Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
“The greatest want of the world is the want of men — men who will not be bought or sold; men who in their inmost souls are true and honest; men who do not fear to call sin by its right name; men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole; men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.” – Ellen G. White
The world becomes more chaotic by the day. Good luck finding a politician, business icon, or religious leader who is not bought and sold by corporate or special interests. Finding truth telling honest leaders in today’s world is virtually impossible. Charles Foster Kane, a quasi-biographical portrayal of William Randolph Hearst, is a fine representation of the billionaire clique that pull the strings in our warped, deceitful, greed driven, materialistic world.
Citizen Kane’s thematic portrayal of the American Dream is far more germane to our society today than it was when made in 1941. Financial affluence, material luxury, wielding power over others, and controlling the opinions of the masses through propaganda media, did not guarantee happiness or fulfillment for Kane or todays oligarchs. Kane was happiest as a poor child, living with his parents, playing in the snow on his sled – Rosebud.
Life is a tragedy, with the richest and poorest dead in the end. The only thing that really matters is your character and integrity. The societal hollowness created by those pushing the delusion of a materialistic American Dream based on an ever-growing pyramid of debt has left a society morally deadened, psychologically damaged, living lives based on deception, and willfully ignorant of the truth.
Until individuals in this country choose to tell the truth and insist on being told the truth by the leaders they choose, chaos and ultimate collapse will be our destiny. Our economy, our currency system, our banking system, our political system, our mass media, and our public education system are built upon nothing but deception, lies, misinformation and falsity. The entire fetid cesspool of lies cannot withstand the glare of truth, as explained by Ron Paul:
The daily dose of deception doled out by the despicable Deep State denizens of decadence, debt and debauchery is depressing to critical thinking truth seekers. I’ve made it my mission in life to only follow rational thinking, honest, straightforward, fact based people who have not been bought off by a party seeking to cheat, mislead, or steal from average Americans. The number of politicians who meet this criteria can be counted on one hand.
Very few corporate executives at S&P 500 sized companies meet this standard of honesty. The criteria for reaching the corner office is insatiable greed, backstabbing, lying, and a sociopathic personality. Despite the Wall Street/Fed rigged financial systems and fake news propaganda spewing mainstream corporate media, there are still independent, non-corrupt, truth tellers as the lone voices of reason in this empire of lies.
These authentic purveyors of reality, based on facts and evidence, are scorned and ridiculed by CNBC spokesmodels and highly compensated intellectual but idiot talking heads. When a nine year Fed engineered bull market in everything is sold as proof of economic recovery, propagated by media mouthpieces, and substantiated by government agencies producing fake economic data, then a populace begging to be misled, because they can’t handle the truth, turns off anyone telling them the truth.
I sense disillusionment among many of the financial analysts who have correctly assessed the present-day insanity and expect a reckoning for the ages when this debt bubble blows like a super-volcano. Facts and reality are meaningless when the madness of crowds, built on delusions of debt, and a financial system engineered by banker psychopaths, keeps the bubble growing to heights not thought possible by rational thinking people.
Many of these truth telling realists are in the business of selling newsletters, books, mutual fund investments, or other financial products. That does not automatically make their analysis suspect. Everyone has to make a living. What separates shills from honorable men is their use of facts, historical data, and rational thought to make their case. Deciphering the bullshit narratives spewed by the majority of faux journalists employed by the corporate fake news media versus straightforward non-slanted analysis from the reality grounded men is crucial to retaining integrity in a deceitful corrupt world.
I continue to respect the writings and analysis of Taleb, Shiller, Hussman, Mauldin, Jesse, Kreiger, Rosenberg, Bonner, Casey, Martenson, Kunstler, Schiff and lately Jordan Peterson, among many others. As the “everything bubble”, inflated by the Fed and their central banker brethren across the globe, has grown to epic proportions these men have endured heaps of scorn and ridicule from the small minded non-thinking momentum cowboys who arrogantly confuse easy money with their own financial brilliance. I continue to have the utmost respect for their ability to ignore the lure of following the crowd and sticking to the facts. It’s not easy stating the truth when 95% of so called financial journalists are bought off and captured by the Deep State.
