WFF STRATEGY 2014 AND BEYOND

The title of this lecture is 2014 and beyond, but it's going to be an informal discussion of where we go next year and the long-term future in years to come. One of the issues that greatly concerns me is how do we encourage, educate, and nurture the forces of reform around the world? Now all elites, all societies, try to crush their own dissidents. It's just a fact of history that in the old days, the general way to do it was to murder them and torture them, lock them up, you get the general picture there. In modern society, there's a different way of going about it. Now, we do need to be thankful for the freedom of speech that we have in America, and the radicals on the left and the right who are so critical of America and don't adequately appreciate that, because there are a lot of positive things about today's world. But the problem is that the freedom of - limited freedom - of speech that exists, particularly in America, is counterbalanced by a horrendously hostile attitude towards new ideas. The American people are probably among the most narrow-minded people in the world when it comes to politics. They're absolutely convinced that their system is the best, and so on and so forth, or if it's not the best, it's the least bad... we've heard all these arguments.

Now, when you have a system that is as diseased and as malevolent as this system is, revolution is really inevitable. Now, the people who are going to be the revolution are out there alright? Now, we've got to understand that you need to think in terms of the world we've lost, say the world we've lost because of Reagan's destruction of the renewable energy budget back in 1981, which was really kind of permanent. People would be driving solar cars today. The skies over Third World cities would be clear, they wouldn't be filled with poison. There's a whole series of things we lost due to the mismanagement of World War II, which prevented the war from being ended in 1943, and the lunatic decisions of Roosevelt with unconditional surrender and the mass murder of civilians via bombing, as opposed to aiming at military targets, and so on and so forth. So, that's a huge loss, too. But we're not going to dwell on all that.

The destruction of creative people

Actual death and the living death

The point we're trying to understand here is that there's a huge loss in terms of people. The people we never heard from. The overwhelming majority, I'm convinced, since World War II, of creative, enlightened people who might have made a difference have been crushed.

Now, there are two ways of crushing people in modern society. One is to drive them crazy, because they try to be sane in a crazy society, and they end up in the jails, lunatic asylums, alcohol clinics, and so on and so forth, and engage in other forms of self-destructive behavior that eventually prevent them from really accomplishing a whole lot, and basically going down the drain without really contributing anything. The second form of destruction is overwhelmingly 95% the more prevalent and the more dangerous. Nietzsche very correctly observed that deceit is far more dangerous than outright hostility. And the main form of destruction of creative thinkers is deception. There's two kinds or two forms of death. One is real death, where somebody gets so discouraged, they put a gun to their head and pull the trigger. The other is, again, far more prevalent, the living death, where the person finally goes out and gets that office job, gets that corporate job, and again, we're not saying that, for everybody, that's bad or whatever, but for a lot of creative people, this is very destructive. Because they start - instead of being the creative voices that they were destined to be - they become deadened.

The pursuit of the truth is like the pursuit of light: the farther away from you get from the light, the harder it is to see where the hell you're going. The same goes for the pursuit of the truth. The more you get lost in the corporate world of being obsessed - and frequently need fully obsessed because of the reasons of money - to suck up to the boss and do what the boss says etc. etc., the more you get obsessed with that, the more your mind gets more and more clouded. You cannot over emphasize the importance of the subconscious part of the mind. Most people are being spiritually deadened, and also emotionally, physically drained by being part of all this. Yes they are. And that's the fate of a good part of the reformers. Only a very small number of reformers are likely to get through the system.

Need for new ideologies

What's really disquieting about today's world is the lack of a creative response to the plutocratic Washington consensus, shall we say. And - probably not going to mention any names here because there are people we'd like to work with - a lot of the key critics are, well most of the key critics are from the radical left who have a lot of great criticisms, but their solution is to bring back the disasters of communism and so on, and so forth, which is obviously a further downward spiral. Some of those in the environmental movement want to blow everything up and start over. Well, their argument, when you challenge them, is that there is no alternative. And those people may be right, they might, but that doesn't really do it as a reform agenda.

