Systemic Terrorism and The Illusion of Democracy

The most effective way to undermine a democracy today is to purchase it and force each citizen to buy a share in it.  In one step you have seized power and eliminated all potential opposition.  This is not a new political system. Rather, it is the end of politics altogether.

Power today has been transferred from humans to global capital.  Global capital controls everything because it owns everything: the media, politicians, and consumers. We have been paralyzed into subordination via two threats: the threat of losing our job, and the fear that we won’t get to buy all the things the system convinced us we need.  We have been made complicit to the ongoing crimes of global capital.  As long as we are kept in a perpetual state of pursuit, financial blackmail, distraction and narcissism, we won’t even blink an eye at the existential issues this civilisation faces. 

It is about time we recognise that both politics and democracy are illusions.  They are merely a façade for a global regime of capital that has been in power for decades already. Hostages to money, we live in a global terror state but are so symbiotically dependent upon it that we cannot even bring ourselves to admit we have been blackmailed.  Instead we choose to sink into denial and even defend this self-destructive economic system to our death, perishing in the company of billions of other sheep rather than suffer the loneliness of a crucified rebel that stuck out like a sore thumb.  When you cannot fight your master you side with them, like a battered wife afraid to assert herself, doing what all the other battered wives are doing: shut up and take it.  She convinces herself that she has full control of her black and blue situation, perhaps even some bizarre power over her aggressor. 

The best, and the only protection we have against the truth of our predicament is denial.  This of course only guarantees even darker times ahead.

To take stock of what exactly this system is, we need to first understand that it is far worse than fascism or any other totalitarian system we might be familiar with from college textbooks.  Our modern totalitarianism manages to hide in plain sight by putting us in charge of our own censorship and exploitation in the most cunning way.  A crucial difference between the global capitalist terror state and traditional fascism is that there is no “dictator” or tyrant in charge, but something much more sinister: a semi-sentient incarnation of profit presiding at the global level, irrespective of national or cultural borders, time zones or party affiliations.  Given its nebulous nature, it cannot be eliminated the way you would eliminate a normal dictator. 

Profit is in fact an internal parasite in all of us, because we depend on it for our jobs and livelihoods.  We nourish the parasite by keeping our head down so that we don’t make it angry.  It makes all our decisions: infecting our parliamentary process, our judicial system, our media, what we think, and who we end up voting for – that is, if we we’re not too distracted on Netflix to go and vote.  To put it simply, there is no “dictator vs the people”.  Each of us has become our own dictator, assisting a system that controls our every move, every thought, every intention. 

Most of us will never realise that capital owns every bit of our existence.  We live in an illusion of infinite freedom because our very consciousness has been confined within the strict black lines of the consumer colouring book.  Why seek real freedom when you can have products instead?  We have bought so many shares in this system that we are stakeholders to our own demise, whatever we may do or say otherwise.  Humanity has reached a cognitive cul de sac where it is unable to even imagine a life without capitalism.  This does not mean that such a life cannot exist.  It only means that this system owns so much of who we are that we are incapable of asking for a divorce.  Yet the only chance this species has of continuing its existence is, in fact, if it expels this system altogether.

The other clever attribute of the capitalist terror state is how effortlessly it can masquerade as a democracy. The most effective way to keep democracy permanently disabled is to maintain the illusion that it exists.  Rather than dissolving democratic institutions, global capital zombified them much like a deep fake that steals your voice, your face, and your reputation.  This pseudo-democracy may sound like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. Technically people can still vote, but their votes are the result of microtargeted brainwashing by media empires owned by global capital. Decision-making and debate continue to take place via “democratic” parliamentary procedures, but all MPs are prostitutes to corporate stakeholders.

Rather than dismantling democracy therefore, as previous, more overt types of fascism may have chosen, this system has decided to infect it. It is an incredibly successful parasite nested within the democratic apparatus so much so that, parasite and host have been co-evolving:  capital cannot function without the illusion of democracy, and democracy can no longer function without selling itself to capital. This was a very predictable outcome of neoliberalism.  Because once you surrender all privileges to capital, eventually capital becomes your master. It becomes your politics, your judicial system, your media. 

But how did we get here?  We may be forgetting that things have not always been this way.  At some point in our history, we were forced to buy shares into this system.  The industrial revolution was the age when we officially became converted to consumatrons:  a low-intelligence humanoid whose purpose is only to work, consume, and financially support an ever-strengthening, exploitative, colonialist, racist, ecocidal, genocidal and war-hungry system.

This didn’t happen overnight.  Unlike traditional fascism where you take control of the military and scare the hell out of everyone into subordination within 24 hours, establishing a capitalist terror state is a slow process which takes decades to root, as parasite and host co-evolve.  The parasite must creep and grow very slowly in order to not kill its host.  It maintains the illusion of democracy through consumeristic distractions, all the while as it erodes the rights to protest, the judicial system, public consultation on government projects, and all elements of a real democracy.  Almost there.

Most of the ideological machinery of systemic terrorism originates directly in the corporation.  Corporations were the hothouses of the modern capitalist terror state, where this system was first conceived, introduced and beta-tested within small populations of salary slaves. It was there where it was perfected before eventually breaking out into society, infecting central governments worldwide.

