I’ve been sitting with — reading, obsessively reviewing, annotating — Jem Bendell’s Breaking Together for a week now. While I don’t think the book is perfect (judicious editing would have helped), I consider it one of most accurate, comprehensive treaties on our current situation, overall. I’m very interested in other people’s views on it ( I deeply appreciate the level of discourse on the comments here). I hope people will read it and share their feedback.
Breaking Together explores many areas I want to address — too many to choose from! I consider Bendell a fellow traveler, following an intellectual path similar to mine, although from a different starting point. Like me, he realized that our society prioritizes specialist, expert knowledge in narrow domains rather than the development of a comprehensive generalist viewpoint, which allows one to make inquiries across multiple fields. When the establishment gives the spotlight to a generalist or a cross-disciplinary thinker, it chooses people like Yuval Noah Harrari, Malcolm Gladwell, or other Ivy League/Oxbridge shills who back up the technocratic, materialist, Neoliberal ideology which is killing the planet.
In general, people are programmed — mass-indoctrinated, media-manipulated — to think about certain things in particular ways, and to not think about other things at all. They do not receive the training or the incentive to develop tools of critical thinking and analysis which would make it possible for them to approach complex subjects (such as the underlying mechanics of the global financial system) from multiple angles, to hold competing narratives or contrasting ideas in their minds at the same time. A professional class of establishment intellectuals and pundits controls the public narrative.
I agree with Bendell here:
I am not under any illusion about the power of free thinkers against many thousands of the best minds working to promote delusion, compliance and division between people who would otherwise be natural allies in a revolution as we all wake up to this era of collapse caused by Imperial Modernity. Instead, my expectation is that the ideas of people who want to respond compassionately and boldly to societal collapse will be further marginalized while public policies will be defined in the corporate interests of techno-authoritarians. They will tell sufficient numbers of people what to believe in and when to believe it, in order to gain consent for their agendas. In this way, the collapse of generative social dialogue and effective policy scrutiny will continue… Professionals will be paid to lie to us all as we die prematurely from the direct and indirect impacts of the destruction of the biosphere [this just occurred in Maui - check out Naomi Klein’s piece on how corporations stole the local’s water supply]. And people like you and me will be blamed along the way.
That is what happened to me when I wrote Quetzalcoatl Returns (originally published as 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl), where I took seriously the many indigenous prophecies forecasting imminent catastrophe and tied it to the ecological and geopolitical data. The mainstream media attacked and ridiculed me. Although I constantly pointed at solutions, The New York Times dismissed me as a “doomsday thinker.” After I was mocked, I was exiled.
One hallmark of our time is the annoying hyper-focus on the idea of “conspiracy:” Some sectors of our society embrace this notion passionately, while others reject it, equally vehemently. In general, “conspiracy” is a bit like a splinter stuck in everyone’s brain. We can, instead, define a more nuanced, multidimensional approach to the topic by recognizing levels such as “complicity” and “collusion,” not quite so fully planned and orchestrated as the term “conspiracy” indicates.
Among many topics covered by Bendell, I appreciate his analysis of the workings of the global financial system. I began to explore this in my last essay. Bendell theorizes that the massive giveaway of $6 trillion during the Covid pandemic — largely to financial institutions and corporations — was an actual conspiracy. He thinks it was planned in advance, awaiting the right opportunity or emergency. In a sense, the 2020 giveaway was the next phase of the massive financial experiment begun in 2008, when $245 billion was created and distributed to keep distressed financial institutions afloat, even though these institutions had knowingly profited off the massive scam of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) made from subprime mortgages.
Bendell thinks the scheme involves completely separating the financial services economy and the “real economy” of actually goods and services. Here is what he writes about what he calls “the largest corruption scandal” in history:
In 2008, to keep money circulating and consumer demand sufficient for industrial consumer societies, most governments of OECD countries chose to provide money directly to their financial sectors — by buying what would otherwise be worthless financial assets from otherwise distressed financial institutions. To have the money to do that they also sold more bonds. As this was an unusually large volume of public debt creation, the private banks were encouraged to continue buying the bonds by the central banks backstopping that process and buying the bonds off the private banks. Not only did that mean government debts spiraled in unprecedented ways… it also enabled an untethering of the financial system from the real economy. Because of austerity policies, the real economy nose-dived, but this financial engineering meant that the financial sector became even richer…
This new situation where governments and central banks provide huge sums of money directly to financial institutions opened the door to what I believe is the largest corruption scandal in the history of humanity when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The key mechanism that enabled it was central banks buying bonds directly from large corporations. That amounted to Western central banks giving trillions of dollars, pounds and euros directly to large corporations which then used those funds to buy up foreign assets, making those corporations richer, the citizens poorer through inflation, and governments even more controlled by the international bond markets.
Bendell theorizes that at least a subset of the financial elite know we approach an inevitable breakdown of the global economy and the current money system.
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