Are We Moving Towards Global Governance, or Something Else?

What happens at the End of the Empire?

transcript:

So imagine that it's the year 1423.

You're a serf.

You own nothing and you're not happy.

You think that it's the end times.

You become a flagellant and you go through the village square and you whip your sinful body to repent from your sins.

You're scared of God. You're afraid of a coming apocalypse.

And it's the end of the Middle Ages and you think that hell on earth is either already here or about to come.

Fast forward to 1440. You have the Gutenberg printing press, which is invented.

This sparks the beginning of the Renaissance.

Suddenly information that was only available to the powerful and the privileged is now dispersed for all people to read.

Suddenly literacy blossoms. People are more independent. They start to think for themselves. They're less afraid. They're able to read the Bible and understand what it actually means. They're able to read other books. They're able to learn to read and to write. This leads to an explosion in knowledge. Out of this comes the scientific method, the age of reason, the gunpowder revolution, and the Enlightenment.

So imagine you're that same serf thinking that it's the end of days, not knowing that the Renaissance is right around the corner.

This is what I want to talk about in this video.

“For scientists, it is unequivocal. Humans are to blame. All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings. The only surprise is the speed of the change. The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.

The air is unbreathable. The heat is unbearable.” - Antonio Guterres

We have nowadays a lot of parallels. There are a lot of doomsday scenarios. We think this could be the end of freedom, the end of liberty, the end of personal sovereignty. You have CBDCs which are on the horizon. Social credit systems, digital IDs, this move towards hyper-centralization with a few people at the top controlling all of the population of the world. Now what I want to think about here is how did this tendency arise? How did we get to a place where we have Klaus Schwabs of the world trying to organize a Great Reset?

So I want to think a little bit about history and how the pendulum swings from one end to the other. We can think about this kind of in 500 year cycles.

So you have the birth of Christ and then you have 496 AD, the end of the Roman Empire. So at the end of the Roman Empire, people didn't really realize that the Empire was done. There was no official date at the time. Historians could look back and say that was the end of the Roman Empire. But the people living through it basically just kept living the way that they were until things started to shift under the new regime. So this was the German barbarians who invaded Rome and basically took over all of the old positions of power. But what happened was that the power structures changed. The Roman currency, the Roman coin started being used less. It eventually kind of went out of style. It became very badly organized. It wasn't good for a lot of people, but it was good for people like farmers. The German invaders who took over were no longer charging property taxes to these people. And so there was a little period of flourishing for certain parts of the population who were well set up for it.

Around the year 1000, again, 500 years later, there was another shift and that was the beginning of feudalism. People sought protection from marauders and people with a lot of power, knights who had this heavy armor, who could come in and seize all of this property and seize all of these crops and all of these resources. So they said, "Okay, well, it's better for us to have protection underneath a lord than for us to be kind of left alone." There was more competition now for farms and for land and for resources. And so then you had the feudal system taking place. So there was another shift in power, another shift in the regime.

And of course, all of these periods in time have certain people who were thriving and certain people who were living a life of subsistence or who just were not doing well at all. So this brings us to our friend, the serf that I talked about at the beginning of this video, who now it's the end of the 1400s. And he's thinking things are really looking bad. You have Dante's Inferno, which is being written. The mood of people is thinking, you know, this is horrible, desperate times. You had the Black Plague, which wiped out large amounts of the population in Europe. And people were just thinking that life could not get better.

And then of course came the Renaissance. Out of that, you had the Medicis who started to patron the arts. Florence and Venice started to become these kind of city states. You no longer had the power of the church, this monolith that controlled everything for so many hundreds of years before that had now been broken up because you had the Gutenberg printing press, which allowed people to read the Bible, which led to eventually the Protestant Reformation and then the state and the church were separate in power. Out of this sprung the Enlightenment and times that led us into prosperity.

But then after the Enlightenment, you had industrialization. This was good for many reasons, also very bad for people. There were people who suffered through industrialization and who basically lived a life of subsistence again. And then on the other hand of that, you had a lot of progress happen.

So these things don't arise where there's just good or bad. There's like I said, winners and losers of each system.

Then you have the development of the Nation State. So you go from these small city states to now the birth of the nation state. You have all of these countries that pop up everywhere and they break up the monarchies. They're no longer state and church combined. And now it is just the nation state that is running things. And that is the world that we are still in today. However, if we look at the nation state, we can see that the nation state resembles what the Roman empire did at the end of the empire. Today, corruption, debasement of currency, leaders who were not taken seriously, overt abuses of power in order to hold on to control that was waning. So a lot of us think when we're looking forward that these are the end times, CBDCs, the digital gulag is coming and there's nothing that we can do to get out of that. But what if instead we are just like that serf sitting there thinking that this is the end of everything good and that we are just moving into hell, but instead we are actually on the verge of a new Renaissance.

“It is a fact of human nature that radical change of any kind is almost always seen as a dramatic turn for the worse. Five hundred years ago, the courtiers gathered around the Duke of Burgundy would have said that unfolding innovations that undermined feudalism were evil. They thought the world was rapidly spiraling downhill at the very time that later historians saw an explosion of human potential in the Renaissance.”

