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How To Destroy a Civilization by Steven Yates
From:
[email protected] Hello. You know who I am? That's right. It's been a while since I've communicated directly to you – but I'm still getting over my amazement at the power of this new human creation, the World Wide Web, and this thing you call email. Nevertheless, here I am. I'm sure most of you didn't believe I existed. Maybe you still don't. You're probably thinking that I'm a double, like Saddam's double, or that this is someone's idea of a practical joke. That's fine with me. In fact, I prefer it. The more people who believe I don't exist, the greater the ease with which I can go to and fro in the Earth, and walk up and down in it. You've done well, my servants – whether you've believed in me or not. You've needed direction here and there, but overall, you've done well. Despite occasional fits and starts and a few close calls, you're practically in charge now. Most of those under your charge don't even know it. You've climbed a long way, stayed the course, and decimated most of the freedoms, morals and values those under you started with. There are those who would oppose you, but they remain scattered, not that well organized, lacking in resources, but above all, lacking in perceived credibility. The people at large do not believe in you any more than they believe in me. Your employing toward my cause the wealth accumulated by the rich of a century past was a stroke of genius without which my work in destroying these once godly people would have taken considerably longer to accomplish. So was your decision to remain unknown. Yet your work is not finished. As I said, there remains that remnant that knows who you are – and who even know that I am not a myth. They may be scattered and poor in resources, but that doesn't necessarily stop the truly determined. Look at those who launched the revolution that gave rise to this civilization and allowed a free people to flourish for a time. They were also a small minority, poor in resources. Yet through enormous displays of courage, they triumphed. If it happened once, it could happen again. And you should never forget: those in your charge greatly outnumber you, and if in large numbers they ever became convinced of the threat you pose to their entire way of life, they would rise up in a minute and throw all of you out of your banks, your boardrooms, your tax-exempt foundations, your government offices. So lately I've been thinking. It might do to set down, for posterity, the things a small but powerful elite such as you must do to destroy a civilization and render as few people as possible savable. Just so you stay the course and don't lose sight of your goals – my goals! Before doing anything, of course, such a group must cultivate in itself the sense of superiority necessary for any group to become a true political elite. Its members must come to believe they can do anything they put their minds to, including moving mountains if necessary to achieve their goals. They must believe they are akin to gods. Did not my servant Karl Marx cite his twin goals of "dethroning God and destroying capitalism"? They must believe they have what it takes to engineer the kind of society they want to rule, whether they call it the Perfect Society or not, whether they describe their methods as scientific or not (although in an age in which science is worshipped by its intelligentsia, this is helpful). A true political elite must believe, that is, that there is no knowledge problem, that social engineering is a live option, and that anything is possible to them if only they employ the proper methods using sufficient resources. Is this not a description of someone who has "dethroned God"? Second, they must have little sincere respect for the wishes and feelings of those in their charge. They must learn to see the common people as nothing more than cannon fodder to be used to fight their wars and pay taxes, and then be cast aside when their usefulness is over. That is, they must regard ordinary people not as men and women with lives and goals of their own but as objects of no greater moral significance than beasts of burden or natural resources. (The introduction of the term human resource instead of worker or employee was another stroke of genius.) To do this most effectively it is best if they forget completely about beings such as myself, and just assume the truth of a hard materialist view of nature and of man. That is, their best bet is to see the universe as nothing but matter in motion, obeying the laws of physics and chemistry only, and in which there are no gods, souls or other supernatural agencies or transcendent moral values. That way it will be easy for them eventually to see a person as nothing more than a physical entity to be used for their purposes, whose life has no transcendent moral significance. Now, to the nitty gritty. You've come very close, in your own labors, to bringing this civilization under your domination, and exemplifying what must be done to get to this point. Thus you've fulfilled my plan to thwart as much as possible the will of You Know Who for these people. But you don't dominate yet. Your very existence is still a well-guarded secret. The battle is still being waged. So it's important to set down, for the future, what you've done right – that you might do it better and finish the job. There are three things you must do to destroy a civilization, three cardinal steps you must take. These are not in sequence; in fact, they work best if you are eventually doing all three at once, but you should begin with the first. Then, eventually, the others will fall into place; and if you do not miscalculate and move too fast you will end up in a situation where you can act almost unopposed, because the majority will be indifferent, and those who would oppose you can do very little. The first thing you must do to destroy a civilization is destroy its educational system; the second, destroy its finances and the value of its currency; the third, destroy its moral base. You've done reasonably well with each. Let's take a closer look at all three. The first step: If you destroy a civilization's educational system, you will more and more undermine the capacity of each generation to pass its traditions and accumulated wisdom down to the its children. Eventually there will come a generation with virtually no knowledge of how its country began, what moral and political achievements its founding embodied, or how these achievements were intended to fetter the likes of you who enjoy wielding power, usually (though not necessarily always) through the