The Following is the Introduction to my upcoming book “Conspiracy Theory: The History of Social Control In The United States”. At the end, you will see a list of Chapters. This book will be available on Amazon, my website and other venues in June 2024.
Introduction
Conspiracy Theory: A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable. The term has a negative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence.A conspiracy theory is not the same as a conspiracy; instead, it refers to a hypothesized conspiracy with specific characteristics, such as an opposition to the mainstream consensus among those people (such as scientists or historians) who are qualified to evaluate its accuracy.
Source: Wikipedia
“Those who can make people believe absurdities, can make people commit atrocities.”
Source: Voltaire
On January 20, 1942, the world was at war. America had officially entered the fight more than 1 year prior after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was at this time that 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question. This was the defining moment when a government, made up of civilized western Europeans decided, with the calmness of any Board of Directors at a major corporation, to systematically murder the entirety of European Jewry. If something like this were to happen today, would you believe it? Would you be taken seriously if you decided to warn people? Would you be deemed a “Conspiritard” or Lunatic?
The term “Conspiracy Theory” was popularized by philosopher Sir Karl Popper in the 1950’s. The term has always had a negative connotation. To call any theory a conspiracy theory is to immediately imply that the theory is false and its proponents are acting irrationally. While the term’s negative connotations have grown worse with time, it is fairly recently where conspiracy theories have been referred to by governments and elite corporate interests as being a unique threat to public safety or even to democracy itself1. According to David Coady, one the leading researchers of conspiracy theory, the term conspiracy lacks any fixed definition but served a fixed function. This function is to stigmatize people with beliefs that conflict with officially sanctioned or orthodox beliefs of the time and place in question, much like the term Heresy in Medieval Europe.
Coady also points out that the largest negative consequence of this type of use of the term conspiracy theory is that it allows the conspiracy referenced to thrive at the expense of openness. He writes:
The most widely cited example in this literature is the belief that American government agencies were behind the 9/11 attacks. It is treated as paradigmatic evidence of conspiracist ideation in almost all of the recent psychological work on this subject (e.g. Brotherton & French; Bruder et al., Douglas et al., Douglas et al., Drinkwater et al. Klein et al., Meyer; van der Tempel & Alcock, van Prooijen et al.)2. Now this is certainly a false belief and evidence of some sort of irrationality (though not necessarily the same sort of irrationality in everyone who has the belief). However this belief can’t be evidence of conspiratorial ideation, because it doesn’t involve belief in conspiracy in favor of a non-conspiratorial explanation of events; rather it involves belief in one conspiracy rather than another (in this case real) conspiracy, namely the one which took place amongst the 19 hijackers and al-Qaeda. Charles Pigden has pointed out the absurdity of trying to explain the 9/11 attacks without supposing there to have been some sort conspiracy in the following passage:
Nobody half-way sane supposes that the events of 9/11 were not due to some conspiracy or other. (To think that you would have to suppose that the perpetrators assembled in the planes quite by chance and that on a sudden, by coincidence, it struck them as a neat idea to hijack the planes and ram then into the Twin Towers, the Whitehouse and the Pentagon, with the aid of other perpetrators who, presumably, they had never met before.) (Pigden, 2006 p. 158)
Those who believe American government agencies were involved in the 9/11 plots are certainly mistaken, but they are not mistaken because they suffer from conspiratorial ideation. Their mistake is not that they are overly willing to believe in a conspiracy. They are absolutely correct to believe in a conspiracy. They just believe in the wrong one. They have misidentified the conspirators.
The problem with the psychological literature on this subject goes deeper than mere reliance on some poorly chosen examples. If psychologists genuinely want to find out if there is a problem of conspiracist ideation (i.e. excessive willingness to believe in conspiracies), they first need to have an idea of how willing one should be to believe in conspiracies, and that would require them to have a good understanding of how widespread actual conspiracies are. Unfortunately this is not a topic which psychologists are particularly well-qualified to address. If anyone has relevant expertise, they would presumably be historians or political scientists.
