Dear Mr. Steele,
I've read your thesis, which presents a cogent framework to estimate the likelihood for the breakout of a revolution, with great interest.
I have some questions, which I respectfully ask you to answer either via Email or a future post on your website, Phi Beta Iota.
– When explaining the factors of your framework, you state that some of them are to be understood as “Sybilline”. Could you please explain what exactly you mean with that? Please be aware that English is not my native language.
I was a young academic putting on airs. It means prophetic. The model for predicting revolution that I created was two thirds completely original and has never been equaled to date. In some ways it is also a model for governance — address all these preconditions, and you avoid having a violent expensive revolution. Governance is about legitimacy — government serves best when intelligence is devoted to finding the best truth and politics is deovted to finding the best affordable sustainable outcome for the majority over time. That requires integrity. At root revolution is about the government's loss of integrity and then legitimacy. See also my chapter on The Substance of Governance.
– Why is education not part of your original framework, important as it is for the well-being of any society? (You write about the failure of education later, in your paper “Paradigms of Failure”)
Education is explicitly included in the first box of the Techno-Demographic column, and implicitly included across the entire matrix. However, having since read many books on education (Education (General) (157),Education (Universities) (60)), and in particular Will Durant's 1916 thesis, Philosophy and the Social Problem, I now consider education the soul of any community, as did Plato and Durant.
I am very glad to have you bring this up. Here to the side is the latest graphic representing the new PhD program I would like to create (and also be the first to earn). Among the major changes or evolutions in my thinking this past decade of wandering in the wilderness (my conference was stolen from me in 2006 at the same time that I lost my clearances to chimpanzees that could not handle 7,500 cheerfully declared foriegn contacts — this ruined me financially) are these:
01 Secret counterintelligence must be the high table of intelligence. Without a reliable means of scrubbing traitors and criminals from the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, nothing else can be relied upon.
02 Education, intelligence (decision-support) and research & development must be nurtured together. One cannot have smart spies in the context of a dumb nation.
03 There are eight “tribes” of information who must be brought together to share all possible information as well as the on-going challenges of sense-making about everything always. What this really means is that education must be pervasive, continuing, and must easily cross all boundaries.
04 Rote learning is for toads [memoization is still needed, it helps mastery, but not eighteen years worth]. The academy has failed to learn or adapt in the past quarter century, with the result that most schools are not educating anyone properly — when hackers are moved to drop out of schools and invent billion dollar industries, one must consider the possibility that education as now constituted is retarded and a drain on the society.
05 The human brain is the one resource we have in infinite supply. The five billion poor — and the major demographics of Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria, among others, are the future. These people do not have 18 years to sit quietly while some lecturer drones on with irrelevant factory-era didactic drivel. We need to connect the five billion poor to the Internet with free cells phones as well as national and distributed call centers, and then get out of the way while they create infinite wealth. I pitched this to Sir Richard Branson without success. We also need to end compulsory education, a form of state-controlled brain-washing. On this see Education: Free and Compulsory by Murray Rothbard. See also Worth a Look: Book Reviews of Capitalism Reincarnated and Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Common Wealth.
06 I have also realized that the only way we can get to universal free education “one cell call at a time” as our design team called for within Earth Intelligence Network, is if we go “all in” on Open Source Everything.” We need an autonomous Internet — a mesh that cannot be censored nor shut down nor monitored by idiot clerks working for evil mandarins — in which Open Cloud, Open Data, Open Government, Open Hardware, Open Science, Open Software, Open Spectrum, and Open Standards — among others — are all developed together.
07 I have been calling for a World Brain Institute, an Open Source Agency (OSA), a Multinational Decision-Support Centre (MDSC), and a United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN) for close to a decade now. Such developments would restore the sovereign power of the public and sharply contain the excesses of governments, corporations, and organizations that now are free to loot the public treasury and abuse the public trust. I regret to say that the Ambassadors to the USA of the great emerging powers, including India, have failed to respond to my three attempts to communicate these ideas to their respective home governments. Similarly, the EU and NATO have chosen to ignore my suggestions for a joint endeavor.
– In your paper “Paradigms of Failure“, you describe the “failure” of a wide range of institutions and groups which are part of the society of your country. Why “failure” when it is increasingly obvious to anybody observing the political developments in your country as well as in all “western” societies, that what you call “failure” is the product of willful betrayal, subversion and sabotage on part of the self-appointed “elites” of said societies?
I evolve as we all do. Paradigms of Failure was written in 2007 and published in 2008 as part of my political book, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig. Subsequently I ran for President in 2012 for two reasons: to put all the good ideas from others at one place, We the People Reform Coalition, and so as to be able to connect to all the other Presidential candidates and urge them to come together to demand Electoral Reform as the one common goal. All of them faled my test. All of them lack the sense of public duty that would lead them to step away from their narrow home base and actually work for the public good. Ron Paul in particular disappointed me. He could have won the nomination as a Republican, and the election had he announced Dennis Kucinich as his Vice President — and of course they could both have been assassinated. By the by, the following summarizes what I learned in 2012: How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two Party Tyranny (Reality Sandwich).
Our elites are not self-appointed. They are appointed by a long-running financial cabal working primarily through Harvard and Yale, using New York banks and Texas energy companies and Cuban and Italian crime families — as well as various churches — to enforce their control. The assassination of JFK as well as MLK — and the cover-ups that the US Government successfully executed — were the end of democracy and the end of a fair economy in the USA.
Worse, our senior civil servants and uniformed officers — Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft come to mind — have chosen to confuse loyalty with integrity, and have repeatedly violated their oaths to defend the US Constitution against all enemies, domestic and foreign. I am sympathetic to the view of many that the greatest threat to peace and prosperity, both within the USA and abroad, is the US Government as it is now constituted and corruptly managed.
