The subject of this lecture is Nature's Political Revolution. We're in the middle of a modern plague. The so-called coronavirus. But in this lecture, we will simply refer to it as the modern plague.
THE FAILURE OF TODAY'S LEADERSHIP
Now, we need to understand something very clearly about this whole disaster. It's not an accident. No it is not. It is a very logical result of government policies around the world. It is a very logical result of policies that are in complete contradiction to science and in complete contradiction to nature. All the experts who study epidemics and disease have been warning about this for as long as we can remember and they've been ignored by the political leaders. Why? Because if they'd been followed, certain measures would have had to have been put in place that might have made life a little bit more difficult. Just as in order to conduct a successful life, you have to make certain sacrifices. Also there's just a general level of madness and incompetence on the part of the world's political leaders to understand how we got into this mess.
ORIGINS OF TODAY'S DISASTERS
THE GRIM RESULTS OF WORLD WAR II
You need to go back to 1945. This is where two very aberrant ideologies, American imperialism and Soviet communist imperialism, came to dominate the world. Now prior to 1945 you had a number of different ideologies and prior to the expansion of western imperialism you had a greater number of ideologies, but in 1945, you had these two incredibly destructive ideologies come to power, really on a global basis, and they began the wholesale destruction of the natural world in human history. The scale of the destruction is really breathtaking in terms of the percentage of animals and fish that have been annihilated. And we're not going to get into all the details about that, but the death toll has been horrendous. The argument was made that, "Don't worry, the people at the top know what they're doing." Well they don't.
CORONA VIRUS DISASTER REVEALS
INCOMPETENCE IN BOTH THE EAST AND WEST
I think it's really important to give a full bipartisan award for the disaster because it's been handled by incompetence at both ends of the current ideological spectrum. It's been known for a long time that China is an absolute environmental horror show. However, the plutocratic leaders, particularly in America...it's a great irony of history. Lenin once said that the capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them. Well the plutocratic leaders in the United States, in order to make more money throw their workers out of work here in America and move their factories to a communist slave labor state, the dictatorship of China, it's really one of the most mindboggling crazy and disastrous decisions in the history of the world doing a tremendous, really the biggest economic disaster in American history. So this was a disaster and this modern plague began in China.
Now we're not going to speculate what happened, whether it was a bio warfare, we have no idea. What we do know is that it started in China. What we do know is that the Communist Party goon squads tried to cover it up and that caused it to absolutely explode. What we do know is that the incompetent structure of the West allowed it to spread through the West. These are things that we do know.
AMERICA'S LACK OF A SOCIAL SAFETY NET FUELS DISASTER
Where we go from here in this situation? We really don't know how bad it's going to be. But it certainly does not look good. A particular problem is in the center of western capitalist imperialism. The so called democracy in the United States America does not have a social safety net. It's the only modern state that didn't bother building one, even though every expert on epidemics, every expert on bioterrorism warned about the deadly consequences of not building National Health insurance national sick leave. But this was ignored. The money Lords at the top of the system were so filled with greed and so filled with stupidity that they did not build this.
National Health insurance isn't charity it's security. You don't want sick people wandering around in society. Honestly, you really don't. You don't want sick people coming to work. You don't in any sane society. But the greed at the top was too great and the delusions at the top were too great. My goodness, we were building the new economy, the high tech economy, we were building some high tech new Jerusalem fantasyland, some Kingdom of prester John with iPads and it was a lie from day one. It was an illusion from day one. So America faces very, very, serious problems with the modern plague because you can't construct a social safety net after the disaster. It's like if you're in an airplane, you can't stitch a parachute together after the engine failed and try to figure out how it works before you jump out of the airplane. Honestly, you can't. You need to have the good quality parachutes put in the plane and train people how to use them. Now that might cut into profits because if you had spent money on parachutes just think of how that could cut into profits.
THE MODERN WORLD IS A GLOBAL TITANIC
In some ways, the modern world is almost like a modern Titanic. People forget that the disaster of the Titanic was not an innocent accident either. The White Star line was in big financial trouble. That's why they cut corners on safety and building it leading to a horrendous number of industrial accidents when the ship was built and that's why they cut corners on trivial things like lifeboats. So why spend money on lifeboats? That would cut corners and new revelations are priceless, that the ship was actually on fire. Internally there was a coal fire inside the thing and rather than waiting to try to put it out, which would have taken quite a while, they ran the ship with the coal fire going. In order to deal with the coal fire they poured as much coal as possible into the engine, causing the ship to be at a very high speed, translate it was very difficult to avoid the iceberg when it was spotted. So this is like an analogy of where we are. It's like a global Titanic.
