An excellent thread from @GeorgeMonbiot. I have spent decades of my life trying to understand and work out this apparent paradox, and how this all works. The simply summary, is that none of this works like how we are taught. It's what I call a Conspiracy of Common Purpose.
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https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1486950829194190848
We are taught that any coordinated group needs a leader and a hierarchy, to coordinate. This is a demonstrable falsehood. Take football supporters. They chant and sing in unison. Do they go to choir practice and have a conductor? Of course not.
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I could give many other examples of large groups of people with a common interest binding them together - acting in a highly coordinated way, without a leader orchestrating them. In other words, groups can coordinate like a conspiracy, without there being a conspiracy.
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This is what I mean by a Conspiracy of Common Purpose. An actively coordinating and controlling group, in society, which acts in a coordinated way, without being part of an organized conspiracy as portrayed in fiction - both books and movies.
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The classic conspiracy, is a red herring, either by lucky accident, or itself being a product of a Conspiracy of Common Purpose, which actively misleads the public. It pretends the powerful cannot possibly be coordinated, unless there is some shadowy movie type of conspiracy.
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This means anyone who says there is a controlling elite, is dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. In other words, unless they produce evidence of a controlling movie type conspiracy, they are delusional, imaging it.
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This is how this sleight of hand works. It's like the distractions an illusionist uses, to make the audience look elsewhere, when they do their tricks in plain sight. It's to stop the public realising how they are being exploited, without them seeing it.
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Above a certain indefinable level of wealth and income, the principles of property, ownership etc, what George outlines, becomes advantageous. It is not advantageous for those below it though.
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For anyone below a certain level of wealth/income, owning even a mediocre home, normally involves some sort of mortgage, they will spend much of their working life paying it off i.e. not really owning it until later in life.
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The only property most people own, tends to be their house, their car, and appliances. As we've seen, they only partly own that, and have to work for others most of their life, to pay it all off and only late in life get to actually own it.
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This is a very crude summary, simply explaining why the system George has outlined, only really suits a minority of the population, say the 1%. Others may mistakenly think it benefits them, but in reality, they are in hoc, and enslaved by the wealthy and powerful.
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It's an illusory type of freedom, in which people are really enslaved by a few, but see themselves as free. Their "owners" are also invisible, and most of the progressive ones don't even see they are ruthlessly exploiting everyone else, or just don't like to think about it.
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At this point, I must make it clear, that I am not moralising here, I'm not an ideologue, saying look at this, it's disgusting, it should be like my preferred ideological goal. No, I'm simply a naturalist/ecologist, describing how the system works.
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I'm an actual naturalist/ecologist, and I've spent my life observing the natural world and how other species live and operate. I've used this to work out ways of finding and photographing these species. I'm simply observing human society in the same way.
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As I said initially, the problem is that people, the public, have been actively misled by the powerful 1% who control everything, about how our modern society actually works and how most are being ruthlessly exploited by a few. It's not moralising, just saying how it works.
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It's only become necessary for me to say how it works, because of the climate and ecological crisis, which means we are hurtling towards entirely avoidable crisis. This is both being driven by the 1% - whilst action to change direction is being blocked by the 1%.
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When I say 1%, I don't mean the exact 1% of the richest. The 0.001% benefit most and have the most control. The top 10% are benefiting somewhat. All we can say is those outside the top 10% are not benefiting so much in a descending continuum, to not benefiting at all.
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So when I talk of a Conspiracy of Common Purpose, the shape of this would be like that of a tornado, like the Oxfam graphic above, which is actually individual carbon emissions plotted against wealth.
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As I say, I'm just illustrating how it actually all works. Everything I say is demonstrable fact. It is not an idea, a theory, a hypothesis, it is not an ideology. If you unpick it all, that is what you will find. Of course, because of space, I've had to massively simplify.
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