Shaping Conventional Wisdom
by Henry See
from www.sott.net/articles/sh...ional-Wisdom

We ran an article www.newsweek.com/id/130637/output/print recently on the Signs page about the elite that run the world. It is from a mainstream publication, about as mainstream as they get in the US: Newsweek. It is about the group of people the author calls the "Superclass" and who are:

"part of a new global elite that has emerged over the past several decades. I call it the 'superclass.' They have vastly more power than any other group on the planet. Each of the members is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power, and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members. This new class of elites is both more permeable, and more transient, than elites of the past...
The top 10 percent of all people, for example, now control 85 percent of all wealth on the planet.

That such a group exists is indisputable. It includes the heads of the biggest financial institutions, the 14 families Blankfein joked about, and then some; the top 50 control almost $50 trillion in assets. The heads of the world's biggest corporations are also members; the top 2,000 support perhaps 500 million people, generate almost $30 trillion in sales and have well over $100 trillion in assets. The list also includes top government officials with real cross-border influence... media barons...religious leaders...cultural icons..."

The author goes on to describe the lifestyle "up there", looking down upon the rest of us peons from the leather seats of their private jets as they circle the globe entangling us in their machinations. No standing in line at airports and passing through humiliating security checks for these folks. No way. They just implement those rules to keep the rest of us in line.

It is a small group, and they all know one another.

Says Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Wall Street's Blackstone Group, "The world is pretty small. In almost every one of the areas in which I am dealing or in which we at Blackstone are looking at deals, you find it is just 20, 30 or 50 people worldwide who drive the industry or the sector."
They meet at places like Davos to "get to know one another, hatch deals and exercise perhaps the greatest power the superclass has collectively: to shape conventional wisdom."

Did you catch that phrase about shaping "conventional wisdom"? You know what that really means, right? Brainwashing. Telling us what to think. Shaping the insides of our heads by creating the invisible prison bars of thought that keep us prisoner while they scurry around robbing and plundering under our very noses.

They have it down to a well-oiled and highly perfected machine. They have conquered our minds, and once that has happened, there is precious little one can do until the mind has been reclaimed.

Unfortunately, how can you find the time to reclaim your own right to think when you are thoroughly preoccupied with putting food on the table? When you are worried that the next health problem will bankrupt the family? Worried whether you will be able to pay for your next dose of anti-depressants because the big pharmaceutical companies have raised the price yet again? Or how to pay for that impressive car or big screen flat-panel TV bought with financing.

How could you even get suckered into thinking you needed that car or TV or those anti-depressants in the first place?

"Shaping conventional wisdom" is a thought war. If one never asks the right question, it doesn't matter what the answer is, and all the wrong questions and answers are being broadcast into your brains over the television, via the newspapers and radio, in the mindless activities of the Internet, and via the gossip around the water cooler at work.

What is the step from being there, confronted with these problems, real and imagined, bombarded by mindlessness 24 hours a day, not to mention the waves that are part of the new 'connected' environment that affect us from cell phones, wireless internet connections, or microwaves, to wondering, "Gee, it does look like Bush, Cheney, and their cronies in Israel had something to do with 911, doesn't it"?

How big is that leap?

How many people do you know who are willing to pose the question? And if they have posed the question, how many have risen above the likely response, "Well, what can I do about it?", before returning to their TV or computer.

So this small group, this "superclass", have done their job well.

But don't be fooled by the idea that this new "superclass" is "permeable" or "transient", as the author puts it. The psychopaths at the top have always had minions working for them, the expendable ones.

Heck, even your corner street gang leader knows that. Look at this example from Political Ponerology:

When drawn into a felonious group, these constitutionally weakened individuals become faint-critical helpers and executors of the leader's intentions, tools in the hands of more treacherous, usually psychopathic, leaders. Once arrested, they submit to their leaders' insinuated explanations that the higher (paramoral) group ideal demands that they become scapegoats, taking the majority of blame upon themselves. In court, the same leaders who initiated the delinquencies mercilessly dump all the blame onto their less crafty colleagues. Sometimes a judge actually accepts the insinuations. [Political Ponerology, Andrew Lobaczewski, p. 112.]
Think 'Scooter' Libby. Only at this level, the ones with the real power can get their "constitutionally weakened" patsies off the hook. Libby took one for the team and was duly pardoned. As for Bush and Cheney, after dumping the blame for the Valerie Plame leak onto Libby, they walked out clean as any Mafia don or street-corner bully who had the patsy take the fall.

The author of the Newsweek article concludes by saying:

"In short, while we may have a somewhat different superclass in the future, until the people of the world are more comfortable with creating the kind of strong global governance mechanisms that can contain and regulate many of their activities, the 6,000 will continue to play the greatest role of any group on the planet in defining our times."
Well, we won't even comment on the need to "contain and regulate" their activities, because that is so far from being all that is necessary, that the remark, slipped in like that, is nothing more than another example of the shaping of conventional wisdom. It sets the limits in the reader's mind before he or she has even thought the problem through.

So just take note of that and then think about the figure he gives.

Six thousand people. All over the world.

Six thousand people. Who know each other. Who meet secretly, plan our future, and make decisions that affect billions of people. Six thousand people who "shape conventional wisdom".

Could you call it a "conspiracy"? Or would that be stretching it?

Is it any less a conspiracy because they meet in the "open" in places like Davos? What are they doing the other 364 days of the year?

