Rituals of humiliation
How to get into the 0.000001%
How does one join the dizzying heights of the elite? Not the 10%, the 2%, or the 1% of professional or business success, but the billionaire class, the House of Representatives, Governor of a major state or mayor of New York City? Is it by proving your merit in school, a bit of good luck, perhaps a grinding mindset as aspirants are taught to hope? Or by family connection and bloodline, as those doomed to fail may fear?
Certainly it’s the latter. But there is a missing ingredient that aspirants should know before they set out to try to join this genocidal Western club.
In the book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, Italian political scientist Diego Gambetta talks about how in certain circumstances it is rational for subordinates (say, enforcers who are collecting extortion money from businesses) to display to their superiors how incompetent they are (at, for example, actually running a business). This is a display of loyalty: an incompetent subordinate can only survive at the boss’s whim, and is therefore going to be loyal. Taking some irreversible action can also show loyalty: the importance of tattoos to criminal organizations is an example. Getting a specific tattoo permanently affiliates a criminal with others in the group, a valuable display of loyalty.
The codes of the underworld help answer the question: why did the whole elite, Republicans and Democrats, Hollywood and Wall Street and Silicon Valley, go to the private island of convicted-then-assassinated child abuser Jeffrey Epstein?
Epstein’s activities were the proclivity of some, others were ensnared through the normal methods spies use, but for others it was probably understood as the equivalent of getting a tattoo: one must make oneself reputationally destroyable as a condition of getting into the elite. When this kind of thing blows up, with members accusing one another and people like Epstein or his mentor Robert Maxwell meeting with fatal accidents, it reveals the pattern in sufficient detail for researchers like Whitney Webb to document them (in the two-volume One Nation Under Blackmail). Neither sexual abuse nor blackmail are the point: the point is to undergo rituals that prove your subordination is absolute, and that you can therefore be trusted to exercise your power according to (genocidal) principles.
The greater the power sought, the greater the display of submission required.
For lower rungs, public words of submission could suffice.
Sometimes an elite member will survive (or be allowed to survive) a revelation with a warning.
Or the revelation will have the effect of keeping things in line.
But where scandal fails to have the desired effect, there are other, more murderous options.
As genocide subordinates all other Western goals, these messy rituals of humiliation become more public. As revealing them becomes a valid tactic for intra-elite disputes, we may all be subjected to a more comprehensive view of the mess.
We already have a picture: This is an elite that wants nothing more than to continue a genocide against children, bound together by fear of exposure of the crimes they’ve personally committed in private.
Can they be trusted to solve the problems of the world?
Best thesis I’ve read to explain this facet of oligarchy. Thanks also for sharing Gambetta’s work. Jon Elmer was right, with respect to your diverse thinking. I think this unofficial anti-genocide academy, here, is led and followed by diverse thinkers.
On rituals of humiliation, Syme wrote “Behind every monarchy lurks an oligarchy.”
The oligarchs don’t want a competent and independent monarch? Right, the peasants will bypass the oligarchs in desperation and appeal to the king. He can only do so much, he’s not a communist, and if he does anything he risks being killed or overthrown. And that’s why the Roman Republic was founded, despite what oligarchic propaganda would have us believe. Same principle applies to modern rulers in the West.
To tie your article to the resistance, now we all know why certain leaders are demonized. Anti-monarch and anti-oligarch leaders who refuse rituals of humiliation. A revolutionary. I’m neither Muslim nor communist. Maybe I should be! Thank you Mao, Lenin, Ayatollah, Castro, Kim il Sung, Al-Assad (senior especially, junior too), Nasrallah and Sinwar for refusing the West’s poisonous gifts, arming your people, and fighting the empire. I tell you the West really hates a colonial people who is not only decolonized but capable of fielding a conventional army to drive their mercenary hordes and fanatical auxiliaries into the sea. Honored to have visited south Lebanon to pay my respects to Nasrallah’s shrine in Dahiyah, who was assassinated for being impossible to humiliate.
Thanks for writing your article. Very helpful.
No, I can't! In the UK, most of those elites(?!) go to boarding schools where those humiliation rituals take place, meaning they're exposed to those rituals from very young. On top, they don't grow up with their families. I don't think that you can expect them to act based on usual sense of love, compassion, empathy or moral even. This is not to justify their actions, but as you said, they are "0" competent, nothing more than ego maniac. Very harmful beings on the earth.