So, what we want to do, as which we discussed before, is to create a better organized set of reading lists, particularly stuff that's free on the Internet, and videos. Now, that's not enough, okay. Here is an area that we have not adequately dealt with, because I go back to my own experiences getting out of college, and really, America is not a friendly place for new ideas. It's not. But the good news is the Internet today opens up huge opportunities that did not exist when I got out of college in the 1970s. The control of information, for the time being at least, has been shattered by the Internet, which enables small organizations such as Underground Web World, World Future Fund to reach a global audience. That's extremely important. It also enables creative people to publish and reach a global audience without going through the gatekeepers. Back in the 70s, if you wanted to publish, the only way you could do that was through a major publishing house. They would then own your work and control your work, well, you can see where that goes. So, this is a very important plus. But just having the tactics of this technologically is not enough. People need to be given guidance in the overall - which we have not done an adequate job of at all  - of the overall structure of their lives. Let's get to some specifics here.

People - first place, as we mentioned, we need to have a clearer communication of what to read, and we've discussed that in previous lectures, and we will go over that in other lectures.

Life structure

But we need to do a lot more in terms of lifestyle, okay. Like, some people really need to get rid of a good part of their friends. It's a terrible thing to say, but many people's friends are their worst enemies. This goes particularly see a lot of alienated people tend to drink a lot, and their friendship revolves around alcohol. Beyond a certain point, that becomes a source of self-destruction. Most important, people need to spend time alone with nature. We need to evolve the idea of people going into the woods, say with audio recorders, and recording what they think, and so on. We believe there is a collective unconscious out there, yes. God, fate, whatever you want to call it, that people can tap into, yes. That's extremely important, and we need to get a clearer guidance to people as to how they can make a living without committing spiritual suicide. That's a tough one. That's really tough. Or, if you are in a corporate job, how do you keep yourself from being totally destroyed?

That's also very tough. Obviously, Underground Web World and World Future Fund can't employ all these people. Nobody really has a really good answer to that situation. I think the best we can do is for people to try to get out there and be creative, and just have faith in what they do, they may fail.

Structure of fear.  Real hope vs. fake hope.

Here's a very important point: some people say you shouldn't be governed by your fears. I have very mixed emotions about that kind of thinking, because fear is a very healthy emotion in many ways. I mean, if you're afraid of putting your hand on top of the blast furnace, that's good, because you don't put your hand on top of the blast furnace and burn your hand off, okay. Fear can be paralyzing, though, if people don't take risks and don't make decisions. How do you get people to make the right decisions? That's a key issue. Now, we're going to pause here so we don't put all the lecture into one thing and then we're going to start up with the next section of this lecture.

Now, getting back to the issue of fear. Alright, let's try to psychologically look at the kind of people we think are likely to have creativity. Let's take somebody living in say the slums of Nepal, as in Bolivia just for example. Somebody who's absolutely desperate, thinks that there is not much of a future for them, and so on. Part of the way to look at this is if you think there's no future, than what have you got to lose by going out and being creative? That's kind of a macabre way to look at it, but we need to somehow give these people some hope and the courage to live out their dreams. I spent a good part of my time dealing with inner-city problems in this country, and white people tend ridicule people like Jesse Jackson for making hokey statements like "Keep hope alive," and "I am somebody, I may be poor, I may be black, but I am somebody." These people obviously have no understanding of the social horrors of America. Jackson's work has actually been very important. I am totally convinced it can't be documented that he saved a lot of people from completely destroying themselves. So, we need to give people some sense of hope, some way to structure their lives, to be creative, to step forward. But there has to be a larger structure of networks as to where they participate. That's a real problem. Because the structure of dissident organizations in the world today is not good. It's not good.

Future of politics:  Two Options

We see two likely options, one of which is already taking place. Chris Hedges has very creatively referred to a cultural leftist book called "Inverted Totalitarianism." We don't agree with everything in the book, but part of what's in the book is spot on. And what's in the book is actually already happening, that after the ineptitude of the Bush administration, which led to the terrorist attacks of 2001, there has been an enormous totalitarian revolution in the developed world which is designed supposedly to protect the innocent citizens from the terrorists, but is actually designed to keep the elites in power, and crush anybody who speaks up on grounds that they're terrorists. Now what is particularly macabre and troubling is that with the election of Obama, the totalitarian revolution has accelerated, not declined, and the Democratic Party, which historically has spoken out against that has basically come into line in favor of it. So what you see here, is all right, say there's an economic crisis, say there is a biological terrorist attack, say there's an epidemic, say there's an EMP event, which is highly likely. The state will declare a state of emergency and will do as Hitler did in the passage of the Enabling Act in March 1933, supposedly on a temporary basis to sweep aside the structure of civil liberties, and so on.

Now, we're a long ways down the road already in relation to that here in America. That's highly likely, and not just highly likely, it's already happening.

