Watch This to Make Sense of the World

Uploaded 2/21/2021, approx. 36 minute read

Summary

Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the history of politics and the role of elites in subjugating the masses. He explains how the elites use psychological manipulation techniques on the masses via the middle class and divide religions and philosophical systems into three options. He also discusses the geopolitical implications of the pandemic, including the decline of the United States and the rise of China and Russia. He advises small countries to adopt a neutral stance between East and West and encourages people to opt out, minimize consumption, and fight back through civil disobedience and passive resistance.

But before we do this, we need to understand something about the repertory of the elites.

How do the elites co-opt the middle class? How do they subjugate the masses? What are the secret tools, signaling and messaging that they deploy when they succeed to regain and retake power?

Because the elites have been challenged thousands of times throughout history. And they never ever failed.

Numerous movements, rooted in the middle class, for example, in 1848, rooted in the masses, for example in the 1930s, there have been numerous challenges to the elites, to the power structures. Numerous challenges.

And the elites saw them off. The elites succeeded to suppress, eliminate, destroy and reverse every challenge ever thrown at them.

The elites are very creative. Sometimes they come up with sham concessions, such as democracy. Sometimes they come with a unifying narrative, such as nationalism.

Maybe I’m elite, maybe you’re a mass, but we belong to the same nation. They have many ways.

And the elites are not a conspiracy. The elites are not a coordinated bunch. They don’t pick up the phone every morning and coordinate actions.

The elites have common interests. And that’s enough. Common interests dictate common courses of action, common behaviors, common cognitions, common emotions, common derision of the masses, common contempt, common hatred, common everything.

When you have common interests with someone, you don’t need to talk to them. You’re both likely to act the same way.

And so the elites are a diffuse mass. They’re more like a cloud. They’re more like a cloud. And they’re a diffuse mass that permeates every crevice and nook and cranny of society.

And they have common interests. Above all, the interests of stability and self-preservation so that they can increase, enhance their wealth and transfer it to the next generation. That’s the main interest of the elite, the selfish gene.

And so the elites use a variety of psychological manipulation techniques on the masses via the middle class.

The mediators, the intermediaries of the middle class, for example, middle class intellectuals, middle class intellectuals write all the influential books and come up with all the amazing captivating ideologies that the masses adhere to unthinkingly.

But the middle class is operating on behalf of the elites. Whatever they say, whatever they do, whatever they write is intended to preserve the system.

Very few intellectuals are real subversives. They’re not. Even when they sound as though they are rebellious and subversive, they’re not. They’re hyper conservative.

The middle class is much more conservative than the elites. And all philosophical systems were invented by the elites in the middle class to subjugate the masses. All religions have the same purpose exactly, to keep the masses in check. So religions and philosophical systems, they can be divided into three options.

There are three ways of going about it.

One, the psychotic school, magical thinking and misperceiving internal objects as external.

And the most famous example is, of course, God. God is an internal object. It’s a confabulation. It’s a concoction. It’s a piece of fiction.

And yet, the elites with the middle class had succeeded to convince the masses that God is an external object. It’s really out there.

And what does God tell the masses? Support the elites. Support the current existing order. Don’t rebel. Be good. Be good boys. Be good citizens. Pay your taxes. Work hard for the elites.

Because if you work hard, someone in the elite is getting richer.

Religions are instruments of the elite to control the masses via magical thinking. Opium.

The second school is the narcissistic school. Entitlement, rights, obligations, hubris.

The narcissistic school mistakes external objects and symbols for internal ones.

So, for example, the rule of law. It’s like the law is something outside you and the law is its own existence. Then the law must prevail. The law must rule.

But if you have a close look at the law, the law is a manipulative tool of the elites to take whatever you have, enrich themselves and then preserve the wealth against your rage and transfer it to the next generations, to their next generations.

The law is confiscatory. The law is exclusionary.

The rule of law is a code word for stagnation.

So the narcissistic school lets you believe that there is something outside you which is bigger than you, more important than you and demands your sacrifice.

I mentioned the law.

There’s also the nation. The nation is an invention of the elites, of course. So it gives you the sense that you belong, that you accept it, that you’re part of the club, that you’re a member of the club, you feel entitled, you feel that you have rights, you have obligations and it caters to your grandiosity.

You no longer feel a member of the great unwashed elite masses. You feel an almost member of the elite because you both belong to the same nation and both of you are subject to the same laws.

