Timothy Birdnow

Recently I've been discussing crypto-currency quite a bit, largely because Facebook announced it was going to star it's own version.
See here for more. This got me to thinking; what exactly is the difference between a transnational corporation at a government? There used to be a huge gulf between corporations and governments in what they can do, how they have to behave, and the like. But at what point does a company become a government?

Well, how did it happen in the Middle Ages? The Middle Ages started because the Roman Empire "fell" but what does that mean? Rome didn't just fall; it wasn't there one day and gone the next. Rome died of a series of bad decisions and sclerosis. Most of those bad decisions and sclerosis are quite similar to the bad decisions and sclerotic thinking we are experiencing today. The Romans had an egalitarian movement similar to ours today. As Rome absorbed more and more people into her empire they began putting those people into greater and greater positions of authortty. But often those people were not Latinized, and did not hold with the ancient virtues of Rome. When push came to shove too few Roman citizens actually believed the Empire worth fighting for.

This dovetails with the "barbarian Invasions" which were a peaceful immigration (largely peaceful) of tribes from outside the Empire. Mostly Germanic, these invaders came in because Rome was a good place to be; it was peaceful, prosperous, and "dreams of a better life" could be had. Sound familiar? It was no different than than what we are hearing about illegal aliens today. And the sympathies for them, thanks to a decrease in the old Roman virtues, were with the invaders to a large degree. These massive numbers of people never encurlturated fully, choosing to remain German while living in the Empire.

I fleshed some of this out in my essay Barbarian Invasions at Amerkcan Thinker. See also Charles Scaliger's piece at The New American. There are so many other similarities. The disparity between the wealthy, ruling class and the masses, for example; Rome saw a huge rise in the amount of wealth of the nobility while the working middle class slipped into poverty. The Roman answer was to provide "bread and circuses" and it became possible to live in Rome without having a job, by living on what today we call welfare. Sound familiar? The Romans also kept increasing taxes to pay for this, and for the endless wars (sound familiar) waged on the Empire's borders. They had devalued their currency in an effort to help defray the cost of a bloated government, and that contributed to the financial woes of the people and the centralization of wealth into the hands of a few. Government growth was out of control, as so many people left their jobs and self-reliance and became wards of the State.

Furthermore, farming had exhausted the land in Italy, forcing the Empire to move her agricultural center to Africa, making supplies to the European portion more precarious. Now, America doesn't have this problem, or does it? We've had a farm crisis for decades as government has tied up more and more land as wilderness zones and national parks. Also, farming has become so expensive with so many government regulations that the small farmer is being driven out, leading to giant corporate farming becoming the norm. That and urban sprawl - which was part of the plan under Marxism, to erase the boundary between city and countryside,, and with so much land tied up in ethanol production, we have a situation analagous to the farm crisis of old Rome.

And Rome had become a dictatorship run by an Emperor with a veneer of the old Republic. How is America different these days?

Perhaps most importantly, Rome had been seduced by foreign philosophies brought in from Asia, and by foreign religions. The old Roman religion, tied closely to the Greek, was a pantheistic one, but it still promoted virtues like self-reliance, chastity, and the like. Christianity, which won out in the end, did too, but it was an internationalistic religion. At one point Christianity was rivaled by Mithraism, an Asian import. Now, I think the Christianizing of Rome was a good thing that probably saved her for several centuries, but it helped further fracture the Roman belief in herself, and in the sense of duty to Rome as an ideal. America was built on the very same ideal, albeit a Christian one. Now, in Rome, most people became agnostic or atheist, not Christian or Mithra. So too in America; we are turning our backs on Christianity, our traditional cultural faith.

And Roman sexual libertinism is infamous. So too is ours.

So what is my point? We have become Romans. And if Rome is our model, we will meet the same end.

That end resulted in a few interesting things. First, as Roman power waned, wealthy citizens built fortresses to protect their families and employees. So the average person in town, the farmers and blacksmiths and shopkeepers, sought to work for the rich guy. They offered their services to him for free and HE offered them security and the services which Rome no longer provided. When Diocletian issued an edict freezing people into their professions and forcing them to remain where they had been born, we saw the beginning of serfdom, and it was accelerated when these people hired themselves out to the Lord of the Manor.

In short, Feudalism was born of the disintegration of Rome and the need to establish some sort of social order.

That, I believe, is precisely what we are witnessing today with these big tech companies. The rise of the meta corporations coincides with the decline of not the power of government (Romes power increased, too, even as services declined) but of the usefulness of government, of her ability to provide the things that government SHOULD.

Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter all show signs of being proto-feudal states. This is especially true as the electronic age morphs into the virtual reality age. These are the people who run the new world. And, to the minds of the modern man, it is a better world, one where they can be who they choose and ignore the drudgery and bitterness of real life. But it is all an illusion. We have stopped actually doing things and instead dream.

So it makes perfect sense for Facebook to start it's own currency; like Charlemagne, they are creating a massive feudal empire, and like any good government they must coin their own currency.

Coining currency is one of THE principle jobs of any government. That, maintaining public order, protecting against foreign invasion, and regulating commerce are the principle functions taken by any sort of government. Now Facebook imposes internal discipline, and does so quite effectively with shadow banning and other forms of censorship. That would be their police function. They maintain records on every "citizen" to serve them for profit and maintain order. They tax by selling your information to advertisers. They do everything a government does - at least in the virtual world - but protect against forcing invasion (although they do constantly work to avoid "Russian Collusion" and foreign hacking.) They punish sedition and rebellion. Now they want a currency.

Amazon is even more like a government, as they actually deliver physical goods to the public. There are people who survive by shopping on Amazon.

How long before these pseudo-governments start actually behaving like true governments?

Steve Wozniak called for a boycott of Social Media, largely for this very reason; he sees them as becoming too powerful. Ditto the co-founder of Wikipedia.

What we are witnessing is nothing short of the rebirth of the Medieval Period, this time with corporations rather than individuals.

Does anyone remember the 1970's movie Rollerball? In that movie corporations ruled the world; there were no longer any governments in the old sense,, no nations built on linguistic and cultural lines, but rather just corporations that ruled territory and the executives issued orders and the pleibs had to obey. I suspect we are becoming precisely that. This doesn't mean that the socialist drive for world government and Marxist ideology is any less important; it is the tool which is used to drive the consolidation of power. But in the end Marxism is a fools errand, something that cannot and will not work. And it continues to empower these global corporations in it's quest to stamp out free markets - which is just fine for a Zukerburg or Bezos, who do not want competition but monopoly.

(It was none other than G.K. Chesterton who said "capitalists are just communists with a bigger paycheck". He's right, as far as the crony capitalism of the modern era is concerned. There is a huge difference between private enterprise and the crony capitalism of modernity. )

It's happened before; once the BUTLER of the French kings became king himself just because he would fight wars where his master was too corrupt and  would not.  Merovingian King Theuderic IV was replaced by none other than Charles Martel, his butler. the man who drove the Saracens out of Europe.

We need that guy now, methinks; who will drive the Saracens out now?  Mark Zuckerburg?

In conclusion, I believe we are reaching the cusp between the decline and fall of Western Civilization and the coming Dark Age. A new feudal order is being born. That is why Facebook is creating it's own currency; it is in the process of liberating itself from the power of the established governing order. Soon Facebook will BE the government.

If it isn't already.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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