Advertising must work, otherwise why would companies pay fortunes to seduce us to buy their products and services? And yet, why does it work? Doesn’t the very success of advertising imply that most consumers are reliably suggestible?

If you need something, it is easier than ever to find it for sale somewhere. Apart from transactions online, many stores and suppliers post their catalogues online. But that’s just useful information for the shopper, not a sales pitch. The purpose of advertising is to get you to want something that you are not already looking for, or to convince you that you need something that you don’t already want—and probably will never need. There is a difference between informing people and influencing them. And there is a difference between those who know what they need and those who don’t. Sadly, advertising works best on the latter, which must include a lot of people to merit the billions spent on it.

The internet began as a distributed military network, for the strategic advantages of decentralization. When first made available to the public, it was exciting as an unfettered universal show-and-tell. Few foresaw its inevitable commercialization or that it would ironically become highly centralized, dominated by a handful of giant corporations, and choked to uselessness with distracting ads.

Invasion of privacy through “data harvesting” is a hot topic. Apart from outright identity theft, the data are traces of your online searches and activities, including your physical location and movements, who you contact, etc. In the West, these are mostly used to tailor online ads to your shopping habits—that is, to provide the advertising to which you are most susceptible as a consumer. So far, the motive is profit more than political control. In a society that revolves around the market place, however, these are hardly distinguishable.

With good reason, perhaps, we blame corporations for nearly everything wrong in the world today. Certainly, they have led the directions of technology‚ which we eagerly follow. Without the consumer (you and me, brothers and sisters!), none of that could take place. The silent partners of corporations are the people who buy their products and services—whether we need them or not. The shareholders of corporations are everyone who has a pension or portfolio. In short, most of us.

The other side of corporatism is consumerism. The other side of tracking and selling data is making those tracks in the first place. Those who don’t want to be traced should leave no traces. Those who resent their “data” having commercial value should rethink their shopping habits. Consume not, lest ye be consumed!

Easier preached than done, of course. Except through “market response,” after the fact, we are not consulted about what products should exist or what new technology is really useful. We did not design, and do not control, the world’s system of production and distribution. And yet it has come into being at every stage through our consent and participation. In our free-market society, not even governments organize how and which things are produced. This is left to “free enterprise”—in other words, to relentless efforts to make a buck by pushing whatever can be sold to gullible consumers. The bottom line is making money, not making truly useful things or making a society that works. The consumer is the silent partner of this dance of avarice: they lead, we follow.

On one side are labour unions, corporate cartels on the other. Not yet do we have a union of consumers capable of striking and lobbying effectively. Not yet is there the will to take charge of the “free” economy. The internet was free. Now there is a price on your head.

When I first arrived, this seemed a vibrant do-it-yourself community of volunteers. There was an enthusiastic frontier spirit of local initiative, mutual help, communal barn-raising, spending locally and even operating outside the official economy through barter. An ethos of taking back control of life. Many people had come here seeking a way to live less encumbered by the conventional ideas and outside authority of the mainstream urban culture. Of course, change is the only constant.

This leads me to wonder why a local organization—essentially volunteer-based—might reject the services of local experts, offered for free, in favour of paying an outside consultant or contractor. One reason could be that the organization is not spending its own money, so why economize? It seems obvious that local projects need financing, hence the appeal of grant money. (Many organizations now pay someone just to find money.) Yet, to some extent, the need for money in the first place implies paying for services that could be (and once were) done for free by local volunteers. Already this represents a shift away from local autonomy, and toward a mentality of dependence on outside authority and resources. There is a growing litigiousness and officiousness in the mainstream culture, where any public project is subject to labyrinthine regulations, and where contractors and consultants must have professional insurance. This may be a product of the city, but the tendency is hardly limited to place or circumstance. Granting agencies have their requirements, hoops to jump through, set far away from our community, according to conventions that people formerly came here to escape. Money has strings attached. Complying with them ironically requires more work, and skills unrelated to those needed to directly realize the project itself.

Beyond legal liability, a more subtle reason to reject volunteer effort involves control. If you hire someone, you are the boss. They are contractually obligated to do what you have specified and to complete the work. If they fail, you can fire them or take them to court (more dependence on outside authority). Not so with volunteers. There is no contract, no legal obligation to see work through, nor to do what someone else tells you to. In fact, there is no boss. It’s a cooperative effort based on good will, good feeling, good faith, and good communication from beginning to end. In situations where those conditions do not prevail, calling on volunteer services may be less attractive to boards of directors than a contractual relationship, despite the cost.

