Happy Sunday to everyone! I woke up early and continued work on my new book project. Amazingly, the research and subsequent analysis of my finding is shocking even me! I have committed to follow truth wherever it leads me in life and I have researched the below topic extensively. Never underestimate man’s fallen nature and thus the avenues people will seek to exploit others. The Bible states, “Be harmless as doves and wise as serpents.” This means to me – do not practice exploitation, but be wise enough to discover it and stop it. This is what I intend to do with the help of other people who are harmless as doves, but wise as serpents. LIFE Leadership is on the move!

Sincerely,

Orrin Woodward

In consequence, in any society where the FLD is progressing, one also discovers increasing control of the media by the exploiters. In essence, the media’s role is to deflect people’s attentions from the exploitations they are suffering and instead focus them on sports & entertainment, the stock market, and various political disputes that do not address the real injustices. In effect the people are lulled to sleep by the media who are funded by the FLD exploiters. For instance, Aberto Fujimori, the democratically elected leader of Peru, led a coup that  transformed the democracy into a dictatorship in 1992. He relied heavily on the support of his right-hand man Valdimiro Montesinos, who organized a mass system of bribery, payoffs, and hush money to ensure the support of influential members of Peruvian society for his dictatorship. Interestingly, however, after the fall of Fujimori’s government, the meticulously documented records of Montesinos misdeeds fell into the public’s hands. Acemoglu and Robinson wrote:

The amounts are revealing about the value of the media to a dictatorship. A Supreme Court judge was worth between $5,000 and $10,000 a month, and politicians in the same or different parties were paid similar amounts. But when it came to newspapers and TV stations, the sums were in the millions. They paid more than $1 million to a mainstream newspaper, and to other newspapers they paid any amount between $3,000 and $8,000 per headline. Fujimori and Montesinos thought that controlling the media was much more important than controlling politicians and judges. One of Montesinos’s henchmen, General Bello summed this up in one of the videos by stating, “If we do not control the television we do not do anything.”

Does anyone seriously doubt, considering human nature is common to us all, that similar activities do not occur in the Western World? True, the influence may be less direct and the bribes rationalized as perks of the job, but the result is the same. Needless to say, the exploiters use the media to redirect, entertain, and rationalize  the people into passivity. Interestingly, since all governments exist through the “consent of the governed”, the press, in a democracy, is responsible for the “manufacturing of consent” as Walter Lippmann stated nearly a century ago.

Noam Chomsky

In any event, propaganda blossomed as a tool of social control during WWI when the British, realizing they were losing the “War to End All Wars” to the Germans. In consequence, they poured funds into their propaganda machine, called the Ministry of Information, to convince America to help defeat the barbaric “Huns”.  Noam Chomsky explained:

The British Ministry documents (a lot have been released) show their goal was, as they put it, to control the thought of the entire world . . . but mainly the US. . . In the US there was a counterpart. Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. . . But he decided to go to war. So the question was how do you get a pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics so they want to go kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda. So they set up the first and really only major state propaganda agency in US history (Committee of Public Information or more commonly called the “Creel Commission” in honor of its founder George Creel). . . The task of this commission was to propagandize the population into jingoist hysteria. It worked incredibly well. Within a few months the US was able to go to war. . . the American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. . . the huge public relations industry, which is a US invention and a monstrous industry came out of the first World War. . . Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out a few years afterward called Propaganda . . . The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, that it is possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.” These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by “intelligent minorities” in order to make sure that the slobs stay the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.

Presumably, if the few were benefitting from unjust FLD plunder over the many and knew the importance of the “consent of the governed” in a democratic republic, it would logically follow that they would seek “manufactured consent” to maintain societal  peace while they enjoyed the plunder. In fact, the big corporations (Big Banks/Big Business/Big Government), hired the members of the “Creel Commission” propaganda ministry to improve the messaging of their companies. Naturally, when the companies realized great success from these techniques, they sought to own the media outright to manage the message to the masses daily. Not coincidentally, this is exactly what they did. For instance, when the book The Media Monopoly first hit US shelves in 1983, author Ben Bagdikian stated that, “Fifty corporations dominated almost every mass medium.” Significantly, with every new release of the book, the number of corporations controlling the media dropped. From 29 firms in 1987, 23 in 1990, 14 in 1992, ten in 1997 and only six today! Six corporations, in other words, create, print, and deliver the news that the US public consumes. This consolidation of media ownership ought to be concerning to anyone who understand the FLD and the role of propaganda within society. For the “Freedom of the press,” as noted journalist A.J. Liebling once remarked, “is guaranteed to those who own one.” In reality, the six remaining media conglomerates are not truly independent since they are closely connected through their interlocking corporate boards. Media critic Mark Crispin Miller emphasized, “The implications of these mergers for journalism and the arts are enormous. It seems to me that this is, by definition, an undemocratic development. The media system in a democracy should not be inordinately dominated by a few very powerful interests” On the other hand, however, if the goal of the rulers was the “manufacturing of consent” to support its agenda over the many, then a media monopoly is exactly the intended result.

