Editor:Sean Carney, Editorial input: Roland McCabe, Image: Alan O’Rourke

Legal fiction: “an assumed fact notoriously false, upon which one reasons as if it were true.”Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation

Since the first Business-as-usual (BAU) revolution, our way of life has progressively been institutionalized. Today, real people are co-dependent on a mainstream “legal fiction” aka corporate persons modelled on the “original corporate raider.”

It is human to want to stay alive but with Scarcity baked into the system and fear baked into our beings, the obsession with surviving blinds you to how all of us are complicit in creating and sustaining a toxic BAU paradigm. Since money is (still) used to psychologically control us with numbers, how can one not be addicted to living a “cradle to grave” business plan?

Derived from Latin, ‘addiction’ means to be “enslaved” or “bound by something.”

Look at all the previous technological revolutions. In each case, a new technology opened up for exploitation a new, superabundant resource: agriculture — arable land; mechanical spinning and weaving — water power; steam engine and steelmaking — coal; internal combustion engine — oil; artificial intelligence-based robonanobiotronics — still oil? Sorry, that’s no longer overabundant by any stretch of the imagination. (If you said “renewable energy” then think again: wind turbines, solar panels and battery banks can’t be made or maintained without oil and natural gas.) Technology without a superabundant resource it can tap into is as useful as a spoon if your bowl is empty. The logic is simple: spot the resource; if you can’t, it’s probably you.” Dmitry Orlov

Since almost eight billion of us are perceived to be a “superabundant resource,” will most become “the abandoned carcass” as the Great Reset seeks to transition us into a future where data replaces money as the key tool of resource management?

Part I and Part II explore how our BAU way of life was evolved by real people doing their jobs, with the most addicted rewarded with money and status.

Based on addicting us to the pecking orders of Scarcity, Part III explores systemic patterns of behaviors that inevitably emerge. There are exceptions but the BAU system largely molds two key types of unnatural behaviors:

· Used to “faking it till they make it,” tyrants are paranoid about predictability, control, power and increasingly, have a penchant to want to live forever as gods.

· Since all key decisions that govern our lives are made at the corporate/ systemic level, the rest of us are either conditioned to try to emulate tyrants or are divided/traumatized and in the harrowing process of learning coping mechanisms: Learned helplessness. Or by Amusing Ourselves to Death.

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Let’s explore how legal fictions systemically hard-wire you to self-organize and to keep feeding yourself and each other to the insatiable BAU beast.

The Simple Age-old BAU Formula?

“We live in a society that demands addiction. The person who is best adjusted to this society is not dead and not alive because if you were fully alive, you couldn’t support the system.” Anne Wilson Schaef

The core dynamics of what deeply divide us:

· Money is the key tool for accessing basic necessities (and more). Is that why you trust money more than value one another?

· The operating system we depend on uses numbers to control, manipulate and addict us to the BAU cult of Scarcity.

· Corporate persons — “legal fictions” — provide the means for accessing basic necessities. They dangle wages, jobs and opportunities to have you surrender your time, ideas, energy, skills — YOUR (INNATE) VALUE — to them (some even call that theft or corporate theft of human rights).

Corporate persons are NOT individuals but are MADE UP of individuals. To survive, they have to outcompete others. Legally, they have no greater god than growth.

Isn’t this why you willfully outsource your survival to corporate rent-seekers?

· The year before the world’s first longest, deepest and most widespread depression, Edward Bernays published Propaganda. Through “the engineering of consent,” leaders learn to “control and regiment the masses according to our (their) will without their (our) knowing about it.”

· Today, money exists mostly as digital entries. Numbers transactionalize relationships, emotions, expressions, communications and increasingly, all aspects of our lives:

Sum of what We Each Do in Our “Surviving for Self” Belief Bubble = The Whole (But is the Whole/Context available to you and I?)

· Bruce K. Alexander believes the conventional wisdom of the last two centuries had focused too single-mindedly on the afflicted individual addict. In The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, he observes how people develop all sorts of addictions to adapt to life.

Scarcity self-organizes you to conform and to work hard for money so the more you have, the more you want. This instills the worst of insecurities and systemically manifests in “Taker and Giver” aka “Predator and Prey” dynamics.

Doesn’t the operating system that thrives on Scarcity mold addictions?