“Likewise, what may someday be seen as a new Renaissance from the perspective of the next millennium will look frightening to tired 20th century eyes.” - The Sovereign Individual

So what comes at the end of the last 500 year span in time? We talked about one to 500, which is the birth of Christ to the end of the Roman Empire. Then we have the dark ages until year 1000 and we have 1000 to 1500, which is the late Middle Ages where people are thinking that it's end times. And then you have the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, industrialization, the birth of the nation-state. What happens in year 2000 or around that time? Well, this is where we enter the Information Age.

This is where technology is starting to revolutionize the world and is starting to once again change the hierarchies of the world. So you have the invention of the Internet, a powerful, powerful tool that can be used for good or for ill. The Internet at the beginning was mostly a peer-to-peer network. So you were just exchanging with people without having a middleman. But then eventually you had these big tech conglomerates come and organize and manage the Internet so as to centralize the information to make it more available to people and more easy to go through, kind of like Google would be a great example of that. But then those middlemen end up growing so powerful that they then try to take control and shape human behaviour, to censor people, to suppress information, you know, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google.

When you have more centralization, you have some advantages when it comes to accessing information but it also makes it so that the people who are the centralizers are able to control more. This tendency to want to centralize something that is naturally decentralized is basically what we're seeing with the Great Reset.

So because of the age of information, the decentralized nature of technology coming from everywhere, people having information everywhere, being able to share a video or a tweet, something that they write or something that they saw from their telephone to the rest of the world, that's decentralized. You're using a centralized platform usually to distribute that information but that is representative of the information age. These are basically like little Gutenberg printing presses all over the place. It's like the Gutenberg printing press on steroids. And if we think about what the printing press did for the Renaissance and for the Enlightenment, it's that it gave people more knowledge and it gave people more choice and there was human flourishing that came out of that.

So I believe that this is what we are seeing coming from the invention of the internet and all of the other technologies that are based upon that foundation. So the Great Reset or the UN SDGs to me is just this tendency to want to control all of that, centralize all of that, to try and change the trend from a world that is decentralized and that is spread out all over the place to trying to hoard information, hoard control and hoard power into one central location where all of human behaviour can then be monitored, surveilled and controlled from that center. But that's exactly the weakness of these kind of supranational organizations like the WEF or the UN. They're kind of like trying to create a supra-nation state and thinking about what I said earlier about the nation state, that is a model that seems to be kind of at the end of its life; at the end of its process of decay.

It's hard to think about. It's hard to think about what would the world be without countries, without nation states, without governments heading this big nation state or going even further than that and going above government to organize like they'd like to do. But I want you to think back to our friend the serf again who couldn't have imagined at that time that the church would no longer have the monopoly on force and the monopoly on power over the citizens. If you were living at that time, it would have been almost unimaginable to think that the church would one day no longer be in charge of everything and everyone.

“Increasingly autonomous individuals and bankrupt, desperate governments will confront one another across a new divide.” - The Sovereign Individual

So we have these two equal and opposing forces. The hyper centralization model that they're trying to push down and the decentralization model born of the information age which threatens all of that monopoly on power.

“When the technologies that are shaping the new millennium are considered, it is far more likely that we will see not one world government but micro government or even conditions approaching anarchy.” - The Sovereign Individual

So perhaps the people pushing for CBDCs and the digital gulag will achieve their goals for a certain time.

But I don't think that it's a sustainable thing and I don't think that they're going to be successful at it. And that's because the technology that we have invented and that we are continuing to invent and create and nourish and feed is becoming or will become a stronger opponent than that old tired centralization model. And as I said the pendulum swings back and forth throughout the eras but it also seems to swing between centralization and decentralization. So you had the feudal system breaking up from being one where there was centralized control, monarchs, lords and peasants to being little city states like Florence and Venice where you had free market conditions where you started to see human flourishing again and then it swung back towards the nation state again that centralized control. So if we're moving in the same trends as we have historically we are moving towards decentralization.

You might say maybe this isn't a convincing enough argument that these aren't the end times and we actually do have something to look forward to but I want you to consider this, written in The Sovereign Individual:

“In the information age individuals will be able to use cyber currencies and thus declare their monetary independence.”

“When individuals can conduct their own monetary policies over the world wide web it will matter less or not at all that the state continues to control the industrial era printing presses. Their importance for controlling the world's wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence. In the new millennium cyber money controlled by private markets will supersede fiat money issued by governments.” - The Sovereign Individual

So is it possible that in the same way we saw the separation of Church and State because of that breakdown of power and that competition of information that we see the breakdown between State and Money?

“Like an angry farmer the state will no doubt take desperate measures at first to tether and hobble its escaping herd. It will employ covert and even violent means to restrict access to liberating technologies.”

“Such expedience will work only temporarily if at all.”

“The 20th century nation state with all its pretensions will starve to death as its tax revenues decline.”

So what will the next 500 years bring?

It's like our friend the serf sitting on this cusp not knowing what is coming. It's easy to mistake the end of an empire for endless hell on earth. But is it possible that instead we are on the verge of a new Renaissance?

Let me know what you think in the comments below.