A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 18 – Retail politics, scarcity, corruption

It is really pretty simple.

Among Bucky Fuller’s many astute observations were the ideas that all politics was about who got the benefit of the scarce resources, and that all politicians were “stooges” of the economic interests. With Jimmy Carter’s death yesterday, I was reminded that he established the Department of Energy (“DOE”) in 1977. Dennis Lee’s brilliant marketing plan for the world’s best heating system was predicated on Carter’s energy tax credit.

Dennis had an ally in the head of the DOE in New England when I became Dennis’s partner in 1987, but in the months after that, one person who approached us was a long-time energy activist, and he said that the DOE was nothing but a front for energy corporations. When Dennis and I spoke at DOE hearings in 1997, the DOE official who ran the hearings told us the same thing. In 2009, when I helped Brian O’Leary approach the DOE, I wondered what he thought that we would accomplish.

I have written on the medical racket since the 1990s, and corporate dominance of medicine in the USA began during the Civil War, when Big Pharma got its start by vending mercury “medicine” to the troops. When robber barons such as Carnegie and Rockefeller got involved over a century ago, it assured the medical racket’s status, and Bill Gates is just the latest “philanthropist” to preside over the racket, which was never more apparent than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Gates had carte blanche to evangelize in the media about treatments that he had a financial stake in, along with Anthony Fauci.

The level of corruption is surreal, and it is completely normalized by our system, as if it was the natural order of society. In a way, it is. Elites have dominated civilization since its earliest days. Elites were always economic elites above all else, and conspicuous consumption was the marker of their status. What we see today is little more than a modern version of Sumer. In a world of scarcity, I just don’t see it changing much. But in a world of abundance, none of it will make sense any longer, and elites will become obsolete. Elites understand this very well, which is why they have been at the forefront of ensuring that the means of abundance remains unimaginable to the vast majority of humanity, and humanity obliges them. This was the most important lesson of my journey. It really does little good to castigate elites for their immense crimes, which nearly all of us are accomplices to. The only real solution to elites is to make them obsolete, only abundance can do that, only one thing can bring about abundance, and politicians are not going to help.

It is really pretty simple, but it takes a comprehensive perspective to see it.