But even if we don't use the C-word, does that make it any more just? Let's say it isn't a conspiracy, that these individuals are just average Joes, luckier and richer than the rest of us, doing their best. Does the fact that "the top 10 percent of all people, for example, now control 85 percent of all wealth on the planet" not reveal an injustice so profound, one that is so deep, so overwhelming, that it really doesn't matter whether or not it is a "conspiracy"?

When you read that, don't the hairs on your neck stand upright at the sheer horror of it?

If they don't, why not? Have you become anaesthetized?

If 6,000 people really have that much power, then isn't the use of the word "conspiracy" really something of a straw man, erected precisely in order to divert attention, to "shape conventional wisdom", as it were?

Then think about the way the Palestinians are being killed a few at a time while the entire population suffers from the occupation, an occupation that if it were happening to any other group on the planet would be on the front pages of every newspaper in the West.

"Shaping conventional wisdom".

Look, then, at Iraq, the destruction of a country that was one of the most vital in the Middle East prior to the "liberation" by the forces of "democracy and freedom". There are estimates that well over one million Iraqis have died. But we saw images of Iraqis happily welcoming US invaders into the country.

"Shaping conventional wisdom"?

Have you been following the food riots that are breaking out around the globe? Do you think the "superclass" are going to go hungry?

So there it is, in black and white and Newsweek of all places. Of course, sociologists have been studying this for years and have been saying much the same thing: power resides in a small group of people. What is new is that globalization has switched the focus from a power elite in one country to a power elite that more or less openly runs the world. And they are doing it out in the open. They aren't hiding when they jet off to Davos. Their arrogance and their success in "shaping conventional wisdom" is such that they no longer need to hide it. Hey, they can get away with 911, and no one called them on it.

No one.

Except for that small group of people who have refused to succumb to "conventional wisdom". But this group can be easily handled, marginalized, set against each other, and rendered uncredible through the planting of outlandish theories that discredit the serious researchers. Agents are sent in to cause disputes and in-fighting that cripples the movement.

It is down to a science. The science of control. "Shaping conventional wisdom".

It worked with the Kennedy assassinations. It worked again with 911.

Why? Because most people are struggling around the ultimate problem. They have not yet identified it, the root problem, the underlying cause: psychopathy and deviants in control of our world.

All the struggle and fighting for justice, for sustainable growth, for equity and equality among the peoples isn't going to get us anywhere as long as we continue to think that we are up against people "like us", people with a heart, with a conscience, who care about the world's peoples. Bono can run around from meeting to meeting extracting promises till he is blue in the face or U2 has another number one hit, and it isn't going to change a thing. Promises while he is at the table, a quick photo op with Bush or Blair or the humanitarian politician of the month, and then laughter when he walks out of the room.

They don't care one whit.

Worse than that, not only will they never lift a finger to improve things for the majority of people on the planet, they do their best to destroy anything the people themselves set out to accomplish. It is easy for a few to destroy the life's work of thousands. All it takes is one psychopath. It is much harder to create, to give something real to the world. It is an uphill fight at the best of times, and we are not in the best of times.

While the people struggling for change are busy in the trenches, through what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism the pathocrats ferret out the individuals and organizations in a country that are actually working to improve the lives of the people, either by killing them or jailing them or banning them, and they then implant economic policies that benefit this same small group and institute dictatorships to ensure the new laws are followed, all done with the knowledge garnered from research such as that done by Ivan Pavlov on transmarginal inhibition. And they do it under the banner of "democracy'! Iraq was invaded and destroyed in the name of "democracy", in the name of "freedom".

Well, if this is what they have been doing since the end of the Second World War, what are they up to now? Disaster capitalism is business as usual, or has been for the last forty years. But something feels different now, in our post-911, pre-apocalyptic, return of Jesus world.

The "superclass" are stockpiling the samples of the world's grain supplies on an island off Norway.

They are building underground bases.

They are making it more and more difficult to fly and travel, from humiliating searches and ridiculous regulations about putting toothpaste in clear, plastic, government approved baggies instead of the clear plastic travel kit your spouse gave you, to issuing passports with electronic ID that will include any piece of private information they can find about you.

They are closing down the economy by siphoning off ever greater amounts of money through their criminal and fraudulent trading practices.

They are poisoning us with their genetically modified foods, not to mention forcing people to return year after year to the multinationals to buy new seeds instead of continuing on in their old ways of setting aside seed from one year for the next.

They are spying on us, checking our emails, our credit and debit card purchases, our library book borrowing, our text messaging and cell phone messages, our telephone calls, our medical records.

It sounds to me like they are preparing for something.

And what could that be, after years of dumbing us down, after years of numbing us with TV, cell phones, deficient schooling, after years of war?

They are hanging us out to die. They know the planet is subject to cyclic catastrophes. They know the next one in the cycle is due very soon. If SOTT can see a sharp increase in the sightings of fireballs fireballs-meteorites.blogspot.com/ in the skies, don't you think, with all their black budgets, that the pathocrats have a even clearer idea about it than we do?

It is all part of one, overreaching plan: to save themselves while letting space rocks take care of the rest of us.

But if someone can't even see 911, how can they see this?

If it is impossible for your average citizen to transgress their inner world and strictures of thought about 911, if it goes against everything they believe, against the "conventional wisdom" drummed into us since we were children, how could they possibly comprehend the whole?

But, you, reading this page, you see it, don't you?

What are you going to do about it?