At this point in human history, it is getting harder and harder to define what a conspiracy theory is because most of the conspiracies we see are done out in the open. Instead of denials and charges of fantasy, those engaged in the conspiracy just use gaslighting3. They will deny what you just saw or what you noticed is actually happening. It becomes harder and harder to discuss what you are seeing because you start to wonder yourself if what your senses are observing is real or is it just a glitch in the Matrix?
At this point the conspiracy is more advanced than the Conspiracy Theories of previous generations (which makes it easier and easier to write off conspiracy theories as the ranting of disturbed lunatics). The entire dynamic has changed. Conspiracy theories used to be born of a lack of information (at which point you had to fill in the blanks after blindly connecting the dots). You had to have sources and trust that any person willing to discuss the conspiracy with you was telling the truth. Groups like the CIA/FBI/DoD worked in the shadows ad focused mostly on spies (Human Intelligence). Now, The CIA/NSA doesn’t really require human intelligence anymore or to work behind the scenes to sell drugs in the Ghetto4 or use their resources to arrest domestic criminals5 they have new technological tools which were always intended to exert social control and promote a uniparty totalitarian administrative state. In almost all cases of recent memory, the CIA/NSA/DoD funded new technologies they claimed were created for military uses and then they “allowed” them to be converted to civilian use678. These include the Internet, Cellular Technology, the Onion Router (TOR) and Global Positioning Satellites among many others.
It is fair to say that governmental organizations like the CIA/NSA don’t use the internet as a tool. It isn’t a resource for them to execute plans. They ARE the internet. The NSA is easily one of the most secretive organizations in the US, with over 19,000 employees and a decent portion of the $80 Billion that congress has authorized for the Intelligence Agencies9. They operate more in the shadows than the KGB or Chinese Internal Security Service ever does. This is demonstrated by the fact that almost NO ONE in America knows what they actually do. Until the revelations by Edward Snowden10 that the NSA was involved in a massive, and illegal, surveillance program aimed at the American People, most people hadn’t heard of the NSA at all. Like every other US government agency, the NSA is supposed to keep us safe. Their mission11 states that
“The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both signals intelligence (SIGINT) insights and cybersecurity products and services and enables computer network operations to gain a decisive advantage for the nation and our allies.”
The NSA officially, as per their website12, collects, processes, and disseminates intelligence information from foreign electronic signals for national foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes and to support military operations. NSA/CSS is also tasked with preventing foreign adversaries from gaining access to classified national security information. They were originally not supposed to use their mandate to investigate American Citizens in traditional criminal investigations13.
All this has changed over the years since its inception and we now don’t have to even consider the lies we have historically be told about how the intelligence services are to detect foreign threats and do not operate on American soil against Americans. The Snowden revelations show us this was never the case, but now they don’t even try to hide it. The Intelligence services work to further an agenda only they know and inc encert with politicians they agree with.They ensure that we are not governed by such nuisances as elections, the will of the people or a mandate given to elected representatives. There are plenty of times where politicians screw up and say the “quiet part out loud”14 15or where they openly urge the intelligence services to go after dissenting politicians or political groups16
One of the biggest tools of the intelligence services is the use of false flags. This term is not used lightly but is being used not to make strange allegations of crisis actors at school shootings or things like that17. I am talking more about things like human microchipping.
Things like microchipping are the newest form of false flags because they lead those who enter the discussion to conclude there is a false binary (ie that we currently are not microchipped but we face the threat of being microchipped in the future). These false flags create a sense of urgency among those that discover them because there is an assumption made that these types of things can be fought against and prevented from being implemented as opposed to understanding that these things already exist and that we have incorporated them into our daily lives. The idea that there is a modicum of privacy we all enjoy and that the government is not able to access any data they want about us is not only false, but we gave up the right to privacy voluntarily. We are already microchipped.