I have a surprise for you. Laws are for masses, never for the elites. No member of the elite is subject to any law.

And when I say any law, I mean any law.

The last solution of the elites on how to subjugate and co-opt the masses is the schizoid school, withdrawing from the world and shunning reality altogether.

And this is the solution, this is the preferred solution of the elites.

They give you mass media. They give you sock operas. They give you reality TV. They give you the internet. They give you all these things because they want to push you away from reality. They want to get you addicted. They want to condition you. They want you to forget about reality because reality is the elites.

The reality is 99% of the world is owned by the elites. When I say elite, I mean a few thousand people.

And so they don’t want you to pay attention to this. They want your eyeballs. They don’t want you to have intimacy because any minute you have intimacy is a minute lost to Zuckerberg and Facebook and Zuckerberg’s pocket.

They don’t want you to say anything subversive or controversial or politically incorrect or and if you do, they cut you off even if you are the president of the United States.

They want you to live in a confabulated, fabricated, nonsensical, counterfactual, fallacious, fantasy world. They want you to inhabit a dreamscape.

They even give you opioids to ascertain that this happens.

This is the schizoid solution.

In any given period of history, one of these schools is on the ascendant and the other two are on the defensive.

The elites experiment with one of these three solutions, the psychotic solution, the narcissistic solution and the schizoid solution.

In some periods in history, the psychotic solution is the dominant solution. So people believe in gods and religions and angels and I don’t know what else.

So other periods of history, the narcissistic solution is on the ascendant. And so people believe that they can become rich and powerful and so on and so forth because they are sold on an American dream or some kind of dream.

And at other periods of history, the schizoid solution is dominant and the other two are a bit recessive.

In our postmodern world, the two dominant solutions are alternately narcissism and schizoid.

What happened with the pandemic? The pandemic didn’t create a single trend. The pandemic didn’t render anything different or new.

What the pandemic did was shine a bright light on reality. It forced us to confront reality.

First of all, there was a massive transfer of wealth for poor people to rich people. Billionaires in the pandemic had increased their wealth in a single year by 59%. Where did they take this money from? You, of course. They took this money from you.

Poor people had transferred their wealth to the richest people on earth. That’s the first effect of the pandemic.

Second effect, all the sham and fake narratives that the elites were selling you, free speech, human rights, civil rights, democracy and other bullshit, they are now taking away from you because it doesn’t serve them right now.

So you realize that these were not natural rights. This was not something God-given. Free speech, free association, free demonstrations and protests, free anything is the gift of the elites, is given to you by the elites and can be taken away from you at any minute. None of it is yours, not your property, not your freedom, not your speech, nothing. It all belongs to the elites. They deluded you into thinking that you own these things because there is a law, because there is a nation, because there’s a community, because there’s common destiny. They lied to you because there’s democracy and you have influence over the proceedings and you have power. They lied to you. You’re brain dead and they took advantage of this and now in the pandemic you see a suppression of free speech and the elimination outright of the vast majority of human and civil rights.

And casting to sharp relief like under a huge projector you see who is in charge and who is in charge are technologies, owners of technology companies, finance and to some extent, but it’s extremely limited, other types of businesses.

So business, the corporate world, especially multinationals, international banks, international technology companies, they’re in charge. They’re the elite. This is the nexus. These are the elites, most of them are billionaires and so on. These are the elites. They rule you and control you.

Had it been different 200 years ago? Of course not. International bankers have ruled the world during Napoleon’s time. It’s the same elites. The same elites ruled Babylon. The same. The people with money, the people with technology, they rule the world. Always 10,000 years ago, the people who invented the agricultural revolution, the people who came up with the industrial revolution, mining, mine owners, factory owners. These are the elites. These have always been the elites.

They shapeshifted to deceive you. They pretended to introduce members of the middle class into the exclusive elite club. This was intended to deceive you, give you false hope that one day, maybe you can belong. It’s a deception. No intellectual is member of these elites. They co-opt. They kind of collaborate with certain intellectuals. They adopt certain intellectuals. They elevate certain intellectuals to make these intellectuals feel that they have real power somehow to move the masses.

Who cares about the masses? The masses can move left, they can move right. They’re useless. They’re useless because ultimately the elite is there. Even when the masses did take over, for example, in communism, in Nazism, Nazism was immediately compromised by corporate industrial interests. So was fascism.

In communism, communism fell prey to the managerial class. Who is the managerial class? People with money, people with technological skills.