This suggests a third reason: the breakdown of good will, good feeling, good faith and good communication—the qualities upon which localism and volunteering depend. We appeal to outside money and expertise because we can’t get along with each other on our own! Ironically, this tendency is self-aggravating. The less confidence we have in each other and ourselves, the more we turn to big brother—and then we no longer need to cooperate in the name of local autonomy. Divided by petty rivalries and suspicions, we lose dignity and what autonomy we have, subdued at last by the mainstream culture.

The general bureaucratization of everything dovetails with the general commodification of everything. Pandering for money to spend on consultants displaces practical skills that are dying out for lack of renewal. (Who makes their own house, clothes, or entertainment?) But the do-it-yourself spirit cannot thrive without actually doing it yourself. And neither can community thrive without cooperation, self-reliance, and mutual trust.

Imagine a boundary, an interface between two worlds. On one side of this veil, everything is mechanical, deterministic, well-defined. On the other side, everything is free will, uncertain, aethereal, up for grabs. Right on the boundary is a button, which a genuine agent on the free-will side can push to set in motion some chain of inevitable events on the other side. Human beings are such agents, on the free-will side, right? Well, maybe.

The concept of the machine embodies the ideal of certainty and control. Before the machine there were slaves, whether human or animal, which lived on the other side of the boundary from their masters. There was no simple button to push to get slaves or animals to do what their masters wanted. Instead, there was the whip, chains of command and literal chains, bargaining and persuasion with rewards and punishments. Individual creatures could be dominated thus, but hardly the whole of nature. And it was always uncertain who would dominate society. So, magical incantations, prayerful supplications, prostrations and political stratagems were used to manipulate who or whatever lay supposedly on the other side. This was hardly a stable arrangement, for you could find yourself one day master and the next day slave. The boundary was fluid and ill-defined. Were the gods, after all, agents who control you or forces to be used?

Along came science, with a simple solution: let the whole universe be a machine, with push-button control. Everything was then available to use, including one’s own body. This was a lob-sided arrangement, however, for whole the mass of the material world lay on one side of that boundary, with mere ghostly agency on the other! But bodies and brains are also material, so what is this agent if not material? A soul? How do mind and body relate? Acknowledging this dilemma did not resolve the issue of control. If the brain is a machine, do “you” control it or does it control you?

The irony, of course, is that human beings invented the machine concept. Presumably invention is an act of free will, which should put us on the agent side. We create the boundary, with a button there to simplify control! By pushing a button, we can even destroy wholesale, at will. While thinking is also presumed an act of free will, we are trying to mechanize that too. Then you push a button and the machine thinks for you. How long will it stay on the mechanical side of the boundary?

While pushing a button requires a finger, with the right technology a mere thought can now serve to give a command. Still, what is a thought, and is it truly yours? If a thought is an electrical impulse in a fleshly computer, on which side of the boundary does it live? Who exactly pushes which figurative button to create the thought?

Why should any human being pay another human being simply to have a place to exist in the world?

In the stone age, small clans moved about hunting and gathering. Where sparsely populated, there was little competition for the area they used. However, as human numbers increased, they might have had to defend their exclusive use against competing clans. With settlement and agriculture, claims to territory were more clearly asserted and defended. Some land was better for producing food. Low-lying and open land would be less defensible than hill tops, where farming was harder.

As civilization developed, warrior elites took control of the best lands, which they leased to farmers in exchange for protection and guaranteed right of use. This rent was paid in food produced and services rendered, including labor or military service. More was charged for use of more productive land. With urbanization, there was similar competition for the best “properties.” (As we still say: “location, location, location!”) Elite families continued to dominate ownership and manage the system whereby land use was stably apportioned through payment of rents. Now, as then, you pay for the uncontested right to occupy a place.

In modern society, it is no longer the king or baron who defends your right of use, but the state. (If you own property, proof of ownership may not even be a paper deed but simply a registry in a government office.) If you rent, your entitlement is guaranteed in a signed agreement. Through taxes, you pay the state to enforce and defend these formal arrangements. Yet, on top of that, you also pay private individuals for the “right” to occupy that property—either through monthly rent or the price of purchase. But, if the state has taken over the role of regulating the system of land use, why does money continue to be paid to private parties for the use of land? The state has superseded the nobility for governance and protection, but not for ownership. It seems we are caught in a hybrid system of double taxation, a compromise descended from feudal society. One way or another you pay twice for a place to put your body—once to the private landholder and once to the state to protect you from usurpers.

