Reflection on Global and Personal Connections in the So-Called ‘New World Order’ (Polemic) by Edwin L. Young

I was born in 1933. I remember the Pierce Arrow car but the memory is fuzzy as I was too young to consider the significance of it. I do, however, vividly remember the Packard car as the father of one of my best friends had one around 1945. It was a magnificent car, especially for the times. Philosophically, the significance of the Pierce Arrow, the Tesla car, Tesla’s Alternating Current,[i] and an endless succession of near miraculous inventions and inventors is that they have been relegated to the ‘Mausoleums’ of history in favor of inferior inventions with built-in ‘planned obsolescence’ designed to perpetuate their bountiful profits indefinitely and their freedom from rivals everlastingly.

That is our legacy of The Founding Fathers and their drive for economic dominance in their new nation. Surreptitiously, and, to err on the side of kindness I will say, perhaps unconsciously, they were insuring their prominence which was inherent in their creation of an ‘ole boy’ capitalistic, free enterprise economic system along with their ‘representative’ democracy. Representative, of course, meaning that elected leaders would be from the ‘landed gentry’, all with the exception of one or two were slave owners. Moving far into the industrial age, it was inevitable that by 1890 the Sherman Anti-trust Act had to be enacted to curtail the inevitable results of the contradictions intrinsic to the competitive, free enterprise economic system. In the early twentieth century, under Theodore Roosevelt, the Sherman Anti-Trust act finally began to be enforced. It had become clear that to succeed a company must grow and defeat the competition and leave behind in the garbage dumps of history those inventions that were superior and those inventors were not sufficiently ruthless and conscienceless to destroy their sociopathic competitors.

The rampant rush toward monopolies that, nevertheless ensued, must have made the politicians of that era, trembling in fear at the feet of Colossus, act quickly to stave off the usurpation of their own power. Little did they know, but surely must have had intimations, that their days of lordship were fading fast and they were destined to be seated at the end zone of power as mere spectators of the conflagrations fed by the small corporations being consumed as kindling by the megalomaniac, monopoly obsessed, modern, corporations. Reflect on this. What is the legacy of these well-meaning midgets of political history? What is the upshot of their pretentious legislative efforts?

‘To the victor belong the spoils!’ Ironically the ‘spoils’ so often are far superior to the inventions of their successful survivors. This trend also entails that our culture endorse winning at any cost - cheating, lying, stealing, bullying and violence, trickery of all sorts, producing enticing but life-threatening products, bribing - whatever unethical and illegal behavior one can get away with as long as you are not caught. This aspect of our culture is so deeply embedded in the minds of the population that it is considered normal and as essential as the air we breathe. Preposterous as it may sound, we have become expert at convincingly calling evil good.

Were anyone bold enough to take a contrarian tack and to try to teach maturity and genuinely ethical behavior in our schools, to teach anything contrary to the maliciousness of our free enterprise mentality and warped ethics, a multitude of versions of the Tea Party would instantly emerge and pounce upon and destroy them, would they not?
Our dear Tesla is only one of many, albeit a most prominent one, examples of the sordid history of our free enterprise system.

Entering the contemporary scene, consider this. If a corporation defeats and acquires all of its competitors, does it still believe that competition is ideal and essential in a free enterprise economy? Here lies the contradiction: in a free enterprise economy, competition tends toward eliminating the competitors, which ultimately leads to monopoly. Monopoly is the opposite of free enterprise. Hence the contradiction.

One corporation for example, Monsanto, Inc., now owns 80% of all of the soybean business and boasts that it will soon have 100% since its rivals are no longer able to compete with their ‘bigness’. Incidentally, they own the patent on the ‘Genetically Modified Organism’ Soy Bean! This phenomenon of sewing up the market and crushing competitors is being carried on, not just by and in the US, but by all Western nations and in all of the outsider, clueless nations around the globe.

Monsanto’s ‘soybeans’ is just one example of the hundreds of thousands of corporations involved in the creeping stealth of Global Corprotocracy’s suzerainty.

Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division, initially designed to be the Sentinel guarding the purity of the free enterprise system against monopolies, became, from Reagan on, the suppliant handmaiden doing the bidding of the omnivorous, mega-corporations. These corporations showed their gratitude by generously dolling out campaign donations and perhaps other forms of illicit, undetectable, gifts. Essentially, this malevolent symbiosis between these market conquering, multi-national corporations and their groveling handmaiden Anti-Trust Division turned the latter into virtual Satrap Henchmen enforcing the will of the powerful, unscrupulous corporations upon whatever lesser corporation they wished to acquire.

Taking another retro-analogy but from further along in history, our society has rather briskly been, for at least over the last thirty years, mutated into a large but shrinking number of transnational Feudal States. Our CEOs and their corporate warriors, not unlike the ‘aristocracy of mounted warriors’ of that Medieval Ages, have been raiding with impunity the natural resources of weaker countries using their governors and beating into submission, like the Mafia offering protection to small business owners, their struggling, small, corporations. Furthermore, they have been ruthlessly turning these countries and their defenseless people into virtual indentured slaves with the added burden of never-ending indebtedness. Reminiscent of something, say our Founding Fathers, for instance? The debts owed by these impoverished, struggling, third-world businesses come under the guise of ‘patronizing’ loans that have been negotiated under the covert auspices of the double-dealing, loan sharks, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, but ultimately going to the profits of the large multi-national corporations. Again, as with the legacy of the Founding Fathers, we can see the shades of our Anti-Trust Division and their virtual forfeiture to late twentieth century US mega corporations.