Now the second option is really going to be a bloodbath, which is the political order collapses, and this is true and you see this in many Third World countries that fall apart. There's no real coherent dissident movement, so you have a bunch of crackpots from various factions try to govern. Now in the death toll that's coming with the environmental problems, the green revolution, all that - this is going to lead to a tremendous level of violence. What we see as a parallel is the collapse of the Roman Republic, which led to just a tidal wave of carnage. And very important to understand in both the revolution from below and the revolution from above, in both cases, there's going to be a lot of violence. Violence begets violence. Violence justifies violence. If a national emergency is declared by somebody such as Obama, whatever - we're not saying Obama is trying to create dictatorship, whatever we don't go down that road… but let's say anyone. Let's not say Obama, but anybody, alright. Then there are a lot of people who are going to fight back. Now, these people all will probably do a lot of things that aren't very good, such as blowing away civilians here and there. So that becomes a justification for the state to crush things even more. The more they crush things, the more people that are alienated, the more people are enraged, fight back, you see a cycle violence perpetuating. In the case of the revolution from below, you really have the possibility for total carnage, and that will create an even more brutal dictatorship out of the ashes, and the emergence of totalitarian political cults. That is highly likely. So, who will be these people who come to power? This is something that we need to educate the potential future leaders of a revolution.

Rise of political prophets:  How do we find future leaders?

Now, you cannot overestimate the spiritual aspect of all this, you see. Charismatic leaders will emerge and communicate via the Internet to gain enormous political momentum. That's going to happen. So, we need to help encourage these charismatic leaders, and put the outreach out to where we want to find these people. that goes back to Europe. Maybe it's just because I live here, and I've grown up at very close range; I've met top politicians and celebrities ever since I was a child. I guess proximity breeds a certain level of contempt. I am not contemptuous of all these people, but Bismarck once observed that making laws is like watching the making of sausages, not very encouraging. So, that may be my own bias. I have a hard time seeing America not having some sort of tremendous catastrophe, but that may be my own bias. That may not be the case. And there's still hope with Obama, and that's something that we do want to proceed. But Europe still looms large, in spite of the Merkel catastrophe in Germany, which is greatly complicating the long-term future of Europe. And we should definitely keep Europe as a priority. Our resources really do not go beyond that. I mean, we do not have the time, it would be interesting to learn a lot more about Russia, but our focus on Germany makes sense, and we are already stretched very thin as it is, so that's a geographic focus of what we do.

Obama:  X Factor
Solution or dangerous trap?

Final point of this series of lectures is which you might call the X factor: the possibility of reaching Obama. This has been a very difficult issue to resolve, and in 2014, this issue is going to be resolved. We have the outline of what we want to do, which was developed in 2013, and I feel that we should go ahead and try to do that. It is a difficult situation, but that could reverse a lot of things, and we need to work on that and proceed to see where that goes. We've been trying to do this, and it's very hard because the whole structure of society is such a mess. There's this business political monoculture as we've discussed that was forced on the world after 1945. It is a sick monoculture, it is a malevolent monoculture. So, it's very hard to see exactly who to work with on a lot of this stuff, and we have a very limited amount of time. I do see a role for us reaching out to Obama. I do see a limited outreach to the DC political leadership that we've been doing for two years. But ultimately, our role is to educate and inspire people around the world. That's the goal here, and I'm very proud of the structure of our programs, particularly Underground Web World and the potential outreach to artists, and so on.

It's extremely important to understand that we will never know  - at least probably not know - the impact of what we do. In 2014, the issue of the Obama situation needs to get resolved. In so far as we decide not to do that, or that is not a viable prospect, we need to augment our own ability to communicate, hopefully move to a more rural location, augment the European aspects of what we're doing, and so on. There's a real need for this because there is no coherent alternative to these people, and we're certainly not the be-all and end-all, but it's our role to move this as a catalyst forward for a real solution to what's coming.

And we have - summing this up - we have the communications platform. If I died tomorrow, what we've created, it's been worth it. It has. So we have the global reach, we have the quality material on the Internet, that is better than just about anybody out there. So that's the base. The summation is that the US leadership, the Obama question needs to be resolved, and the programs are in place. We have one of the most sophisticated networks programs of anybody around the world. Simply building on that base is a solid road to progress. So, didn't cover everything as articulately as I might've wanted, but that's the basic outline for 2014 and beyond, and everybody on the staff can think about this, and come up with their own ideas etc., etc., and so on. So that's the end of this series of lectures.