I am still diligently working on my next book on State, Society, and Justice. Boy, what a project I have undertaken here. I am, at the same time, have the blast and pulling my hair out. 🙂 There are so many subtle nuances that must be cleared up to keep the main thing the main thing. At any rate, this is what LIFE Leadership is about – learning, growing, and helping to create positive change. Here is a segment on government and the Five Laws of Decline.

Sincerely,

Orrin Woodward

Throughout recorded history, human beings have been shown to be capable of remarkable acts of honor and correspondingly astonishing acts of dishonor. Indeed, if a Biblical scholar were to describe this historical fact from a Judeo/Christian worldview, he would say – although mankind is made in the image of God, his rebellion led to his alienation from God and his self-centered will is capable of spectacular deeds of both good and evil. For on one hand, when people work cooperatively together in justice, the SDS thrive in a growing society. However, when mankind seeks to exploit his fellow man for his own gain, the magnitude of injustice man is incapable of of being quantified. For the history of genocides, mass murders, and total war boggles the mind. In effect, the Five Laws of Decline (FLD) describes, in a systematic fashion, mankind’s exploitive nature which results in his ongoing inhumanity to his fellow man. Dismally, the historical record is loaded with egregious examples of man reaping where he didn’t sow, exploiting the production of others rather than producing wealth for himself. Ironically, when the SDS are thriving under justice that the risk of exploitation and injustice is the greatest. For the increased wealth becomes an irresistible temptation for the exploitive potential within mankind. In other words, the more wealth a society produces by just “economic means”, the more creative the exploiters will become in seeking to plunder it by “political means”. Accordingly, wealthy societies must forever be vigilant to identify where the FLD is seeking to siphon off its wealth. For the FLD is a systematic method for describing how man’s fallen, exploitive, and anti-social behavior seeks to gain plunder at society’s expense. The Five Laws of Decline were first introduced in my book RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE to describe how organizations decline. These concepts were then further expanded into the political field with the release of LeaderShift, co-authored with Oliver DeMille.

In general, when the FLD are not checked, society is split into two groups – those who produce wealth and those who plunder it. James Madison described man’s nature appropriately when he wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Men, however, are not angels; therefore, most men, when they recognize opportunities for plunder without punishment, will move in this direction. The purpose of just governments, in essence, is to check mankind’s exploitive nature to ensure justice for all. For then society’s members will choose cooperation “economic means” to create wealth since exploitation “political means” is not viable. For just as a pickpocket avoids practicing his craft in the vicinity of police officers, so too do exploiters steer clear of plunder if the government punishes it properly. However, it’s vital to remember that society’s protector (government) consist of men and women who also have good and evil within them; thus, if society isn’t diligent, plunderers will seek to redirect the government’s “monopoly of force” away from protecting against injustice into initiating injustice at the exploiters command. In fact, much of third-world poverty is a disgraceful record of government force being used as a tool of injustice rather than justice. Although Western Society governments are, of course, less overt when practicing injustice than their third-world counterparts, the same principle still holds true. All governments, in short, must be watched to ensure exploiters do not gain control of government and set up systems of exploitation. Thus, using the “monopoly of force” for unjust ends.

Indeed, the real challenge to taming the FLD within society is that any government with sufficient power to protect, is, by definition, also powerful enough to exploit. For when government receives the “monopoly of force” to restrain injustice, what is to ensure this force is not used unjustly by the rulers themselves? Regardless of governmental form society chooses, the underlying systemic issues of FLD must be specifically addressed, for the FLD is inherent within the human heart. Hence, since governmental leaders are human in every form of government, the FLD question must be addressed and answered or liberty will die as exploitation increases. Professor Issac Kramnick aptly described the challenges of government power and man’s inhumanity to man in his discussion on the French Revolution and the ideas of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke:

French Revolution: Guillotine

Government is simply a necessary evil, useful, if not mandatory, to control ourselves when we fail one another. How we effect that control (and what additional restraints need to be governmentally supported) is for each age to decide. The important consequence for Paine was that no matter how much reverence Burke adduces to support the undeniably important wisdom of the ages, Paine asserts that those living now should not have to forfeit their right to pass judgment on choices made by those no longer alive. Both Paine and Burke decried the extremes of the French Revolution, and both were disillusioned by man’s inhumanity to man, but both saw opportunity for needed change in the events unfolding in Paris. Paine’s support of the revolution was founded in the insanity of the French monarchy. Burke’s denunciation of the revolution was rooted in the insanity of the republic. Both were right.