The Fossilization Of The Human Mind

I like the way The Firm opens. Everything is golden. Everything is excellent and prestigious and coming up roses. Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is a top tier Harvard graduate in law pursued hy numerous law firms. He takes a job in Memphis that offers him a monster salary. Oliver Lambert (Hal Holbrook), chief of the law firm, shows him a lot of affection. Then there’s a rooftop luncheon overlooking Memphis and the Mississippi. And things start feeling weird to Jeane Tripplehorn, who plays Cruise’s wife. She learns from a brief conversation with one of the other wives that it’s not forbidden for the wife to have a job. And they encourage having children, because children promote stability. Things start escalating from there. Bar by bar by bar a cage forms around the couple. The big turning point comes [spoiler alert] when McDeere is sitting at a booth in a café trying to eat while studying for the bar exam. The fact he isn’t home and is having dinner in a café, surrounded by piles of books and notebooks, illustrates the pressure he’s been under and the strains beginning to appear in his marriage. FBI agent Wayne Tarrance (Ed Harris) and Thomas Richie (Paul Caldéron) come swaggering in and sit at a nearby table. They playfully drop some hints that gradually reveal that they know about McDeere and the law firm he works for, which is steeped in corruption. They firmly and persuasively convince him to meet with a higher official in Washington DC, by the Lincoln Memorial. Which he does. And he is told that if he cooperates with the FBI he won’t go to jail, but his career as a lawyer will be over. In the gathering of evidence, he will – by default – be breaking his oath of confidentiality. He and his wife will also need to go into a witness protection program, his dreams of pursuing a career in law utterly and irretrievably shattered.

The Firm is a dramatization of personal asphyxiation. The American Dream turned abject nightmare. Which is what has been happening in real life over the last several decades.

It's a terrible feeling. Dank, dreary, dungeon-like. Eerily similar, in fact, to a feeling I get related to our current political situation. Not just Trump, but one that’s been building over the last few decades, beginning with Reagan. The discovery that the country is steeped in so much corruption, so much aggressive surveillance, so much police state militarization, so much psychopathic greed and inhumane treatment of the poor and vulnerable, that escape seems impossible. It would take the genius of a Houdini to wrest free of the regimented lives people are now forced to inhabit like prisoners in a minimum-security Federal Prison Camp. Right now, the people who feel it most are poor, people with barely enough money in reserve to cover an emergency room visit. People blessed with higher incomes might not feel it at all yet, even when they see videos of thugs kidnapping people right off the street and deporting them to a CECOT prison in El Salvador.

The places that frighten me most right now are grocery stores, and Top Pot Doughnuts. The self-checkout aisles are trying to nudge us away from cash by reducing the number of stands that accept cash payment. Top Pot Doughnuts – at least the one in our neighborhood, which has recently closed – refused to accept cash altogether. I took offense to this. I stopped giving them my business. Boycotting them wasn’t easy. I love jelly doughnuts. Why is this? Not why do I love jelly doughnuts. I know why I love jelly doughnuts. They’re delicious. They’re palpable evidence that the universe is quintessentially benign. No. My question is more sociopolitical in nature. Why are certain businesses refusing cash? Is it because of Covid? Is it because of cooties? It makes no sense. It’s just paper. Though actually it’s not. It’s 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. But that’s not the point. The point is despotism. Rumblings in the media conjecture the end of cash and the launching of a social credit system. This maneuver would be final nail in the coffin of anything resembling free speech, or privacy or individual agency, and the institution of a totally totalitarian state of social control.

Catherine Austin Fitts, an investment banker and former public official who served as United States Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing during the presidency of H.W. Bush, warns that a digital concentration camp is posing a real threat in the behind-the-scenes machinations of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. “A complete re-engineering of the U.S. government through the digital systems is now possible at high speed,” she writes in her blog the Solari Report. “A digital control grid is an electronic network of telecommunication and information systems that allows individuals to be surveilled, tracked, and made subject to invasive controls applied to their financial transactions and resource use (such as electricity, food, water, transportation),” she writes, “compromising, if not ending, all human rights and liberties. Control grids operate with significant data collection and AI to apply social credit systems that can be dictated on a highly centralized basis. A digital control grid ends financial freedom, replacing markets with technocracy – a system run by rules created by ‘experts.’”

This is what happened to the truckers in Canada when - in early 2022 - the truckers organized a protest known as the Freedom Convoy, initially against a vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers requiring them to be vaccinated before being allowed to cross the U.S.-Canada border, and Justin Trudeau responded by invoking the Emergencies Act and blocking access to their bank accounts.

The implications of this are terrifying. One could feasibly be debanked simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a protest against the official government narrative, and there you are, exiting a drugstore and exposing oneself to the biometric examination of a street camera, or – after enjoying a glass or two of wine after dinner – posting, on impulse, a provocative political statement or voicing a raw reaction on social media that might be interpreted as “hate speech.”

This would effectively end free speech altogether and have a chilling effect on public – and private – discourse. Imagine you’re a parent and you give your son or daughter a birthday party and one of their friends overhears an untoward statement between you and your partner that gets reported to their parents, then reported to the authorities, and the next morning at the grocery store you discover your bank account has been frozen. Or you buy a book on Amazon that goes contrary to the official government narrative. Or your produce a documentary about the atrocities of a foreign government that our government is friendly with, and making huge profits from the sale of weaponry. The documentary is quite successful and wins prestigious awards, at least in other countries. Like the César Award in France, for example. You’re suddenly rich. But you can’t access your money. You’ve been naughty. The government is calling you a terrorist, and your account is frozen.