The good news is that the Internet cannot be put back in the box. That is the Liberation Technology of note. The public cannot be repressed — on this I agree with Howard Zinn, Jonathan Schell, and Vaclav Havel. What we are missing — most of the preconditions for revolution being amply present within the USA — is a precipitant … our Tunesian fruit seller.
I believe that in 2016, or at the latest 2020, Occupy, the Independents, the four small parties now blocked from ballot access (Libertarian, Green, Constitution, Reform) and new parties (Working Families, Justice, Whigs) can come together to dismiss two-party tyranny and restore the rule of law within the USA.
What we have right now is a deliberate decision by the nominal leaders across each of the eight tribes to accept the status quo and not fight the corruption that is so prevalent across every aspect of US society and US governance at all levels. They are all betraying their constituencies and “passing the buck” into the future. I do however have very high confidence in our youth, and believe that the legalization of marijuna represents the end of government “because I say so” and the beginning of government on the merits of the matter.
– Why is betrayal on part of the “elites” not a factor in your original framework? Is this because this thought would be anathema to somebody who has earned his livelihood as part of the intel community, which by definition serves the interests of the “elite”?
I confess that I am a slow learner. I was not fully radicalized in my understanding until I watched Dick Cheney prepare for and allow to happen 9/11, and then exploit that with 935 now-documented lies to execute two failed wars costing trillions of dollars, “because he could.” Colin Powell failed the nation, and so did Dick Clark. So did the generals and admirals all too willing to go to war on the basis of known lies. My review of VICE–Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency itemizes 23 impeachable offenses committed by Dick Cheney during his rogue tenure in the White House, offenses that I hope he is held to account before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2021 if not sooner. I pray he lives to see the day. This is what opened my eyes to the insanity of how incumbents at the top of the US Government so easily get away with high crimes of treason. More recently, Henry Kissinger is now famously quoted from a White House meeting, as saying: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” And everyone there laughed. This is the same Henry Kissinger that murdered 20,000 US citizens and hundreds of thousands of Asians by underminding the Paris Peace talks the first time around, only to settle on the same terms four years later. I pray Henry Kissinger lives to stand before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
There are two thoughts I want to share as long as I am answering this interesting question of yours. First, most people, including myself until 2006 when the US Government put me out of business and freed me to think 24/7, are naive. Sophmoric. The US Civil War, for example, was not a civil war, it was a war of secession, and it was not about freeing the slaves, it was about the North being able to loot the South for twelve years after first killing an entire generation of men on both sides. I hope one day to guide a team in documenting the “true cost” of the US Civil War as I believe that only the prevalence of broad public knowledge about the true cost of anything will stop our corrupt elites from continuing to loot the treasuries placed in their truth.
Our elites are also much filthier than one can imagine. The UK is not the only place with a pedophile problem. The USA has a thriving pedophile industry led by a portion of the Catholic Church that takes babies from unwed mothers and then sells them into a lifetime of sexual slavery, with elite pedophiles as the first stop. We have extraordinarily robust pedophile networks at the highest levels in Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles, as well as at selected locations in the heartland. For more on this see Pedophilia @ Phi Beta Iota. It was pedophilia, not 9/11 that persuaded me that the FBI is a protective service for our very sick elites, and not actually in the public service.
– What do you make out of the fact that no revolution has yet come into being, either in your country not anywhere in the western world, despite most factors of your framework being “red” as per your latest article?
Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. Indeed, the Davies J Curve is just now being rediscovered (and often without due credit). People do not revolt when they are deeply repressed. They revolt when they have had it good and then seen it taken away from them. The assassination of JFK was the beginning of the end for the American Dream. No president since has actually been president — they are all “warned off” and so alse are candidates such as Ross Perot. That and the death of MLK ended social justice in the USA, and started a mix of inflation, land grabbing, tax avoidance, and other toxic policies and behaviors.
I continue to under-estimate how dumbed down and drugged up the US public has become. One would have thought Dick Cheney and 9/11 and two failed wars would have led to public anger. Or the 22 veteran suicides a day. Or Occupy (note that over 7,000 Occupy protesters have been arrested, and not a single banker less Madoff, who stole from the elite). The elites were able to bring Obama out. Now they are planning for a “kinder gentler” Republican — all to the end of keeping the public on the sidelines for “four more years.”
Education is the only non-violent revolution, the only lasting revolution, and in my view, the only way we older people can serve the next generation. I am 61 now, with no pensions, and it is my intent to serve the next 20 years or so as an educator, designing a new PhD program in hybrid public governance that has three tracks:
1. Intelligence (Decision-Support) as a craft with deep multi-cultural history and holistic analytics, essential to collaboration and innovation at a time when we must do more with less.
2. Whole Systems True Cost Economics as a science inclusive of the philosophy of causality.
3. Open Source Everything – the affordable, inter-operable, scalable technical approach to design and development in the digital era.
My draft PhD proposal is here: 2014 Research Proposal PhD Robert David Steele 1.4
I would be glad to see it translated into other languages and sent around. US universities are are not up to this challenge.
The revolutions in the Ukraine and Venezuela are false revolutions — a last gasp of morons with too much money who think they can play the game of nations with impunity. The “true cost” of those faux revolutions will be with us for a decade or more. Education — one mind at a time — is the only win-win. IMHO.
Thank you for any answer you could give to my questions, and thank you for the very interesting material you publish. I live in Austria and follow political developments with interest. I attribute my political education mainly to what I have read from USAn authors, such as yourself.
Kind regards and best wishes,
RD
