Euro will not fail, say Wolfgang Schaeuble (left) and John Major … Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has warned those who bet against the euro that they "will not succeed". The single currency won't fail, and the region's nations are determined to defend it, Mr. Schaeuble told German newspaper the Bild am Sonntag in an interview published on Sunday. "All those responsible in Europe agree: the euro is to all our advantage. And that's why we will successfully defend it," Mr. Schaeuble was cited as saying. "Those who bet their money against the euro will have no success," he added. "The euro won't fail." – UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: Fear-based promotions do not exist; the ones we have implemented will doubtless succeed. Hey, wait a minute, forget we said that! …
Free-Market Analysis: The fabulously wealthy Anglo-American power elite families – those that have conspired inter-generationally to build a one-world government – have started to find their strategies are not working. The dominant social themes that they rely on to frighten the masses into giving up power and wealth to international authoritarian solutions (the UN, etc.) have become less efficacious as the truth-telling of the Internet itself has become more powerful.
You would think that those who pro-offer failed public promotions would know when to retire them, but those who promulgate dominant social themes do not, apparently, ever surrender. When belief in such promotions falters, the elite seems to push harder, to the point where it becomes almost ludicrous. In some cases, the signature of an elite promotion, apparently, is its lurching progress despite almost universal derision. We have compared such themes to the living dead (zombies). They apparently cannot be killed.
There is one other possibility that might explain why the elite is pursuing its promotions ever more zealously even as they are becoming less and less credible. We explain it at the end of this article. However, before we get to it, we want to summarize once again what is taking place as regards elite memes, their continued rejection and the role that the Internet is playing in this process.
Take the Afghan war on terror. The war is evidently and obviously being lost; and NATO itself is suffering from enormous stress and strain as a result. But the solution, so far as we can tell, has not been to disengage but to send more troops into the field of battle and to extend the timeline for the conflict. This is not a viable solution. Western states reel under virtual economic collapse, and their citizenry will continue to increase the pressure to end hostilities. The Anglo-America-NATO course of action is increasingly disassociated from reality in our view. A non-solution.
And then there is the EU. The EU itself is falling apart but those at the very top (see article excerpt above) make stronger and stronger statements about EU unity. German citizens are likely not in favor of the EU if they have to work longer and harder to support more profligate countries. Much of the rest of Europe is aflame with resentment over Brussels'-imposed austerity. That does not seem to matter to Wolfgang Schaeuble who apparently believes he does not have to consult with his countrymen before making sweeping statements about Germany's enthusiasm for the EU and the euro.
How about global warming? The global warming meme has fallen to pieces, but you wouldn't know it from the just-concluded meeting in Cancun, Mexico attended by over 150 countries. The result of the conference was general agreement to set up a US$100 billion fund – one paid for by Western countries to compensate "developing" countries for producing too much carbon dioxide. Never mind that this fund probably will never be created; the disassociation between what the political class is proposing and what the average-person on the street believes continues to widen. This is a recipe for increased civil unrest and even violence.
One begins to believe that the elite is increasingly removed from reality. It is suffering from a collective cognitive dissonance. Like an unimaginative poker player whose luck has turned sour at the end of a big hand, the Anglosphere's brain trust doesn't seem to know what to do. It continues to double down with a kind of mechanical certitude that is increasingly disassociated from the "facts on the ground." The best thing would be to reduce exposure, to wait for a more promising opportunity. But that's not how it's done. The elite seems blindly resistant. Increasingly it seems dysfunctional rather than realistic.
As with the Gutenberg press before it, the Internet has galvanized seemingly unstoppable sociopolitical evolution on numerous levels. Here at the Daily Bell we have tried to catalogue them on a regular basis. In fact, for years it has been our contention that the wealth-conversation of the 21st century would consist of the elite's continued efforts at promotion (dominant social themes) versus the inevitable deprogramming of the Internet. People's investment returns would be predicated on how well they understood the conversation between these two forces and how accurately they determined which side was winning.
There are significant, real life ramifications to the ebb and flow of these conversations. One example would be the Chicago Climate Exchange, which just collapsed. Its founders announced in November 2010, that it would effectively dissolve at the end of the year after having been purchased by Europe's Climate Exchange PLC. This is a definitive business setback for the elite that is trying to create a kind of carbon-based money that will effectively tax carbon dioxide emissions as a threat to the environment.
There is suddenly a struggle for share of mind, one that certainly could not have been predicted in the mid-20th century. It is evident and obvious that the almost incomprehensibly powerful banking families of the West did not mean for the Internet to gain traction; its invention by the Pentagon's DARPA was merely meant to connect military and academic researches to libraries, universities, etc. But when the two "Steves" met in a garage and invented the home computer, the technology was suddenly galvanized; the Internet became a connection device for the Western middle class and revivified, especially, American exceptionalism. The Dark Promotional Age of the 20th century began to be rolled back by an exciting flood of knowledge.
