Our journey begins four billion miles from home. From this deep space vista we are just able to make out our tiny planet, a pale blue dot—a microscopic speck adrift in a sea of infinite dark, perhaps the very definition of humility. We recall the innocent musings of our childhood, sleeping out under the stars, young minds opened to hope and aspiration by the beauty and wonder of the heavens. Are we really alone? Are there kids out there like us? Are they looking back?
We did our best growing up on our little planet, learning, working, and earning our place in society. Now, we are being told that the very institutions that guide and govern—our laws, economic system, cities, nations, and corporations are completely wrong. Not only are they wrong, these institutions are on the brink of failing, and when they collapse they will take down civilization as we know it. This may all sound like a dystopian sci-fi movie or a conspiracy theory, built on fear more than fact. People don’t want to hear stuff like this. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, “We don’t want the truth because we can’t handle the truth!” The good news is that we absolutely can handle the truth. But first, we must understand the truth—all of it.
With this nearly incomprehensible struggle in mind, this book is organized in a specific topic-per-chapter format with extensive references and links to qualified sources supporting every conclusion along the way. This enables the reader to jump into the story at any point, look up references, skip over details and return later if desired. Some of this information may not be familiar, so it may take some time to work through the whole saga. Although not overly technical, we will delve into sufficient depth to gain a system level understanding of the primary issues. Still, this is a complex topic involving a broad spectrum of subject matter including the human brain, propaganda, emotion, belief and social behavior.
The first half of the book is a step-by-step scientific overview of how human perception, propaganda, and our economic institutions themselves interact to create, instill, and sustain belief. The first two chapters cover the origin and explosive growth of modern-day propaganda and how it creates and reinforces belief through mechanisms like conformation bias, operant conditioning, and the backfire effect. Chapters three through six highlight the physiology of the human brain and examine the broad landscape of issues involved in the nearly-impossible task of changing the adult mind due to embedded belief. The four elements of belief are arranged in a diagram to demonstrate how faith and reason diverge in the breakdown of religion and science.
The last half of the book addresses exactly why our economic institutions are, in fact, false. It will be shown that they are diametrically opposed to a society that enables, incentivizes, and provides for the wellbeing and basic needs of the people and their planet. After that, we will take these institutions apart to reveal that they are not based on scientific principles at all, and they never were. Humanity has been seduced into playing a superfluous game called the Market, which is structured on faith alone and deeply obfuscated by propaganda and complexity. In truth, our monetary system is an illegal pyramid scheme requiring continuous growth simply to keep it from collapsing. It enslaves the lower classes by bonding them in debt while passing unearned income to the non-producing upper classes. The system incentivizes only for profit and provides no linkages to life needs, human or otherwise. We are being held in a death-grip inside an institutionalized global monetary structure that is unscientific and unsound. On top of all that, this entire global structure is self-terminating.
