THE SATURDAY ESSAY: They have 9 ways to enslave us. We do not have 9 lives with which to escape.

 It might feel like convenience. It might look like progress. It may seem to be good for the economy. It may convince you that we need more protection from terrorists. But the ‘It’ I’m talking about – universal digital purchase via smart plastic – is nothing less than the transfer of all our citizen rights to the all-embracing ruthlessness of technocratic corporate States. This isn’t science fiction: it is the coming triumph of inhuman fact.

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The reasons why banks, governments and security bureaucrats want to move away from cash to digital plastic as the world currency form have changed in intensity and number over the last forty years. In some sort of roughly chronological order, they are as follows:

1. To reduce the costs of security, transport and storage involved in the printing and distribution of physical cash
2. To reduce the cost and increase the margins involved in offering instant credit
3. To increase the velocity of plastic use, which acts as a permanent ‘invisible’ stimulus for purchase, and thus help in maintaining steady gdp “growth”
4. To make it easier for State treasuries to track and tax sales in what had previously been the “black” (unseen) economy
5. After the 2008 banking crisis, to help banks increase margins on credit, given the higher rates and service charges levied on credit and debit cards
6. To facilitate direct banking bailins using “creditor” (aka customer) deposits electronically….thus removing the fear of bank runs on cash should confidence in bank solvency deteriorate
7. To reduce resistance to tax demands at all levels by using direct electronic withdrawal of citizen funds
8. Similarly, to enable globalist energy, health and service entities to offer credit via smart plastic with similar rights to irresistible use of consumer bank deposits
9. To ensure eventually that every adult owns a digital smart card for every purchase they make, thus providing an instant fix on their location for security agency surveillance purposes.

Looked at overall, we can see from the above that the motives for the move from physical to virtual in terms of “money” have been, variously, more banking profits, more credit dependence, more citizen feelgood factors, higher tax takes, reduced citizen power to object to the foregoing, and reduced ability to oppose an amoral corporate State.

Over the next twelve years at most, the emphasis of power between the citizen and an increasingly technocratic corporate surveillance State will move from being one where we have the choice not to pay, to one in which they have a carte blanche to steal.

In just sixty years, we will all have gone from being erudite, sovereign consumers with the power to make or break a system, to a suppliant gaggle of geese being turned upside down at regular intervals, the better to empty their pockets of any remaining golden eggs.
And we will have paid for this privilege every step of the way.
Why is this not so much possible as almost inevitable?

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As always, the reasons are myriad. A person born around a hundred years ago, for example, transported forward to today, would laugh disbelievingly at the idea of us being where we are now….let alone where we’re going by 2030 at the latest. Readers of George Orwell’s signature novel Ninteen Eighty Four were, in the 1950s, terrified by the possibilities that the author set out before them: the 1953 BBC rendition of the book (starring a young Peter Cushing as Winston Smith) created a sensation – along with several Parliamentary questions about whether it was right for the national broadcaster “to frighten the British People in such a gratuitous manner”.

But relatively few drastic changes in our culture were required to fertilise the soil (a polite way of putting it) in preparation for a passive acceptance of – and even enthusiasm for – totalitarianism by another name.

The first factor is without doubt the slow speed at which banking, investment and ‘blocist’ ideas have copulated with technology. It is now nearly 50 years since the first UK credit card, 45 years since the first cash machine, 43 years since the UK voted to stay in the EEC, 34 years since the onset of financial Big Bang, 31 years since Black Friday, 23 years since the internet went mass market, and 12 years since EFTPOS smart cards became available.

No matter that the last five years have seen an exponential explosion in hitech: since the invention of plastic credit, an entire old generation has died, and an entire new generation has reached a level of management maturity. For the greater majority of humans in the West alive today, the wisdom of elders is either arrogantly dismissed, or goes unnoticed.

The second factor segues neatly in here. Streamed and open-minded, meritocratic education in Europe has been replaced by target driven, one-size-fits-all narrow learnings that reward conformity.

The third factor is the near extinction of genuinely fearless and clinically databased investigative journalism to hold (for example) Blairite relativism and neocon globalist monetary theory up to the light of empirical reality. Honourable exceptions here include Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Daily Telegraph, Paul Craig Roberts in the US, Dr Tim Morgan on the subject of energy-surplus economics, the late, hugely lamented Christopher Booker, and Craig Murray the Scottish former diplomat. 

In short, the lobster has been so slowly boiled it thinks death is a sauna, the lobster’s education persuaded the poor thing that it is an amoeba, and the lobster’s daily media kept presenting abnormal danger as Normal Service to be resumed as soon as possible.
Smaller but also telling influences include time starvation, media programming distraction, cynicism about – and apathy towards – the subject of political history, and a consequent inability to spot the commonality between Johnson, Hunt, Cable, Corbyn and Farage: viz, they are all selling tartan paint.

So here we are again, back at the same old conundrum: what is to be done?

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There are always short, medium and longer-term actions to be considered.

Short-term, we need to persuade the 12% of Brexit Don’tKnows to hold their noses and support Boris’s new Administration, and perhaps Farage’s TBP as part of it.

Medium-term, we need to engage with that 12% of open-minded people to start legal but powerful resistance to the corporate State and its aims while we still can.

Longer-term, we need a revolution in education to embrace less conformity and more social curriculum elements like health, civics, respect for others and genuine independence in our trade and foreign policies.

I continue to doubt that such moves will be Westminster based. What we need more than anything else now is our own Gilets Jaunes movement with the goal of both holding privilege to account and restoring Equality before the Law.

In turn, such an organisation must look to PDC (Personal Destiny Control) developments designed to turn the corporate rivers of blood into isolated ox-bow lakes.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.