared that Bateson had provided the rationale for the creation of the 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

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.”

In the 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.

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.”

Twenty-three years after the Bretton Woods Conference (officially known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference), John Kenneth Galbraith 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 market-driven, ground-up, our economy was organization-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. Today, the United States is a structured state controlled by the largest companies.

A predictive model for self organizing systems was a 1960 proposal by two cyberneticians (Heinz von Foerster was a key member of the Macy conferences) pitching how in “social interaction experiments,” “players are human subjects who interact with one another, (albeit) restricted by certain constraints … and in particular by a limited supply of a commodity (called ‘money’), which players must use in order to ‘purchase’ the channels of communication … as ‘trading with’ one another …

An essential feature is for the (electronic) connection system to be of two different kinds:

[the] ‘monetary connection system’ will be stationary and symmetric during one experimental run, although its structure can be changed from run to run.

The other kind will be called the ‘signal connection system’ and will constantly change as a consequence of the activity of the players.”

Within the system, money will then correspond “to raw material (or unutilized energy) in the real world. The kind of raw material does not matter … In general these individuals or corporations will organize the raw material into potentially saleable merchandise …” where “accumulated money” becomes “the wealth of the player” even as “the structure is continually changing. It depends upon, and comes into existence as a result of the trading activity of the players” … “We make the assumption that the players in the game of trading wish to maximize their average wealth … and it is arranged that each player in the game is at least aware of his own wealth at each instance. In reality we may have to motivate the players by converting their average wealth into a currency — such as real money — which is useable in the real world.”

Through boom-and-bust cycles, especially post the Nixon shock, hasn’t the fiat currency system become a casino the “invisible hand” orchestrates to have Greater fools ultimately surrender whatever’s theirs to it? Will that lead to today’s social media platforms becoming the forerunners of a global social credit system in the Metaverse?

From hidden fist to iron law to iron bank to Iron Mountain

“As centers of industrial and financial power, market-organizers, and general governing bodies, big corporations are necessarily planning agencies … the connection between planning and pricing … is a crucial political fact in the Paper Economy … where markets are dominated they are not ‘free,’ and the dominating economic institutions have, among their other powers, the capacity to set prices with a certain independence. The latter have come to be called ‘administered prices’ … Underwriting in the Paper Economy is simply a sophisticated adjunct to the more ancient act of governing.” David T. Bazelon

In September 1970, as American businesses grappled with the initial impact of globalization, Milton Friedman’s New York Times article clumsily rallied their key drivers to make profit their social responsibility. It has since been hailed as the world’s dumbest (business) idea.

After Friedman joined its economics faculty in 1946, the Chicago school blossomed into one of the most influential schools of thought based on rigorous mathematical modeling combined with statistical research to demonstrate the empirical validity or falsity of an economic theory or policy prescription.

But when people are systemically conditioned to want to gamble to maximize corporate profits, is that really in the best interest of society?

I stumbled upon David T. Bazelon’s work in the Iron Mountain report (read below). A corporate lawyer turned writer/teacher, his articles were published about a decade prior to the Nixon shock.

In The Paper Economy, he wrote:

“In 1961, the (US) Secretary of the Treasury said:

We are no longer in a time of shortages. There is unusual — and under-utilized — capacity everywhere in our land today … We also … are under-utilizing our labor force, which stands ready and willing to operate the unused capacity of our industrial plant.

Because capitalism and its paper world were based on actual scarcity, the drama of the system was to contend heroically with this condition. But the whole point about the new freedom, the new technology, is that it has made scarcity absurd. So our society can no longer dare to be based on it, heroically or otherwise.

The paper system is still conceived in terms of scarcity — still founded upon that concept.”

Did Bazelon’s work lead to how a mystery Special Study Group was set up in 1963 to examine problems that would emerge if the US entered a state of lasting peace?

The “invisible hand’s” Obsession with War?

“Actually war becomes perpetual when it is used as a rationale for peace.” Norman Solomon

An anonymous panel of 15 men met over two and a half years, including in an underground nuclear bunker called Iron Mountain.

“Charged to use a ‘military contingency’ model” for their study, they acknowledged “a considerable debt to the civilian war planning agencies for their pioneering work in the objective examination of the contingencies of nuclear war. There is no such precedent in the peace studies.”

“John Doe,” a professor at a college in the Midwest on the panel, decided to release the report to the public. The heavily footnoted report concluded that peace “would almost certainly not be in the best interests of society to achieve it.”

“War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained — and improved in effectiveness.”

Instead of how peace could be achieved, the men had theorized how “the development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace …” and they contemplated having “institutions more or less like a World Court, or a United Nations, but vested with real authority … (and for how) a well-armed international police force, operating under the authority of such a supranational ‘court,’ could well serve the function of external enemy.”

They saw war as essential for the incumbent control system because “Wars are not ‘caused’ by international conflicts of interest … war-making societies require — and thus bring about — such conflicts. The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise … The ‘alternate enemy’ (is) needed to hold society together.”