· The Iron Law of Oligarchy further ensures we create a toxic paradigm that’s legally more pro Big Business than real people to live.

· As the cost of living becomes increasingly unbearable, won’t you be wired to constantly FIGHT to buy what we produce to build corporate empires — even if that means racking up huge debts?

The paradigm of Scarcity hard-wires the most addicted to their “Surviving for Self” belief bubbles so they disregard everything apart from that and wanting to win at all costs.

On its own, money (or even data) means nothing beyond being a psychological symbol of what we have been conditioned to value.

But because all you perceive is money, are you aware YOU are the vital and “superabundant resource” that fuels the global operating system?

Has BAU normalized the world wars as our way of life?

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” Sun Tzu

After the Second World War, military strategy materialized in the business world as strategic planning. It focuses you on setting objectives, collecting intelligence and then using that intelligence to make informed decisions about how to achieve objectives to out-compete the competition.

With themilitary industrial complexinfluence normalized, you may not see how sports and games encapsulate war-mongering patterns of ‘I win, you lose’ behaviors in short-sighted artificial zero-sum games. Or how online or off, the data-driven gamification of life is the covert art of adding play to engage and motivate people to do what “legal fictions” want you to do — competing for rewards.

Scarcity, the Bedrock of Economics

“Nowadays people know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde

Economics is the study of how we use limited resources like money, time and attention.

What’s rare is often expensive, and the scarcity of anything will make it more valuable and obsessed over. So, the rarer and more unattainable, the higher an object’s price becomes. Because many people perceive higher prices to mean higher quality, “legal fictions” manufacture scarcity. Raising prices systemizes scarcity effects to sustain an artificial system of supply and demand.

As you fight each other over whatever is desirable, do you realize that the true price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it? Or fundamentally, what it means to be you — a human being?

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anaïs Nin

Money is a social construct but when your basic needs are not met, it will be difficult to think of much else.

Your anxiety over scarcity is largely created by your belief bubble. When the only thing you need to keep at all costs is your job/life/reputation, won’t you fight tooth and nail and do whatever it takes to protect yourself? Ultimately, isn’t that how you self-organize to co-create the social contract — a lifelong business plan — we live?

Your belief bubble blinds you to how the whole is greater than the sum of what we each do i.e.,how everything we do fuels the making and exponential growth of competing and distributed artificial (corporate) persons. The “transactionalization of life” renders our hard work, time and labor invisible.

BAU is predicated on celebrating how rich people are doing because investments — making money with money — is what’sprized:

“Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.” Rutger Bregman

The “FIRE sector” — an acronym for Finance, Insurance and Real Estate — is now comprised of the most powerful corporate persons:

“The real estate, financial system, monopolies, and other rent-extracting ‘tollbooth’ privileges are not valued in terms of their contribution to production or living standards, but by how much they can extract from the economy. By classical definition, these rentier payments are not technologically necessary for production, distribution, and consumption. They are not investments in the economy’s productive capacity, but extraction from the surplus it produces.” Michael Hudson

BAU is rent-seeking

“First came privateers and pirates, then commercial corporations. That the first were freebooters outside the law and the second were legalized by nation-states, materially changed the form but did little to change the function.” Dee Hock

In J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception, Michael Hudson explains the concept of rent-seeking:

“A zero-sum activity in which one party’s gain is another’s loss, unlike new capital investment and hiring that expand an economy’s production and income stream. The classical meaning of ‘rent-seeking’ refers to landlords, natural resource owners or monopolists who extract economic rent by special privilege, without their own labor or enterprise.”

In The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay, Professor Guy Standing affirms:

“There is a lie at the heart of global capitalism. Politicians, financiers, and global bureaucrats claim to believe in free, competitive markets, but have constructed the most unfree market system ever made.

It is corrupt because income is channelled to the owners of property — financial, physical and intellectual — at the expense of society … global capitalism is rigged in favour of rentiers to the detriment of all of us, especially the precariat. A plutocracy and elite enriches itself, not through production of goods and services, but through ownership of assets, including intellectual property, aided by subsidies, tax breaks, debt mechanisms, revolving doors between politics and business, and the privatization of public services.

Rentier capitalism is entrenched by the corruption of democracy, manipulated by the plutocracy and an elite-dominated media.”