Every American (at least almost every American) carries with them, at almost all times, a device that openly transmits our location (past and present and, in some cases, future), access to our financial information, access to our health information, data on our families, our kids, our jobs literally anything that any intelligence agency could want is on the device we carry around daily in our pockets and purses.
It’s called a Cell Phone.
A cell phone stores the entire contents of your computer hard drive, your contacts, medical records, financial data and more. It is a complete record of your personhood stored on a trackable device that you keep with you at all times. You would think that the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th amendments and more would protect your cell phone from governmental intrusion, but you would be really wrong.
Additionally, it is becoming more and more common for our cellphones to interact with other devices to increase the data we allow it to access. Whether it is the digital home assistants we buy (Amazon Alexa Google Assistant) which listen in to our conversations, or the various devices that make up the IoT which tells our various apps what groceries we have or buy, what different products we purchase, how much coffee, tea or hot chocolate our Keurig makes and the list goes on and on. While all this information may make your life a little more convenient it also allows organizations like the NSA/CIA/Government in General to not only see your personal data, but to create policies and plans on how to use that data against you if they want.
The Courts have ruled that police generally need a warrant to search your phone, but the real question is, if they have that warrant what data on your phone can they use against you. The simple answer is, all of it. So if you are suspected of any crime the police can ask for a warrant for your phone, you will be compelled against your will to give them access and anything they find there can be used against you, regardless of whether it is related to the crime you are being accused of1819.
Your cellphone can be used to determine your location, your travel history and anything else the police need to know in order to charge you with a crime. The vast majority of the people who went inside the capitol on January 6, 2021 were found through cellphone tracking data20
Those who wish to control you have done a fantastic job of making cellphones so socially necessary that they do not require you to have one, society demands it. Most online apps which require 2 factor authentication (which is most these days) require a cellphone so they can confirm your identity through text. Financial services like centralized crypto exchanges, stock trading platforms and banks require the same to execute any transaction.
It isn’t just cellphones. It is social media and email. Social Media and Email have become the preferred communication methods of the time. Most employers require you to disclose your social media accounts as part of the hiring process. New York State requires all social media links used by an applicant which they have used for the previous three years for a concealed carry permit. Social Media is even more nefarious than cell phone data because the TOS of all these services declares that all data uploaded is not your property but that of the social media site it is uploaded to. This is because your disclosures to the site are uploaded to the public domain voluntarily. How can you argue that the data is owned by you or private when you voluntarily put it in the public domain?
The History and Expansion of The Internet, The Ultimate System of Control
While a rudimentary system of communication protocols was developed in the early sixties as a way for governmental researchers to share information, the official date of the Internet being born was January 1, 198321. Before that, it must be emphasized that this system only existed from the government and was used by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to allow entities with contracts and grants from the Department of Defense to communicate with each other and share complex information. This in and of itself is not nefarious. The US government has spent trillions of dollars giving grants to various scientific, medical, aerospace and hundreds of other fields of research. Their grantees have created some of the most advanced and exciting discoveries the world has ever seen. The issue is that systems of information sharing that get their start in governmental offices should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism as to their altruistic design, especially if the projects originated from the military. The important phrase in this whole game is “multi-use technology”. An example is GPS (Global Positioning Satellites). This system was originally designed by the Department of Defense and NASA in 1958 in order to track and locate United States missile submarines rapidly while at sea if all other methods were not operational and radio communication was not possible22. This system was called TRANSIT and was funded by ARPA (this organization and its sister organization DARPA will come up a lot in this type of research). This system went through dozens of updates and expansions for its military uses until 1983. In 1983, President Reagan authorized the use of Navstar (one of TRANSIT’s interactions) to be given to airlines in response to the shooting down of a Korean Airlines plane by the Soviet Union. 269 passengers were killed in the incident, including a US Congressman23. In 1995, almost exactly on schedule, the current iteration of the GPS system was released to the civilian population and private corporations were empowered to use the technology in cell phones, cars, planes, ships and 100’s of other uses.
