Alt-QAnon: Evidence and Examples

 

The roots of Alt-QAnon go back to this post, from December 2017.  Below, I'll reproduce, edit, and add to the evidence presented there -- i.e. specific evidence of Alt-QAnon at work, although I wasn't calling it that back then -- and in future posts I'll expand on some of the points.

The basic thing to keep in mind when reading and thinking about this as that WRAITHs attract and collect human beings to serve their purposes, where those purposes are completely amoral -- always sociopathic, often homicidal.  

Sam Harris (perhaps another honorary high priest of Alt-QAnon) made a point about religion that resonates here:

Now, I’m obviously not saying that all . . . all religious people[] are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.

Here's the beginning of the list of the behaviors of WRAITHs that have achieved malevolent artificial intelligence:

Industries and Corporations

Drug companies

• They engage in all sorts of profit-maximizing behavior that is socially horrible, and actually prevents medications from getting to patients who need them.  Here is a link to a proposal for nationalization of drug development, which itemizes some of the abuses.  
• They are responsible for the opioid epidemic and the suppression of legalized medical marijuana

Communications companies 

• Suppression of broadband, while other countries have it, at low prices.

Financial companies as having achieved malevolent artificial intelligence:

• 1971 Change of NYSE rule that investment banks had to be privately held such that partners could only take their draws on retirement; shifting to an annual bonus culture based on sales, not relationships
• Clinton Administration repeal of the Glass Steagall Act
• Repeated ability to get bailouts
• Various profit-maximizing behaviors -- both legal and criminal -- that led to 2008 financial crisis 
• Using political influence to avoid prosecution for these behaviors
• Using political influence to prevent corrective regulation

Oil Companies and companies like Halliburton and Exxon Mobil

• Iraq war
• Suppression of information about climate change back in the 1980s

The Gun Industry

• NRA members see themselves as fighting for their individual rights, but really they are pawns of the gun industry
• If lobbying to ensure that assault weapons are widely available will help them increase profits, that's what they will do, regardless of social cost.

The Cigarette Industry

• has always had the goal of hooking people while they are young.  Now that this is difficult to do in the United States, they are doing it in other places, like Africa.
• And they've also gained more vulnerable addicts by giving out free cigarettes to mental health patients

The Alcohol Industry

• Like big Pharma, has lobbied hard to suppress legalization of marijuana for medical purpose

The Meat Industry

• Treating sentient beings -- ones who experience exactly the same kinds of emotions of love, attachment, and loss that we do -- as assembly line products to be raised and killed at the lowest possible expense, and thus in the most inhumane ways.

And that's just the industries.  There is also an endless list of individual corporations that have caused untold damage in pursuit of profit.

• Facebook selling the election to the Russians
• Credit reporting agencies compromising our data
• Toshiba selling submarine propeller technology
• Ford not recalling exploding Pintos based on cost benefit analysis

Governments

• Starting or supporting wars of expansion based on notions of national or racial superiority

Armies

• Encouraging mass murder of civilians by de-humanizing the enemy.

Religions

• Inciting adherents to murder those who have other beliefs

• Inciting human sacrifice among adherents -- in many ancient cultures, including sacrifice of ones own children; in today's world, inciting suicide bombers.

Alt-QAnon: 100% of Wars Are Started by WRAITHs and 75% of Them Are Fought By Mercenaries

You might dispute the title - didn't Hitler start World War II?  Didn't Caesar cross the Rubicon?  Didn't Alexander the Great attack Persia, India, Egypt, and the rest?

The answer is "no."  While it is true that in each case, an individual human being made the decision to start the war, in each case, it was the military that took the actual concrete steps of starting the war.  Thus, Hitler didn't invade Poland; he was in Berlin.  What invaded Poland then?  The German military machine.

No single human being can start, much less carry out, a war.  War is a creation of WRAITHs and is their domain, which is what makes war so terrifying.  

A moment's reflection makes it clear that a nation's military is just the kind of WRAITH that Alt-QAnon is talking about.  Any given member of the WRAITH may die -- and many do -- but the hive persists, and existing members and/or new recruits step in to fill the slots vacated by the dead.  While strategic and tactical decisions are made by leaders up and down the ranks from the sergeants to the generals, that's no different than a corporation, whose decisions are made by middle managers and CEOs.  A military is perhaps an even better example of a superorganism than is a corporation, since its members are have even less autonomy than workers in a corporation.  While at war, a soldier works for the army 24-7, in a specialized role, and is constantly subject to being sacrificed for the good of the greater whole, just like a constituent of a superorganism in nature.