How BAU brings out the worst in us

Margaret Heffernan, the former CEO of five companies, believes excessive competition stifles our creativity, discovery and joy. In A Bigger Prize, she shares an experiment to determine whether the most productive chickens would breed a kind of super chicken and spawn future generations of top producers:

Evolutionary biologist William Muir at Purdue University chose to experiment with chickens because their productivity is relatively easy to measure — you just count the eggs. Numbers greatly simplify complexity.

He started by dividing the chickens into two groups: The most productive were selected for the first and he left the rest to roam freely. After six generations, the chickens in the average group were found to be plump, fully feathered and their egg production had also increased dramatically.

Alas, of “the super chicken” group, only three were left.

To survive, they had pecked the others to death. Over successive generations, they also became less productive. By contrast, the free-range chickens became even more productive over time.

Starting from school through to career and perhaps even while seeking life partners, BAU seems to super reinforce “the super chicken” model.”

By picking superstars — the brightest and most knowledgeable men or women and giving them all the resources and power, the popular myth is that they will lead us to success and happiness.

But just like in Muir’s experiment, the results have been aggression, dysfunction and sheer waste. Qualities and behaviors that make individuals successful — narcissism and self-aggrandizement, the ability to skillfully speak or act in an evasive way, having no conscience or moral compass and presenting oneself in ways that are not authentic: All are devastating for good group results or healthy workplace dynamics.

Key Corporate Drivers of the Iron Law of Oligarchy

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frederic Bastiat

In his 1911 book “Political Parties,” Robert Michels asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable because an “iron law” within any democratic organization is part of the “tactical and technical necessities” of organization.

But let’s not forget the context — we are deeply enmeshed in a BAU paradigm of Control through Scarcity.

Michels’ theory states that no matter how democratic they may first appear, all complex organizations eventually evolve into oligarchies stewarded by a “leadership class” that frequently functions as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists.

Just as on factory assembly lines, bureaucracy works when jobs are highly specialized as the work is highly standardized. A large hierarchy of middle managers may control the work but the ultimate power rests in very few hands.

“Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred — ergo, highly secure — lifelong position.” R. Buckminster Fuller

Measured and benchmarked against numeric Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — as everyone does his/her job — bureaucratization and specialization become the driving processes.

The result? A group of professional administrators rises to lead the rationalization and routinization of authority and decision-making. Since leaders have control over sanctions and rewards and promote likeminded peers, bureaucracy by design leads to reinforcing the centralization of power.

How the system molds corporate behaviors

As an example, consider the boom years of the 1990s:

According to James Hooton, then chief of Andersen’s worldwide auditing, the accounting industry had flexed its lobbying muscle on Capitol Hill like never before:

“If you move accounting and accounting standards into the political environment, then you’ve lost control over whether those standards are the best standards.”

As accounting principles became influenced by commercial and political interests, Frontline, the PBS documentary series, details the accounting wars. Three major political battles were fought over stock options, tort reform and an all-out war over the SEC’s attempt to separate auditing and consulting.

Also in the late 90s, secret meetings took place in London where the blueprint for the return of the East India Company was drafted. Called #Vision2020 the scheme was a brainchild of an American consultancy firm born out of US military. Widely considered as the gold standard in management consultancy, McKinsey is also the juggernaut firm the world’s most powerful executives call when they have a problem they cannot solve.

Via GreatGameIndia:

“In a nutshell, the Big Four accounting firms are responsible for the creation of the Tax Haven ecosystem in the former British colonies from where corruption money from around the world is laundered and funnelled into Inner London — the elaborate setup widely known as Empire 2.0.

The Big Four include the consultancy firms KPMG, Ernst & Young (EY), Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Together they audit 99% of the companies in the FTSE 100 and 96% of the companies in the FTSE 250 Index, an index of the leading mid-cap listing companies, dominating the entire audit market. In other words any and every instance of large scale corruption goes through their supervision.

According to Australian taxation expert George Rozvany, the Big Four are ‘the masterminds of multinational tax avoidance and the architects of tax schemes which cost governments and their taxpayers an estimated $US1 trillion a year.’

At the same time they are advising governments (including India) on tax reforms, they are advising their multinational clients how to avoid taxes. It was reported in 2012 that at least 21 trillion dollars of worldwide ill-gotten money of their elite clients was hidden away by the Big Four in tax havens.”