institutions of government. And more: you will render each generation progressively less literate than its predecessor, less able to do mathematics, less able to understand the scientific, cultural and literary achievements of their ancestors, and less intellectually curious. Enamor at least some of them of science, but keep them mostly illiterate about actual scientific method. Then you can lavishly fund junk science and pass it off as truth. With this in place, in a culture that adulates science without understanding it you can lead the people in the direction you want them to go. Just identify education with job skills as much as possible, and truth with conformity to the prevailing consensus. Do not allow those in your charge to dwell overly on history, or philosophy, or theology, or literature. Or especially economics understood as the science of human action and the dynamics of markets. Fortunately, my minions in those areas have nearly destroyed those subjects, using them to confuse and obfuscate instead of clarify and instruct. Teach big-business skills, but not entrepreneurship! All those subjects and topics will make some of them think the wrong thoughts, and ask the wrong questions. In fact, what your progressive educators did was exactly what should be done: institute "educational" programs designed to fail, and in doing so, maim the intellects of entire generations, making them useful only as common laborers serving your needs. Not even the professors in your most prestigious institutions of higher learning or in the upper echelons of your government will grasp such notions as limited government, or rule of law. Thus you can dispense with the first and pervert the second to your heart's content, using it to mean nothing more than rule by your laws. You should, above all, convince the people, working subtly through government schools and the mass media, that only institutions of government can manage and dispense education, and that the problems are not caused by government control but by insufficient money flowing out of government. Give this teeth by strangling those involved in educating the young with petty rules, regulations, certification guidelines, accreditation requirements. Once you have severed the common people from their roots, you can give them a sense of entitlement. Make them believe that government owes them not just an education but a living. Inspire in them anger at anyone who would suggest otherwise. Have them look to government as fundamentally benevolent and independent business as morally questionable at best and depraved at worst – surely needing to be strapped down with regulations. Is this not the start of "destroying capitalism"? Remember, it begins with your attack on education. If you can separate a people from their past, you rob them of control over their future. And that is when you take control – by controlling their present, when all decisions are actually made. But also remember: never move too fast. This is very important. If some get alarmed about some specific decision, concede the point if necessary and back off. Always be willing to take a visible step back today if it will allow you two unnoticed steps forward tomorrow. The last thing you want is multitudes asking potent questions about where civilization is headed. So how do you accomplish this? The best way is the way you've chosen: in addition to the educational malpractice you've fomented in their government schools, fill their minds and lives with endless distractions, trivia, and busywork. Keep them entertained – and the more mindless the entertainment the better. Also the more prurient the better, but we'll return to that in a few minutes. Surround their lives with "white noise" – play rock music everywhere, for example, so there are no quiet spaces and times to think and ponder and maybe pray. Play it constantly, against the ambient sounds of fast-moving traffic. Keep the people busy, busy, busy in their workplaces and lives with tasks – the more routine and mindnumbing, the better. In any event, you've done very well with this large first step. But there remains work to be done, and you must be ever vigilant. The second step: If you destroy a people's finances you can leave both them and their government so debt-ridden that their economy faces eventual ruin. Three ploys have helped you rid your world of the kind of sound money that led to independence and genuine prosperity. First, you centralize banking. This will set the stage for eventually enabling you to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few – yourselves – while blaming the enemy system: "capitalism" (the term was coined, after all, by its bitter enemy Karl Marx). You did this effectively when you created the Federal Reserve system on that dark, wintry night 90 years ago. That gave you control of the money supply, in an endeavor soon to be removed from public scrutiny. Eventually, with control of the banking system and the huge foundations you would be able to control government, education, academia and even large corporations simply by controlling the flow of financial resources. You could control the economy by micromanaging its "booms" and "busts," which my servants in academic economics would call "business cycles" and treat as akin to natural phenomena. But through the inflation your system generates you will eventually destroy the people's savings and sap their will to plan for their futures. Second, you institute the sort of progressive income tax that soon drains the people of their hard-earned money, forcing them to work harder and longer hours. Notice how this and the destruction of their educational system will feed into each other. Unless you can tax people's incomes directly you won't have expropriated from them sufficient money to set up a government educational system and bureaucracy large enough to overwhelm everything else. But soon you will have a generation without sufficient grasp of economics to question the benevolent intentions of the tax system – such as to support the government, feed the poor, fight foreign wars, etc., ad nauseam. The people, absent any instruction in history of economic ideas, will not know that the very idea of a progressive income tax originated in my servant Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. Again and again, I must stress over and over, you must move slowly by increasing the tax burden gradually. Do this, and eventually the people will not question why both parents in any two-parent family have to work full-time to make ends meet. Their historical memories will be too short to recall a time when there was no Federal Reserve or Internal