(THIS LECTURE IS FOR INTERNAL USE) AUDIO MP3 NOT ONLINE BUT IN EMAIL
It's almost July 2020 and we are going to take an overview of where we are in history today. We need to go back to the start of World Future Fund and we need to go back to some very basic principles.
Since our founding in 1995, we have done some truly amazing and incredible research on issues such as totalitarianism in the ancient world and the intellectual roots of totalitarianism and issues such as common themes in world religions we are very proud of.
OBVIOUS PROBLEMS ARE BEING IGNORED
In terms of other subjects we have covered, frankly you don't need to be a genius, you don't to figure out that the world was facing a danger of epidemics. This was widely known the day we opened our doors in early 1995 as well as a whole series of other scientific problems. It was widely known that world fisheries are in trouble. It was widely known that dumping plastic into the ocean is not a good idea. It was widely known that dead zones are not a good idea with the runoff of fertilizer and so on and so forth. It was widely known that the world is facing a global water crisis due to industrial agriculture. These things are all widely known. So the fact that in 25 years world leaders have not just only ignored our warnings, but have ignored the warnings of just about every scientist on earth, is not a very encouraging sign. What it shows is a level of incompetence and malevolence by the elites in power that is truly breathtaking. In the case of America, every expert who studied the situation has pointed out that America needs national health insurance and national sick leave, but we still don't have that, even though Bismarck's Germany got that in the 1890s. So again, this is a level of malevolence and incompetence that's truly breathtaking. Such actions are not actions of charity. They are actions of public health. If the ruling money lords had any brains, they would know that you don't want sickness in society. That's not good for anybody. At the same time, with the neoliberal economic policies, it was not hard to predict that shutting down US factories and sending them to China and wherever was a totally insane and disastrous idea. So here we are in July 2020 with a systematic $350 billion trade deficit with China. Here we are with $10 trillion of net debt from being the world's greatest creditor from World War I up to the early 1980s. It was not hard to predict that this would lead to disaster. So you have to draw some very grim conclusions about those people who are in power.
THE CORONAVIRUS AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT
Now the virus is an existential disaster for the whole world order. What we're going to try to explore here is the scope of the disaster and to be honest we really don't know. We really don't know if this has been exaggerated. What needs to be done, part of the problem is that we have in America done such a rotten job of funding the agencies that are needed to monitor something like this that we still really don't know what we're doing and testing is still a joke on a national level. So we're in a fog of war right now. Let's go over a couple of things. How dangerous is the virus? It's clear it's very dangerous to the elderly and people with compromised health problems and beyond that we're not so sure. There are people who say maybe it's not so dangerous, maybe it's like the flu. Well here's the question about the flu. The flu is something we have been dealing with for a long, long time. We have a vaccine for the flu. We know the flu backwards and forwards. So vulnerable populations can get a vaccine. We do not know what the heck we're doing with this coronavirus, since it just showed up this year. So even if it's just about the same toxicity as the flu, since we don't have a vaccine, that makes it much more dangerous than the flu. But what if we didn't have a vaccine for the flu? We would have a national disaster on our hands. At the same time, the shutdowns have been a disaster on their own and regardless of how dangerous you think the virus is, the the shutdowns in our view are probably every bit as dangerous and destructive to life as the virus itself. We don't pretend to know where things are going to go because basically thanks to the total mismanagement and failure to develop proper healthcare system in this country we just don't know. That's that's the truth. So we don't know.
We need to start looking at this from a global basis. Something here is very amiss when you stand back and look at this with the global statistics. If this thing is contagious, as it appears to be, then the statistics coming out of India and Brazil and Bangladesh and Pakistan have got to be way way off, because those people cannot socially distance and so on and so forth. So there are two options here. One, this thing is less dangerous than it's been predicted, which is quite possible. Or two, we're about to have a huge explosion in those countries and we certainly don't know the answer to that because I don't think anybody on the government of India really knows.
A GROWING CHANCE OF GLOBAL WAR
So those are some realities. Now we need to reiterate some themes that we have been talking about for a long time. What we have in the global economy is a global game of death. Another theory is that this plutocratic neoliberal elite was going to build us a utopia. China was going to become our strategic partner. Bill Clinton assured us America and China would March off into the sunset building a global utopia. This was nonsense from day one. Nonsense from day one. And by the way, we still don't know the role of the Chinese government and its bio weapons or bio research lab. We don't. We haven't gotten any straight answers about that. So we don't know if the Coronavirus come from lab or if it didn't. We don't know. That's another problem here. So the response though, in America, has been a disaster. But a more ominous event is the the growing conflict between America and China and where does that go on being an election year. It's very doubtful that the Trump administration is going to resist the temptation to blame China for the whole situation, which means growing conflict between the world's two largest economies, and possibly a military conflict
TRUMP'S INSANITY BREEDS INSANITY ON THE LEFT
Getting back to what we just discussed, we need to talk about the game of death and the large death toll that's coming. The theory was that this neoliberal high-tech money lord economy was going to build this utopia. That's not going to happen. What's going to happen is a very large number of people ending up dead. Well, the system is not designed to cope with that, but what we never anticipated was some kind of catastrophe like this lockdown, which has catastrophic psychological impacts on people and catastrophic physical health problems. Put on top of that, a president of the United States who is clearly not mentally stable. He is not. Put on top of that, a political opposition in America that's all most as crazy as Trump. We've seen have how craziness breeds craziness. Hate breeds hate. And Trump has fueled a tremendous level of hysteria in opposition to himself. Now in there's very legitimate reasons to be opposed to Trump's policies. It's very dangerous though, the level of hysteria on the other side, but this is true in history that evil hysteria breeds evilness
THE DRIFT TOWARD TOTALITARIANISM
AS DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED LEADERS FAIL TO SOLVE MAJOR PROBLEMS
So we need to reiterate our studies of the preparation for a world for a very high series of death tolls and the movement towards the Emperor, the movement towards a rebirth of political totalitarianism which is already happening in a particularly grotesque paradigm, paradox of our time, is how the establishment liberals are calling for massive censorship of the Internet and the control of thought. So you see that this is the trend that. This is where things are going and getting back to basics, the environmental economic realities that we have talked about remain realities. No amount of rubbish from people like the Clinton's can change that. Quite the contrary, their ideas have been proven to be disastrous. The gutting of the American economy and shipping its guts to other countries has been a national catastrophe. So the these illusions are coming to an end. We need to reiterate our focus on facts. Reiterate the need for investments in renewable energy and so on. But we still don't see anybody in US politics talking about the tough choices that need to be made, which means they're going to slam down very hard in 2021.
A RETURN TO OUR STUDY OF HISTORY
HOW ANCIENT TOTALITARIANISM WILL RE-EMERGE IN MODERN TIMES
Thus, we need to reiterate our research on the ancient world, and in our view, to re-study how democracy committed suicide in Greece, restudy how democracy committed suicide in Rome. Democracy failed in Greece, it failed and Rome, it's failing now. So there are lessons from the past. We also need to look at the religious aspects of all this and how religion plays a role in the emergence of totalitarian regimes. Yes, so these are some themes from when we were started to today. Basic policy issues remain the same and need to be reiterated.
That's the end of this lecture.