The authors of Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works provide an exemplary evaluation of how tax havens function in the global financial system. Individually, tax havens may appear insignificant in the business of managing the monetary resources of individuals, organizations, and countries but collectively, they have a major impact on the global economy.

According to Ronen Palan, one of its authors:

“Tax havens are now a central component of the way international business is conducted. The Panama Papers leak is just further evidence that tax havens are an integral component of modern business.

If we have learnt anything from the various leaks about what takes place in the offshore economy, then it is that the accountancy and legal firms are key players in making them function.”

In The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Columbia Law School professor Katharina Pistor affirms how over time, the invisible pens of lawyers and judges have created broader and bolder property rights that are ultimately enforced by the power of the state:

“Capital is inextricably linked to law and state power, because in its absence, the legal privileges capital enjoys would not be respected by others.”

Rex Nutting writing for MarketWatch shares:

“With the right legal coding, any object, claim or idea can be transformed into capital. Spurred on by their clients, lawyers have pushed the boundaries of what can be considered capital over the centuries, using techniques updated from feudal times to code land, debt, stocks, bonds, derivatives, ideas, digital codes, genetics and even our emotions into capital that can be bought, sold, hoarded or converted into money.

The essence of capital is durable and transferrable property rights over assets. The legal coding in deeds, trusts, wills, debts, corporate charters, sales and user agreements, antitrust law, bankruptcy law, patent law, and thousand other documents determine who has the priority claims — in other words, who are the winners and who are the losers.”

Political questions decided behind closed doors

These are not abstract concerns. With more of the world’s wealth accumulating in fewer hands, with capital expanding its domain to encompass more intangibles, including my thoughts, my movements, my DNA and even my facial expressions, the rights and privileges of capital are urgent matters for all of us.

The capital controlled by Facebook FB, -0.99%, Alphabet GOOG, +0.70%GOOGL, +0.52% and Amazon AMZN, +0.86% consists mostly of trade secrets built on a Big Database of our behavior: what we search for, what we share, what we buy.”

It is not to the strong, or the swift, or the wise that the victory belongs, but to the one with the best lawyer.”

In more recent times

“Actually war becomes perpetual when it is used as a rationale for peace.” Norman Solomon

In June 2019, the United Nations (UN) quietly signed a memorandum with the World Economic Forum (WEF) — the backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — to implement the Strategic Partnership Framework for Agenda 2030.

Two months later, Mark Carney told the Federal Reserve’s annual gabfest at the Jackson Hole Wyoming retreat that central bankers could develop a network of national digital currencies to create a new, basket-managed “synthetic hegemonic currency.”

“The Going Direct Reset was approved at the G7 central bankers’ meeting in Jackson Hole on August 22, 2019 … The Going Direct Reset is about the reengineering of our financial system. The U.S. dollar reserve currency system is aging, and plans are underway for a new global financial system aimed at increasing centralized global control through the use of digital technology and telecommunications and the end of liquid currencies as we know them.” Catherine Austin Fitts

That same month, the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of America’s largest companies headed by Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., stated that 181 top US CEOs realize companies need a Purpose beyond Profit.

In March 2021, the New York Federal Reserve Bank announced it will lend an additional $1 trillion a day through the end of the month to large banks — in addition to $1 trillion in 14-day weekly loans.

Is this an open push for a global bankers’ dictatorship? Of foxes guarding the hen house (us)?

The “Rule by Numbers” Operating System: Control through Scarcity

“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Benjamin Disraeli

What you think of as money is actually an accounting simplification but let’s not forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy and the power of the accounting oligopoly.

Accounting is frequently portrayed as a value-free mechanism for allocating resources and ensuring their deployment in the most efficient manner. But as technologies have evolved the language of all things financial, Accounting has allowed businesses to track all types of financial/trading transactions.

Wharton accounting professor Christopher D. Ittner even calls Accounting “the language of business.”

