Non-co-operation with evil is as much a duty as co-operation with good – Martin Luther King
WHAT if I said you have the power to change the world and you can start changing it from the moment you finish reading this article? What if I told you that we can push the billionaire class back and defeat them and it wouldn’t require much effort at all? All we need to do is work together and stop spending our money and attention with multinationals. Sounds difficult? The beauty is we don’t need to stop completely: if 10 per cent of us moved just 10 per cent of our expenditure away from them next month we would stop them in their tracks. Their system is built on expectations. The entire edifice is based on the premise we will do more of the same tomorrow. If we do less and that movement gains momentum it’s over, they’re finished. We can defeat the WEF by changing the story, we can thwart all who seek to enslave us, force mandates upon us, restrict our movements and control our lives by simply changing our spending and attention patterns, and there’s nothing they can do to stop us . . . yet.
How do we achieve this? Here is one idea: stop spending with Amazon for a month. Buy books from your local bookshop or Litalist.com. You’ll save money and if enough of us do it Jeff Bezos wakes up not just to a falling share price but also a collapsing narrative. When their story fails, they fail. Why did we start buying from Amazon? Convenience? Convenience is one of the most dangerous of addictions. Why are we so attached to it? In its name love has been set aside, unmeasurable time is devoted to it, wars fought, forests erased, rivers poisoned, the truth corrupted, and at what price? It seems all we have to pay for it is ourselves.
Is it that inconvenient to stop doing something? Delete all social media from your handheld devices. Remember if something is free you are either the product, the test subject or the deceived. What did we do before? How much more beautiful the world is when it’s not mediated through a screen. Stop looking at your phone for an hour; practise this, then try a day, a week. At your next upgrade, downgrade. Get a flip phone. The kids will text you when they need something. When they need something, buy it from an independent supplier where possible. Use cash. Research using Brave instead of Google. Put a ladder to the wall of Apple’s garden. Listen to vinyl (the analogue experience is always superior to the digital). Withdraw your attention from celebrities, turn off the corporate and state captured media. Propaganda needs an audience. Savour the ensuing peace.
Start researching local suppliers. If you’re lucky enough to live near a Booths supermarket, shop there. Use cash. We’re going to defeat the armies of Satan himself and all I’m asking is you change your habits. Go to the greengrocers, the farm shop. Let’s stop sacrificing freedom on the altar of convenience.
Cancel Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime: it’s all woke propaganda anyway. Practise forgetting you have a TV. I haven’t consumed mainstream news for three years. What I need to know reaches me. Get a dog with the money you save, and go outside. Go to the pub – remember that? Support your local economy instead of funding power-mad psychopaths. Talk to your friends in person. Can you imagine such a thing?
Brands? Let’s stop buying them for a month. Why would we want to buy anything marketed via the sexualisation of children? Make a conscious decision in each purchase. Refuse to be nudged. Refuse to be sold to.
In economics, a ‘negative externality’ is a cost caused by a company which is not incurred by that company. I posit that multinationals survive via externalities: the true cost of their activities is borne by taxpayers, the environment, our mental and physical health and future generations. They hide these true costs behind virtue camouflage which is nothing more than an enormous lie. The true cost of Amazon is not only the destruction of local businesses but the destruction of social and fulfilling careers and replacing them with timed toilet breaks in bleak and ugly distribution facilities. I’m using Amazon as an example here; I’m sure you can think of many more.
The multinationals hide behind words such as ‘sustainability’, which rides on the backs of children scraping cobalt out of the ground in the DRC. They talk of ESG (Environmental and Social Governance) which conveniently doesn’t exclude the avoidance of taxes, the subversion of democracy via the World Economic Forum or the payment of huge fines for malfeasance. Multinationals have turned hypocrisy into a virtue and corruption into an art form. German car manufacturers built software into their cars so they could fool emissions testers and pump more pollution into our children. Pfizer paid the largest healthcare fine in history for fraudulent marketing. You’d think this might have been cause for pause. The Big Tobacco business model is now the Big Pharma business model, and it has metastasised. I could go on and on. Don’t get me started on 08 and the bail out for the ‘banksters’. How did we let these psychopathic monstrosities dictate our morality to us? The author and fund manager George Cooper describes what happens when humans acquire too much wealth: ‘It is a mistake to think of personality as immutable, the success breeds confidence. Extreme success can lead to a confidence indistinguishable from psychopathy. I call this acquired psychopathy.’
The billionaire class has co-opted protest to its own ends. None of the current protest movements is organic; they all have the hidden hand of the multinational billionaire class operating the puppet show. Just Stop Oil is funded by the Getty family (Americans do understand irony after all). Greta Thunberg has more corporate sponsors than Formula One. Moving your expenditure to local suppliers will do far more for the environment than Greta’s contrived Kabuki show ever could. And if you’re wondering where ‘wokism’ comes from, research the Pritzker and Stryker billionaire families. Use DuckDuckGo if you can.
The world is upside down but we can tilt it back. We can reclaim protest from the billionaire class. All we need to do is stop spending some of our money with them and stop attending to their celebrity-dressed propaganda while we still have the power. This power will be lost with the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies. This must be resisted. In 1917 Henry de Montherlant said: ‘Freedom is always available, one only need pay the price for it.’ Today freedom is short stock but still on sale, in the not distant future it will be on ration and the price could be your life. The time is now.
JFK said: ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’ I believe the authorities would revel in violence as an excuse to impose more restrictions. Let’s evade that trap with non-violent legal protest and hit them where it hurts – the wallet and the ego.
While writing this article I re-read Thoreau’s seminal On the Duty of Civil Disobedience and it struck me that while Thoreau directs his ire at government, ‘that government is best which governs least’, in this rather less seminal piece I barely mention the government. It feels to me that what passes for democracy has become irrelevant. Sunak/Starmer are two sides of the same corporate coin, a modern-day Janus both facing the same direction, answering to the same WEF overlords. Last week Starmer was honest enough to tell the BBC he favoured Davos over parliament. The old divisions of left and right are irrelevant now the real enemy hides behind a wall of money and control.
There’s no English translation for the Greek word ‘thumos’: the closest we have is ‘spiritedness’. To quote Nick Hudson, chairman of Panda, ‘Thumos is required, not a great reset.’ I think he means we all need to make a stand for freedom, to have the courage to oppose injustice. To oppose the WEF, the WHO and all the other anti-democratic acronyms. I’ll ask him when I see him next week.
The Boycott the Multinationals (BTM) campaign can start here today: it can start when you finish this article (just a few more seconds, I promise). We’re going to need help with publicity. We’re going to need to spread the word. We’re going to need thumos. Evil has only the power we give it. The billionaire class survives only with our cooperation. Let’s start by withdrawing it.
Power to the people!
