The System

Part 1 - The What

Note: This is part 1 of a series. I don’t know exactly when part 2 will come out, as it currently exists only in scattered paragraphs. Part 3 is purely nebulous and may never form.

That there is one system dominating global society is, to me, irrefutable.

I don’t find it important to give this system a name, so I’m just going to keep referring to it as the system.

Let me make some observations about it.

First, it has only one principle. The upwards flow of wealth. To achieve this, there is only one underlying two pronged strategy - keep the system rolling and do it better.

Second, it is hierarchical.

Third, it has penetrated every aspect of life on this planet.

Four, it is not some aberration - the system we have now is the ‘logical’ endgame resulting from millennia of wealth and power being ever more concentrated in the hands of the few.

Let’s take the first three observations in turn.

Upwards Flow

Look at the concentration of wealth on the planet. As highlighted by Matt Kennard in 2014, in that year, 85 people owned more than half of the world’s wealth. According to an Oxfam report from the same period, 3.1 million children were dying from starvation every year, more children each year than were final solutioned by the Nazis in total. I can’t imagine that either statistic has improved during the last ten years, considering that the pandemic proved to be one of the greatest upwards transfers of wealth in history and that hardcore sanctions have been chucked around like confetti in the intervening years.

The Amazon, that big jungle teeming with life and importance, is worth nothing until we begin to destroy it through extraction and yet a company with the same name, which is a massive Pentagon contractor, distribution network and world wide indulger of trinkets, has a market valuation of $2.3 trillion at the time of writing. Possibly useful on occasion, but it sure as shit isn’t an integral, vital component of this big old spaceship that we are hurtling through spacetime on.

Blackrock has an AUM portfolio of $11 trillion. Vanguard pretty much identical. There are several others hovering around the 4-6 trillion mark. You can count the number of countries which have a GDP to match or better them on an accident prone hand.

These are crystal clear statements of the dominance of the one principle. If any other values actually held equal sway within our system, you know, such as preventing starvation because human life is sacred or important or whatever term you choose, well then, those children would not be dying by the millions every year. We certainly produce enough food globally to be able to feed everyone. The financial resources are also available to redistribute it in the short term, and then help implement long term sensible, ground up agricultural policies to put food security well and truly in the hands of people all around the globe. And yet, this doesn’t happen. Of course not. The system can’t have sustainable food models all over the place - that would impact the principle. And forget about paying hard currency to give food away to eradicate starvation forever - the system just prefers to chuck it away.

Or, stopping genocide. I mean, if ever there was an opportunity for our worldwide system to act meaningfully, driven by any basic notion of human value, well, that’s it. And what is our system doing? Well, funny that, it’s been profiting. Who woulda thunk it?

This, of course, doesn’t mean that the system doesn’t pay lip service to other principles - in fact, it’ll recognise and promote and publish all manner of things related to all manner of principles and ideologies, as long as such activities are beneficial and subservient to the upwards flow of wealth. Does it help perpetuate the system and ultimately improve the bottom line? Well then go right ahead. Write about it, talk about it, content it in whatever way you want. Go full mad prophet of the airwaves Beale. Don’t get too close to the mark like Assange did, of course, but even situations like Assange get exploited by the system in order to maintain itself and the upward flow. The system is as elastic as you like, like some kind of nightmarish B-movie sci-fi octopus where only the beak of the upwards flow principle is solid, everything else is totally malleable and expendable.

Hierarchy

This concentration of wealth also points to the hierarchical nature of the system. Even a casual glance at the structure of its administrative, legal, military, media apparatus and, well, the entire composition of society lying within it, reveal strict adherence to hierarchy. What’s important to bear in mind when thinking about hierarchy, is that division is intrinsic to it. Wealth and therefore huge levels of power and influence rest at the top of the pyramid. Below that, diminishing levels of said power and influence, right down to zero. As well as dignity, rights and protections. These are very real and destructive divisions cold forged into the very armature of the system.

Alongside this, it’s important to recognise that the top of any hierarchical structure will gravitate towards the promotion of further, internal division below it, because the pinnacle’s comfort, position and elevated status are always threatened by a uniformity of purpose from below, demanding a fairer distribution of wealth, power and influence. So the more divided the lower, larger portions of the hierarchy, the better, as it means they are arguing this and that, spending less time observing and thinking about the pinnacle and less likely to reach that uniformity of purpose the pinnacle so naturally fears.

