Panocracy 32
The Big Boys' Team
These articles are all about a simple idea – that we can and should adopt a different system of democracy. We call it panocracy and it's a lot closer to the democratic ideal than we've had before.
At the moment we're looking at the effects of the largely unelected cabal of elites that many people think has far too much say in how our lives are controlled.
It has always been the case that governments and their acolytes have resorted to dirty tricks to get their own way. Our predecessors were used to it, we expect it, and as long as we have our current systems of government it will not go away.
What has really changed is that the balancing forces, the ones that made it harder for such skulduggery to happen, have also begun to become greedy for political power and influence. In the past we believed that our main civil authorities: law, health, education and commerce were on the side of the population. These bodies used to hold up our principles of decency, honesty and integrity but no longer.
Last time we talked briefly about Mr William Henry Gates III, founder of Microsoft Inc. and born-again philanthrope, his relationship to Dr Anthony Fauci, US public servant and cheerleader for Big Pharma and their place in the informal network of elite movers and shakers.
This time we're going to have a broader look at that network to see how big it is, if it's actually big enough to make good decisions and if not, how much bigger a power network would need to be to provide the best government for a society.
But raw size isn't all that matters. The structure of the network and the political and cultural biases of the people within it are also major contributors to its outcomes. Some people are simply more powerful than others – which is to say their opinions tend to overrule the opinions of others. This effectively reduces the size of the network.
It became obvious during the Covid catastrophe that many groups were pushing a common message – the so-called 'narrative'. The World Health Organisation, national Governments and their agencies, social media and other big corporations all seemed mysteriously and almost simultaneously to fall into a totalitarian mindset.
We're going to argue that this came about in our so-called 'democracies' because our leaders, who are elected and appointed to protect our freedoms, actually sided with those who would happily see them removed.
The hypothesis is that this was down to a relatively small number of people who are at the same time in competition and in collaboration with each other to advance their position.
Think of junior executives in a large corporation all pushing to be the boss.
Their ideology has been taken on board by a large part of our institutional leadership simply because they go along to get along, not because they necessarily subscribe to it. There are a few dissenters who are brave enough to risk their careers but not nearly enough.
The elites’ aim - though they would strenuously deny it - is control by a top-down hierarchy. This should come as no surprise as such people are apt to be the types who espouse the 'me first' philosophy.
Emperors are never democrats.
None of them has yet managed to become the king of kings but that doesn't mean they aren't trying.
The Pecking Order
Hierarchical control tends to hold sway within public and private institutions – it's human nature after all. Those at the top who have spent their career clawing their way up are not going to let go without a fight. They may feel some responsibility to those whose livelihoods their empire supports (and probably use that as an excuse to justify unethical practices) but their main aim is simply to hang on to their hard-won power and extend it if they can.
So the character of an organisation – public or private - is set by the few (or the one) who sit at the top.
Some commentators like Martin Gurri, the former CIA information analyst, have suggested that the institutions that make up the Establishment network were in the past even more distant from the masses and could therefore enjoy monopoly control of information.
Recently this status quo has been swept away by a 'digital tsunami' (as Gurri describes it) of information coming 'from the bottom'. The agencies no longer enjoy their absolute authority. They do however want to drag us back to the way things were when their diktats were unquestioned. In the good old days we had the top-down era of robber barons, factories, music while you work, the golden age of Hollywood and the BBC, but the monopoly on information has been eaten away with the rise of the internet.
A new generation of investigative reporters has sprung up and these people are not accountable to press barons or big corporate ad accounts for their livelihood. They're mostly not mainstream yet but that may well change as the cabalistic cock-ups continue.
If you believe Gurri's hypothesis, the censorship by the mainstream of dissenting views and defamation of those who promote them are part of a general reaction by establishment figures to reassert their former levels of control over information – of authority.
As well as that, life has got a lot more complicated with new ways to use and abuse technology springing up all the time. As a result, the elites and the agencies they run are increasing out of their depth.
Their response is that only authority - as embodied by qualified experts and paraded by the elites - can be trusted. As we saw in the case of Dr Fauci, current authorities are not unbiased and certainly can't be trusted to provide policy that is good for the rest of us.
The Big Boys' Team
That this regression into totalitarianism happened with such speed and vehemence in the Covid debacle gives a huge clue to the size of the elite group - political leaders, agency chiefs, CEOs, financiers and media moguls – and the kind of culture that it shares.
In short the network has come to be small in size and homodox in outlook.
Take, for example, Larry Fink's Blackrock which has effective control over $10 trillion of investments.
Three former Blackrock executives hold senior positions in the Biden government.
So we can see that this little part of the network consists of the US President, the VP and a few very experienced and savvy financial players with direct contacts to the biggest money manager in the world.
