The total global control regime is built like a social movement. It's a segmented polycentric integrated network, or SPIN. On paper, it can be seen in the intermarriages of powerful families, interlocking corporate board directorships, and the revolving door between government and industry. This regime can't be influenced by average people, nor can its power be challenged. It has no central point of failure.
In this Big SPIN, participants share assumptions and values with each other. Because of this, their actions may appear to be centrally coordinated, though they tend not to be except in moments of crisis. The international wave of lockdowns when covid started definitely appeared to be centrally coordinated, though behind the scenes, it probably looked more chaotic. Outside relatively narrow parameters, most people don't really seem to know what they're doing. This goes doubly true for the people in power.
In a sense, society is a rudderless ship bumping into rocky terrain while all of the sailors play games with each other instead of charting a better course. But society is also an endless nest of interdependent systems. The Big SPIN controls these systems. This doesn't mean that it controls society.
Factions within the Big SPIN do exercise immense influence over events and the public narratives crafted to explain these events. The relationships of these factions with each other range from cooperative to adversarial. On matters of power and freedom, all of the factions typically behave as a single class. This class, whether termed the managerial class or the power elite, always seeks to expand its own power at the expense of others. That is the entire purpose of this class.
Sometimes, one of the Big SPIN's factions exposes itself to public scrutiny by flagrantly violating mores or law or decency. Even then, it can take years for a faction's transgressions to come fully to light, if they ever do. Jeffrey Epstein was caught procuring disadvantaged girls for sex and received a suspiciously lenient plea deal in 2008. By the time Epstein was charged in New York a decade later, it was clear that he had friends in the highest of places. People like Alan Dershowitz, Alex Acosta, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew surrounded Epstein, while an unknown number of unnamed accomplices escaped public notice. Some have suggested that the sex trafficking of children was part of a larger blackmail ring used by Epstein to control other powerful people. That would be totally in line with how the elite seem to operate.
Not every celebrity belongs to one of these factions. And some billionaires appear to be factions unto themselves. Bill Gates has bought up a quarter of a million acres of US farmland in recent years. His purchases are part of a larger trend of institutional investments in agricultural land and residential property. To me, the Gates faction looks like it's part of a coordinated campaign to make property harder for people to own by buying everything up and raising prices. But to Gates or other investors, the underlying motive behind these purchases is likely simple profit. Reducing the average person's purchasing power in real estate markets is just a side effect of their relentless profit-seeking.
A great many actions undertaken by the Big SPIN or its factions have side effects like this. Altogether, in aggregate, these side effects systematically reduce the power of individuals. This reduction of individuals' power is always visited upon the lower classes, though it's rarely evenly distributed. The uneven distribution of the negative impacts of these side effects is presented to popular culture as contested territory. Members of the lower classes are encouraged to fight with each other over this territory.
Since the 1960s in the US, the liberal solution to problems stemming from the Big SPIN's unchecked power has been to increase government regulation of industry and to increase taxation of the rich. This solution presupposes a government strong enough to stand up to industry interests, which we do not have, and may never have had. Instead, we have a government that burdens average people with insane bureaucracy while supporting the Big SPIN at every turn. At the same time, the conservative solution to these problems is merely to blame them on the liberals, and sometimes on foreign aggressors. Which isn't better.
It would be very surprising to me if the Big SPIN had a Big Plan. But it does have clear motivations, and these sum to a desire for more power. Governments and companies articulate this desire at every turn. Fortunately, their reach is not absolute.
The Big SPIN controls most infrastructure, but not the entirety of the information space. And the nature of tech ensures that new information space can be created if the space we have gets worse. Factions within the Big SPIN may try to dominate this space with their own narratives, but their success requires everyone to just sort of play along. More and more, people seem disinclined to do that.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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