THE DANGEROUS STRUCTURE OF THE MODERN WORLD
Now we need to look at the big picture. The modern plague is just part of the problems that are coming, that we have been warning about. It's not very hard to understand that when you destroy the world fisheries, good things are not going to happen. All the fisheries of the world are either at capacity or over capacity. This is a disaster waiting to happen, which will happen. It is not very hard to figure out that dumping huge amounts of plastic into the oceans is not a good idea. Honestly it's not. You have these horrible giant islands of garbage all over the world. Now as these things decompose they turn into micro plastic. So that means that plastic goes into the entire food chain of the oceans. Not a good idea. This is not going to lead to good things. Industrial agriculture in India, for example in the Punjab, the pumping out underground aquifers for a one time use. There's no real plan for doing anything about this because you see that would cut into profit margins in the near term. Just like at Fukushima why somebody should have built the seawall a couple of extra feet higher, even though it was in an earthquake zone, even though everybody knew title waves were a possibility. Well hey, there is a very clear rate reason not to do that. Cause that would cut into profit margins and New York City is a classic example.
NEW YORK CITY: THE CAPITAL OF THE GLOBAL PLUTOCRACY
AN EXAMPLE OF THE COMING CRISIS
Superstorm Sandy was not even a hurricane it was a Superstorm. It was a tropical storm which shut down power south of 30th st in a surreal moment.
There is a total fantasyland at the top in terms of dealing with real natural problems on the part of the elites
New York City in 2012 was hit by tropical storm Sandy. That was just a tropical storm. It was not a hurricane. This is the center of the world plutocracy. It was the headquarters of the global plutocrats. The city was almost shut down completely and you almost had a massive death toll when all power below 30th St. was knocked out. Fortunately was brought back in time, but you would think that learning from that the money lords would've taken precautions. You would think, but unlike London, which had a similar disaster, no storm gates were built at the Verrazano Narrows. There's been little done to prevent a category four or category two or even a category one hurricane from wiping out the city. It's very interesting to look at New York as the center of the global plutocrats and take a close look at the city New York has not built a major bridge or tunnel to the island of Manhattan since the 1930s. That's just unbelievable. Meanwhile, the underground railroad going to Penn Station is so old it's ridiculous, and yet they haven't funded the so-called Gateway project in spite of the fact that those underground tunnels were damaged by hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, the billionaires and the money lords have built these enormous skyscrapers on billionaires, where on 57th St., where you can buy an efficiency for 5 million and maybe 20 million for an apartment at 40 stories. You see, they've gone on building their dream castles to the sky, ignoring the realities of nature.
THE TOXIC STRUCTURE OF MODERN AGRICULTURE
This is again a psychopathic obsession with money. That's what this is about. Now when you put all this together there's going to be a series of problems when the natural world restores itself. The so-called "green revolution," which we briefly discussed before, is a classic example. Does it make sense to kill everything in a field with herbicides and pesticides and pumpout aquifers and use genetically manipulated food to have food? No it does not. It does not. We're not fanatics about GMOs. We think some GMOs may be okay. But the the whole structure of industrial agriculture is unsound and that will kick in at some point in time. Unfortunately, probably sooner rather than later.
THE IRISH POTATO FAMINE AS A METAPHOR OF WHAT'S TO COME
A portent of that could be seen in the Irish potato famine. The Irish potato famine is like the modern plague. It was not an accident. It wasn't all, "My goodness, those poor Irish people got killed off by that famine!" No. What happened in the Irish potato famine, this is so relevant to the modern green revolution today, is that the liberal establishment in England decided to help the Irish people, like the liberal establishment in America, the liberal establishment in 19 century England did not think the Irish people were smart enough to help themselves, so they used forced the Irish farmers to give up the regular crops and forced them to adopt a potato monoculture to "help them." Well, again, this should not of come as a big surprise, but when you do a monoculture in agriculture, it means that if a plague or bug or something hits that culture, everybody ends up starving. And that's precisely what happened. On top of that, you had some people in the British government who didn't want to baby the poor in Ireland. They said they were going to give them "tough love" and teach them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Well that didn't work so good either. So that meant basically that an extremely large number of people died under extremely horrible circumstances and we can easily see that happening today.
THE TOXIC NATURE OF TODAY'S MODERN WORLD
So let's just also take a couple of analogies to help enlighten people about today's world. Who would build a transportation system on the internal combustion engine. The internal combustion engine generates carbon monoxide. One of the deadliest gases known to man and was the original gas the Nazis used in their concentration camps. Does that make sense? Obviously it does not make sense. Does it make sense to spray pesticides that are the same family as nerve gas on food? In fact, Zyklon B, which replaced carbon monoxide in the Nazi death camps, was a pesticide. Does that make sense? Obviously it does not.