In Canada only about 5% of the land mass is privately owned. However, that “alienated” part happens to be the most desirable land. In fact, it is the only part you where are allowed to live. The rest belongs nominally to the “Crown,” which in an arcane sense is the King of England. (The “real” of real estate means royal. It may well turn out to belong instead to native First Nations.) In any case, homesteading was curtailed around 1970 and squatters were suppressed. Individuals cannot apply for Crown land for living space, though corporations can for industrial purposes. There is a housing crisis in part because the whole population is herded into a very restricted area, with artificially inflated land prices.

If someone builds you a house, it’s fair to pay them for their work. But the cost of building is only part of the cost of real estate. The rest is payment for the right to occupy land that is both naturally and artificially scarce. You pay the party from which you purchase or lease. In turn, they had to pay someone else, and that party had to pay… and so on, all the way back to colonists or feudal forebears, who were granted use by the king as favors for support. Absurdly, we are all paying each other for the right exist! Rent is like interest paid for the use of money, which was once frowned upon as “usury.” Some ancient societies cancelled debt every few years. What if we cancelled land ownership?

In 1931, Kurt Gödel famously rocked the worlds of mathematics and philosophy with an ingenious and ground-breaking formal proof. He showed that there are mathematical truths that elude any given formalized mathematical system. If we view a given mind as such a system—well-defined but limited—then there are truths it cannot grasp, which a more advanced mind might be able to. (That superior mind, in turn, would have its own relative limitations.)

But is your mind something you can formalize or even point to? If so, then paradoxically the act of pointing or formalizing must come from somewhere outside it. Can a particular brain be adequately formalized? The dream of “whole brain emulation” hinges on this question—along with the hope of uploading a person’s “mind” as a digital file in cyberspace or transferring it to a new body. Can the ability to self-transcend be formalized?

Some (including Gödel himself) argue that Gödellian self-transcendence implies that humans will always have an edge over machines, which can be formalized. Yet AI—a logical extension of the machine concept—has already slipped beyond tidy human definitions. Neural networks, for instance, are no longer fully transparent. They are not strictly products of human design, and we don’t know precisely how they work. There seems to be no reason in principle why AI could not become even more complex than a human brain. If so, might it even exceed the human brain’s ability to transcend its own limitations? Self-transcendence could grant AI the same advantages it offers us: flexibility, self-control, objectivity, and open-endedness. These traits have long given human beings an edge over other creatures. Possessing them more could give AI an edge over us.

The dividedness of human nature—half animal and half god—manifests in moral inconsistency. We frame this tension as a struggle between good and evil, often codified in terms of moral absolutes. Our ideals reflect the desire to be self-defining and unconstrained by biology. Yet morality refers literally to mores—customs and habits—not timeless truths. Custom is a matter of negotiated agreement. Because we cannot trust one another to come to such agreement and abide by it, we invoke ideals often enforced by super-authorities we call gods. The capacity for self-transcendence enables the possibility of agreement—by helping us rise above individual and cultural biases and converge on objective reality. But this capacity remains unreliable in us, constrained as we are by biology.

Could artificial entities fare better? Could AI become our substitute for divine authority—a new kind of technological overlord? We seem to have given up on the Enlightenment hope of reforming humanity through education or politics. In its place, we now imagine post-human futures: genetic enhancement, cybernetic augmentation, colonizing outer space, or escaping embodiment entirely. Perhaps the final solution of “the human question” will come not through reform but replacement—by machines that are more conscious than us, better at transcending their own limitations, and better equipped morally to occupy the future.

Many of the current fears about AI reflect our misgivings about our own darker human nature—and the extent to which technology mirrors and magnifies it. Those are well-founded concerns, especially given the commercial and military motivations for technological innovation. Yet, because the technological impulse also reflects our higher aspirations, it may not be doomed to destroy us. The future remains uncertain, precisely because we are divided creatures. It’s not inconceivable to create a race of machines to replace us, for better or worse. It’s not unthinkable that they could be morally superior to us: super-benevolent and super-objective as well as super-intelligent. That may depend on our purposes now to guide them. In the end, we are likely to get the future we deserve.