As you can see, what we have here is a global consortium of systems consisting of law and justice, politics, finance, commerce, entire powerless populations, and the media all interconnected in a new supra-national, vertical structure of governance, descending through a monetized classification system of nations that, horizontally, encompasses all continents. This is what is euphemistically referred to these days, on TV Channels like the History Channel and in menacing documentaries by cynical Inside-Dopesters masquerading as political journalists, as the “New World Order.” Naturally enough, these dispensers of knowledge of this powerful ethereal species of new world rulers, allude to ‘the New World Order’ without going into the specifics of exactly what that entails, who they are, or where one could find them. These cryptic cynosures merely serve to engender fear and a sense of impotence and subservience in the unsuspecting general public.

When I was young I saw the evils of wealth and status. Later and in my young adulthood, I learned the lessons ‘be realistic; grow up; and that’s the way the world is’ first hand from employers and even from relatives wishing to impart worldly wisdom. ‘The way the world is’ that they were referring to meant that there are two kinds of people, the takers and the taken. Or, one can extend that to include the cheated and the cheaters and so many other corrupting versions of the same socially approved psychopathy. It meant that if you get the upper hand then you are virtually, sub-rosa of course, authorized to use it to mercilessly crush your rivals. It meant that money talks and when it does, it always gets its way. Anyone can be bought for a price, right? It meant that if you have money you must be assumed to be good (remember that good ole Protestant ethic). It meant that you are how you dress as expensive garb ensures deference. It meant that there are only winners and losers. There are only lying exploiters and their suckers, and you surely do not want to wind up being the latter. It meant that elbows are meant for getting ahead in line and that fair play is for fairies. If you wanted to get ahead – and I was learning that that was all that mattered – it was who you know and not what you know.

I regularly went to church and it eventually sunk in on me that these people listened to sweet Jesus sermons on Sunday and went out ripped off customers with a smile and exploited the vulnerable with an air of entitlement on Monday. I wanted none of that crude, merciless, mendacity, that blatant worship of manna, that so-called ‘good life.’ Deep in my gut, I became more and more disenchanted with and more and more revolted by the hypocrisy exhibited by those born to the manor on the one hand and by their obsequious, greedy, grimy-fingered merchants and their acquiescent administrators who oppress the employees of their businesses and ranches on the other hand.

Was I accidentally following in the footsteps of the young Buddha? I was only to learn about another, more truly ethical, way of life taught by authentic, wise teachers with genuine integrity much later in life, but then, finally, that came, much to my relief. I am, of course, not a Buddhist, nor member of any other religion. Still, up to that time, I implicitly possessed my moral heritage and continued to try to accommodate to a conventional morality well into adulthood. Along with that, I thought the only way to have a wife was to go the way of the world and have money, and status, to get married, and live in a two-story house with a respectable car, and have a well-manicured lawn, like everyone else. In my young adulthood, I was a virgin and yet I had a really strong sex drive. What a dilemma, go with the idea of a wife and a respectable life or follow my deeper gut assessment of the world and a quite contrarian life style. I surely did not see any examples of some compromise in between these extremes. Consequently, I jumped from one horn of the dilemma to another most of my life.

Now I believe in poverty as a way of life. I do not believe in legal marriage or any of the antiquated Victorian sexual taboos. My re-assessment of the world and of how I should live was sweeping and included just about everything in our American culture. As a minor example, I think it is silly to dub four letters words as forbidden to be spoken except among guys or with your female lovers. This implied the double standard for the genders and I strongly rejected that position. I assume that by now you are getting the picture. Trying to adhere to the appearance of propriety seems like a death knell for authenticity to me.

Propriety, as is commonly conceived, is only meant to disguise the rampant impropriety that people enjoy when out of the public eye. The need for social approval, conformity to the status quo, pursuing the American ‘Dream’ are recipes for inauthenticity and a betrayal of your own integrity and all of humanity all at once. But these relate to the singular individual. While most of my life I was seeking an authentic, ethical life, in later life I began to see that I am a member of the world community.

Therefore, knowing that I was so relentlessly shaped to conform to the ways of a thoroughly corrupt culture, I made a one-eighty degree turn. I realized that I must become one who tries to reshape that malevolent culture and address all of its tightly integrated, demonic, structures and systems, now metastasizing around the globe. Although just one small voice, I must share it as, where, and when I can.



Author bio:

Edwin is a 76 year old, retired, psychotherapist/institution reformer. His greatest satisfaction came from reforming many juvenile correctional institutions, a maximum security prison, a West Texas mental hospital, and the huge Job Corps in San Marcos, Texas. All in all there were thirteen institutions that he successfully reformed. In the last year of his PhD program, Edwin was one of the two PhD graduate students to be awarded the annual University Research Institute grant. His dissertation committee said his was the longest, best, and most complex in the history of the department. Since retiring, Edwin spends his time writing. His site is: The Natural Systems Institute.