GLASS AND STEEL COFFINS
Let's look at another thing. What we call the glass and steel coffins. Does it make sense to lock people up in the office buildings so they can't open the windows. Literally you can't. You are totally dependent on a central ventilating system and this again is not hard to figure out when something known as the sun comes out in summer and you can't open the windows the sun beats down and turns the whole building into a kind of greenhouse, and then the air-conditioning has to work even harder, and we're not even getting into the sick building syndrome and other issues of what happens when you deny people fresh air and force them to rely on an internal air conditioning system. So does this make sense? No it does not make sense.
THE OPEN OFFICE
Another mass example of idiocy is the so-called open office. Does it make sense? This is really a good one. The great high-tech geniuses want people sitting at tables not in their own offices just babbling away and that is supposed to build some high-tech utopia? It's not. But this is just to point out some completely insane examples of this whole situation.
THE MODERN PLAGUE LIKE OTHER PROBLEMS OF MODERN LIFE WILL NOT BE HANDLED WELL
Now getting back to the modern plague, the modern plague is not going to be handled very well, and we hope and pray (we believe in God), we pray that the death toll is not horrendous. But it's not looking good and if it really gets going in places like India or Gaza or some other happy places on this world, it's not looking good, it's not looking good. Again, all this was predicted. And you can't ram home the point hard enough that this is not an accident. This is a logical result of incompetent leadership. It is a logical result of immoral ideas.
THE TRANSITION FROM THE POLIS TO THE COSMOPOLIS
HOW DEMOCRACIES COMMIT SUICIDE
LESSONS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD
And so now where is all this going is where it will always go. Big mistakes lead to big levels of violence and unrest. And we hope that's not the case, but we think that's a near certainty as social systems break down. Out of all this emerges the transition from the polis to the cosmopolis. The transition that Greece went through when democracy committed suicide and failed and and the emergence of the empire of Alexander and the Hellenistic states that followed. It's very interesting to note that nobody suggested bringing back democracy. The New Testament, which for example was written by Greek scholars. No one even mentions democracy in the New Testament and nobody, democracy had failed so completely in Athens, that no one really even considered bringing it back. The leading intellectual minds of Greece Plato Aristophanes Xenophon and so on openly rejected the political model of Pericles.
Now in Rome, democracy also committed suicide, particularly in in Rome. In Athens, Pericles help bring everything over a cliff by his imperialist policies. In Rome you had a takeover of the government by plutocratic forces with the final takeover of power by Pompey and Crasus of what that led to was the political revolution of Caesar. Yes Caesar was a man of the political left, and contrary to that which you might have been taught in school, and that led to violence and bloodshed and out of the violence and bloodshed came the Empire. When Augustus Caesar created the Empire, he was hailed as a savior, he was hailed as the Redeemer, and nobody really after that, even though the Senate always resented the Emperor, no one really made a serious effort to bring back the Republic. Why? Because these models failed.
American democracy, Western parliamentary democracy, is built on Greco-Roman models. The Capitol Hill is based in America on the Roman Capitoline Hill. So on and so on and so forth, but these models failed. So we need to think creatively about the likelihood that the evolution in our world will be similar to the evolution in ancient Greece and Rome.
WHAT'S COMING
Some people may not like that. They say, "I don't like that." That's great. You don't like that. So what is coming? It's almost certainly coming and it's the responsibility of responsible people to think creatively about the future about the coming emperors the Natures Political Revolution is coming. This is just the start and it's been happening all along. I mean, the issue of climate change and the total failure of the elites to deal with this, you have madness in the Republican Party and then deceit in the Democratic Party of fake reform, Obama and Hillary Clinton promoting fracking as as the magic solution, that ought to tell you something right there. So these things are coming up shortly and nature will solve these problems whether people like it or not.
So we are faced with a grim prospect. Either we are going to come together (which is not likely) in putting forth reforms that bring the society into compliance with nature, or nature's going to do the job for us, which is the most likely scenario, which is going to lead to a tidal wave of bloodshed and death.
In America you've already had a move towards a totalitarian state since 911 and it's been very bipartisan because Barack Obama was probably the greatest enemy of civil liberties this country's ever had since Woodrow Wilson and indeed it was Obama who used Wilson's totalitarian espionage act more frequently than any president in American history. So it's been very bipartisan and this will be the fact that this could be so easily accepted, which can happen when things really start getting out of control.
NATURE'S LAWS
So history remains the same. Nature remains the same. You can't ignore nature's laws. And nature's going to be solving these problems one way or the other. So we as a planet have a choice. Get in step with nature or a natures going to solve all these problems for us. This is the big picture, and we need to get prepared for the coming age of austerity, where we will make up for the tremendous series of mistakes of the way in which the world was set up in 1945. It has been said that God is not fooled. You reap what you sow. And the world as we know it has sown the wind. The whirlwind is just beginning. So we need to come together and face the seriousness of the problems.
Hopefully democracy can solve them. That would be our preference. But otherwise, we need to think creatively, and particularly look back to ancient models to see how we will deal with the coming crisis.
This is the end of this lecture