Revenue Service. They will not notice all the hidden taxes, including the one to be discussed in just a minute. Such parents will be further distracted and stressed by their having to leave their children free to be further corrupted by the mindless distractions and titillations your large media corporations will readily supply. Third, you destroy the value of their money by departing the sort of objective standard for wealth measurement supplied by gold and instituting paper money your central bank can print at will. Thus you can inflate the money supply and destroy its value. By destroying its value, you undermine its purchasing power and further destroy the people's savings. Move slow here as well, and again the people will not ask questions that would otherwise be obvious, such as why they must pay several dollars for a hamburger when it only cost their grandparents a nickel. My servant Richard M. Nixon took this civilization completely off the gold standard and instituted the dollar standard – with you controlling the supply and therefore the value of the dollars your printing presses quietly turned out in the dark of the night. The final step: create and maintain a credit system that will saddle everyone, especially the central government, with a mounting spiral of debt that will eventually cripple the economy. You've done will with this second step, too, my loyal servants. But as with education, there is still work to be done. This civilization's economy remains the strongest in the world, and the most resilient. It will not succumb to hyperinflation immediately, but you are taking it in the right direction. Stay the course, and succumb it will. The third step: It is crucially important not just to undermine the people's capacity to hand down their traditions through genuine education but to attack these traditions themselves head on by destroying public morality. Again we may subdivide this major step into distinct ploys. The first ploy is to sever, in the minds of their intellectuals, all ties between morality and the transcendent. If their intellectuals embrace materialism, this should not be too difficult. Then if they believe morality is only a human creation, or a product of a specific culture in a specific time and a specific place – that there is no such thing as morality as such, only their moral beliefs and customs – then it will follow that their morality is arbitrary and can be changed "to fit the times." If you teach that morality was something that evolved, just as did man himself evolve, then you can teach that the evolution of man is reaching toward something higher, a Supreme Human Collective (ruled by yourselves on Earth, of course – even though you'll be answering to me whether you know it or not, hehehe). To further the destruction of public morality, destroy people's ability to control their appetites, especially their sexual appetites. Behold my servant Alfred Kinsey, Father of the Sexual Revolution in modern civilization. He did more than any one man not just to sever the ties between sex and morality but to destroy the idea that the highest expression of human sexuality is a special kind of union between one man and one woman united in marriage. The sexual impulse, you see, is one of the most powerful in all creatures with a biological side to their nature – it is the impulse that propagates the species. If it is not carefully controlled; if it is unleashed on a culture, it will rise up like a demonic being in its own right and utterly take over the minds, bodies and lives of the young. So to further your goals for destroying this civilization, you should encourage by various means at your disposal its saturation with sexual innuendo – in popular movies, in books, in magazines, in music. Fill the public newsstands with pictures of mostly unclothed women – and men. Include information about sex with your education packages for grade school children. Never allow the people to forget that they are sexual creatures; encourage them to have as much sex as possible; suggest to them that if they are not having as much sex as possible that they are missing out. Soon their young in particular will not be able to get sex off their minds! Their every third thought will be of prurient things. They will be ever distracted by fantasies, and some will act out these fantasies. The girls will become pregnant out of wedlock, and at younger and younger ages; they will believe it acceptable and normal to abort their unborn fetuses; others will bear children in poverty. A few will turn to less and less natural sexual practices claiming that it avoids unwanted pregnancy. The boys will grow irresponsible and dissolute, many becoming sexual predators having learned that sex is readily available outside marriage. Neither, as they grow to adulthood and pursue careers in the dizzying fast-paced world of their creation, will make marriage and children a priority. And there will be no judgments passed, because each person's sexual preferences and lifestyle choices will have come be regarded as entirely his or her own affair. In bringing all this about in your civilization it has proven very helpful that famous individuals ranging from celebrity entertainers to presidents place their sexual lives and conduct on display for all the world to see. Your shills in the media, in the judicial system and in academia can appeal, at this point, to the residual individualism in this civilization. (You may safely ignore the fact that individualism was never meant to sustain an utterly hedonistic way of life; by this time, they won't have sufficient cognitive skills to notice). You can appeal to individualism to undermine the remaining ties of family and loyalty to spouse as well as undermining the residual influence of individualism itself. Let me explain. You've used the idea of everyone having the right to live as he sees fit to justify utter hedonism. Your shills will appeal to a liberty they no longer distinguish from libertinism. But some will reasonably fear this sexual anarchy, after all, and clamor for the government to "do something," to impose various forms of controls if not actual censorship. They will lament the proliferation of pornography, especially as it fills bank accounts to the tune of billions per year. They will gasp at what is available on the Web, including to children. They will argue how this proves that individualism and free enterprise don't work, that they are against "human nature," the vices of which must be controlled by government. The destruction of public morality need not just be sexual morality. Instituting the idea that morality is nothing more than culturally