Excerpt from Steven Yates article on NewsWithViews.com yesterday: 

SOCIOPATHOCRACY

For all practical purposes, much of the world now lives under sociopathocracy: government by sociopaths. The globalist superelite consists of generations of sociopaths who are raised from childhood to see themselves as superior to the human cattle whose livelihoods they destroy with no more thought than one of us would give to kicking over an anthill, whether from the wars they foment to the economic dislocations their corporations create. Sociopaths clearly dominate Europe and have for decades; today, they impose “austerity” on their masses, as the latter pay the costs of the destructive policies of their governments and banking leviathans. Sociopaths permeate our political class and its enforcement subordinates, extending from the White House and Congress on down to your county and city officials who get their jollies from destroying the life of an Andrew Wordes. The sociopathocracy gets support from those in the larger portion of that opportunistic 15 percent remainder who identify with authority and don’t mind helping destroy a man’s life to advance their own standing with the powers-that-be.

In my book Four Cardinal Errors I argue that the third of the errors there documented was the replacement of Christianity as a societal worldview with materialism as a societal worldview. According to materialism the whole of reality is just physical reality; the universe is just physical entities in motion, uncreated, and—on the largest scale—of no moral significance. Human life, in this case, ceases to have transcendent moral significance; it has no moral significance beyond what we can give it, in this life which lasts less than an instant given the vast expanse of cosmic time.

The individual dies; the state and corporations, however, go on. Those in power answer to no One Higher than each other, or themselves. Human beings are just language-using animals who occasionally speak the language of morality, which has no transcendent source or grounding. The best such moral codes are likely to produce is preference utilitarianism: pursue the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number, while letting everyone decide for themselves what gives them pleasure. These ideas begin with intellectuals who play influential roles in universities and in government. Variations on them or applications of them have received support from large corporations or tax-exempt foundations such as Rockefeller. Eventually they reach the public via cultural osmosis. Materialistic ideas are embodied in literature, in popular songs (think of Madonna’s “Material Girl”), in art, and eventually built into the framework of education which, by this time, is far more about the social engineering of compliance. When enough people are operational materialists—their being “Sunday Christians” will do!—we have a materialistic society, the main focus of which is on the pleasures of the present and how best to maximize them. Some of these pleasures turn out to be personally and socially destructive, of course, and so the culture begins to crumble from the inside out. When unbridled greed dominates the financial world, efforts to accumulate massive amounts of wealth grow increasingly reckless until they threaten economic stability. Then, unfortunately, and only then, do people begin to look up from their couches and ask questions.

Materialism by itself doesn’t give us sociopaths, of course, but a materialistic society, in combination with the anonymity noted above, tends to work against the moral compass of its people, rendering persons and institutions vulnerable to sociopaths. As the sociopathic mindset controls more and more of the warp and woof of society, morality and honesty consistently work against a person, who eventually grows cold and cynical himself.

Regrettably, many libertarians have fallen into some variation of this philosophical cul-de-sac, arguing that reason requires rejection of God and other transcendent realities, and that liberty requires only a rejection of the initiation of force, and not the purposeful application of principles (e.g., the objective worth of the individual person) the only possible grounding of which is in a transcendent reality. Sociopaths know how to exploit naïve secular philosophies. They instinctively recognize their cardinal weaknesses, such as the absence of any injunction against sacrificing the few to benefit the many (as happened in the ghastly Tuskegee Experiment). As sociopaths rise to power this gets turned around to sacrificing the many to benefit the few with the most money and power! In the end, under materialism there is no means of keeping sociopaths from accumulating power. The telos of materialism, one might say, is a totally controlled society under a totalitarian corporate-state.

Arguably, sociopathocracy has become a dominant mindset within the country—whether we are talking about government or large corporations, especially the “too big to fail” banks which are larger and more powerful today than they were before the Meltdown of 2008. Those in government are busy tightening down the screws in the name of “national security” and the “war on terror.” There isn’t, of course, the slightest reason to believe the sociopathocracy is interested in the security of the American people, or they would have secured our border with Mexico long ago! The above-noted legislation and executive orders more than suggest that the “national security” state isn’t worried about al Qaeda. It is worried about rising civil unrest among U.S. citizens many of whom are awakening to what is going on, sometimes from having studied how the superelite operates via Internet articles like this one, or having themselves been targeted by cold and sociopathic bureaucrats.