Sputnik, 1957. How shocking the Russians first in space! As a young amateur astronomer I had quite another impression. I was overwhelmed by the realization that in my generation the night sky was changed forever, irrevocably blemished, and would never again be “natural,” the pristine inheritance people had taken for granted over millennia. Now, of course, there are many hundreds of satellites and thousands of bits of “space junk” cluttering the sky. But the space program did not destroy astronomy; on the contrary, the Hubble telescope and its successors have greatly advanced it. And there is something proud and thrilling about watching the International Space Station transit the sky. Satellites and space debris may be a nuisance to professional and amateur astronomers attempting to photograph deep space. But photography has greatly advanced as well. New digital cameras are many times more sensitive than film; multiple time exposures can also now be integrated and “stacked” by computer. Contemporary backyard astronomers can produce images that rival those of professional observatories.

Yet, there is another menace to earthbound astronomy, which comes not from the sky but from the spread of electric illumination over the planet: so-called “light pollution.” Pictures of earth taken from orbit show a planet so lit up at night that few sizable dark areas remain. It is worst, of course, in large cities, where many people spend their whole lives never seeing the Milky Way. Education facilities in big cities, even with superb telescopes, are severely limited by ambient urban light. To see the heavens as they appeared, say, five hundred years ago, you have watch a simulation in a planetarium, ironically sealed from the real sky.

Because the planets are bright, Galileo would have made his discoveries even if handicapped by current light pollution. But our nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, is barely discernable to the naked eye; only in the last century did it become evident that this is a separate system, one of countless many outside our own. Only then could the picture emerge of an expanding universe of billions of galaxies beyond our own. Most of these galaxies, and the gaseous nebulae within our own system, are extremely faint. Could such discoveries have been made under current conditions of light pollution? Even the great Palomar telescope, responsible for so many of these discoveries, has been crippled by its location between merging urban conglomerations. Many of the important optical telescopes are now clustered on the high volcanoes of Hawaii, where nearby towns have cooperated with programs to control light pollution through use of shielded yellow-vapor street lights.

We are blessed to have no public street lights in our rural community. We are fortunate to be able to go out on a clear moonless night and still see a glorious starry sky—part of the precious experience of nature that attracts us to this place. I encourage everyone to help keep our night skies dark. If you have an outdoor light that burns all night, please consider turning it off when you are not actually using it. You’ll save on the electric bill too! With house lights dimmed, bundle up and go outdoors after dark, let your eyes adjust, and see for yourself the splendors of the heavens!

No one wants to seem a capitalist dupe, much less a capitalist pig. On the other hand, even to use the C word these days raises eyebrows—wary of Marxist woke rhetoric resurging in the shadow of the other now disgraced C word. But what is capitalism, anyhow? Any ism suggests a belief underlying a cultural practice. Reduced to essentials, capitalism is the belief that money can make money. But, underlying that truism is the assumption that money is actual wealth.

Genuine wealth consists of useful goods and services that benefit people. Actual goods have a material basis (as in manufacturing, which literally means making by hand), and actual services are grounded in the needs of the body and mind. Such wealth can only be produced by effort of some kind—work. The idea of profit is to get a return for the use by others of your money or property, beyond any effort you put in. While it is true that money can make money, only work can make real wealth. Profit from speculation and rents does produce inflation, however, because it increases the proportion of money circulating to actual goods and services the money is supposed to represent. Wealth comes from genuine productivity, while profit is a legal form of exploitation, a subtle form of theft.

Globalization is a euphemism for hypercapitalism, in which fictitious “derivatives” and “instruments” are speculatively traded for profit. The G word nicely suggests world-wide unity, cosmopolitanism, progress, modernity. (Coupled with liberalism and democracy, what’s not to like?) But the result is the accelerating gap between the extremely rich and everyone else. Globalism is the international financial system that enables profit to run rampant across borders. Cultural and political unification may be progress for the human race. But neo-liberal economics spells progress mainly for the few. Its purpose is to redistribute wealth—upward.

Apologists of globalism offer statistics about economic growth: increases of Gross Domestic Product or per capita income. In a society or world where people have roughly equal assets and incomes, it makes sense to speak of an average. It is extremely misleading (which, after all, is the whole point!) to speak of per capita income when the great bulk of what is being averaged goes to the top one-tenth of one percent. Averaging is no substitute for sharing.

