The New Nobility and Neo-Colonial Exploitation of the Home Citizenry
Context matters, for context establishes cause and effect and what’s elevated to important / consequential.
Context is tricky for two reasons:
1) we only manage what we measure, so what we don’t (or can’t) measure is ignored as if it doesn’t exist. Yet what we don’t measure may still be causal and consequential.
2) Context is cultural and not self-aware of its contradictions. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, the most important phrase in the entire Bible was “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” at certain junctures, with the definition of witchcraft being set not by biblical scholarship or the principles laid out in the New Testament but by the zeitgeist of that era.
Other examples include blatant violations of the principles laid out in the US Constitution–banning ownership of property in certain neighborhoods based on ethnicity, and so on.
In the present era, the dominant context is financial, and so in a “market economy” everything–and everybody–has a price. In the context of my work, a social order in which everyone has a price is totally, blindly, fatally corrupt.
But it’s not polite to state that America’s economy and political-social order are totally, blindly, fatally corrupt, for this is outside the conventional norms / context that the purpose of life is to amass as much private wealth as possible by any means available.
This lack of self-awareness is also a core dynamic in Model Collapse, a context that I view as far more causal and consequential than what dominates headlines and commentary: AI, geopolitics, energy, etc.
As noted in previous posts, to those who accept a context without an awareness of its potentially fatal limitations, the model seems to be functioning perfectly because its self-referentiality excludes any other possible output other than the system is performing nominally.
From the systems-level perspective / context of Model Collapse, in focusing on the conventional realms of AI, geopolitics, finance, energy, etc., we’re picking up seashells on the beach, oblivious to the tsunami racing ashore.
There’s another systems-level context which I see as causal and consequential: Neofeudalism and Neocolonialism, topics I started addressing 13 years ago in 2012. The E.U., Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012).
The basic dynamics here are hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization set in the contexts of Core and Periphery and the passing of the traditional Colonial Exploitation / Extraction model of national wealth-building.
With the passing of brute-force colonial exploitation / extraction in which the Core (the colonial power) extracted wealth from the Periphery (its colonies), national wealth-building was set aside in favor of neofeudalism, an economic structure that exploits both the global populace and the home-country populace via financialization-globalization to the benefit of a class I term the New Nobility, a class of wealth and power whose built-in privileges parallel those of a feudal Aristocracy.
In the conventional telling, nothing has changed, humans always seek to exploit others to maximize their own gain, etc., etc. But this context explains nothing and establishes nothing beyond an empty fatalism.
In the Neocolonial Model, the New Nobility maintain their power by promoting a dysfunctional divide-and-conquer society in which the exploited classes are set against their shared interests via ginned-up cultural conflicts, deranging distractions and hallucinations passed off as predictive narratives: with natural gas and nuclear power running AI data centers, super-abundance is right around the corner.
That we can no longer afford (or access) the healthy foundations of a high quality of life are of no concern.
Please direct your attention to the latest mayhem, the cultural red flags we’re constantly waving, the 792 best series on TV, all of which deserve your devotional loyalty, the AI therapists / best pals that can be yours for a low, low monthly subscription, the latest projections of endless wealth in the stock market / crypto casino and the endless scroll of the top 792,000 influencers and AI-generated “celebrities.”
Are You an Elitist? Class Warfare and the New Nobility (April 26, 2014).
With brute force now problematic, the Neocolonial method of extraction / exploitation is financial–indenture Periphery populations by extending them credit that then siphons off their wealth in interest payments–and globalization: offer jobs to the lower classes (so the interest on the newly expanded debt can be paid) and opportunities for graft, fraud and payoffs to local elites by moving production overseas to exploit cheap labor and lax environmental / labor regulations.
The flood of foreign capital snaps up all the productive assets at low prices (having a strong currency and unlimited credit come in handy) and then offloads them to sovereign wealth funds when it comes time to exit.
When the labor force, resources and other assets have been strip-mined, close down production and move it to wherever is offering the most bribes–oops, I mean tax credits: it might be Kentucky, or it might be Bulgaria, where doesn’t matter.
This flow of maximizing-profit-by-any-means capital is touted as beneficial to all until the debt and imbalanced economies both implode. Then the narrative moves on: gee, too bad you fell into the credit-debt trap and all your assets were seized by creditors.
The other half of neocolonialism is exploiting the Home-Country citizenry with the same tools of wealth extraction: financialization and globalization. The basic mechanism is to slowly siphon off labor’s share of the economy’s output and redirect it to capital, forcing wage earners to borrow money and take on extraordinary risks to maintain their quality of life.
As production was moved overseas and costs / risks were transferred from employers to employees, capital established self-reinforcing advantages over labor, driven by the purchase of political influence that dismantled much of the infrastructure of social mobility.
Since competition and transparency obstruct profits, these have been eliminated in favor of monopolies and cartels, with quasi-monopolies being the favored model to retain fig-leaf of “competition.” The dominance of “market forces”–everyone has a price–normalized corruption and elevated finance as the dominant context of every decision.
The problem with these structures is not visible until it’s too late: they’re self-liquidating, as their very success has generated sclerosis (i.e. loss of adaptability) and self-referential data harvesting and “training”: everything’s going great because our statistics “prove” it.
The New Nobility has bypassed the need for Divine Rights or formal granting of power; their privileges are now informally embedded in the system.
Recall my Neofeudalism Corollary #1:
If the citizenry cannot replace a dysfunctional government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.
In the context of Model Collapse and Neofeudalism-Neocolonialism, all that’s been normalized is inherently self-liquidating as the resulting extreme imbalances will catalyze a swing of the pendulum to the opposite extreme.
Two charts reflect what’s 1) normalized in the conventional context and 2) unsustainably imbalanced:
The top 0.25% collects the majority of income from capital:
The bottom 50% own a sliver of these assets that qualifies as signal noise
Cause and effect generate consequences. Get the context wrong, then all the predictions are hallucinations. Get the context right and we’re one step ahead. That’s far better than always being one step behind.
https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/the-new-nobility-and-neo-colonial