The real question is whether and how freedom-minded and independent-minded people can survive under sociopathocracy, while growing our numbers. We are a threat to sociopaths in power, in that not only do we not simply follow orders without question, more and more of us know who and what they are. The sociopathocracy has tremendous resources at its disposal, far more than any of us. Its denizens own the leviathan banking establishments including the Federal Reserve. Arguably its hands control the upper echelons of Hollywood and mainstream media. They dictate terms within major universities, and lesser ones follow the trends—not to mention their presence at every level within government schools.

Today, it is increasingly difficult to obtain reliable employment in the U.S. without either cooperating directly with the sociopathic mentality or joining with its opportunistic fellow travelers. Yet unless you plan to relocate outside this country—as more and more are doing each year—you might have to learn to do so, to pretend to be at least part of the penumbra of that 20 percent without the inner moral compass. Your only other alternative is to “hunker down” hopefully with like-minded others. Hopefully you can protect your assets as best as you can, link up with others doing the same, keep your heads down and agree to have each others’ backs—because remember: sociopathic rulers have no qualms about grabbing what you have if they know about it and decide they want it. They are more than capable of cooperating. Are we?

http://www.newswithviews.com/Yates/steven152.htm

Yates to Present Paper at North / South Carolina Society for Philosophy Meeting on Feb. 25.

Packing up items and polishing my presentation for the North / South Carolina Society For Philosophy Meeting this Saturday. Topic: Auguste Comte's Law of the Three Stages in Light of Postmodernism--And Beyond. The argument of the presentation is complex and I will only be able to present part of it. Although I'm an anti-positivist (Comte founded positivism in the early to mid-1800s), I believe he was onto something when he contended that intellectual civilization had gone through three stages, a theological stage, a metaphysical stage, and a scientific or positive stage. He was very optimistic (positive) about the possibilities of science, technology, and humanism to transform the world and human nature along with it. Stage Three thinking (as I've begun calling it) prevailed in the intellectual world for quite some time, and is still around, of course, in writings such as those of Richard Dawkins (cf. his The God Delusion). The problem: the trajectory of the twentieth century has left positivistic optimism in utter ruins regardless how you approach it. Two world wars, genocidal holocausts, weapons of mass destruction, calls for more wars, the perverse destruction of our economy and of our middle class, concerns over whether technology is liberating or enslaving us, and evidence of a global power elite aspiring to dominate the planet and rule it in a feudal fashion while impoverishing the rest of us--all of these, and much else besides, shows how humanism has failed, and how scientific and technological improvements have not translated into moral meliorism (the idea that improved living standards via technology actually make us better people). We began to enter Stage Four with existentialism, with an increased historicity about science, and with the abandonment of traditionalism within the arts. Can we look ahead to a Stage Five which actually revisits the earlier stages and recovers from each of them at least one strength that was lost? I do not think we have a choice, but we have what I consider an incipient Stage Five in freedom philosophy, in systems theory, and in the presuppositional approach to theology, if we can learn how these can be integrated, their various concerns brought into balance. Obviously I can only scratch the surface with this note; but I have the scent of another book coming somewhere down the pike!

In the meantime, Four Cardinal Errors tells the story, indirectly, of the rise of the superelite in its quest for global domination, via this country's four key mistakes: (1) we did not achieve full economic sovereignty from the British Crown, which was even then and has remained the center of superelite activity; (2) we embraced an educational system not based on American founding principles but in Prussian statism, which held that the individual does not belong to himself & to his God but to the state; (3) we replaced native Christianity with native materialism; materialism now suffuses our lives; and (4) we did not recognize the centrality and activities of the British Fabian Society, founded in 1844 and eventually also headquartered within the City of London, seat of the Crown. Four Cardinal Errors can be purchased on Amazon.com, on eBay, or ordered directly from the publisher, Brush Fire Press International, by sending a check for $11.95 plus $2.95 for shipping & handling to P.O. Box 923, Drayton SC 29333. Make out your checks to Steven Yates, not Brush Fire Press International. Please wait two to three weeks for delivery. 

New Article: Pseudo Rationalists

The online version of Steven Yates's new article "Pseudo Rationalists" is up at the following web address, on AmericanDailyHerald.com.  

http://www.americandailyherald.com/steven-yates/pseudo-rationalists

Thanks for reading.

