How to Rule/Save the World – Part 2 : Gatekeepers

Thursday Dec 2, 2010

Burros

What are Gatekeepers?

By simple definition, a gate keeper is someone who controls access to something. It’s name originating from those who guarded the gate within a city wall and allowed people in or out at their discression. Today, however it is a term that is more widespread in its usage. Examples of gatekeepers are the bankers who control who gets the credit to build their businesses, the publishing companies who control which artists get exposure to audiences on a large-scale basis, the government who controls who receives the benefits of the productivity of the nation and the storekeepers who control what products you’ll have access to.

Why would someone want to be a gatekeeper?

We see gatekeepers everywhere. They are nestled into every nook and cranny of our existence, but why would someone want to go through the effort and expense of creating systems and structures to redirect the decision-making process of others through themselves? Obviously, the answer is they have the desire to control them. The desire to control things is based on the ego attempting to exert its will on the world around it to try and force it to conform with the ego’s expectations for how it should act. To rephrase that, the egoic portions of ourselves, try to force others to act in a manner that best fulfills our own needs. This method of thinking is distinctly different from that of faith. When one has faith, there is no need to control things because the mind “knows” that the needs will be fulfilled. This ties in with the Law of Attraction as when one is certain that the desired results are on their way, then the universe can fully deliver that of which you are asking.

Why do we let people gatekeep over us?

There are a lot of reasons why people let other people control portions of their lives. Fundamentally, though they are ignorant and feel powerless. In a lot of cases they aren’t even aware of the power relationships in place and think “that’s just the way things are.” Sometimes, we understand that we are being taken advantage of, but are unaware of how to reclaim their power or feel powerless to do so. Perhaps, there are so many other challenges in life, that we don’t have the energy to devote in that direction so it’s easier to not really try. Sometimes the challenges are so big, and we feel helpless to change them.

Power centralizes naturally when the majority of people feel powerless over large areas of their lives. In these circumstances, we offer the opportunity to others to take advantage of us rather than confronting the issues that face us. Sometimes people actively seek to acquire power over others, but often it is just taken by default, so a network is created where everyone has power in small little niches, but is powerless in the majority of their lives.

How to Rule the World

The goal is to create a system in which the control of a population lies within the grasp of a few select people with yourself at the top. In this manner, you can live a life of luxury that capitalizes on the productive capacity of the population at large, bringing you value much greater than the value that you can provide the world via your own energy. Considering that after a certain amount of wealth, time becomes significantly more valuable and limiting, thus you will most certainly want to create a system of hierarchies, in which each organization is controlled by a select few who are controlled ultimately by you.

Gatekeeping is the natural outcome of the desire to concentrate power. Concentrating power is achieved by spreading fear and promoting weakness in the population. This fear causes people to try and hoard what is critical to their well-being, or if the challenges are too great people will give up their power out of complacency. If you can give them too many challenges, they will focus on the most important ones and ignore the lesser important ones. In this way you can covertly have them give up their power on issues they aren’t paying attention to. Over time, this foothold can be grown and improved. You only have to control those who have seized control of power over an area. They will be compliant due to their position of privilege and their not wanting to give it up. When the people have a worldview that they are powerless, this is internalized and their ego will help you perpetuate this weakness and accept further abuses.

Specialization and Experts

One of the ways we can remove power from the individuals is to glorify and encourage specialization to the extreme. Specialization is an economic term describing the division of labor. The more specialized a person becomes, the more dependent they becomes on the systems around them, because by definition they are less capable at doing a variety of tasks. This dependency is a weakness we can exploit by manipulating the systems around them.

First, though how do we encourage specialization past the optimal amount and into the realm of weakness? We do this by creating longer and longer work-weeks, so that people only have enough time and energy to work on the tasks they are specialized. We ensure that our economic textbooks glorify specialization at all opportunities. We remove the ability to work multiple part-time jobs by providing them health care, but only to a worker sufficiently specialized as determined by the number of hours they work in a week at one job. This has the beneficial side effect of making them dependent on this single income stream, which makes them much more compliant. We then slowly create licensing systems, upon which to regulate commerce. This eliminates people from performing certain types of work for other people. We tell them we must regulate them for their own protection, that the licensed people are experts and that those jobs require experts. This creates doubt and weakness in the populations minds. We tell them that only expensive doctors are capable of creating good health and that people shouldn’t be trusted to do it themselves. We encourage this dependence on experts as much as possible. To do this we make regulatory systems as well as systems created by corporations we control which are much more complicated and have more confusing jargon than they need to be, we encourage the monopoly of these systems over other competing systems.

Once people are sufficiently dependent, we can shake the systems upon which they are dependent on to show them just how weak and dependent they are. This will further reduce their confidence in themselves. We make money more scarce to the common people by depressing the economy. We make health care more scarce and expensive.

Education to Employment Pathway

Let’s talk about Education, Employment and the path between them because this is a critical area for us to use gatekeepers to remove power from the individuals. Employment and thus education is based off specialization and the notion of experts described above. Education creates experts as certified by the diploma and employers hire people based on the idea that the diploma ensures that they are experts. This creates a education system that funnels people through different gates. This restricts employment options for those who haven’t passed the tests of the gatekeepers. You can create multiple levels of schooling with gates between levels which further restricts access and availability to earn a high income to the select few which you allow through the gates. By only allowing a certain amount of people through the gates each year, you can regulate the percentage of the population allowed into the upper classes.

