"The economists had entirely demolished the fantastic delusions of the socialist utopians. The deficiencies of the classical system prevented them from comprehending why every socialist plan must be unrealizable; but they knew enough to demonstrate the futility of all socialist schemes produced up to their time. The communist ideas were done for. The socialists [p. 74] were absolutely unable to raise any objection to the devastating criticism of their schemes and to advance any argument in their favor. It seemed as if socialism was dead forever.



Only one way could lead the socialists out of this impasse. They could attack logic and reason and substitute mystical intuition for ratiocination. It was the historical role of Karl Marx to propose this solution...



There was ... the main obstacle to overcome: the devastating criticism of the economists. Marx had a solution at hand. Human reason, he asserted, is constitutionally unfitted to find truth. The logical structure of mind is different with various social classes. There is no such thing as a universally valid logic. What mind produces can never be anything but "ideology," that is, in the Marxian terminology, a set of ideas disguising the selfish interests of the thinker's own social class. Hence, the "bourgeois" mind of the economists is utterly incapable of producing more than an apology for capitalism. The teachings of "bourgeois" science, an offshoot of "bourgeois" logic, are of no avail for the proletarians, the rising class destined to abolish all classes and to convert the earth into a Garden of Eden.



But, of course, the logic of the proletarians is not merely a class logic. "The ideas of proletarian logic are not party ideas, but emanations of logic pure and simple." Moreover, by virtue of a special privilege, the logic of certain elect bourgeois is not tainted with the original sin of being bourgeois. Karl Marx, the son of a well-to-do lawyer, married to the daughter of a Prussian noble, and his collaborator Frederick Engels, a wealthy textile manufacturer, never doubted that they themselves were above the law and, notwithstanding their bourgeois background, were endowed with the power to discover absolute truth."

"... the mass of people simply don't have the time for politics or political shenanigans. The average person must spend most of his time on the daily business of life, being with his family, seeing his friends, etc. He can only get interested in politics or engage in it sporadically.



The only people who have time for politics are the professionals: the bureaucrats, politicians, and special-interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested and lobby and are active 24 hours a day. Therefore, these special-interest groups will tend to win out over the uninterested masses.



...



In past centuries, the churches constituted the exclusive opinion-molding classes in the society. Hence the importance to the state and its rulers of an established church, and the importance to libertarians of the concept of separating church and state, which really means not allowing the state to confer upon one group a monopoly of the opinion-molding function.



In the 20th century, of course, the church has been replaced in its opinion-molding role, or, in that lovely phrase, the "engineering of consent," by a swarm of intellectuals, academics, social scientists, technocrats, policy scientists, social workers, journalists and the media generally, and on and on."