The Wall Street cabal puppeteers have had their Federal Reserve puppets dancing to their tune for the last nine years as bailouts, QE, and free money for feckless financiers has propelled their latest bubble to epic proportions. The bubbles in the stock market, bond market and real estate market are all built upon a vaporous foundation of easy money debt. It took 219 years for the country to accumulate a $9.6 trillion national debt, but our fearless leaders have managed to add $11.6 trillion since September 2008, all geared to enrich Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the sick-care complex and mega-corporations, while leaving Main Street to fend for ourselves with stagnant wages and rising costs for necessities. With government, corporate and consumer debt levels at all-time highs, a financial collapse is inevitable. Hundreds of billions of student loan, auto loan, mortgage loans, and credit card debt are unpayable, especially in a rising rate environment.
As the chart above factually details, the “everything bubble” has put the previous two bubbles to shame. The thing about bubbles is they always pop. An unsustainable dynamic will not be sustained. The reversion to the mean will leave millions of delusional Americans destitute, dependent on the government, enraged, and looking for someone to blame other than themselves. Go to any 4th of July picnic and your average neighbor or relative will tell you how much their 401k and house value have soared as they have been convinced the economy is booming and on a sound footing.
They won’t tell you their credit card balance, mortgage balance, auto loan debt, or student loan debt obligations. The value of their stocks and real estate can plummet by 50% in a matter of months (as they did in 2001 and 2008), but the debt will remain, wrapped around their throats, choking them to death. They have willfully chosen to be ignorant of why asset values have soared and ignored the warnings of truth telling analysts. Human nature never changes, and people never learn from the past, even when they’ve been clubbed over the head with 50% losses twice in the last seventeen years.
I keep pondering whether this “everything bubble” is just another mass hysteria event like many before throughout history (Tulips, Roaring 20’s, Dot.com), or something deeper and more disturbing. I’m reaching the conclusion it is more than mass hysteria. It’s mental illness infecting a wide swath of the population. Normality in financial markets, government deficit spending, journalism and central bank interventions began to dissipate drastically at the turn of the century and accelerated rapidly after 9/11. Annual deficits have averaged over $900 billion since 9/11, versus $175 billion per year in the eight years prior to 9/11. We have been living in profoundly abnormal times, but few question the abnormality. They have been led to believe this is normal.
Arguing annual deficits of a trillion dollars, zero interest rates for eight years, a Federal Reserve colluding with Wall Street banks and the U.S. Treasury to manipulate stock markets, and a corporate media spewing misinformation, fake news, and propaganda is a normal state of affairs is an example of the Big Lie theory. Making these arguments is a false declaration of such outrageous magnitude, employed by the powers that be, as a propaganda measure in the belief that a lesser falsehood would not be considered credible by the masses.
The Big Lie has worked thus far, as government controlled education has dumbed down the masses, people are told what to think by the media propaganda machines, and individuals have chosen to be distracted by igadgets, social media, and modern day bread and circuses. Huxley thought mental illness of the populace was rampant in 1958. He’d be outraged by the level of willfully ignorant, abnormally normal people living in our profoundly sick society today.
“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
Who is to blame for the current state of affairs? The Deep State? Shadowy oligarchs? Politicians? The Jews? The Russians? There is one commonality – human beings are the members of each group. Humans have created the problems plaguing the world. Humans choose to act in a good or evil manner. Humans decide whether to lie or tell the truth. Humans decide whether to be driven by greed, power seeking, selfishness and hubris or generosity, citizenship, sacrifice and humility. The truth is humans commit unspeakable atrocities, steal, cheat, kill and destroy. They are also capable of generosity, self- sacrifice, acting with integrity, and behaving courageously. As Solzhenitsyn realized while imprisoned by the Soviets, good and evil passes through all human hearts.
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Today’s level of violence, mass murder and evil have not approached the monstrous deeds of Hitler, Stalin and Mao within the last century – Yet. Anyone who dismisses the possibility of bloodshed on a grand scale within our borders and the likelihood of a global “winner take all” war is ignorant of human nature, history, and the dynamics driving the course of events during this Fourth Turning. The seeds of evil are planted within each human soul and under the right (or wrong) conditions, can blossom into a full-blown landscape of hate, violence, cruelty, inhumanity and retribution.
Cooperation, peace, and mutually beneficial deeds have not been the default setting for human interaction throughout history. They are the exception, not the rule. But, the mass of humanity is willfully ignorant of history and naively believe their benevolent leaders and media thought police when fear is used to keep them under control. As Jordan Peterson points out, once people wake up to the realization of their potential for evil, they can resist being led to slaughter by their Deep State controllers.
“When once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially) their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.” ― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
In Part 2 of this article I will delve deeper into Peterson’s assertion we need to tell the truth in order to change ourselves and change the world.
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