Thought, creativity, spontaneity, vision, inspiration, expressivity, conjecture and conviction go down the drain. Life – or whatever is left of life – is conducted in an open-air prison in which every word is weighed carefully before being uttered. In which every purchase is carefully considered. In which you’re mandated to submit to a medical procedure despite the recommendations of your doctor or your own suspicions about the inherent dangers of a deviously conceived and poorly researched vaccine. So you refuse. And are debanked. Canceled. Ostracized. Quarantined on a compound in Greenland. And jabbed every six months.

Catherine Austin Fitts remains hopeful that the totalitarian juggernaut being assembled in the secluded corridors of the digitized cybersphere can be stopped. One immediate action to take is to boycott enterprises that forbid cash. Another is to get word out. There will be conveniences to a social credit system, such as paying for things effortlessly, with the blink of an eye or the touch of a finger, that will be used to lure the public into its net. Look how easily the public has been roped into doing the work of a cashier after the onerous chore of grocery shopping. Not to mention the atomization of the agora; for some elderly people, whose friends and family have all died or been estranged by some feud or grudge, a brief chat with a bank teller or grocery checker may be the only opportunity to exchange a few friendly words with someone. There was a checker at one of our local grocery stores who sang everything he rang up, like the people in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. “How are you, I’m doing fine, bananas are on sale this week, and strawberries and blueberries and raspberries and blackberries are $2.99 a pound.” Don’t let a self-check rob you of that. Or a centralized banking system control what you choose to eat.

The biggest enemy is apathy. A public that would prefer handing in an essay or article written by ChatGPT than endure the frustrations and work of writing something themselves. I won’t lie. Writing is hard. I’ve been doing it for years and only rarely does it come flowing out of me in sparkling rivulets of prose. It’s wonderful when that happens. I feel like a sorcerer. A wizard, like Shakespeare’s Prospero. It’s an intoxication. The struggles, too, are enrichening. It’s galvanizing to wrestle an inchoate idea into a vividness of being. Language is a wonderful but maddening medium. I agree with Wittgenstein: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Language is muscular. Syntax and grammar and vocabulary and phrasing and juxtaposition are muscles. The more you use them the stronger they become. The reverse is also true; the less you exercise these elements the quicker they atrophy. The mind grows increasingly vacant. It seeks fodder in distraction, which is low in vitamin D and protein, and withers into the spongy decomposition of a bog. This isn’t just a danger for laying the foundations for a totalitarian social credit system, but the death of spirit, the fossilization of imagination.

I’m a pessimist by nature, so I’m not as hopeful as Catherine Austin Fitts. But I have seen it happen. By ‘it,’ I mean revolution. An entire paradigm shift that seemingly happened overnight. The difference between 1962 and 1964 was gigantic. I’ve seen people who were once shy and retiring and bore all the trappings of what people once called responsible and mature, turn into Bohemian rebels flamboyant as Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider and as outrageously Blakean and headstrong as Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth. You never really know what people are capable of. What’s churning inside them. What’s aching for release.

The Firm was made some 32 years ago. The level of corruption wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. Nor was the surveillance. It was pretty sophisticated, but it wasn’t as commonplace or sophisticated as social media monitoring or data mining or fitness trackers or drone surveillance. Movies once shaped public opinion. They were powerful influences. Now they’re as passé and sad as the Oscars. People don’t even go to the movies anymore. Or read books. They scroll. They gaze at pixels. They watch podcasts algorithmically tailored to meet their specific views of how the world is put together. It’s virtually impossible to find a consensus on anything. You would think that this must, then, be a very cosmopolitan time full of open-minded savants. But it’s not. It’s tribal. It’s electronic. It’s a dumbed-down cyclotron of overworked, overfed, overstimulated, supercharged zombies who have ceased paying attention to the wars and genocide and rising seas and temperatures and growing homeless populations and are still learning how to cope with the anguish burning a hole in their soul. The Great American Novel has imploded into Augmented Reality. Philosophy has been superseded by video games like Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft and League of Legends. The last Tom Cruise movie I saw was Top Gun: Maverick. It was surprisingly good. Nobody looks cooler than Cruise in a Super Hornet.

Money has assumed many different forms over the millennia. Cattle, salt, feathers, hides, shells, coconuts, butter, whale teeth, cocoa seeds, tobacco leaves. Money is a form of language. Its current manifestation as digital currency – bitcoin, or cryptocurrency – underlies its true nature as a transactional abstraction – is as fascinating as it is potentially dangerous. People get caught in abstractions all the time. We call them ‘isms.’ Fascism. Captialism. Communism. Anarchism. One thing you don’t want is a systematized and centralized authority like the Wizard of Oz in control of how one chooses to live or chooses to believe. If you’re lucky, you might one day come upon a yellow brick road and a cowardly lion, a brainless scarecrow and a hollow tin man for companions, and through a combination of persistence and accident you might get a shot at entering the Palace of Oz and flipping the curtain back to reveal a quirky old man pulling the levers of power like a maniac high on ecstasy and ketamine. But really, it’s easier in the long run not to let things get to that point. Next time you go looking for a pastry, or a checker at the local grocery, insist on paying cash.