The elites of the day influenced the changes that the Gutenberg press was making, but they could not fully control those changes. The Renaissance gave rise (perhaps with the elites help, as they wished to split the Catholic church) to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Western discovery and population of the New World, etc. The seals of elite control were breached. Only in the 20th century did the Anglo-American elite fully come into its power once again, controlling every form of communication (or so it seems) and working hard to break down familial bonds while celebrating the increasing power of the state. The goal was always to frighten humanity's billions, especially the Western middle classes, into giving up more wealth and power to globally positioned sociopolitical facilities.
It is in America that the elite expended the greatest amount of energy in changing the culture from one of free-market human action to authoritarian corporatism and collectivism. Everywhere one looks at the 20th century, one can see the promotions – or potential promotions anyway. It was indeed a kind of "dreamtime." But even at the height of its influence the elite could not fully implement gun control in the US; nor could it eradicate the cultural individualism of the American psyche.
In the 21st century, the Internet has provided the spark that has reignited free-market republicanism. The patriot movements of the 1990s are merely a pale shadow of what is taking place now. From Oath-Keepers to various manifestations of the Tea Party to an active hard-money oriented Internet press that supports Congressman Ron Paul, changes are rippling out from the center of the disturbance: the Internet.
It is no different in Europe; long ago we predicted the tribes would begin to revolt once the EU and the euro offered no more upside. The EU elites basically bribed local elites to go along with the EU program. But this assumed that the ancient tribes of Europe had come into the present day denuded of the wits and martial tendencies with which they had overcome Rome some 2000 years ago. Europe's economic and political elites had promulgated a clever, ever-more-powerful European Union, but in a matter of months all of this has been called into question. In Iceland, a new Constitution is being drawn up; there is general unrest throughout the PIGS and now even Britain is rocked by protests and its royal family threatened.
And then there is WikiLeaks. The Internet dissemination of documents pertaining especially to the war in Afghanistan and also of the country's diplomatic corp. have led to international tensions and, after the jailing of WikiLeaks' leader Julian Assange, to a series of Internet attacks on corporations and other entities that have supported the government position. As we wrote previously, this sort of posture calls into question state-monopoly justice itself; we did not expect this particular meme to come under attack so soon.
As of this writing, unofficial cyberattacks in support of Julian Assange have just shut down various European Amazon.com sites; previous sites shut down include Mastercard and Visa. The protests in our view are probably not engineered directly by a formal Western intel, but certainly one could argue that they are the result of certain kinds of manipulation. Nonetheless, as we have pointed out before, the Internet is a process not an episode. Any manipulations of the Internet itself taken at this time may backfire, given the complexity of the Internet and the amount of non-state affiliated hackers and programmers who provide a resource comparable, if not superior, to state-affiliated resources.
At the beginning of this article we indicated we would offer up one more perspective that might shed light on what's going on. In fact, we have done so in our trilogy of short stories about a Julian Assange-like character. In "Coda: Sayeth the Chosen One," we postulated that the elite had made a decision to pursue increasingly clumsy authoritarian solutions in order to ignite a new kind of dialectic. On one side would be the authoritarian, statist solutions themselves (solutions that are not only alienating many but also bankrupting nation-states in the West with an economic perversity that seems deliberate). On the other would be an Assange-type leader promising to use the Internet to make nation-states more transparent and less self-destructive in order to build growing bonds of trusts between them. You can read the story here: CODA: Sayeth the Chosen One …
Is the continued authoritarianism of the elite as regards its failing memes actually a dominant social theme of itself – a promotion that constitutes one side of a new dialectic? Seen from this perspective, one side is the (deliberately imposed) failure of nation-states economically, militarily and politically; on the other side is hypothetically a vision-in-the-making of a more trusting global world order – one of transparency and resolute reasonableness (perhaps led by a Julian Assange-type movement). If over time this observation proves out, it will mark a decisive shift in elite tactics, as we do not believe that such a dialectic was contemplated even a decade ago.
The elite does adapt to circumstances, and the dialectic we have now suggested would at least explain why the Anglosphere has been so clumsy lately in terms of implementing increasingly authoritarian solutions and revealing its strategies and historical perspectives. It could be doing so to offer up a NEW solution (an internationalist leader promoting a new world order) that will seem to address the brutal rapidity with which they are now operating. Alternatively, as we have suggested above, there is no further strategy, only the continued unraveling of elite memes, an increased reliance on authoritarianism to invoke more centralized world governance and, as a result, an increasingly pathological dysfunction.
