Chaos (or not)

The recent Netflix blockbuster, Leave The World Behind, offers some insight into the views that the ruling class wants to inflict on us. The film is full of symbolism and ambiguity intended to open it up to interpretation based on each of our pre-existing biases. It contains several "big ideas", but I'll focus on one.

The most obvious theme is: "people are awful and can't be trusted, especially during a disaster". This is the message of most apocalyptic films; it's part of the Neoliberal propaganda inflicted on us for decades -- we shouldn't cooperate or even interact with each other. The "marketplace" should mediate all of our relations. Since it's a common trope, I don't want to analyze it in depth, though it's worth considering the many, subtle ways that we internalize this message.

The more interesting theme from the film is that "there's nobody in control". As a character with inside knowledge says:

G. H. Scott: A conspiracy theory about a shadowy group of people running the world is far too lazy of an explanation... especially when the truth is much scarier.
Amanda Sandford: What is the truth?
G. H. Scott: No one is in control. No one is pulling the strings.

The line is meant to evoke terror -- chaos is more frightening than intentional malice. I contend that this idea is another layer of the psychological operation inflicted on us by people with vested interests in maintaining control. The fact that Barack Obama was an executive producer on the film and excitedly offered script revisions should clue us in to the degree of manipulation intended.

The same character later explains a theory of the events they're experiencing:

A simple 3-stage maneuver that can topple a country from within. The first stage is isolation. Disable their communication and transportation. Make the target as deaf, dumb, and paralyzed as possible, setting them up for the second stage: synchronized chaos. Terrorize them with covert attacks and misinformation, overwhelming their defense capabilities, leaving their weapons systems vulnerable to extremists and their own military. Without a clear enemy or motive, people would start turning on each other. Done successfully, the third stage would happen on its own.

The third stage is coup d'etat, civil war, collapse. This program was considered the most cost effective way to destabilize a country. Because if the target nation was dysfunctional enough, it would, in essence, do the work for you. Whoever started this wants us to finish it.

In this theory, there is a malicious, unidentified adversary who sets events in motion, relying on compounding, chaotic effects to amplify the damage. Essentially, the character is describing Fifth-Generation Warfare, a well-studied field, consisting of a range of psychological techniques that should truly terrify us.

What I want to offer is the idea that the adversary creating chaos is not a foreign government or terrorist group -- it is the existing global ruling class, terrorizing the underclasses in furtherance of Inverted Totalitarianism.

The ruling class have used this strategy for perhaps thousands of years. A Masonic motto is "Ordo ab Chao" -- "Out of Chaos, Order". Whether Masons have anything to do with those currently utilizing the strategy is irrelevant. Naomi Klein explained it as the Shock Doctrine -- "political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization."

But why wait for "natural" disasters, when you can create them yourself and be prepared to capitalize on the chaos?

For instance, create a global pandemic (real or not) and then use the fear and confusion to consolidate wealth and ratchet up authoritarian restrictions on ordinary people.

And if they can get away with that scale of atrocity, then the sky's the limit! If they can get away with the genocide of foreign people, they will undoubtedly have no qualms with genociding their own people, if the conditions allow for it.

Many people are now rightfully suspicious of authorities and doubt the official narratives about every event. They claim that there are no "natural disasters". When hurricanes wrecked the South, they said the storms must've been manipulated by the government. When fires ravaged Hawaii and Los Angeles, they claimed the fires couldn't have spread naturally; there must be arson or exotic energy weapons involved.

The standard response to these critics is to roll one's eyes and lecture them about how climate change is obviously increasing the frequency of natural disasters. Although I agree that climate instability is accelerating, I think this rebuttal obfuscates the very real intentionality of bad actors who take advantage of controlled chaos. In severe drought conditions, it's very easy to imagine some malicious oligarch or corporation starting a fire, seeing it wipe out huge areas, blaming it on climate change, and then scooping up all of the property.

I predict that these confusing disasters will accelerate -- both because of climate instability and because we are hitting global limits on resource extraction. Since 2019, at least, the ruling class have finally understood that civilizational collapse is inevitable. In public, our political rulers seem to be doing nothing to address climate change. In private, anybody powerful (not necessarily political figures) is planning for the worst. They're building bunkers, delusionally intending on escaping the planet, and using geopolitics to secure resources for themselves.

They know that the age of infinite growth is over; their plan is to maintain control and wealth during a time of instability and declining standards of living for the rest of us. They will use natural disasters and create conflicts around the globe, in order to consolidate power and weaken any opposition to their rule. Part of the strategy includes disabling the population -- physically and psychologically. Please consider how they may do this.

"Leave The World Behind" reinforces the ruling class's psychological operation by attempting to convince us that there's nobody in control, and thus nobody to blame. In the coming decades, we are are being propagandized to:

• accept whatever chaotic events befall us
• do not question who benefits or loses
• do not question the social order, even as it decays into a state of warlordism and possible near-term extinction