generated sentiment or custom is a powerful ploy, after all. You can employ a variety of mechanisms to destroy the capacity of persons to trust one another. No trust means no genuine community. Don't worry; I will supply plenty of temptations that my servant H.L. Mencken once cleverly defined as "irresistible forces at work on movable bodies." These may range from low-level theft from employers and lying on resumes to the larger and far more visible fraudulent accounting you saw with Enron and others so that huge quantities of money simply seem to appear out of thin air – and then disappear, leaving people devastated. Go back to materialism and the idea that as my servant Madonna sang a couple of your decades back, "we're living in a material world, and I'm a material girl." Promote the idea, very subtly, that if the world is material exclusively, all that is important in it is plenty of money (and plenty of sex). If you can use cultural osmosis to inculcate in enough people habits of seeing other people as objects to be used instead of persons to be traded with as ends in themselves, you should have no trouble doing any this. In the social chaos that will gradually ensue and the economic chaos soon to follow, the people themselves, left illiterate by the schools and floundering in an unstable economy, will clamor ever more loudly for greater and greater powers to come in, take over and make things right again. Of course, you've been standing right there all along, waiting for that chamber door to swing open wide. Combine these three – destruction of education, destruction of the civilization's finances, destruction of its moral base and capacity of its people to control their appetites – and you've radically altered the time preferences of entire generations. Unable to discipline themselves, they will spend rather than save, and on credit. Many of those who know they should save will be unable to because of the tax burden, and further unmotivated to save because they know the devaluation of the currency will eventually wipe out their savings. Most will just live in the present and refuse to think about an uncertain future. Educated for loyalty to the institutions of government, they will simply assume that government will always be there and will fulfill their entitlements – somehow – as they grow older in psychological and spiritual isolation. I am not saying that you need limit yourselves to just these three. Your longstanding ploy to divide the races with policies that inevitably favored one race over another and to divide men from women and women from men along lines of gender politics has also yielded tremendous benefits bringing about the sort of world you want. Slavery was this civilization's biggest blunder at its start; you've done will to exploit it to the hilt. You've kept black people's minds focused on slavery and racism, effectively distracting them from the things that are destroying them now – black children growing up without fathers, for example. If black people and white people are looking with one another with suspicion and hostility, they will not look at what you are doing up here behind the scenes. Likewise if women can be made to resent the past achievements of men and men made to resent the present achievements of women, their focus will again be on one another and not on you. And you can divide and dilute the culture still more by throwing open this nation's borders, so that ever more peoples may come in and remain without learning anything of its founding principles. Immigration pursued this way – as opposed to the old assimilationist model – offers still more possibilities for fragmentation and destruction if supplemented by the multiculturalism of the ideologues in academia. Soon no single body of ideas or culture can prevail – except yours, and the people will follow you willingly if your promise them stability and safety. In sum: do not take this missive in the wrong way, my loyal servants in your central banks, your foundations, your federal agencies, and your secret societies and councils on foreign relations and affairs. You are on the right track. I just do not want to see your progress arrested because you got careless and didn't notice what you needed to notice. What you need to notice is that there are people and institutions resisting you – people removing their children from your government schools, for example, and teaching them at home, while other people have taken to dispensing everything from course materials to commentary over this delightful but dangerous World Wide Web. The Web is a two-edged sword. While some are using it to pollute people's minds with pornography, others see in it a means of reminding them about the Constitution. However, things are going acceptably well. Your intellectuals began the job, and cultural osmosis continued it, of transforming a mostly Christian civilization into a mostly materialist one. You have taken the best-educated and best-informed population ever and created an educational system that turns out illiterates suitable only for the military or clerical and technical jobs in your global workforce. You have set the stage for the long-term destruction of their economic well being with government programs such as Social Security – although, again, bewarned: many are aware that this system is broken and will not deliver on its promises in a few years. They are making other arrangements. But these arrangements are nevertheless enmeshed in the monetary system, and you control that. Finally, you have mostly destroyed their heritage and vision of themselves as a moral people. Congratulations are due you for having inculcated terrible visions of a nation built on the backs of slavery and oppression. And for having instituted in the present a sufficiently pervasive hedonism and indifference to matters of principle that this once godly people's highest court can find a "right" to practice homosexual sex in their Constitution without a massive uprising ensuing. This is how to destroy a civilization, my globalist children, taking it ever further from its founding freedoms and from obedience to You Know Who, and delivering it into my eagerly waiting hands. My presence, going to and fro and up and down on this globe, is probably as far from your thoughts as it can be, even now. So be it. But I shall be among you soon, and you shall accept me as one of your own and acknowledge me as your leader! Our New World will be glorious! In anticipation of our future Order, Can't you guess my name? July 12, 2003
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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Steven
Yates [