The post-9/11 era has ushered in an unprecedented expansion of the State's power and influence in every aspect of life. US foreign policy has been most obviously affected but the militarization of ordinary life - the DHS, the TSA, local police with up-armored Humvees and MRAPs - has an expanding effect that gradually seeps into everything.One simple metric of the influence that a corporation has within the economy is its revenues - the more hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that a corporation generates, the more influential - or powerful - that corporation must be. But the case of government is different because governments can engage in central-bank financed deficit spending, which allows them to spend at a deficit, indefinitely, while accruing public debt which, also, can be rolled over indefinitely. Thus, if we want a simple metric of a government's power, we should look at its outlays, not its revenues. US Federal outlays have grown at a stupendous pace, especially since 9/11. George W. Bush campaigned on the Republican, limited-government platform, yet Federal spending under Bush grew at a record pace."During his eight years in office, President Bush oversaw a large increase in government spending. In fact, President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ. In his last term in office, President Bush increased discretionary outlays by an estimated 48.6 percent.During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton. Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 12.5 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 53 percent." Source In the last 13 years since 9/11, the power of the Federal government - as measured most simply by Federal revenues - has grown at an unprecedented pace. For this reason, it is important to stop and examine the rational basis upon which the power of the central government has been so recklessly expanded.The general line of reasoning is this. The United States had ignored radical Islamic extremism for decades, despite warnings from Israel and other allies that had been in direct conflict with radical Islam for many years. On Sep. 11, 2001, this glib optimism in US foreign policy was finally shown for the false assurance it was. Nineteen radical Islamic fundamentalists hijacked four airliners and crashed them into each of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing more than 3,000 Americans in one day.The American public got a wakeup call on that day and now demanded that their government not only retaliate against the networks responsible for planning and executing this deadly attack but invade any country harboring them. Public apathy and popular isolationist attitudes had politically tied the hands of the few within US intelligence that had advocated for an aggressive anti-Islamic radicalism foreign policy. But now, they were recognized to have been right all along and the impediments to much-needed action were removed. The US government demanded the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden and, when they refused, they invaded Afghanistan where the Taliban had a fairly strong foothold. This was to mark the beginning of a 13 year long "war" that is ongoing to this day.United States foreign policy has remained in an extremely aggressive stance ever since. The total cost of the so-called War on Terror and the ensuing aggressive US foreign policy program is well in excess of $10 trillion - $3 billion for every person that died on Sep. 11, 2001. The War on Terror has lasted three times longer than the US involvement in the Second World War where we defeated the Nazis, then the most aggressive military power in the world, fueled by a world-leading economy in national-scale industrial and technological production. It cost us roughly $300 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars to defeat the Nazis. In other words, we have spent 30 times as much on the War on Terror and the ensuing aggressive US foreign policy program since 9/11 as we spent on our involvement in World War II.The US government's own explanation for why the 9/11 attacks occurred over American financial, political and military headquarters - the most heavily defended airspace in the world even at that time - is simple and direct: incompetence. George W Bush gave the excuse that no one could have imagined flying airplanes into buildings prior to 9/11 and this is why the airspace was not properly defended against such attacks. Leaving aside, entirely, the fraught nature of these claims, the point that should be underscored is that there is no rational connection between the incompetence of the Federal defenses on 9/11 and the aggressively expansionary post-9/11 US foreign policy. In fact, not only is there no logical connection but the measures taken in response to the 9/11 attacks are, by the government's own admission, actually putting America in greater danger. Barack Obama said in 2010, "Guantanamo is probably the number one recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations."Whatever you may think of conspiracy theories in general, and whatever you may think of conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks, it's not crazy to doubt the official explanation of 9/11. If you believe the government's own explanation for 9/11 - incompetence - then you should also believe that the government is almost certainly lying about the facts of what happened on 9/11 to at least some extent in order to cover up the incompetence. No one was fired or held legally accountable in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Yet, if there was enough incompetence to allow four airliners to be flown around willy-nilly in North American airspace over Manhattan, the Pentagon and the National Mall, then surely someone or other deserved to be punished. And this goes to underscore the point: those whose incompetence was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, according to the official explanation, must have done a good enough job covering their incompetence as to avoid disciplinary or legal action being taken against them.No matter which way you slice it, the US government is almost certainly lying about what happened on 9/11. And we can be confident that this is true before looking at a single fact about what did happen on that day. Thus, it's not crazy or paranoid or tinfoil-hat to doubt the official explanation of 9/11.In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter whether 9/11 was an inside job or not. This claim is liable to put me in the crossfire between both 9/11 Truthers and US government apologists alike. If researching the facts of 9/11 is something that interests you, by all means, go ahead and do it. If