The hand of the invisible men: How the social hierarchy works.

I have given myself the task of superficially studying the model of social organization that currently prevails over the countries of the Western world. Generally, when you look at the past, feudalism or any other system of government of yesteryear, we can appreciate a kind of pyramid that separates royalty, aristocracy, clergy and merchants, and in turn, separates the vassals of the slaves.

However, at present, although I was able to find some models that try to explain the form of social organization, I think they are very simple and don't really represent the power structure that governs our nations.

In this way, I decided to describe the current social structure based on the knowledge I have gained about the way in which some things work.

In such a way that my starting point is to identify which are the institutions that hold power and know where such power comes from.

Karl Marx said that social organization was governed by an infrastructure and a superstructure. He argued that the means of production and the relationship that individuals had with them was the basis of social organization, and that based on these material factors the superstructure was dictated, that is, religion, ideology, education and that the entire structure of the State depended on material conditions. That is, in essence, the historical materialism.

Well, I have taken part of the Marxist theory and I have turned it around, because I believe that history has shown us that it is the beliefs of the people that determine the material conditions and not the other way around. Although it is possible that material conditions may represent an influential percentage of the circumstances, I don't consider that this has been the most important historical factor.

According to the pyramid that I propose, the people are the base, because they are the ones who work to satisfy the needs of all, and it is they who are governed by those at the top.

Just above is the government, it is important to note that this government is not the state, the government is only the set of people in public office, such as the parliament, the presidency, or the supreme court of justice, and although theoretically speaking they should be the ones who conform the totality of the State, in practice it is not like that, the politicians are only the most visible face of the true State, an organism that at present is much bigger than in any past time.

Unlike feudalism or systems of previous governments, the current system seems to have a kind of state in the shadows, could have a bit of conspiracy theory, but according to what I have seen, and as I have said in previous publications, the State are the set of people who hold power, and the key word is "people", because I argue that power does not fall on the institutions, or the politicians who control them, but in external hands, in the hands of invisible men.

These are the hands of the people who really hold power, the corporatocracy, an organization of people with interests to dominate over the population. The corporatocracy is represented by the owners of the large media, large companies and multinational industries, guided by the global financial system that is at the head of this great structure with global networks.

It may interest you: Democracy or Corporatocracy?

This group of individuals uses the democratic systems of political parties and the advantages that these false systems grant them, to replace at will those who don't align with their interests. And they use persuasion, extortion, and if necessary, the force to appease dissent.

In turn, all these individuals serve, unknowingly, a purpose greater than themselves, and that is the same purpose served by all members of this society organized under the current principles. Who really governs, in all cases, is capital. The ideas and beliefs of the people are the ones that mark the relations of power, it has always been that way. Then, if materialism becomes the supreme belief of the people, the material rules over their mind.

The top of the pyramid represents the predominant belief, it is the idea that rules over man, here is the cause of all religious and ideological conflicts that arise in history. Who dominates the field of beliefs dominates the social structure.

In the Ancien Regime one could see the degree of development that a civilization had because of its level of cultural or spiritual wealth, large cathedrals were built due religion and Christianity were the predominant idea that governed society and people.

However, in the modern world, totally devoted to materialism, we measure the level of development of a nation by the size of its GDP, the distribution of wealth, the rate of inflation and the quality of material life. Thus, the large constructions refer to the industry and the business world. For example, the One World Trade Center, the largest building in the Western world, along with the rest of the corporate buildings.

A material world where the idea of utility defeats the idea of beauty or symbolism.

I make this parallelism between the present and the Ancien Regime, because the idea is quite simple, if people have faith in God and in the hierarchical structure of the Church, and their representatives tell us that the Kings are the ones who must govern, so the sensible thing is to think that kings should govern and that we should be governed by them. However, if we believe that we are all equal, then there is no reason why they should rule over us. Then, that if the dominant belief is materialism, and our faith is placed in money, it is easy to determine that those who are going to govern are those who control money.

With all this on the table, I will begin to explain the functioning of the current social organization.

The Central Banks are the ones that are higher in the system, because they are the ones who control the supply of money. The International Banking is in charge of buying the sovereign bonds issued by the governments of different countries, in this way, the politicians can make the public institutions work, the armies, the police, the public health system, the education, and the rest of the state bureaucracy responsible for governing people. Without the money of the International Banking the governments can't pay the institutions, and if the public servant don't receive money they will not work, and if they don't work the corporatocracy can't govern the people. In this way, the International Banking indirectly controls politicians.

What do not control the politicians directly?

Yes, most politicians belong to the corporatocracy, since it finances their electoral campaigns, they give coverage in the media, or they simply bribe them, in short, they make life simpler for politicians who align with their interests. Sometimes some politicians serve the interests of the corporatocracy without even knowing that they do it, they simply think in a way aligned with the interests of the elite. Otherwise, they extort or use force.

However, like every system, it has a flaw, and that flaw is that materialism, headed by money, are at the top of the pyramid, so that whoever has a significant amount of money, in effect, can use it to do the same thing they do. After all, under this system people have no loyalty to the corporatocracy but to the money, who can pay, can get support.