“What gives the war system its preeminent role in social organization … is its unmatched authority over life and death … [it] serves to rationalize most nonmilitary killing … [and] provides the precedent for the collective willingness of members of a society to pay a blood price for institutions far less central to social organization than war.”

The Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace goes on to note that military “exercise” is needed “to prevent its atrophy.”

“The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which nor government can long remain in power. The historical record reveals one instance after another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, or reactions to social injustice, or of other disintegrative elements.”

War provides the incentive: “Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy …”

“It follows, from the patterns of human behavior, that the credibility of a social ‘enemy’ demands similarly a readiness of response in proportion to its menace. In a broad social context, ‘an eye for an eye’ still characterizes the only acceptable attitude toward a presumed threat of aggression, despite contrary religious and moral precepts governing personal conduct.”

“Enemies” other than those of war need to be “… underscored with a not inconsiderable actual sacrifice of life …”

“Games theorists have suggested … the development of ‘blood games’ for the effective control of individual aggressive impulses. … More realistically, such a ritual might be socialized … for purposes of ‘social purification,’ ‘state security,’ or other rationale both acceptable and credible to postwar societies … What is involved here … is the quest for William James’ moral equivalent of war.”

Check out the Functions of War.

Were these men paid to embrace the status quo of psychological warfare or were they simply unable to think outside of how they had benefitted from being controlled and exploited in the BAU system? Was this indicative of their mindset?

“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

In a 2011 interview, Walter Kiechel, author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World explained 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.”

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

According to Kiechel, 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 60s, 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.” Willfully 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 1960s, 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 or particular business background, he was Henderson’s best salesman and alter ego till he founded his own firm. Bain & Co. grew wildly through the 70s and 80s, skittered close to bankruptcy before reinventing itself. Along the way, Bain helped invent Greater Taylorism, the means by which companies crawl over every aspect of their own operations and their competitors’ looking for an edge.

In Bain: A consulting firm too hot to handle? Fortune editors wrote: “Bain has over the years been labeled the ‘’KGB of Consulting,’’ or a ‘’Moonie commune’’ run by the ‘’Reverend’’ Bain. Bain consultants seem possessed by a mission to increase the ‘’total economic value’’ of their clients. Like religious zealots, they single-mindedly dedicate themselves to improving their customer’s competitive position. Business is a holy war that the client must win and the competition must lose.”

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. He 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.

In Leaders Single-Handedly Shaping Business Culture is an Urban Myth Invented by Business Schools, David G. White Jr. wrote that 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 who had peddled why a “biological elite” should be given power as he championed for work to be a temple of self-actualization.

Let’s fast forward to the spring of 1997 — two years after the events in Beijing and Copenhagen — as Fitts shared what the president of the largest US pension fund had told her:

“You don’t understand, it’s too late … they’ve given up on the country. They’re moving all the money out starting in the fall.”

However, do physical countries really matter when the “invisible hand” spans a system that is global and as it aspires to play “god”?

“The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“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

A paradigm is a way of life.

As the “invisible hand” orchestrates how we collectively create our world, ours seems to be a way of thinking and doing that literally has you robbing Peter to pay Paul:

“Fiscal policies whose inherent structure is to rob Peter to pay Paul, do not lead to economic security; arbitrary administrative decisions in too many facets of our economic life do not lead to economic security; most of all, a monetary policy that is designed to lend money to people who have money — and mostly ‘invest’ this money in the purchase of financial assets, rather than in the creation of real wealth — this monetary ‘policy’ does not lead to economic security.” Carmine Gorga

“The world’s total wealth is estimated to be close to $255 trillion, with the US and Europe holding approximately 2/3 of that total. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the world’s people live on less than $10 a day. The poorest half of the population lives on less than $2.50 a day and more than 1.1 billion live on only a dollar 25 a day.” Peter Phillips

Can we really solve our systemic challenges with the same BAU illogic used to create them even as data is poised to become our future of no/ (programmable) money?

Check out The World’s Tech Giants, Compared to the Size of Economies

Born into a control grid where the “invisible hand” governs by manufacturing consent with fear, are you and I complicit in normalizing exploitation and wars? Is that in the best interest of society? If not, what truly is in the best interest of society?

Please share this far and wide so more people will start thinking about why we do what we do — aka the world we collectively create to live.

Besides the system being opaque, self-interests do make the 21st century’s Tower of Babel daunting. As I connect dots, I’m also never sure as there’s too much info. So, please do your own due diligence — I hope the links shared will provide some context for you to embark on your journey of self-discoveries:

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

This was supposed to be the last article in the “Hacking mindsets” series I’ve been writing, but there will be one more to observe if you are ready to kickstart the shift from Control to Empowerment.

Meantime, let’s stop fighting and try not to let your self-interests hurt you, yourself and one another.

References

Global Financial System 1750–2000

The Dodd Report to the Reece Committee on Foundations

Foundations — Their Power and Influence

Wall Street and FDR: The True Story of How Franklin D. Roosevelt Colluded with Corporate America

Why Wars Happen

The Strategy of Conflict

A Century of War

The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society

Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism

The Web of Corporate Oligarchy Ensnares them