So the pandemic revealed to us how powerless we are and how powerless we’ve always been.

And the pandemic, of course, has geopolitical implications as well. It has accelerated the decline of the United States and restored the historically dominant Eurasian landmass.

Throughout human history, the dominant power was China, contiguous China, not the United States.

The United States and the West, it’s an aberration, aberration established by refugees, criminals, privateers, pirates, and so on. The entire so-called Western civilization is founded on crime, is founded on persecution, is founded by outcasts and outliers. It had no chance in the world to survive. 500 years, which is the length of Western civilization, is nothing in historical terms.

It’s a glitch, it’s a blip, it’s a nothing. And it’s ending. Western civilization is ending.

It was an experiment by outliers and outcasts. And the elites are going to eliminate it.

It took them 500 years, which is shocking in itself. But they’re going to eliminate Western civilization.

The old powers, the historical powers, China and its extension Russia, the Eurasian table, is rising up again, as it had done for thousands of years, long before there was any concept of the West, when Europe was a big swamp.

Russia today is providing weapons not only to Serbia, but to NATO allies like Turkey.

Russia had cast itself as an important diplomatic force in the Middle East, not only in Syria, but even in countries like Israel.

Russia is emerging as technological and scientific power, both for good vaccines and for bad hacking.

But Russia is a minor player. Russia is China’s extension.

It just doesn’t know it yet.

China is now pivoting from a strictly economic superpower to a military superpower.

That’s where the game begins. That’s where the game is afoot, as my friend Cello Holmes would have said.

Russia is purchasing critical infrastructure, the belt, the road, silk road, critical infrastructure, everywhere. Greece, Africa, Latin America, you name it, Chinese are there.

Lending, buying, selling, establishing, building. It’s a Chinese world.

China’s soft power has surpassed the United States in terms of lending to sovereigns, online social media, payments and retail platforms, and propaganda. China’s GDP is nearly the same as the United States and the entire European Union bloc.

What can small countries do?

Small countries cannot afford to surf the wrong geopolitical wave. Small countries must strike a neutral stance between East and West, even if it means that small countries have to postpone certain supranational aspirations like joining the European Union.

Small countries should adopt the Swiss model and welcome everyone.

And I think the United Kingdom was a harbinger and a pioneer of this approach with Brexit. Small countries should redirect themselves and embrace industries which do not render them dependent on either superpower, services, green agriculture, medical tourism, offshore banking, coding, back office operations, you name it.

This is small countries.

What can you do as a member of the mass? Opt out. Do not collaborate. Do not be a slave. Just walk away. Nothingness. Adopt nothingness.

It’s wrong to advise you to go back to a totally imaginary past where men were men and women were women and families were families and nations were nations.

There was never ever such a past. It was all an illusionary facade, hocus pocus, perpetrated by the elites. They had deceived you. It was a magician’s sleight of hand. It was never real. It was a decoy.

Jordan Peterson’s vision is a decoy. The guy is delusional. There was never such a thing, the kind of world they described.

In this sense, it’s indistinguishable.

From Donald Trump, make America great again. I don’t know when America was great.

It was like the illusion or hallucination of a Britain that had never existed in the 19th century.

These are psychedelic experiments by the elites on your mind.

To defeat the elites, the masses must walk away. Not walk away from jobs.

You need to live. You need to eat. You need to drink. You need to raise a family.

I’m not advocating becoming a lone wolf in a forest. Walk away from the dream. Denounce and renounce the fantasy. Stop participating in the race.

Minimize consumption. Damage them. Fight them back with their own weapons.

Democracy is a sham. Don’t participate. Consumerism is an addiction. Don’t consume.

The rat race is designed to keep you too busy to think. Don’t quit the rat race. Focus on you.

They want you to focus outside. That’s why they had created this technological platform, social media and so on, so that you are so much outside your mind that you are not aware.

They reduce your awareness. They hypnotize you. They sedate you. They entrain you.

These are pernicious, sick brainwashing tactics.

Do not willingly succumb. Don’t go into the mental asylum of the elites willingly and extend your hands for the straitjacket. Fight back. Fight back by not fighting. Fight back.

Civil disobedience. Passive resistance. Opt out. Tune out. Choose nothingness.

Watch my new channel. Subscribe to my new channel on nothings, where I elaborate on these topics. I hope I introduce some order and meaning and structure into the chaos that is today’s world.

If you have any questions, post them in the comments section. I’ll do my best to respond or even create a new video.

Thank you for listening.