We can now see how this system works in its pure, unadulterated form by simply looking at corporate environments.  A culture of toxic positivity and self-censorship reigns large in all corporations today. If you challenge, question, or appear “inflexible” towards client needs or the company’s strategy, then you have directly attacked the “Profit God”. Employees are strictly forbidden from expressing their personal opinion, especially if this opinion may remotely suggest a potential threat to the company’s profits. This level of censorship and disempowerment of employees is easy, when everyone in the company depends on a salary.  Highly educated people in these companies have fully accepted to be seen and treated as working machines, not the intelligent humans that most of them are.  Ethics-based opinions are automatically dismissed and at the very least laughed upon as “unprofessional”, “naive”, “personal” and “irrelevant”, given that ethics is a significant overhead to any corporation. The only ethics followed is the minimum and inadequate level required by law.  This allows the corporation to get away with as much unethical activity as possible, at the minimum litigation risk.

Governments today have successfully replicated the corporate terror state within broader society. Rather than terrorising their subjects with the loss of their salary, they terrorise them with the loss of the consumerism theme park these companies have addicted them to: if the economy goes down, everyone will suffer.  “The economy” is the number one entity to be protected at all cost: environment, human rights, justice are all secondary, and can be sacrificed at any point in order to protect the economy and appease the profit god.  All the while the illusion of democracy is maintained, because these global corporate entities are masters of delusion, having learned over many decades the art of marketing, branding and re-branding, communications strategy and media buying and selling which they developed to promote their cheap, toxic and often defective products to consumers the world over. They have taught our governments how to maintain the illusion of democracy, just as they have been maintaining the illusion of choice and product quality among their consumers. In fact, many of these politicians are former successful businesspeople, so they know very well how all this works.

But along with the illusion of democracy, there is an illusion of politics altogether – that is, the illusion that people have choices when they enter the voting booth.  We live with the delusion that our vote still counts for something, because we have not started questioning this system.  We may have more plurality than ever, but it is different flavours of the same narrative.  While old fascism dismantled all political parties, the capitalist terror state has made them all the same, achieving the same result. Voting is pointless when the necrosystem owns us, the media have rendered truth irrelevant, and choice is now limited to one corrupt politician over another.  We are powerless as long as profit owns our politics. 

Every truth, however self-evident or irrefutable, can instantly perish once there is no one left to acknowledge it. While old totalitarianism censored the truth, our clever digital dystopia drowns it out with an overload of product placements and false debates.  Reality has been rendered irrelevant, and the search for truth an impossibility. As Netflix and TikTok play 24/7 dance videos and binge programs, those who dare to look away from their screen and into the real world are living the most surreal experience: watching everyone else fall asleep like sheep on drugs.  Anyone who tries to warn people is labelled as “the boy who cried wolf”.  While old fascism distracted people from real crises with football, the capitalist terror state is so reality-bending that it doesn’t need to rely as much on distractions. The entirety of modern human existence has become one, big distraction.  Even as climate chaos and social inequality ramp up in a world devastated by capital, the terror state’s marketing departments are hard at work, bending reality.  Any social activism and protest is increasingly shadow banned or condemned by the media, and if this doesn’t work, shut down by force.

This should come as no surprise. The corporate entities are the big polluters and the masterminds of the very inequality which is vital to their profit margins. They do not want to see people fighting for human rights, nature’s rights, pollution or the climate crisis, all of which are very expensive overheads within the economic necrosystem. Those who dare to protest are now being imprisoned with long sentences to terrorise the rest of us away from questioning, challenging, and dissenting against the capitalist terror state.  We are slowly beginning to see images of old fascism: activists’ houses being raided and people who protested for Palestine or the climate crisis being taken to prison by a system which deems their arguments “irrelevant”.  In the UK, and soon all over the world, “the climate apocalypse” cannot be used as an argument for protest, or defence in a court of law, even as the facts on the ground unequivocally prove that this planet’s climate is in free fall.  Prisons may begin to fill up with climate protesters worldwide, as the system does everything it can to protect its profits.  Meanwhile the real criminals, the billionaires and the leaders who support them, will continue to rake in billions. We are beginning to experience the worst of this system as it goes from strength to strength.  Visible manifestations of “old fascism” are becoming more pronounced, but don’t expect tanks and “heil Hitlers” on the streets.  We won’t need them, because we’ll all be asleep watching TikTok dance videos, probably created by AI. 

The climate crisis created by this system will bring tremendous death, destruction and destitution.  As long as this civilisation is motivated by profit, we are on a path of no return from an Earth so devastated, so unrecognisable, violent and unsurvivable that the average person struggles to even imagine.  But this economic system is incredibly resilient.  As resources run out, it will attempt to profit from its own disasters and steal from its victims, as it has done numerous times in history. This is why it is essentially a necrosystem: it creates, markets, and monetizes the death of everything.  It is up to us to recognize the necrocapitalist terror state, rather than succumb to the messaging of a system trying to profit from its own catastrophes. 

Fascism, genocide and greed will always change their masks, merge into the crowd, and only get noticed when it’s too late.  As the terror state begins to morph into full-blown old fascism, we cannot sit back and wait for it to complete its transition. A revolt is necessary.  Not against our new fascist governments, but against the economic system which gave birth to them in the first place.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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