The Ego Trip of the False Individualist and the Sour Seeds of Revolution (Part One)

From the No-Globals, through the Occupy Wall Street Movement, on to the Stop ACTA Movement, the revolutionaries of our time are not linked by a common thread. They are linked by a common rope, off of which only a few individual threads succeed in peeling off.

The slogans and the publicly manifested roots of today's mass protests are well-known. There is a struggle. A struggle against a faceless, nameless, new world order (although the New World Order is a name, it is not the name of any actual order, much less a definition or description thereof, novelty not being, in and of itself, substance). 

According to revolutionary legend, that new world order (or New World Order) seeks to dominate and enslave the human race. It aims to crush hard-earned and battle-won human rights. It desires the elimination of privacy and individuality. Just like Huxley's nightmarish Brave New World, it wants to make us all the same or, at best, all the same within a given social class. “Conform”, “comply”, “fit in” are the keywords of the oppressive global regime-or so the revolutionaries of our time would have us believe.

I do not seek to prove or disprove any conspiracy theories in this essay. I do not know whether there is a New World Order or what that term means-if anything. I do not claim esoteric knowledge of the workings of a “secret elite” that may or may not rule the world. What I do know, as do all of my readers, are the external manifestations of the world that we see today.

One of the most visible external manifestations is that of youths claiming to fight for individuality, against an anti-individualist regime (this regime is either nascent or currently in power, depending on the version of revolutionary lore that you adhere to). Thus, we have individualists on the one hand and anti-invidualists or conformists on the other. This is our mise-en-scène.

We shall not examine, for the purposes of this essay, the truth behind the allegedly all-mighty, obscure, tenebrous, New World Order. Logically, however, if the New World Order exists, being an all-mighty, obscure and tenebrous organisation, it hides the truth about itself-quite successfully. Indeed, the inability of the revolutionaries to unveil the whole truth about this alleged organisation (or state of affairs) is one of their loudest battle cries. We shall not attempt to unveil such truths here. We shall examine instead, the character of those clamours for individuality and claims of the existence of the New World Order-without disputing their veracity.

For the sake of argument, therefore, let the New World Order be our shady antagonist. Let us then cast the modern revolutionary, as we know him, in all his transparency (which proudly distinguishes him from the shady antagonist), as our-protagonist. The revolutionary is, therefore, our main character, as it were.

Now let us examine our protagonist's main claim of superiority over the antagonist: his individuality. We know who he is, we know what he believes and what he believes is different from what the "masses" have been "misled" to believe. These are our protagonist's defining features.

Our protagonist informs his opinions through non-mainstream sources. Though not mainstream, all of these sources dwell, essentially, on the same story: of an oppressive, tyrannical, anti-individual regime that seeks or has already attained global dominance.

The oppression follows, generally speaking, along the same broad plotline, which usually begins with a shady elite of bankers or moneylenders of some sort. In the more anti-Semitic versions, it begins with Europe's medieval Jewish moneylenders, or protobankers, so to speak, established in Venice (operating on wooden tables, banchi, thus the Italian banca and the English “bank”). In the less or non-anti-Semitic versions, it begins with medieval Christian protobankers-most commonly, the Medici family or the Knights Templar. The protobankers, Jewish or Christian, never walk alone and they are intertwined with the Freemasons (sometimes portrayed as part of the same plotline as the Knights Templar, i.e as as an organisation dating back to the Medieval period and at other times as an organisation that emerged in the Enlightenment Period-the official foundation period of what is today known as Freemasonry).

These bankers and Freemasons used their money and their arcane skills to foster false revolutions in France, Italy, the United States and other countries. Under the pretext of democracy, they destroy the sovereign rule of kings and gradually create puppet regimes. Democracy, heavily dependent on campaign finance and characterised by a constant turnover of rulers, is easy prey for the bankers and Freemasons, who have the two vital advantages that elected politicians lack: money and permanence. Currently, the story goes on, we find ourselves in the final stages of the bankers/Freemasons conspiracy, where their dictatorial intentions are laid bare. According to the conspiracy theorists, the greedy banking system is on the verge of collapse, the democratic United States are overtly creating institutions of “oppression”, such as FEMA and Homeland Security. Civil rights are curtailed and the bankers take more and more from the masses. This, more or less, is the standard “revolutionary” plotline of our times. Some versions, found mainly in the United States, distinguish between “good Freemasons” (such as Thomas Jefferson) and the decadent, greedy, corrupt kind of today. Thus, while the Freemasons of the 1770s had good intentions in creating the United States, today there is a different breed, apparently, that tramples on all the “traditional values” of the “Founding Fathers”. The paradox involved in having an institution so permanent, so devoted to its causes as the Freemasons do a hundred-and-eighty degree turn and destroy their greatest creation is, of course, conveniently ignored.

So, what do these New World Order oppressors want from us? To work hard, obey orders and hand most of our money to them, no doubt? That is what the conspiracy theories essentially boil down to, at least the ones that are limited to human motivations (we shall ignore, for the present purposes, those conspiracy theories that revolve around alien races, lizard kings and other extra- or super-human phenomena).

In order to be unquestioning and to surrender our hard labour to the New World Order, however, we must be made compliant. In order to become compliant, we must lose our individuality. Monkey see-monkey do and we will be none the wiser. How does the New World Order achieve that? Through control of mass media, is the revolutionary's reply. As the revolutionaries rightly infer, it is to control of the mass media that all or most of the world's grievances can be traced back. The wars of today, as some like to put it, are “information wars.” On this very blog, I, the writer and you, my dear reader, are, willingly or unwillingly, “soldiers” in that “war.”

Enter the modern-day individualist revolutionary. His historical task is to free us from the bondage of “mainstream media” and unveil the “truth” behind the “lies” of the “regime.” Such “truths” are revealed, it seems, every second, on millions of web pages and blogs-just like mine. While once, my dear reader, you were blind, now you can see. You can realise and develop your full potential and escape the shackles of oppression cast upon you by the moneylending/deceitful New World Order.

Here we arrive at the two gaping voids in the revolutionary plotline and the main point of the present story. The first void is: what was stopping us from being “individuals” yesterday, prior to our blogosphere-induced enlightenment? The second void is: how “individual” is our newly-found “individuality”, really?