In such a way that the international clique of corporatocrats use two very subtle mechanisms to monopolize to a greater extent the control of money.

And that is achieved through direct and indirect clientelism.

Direct clientelism is the one that employs the use of state power, using legislation to dictate laws that favor corporations that are owned by corporatocrats, this with the objective of eliminating competition. In this way they use the law, an instrument that they consider fiction, but that people like you and I accept because we don't want to be recriminated. The law does not apply to them, but to us.

Indirect clientelism, on the other hand, is carried out through credit, using conventional private banking to finance their own businesses with people's money. Because the current banking system works with the fiduciary money system, and with a fractional reserve system, the issued credit dilutes the purchasing power that people's money has, and transfers it to their hands. That money, of course, is spent wisely, with the aim of increasing its power in the industrial sector. The premise is as follows; the money must always be monopolized and never spent arbitrarily, otherwise, the distribution of that money in the hands of the people would cause a lot of inflation.

Ludwig von Mises, explained that if the money supply increases, the rise in prices would not occur in a general way, but would increase first in one sector and then in another. For example, if we gave all consumers of an economy $ 1,000,000, it is likely that the price of basic goods and services increases in a general way, however, it is likely that a fairly large group of people will want spend their money on sports cars, therefore, we may see a greater increase in the prices of sports cars than in the rest of the cars, that is because the demand of sports cars will be much higher than the supply available.

Well, what happens in practice, is that the banks issue new money and give it to the corporatocrats, and they spend that money on specific goods and services, that is, on increasing the capacity of their own companies, in such a way that can beat the competition.

Let's see an example:

Suppose a new entrepreneur, one that does not belong to the corporatocracy, decides to start a business. If the business does not increase much in size, there is no problem, but if the business is emerging as the dominant force of an market, the corporacrats can easily create companies in that sector, and inject a large amount of credit, that will make their companies can grow at a faster rate than the market naturally allows, which means that the prices of the resources that this new economic sector needs to produce increase at such a high rate that the entrepreneur can't keep his company unless get a bank loan. So the entrepreneur faces a dilemma, bankruptcy, or mortgage his business to the corporatocracy.

I invite you to investigate the big corporations, all of them are totally or partially in the hands of the banks.

All this, of course, they do on a large scale, which causes them to inject so much credit into the economy that they overestimate the capacity for real growth, creating what is known as a credit bubble, which is always preceded by a recession that allows them to close the inorganic companies that they created by injecting the credit.

That process has a high cost that, of course, people and the credibility of politicians have to pay.

At this point, to regain the credibility in politics, new politicians emerge and the Central Bank is in charge of buying the financial assets of debt held by the banks, with the objective that they reissue credit and repeat the process again, but an even bigger scale.

The end result is the hoarding of wealth in a few hands, because if they let all this credit spread in a general way, the result would be inflation, and therefore, the destruction of the economy. And what they are looking for is the concentration of capital, with the objective that there is no inflation, but in such a way that when monopolizing money, they also concentrate power.

Those influential companies with which they can't compete for different reasons, such as, for example, companies with new technology, generally end up being acquired by larger companies. Companies like Microsoft and Facebook have acquired different competitors, just to name an example.

All this mechanism that I have described allows them to control all institutions, such as banking, government, media, industry and bureaucratic institutions.

They also wield great power in institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the credits rating agencies, these three elements allow it to largely subject the smaller countries with underdeveloped industries, lending money as long as these small countries decide to accept their conditions, or failing that, to flood them with expensive private loans so that the high interests end up drowning the economies of these countries.

Finally, for them the rights are a business, they need to sell us as many rights as possible, with the aim of increasing taxes and increasing the control of the State over our lives.

We all know that the taxes collected by the government are never enough to pay the debt they incur, the real purpose of taxes is to reduce as much as possible the money that is in circulation, and that they themselves have introduced into the economy through credit, in order to control inflation within relatively manageable parameters.

The rights, on the other hand, should be expanded as much as possible. The more rights people have, the larger the State must be to guarantee them. For this same reason they love minorities, it does not matter if there are not, they will take care of creating them. After all, totalitarian nations have had constitutions with a lot of rights for their citizens.

To conclude, I can't assure you that there is a group of people who are doing all this that I describe, but I have tried to fit my theory into the facts, instead of the facts in the theory. History has shown us that social organization has always been directed by a small group of people, an elite, and when I see the behavior of the world economy, everything seems to indicate that things are not very different.

However, there is also the possibility that the system works, as it does, in a purely inertial way, that is to say, that there is not a conspiracy of people doing all this that I have said, but that, when all seek the material benefit, their actions are harmonized in an almost providential way to generate this result.

In such a case, the result would be very similar to what Adam Smith said:

"Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

If so, if the invisible hand is not that of invisible men, but is ours, that of all, if what we are living now is the result of the action of man in freedom, but submerged in a materialistic belief, the change it resides simply in modifying our belief structure, that is, displacing materialism by a different belief.

In conclusion, the current system is governed by our beliefs and the value we give to the material, whether there is an international clique governing us, or if there is not, the change of social organization is to transform our scale of values and replace materialism for something better.

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