This “science” provides management with a clear set of data for finding the best path to maximizing profits and power for themselves through their business:

“Accounting firms are paid fees to help their clients, legally, avoid paying tax on their sales. Companies transfer wealth from society to capital with the help of an accounting industry that has been at the heart of capitalism since the very beginning. The architecture has deep foundations, and it allows corporations to sidestep the sources of revenue which might enable governments to improve the quality of life.” Christina Ionela Neokleous

In Accounting at War: The Politics of Military Finance,Warwick Funnell and Michele Chwastiak demonstrate how Accounting for military forces is primarily a political practice. Throughout history, military force has been a pervasive force:

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” Thomas L. Friedman

Accounting has repeatedly been used to assert civilian control over the military, instill rational business practices on war, and create the visibilities and invisibilities necessary to legitimize the use of force.

“I look at how Accounting influences our perception of war.” Michele Chwastiak

Accounting for Warauthors Michele Chwastiak and Glen Lehman believe Accounting has actually helped to rationalize and normalize violence by not accounting for human costs. This numerically guided “thought system” provides decision-makers with a way to think about death and destruction without actually having to think about death and destruction.

Because it“reduces people, places and things to quantities and lends itself to an abstract, cold and calculating way of reasoning,” what Accounting does not say is what makes the difference.

Any surprise that Silicon Valley was built on the business of war?

Tokenization: New technology, same top-down tactic/direction

“Rewards and punishments are the lowest forms of education.” Lao Tzu

With rules devised to reward the results, isn’t Accounting the core but invisible underlying (distributed and decentralized) BAU operating system of governance that uses numbers to self-organize and have us perpetually feed ourselves and each other to the insatiable BAU beast?

Based on how the Big Business-driven WEF is driving our shared future, Ida Auken, former Minister for the Environment of Denmark and voice of the Davos elite, predicts this by 2030:

“I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes … One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.”

By 2030, are the UN and WEF signaling that we will all need to rent everything we need to survive? As corporate persons dispense with paying salaries, is below what’s designed to take over?

“As soon as each of these things become the subject of a service, they become transactions: they become an atomic part of a procedure.

Because this is what a transaction is: an atom in a procedure, in an algorithm. This includes the fact that transactions are designed, according to a certain business, operational, strategic, marketing model.

This means that when our relationships, emotions, expressions, knowledge, communication and everything become transactions, they also become atoms of those business models whose forms, allowances, degrees of freedoms and liberty are established by those models.” Salvatore Iaconesi

Excerpt fromSocial movements powering the future of money:

“With digital, reward-and-punish can more speedily and more exponentially exploit behaviors. For example, by the end of 2017, Bitcoin’s price had soared to near $20,000 but one year later, it tanked to below $4,000. What a difference a year madeas Bitcoiners tried to survive for themselves.

To outsource our value to codes, to mathematical algorithms formulated and tweaked for powerful interests, the Blockchain and smart contracts have already been bandied about as ‘trustless’ solutions.

‘Artificial persons’ have no higher god than growth and the global rent-seeking ‘technostructure’ is shrewdly built on debt. When people lose their jobs to automation, robotics and AI, how will they pay back any of their accumulating debts? How will you survive?

You may want to consider tokenization which very conveniently allows you to convert your rights to an asset (including your DNA) into a digital token:

Let’s say you own an apartment valued at $200,000. On a Blockchain platform that supports smart contracts, tokenization can convert that monetary value into say, 200,000 tokens. Each token represents 0.0005 percent share of the underlying asset (your apartment) and this can be freely bought and sold on the different exchanges.

A stranger who buys 100,000 tokens of that will own half your apartment while owning 200,000 tokens will make the buyer a 100 percent owner.

The Business-as-usual logic maintains that because Blockchain is a public ledger and immutable, that alone will ensure that once you buy tokens, nobody can ‘erase’ your ownership even if it is not registered with a government-run registry. However, if you upload titles and deeds to your (physical or intangible) assets to an online platform, doesn’t that mean that anything of value that you own can also be taken away from you with your (unwitting) consent?”

In Iaconesi’s words, to become “Citizens of everywhere. Citizens of nowhere and nothing” because:

“As a society, we are now using Science and Data like once we used Religion and Magic. The Blockchain is one direct effect of this.

It is the procedure that “liberates” us from trust, from having to trust, from having to trust others. It compels you to trust, because it is the algorithm itself which embodies trust. And, by doing that, by forcing you to become like it, transforms all into a transaction. To make trust exist, it transforms all into itself.”