So it is no surprise that racism, sexism etc have flourished under this system. Indeed, as Pam points out, they are virtually baked into the very foundations of our modern variant. Visible divisions like this are wonderfully effective, because even total dunces like Pete Hegseth can get them. There’s zero explanation required. Not male, not white, not christian - or the inverse versions that naturally spring up in opposition. This practice of divide and conquer has been around a lot longer than the phrase in the English language, and also predates any modern pseudo scientific notions of race. Off the top of my head, check out Isabel in Spain, way back at the end of the 15th century, forcing Jews to wear visible identifiers on their clothes, banning them from wearing particular types of cloth etc.

It is also equally unsurprising that the pinnacle will always seek to pull some of the divided rabble closer to act as a buffer by rewarding conformity to the principle with position, wealth and some semblance of power. When the system administered itself via the old colonial powers, they understood this totally - look into the history of how the British empire used the Caste system in India, how the Belgians exploited the fluid notions of Hutu and Tutsi in Rawanda, to name but two of a myriad of available examples where power promoted certain groups in order to administer, control and aid in the theft of everything, including humans, to aid the upwards flow of wealth.

This is because the pinnacle understands very well that threat from below is best fended off by ferocious attack dogs that chew off the arm of any meaningful deviance from the principle. Or even just a deviance with a sufficient number of people behind it - look how demonised and penalised certain sections of society were during Covid for crying out loud. There wasn’t much there in terms of a cohesive, ideological threat, but there was a big volume of people questioning the message and measures issued from the pinnacle. The most ferocious attack dogs are of course individual corporations, nations, governments and their henchmen in the military, police, media and legal system.

Such rewards for conformity also reinforce the aspirational element that is always an inherent part of a hierarchy. The lower portions must feel like they too can get closer to the pinnacle and bathe in the comfortable pool of those rewards. You can make it if you really try! It’s not a rigged game, pull yourself up by the bootstraps of ideological conformity! Additionally, how else to ensure a ready supply of rabble to replace the ranks of the attack dogs?

Yet even within those ranks that largely conform to the principle, the pinnacle naturally fears uniformity of purpose. Therefore wars, geopolitical tensions between nation states, political parties, corporate competition and so on are something the pinnacle is wholeheartedly in favour of. Plus, they happen to be bloody profitable endeavours. For example, laundering public money directly into the hands of weapons manufacturers and onwards into the pinnacle through single use munitions is a prime example of upwards flow.

And somewhere around the time of Freud and Gustave Le Bon were sown the seeds of the upgrade to the crude visible, economic and other forms of division the system had already fomented and along came large scale manipulation through rapid technological advancement and the glorification of the individual and the individual’s subconscious wants and desires. For an in-depth analysis of this, check out the ever wonderful Adam Curtis’ “Century of The Self”.

And so here we are today. Divided into atomised individuals - a purer expression of division you won’t find. Every idea, thought, whim, desire, want catered for and serviced. With an online community of like minded folk, no matter what you’re into, so that you don’t feel entirely isolated and yet, in reality, we are pretty close to that total isolation. Tiny grains of sand in various forms of the old school egg timer. These mini groups all represent lines of division, along which constant squabbling and bickering occurs. Fuck you commie Antifa wingnut, yeah well fuck you, you cracker nazi hayseed. Even fucking anarchist flavours squabble internally now, and if that doesn’t make you howl with laughter at the glaring contradiction contained within, then I don’t know what to tell you.

All of this atomisation is being serviced, invested in and encouraged by the system. And it is working a treat, so much so that most people now don’t even ask about or even acknowledge the system’s existence. It has just become accepted as our reality. The perfect camouflage under which to shovel that wealth upwards.

Which leads to observation number three.

Pervasive

All aspects of our society, existence and even our very perception have been infiltrated and co-opted to be cogs in the upwards flow of wealth. Some of these societal aspects cost an arm and a leg to maintain, but that is inconsequential if that expenditure helps maintain the system intact and therefore allows wealth overall to continue flowing upwards. Public education, for example, is an expensive undertaking. But it is an essential wing in helping ensure the continuation of the system’s reality. There’s a reason critical thinking, genuine experimentation and philosophical discussion don’t really feature much in our systems of education, replaced instead by a fact regurgitation, technique mimicking approach. It serves simply as a factory to turn out the maximum number of prefabricated cogs possible that can slot into the almighty mechanism pumping the wealth upwards.

