I believe laws ought to be decided by We The People. The present governmental system with its oligarchic legislate and executive ought to be transitioned out of, and restricted to the details. (This is what Switzerland has been doing in the last 25 years, to immense social and economic success.)
When I propose this, skeptics often object that people are brazenly ignorant, turgidly stupid, and prone to fashionable madness. So my proposition would be worse than what we have now, they sneer.
There is some truth in all this. I will roll out an example: gluten. And explain why We The People indulge in this sort of obsession. It’s actually a basic manipulation they are neutralized with.
This point of view, that the demos cannot be trusted, is nothing new, and why Aristotle proposed to the best to rule (Aristo-crat). In practice, he defined as the best were his personal buddies, and everybody who was seriously rich.
I will explain why We The People tend to be ignorant, stupid, and mad. Mostly, when People are treated as children, they compensate by leading with gusto where they can lead: in nowhere land, for nowhere men.
They are engaged in the mental equivalent of captive animals pacing back and forth in too small a cage.
The obsession with gluten, sodium benzoate all over foods, profits in foods, all help build a mental box in which to cage We The People.
It is fashionable to avoid gluten, a protein in wheat, rice, barley which makes them chewy. Many people claim that gluten makes them sick. The for-profit corporations created a non-gluten movement. They tend to replace gluten, a protein, by sugar(s). Never mind the well-established fact that those sugars make people sick with an impressive array of diseases.
Some studies claimed that gluten caused intestinal distress in some patients who did not truly have celiac disease.
The same scientists who suggested gluten sensitivity first, followed up with more rigorous studies. In which they found that non-celiac gluten sensitivity doesn’t exist.
Yet, 30% of people want to eat less gluten (they have been so persuaded by industry). Sales of gluten-free products are projected to be $15 billion by 2016. Only 1% of Americans suffer from celiac disease, yet 18% of adults now buy gluten-free foods. (No wonder, it’s full of sugars, and obese Americans need all the sugar they can get, so they have enough fuel to move!)
In several follow-ups, some by the same authors who had found the apparent gluten sensitivity, subjects cycled through high-gluten, low-gluten, and no-gluten (placebo) diets, without knowing which diet plan they were on. In the end, all of the diets – even the placebo diet – caused pain, bloating, nausea, and gas to a similar degree. Thus there are problematic foods, but it didn’t matter if the diet contained gluten. Gluten sensitivity was found NOT to exist.
“In contrast to our first study . we could find absolutely no specific response to gluten,” lead scientist Gibson wrote in his first follow-up paper. A third, larger study published this month has confirmed the findings.
However detailed studies found great sensitivity to FODMAPs.
So why people don’t worry about these? Because “Gluten-free” is an industry, and a new one, bringing new profits, whereas FODMAP avoidance would be a problem for industry.
I just saw one Monarch Butterfly. I used to see thousands, in just one day, on the same hill. Those Monarchs don’t go to Mexico, they migrate within the USA, from the Rockies, to California, back and forth. Why did they disappear? Insecticides, and, in particular those made from nicotine (a deadly poison in minute doses), or neonicotinoids. They are the same poisons which kill bees.
There again, this was scientifically established, but it’s ignored in the popular knowledge base, as it stands in the way of our masters.
In general one may wonder why poisons such as the mighty carcinogen benzene are deliberately introduced in food. My daughter has a very strong allergy to Sodium Benzoate, so she can be used as a Sodium Benzoate detector. When she turns all red, it means she was poisoned by the authorities.
Authorities? Well, after all, the FDA allows industrialists to put benzene in food, to kill the little beasties who would be otherwise found there. So, if you do not eat as much of that food as the little beasties, you will survive long enough to buy more, and more, and more, so it’s OK, with the FDA.
And it does not disrupt the Masters in the least, as they eat fresh food prepared by their chefs in their private jumbo jets, far above the minnows, while paying no tax, as the Google guys.
Why are people so gullible? Because the Masters made them gullible. Putin, a Master, made his population so stupid that it interprets its difficulties as caused by the West, and thus, the more Putin attacks, the more popular he gets (86% approval for Putin in Russia, latest polls).
This phenomenon has been seen before: after he killed millions of Ukrainians and Soviets, in obscure “purges”, Stalin was loved (especially by Western pseudo-intellectuals). Later Hitler became most popular as Germany met the apocalypse.
Conflict wakes up the fascist instinct, all becoming of one mind behind the leader. Uncertain, feeble Masters know this, so they create conflicts to get a following (whereas, as Ibn Khaldun pointed out, strong empires know peace inside).
Direct democracy would force We The People to become deciders, instead of stupidified followers in need of all-knowing leaders to make, or, rather, eschew, all the big decisions. Instead of believing obvious stupidities, We The People would examine them.
What we have now is an unexamined polis. Socrates famously, and stupidly, said that an unexamined life was not worth having (it’s stupid, as crocodiles, politicians and bankers demonstrate every day). What he should have said is that an unexamined polis is best not having.
If We The People was examining foods, it would find the following: the food industry uses massive, unsustainable amounts of antibiotics, pesticides, fungicides, poisons, and chemical fertilizers. They no doubt correlate with the multiplication of the occurrence of brain tumors by four since 1950. Parts of France, who supported agriculture for more than three millennia, are now so polluted, that the European Commission’s threatened sanctions have been approved by the Court of Justice of the European Union.
And why is that general poisoning going-on? Simple: the profiteers want to maximize profits. The food budget of We The People is a fixed amount. Beyond that we would be back in the pre-revolutionary mood of France (when a free market reform under Louis XIV’s PM Turgot allowed the price of bread to jump up).
So, to maximize profit margins, the profiteers have to reduce their costs, hence all the poisons, chemicals, etc. And gluten in all that? A red herring, a bone, the stupidified People can gnaw on, while augmenting the profiteers’ profits (there are state subventions for sugar). Their outrage and interest is carefully entertained: it’s a more sophisticated version of the panem et circenses (bread and circus) of the Romans.
All the silliness would disappear if We the People learned about the world enough to pretend to decide about its fate. Learning that the largest corporations avoid taxes, often completely, and that banks, which are truly agents of the state, are a state within the state, and a criminal one at that., would help to forget about imaginary celiac disease, or the one caused by too much sugars (FODMAPs).
And that’s exactly why the plutocrats will try their best to make sure this will not happen, by occupying the minds with the dumbest obsessions evil minds can find.
That was done for centuries in the Roman Empire, until all the mental energy of the Demos went to charioteers, culminating in the Nika Riots, an aborted revolution, in 532 CE, which burned half of Constantinople. The reason the Nika Riots were not a successful revolution is that We The People had become too dumb to understand what was truly happening. This is where we are headed now.
Patrice Ayme