No need to ask who calls the shots in those meetings.
To understand why this means unelected power, it's important to see that even though Blackrock doesn't directly own the investments it manages – it decides which assets to invest in. The size and reach of its funds can simply mean life or death even for a large corporation. If a Blackrock fund decides to pull out its holdings the resultant loss of investor confidence can wipe out a company. A huge investment can do the opposite. CEOs know this and make sure their company stays on the right side of its fund manager and hence its overlord, Blackrock.
In case you think this kind of thing is limited to the USA, here's a little about recent UK Chancellor, Sajid Javid: “Before being first elected in 2010, he worked in business and finance. Aged 25, he became a Vice President at Chase Manhattan Bank. He later moved to Deutsche Bank in London to help build its business in emerging market countries. Sajid left Deutsche Bank as a senior Managing Director in the summer of 2009 to give something back through politics.”
It's probably just a coincidence that he left Deutsche Bank just after its several year involvement in the Libor Interest Rate scam. The bank was subsequently fined $2.5bn for that. Oh, and it 'settled' another $7.2bn for 'contributing to an international financial crisis'. I wonder who really paid for all those fines and settlements.
Mr. Javid also attended a WEF meeting in January 2020 to 'drink champagne with billionaires'. All perfectly innocent of course.
It seems that whatever stone you turn over, something nasty crawls out and this scenario pervades public life and industry and commerce.
Meryl Nass details a little of it in this substack article.
She points out how the same bad pennies always seem to be showing up whatever the current 'crisis':“But isn’t it strange how few players the big boys’ team has? They have to recycle them over and over.” One door closes and another opens.
So we can have an inkling of how the power is exercised and how it's justified but what size is the network that essentially determines policies?
Using the size of the human neocortex, Robin Dunbar suggested in 1992 that a human can maintain a cohesive social unit through time of (about) 150 people. Clearly a single number can only be a guide and others have suggested, using statistical techniques, that it's somewhere between 4 and 520 (95% confidence). The upper bound is really the one that matters here so we're talking a few hundred.
If we assume that our elites have similar neocortexes to the rest of us then each one will have a few hundred associates, some less, some more. These are people the individual will know and trust, at least enough to take seriously.
These associates will have been consciously or subconsciously selected for various attributes including political power, wealth, and connections to those, together with media profile, personality, desire for advancement and credentials which are all the attributes that ambitious elites find useful.
Dunbar points out that “When a group's size exceeds this limit, it becomes unstable and begins to fragment” so we also note that breakups can occur within the network. Elites know this too and they pay special attention to not being ejected from the group. This means going along with the group norms even if you don't subscribe.
A group of a few hundred people will get hold of an idea very quickly, especially in this era of instant communication. Some memes will catch fire, especially those which appeal the elites' desire for control. If they can piggyback the idea on the back of a manifestly 'good cause' like public health or 'climate change' then the meme's a winner.
If they're as well-connected as our elites then each group member will have considerable sway over something the size of a country. It's not hard to see why repressive ideologies affect all our lives quickly.
The result has been that the effective control of tax revenue money has been diverted from those who were elected to spend it wisely to those who wish it to be spent in the pursuit of their own aims.
We are approaching economic and social ruin as a consequence of the groupthink and hubris of these people.
As the saying goes “I went bankrupt slowly at first, then all of a sudden”.
How Big is Big Enough?
So if a power cabal of a few hundred is not enough to get policies that don't run us into the ground how big does the ruling tribe have to be?
I had hoped to provide a mathematical demonstration of this and who knows, it may be possible. But it seems to me that any ‘proof’ is still going to hinge on assumptions and beliefs that are open to question.
One of those beliefs is simply whether you believe in democracy or not. If not then perhaps you believe in the infallibility of credentialed specialists. At the moment we have no evidence to suggest that a different group of credentialed specialists would have done any better than the ones we found ourselves lumbered with.
If you don't want some people to have their say because you think they're stupid or prejudiced then you may not be swayed by the following arguments.
In the Covid catastrophe our leaderships allowed themselves to be led by opinions promoted by a powerful tribe. They actively suppressed entirely reasonable and safe mainstream views, for example from the sponsors of the Great Barrington Declaration while espousing risky, possibly murderous, mass medication strategies using novel and potentially dangerous medicines.
If we don't want to
miss useful - or even critically important – policy innovations
fail to consider ALL the pros and cons of each policy proposal (RFC)
balance the extreme views of some groups with their opposites
watch helplessly as political power is further syphoned from voters to vested interests
then no member of society can be ignored.
Panocracy requires that we must all be in the ruling tribe if our society is to reverse its downward spiral and regain its prosperity.
Next time we're going to look at that much-abused and overused concept, freedom, to see how it might affect the size of the ruling tribe.