Similarly, manufacturing, food, drink, entertainment, love, health, government, the arts, science - their very existence within society is now dependent on their ability to contribute wealth upwards through new inventions, new methods of wealth extraction or by ensuring the perpetuation of the system through division, distraction and catering towards the wants, whims and desires of the atomised individual.

Are you a muslim lesbian communist with a safety pin fetish - that’s cool, we have some books, songs, literature, scientific research and a souvenir baseball cap for you. And an online platform where you can frolic with others like you! Are you a Dahmer worshipping albino nazi with a fetish for children, fear not - we’ve got you covered… you need to slink over to this corner in the dark here, but as you’re albino, best you stay out of the strong sunlight anyway… Or maybe you’re a communist dissident with sharp geopolitical analysis - fine, keep talking empire, resistance, sovereignty and worker solidarity. Here’s some independent media for you to consume and a chat room too. Don’t forget the subscription fee. Yes of course the system will badger you, make life difficult, censor you - it’s all part of the show. Or better yet, become an independent media investigative journalist and get others to follow your line. Unipolar or multipolar, vegan or keto, homeopathic or cutting edge pills, organic or GMO, climate change or hogwash, Liverpool or ManU, Yankees or Mets. Subscribe now! And on it goes.

And for all of this, we’ve got expensive devices which allow us to connect to this almighty data gathering exercise, all of which rely on this huge infrastructure that is chewing through rare resources, electricity and water like a swarm of locusts does to young crops. The system loves all of this - extraction of resource, power generation and even water-use all equal profit. All these interactions also foment division as people are algorithmically herded into those warring egg timer echo chambers, providing huge data feedback loops about how to refine and further foment the division and cater to ever more combinations of individual wants and desires. Which in turn helps drive consumption, which of course pushes more wealth into the system’s jet-stream and up it goes. It’s hard not to applaud the unbelievable efficacy of it, if one could but put all moral questions to one side for a second.

And the system cares not if empires or nation states fail, like the British one did. The system will simply administer itself via another route, as it has done via the USA, which, when it fails to be the most effective headquarters, will become the sidekick to the pretender China waiting in the wings. All in the thrall of the system's reality. Oh, I hear some of those sharp geopolitical commentators scream, China is lifting people out of poverty, that’s not upward flow of wealth. Ok, it is doing that. You don’t think the same thing happened in Britain, or in the USA at the beginning and middle of their rise within the system’s admin ranks…..?? And I don’t care how much positive spin you want to put on what is happening in China right now, because for sure there are good things happening that we have totally lost sight of, it is also the capstone in the entire system of wealth creation and its upwards flow. In other words, in extremely close alignment to the principle. And as I mentioned earlier, the pinnacle rewards conformity to the principle. So, sure, there’s a lot of rewarding happening right now in China. And, well, for those of us from the lands that have conformed for longer, myself included, look around you right now… see the rewards. Or the remnants thereof. Try replicating those rewards for everyone around the world and you’d find there simply isn’t the resource available to do it. Not to make them, not to provide the power for the production or use of them. And certainly not on a home of finite resource with nature groaning under the current strain of it all. Yeah, we live closer to the pinnacle than the bottom. We have it good, relatively speaking with the kicker being that the better we have it, the worse others have it. That’s explicit in the cast iron reality of finite resource

This is all to be expected and said rewarding process continues until the insatiable upwards flow begins to hoover those rewards upwards too, piece by piece, most notably of course at the levels furthest away from the pinnacle. Does that sound familiar to anyone finding economic realities a lot tougher in the western lands these days? I can guarantee you it sounds positively everyday to people in what is often referred to as the global south, whose rewards, if any, were scant to begin with.

And now to the chasm in my argument, which relates to observation number four outlined at the beginning of this piece. The system is an inanimate, non living thing incapable of making decisions or implementing or choosing or anything else. This is of course an entirely irrefutable observation. And yet, the above, to me, is also a clearly observable set of realities, visible once a little time is taken to lift the head out of the division sand and really take global society in for a while, without the background noise of preconceptions and previously consumed cultural norms. So how can both things be true and observable? Well, that’s what I’m turning to in the second instalment - The How.

Let me round this one off with one of my favourite pieces of art. From 1976, the year of my birth, coincidentally enough.