It should come as no surprise that the most advanced (and controversial) technologies originate in the military. National Defense is where the money is, and unlocking that purse is best achieved with creating new tech. It is only natural for non lethal tech to make its way to the civilian market, but the real question (of which there may be multiple answers to) is whether the tech created by the military was created for the purpose of social control or if social control was just a by product?
Governmental Systems of Control
While the government has been more than happy to give private industry the means at which to monitor and control the lives of the vast majority of people, there are still those who remain in a state of rebellion against the norm. While communities like the Amish and the Orthodox Jews are easy to point at (these communities have historically low divorce rates2425, fantastically high fertility rates26 27and extremely high rates of societal cohesion) as being the proof that lack of engagement with the tools of surveillance leads to happier and healthier societies, it is hard to extrapolate this success to the greater society we live in. The overwhelming majority of people are not going to embrace a religious standard far above where they currently are. Additionally, it is equally unlikely that most communities will be able to form such close knit societies which strive to provide for the needs of their communities locally. The Internet, Cell Phones, Mass Media and Social Media have made the world dramatically smaller and will continue to do so. So what is to be done with people who make a choice to dissent from the norm? The government has not only instituted but perfected the ways in which to bring those who do not join the main group to heal.
Remember, the goal of a truly effective governmental system is not to bring criminal charges and convict you. This does nothing for the government but cost them money and your rights to defend yourself in the case of criminal prosecution are much higher than the government wants to spend. Instead the goal is to charge you civilly for any infraction fo their code of conduct. The burden of proof in a civil case is much lower, the government doesn’t have to afford you the same rights against unreasonable search or against self incrimination. In effect, all the government needs to do to ruin you civilly is go after you. Unless you are independently wealthy, defending yourself against civil liability is almost always financially unfeasible.
If there is any doubt as to how the government sees this philosophy, you just need look at the ways in which they pursue them. While violent crime has dramatically fell in the last 40 years28 we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of police hired29, entire new agencies created to deal with travel and border security bring huge increases to enforcement personneland the IRS, which already has the largest enforcement division of any law enforcement agency in the country, has recently been authorized to hire an additional 87,000 agents to add to the 84,000 agents currently employed30. Why the need for so many new enforcement agents at a time where crime is at historic lows, air transportation has never been safer and it has become easier and easier for the government to follow your spending habits? One need only “follow the money”. How does the government civilly enforce their hatred of dissent?
Civil Asset Forfeiture (enforced by local, state and federal law enforcement agents)
Civil asset forfeiture laws allow police to seize property, money, or assets if police merely believe it is connected to criminal activity. Police do not have to file charges or even establish guilt in these cases before seizing and keeping property and there is no limit to what police can seize. In civil forfeiture, assets are seized by police based on a suspicion of wrongdoing, and without having to charge a person with specific wrongdoing, with the case being between police and the thing itself, sometimes referred to by the Latin term in rem, meaning "against the property"; the property itself is the defendant and no criminal charge against the owner is needed31
The No Fly List32 (Enforced by Transportation Safety Administration Agents)
The TSC's No Fly List is a list of people who are prohibited from boarding commercial aircraft for travel within, into, or out of the United States. This list has also been used to divert aircraft away from U.S. airspace that do not have start- or end-point destinations within the United States. The number of people on the list rises and falls according to threat and intelligence reporting. This list actually started specifically with included “Social Credit Scores”. Organizations like the ACLU have sued the TSA and FBI on multiple occasions3334 claiming that there was no concept of due process when it came to who was added to the list or how someone could get off it. Multiple Federal Courts have ruled the No Fly Lists to be unconstitutional but small tweaks to its implementation keep it alive and well in 2022. In 2020, many of those who attended the protest at Capital Hill on January 6th, 2020 were added to