..”if we all had enough time, information and mental acuity to form an understanding of what’s going on in our world, things would get mighty guillotiney real quick..”
by Caitlin Johnstone on Nov 13, 2025 via thefreeonline at wp.me/pIJl9-HFX
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Which sounds more likely: (A) that things are bad because the population keeps organically voting for policies which just so happen to hurt ordinary people while benefitting the rich and powerful, or (B) that things are bad because the rich and powerful want things this way?
Does it seem more likely to you that (A) the democratic process consistently leaves people unable to advance basic human interests because the population always organically splits itself into an exact 50–50 deadlock that leaves everyone unable to get anything done long term, and that this deadlock always just so happens to land on a status quo that serves the interests of the rich and powerful, or (B) that the rich and the powerful artificially created this status quo via manipulation?
You don’t need to know anything at all about politics or parapolitics to see that (B) is the most likely explanation for why things keep getting worse for everyone besides the rich and powerful.
Your own basic reasoning and understanding of human behavior will tell you that there’s no way democracy is working as advertised if things keep getting worse and worse for ordinary voters while billionaires and empire managers keep getting everything they want.
Things are shitty because we are ruled by people who want things to be shitty. Once you awaken to this undeniable reality, you will inevitably find yourself growing more and more radicalized.
Our rulers want nonstop war and genocide. Our rulers want obscene levels of inequality.
Our rulers want the public to be poor and struggling. Our rulers want people to be getting dumber, sicker, and more miserable. Our rulers want the unrestricted industry that’s killing earth’s biosphere. Our rulers want us to have vapid, unedifying mainstream culture. This dystopia looks more or less exactly how they want it to look.
Our rulers want war, militarism and genocide to be the norm because military force is one of the critical ways by which they dominate the planet, control resources and trade routes, and prevent foreign states from trying different systems and establishing a different world order. Waging and preparing to wage war has the added bonus of also being extremely profitable.
see also: Elon Musk gets $1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) paycheck
The plutocrats want inequality to continue because it’s what allows them to live as modern-day monarchs.
When money is power and power is relative, you’re going to see the people with the money making sure they have as much as possible while everyone else has as little as possible, because if everyone is king then nobody is.
They want the public to have just enough spending money to keep the wheels of capitalism turning, without having enough money to do things like fund political campaigns or buy up media influence. The poorer everyone else is, the more powerful they are.
Our rulers want us to be stupid, misinformed, distracted, sick, struggling and suffering, because if we all had enough time, information and mental acuity to form an understanding of what’s going on in our world, things would get mighty guillotiney real quick.
They have a vested existential interest in keeping us all in a mental fog of propaganda, diversion, ignorance, illiteracy, and psychological dysfunction.
Our rulers want companies to be free to destroy our planet’s ecosystem, because offloading the costs of industry onto the environment is the only way to steadily increase profits.
So long as they’re free to fill the air with pollutants, fill the oceans with plastic, clear the rainforests, incinerate biodiversity and poison people’s drinking water at the expense of other people and other organisms, corporations can continue to grow and to maximize value for shareholders.
An alliance of corporate and state power has emerged to advance these agendas in service of the few people who benefit from them, while the rest of humanity flounders in suffering and toil. They use mass media propaganda, campaign donations, lobbying and other influence operations to ensure that this remains the case. The more you learn to spot the signs of these dynamics and the more clearly you perceive them, the more urgently you see the need to end this way of being.
Truth and clarity paves the way to real revolutionary change. That’s why our rulers spend so much energy trying to obfuscate truth and clarity via propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, mainstream culture, AI, garbage education systems, and other forms of perception management. They’re doing everything they can to stop us from following the strings of our society’s ailments to the hands up above that are pulling them.
They want us to be stupid, so we need to get smarter.
They want us to be ignorant, so we need to inform ourselves.
They want us to be uncaring, so we need to become more compassionate.
They want us to be compliant, so we need to become disobedient.
The world is a mess because our rulers want it to be a mess. So we need everything in us to be pushing in the exact opposite direction.
________________
Caitlin’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. ……
The Free 