you approach it with an honest, unprejudiced mind, you are likely to be surprised by what you discover. Any honest-minded individual that researches the facts surrounding 9/11 is likely to come away with more doubt about the government's explanation for it than he started out with.But just like it's not crazy to doubt the government's explanation for 9/11 before looking at a single fact, it's also not crazy to doubt the orthodox explanations for most of the things that the government does today, and why they are necessary. This includes things like, for example, invading Iraq, or bailing out bankrupt banking institutions, and so on. And this brings us to the one conspiracy theory that really does matter, and this is the conspiracy against reason. Ludwig von Mises explains this conspiracy in Human Action:This is Mises's claim: the socialists were thoroughly refuted by the classical economists on every front, they had not a single argument for socialism that had not been dismantled. The only solution, therefore, was to attack and undermine reason itself and to substitute a new kind of reason - which Mises calls polylogism - in its place. In this way, the arguments of the classical economists could be dismissed on psychological grounds. As members of the bourgeois class, these classical economists are, in a sense, handicapped. They are unable to comprehend proletarian logic and while their arguments appear to have a kind of self-consistency that cannot be refuted within bourgeois logic, they are easily seen by the proletarian to be contradictory and untenable.The conspiracy against reason has infected every aspect of academia and spread like a cancer through every department of human life, from politics to economics to religion. This "trickle-down" effect has occurred by the action of what Murray Rothbard termed the "opinion-molding class":Every age has seen its political problems, some of greater severity, others of less severity. There is no point in trying to compare whether things today are better or worse than at other times in history, in any absolute sense. Nevertheless, we can make definite observations about the nature of the problems facing us today, problems that are unique to our time.Within the US-centric sphere, there is a growing social malaise that affects all aspects of society. Our financial malaise is perhaps most easily understood as it is the direct result of the 2007 housing bubble and the ensuing aggressively inflationary policy of the Federal government to prop up the housing market. Nationalization of healthcare, secular rise in tax rates and the costs of regulatory compliance, increased tuition costs, and decreased employment prospects - particularly among young workers - are producing an indefinite financial malaise. But this malaise is only one aspect of the wider social malaise, what Naomi Wolf terms the "closing society".Wolf identifies ten "steps" to close an open society:1) Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy - al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS, etc.2) Create a gulag - Guantanamo Bay answers to this purpose3) Develop a thug caste4) Set up an internal surveillance system - the Snowden disclosures leave no question about this. Critics of the NSA have pointed out that the Bluffdale, UT facility - a Top Secret facitiliy commissioned by the single most secretive agency in the US government- is curiously built entirely above-ground, when the facility could have been operated more cheaply and clandestinely underground. The unmistakable object of Bluffdale is to make a statement: We can see everything you're doing and we're storing every bit and byte of it, forever.5) Harass citizens' groups - The IRS investigations targeting Tea Party political groups is a good example of this, but hardly the only one6) Engage in arbitrary detention and release - Anwar al-Awlaki and his son are certainly the most extreme examples of this, to date7) Target key individuals8) Control the press9) Dissent equals treason10) Suspend the rule of lawWe have seen all of these measures implemented to varying degrees in the United States. I could write an article of the same length as this one on each bullet point. It makes no difference whether these are the agenda items of a sinister, organized, global conspiracy or whether these are the result of the disorganized clawing for power by scattered interests throughout the government - the outcome is the same.At a higher level of abstraction, we can reduce all forms of social malaise to a straightforward principle of economics: time-preference in respect to one's own property is lower than in respect to the property of others. We treat what we own with more care and respect than we treat the property of others or than we treat that which is unowned. The expansion of State power necessarily reduces the individual's self-ownership. If there is a regulation that prohibits shuffleboard, then shuffleboard is one less thing you can choose to do with yourself (your body, ostensibly, being your property). Each additional option that is taken away is a reduction of one's self-ownership. The power to self-actualize can be thought of as a kind of "property" and this is what is reduced with each new restriction. And the predictable outcome of this is that people will lose ambition, self-direction and even self-care in the closed society. These are exactly the symptoms of social malaise we observe all around us, if not on broadcast television, then in the humdrum of daily life and especially in the shadows around the fringes of polite society that are growing wider and darker year by year.This malaise is centered in the US but it is not restricted to the US alone. Its causes - especially military adventurism and central bank inflation - are cross-border phenomena. It is a global social malaise that is afflicting many people throughout the world.Everything you think you know about power is probably wrong because you probably believe the rise of democratic governments in the West over the last two centuries has been the result of and/or cause of a transfer of power from the hereditary elite into the hands of "the masses". In fact, power has not been transferred out of the hands of the hereditary elites - what we might call the permanent establishment. [See "Who is the Ruling Class?" by Sean Gabb in the Epilogue below]If power operated as you were taught that it operates in civics class, then why is it that the President's power to fulfill popular mandates is limited? For example, Barack Obama recently explained that he has been unable to close Guantanamo Bay because he has been obstructed by political maneuvers by the Congress. Yet, closing Guantanamo Bay is