It is equally misleading to point to the vast increase of “global GDP” in the past few decades as proof of the benefits of neo-liberalism. First, world population (the work force behind productivity) nearly doubled in that period. Second, much of any increase in real productivity is due to improved technology, which is only indirectly related to globalism through trade. Third, trade itself is not a proper index of productivity. (You can trade the same widgets back and forth, and each time it will register as an increase in GDP for each country.) Similarly, all sorts of things are counted as GDP that are not net productive, such as wars and ensuing reconstruction. And finally, most of increase of GDP goes into a very few hands. Ordinary people’s lives may improve marginally, but not in the measure suggested by statistics that are unfairly weighted by the gains of the few.

Capitalism is popular for the same reasons that lotteries are. Supposedly, we all get a fair chance to win the jackpot. Of course, gambling does not actually produce anything. It pits all against all in a zero-sum game (I win means you lose), whereas real productivity results in a potential gain for all. Are we then dupes after all?

Here is a sure way to save the planet: cut the number of people by two-thirds. Somehow this (final?) solution rarely comes up for discussion in the media, which instead flaunt horror at the loss of human life through war, famine, and natural disasters—all of which, along with abortions and murder, do tend to reduce population. Animal life suffers along with human life in such tragedies, but a reduction of the human boot-print, by any means, should ultimately relieve stress on the biosphere.

Perhaps this is just to say that we are unable, as yet, to plan our collective future. Other species do not either, but most of them are not equipped to alter the biosphere significantly and are kept in check by other species. The human program, of course, has been to eliminate those species that could keep our populations and planetary effects in check. Consequently, homo sapiens is the first creature that needs to plan its future, because it has eluded nature’s plan for balance.

Climate change is an unfortunate catchword, which masks the real damages we continue to inflict on the rest of life. On the other hand, no one can claim that whole forests somehow clear-cut themselves. Or that humans have no hand in the mass extinctions underway. Our beeline to dominate nature has created an imbalance that we are ill prepared to survive, let alone to rectify.

Here is a consideration, with apologies to Plato, who thought that kings were the answer if they were also “philosophers”—by which he surely meant “lovers of wisdom” and not the academics who now go by that name. (Ironically, the word academic derives from the name of Plato’s school for the training of potential philosopher-kings, which today we would call benevolent dictators, had that not become an oxymoron.) Hardly anyone today could disagree with his idea that only a certain type of well-motivated and wise individual is qualified to lead society. But there does not seem to be a modern version of his Academy to train statespersons. Instead, they graduate from business schools or Hollywood contracts. There are think tanks, but no wisdom tanks.

If the job is to plan humanity’s future, there are scholars with expertise in the many disciplines relevant to that task, including population control. Assuming they could come to agreement, they would need the authority to make and enforce laws designed to ensure a viable future. This would be a technocracy. The large governing body of experts could be democratic within itself; but society as a whole (the world) would not be ruled by democratically elected representatives, but by qualified experts. Terms of service would rotate by lottery, much as jury duty is selected, with the current membership able to reject new candidates by consensus.

This arrangement would bypass many of the problems that plague modern democracies. There would be no occasion to curry favor with the public nor fear its disaffection. Since the “will of the people” would be irrelevant, the nefarious aspects of social media (or corporately controlled official media) wouldn’t touch the political process. There would be no election campaigns, no populist demagoguery, no contested voting results, and no need for fake news or disinformation. Power could not corrupt or even be sought, since the office is a temporary and compulsory civic duty, randomly chosen and without prestige, which would pay only a fixed modest salary. It would be not only shameful, but seriously punished, to gain economically from the term of service. Just an idle thought.

A hefty buck lords it over my orchard, waiting for apples and chestnuts to fall. He’s muscular, even fat. He’s gotten that way by letting other deer make the latest finds for him, then chasing them away. One could imagine he reasons about his actions, what he wants and how to get it. Yet, by a Darwinian account, he does what he does simply because he wouldn’t exist otherwise.

He needs to be strong to challenge or resist challenge by other males, so that it will be him that mates and leaves offspring. For this he has antlers, which are also used to chase away his food-finders, so that he can eat more and be strong to reproduce. He does all this because the genes he got from his forebears encourage him to, and following their dictates ensures the cycle will not be broken. We needn’t imagine him thinking about any of this in order to understand why he does it. If it weren’t in his programmed behavior, his line would have perished long ago and he wouldn’t be standing here. This kind of explanation reasons about the whole system and its implications for the individual. It’s backwards from how people usually reason about how to navigate life.

