Transcription
And as I will show you, the great innovation of the past 100 years is to convince people that money is God. Money is both nothing and everything. And so you can spend your entire life dedicated to achieving money. Okay.
So that's the second great innovation. The third great um technique that's changed economics is to understand that if you really want people to focus their energies, you need to create anxiety in them. Okay, anxiety. And how do you create anxiety? Well, the um best way is to create the idea of debt, right? So, I'll lend you a million dollars today and you enjoy it, but then you have to spend the rest of time paying it back. The problem with this, of course, is that there's interest and so you can never really pay it back, which causes anxiety. And so the idea of debt, I can extract much more value than from you than if you were not in debt. Okay, that's the first tool.
Second is the idea of inequality and poverty where a certain class of people are poor and they'll always be poor and that incentivizes encourages the middle class to work even harder. All right. Um the third mechanism of anxiety is wealth destruction. What is wealth destruction? Simple war or depression, right? When the economy collapses, when all your wealth vanishes. The idea here is listen, if the peasants work really hard and they store up a lot of grain, they have a huge granary, they really don't have to work anymore, right? So as a landlord, what do you do? We go burn down the granary. All right? So, war is not just a mechanism to expand capitalism, but it's also a way to make people more anxious uh because you destroy their wealth and therefore they have to work a lot harder. Okay?
So, again, um in in economics class, you may be taught that [clears throat] the point of capitalism is to accumulate more capital. No, no, no, guys. The point of capitalism is to focus the energies of the peasants. Okay? Because the attention, the focus is what makes society much more energetic. And that's the end goal. All right? So, so if society is wealthy, that's necessarily a good thing because it makes people lazy and complacent. And so the way to resolve this issue is by constantly engaging in wars and by having the boom bust cycle that you might learn in economics class, right? So I can actually might learn that the boom bust cycle is natural to capitalism. It is not natural to capitalism. It is artificial. The people in charge um artificially destroy economies to destroy wealth to make the peasants work a lot harder. Okay.
So are you guys following along? Okay. So that's the strategy that we've learned um these past few centuries. And that's why in today's society, we are the wealthiest society ever in human history. And yet at the same time, we are the most miserable. We are the most anxious and we are the most in debt. Okay? Because the landlord class, the capitalist, the elite, what they figured out are three mechanisms in which to extract as much energy from us as possible.
First is to give give us the illusion that we have freedom in our lives. We have the freedom of choice. That we have equity in society. We can vote for our leaders when in reality it's all just an illusion. Okay. Second is to make money God the end all and be all, both nothing and everything. The very focus of your life. And because money is so abstract, you can spend your entire life trying to achieve more and more of it, yet at the same time achieve nothing and nothing. Okay? So think of like someone like Jack Ma who has like more money than he can possibly spend. And what does he want? He wants more money. Okay. And the third is to create anxiety in society so that people's entire existence is one of stress and as a result people are much more focused on work and wealth creation. Okay? And you do that by a constant process of wealth destruction. All right?
So, but the problem of course is that when you push people too hard, when it becomes so obvious you explain people, then people will eventually revolt against you. So, the solution that we figured out is what we can do is we can actually move. Okay, the landlord class can actually move somewhere else. And so when the anxiety becomes overwhelming, what will happen is the peasants will destroy each other. Where and the landlord moves somewhere else to the capital and they'll come back when the peasant class have completely exhausted themselves and they're willing they're willing to rebuild society. Okay.
And this process is what rules the world today. It is what we call transnational capital. In other words, the wealthy people of the world, they have actually no loyalty to nation or to people or to place. They only have loyalty to their capital. And they're willing to move to wherever they can, wherever they have to in order to keep their capital safe and to grow it. And that's why a lot of people today are moving to Dubai or Hong Kong or Singapore. They don't care. They may not be all that place, but they'll go wherever uh they need to in order to pay less taxes, in order to avoid the social conflict created by their policies, okay? In order to find better investment opportunities and that's the system is what rules the world today.
But then the question is okay, in concrete terms, what really is transnational capital? What allows transnational capital to function, to be able to move from place to place? Because remember, when you move from place to place, there are a lot of costs involved. For example, you don't really know anyone there and so how can you trust the people, right? And the solution that we've dealt over the centuries is the idea of secret societies. So what you will learn is that secret societies and transnational capital are essentially the same thing. Okay. And this is the force that rules the world today. All right.
So now that I've discussed transnational capital, let's look at secret societies, like where they come from and how they work. Okay. Well, secret societies exist because the lender class and the peasant class are fundamentally different. Therefore, um the motivations, the beliefs, the worldview of these two classes must be different. Okay? So, the peasants, what do peasants want? They want to live a simple life. They want to make some money. They want to have a family. They want to have some fun. They want to believe in God. Okay? And so, for the peasant class, we have organized religion, whether it's Islam or Christianity. Okay? Christianity. Jesus, right? Jesus tells you to be a good person. Confucius tells you to be good to be a good person. Right?
But the landlord class, they're different. They have a responsibility. They have an obligation to control the peasant class and extract as much energy as possible in order to maintain their society. Okay? So their religious practices must be very different. So whereas the peasants can pray to God, the landlord class must fundamentally pray to Satan. Okay. So now let's look at why the landlord class must pray to Satan. And this is true for all societies throughout human history. Before the landlord class was blatant about it. Okay? Now they have to be more hypocritical, more secretive about it. Right? So let's look at the landlord class. All right.
So to be a landlord class, to be the elite, you have to do terrible things. But it's actually hard to do terrible things. All right. So let me give an example. Let's just say I would say to you, all right, I'm going to give you $10 million US. What you need to do is this. What you need to do is take a gun and late at night go kill a random stranger. You think, "Wow, that's a really good deal. If I kill a random stranger at late at night, no one's going to know I did it and I walk away with $10 million and you think that I can do it. But guess what? When I actually make you and go make you go do it, you actually can't do it because there are lots of um constraints on your behavior. Okay.
So think of suicide. If if I gave you $100 million and promised you um a path to heaven, would you kill yourself? Probably not. Okay, so suicide, killing yourself, in many ways it's so different from killing someone else. We can't do it. Okay, but there actually hacks around this. We figured out ways to make you go kill someone in a way that doesn't make you feel that guilty about it. Okay. So to understand why, I will introduce you to two social science experiments that they conducted in America at the end of the 20th century. Okay.
The first is something called the um Milgram experiment. Um and this was done at Yale by a psychologist named Stanley Milgram. And and the experiment was very simple. What he would do is he would set up an actor. Okay, this is an actor. Okay, what we call a confederate. And the person will be hooked up to an electric chair, right? And there'll be a buzzer, a buzzer which increases the voltage of that electric chair. Okay? And there's there's like a max and there's a min. Okay? And suddenly Milgram would be here in his lab coat and he would invite a participant, okay, who's essentially a student to come and be an assistant. Okay? And the assistant's job was to press the button. And Stanley Milgram wanted to know first of all, would this volunteer, this assistant agree to shock another human being even though he'd seen the human being in pain. And second of all, Stanley wanted to see how much pain the volunteer was willing to inflict. And it turned out that with the idea of authority, okay, people are much more willing to let go of their inhibitions because what you're doing is you are removing responsibility from yourself to someone else. I didn't do it. I was ordered to do it. And surprisingly, people are willing to inflict a lot of pain on other people because they are able to remove responsibility for their individual actions. Okay? Or does that make sense?