Yates to Appear on Internet Call-In Show Tonight

Steven Yates, author of Four Cardinal Errors, will appear as a featured speaker on the Internet radio show Collective Consciousness at 9 pm this evening, EDT, to discuss the book and its implications.

Call: 218-339-6901, code-5092984#   or Broadcast Live on www.Talkshoe.com.,  use call ID: 48335

AUNetwork.tv

Feel free to stop by.  



Welcome!

This blog is about a new book, published on December 2, 2011 by Brush Fire Press International (based in Spartanburg, S.C.). The book is entitled Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic, and I am its author. I will state my credentials up front (once we are more set up they will appear to the side): I have a doctorate in philosophy; I earn the bulk of my living teaching the subject; and I write regularly about current events with attempts to look behind the surface. Perhaps in a future post I will discuss what I think of as my "awakening" (or, for those who prefer Matrix imagery, my "unplugging," which encompassed several years--there was no singular, lightning-flash event). But for now, let me just talk about the book, since this blog is about the book and its ideas, not about me.

What are the Four Cardinal Errors?

Glad you asked.

The Four Cardinal Errors are four core mistakes that have gradually brought about the decline of the greatest civilization history had given rise to. I don't claim, of course, that there are the only mistakes we Americans have made; but if we are seeking to understand the particulars of why our long term advance has slowed, why the only areas where we are still advancing appear to be in technology (most of it manufactured in China) and in indebtedness, these seem to this writer to be the most fundamental. Here, reduced to just one paragraph each (obviously, each needs far greater elaboration than I can provide in a single post), are the Four Cardinal Errors.

(1) The United States of America, which had just fought a war for independence from Great Britain, failed to secure full economic independence from the British Crown, ensconced in the City of London (the City within the City), also known as the wealthiest square mile on Earth. Its minions, especially the superwealthy Rothschild family, having established two central banks on U.S. soil only to see both shut down, continued meddling in our internal affairs until they were able to secure their ultimate prize: the Federal Reserve System founded in 1913. This central bank remained. How do we know we did not win full independence from the Crown? The matter involves a little-known but very important document known as the Jay Treaty of February 29, 1794. What is so special about the Jay Treaty? Although passed by our Congress and signed by our president, as the first "international agreement" it did not go into effect until it was proclaimed by His Brittanick Majesty, the King! Proclaiming is not an act recognized in our Constitution. It is an action performed by kings, not presidents. The history, role, and longstanding influence of the Jay Treaty is further explained in Chapter One.

(2) The United States of America, having established a Constitution which did not mention education as a responsibility of its federal government, nevertheless embraced a government educational system. This system, created by Horace Mann beginning in the 1840s, was steeped not in American founding principles but in Prussian philosophy. In the former, the individual person belongs to himself and his God; in the latter, he belongs to the state. At first, public schools seemed benign. Only a few theologians such as Cox and Dabney warned of danger. But by the latter half of the 1800s and especially in the 1900s, they were hijacked by the developing elite, via the Rockefeller-founded General Education Board and later via the Rockefeller-financed "progressive" education of John Dewey. (For more on "progressives" see (4).) The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Public schools--more accurately, government schools--have more and more fallen under the sway of federal mandates, and become training centers devoted to graduating obedient serfs who are willful mass consumers. For more details see Chapter Two.

(3) The United States of America, however we interpret it, was a Christian nation--not in the sense of having an established church or creed, but in the sense of its first generation (and their leaders) having embraced a native Christianty that suffused their lives and informed their thinking about the autonomous roles of the family, education, enterprise, and government. This was gradually replaced, starting in the late 1800s and continuing throughout the 1900s, with a materialism that, for the masses at least, would eventually be equally native and suffuse their lives in the same way--as a tacit worldview or mindset rather than a specific doctrine consciously embraced. Yet this materialism would not provide the basis for the autonomous family, autonomous education, responsible business, or limited government. Its ethics were utilitarian and relativistic--and ultimately, opportunistic. In the last analysis, it would pave the way for the replacement of God by the State: for those in charge of government at our founding believed themselves to answer to a Higher Power. Those in charge of the State today have no such beliefs. For the specifics see Chapter Three.