overwhelmingly popular. How can Congress - a body elected by popular vote - possibly succeed in obstructing the President from fulfilling a popular mandate? The President and Congress also routinely override popular opinion to enact massively unpopular measures. The 2003 Iraq invasion was not positively supported by a majority of Americans at the time and, in short order, a majority of Americans came to oppose it; opposition to the war and occupation of Iraq has steadily increased with time. The TARP bailouts were opposed by 80% of the public, yet they were passed and implemented without any serious political obstruction.Democracy - that is, universal suffrage - has altered the distribution of power among the disempowered masses. But it has not altered the balance of power between the ruling elite and the masses. Power works the same way it has always worked: threats, intimidation, blackmail assassination, bribes, extortion, hush money, and so on. The real nature of power is what James Douglass has termed The Unspeakable. It has a lot more to do with corruption and dirt than it has to do with armies or even popular opinion. To illustrate my meaning, consider two cases of horrendous crimes whose investigations were essentially abandoned when it became clear that the implications reached into the upper echelons of political power. The first is the Franklin scandal centered on the Nebraska Home for Boys, where young boys were being trafficked around the country for pederastic orgies with political elites. Future President George HW Bush and other leading political figures were named by one of the victims. The second is the Marc Dutroux child-rape and torture dungeon operated in Brussels, Belgium. When the investigation began to turn up the names of high-ranking politicians and even members of the Belgian royal family, the investigation was closed and Dutroux was said to be essentially the only participant in the murders, despite abundant evidence that there were many people involved.Needless to say, this is not exactly Christmas dinner conversation. We have a natural revulsion to contemplating such horrendous crimes. No normal person likes to talk about such things. But the burden is on those who want to assert a pollyannaish view of the nature of power to explain how such dirty affairs can possibly fail to have an impact on those who are in power, when they have participated in, facilitated or overlooked such heinous crimes.Even if you're not convinced that power is really as corrupt and twisted as I am painting out, you surely acknowledge that there is corruption among the ruling class. This, then, leads to the obvious question: Why do such crummy people have so much power? This is where the soul-searching gets really uncomfortable. Populism has broad appeal because it strokes the ego of the audience. But what if we, the masses, are responsible for this predicament we are in, where the ruling class can abuse its power with impunity? The fact is that the ruling class might be crummy in particular ways, but they are actually quite virtuous in other ways: family solidarity, discipline, focus, consistency, diligence, frugality, and so on. The essential difference between the ruling class and everybody else is that they have the virtues required to organize, mostly along kinship and ethnic lines. The subject classes are mostly divided against one another, too busy squabbling amongst themselves to notice their exploitation at the hands of the ruling class.Utopia-building is a waste of time. "Scrap it and start over" might work for organized projects but cannot work with society generally, which is a decentralized, emergent process. For example, we do not propose to "scrap the language and start over" because of the corruption of words in language. Those who manipulate and mangle the language for their own purposes cannot be countered by starting with a fresh language. They must be countered by fighting back and taking the language back and helping people understand why it matters and why they should care.Real solutions to these problems are a lot harder than Utopia-building or escapism. Real solutions will require a return to roots. They require that we respect tradition (lessons learned). They require us to learn to think, to find independent experts to trust, to disseminate the truth, to not worry too much about propaganda lies and to be morally unimpeachable.While reason is the proper tool for academic power elite analysis, the fact is that much of the nitty-gritty subject matter of PEA is not suitable for dinner table conversation and, thus, is difficult to discuss in a non-academic setting. I believe we can benefit from reasoning about PEA in the wider audience in more mythical/metaphorical language. It is not completely incorrect to describe the ruling class in terms of sorcery and witchcraft, and to think of the opposition to such shadowy forces in terms of a kind of spiritual warfare. This mode of discussing these problems is not about circumventing rationality, it's about providing a vocabulary in which the common man - who is naturally and understandably uncomfortable speaking about the Unspeakable - can talk and think about PEA.Perhaps the most neglected form of change that we need in order to really confront the corruption of our culture is religious reform. This is one that most in the liberty community generally don't talk about. Among the most effective facilitators of State power are corrupt religious leaders. People look to religion and to religious leadership for moral and spiritual guidance. It is impossible to overstate the consequences of the corruption of this guidance. If you think that secularism is going to one day "wipe out religion", you have your head firmly buried in the sand. Even in the United States, UK and Europe - the most secularized countries in the world - secularism is far from a foregone conclusion. The masses remain vaguely religious and large blocs of wealth and power are controlled by doggedly religious families and organizations. And even if the secular nations were completely secularized, they would still be a distinct minority, worldwide.In order to really challenge what exists, you are going to have to build your confidence in the power of the truth. Don't give in to the urge to just "take your ball and go home". Don't just wash your hands of politics. Politics is not your savior but neither can you avoid it. What you must not do is fall into the trap of "change the system from within". This has never happened even once in the history of the world. By definition, a system cannot be changed from within... otherwise, it would not be a system. Change always occurs through disruption of some kind. Those