Gatekeepers in the Media

One of the most important aspects of society towards centralizing control is the media. The reason for this is self-evident. If you can control the information going to the people, then for the most part, you can control what they’re exposed to and what they can become aware of. In other words, you can determine how big of a box their reality fits in. Qualitatively, you can shape what their reality and experiences will look like.

To control the media is all about controlling the mechanisms of distributing the information to the people and being large enough to dominate the industry so that you drown out the competitors. Like anything else, the idea is to centralize the power in as few hands as possible, then apply leverage on that person to get them to make the choices that you wish to see.

Government Subsidies and Regulation

To further our control of society, we must control the private sectors as well. To do this we create an incestuous relationship between the government and private sectors, despite creating the illusion of the government as being separate from the private sector. The way we do this is through the use of subsidies and regulation. Once we control the government, we can give subsidies to the corporations that are doing what we want and we withhold subsidies to their competitors. This provides them with an unnatural competitive advantage so they can out-compete their opposition. We can also do this through our bankers and controlling their access to credit. When they become dependent on our subsidies for their survival, then we can add strings to our subsidies as a method of control. Clear examples of this are through the work of the IMF and World Bank on the international levels and in the agricultural educational and utility industries on a national level.

The sister side of subsidization is regulation. By increasing the costs of companies to comply with our regulations, we reduce the ability of those who try to compete with our monopolies, and with sufficient subsidies we ensure that the monopolies can comply with our regulations.

Once at a certain level, we can use subsidies and regulation to ensure the production of the products which further weaken the power of the population and encourage those which further our control. An example would be to subsidize food which is devoid of nutrition and weakens the populace. Another would be to encourage automobile production as it increases the financial burden on those who utilize it as well as it is a system we are firmly in control of on the regulatory side.

The Government

Control of the government is clearly crucial to long-term success of the people. The government operates under the guise of being created by the people and thus for the people, but under our control we can regulate the different areas of society as we please. The way we control government is simple, we control who is allowed to participate in government and thus ensure that they are filled with those who will fulfill our requests. We create two gates to accomplish this task. The first gate is that we make the cost to become a politician so extravagantly high that very few could afford to fund themselves to complete the process. Since we control the monetary supply, we can create money to fund the candidates we desire so that they will sufficiently overpower all competitors. Similarly, bribes work well for most politicians already in office. Once we have sufficient control of the political system, we reduce the ability of uncontrolled candidate from even making their voices heard so they will never gain a sufficient following to be elected. We do this by creating a system based on political parties and controlling the major parties.

How to Save the World

The purpose of the How to Rule the World section above is not to spread or start conspiracies, but instead to show some areas where we commonly give our power of creation to someone else. They offer services to us that at the first glance appear to benefit us, but over time they prove to be detrimental to us when they try to change the relationship so that they have power over us and then use that power to further their own lives at our expense.

The bare essence of how we’re going to save the world is that we’re going to learn how to take full responsibility for the life we live, and to make all our choices consciously.

Become aware of where you give your power away

The first step is to become aware of the gatekeepers in your life and in becoming conscious of where you’ve been unconsciously giving your power to other people. These are easy to find because they’re everywhere. The How to Rule the World section is a good starting point. Look for the areas in your life that have been causing you pain for a while. Lots of times these are areas where you’ve been ignoring them because you’ve felt powerless to fix them. Look for situations in which there is a subtle societal pressure to do something without fully exploring all the other options. These are where the gatekeepers funnel people into using their services. You can also look at your finances and see where you’ve been spending your money unconsciously. Look at your relationships. Are you in any relationships where you feel subservient to another rather than being two equals? You’ll be amazed at how often you’ve been giving your power away, once you start looking for it.

We do this because we feel that it’s the easy thing to do or that we have too many other things to focus on, but often we would have been better off if we had just taken the time to figure things out earlier rather than later.

Choose a Better Option

After you learn where you are giving your power away, the next step is to choose something better. All of life is choices and often we make choices without being fully conscious of them, however nothing changes until we start making different choices. Our unconscious mind, makes choices based on the set of stimuli it is presented with and the patterns that are stored in your brain. The significance of this is that the unconscious mind will continue to make the same responses (choices) when given a set of stimuli. The only way to a better life is to use your conscious mind to consciously choose something different , something better. With regards to gatekeepers, we have to choose to not participate with people that try to manipulate us for their own benefit. We have to choose to not support employers that aren’t supportive of us.

This brings us to our last step. It’s fine to consume products from ethical producers, but ethical producers are in short supply. We also have to become ethical producers ourselves. We have to hold our own workplaces to high standards. We have to change them so that they support all life. If we cannot find this in our workplaces, than we must opt-out and build our own workplaces in the model that we so desire. We must create our structures to support others, because we also need them to support us. Be conscious of the power relationships you create and participate in so that control over ones actions are left in their hands. Choose small and distributed over large centralized industrial models.

Most importantly, do not fear. The universe is moving this way, you just have to move with it so that you don’t get left behind.