(4) The United States of America failed to recognize and circumvent the "penetration and permeation" of its major institutions--academia, unions, government, media, and so on--by the British Fabian Society founded in 1884. The Fabians, who openly declared themselves to be socialists, began publishing tracts around 1890. In 1895 they received a huge grant courtesy of the estate of a deceased member and used the money to found the London School of Economics, which shortly after the turn of the century was built up into what became one of the most prestigious social science universities in the world. The Fabians had come to the U.S. by this time where they became the first "progressives" (they realized that the term socialism had far more of a negative connotation in the U.S. than it did in Great Britain). Their members came to include John Dewey who founded both the "progressive" education movement we saw above and John Maynard Keynes who became the dominant economist in this country. David Rockefeller Sr., who would arguably become one of the most powerful and best-connected men in the world, studied at the LSA in the late '30s (he wrote a thesis entitled "Destitution Through Fabian Eyes"--see his Memoirs published in 2002). The role the Fabians played in bringing about the transformation of capitalism is described in Chapters Four and Five.

The Fabians had originally surrounded Woodrow Wilson, alongside banking leviathans such as J.P. Morgan. The two groups realized they wanted the same thing: power. They began to cooperate closely, with the banking titans handling the finances and the Fabians handling the intellectual side of the movement. They became what I call the superelite: the group of perhaps 300 extended families operating at the global level first to control as much of the world as possible by gaining control over banking and financial systems, and over education and the media. What is their goal? Domination, eventually establishing a world government. They are probably 90 percent of the way towards achieving that goal--sufficiently close that they no longer need to operate in secret, as did the founders of the Federal Reserve (for those details see G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island published in 1994).

Which remains me: what I've developed in Four Cardinal Errors is not a "conspiracy theory." I will not allow that particular phrase of opprobrium to be applied to this work, because it isn't true. As I've explained in numerous articles, and will explain more in the future, conspiracies are hidden from us. A perfect conspiracy would be undetectable in principle. The superelite are not hiding. Many have written down and published their thoughts, just as Adolf Hitler did when he wrote Mein Kampf in the mid-1920s. I discuss examples at length, especially in Chapters Four and Five. I have already mentioned certain works, such as David Rockefeller's Memoirs. There are others, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski's Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era published in 1970 which gave rise to the founding of the Trilateral Commission three years later. Others close to the superelite have also written down their thoughts, beginning with Woodrow Wilson (in The New Freedom, 1912) and continuing through Carroll Quigley obviously (Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World In Our Time, orig. 1966). These are only a few. There are others, as we shall see.

We cannot say the truth isn't out there. We cannot say we weren't warned. There is no "conspiracy," except in the open sense written about back in the 1930s by H.G. Wells, best known for his science fiction and not as well known for his association with the Fabians. He did not write just The Time Machine and War of the Worlds but also The Open Conspiracy and The New World Order which looked to a future world controlled by a powerful elite. None of these works were hidden, or suppressed. If they are not well known, it is because so large a percentage of the public schooled American public is more interested in who will be the next American Idol than in how we got into our present economic predicament, or the apparent inability of our present political class to muster an effective response that will allow Americans to go back to work. Instead, we appear to be well on our way to becoming a third world nation with a very small middle class consisting of those who work for the federal government or under the superelite (or who have learned to invest very wisely!).

It might be useful to clear other debris out of our minds as well. Please don't view Four Cardinal Errors as, in some sense, a "right wing" book; nor is it a "left wing" book. We need to start thinking outside these narrow boxes which are worse than useless in coming to terms with the subject matter presented here. Nor is this a "libertarian" tract. I support Constitutionally limited government, which means there is a sphere of activity which government ought to do and not markets (run prisons, for example). Moreover, there can be reasonable rules for personal conduct grounded in common morality which government must enforce when no one else will do it; otherwise civilization again deteriorates. One of the things Four Cardinal Errors should make clear is the damage the materialist mindset has done to common morality and its capacity to motivate people to police their own conduct towards others, whether in business or in their personal lives.

I believe that if you've followed me this far, you will want to read the entire book:  Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic. How can you obtain a copy? At present there are three ways. It's on the Amazon site; that is an obvious place to obtain it. You can obtain it from the publisher (Brush Fire Press International, P.O. Box 923, Drayton, SC 29333). Or you can shoot me an email. My email address set up for this blog and this book is:  fourcardinalerrorsinfo@gmail.com. I have a few copies left at $11.95 (slightly less than on Amazon), but they are going fast! Feel free to contact me.