the list without any proof they participated in the ensuing riot nor were they ever charged with a crime. This is despite denials from mainstream media sources that protestors were added to the No Fly List35. There is no defined way to get removed from the No Fly List. Generally, if an American finds themselves on the No Fly List they can request the reasons why from the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) has paced them on the list in the first place. The TSC is not required to give you all the evidence or reasons and will likely avoid doing so. If you think you have been place on this list erroneously, you can submit a letter with as much evidence as you have to the TSC and request removal. This rarely, if ever, results in a person being cleared from the No Fly List36
Audits by State or Federal Tax Authorities (Enforced by the IRS)
By definition, auditing is an official inspection and verification of the credibility of financial reports. Audits can be conducted by either a business’s management as an internal control process or by the government, in case they notice suspicious financial activity. While this seems like it should be a simple process of verifying your financial data to the IRS and moving on with your life, anyone who has been through an audit knows this is rarely the case. The United States has one of the most complicated tax codes on the planet. Noted physicist, Albert Einstein marveled at how the income tax system was harder to understand than physics37. The IRS asking you to justify your filed taxes and reconcile them with the records you keep is near impossible for a certified account let alone the average citizen. The IRS has the ability to access dramatic penalties civilly if you are found to have made a mistake in filing your taxes (less than 2% of IRS audits end in criminal prosecution38). The IRs can fine you up to 75% of the total cost of your income tax return as a penalty for a variety of issues they can uncover in an audit.
As you can see, it is a daunting task to disagree with those in control (and typically it can be a very expensive one too). Also, the government is a beast which can keep eating and never grow full. There was still some level of limited opposition to the previously mentioned systems (asset forfeiture, no fly lists and financial audits) but the COVID 19 Pandemic let the cat out of the bag. Those in control didn’t even feel the need to have to justify their oppression anymore. They just had to tell you it was there to keep you “safe”. There has been a rapid acceleration of control that has been put in place since the beginning of the 2019 COVID Pandemic. It is hard to even keep up with it all, but we have to in order to understand how to fix it. Not all of this started with the COVID Pandemic, in fact very little of it did. All the COVID Pandemic did was hyper accelerate what was already happening. The COVID 19 Pandemic also got all the players on the same side (at least publicly).
The State of Fear
In 2004, novelist Michael Crighton wrote a novel called State of Fear39. While its main focus was on environmentalism and the various instances where environmentalism has been used to advance totalitarian governmental encroachments on freedom. While the story was fictional, Crichton made sure to cite his sources when he made claims that were either scientific in nature or referenced studies. In this novel he coined the term “The Politico-Legal-Media Complex (PLM)”. Like the Military Industrial Complex warned about by President Eisenhower in his farewell address at the end of his presidency, The PLM functions as a system which feeds on society and advances governmental control in a symbiotic way, the government advances societal control, and the PLM generates profit and status.
While it would be easier for me to just rewrite this next section, instead I am going to copy a section of the Michael Crighton novel “State of Fear”. I will take out the dialogue which was there to move the story forward but keep the points that were discussed. (citations of data in the footnotes).
“Ten years ago, I began with fashion and slang,” he said, “the latter being of course a kind of verbal fashion. I wanted to know the determinants of change in fashion and speech. What I quickly found is that there are no identifiable determinants. Fashions change for arbitrary reasons and although there are regularities—cycles, periodicities, and correlations— these are merely descriptive, not explanatory.
“In any case, I realized that these periodicities and correlations could be regarded as systems in themselves. Or if you will, ecosystems. I tested that hypothesis and found it heuristically valuable. Just as there is an ecology of the natural world, in the forests and mountains and oceans, so too there is an ecology of the man-made world of mental abstractions, ideas, and thought. That is what I have studied.”
“Within modern culture, ideas constantly rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something, and then, bit by bit, they stop believing it. Eventually, no one can remember the old idea, the way no one can remember the old slang. Ideas are themselves a kind of fad, you see.”