who control the system will ceaselessly admonish you against disruptive strategies and will attempt to persuade you to content yourself with "change from within". And you must also avoid the trap of "change by any means". The goal is to bring about changes that lead to a society that is more just and healthy... it cannot possibly be justifiable to resort to injustice and social destruction in order to accomplish this end. It's like a doctor proposing to poison someone to help them recover from toxemia.You must reject the crass choice between violent revolution or submission to the dominant regime. It is only when you understand the true nature of power - that it consists of many powerful groups temporarily aligning with and opposing each other on the basis of expediency - that you begin to understand that you must be flexible in order to be effective. Flexibility is what gives you the ability to adapt to circumstances and to move to where you are needed.Identify genuine leaders within the movement. Learn to organize around them. No, this doesn't mean become slavish automatons that hang on their every word. Genuine leadership is possible. Those who are opposed to the progress of liberty are quick to advise libertarians to "reject hierarchy" and "don't get organized". As long as you believe this canard, you are ensuring that liberty will never be a force to be reckoned with. Fix what already exists. Copy what works. Prioritize new innovation to only those things for which we have no existing working models or historical models that can be reworked and revived. Stop expending your energy on reinventing the wheel so you can focus it into more effective areas.Don't weaken local governments. Oppose political unionism always. Remember that higher political authorities are essentially colonizers of lower political authorities. Support all secession movements that do not have a morally offensive basis. Reach across aisles and hold hands with whoever is doing what is right. Unfortunately, this means you're going to get "dirty", but this is why moral uprightness is so important. If all they have against you is that you talked to "the wrong people", that's not really anything to get too worried about.Unfortunately, there are no "quick fixes" to our problems. Human society has always been partly functional and partly dysfunctional. We will always have dysfunction in society - including the dysfunction of tyranny. Voltaire wisely noted that "The perfect is the enemy of the good". We must not hold out for Utopia at the expense of changing what can be changed for the better, now. There are many ways to get it wrong, so we must choose our steps carefully. The task before us is difficult but not impossible.For those interested in understanding in more detail why someone might doubt the government's explanation of 9/11, here are some resources.If you'd like to learn more about the ruling class, check out the following lectures by well-known libertarian luminaries:Please be as skeptical as you like, and do follow up on the factual claims in these resources - they are not filled with wild claims and exaggerations as so many of the irresponsible videos and articles touting 9/11 conspiracy theories often are. You may yet remain unconvinced after viewing these resources, as I was for a couple years after I first began investigating the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job back in 2007. But I think even the staunchest 9/11 conspiracy skeptic will come away with at least an appreciation for why it is not crazy to doubt the orthodox explanation of 9/11.Propaganda materials have a tone of desperation and wantonly employ emotional manipulation: dramatic music, fudged facts, exaggerations and even outright lies. It's so important that you realize the truth right away before the world comes crashing down on your head. If you do not realize that 9/11 was an inside job, the world will not come crashing down on your head. It's never too late to change your mind at some point and we are never going to pass a "point of no return". Calm, cool, rational contemplation is the order of the day. Take your time, relax, and think critically about what happened that day, who benefited and who had the resources to pull it off. Compare the kinds of secrets that governments routinely keep with the secrets required to pull off a compartmentalized controlled-demolition and psyops operation on 9/11. The government already keeps secrets about all sorts of outright criminal actions, such as CIA black sites, torture sessions, indefinite detentions, summary executions, assassinations, illegal mass domestic spying, psychological operations, involuntary mass experiments, and so on. If "truthers" are right that 9/11 was an inside job, then it really was a criminal operation of immense proportions... do not think it will be so easy to figure out who did what, when the amply-resourced criminals will have gone to great lengths to cover their tracks and are in positions of authority over the very people who would ordinarily be tasked with investigating a terrorist crime, such as this.In 1962, the US government actually planned an operation that would create the illusion that hundreds of Americans in jumbo-jets had been killed by the Cuban government - an operation planned at the level of the joint-chiefs (just under the Secretary of Defense). This operation would have involved using CIA agents to board commercial airliners disguised as college sports teams headed to an overseas competition. These loaded planes would surreptitiously land at a secret location and deboard, while empty airliners answering to the same visual description would take off from the secret location to the skies and continue in the original flight path, to avoid suspicion in the radar tracking. The pilots of the empty planes would parachute out of the auto-piloted planes once they were well over the Gulf and then the completely empty planes would be shot down by missiles. This secretly planned operation was called Operation Northwoods . Its purpose was to set a pretext for an invasion of Cuba. That this operation was planned at the highest levels shows that the chiefs of staff of the US military thought that it was possible to keep such an operation secret enough to convince the American public that they had been attacked by the Cuban government. The 9/11 attacks were, admittedly, broader in scope than Operation Northwoods but answer to the same basic outline. Of course, this does not prove that the 9/11 attacks were staged, only that it's not absurd to think that such an operation could be kept secret enough to convince the public to accept a war against an enemy that had not actually attacked us.