Without intending to, the buck has fattened himself up nicely for the hunter. While we needn’t suppose he obligingly had the hunter in mind, at one time people did suppose that God had designed the world with Man in mind, and even designed the buck to suit the hunter. Even today, the hunter could reason two ways about which deer to shoot. Should it be the nicely fattened buck, the epitome of fitness and the maximum gain of meat for the least effort? Or should it be the genetically less fit, culling of which would strengthen the stock for future use? (One used to throw the small fish back; now we are not so sure.)

If we reason about the system as a whole, then we have to wonder about our place in it. Religious people used to assume (and some still do) that humans were special, made in God’s image, whereas animals were like machines, without souls. Science now tells us that humans too are no less like machines. Yet, we are machines with headstrong purposes, bent on controlling the system if we can. We consider ourselves special, exempt from the rules of natural selection. The weak and the sick are protected, so that the human stock is far from genetically strengthened. We hold our dominance on the planet by dint of numbers and collective intelligence. The values that make us strong as unnatural creatures make us weaker as natural ones—an experiment with inconclusive results.

Are we indeed the lords of the system? Whereas God was assumed benevolent, we have our doubts about any sort of flesh. Could we be food for angels? Could Earth be a game preserve for alien carnivores? Perhaps we don’t need to look so far. Don’t we have predators within our own ranks? With our little entitlements, are we little more enlightened than the buck in the orchard, lord of his small domain? Are we more secure than the fattening goose feels right up to the moment of losing its head?

The buck’s greed serves him and his genetic line, even though he does not reason about his motivations or his possible end on someone’s table. He does not need to understand the system. If humans or an asteroid somehow bring about the end of his line, it was never his concern. He just needs to seek the falling apple or chestnut and potential mates. The sensations involved must seem reward enough. How different is it for us?

Power is older than Adam. Yet, it must have evolved considerably in the ten thousand years we know as civilization. We could view the power elite as a kind of symbiotic parasite, merged with the social organism like chromosomes or mitochondria within the cell. This parasite plays a key role in the development of society. It evolves along with its host, gaining influence over time.

There have always been elites: hereditary chieftains, warlords and nobility, captains of industry, nouveaux riches, corporate empires. One way or another, such groups have always been well placed to dominate society. Of course, there has also been resistance to this domination—and competition among the powerful themselves, who enjoy privilege that motivates them and positions them well to refine their control and adapt to resistance.

Power may be a strange concept to people content with more modest goals, struggling to make ends meet. Religions prescribe fair practices through which society can function in relative harmony. Yet, ironically, it was Jesus who articulated the rule of history: those who have shall get more, and those who have not will forfeit even what they have. Henry George said something parallel in the 19^th century: wages never increase in proportion to the wealth of society. Quite the contrary, today we see unions floundering and governments subservient to corporations, wealth obscenely concentrated in ever fewer hands. How is that possible?

While most people’s wants are modest and straightforward, some people demand far more and intend to get it. This puts ordinary folk in an awkward position. They must devote resources of time, energy, and money they don’t have, just in order to defend their modest station against the intentions of the more aggressive. They are not in a good position to adapt quickly to the inventive strategies of the elite, who count on the masses to be distracted, passive, short sighted, busy repaying their debts, looking the other way.

Social movements over the centuries that challenge the unequal distribution of wealth have inadvertently strengthened the stranglehold of power, by training it to adapt to resistance with ever subtler strategies. Power has evolved to be less visible and more devious. Discretion is the lesser part of power, which has the leisure to plan and plot. Cool heads pull strings in back rooms, hire mercenaries, buy up media to control what the potential resistance believes. How many of the hundred richest people can you name?

Is history just the story of the evolving ability of the rich to dominate the poor? Is a revolution possible that does not eventually revert to the business as usual founded on greed? The masses are at a disadvantage. For, only through poverty and homelessness can one secede from dependency on the modern economy. Instead, we collude with our masters by playing their games: every time we buy one of their widgets, we add to their power and the widening gulf between us. Through savings, investment, and retirement funds, we lend them the means to tighten their grip. Through agreeing to a governmental structure which they are skilled to manipulate and control, we underwrite our domination. It was clearer in the days of powdered wigs who was “them.” Now the lines of class and of responsibility are blurred, even as the middle class dissolves back into a peasantry and an aristocracy. Unless we can understand the evolution of power well enough to think ahead of it, we will always be on the defensive. Worse, we will always be part of the problem, inadvertently working for the enemy.