“Why do ideas fall out of favor, you are wondering?”
“The answer is simply—they do. In fashion, as in natural ecology, there are disruptions. Sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in the charred acreage. Accidental, haphazard, unexpected, abrupt change. That is what the world shows us on every side.”
“But just as ideas can change abruptly, so, too, can they hang on past their time. Some ideas continue to be embraced by the public long after scientists have abandoned them. Left brain, right brain is a perfect example. In the 1970s, it gains popularity from the work of Sperry at Caltech, who studies a specific group of brain-surgery patients. His findings have no broader meaning beyond these patients. Sperry denies any broader meaning. By 1980, it is clear that the left and right brain notion is just wrong—the two sides of the brain do not work separately in a healthy person. But in the popular culture, the concept does not die for another twenty years. People talk about it, believe it, write books about it for decades after scientists have set it aside.”
“Similarly, in environmental thought, it was widely accepted in 1960 that there is something called ‘the balance of nature.’ If you just left nature alone it would come into a self-maintaining state of balance. Lovely idea with a long pedigree. The Greeks believed it three thousand years ago, on the basis of nothing. Just seemed nice. “However, by 1990, no scientist believes in the balance of nature anymore. The ecologists have all given it up as simply wrong. Untrue. A fantasy. They speak now of dynamic disequilibrium, of multiple equilibrium states. But they now understand that nature is never in balance. Never has been, never will be. On the contrary, nature is always out of balance, and that means—”
“That means that mankind, which was formerly defined as the great disrupter of the natural order, is nothing of the sort. The whole environment is being constantly disrupted all the time anyway.”
“If you study the media, seeking to find shifts in normative conceptualization, you discover something extremely interesting. We looked at transcripts of news programs of the major networks—NBC, ABC, CBS. We also looked at stories in the newspapers of New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We counted the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking.” “What did you find?”
“There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster For example, during the 1980s, the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition, prior to 1989, adjectives such as dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it all changed.”
“These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic.”
“Why should it have changed in 1989?”
“Ah. A good question. Critical question. In most respects 1989 seemed like a normal year: a Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; Jane Fonda, Mike Tyson, and Bruce Springsteen all got divorced; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France, and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other. But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision in the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should coincide so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Which happened on November ninth of that year.”
“At first we thought the association was spurious. But it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet empire. And the end of the Cold War that had lasted for half a century in the West.”
“I am leading to the notion of social control. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the right side of the road—or the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.”
“Exactly. For fifty years, Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of nuclear war. The Communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire. And within the Communist countries, the same in reverse. Fear of us. Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finished. Gone, vanished. Over! The fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something had to fill it.”
“You’re saying that environmental crises took the place of the Cold War?”
“That is what the evidence shows. Of course, now we have radical fundamentalism and post—9/l 1 terrorism to make us afraid, and those are certainly real reasons for fear, but that is not my point. My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before terrorism we feared the toxic environment. Before that we had the Communist menace. The point is, although the specific cause of our fear may change, we are never without the fear itself. Fear pervades society in all its aspects. Perpetually.”
“Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things they can’t even see—germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it’s an extraordinary delusion—a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear. Amazing.
“How has this world view been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nations—France, Germany, Japan, the US—in fact, we inhabit exactly the same state, the State of Fear. How has that been accomplished?”
“Well, I shall tell you how,” he said. “In the old days—before your time,—citizens of the West believed their nation-states were dominated by something called the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower warned Americans against it in the 1960s, and after two world wars Europeans knew very well what it meant in their own countries. But the military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society. In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population—under the guise of promoting safety.”
“Safety is important.”
“Please. Western nations are fabulously safe. Yet people do not feel they are, because of the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. If it has no basis in fact at all. For instance, consider silicon breast implants.”
