Better you should die than threaten our power. Better many of you should die than risk the future of our system. Work. Consume. Borrow. Work some more. The best result of this pandemic would be to instill enough insecurity and fear to guarantee your even more abject obedience — because we control your mobility, your ideas, your food and water, your access to medical help. That control is OURS and no other’s.
It’s not cruelty, except incidentally. It’s desperation. For us — for those who rule with dollars — to call it cruelty would be to acknowledge your humanity as one on par with our own. You are draft animals, your barren lives barely worth living. Animals work better when they are kept a little hungry.
This is a dangerous moment for us, because we cannot risk you apprehending two things: you depend on the scraps that fall from our tables, and that dependency is enforced through money-scarcity. Three things actually . . . the third is our own incompetence. We rule through money, not competence, and we cannot risk the discovery that power and competence are two different things . . . that “bureaucratic authority is nothing other than successful power.”
We’ve got to keep a lid on things until this virus passes. In the meantime, we cannot let you see how the sky doesn’t fall when the state provides “free stuff,” and we especially cannot let you see that we are printing money for ourselves. You might discern — in your own dull draft animal way — how this all works. We have built a world where money is necessary for everything; that money is an entitlement to your bodies and time, your work and your loyalty; and when we have a great deal, our power over you is that you depend on us to have enough to survive.
We’ve cultivated your dependency for centuries now, from Enclosure to slavery to the thirty-year-mortgage to a food system with supply chains that wrap around the world like ropes binding a hostage.
The printing presses in the US Mint aren’t bailing us out. We have more money than we could ever spend right now. We could cash out today. The bailout money is to bail out our power over you. Our fear is that this could tip our hand. The draft animals might realize that we play in a casino where our losses are always covered, even as you — draft animal — are told to work it out as best you can through privation and suffering. It’s the lot of draft animals. You should be grateful that we even let you live.
When you don’t work or buy or service your debts, you are useless to us. We want you desperate, and choking you off during this pandemic is one way to consolidate our power in its wake.
When you become superfluous to profit, we’ll let you die by the thousands, by the millions. We’ll burn the world as long as we can be its masters. Better we should die than live like you animals, but die sated and content. That’s the real COVID-19 exposure we are avoiding.
Après nous le déluge.