End of Life as We Know it?

“The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.” Lao Tzu

Since the second Earth Summit (the UN Conference on Environment and Development) in 1992, the UN has been advocating that Agenda 21 (since evolved/rebranded as Agenda 2030, Sustainable Development Goals, Fourth Industrial Revolution, Great Reset and etc.) is a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”

Addicted to feeding the insatiable BAU beast, the Greater fools of our time are now being signaled to transition humanity from the world’s dumbest idea to the world’s most dangerous idea to continue feeding the insatiable BAU engine and to systemically grow Big Business with no greater god than growth.

Anand Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant turned journalist and author, reminds that so much of the very nature of management consulting firms “is about increasing investors’ share of profits by reducing labor’s share.”

In January, 2021, ILO reports that at least 225 million full-time jobs have disappeared because of the measures implemented to police the novel coronavirus pandemic while the wealth of ten of the world’s richest men has increased by more than £400 billion. According to Oxfam’s latest report, the world’s 2,153 billionaires now have more wealth than 60 percent of the planet’s population (4.6 billion).

Businesses minimize costs by outsourcing their risks to all and sundry. As automation, robotics, and AI replace most humans in the workplace, won’t getting a salary consequently go the way of the dinosaurs? WILL they keep paying us to buy what we produce? Especially as the Internet has made obvious how we are a “superabundant resource” addicted to working for free.

Granted, a universal basic income beckons but won’t our Iron Law of Oligarchy-induced way of life hijack that sustenance to have your belief bubble bridge us directly into the Age of Surveillance Capitalism?

Let’s not forget BlackRock’s call to reinvent investing in Part I.

“Data is to Technocracy as blood is to your body.” Patrick Wood

Systemically divided, most startups fail. In 2014, Richard (RJ) Eskow writes that the “sharing economy” has made Silicon Valley rich by taking from the rest of us.

Has BAU turned Silicon Valley intowhat’s perhaps one of the biggest ponzi schemes in human history?

The president of a US financial planning practice explains rent-seeking:

“You might think that giving away money is free, but it is not. Even if you hold a random lottery, potential winners still need to take the time to enter. At my $5 hourly wage, my entry cost me $15. I learned later they received 450 entries. If my experience was typical, the rent-seeking cost of all the applicants was $6,750 just to win a $1,000 scholarship. If you add the time to judge the competition and send return letters, the waste gets even greater.

Rent-seeking never encourages productivity. The production of valuable goods and services is maximized with strong property rights when little is wasted in efforts to seize the surplus of others or to prevent others from seizing our surplus.

Much rent-seeking is redistributing the surplus of one group of the middle class to another group of the middle class via the government. Although there might be great incentives for one group to seek another’s surplus, there is no added value for society as a whole.” David John Marotta

In the BAU paradigm, any form of competition is a hidden form of rent-seeking.

Based on more of the same, do you have a role in perpetuating how society will disappear in the final corporate takeover of our lives and whatever’s natural?

“Society as actively and consciously built by people who freely decide if and when to trust each other, and who collectively agree to the modalities of this attribution.

What remains is only consumption of services and products. Safe, transparent and all. But mere transactionalized consumption. Society ends, and so does citizenship: we become citizen of nothing, of the network, of the algorithm.” Salvatore Iaconesi

Ready for a Shift out of your Belief Bubble?

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” Lao Tzu

Since legal fictions control us and the Iron Law of Oligarchy addicts us to a life ruled by spreadsheets, can we solve our challenges with the same BAU logic used to create them?

Making money with moneyis what’sprized. With our money, the rich and powerful (including institutional investors) have systemically turned our world into a global casino increasingly controlled by algorithms where all the risks are borne by us while they retain the key benefits.

Do your own research but I hope this three-part article helps provide the context of how we unwittingly but systemically create an unnaturally inhumane world. By controlling us with Scarcity and numbers, the BAU operating system has us manifest a toxic way of life.

If you want our operating system to bring out the best in us, can you PLEASE clap/like and share this article?

Help strangers anywhere understand that we NEED to reboot our “Surviving for Self” belief bubbles before we can go from Control to Empowerment.

Not for me but for yourself, our future generations, and all of us.

Our shared future depends on you if you do not want society to disappear.

Thank you ♥️