“Yes. You will recall that breast implants were claimed to cause cancer and autoimmune diseases. Despite statistical evidence that this was not true, we saw high-profile news stories, high-profile lawsuits, high-profile political hearings. The manufacturer, Dow Corning, was hounded out of the business after paying $3.2 billion, and juries awarded huge cash payments to plaintiffs and their lawyers.
“Four years later, definitive epidemiological studies showed beyond a doubt that breast implants did not cause disease. But by then the crisis had already served its purpose, and the PLM had moved on, a ravenous machine seeking new fears, new terrors. I’m telling you, this is the way modern society works—by the constant creation of fear. And there is no countervailing force. There is no system of checks and balances, no restraint on the perpetual promotion of fear after fear after fear. . . .“
“Because we have freedom of speech, freedom of the press.”
“That is the classic PLM answer. That’s how they stay in business,”.
“But think. If it is not all right to falsely shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, why is it all right to shout ‘Cancer!’ in the pages of The New Yorker? When that statement is not true? We’ve spent more than twenty-five billion dollars to clear up the phony power-line cancer claim. ‘So what?’ you say. I can see it in your face. You’re thinking, we’re rich, we can afford it. It’s only twenty-five billion dollars. But the fact is that twenty-five billion dollars is more than the total GDP of the poorest fifty nations of the world combined. Half the world’s population lives on two dollars a day. So that twenty-five billion would be enough to support thirty-four million people for a year. Or we could have helped all the people dying of AIDS in Africa. Instead, we piss it away on a fantasy published by a magazine whose readers take it very seriously. Trust it. It is a stupendous waste of money. In another world, it would be a criminal waste. One could easily imagine another Nuremberg trial—this time for the relentless squandering of Western wealth on trivialities—and complete with pictures of the dead babies in Africa and Asia that result.”
“At the very least, we are talking about a moral outrage. Thus we can expect our religious leaders and our great humanitarian figures to cry out against this waste and the needless deaths around the world that result. But do any religious leaders speak out? No. Quite the contrary, they join the chorus. They promote ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ As if they have forgotten that what Jesus would drive is the false prophets and fearmongers out of the temple.”
“We are talking about a situation that is profoundly immoral. It is disgusting, if truth be told. The PLM callously ignores the plight of the poorest and most desperate human beings on our planet in order to keep fat politicians in office, rich news anchors on the air, and conniving lawyers in Mercedes-Benz convertibles. Oh, and university professors in Volvos. Let’s not forget them.”
“The point is this: the world has changed in the last fifty years. We now live in the knowledge society; the information society, whatever you want to call it. And it has had enormous impact on our universities.
“Fifty years ago, if you wanted to lead what was then called ‘the life of the mind,’ meaning to be an intellectual, to live by your wits, you had to work in a university. The society at large had no place for you. A few newspaper reporters, a few magazine journalists could be considered as living by their wits, but that was about it. Universities attracted those who willingly gave up worldly goods to live a cloistered intellectual life, teaching timeless values to the younger generation. Intellectual work was the exclusive province of the university.
“But today, whole sectors of society live the life of the mind. Our entire economy is based on intellectual work, now. Thirty-six percent of workers are knowledge workers. That’s more than are employed in manufacturing. And when professors decided they would no longer teach young people, but leave that task to their graduate students who knew much less than they did and spoke English poorly—when that happened, the universities were thrown into crisis. What good were they anymore? They had lost their exclusive hold on the life of the mind. They no longer taught the young. Only so many theoretical texts on the semiotics of Foucault could be published in any single year. What was to become of our universities? What relevance did they have in the modern era?”
“What happened,” he continued, “is the universities transformed themselves in the 1980s. Formerly bastions of intellectual freedom in a world of Babbittry, formerly the locus of sexual freedom and experimentation, they now became the most restrictive environments in modern society. Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the PLM. Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties. All the new restrictive codes. Words you can’t say. Thoughts you can’t think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can’t smoke, can’t swear, can’t screw, can’t think. These institutions have been stood on their heads in a generation. It is really quite extraordinary.
