Brain Therapy, Exercise 1: Extension

26 February 2009 by blog.

In Brain Therapy Exercise 1, the acceptance of fear, greed, and corruption in our day-to-day lives are shown to underlie the Architecture of Fear upon which it is posited that the world operates. The Brain Therapy exercises are structured tasks that are a part of my “home therapy” program. If we had the luxury of taking a bottoms up approach, we would take the findings from Exercise 1 to the people of the world for vetting, seeking to refine the view until a consensus is agreed on and people understood what is really going on.

For the purposes of this case, we shall clarify the post Brain Therapy, Exercise 1 with a discussion using concrete examples to show that the real problem in the world is the tacit acceptance or inability to control values of fear, greed, and moral corruption in societies and people. Fear leads to an adversarial mindset that traps people in a competition for resources – we have to protect ours from them and if they have what we want and we cannot trade, then we will defeat them in battle and take what we want. The battle for resources, including intangible resources such as the support (or, far too prevalent in reality, the forced support) of populations to adopt ideologies (for example, “Capitalism” vs. “Communism”) has lead to significant investments in a global military-industrial complex to fight the battles and control the distribution of resources.

The world thus operates in a mode of survival of the fittest, where the winners take most of the spoils and there are shortages for everyone else. Since most people in the world do not have (or exercise) any real say in how their governments operate, this leads to an opening for a small number of people to take essentially autocratic control of militaries and governments, thus gaining autocratic control of public resources.

For example, the United States would position itself as the leading democracy in the world. Recent history, however, shows how a small group of people can muscle power from the masses to implement their own agenda, effectively ignoring a majority of people. Specifically, in the Presidential election of 2000, Democratic Party candidate Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote. The election however, was decided by the arcane system of the Electoral College. By coordinating forces of evil to disenfranchise voters in minority districts in Florida, effectively throwing out thousands of votes that would have changed the outcome of the results in Florida, and thus the Electoral College, George Bush was able to steal the election.

In a society that valued the integrity of the democratic process, given the controversies and closeness of the election in Florida, we would expect a creative solution such as re-voting. It was too close to call and the obvious solution was to do it over – with no nonsense and towards a view that everyone gets to vote. However, there were no leaders who stepped up to call for this bold and right action. Instead we relied on the politically appointed and Republican dominated Supreme Court, which handed the election to George Bush using a highly controversial and widely disagreed logic. The same thing happened in the 2004 elections, this time with intentional minority voter disenfranchisement in Ohio.

George Bush never should have been President of the United States. Once he ascended, autocratic control was exerted, the government underwent a massive expansion with substantially all of the growth in military spending, and the largest transfer of wealth from the masses to the richest class in history was witnessed.

The results of the ascendancy of George Bush and the so called neo-cons to power can be described using the Architecture of Fear. Republicans had developed by 2000 a brilliant political strategy based on fear that exploited a)  right-wing conservatives and b) racists constituents. Fearful people are the most easily exploited because their fear of “others,” even in their own society, leads to irrational behavior such as consistently voting against their economic interests, which is by far the biggest determinant of how most people in the mainstream vote. Republicans mounted a campaign of fear that worked brilliantly to capture the marginal votes of conservatives and racists needed to put them into a position to steal the election.

The Republican and the Democratic parties have been historically dominated by a moneyed class.  It costs millions to win a national office so rich fund raisers are crucial constituents. It can be argued, however, that the Republican party is the party that unashamedly caters to the rich – it is known as the party of business, not labor; as the party of Wall Street, not Main Street. By crafting a misleading message on tax cuts – namely by claiming that tax cuts would benefit everyone while implementing policies that resulted in the largest transfer of wealth to the richest Americans in the history of the nation – the Republicans brilliantly exploited people’s greed. The Republican policy of deregulation or lax regulation of the financial system, furthermore, lead to the non-productive creation of capital as the moneyed Wall Street denizens invented “products” such as derivatives and complex mortgage-backed securities in an environment of weak oversight.

We use the term “non-productive” because these vehicles of capital creation were not based on tangible or physical factors of production. Rather they were based on the idea that money-begets-money and were implemented as a vehicle that greatly enriched a small number of people at the upper echelon of the Nation’s moneyed elite. The results of this non-productive creation of capital are seen today as markets crash and money seems to dry up. The public has agreed that greed got us into this mess.

Finally, the exploitation of fear and greed, and wide, tacit acceptance of these values throughout society, opens the door for and sustains moral corruption, particularly in the elite classes and among the fearful ignorant. For example, Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, was previously the CEO of defense contractor Haliburton. Haliburton has profited substantially following Cheney’s ascendancy to office and ability to push his agenda for war on the American people. This example of bald-faced moral corruption is emblematic of trouble with the current control and operation of the Military-Industrial complex.

Corrupt control leads to imbalanced investment and development. In the US, while public education is faltering, particularly in large Urban districts, even as the knowledge base offers solutions to these ills, trillions of dollars are spent on militaries and wars while schools crumble and a substantial percentage of the next generation is left uneducated and ignorant. These ignorant people are susceptible to future exploitation through asymmetric knowledge dissemination – even if they gain access to the canon of knowledge they would be hard pressed to read it, yet alone think it through and act upon it.

The tacit acceptance and subsequent exploitation of fear, greed, and moral corruption as operating principles introduce peculiarities into the world’s operating systems that lead to the outcomes we see around the globe today. The competition for resources shapes the development of business and trade around the world through the lens of a Military-Industrial complex. Militaries and multi-national corporations exercise limited control over public resources. The result is that we have a world of Developed (1^st World), semi-industrialized (2^nd World), and underdeveloped (3^rd World) nations.

We live in a world of conflict where some people win but most people lose. Resources are diverted to militarization instead of development and to the winners instead of the losers. There are wars. Terrorism arises out of the frustration of the world’s impoverished, hopeless, and disenfranchised peoples and in States that use the tools of terror to advance their ideologies or tolerate hate. People everywhere are fighting, some building nuclear weapons, while a substantial majority of the world’s population lives in poverty. We have a global high-tech pharmaceutical industry that produces life saving medicines, but because of the competition for resources, poor people do not have access to these medicines and suffer disease and death. We have the technology in the US alone to feed the world two times over, but hunger is even a problem here as nearly 35 million children in the US live in poverty.

Negative values and divisive control systems work in concert with the Military-Industrial complex to produce systems that lead to conflict, wealth imbalance, and wasted human potential around the world. Most people do not view themselves as part of an integrated whole of humanity. Rather, our worldviews are shaped at the most local level, being members of cultural and ethnic groups first, states second, nations after that. While there has been some progress with regional trade and political pacts opening the door for some semblance of unity and cooperation, at the end of the day the world is nation against nation, peoples against peoples.

Moral bankruptcy leads to collusion, exploitation, pollution, and inhumane treatment of individuals everywhere. As a result, it appears that most people are ignorant of how the world really works (or perhaps, apathetic about it), leaving the majority of the world’s population struggling to get-by if not living in destitution. This is particularly disturbing considering the relative wealth of nations and the advanced capabilities of human technology in the 21^st century. Alas, the world is what we make it and this is explained by the Architecture of Fear.

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