“The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can thrive only in a restrictive setting, behind closed doors, without due process. In our society, only universities have created that—so far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core, I’m telling you.”
It is ironic that Crighton used a book which uses the environmental lobby in order to expose readers to the idea of social control. Social Control has been a very prominent feature of American life since the Civil War. While the idea that those in power will manipulate both the people they rule over and use the strong hand of government and related entities to accomplish these ends, it should be noted that it is America’s stance as the last remaining world Super Power that enables it to use all available means of social control available. America also has the unique ability to do this without even the minimal amounts of accountability. America has done what the CCP, The Bolsheviks and the Nazis always strove for but couldn’t accomplish, which is the wholesale gaslighting of not only their own population but the whole world.
Chapters In The Book
The Declaration of Independence/The American Revolution
The American Civil War
Reconstruction
Woodrow Wilson and World War 1
Leaving The Gold Standard
Women’s Rights
The Great Depression
The Petro Dollar
World War 2
The Cold War
McCarthyism
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The Immigration Act of 1965
The Drug War
Vietnam
Environmentalism
The Internet
The Crime
9/11
The Housing Bubble Collapse
Obama
Trump
Biden
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2021.1917364
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2021.1917364#
Gaslighting: manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch01p1.htm
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/10/08/did-the-nsa-help-with-the-silk-road-investigation/?sh=611fc77d7f7f
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
https://www.torproject.org/about/history/
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/05/making-sense-of-the-1-25-trillion-national-security-state-budget
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance
https://www.nsa.gov/about/
https://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/how-nsa-transforming-law-enforcement
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312605-schumer-trump-being-really-dumb-by-going-after-intelligence-community/
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/privacy-and-surveillance/do-us-politicians-need-fear-our-intelligence
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/30/schumer-coats-trump-intelligence-1138313
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2022/08/02/alex-jones-sandy-hook-shooting-school-victims-parents-jesse-lewis-infowars/65390023007/
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/24/21133600/police-fbi-phone-search-protests-password-rights
https://www.businessinsider.com/doj-is-mapping-cell-phone-location-data-from-capitol-rioters-2021-3
https://flowingdata.com/2021/02/08/tracking-capitol-rioters-through-their-mobile-phone-data/
https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_02.phtml
https://aerospace.org/article/brief-history-gps
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/the-plane-crash-that-gave-americans-gps/382204/
https://jewishlink.news/features/18179-a-stunning-statistic-about-the-orthodox-community
https://mensdivorce.com/amish-divorce/
https://mercatornet.com/one-group-of-americans-has-the-highest-fertility-in-the-world-it-doubles-every-20-years/77391/
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-demographics/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/
https://www.police1.com/crime-prevention/articles/how-the-90s-changed-the-future-of-law-enforcement-YR02YdrfoAipY6W2/
https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/irs-and-allies-downplay-87000-person-hiring-binge
https://www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/evolving-civil-asset-forfeiture-laws.aspx#:~:text=Civil%20asset%20forfeiture%20has%20its,and%20the%20Equitable%20Sharing%20Program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List
https://www.aclu.org/cases/kashem-et-al-v-barr-et-al-aclu-challenge-government-no-fly-list?redirect=national-security/latif-et-al-v-holder-et-al-aclu-challenges-government-no-fly-list
https://www.aclunc.org/cases/landmark_cases/gordon_v._fbi.shtml?ht=gordon%20vs%20fbi%20gordon%20vs%20fbi
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/11/business/no-fly-list-capitol-riot/index.html
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-you-think-youre-no-fly-list
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."–Albert Einstein
https://www.findlaw.com/tax/tax-problems-audits/tax-audit-penalties-and-consequences.html#:~:text=Less%20than%202%25%20of%20IRS,estimated%20taxes%20or%20keep%20records
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address