And like other WRAITHs, a military organization is programmed to survive and thrive, and will take every opportunity to expand.  It's not just the defense contractors (classic WRAITHs); it's also the generals who argue for ever increasing defense budgets.  And in the right conditions, a country's military will take over the country in a military coup, regardless of exactly who the military's leadership is.

So what should we make of the fact that wars are being fought by mercenaries?  

It's hard to say.   A nationalistic army comprising the flower of a country's youth, stirred to a killing frenzy by appeals to patriotism or worse is terrifying enough; perhaps even more terrifying than a mercenary army. 

But there is something understandable about a national army.  A nation has to be prepared to defend itself against other nations, and even the most peace-loving nations therefore have armies.

Moving to the second half of the title, that's from today's New York Times, which quotes human rights consultant Varvara Pakhomenko as saying that about three quarters of all wars today are fought by mercenaries and other "non-state combatants," rather than by members of nations' armed forces.

The idea of mercenaries is nothing new.   As Machiavelli explained, compared to one's own army,

Mercenary and auxiliary troops are useless and dangerous. Mercenaries are “disunited, undisciplined, ambitious, and faithless.” Because their only motivation is monetary, they are generally not effective in battle and have low morale. Mercenary commanders are either skilled or unskilled. Unskilled commanders are worthless, but skilled commanders cannot be trusted to suppress their own ambition. It is far more preferable for a prince to command his own army.

But in this day and age, unless you control a nation state, if you want an army, you need to get a mercenary one.  That was the problem facing Russian oligarch Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who surmounted it by financing Wagner, an ultra-violent mercenary force carrying out operations in Syria.  Recently, four members Wagner filmed themselves torturing, murdering, and dismembering a quite possibly innocent man, and the New York Times is quick to point out the parallel to the Nisour Square shootings carried out by U.S.'s mercenaries -- Blackwater -- in 2007, and the recent pardons of those involved by Donald Trump.

So to tie it back to Alt-QAnon -- the NY Times article says:

It is not clear why they recorded the killing, but analysts said it might have been for propaganda reasons or as a horrific form of advertising.

What better way for a WRAITH mercenary force to drum up business -- to satisfy its drive to survive and thrive -- than to advertise this way?  Unlike nationalistic forces, mercenaries do not feel the pressure to end the war so that the army can go home.  Mercenary armies just want more wars, and may well be using the current one to advertise their services for the next one.

Nursing Homes Mask Neglect To Lift Ratings: Classic WRAITH Behavior and Evidence of Alt-AQAnon

"Nursing Homes Mask Neglect To Lift Ratings" is an over-the-fold headline in today's NY Times.  The on-line version as of this moment has a more sensational headline:  "Maggots, Rape and Yet Five Stars: How U.S. Ratings of Nursing Homes Mislead the Public."

You don't have to read the story to be able to sense what happened.  Turns out the US Government has set up a system for rating nursing homes, and the nursing homes -- like the good  WRAITHs they are -- have used their artificial intelligence to game the system and achieve artificially high ratings.  

Now that we have a mostly non-manipulable (asterisk for the WRAITH that controls the governorship of New York) empirical metric -- the number of COVID-19 deaths -- it turns out 5 star nursing homes are no better than 1 star homes.  

None of this is surprising.  As you'll see below, 70% of nursing homes are for-profit and many are owned by private equity firms.  In other words, they are WRAITHs, programmed to maximize profits.  If the benefits from cheating on reporting requirements exceed the costs, they will cheat.  If figuring out when inspections will occur in advance, and overstaffing and putting their best foot forward for the inspection will help them achieve a five star rating, they will do that too.  If it will hurt a home's rating to report that residents are falling and breaking bones, are developing pressure ulcers, are infested with maggots, and are being sexually abused or raped, then under-reporting will occur.  These are all calculations that WRAITHs make under any system of regulation, and this is clearly one where the "cost" of lying and cheating did not outweigh the "benefit," leaving the nursing homes unprepared for a crisis like COVID-19, and consequently leaving thousands of residents dead, without a chance.

Once again, it's not satanic child-molesters that are causing these problems.  It's WRAITHs and Alt-QAnon.  QED.

This is really important so I'm going to quote the key findings here:

Much of the information submitted to C.M.S. [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] is wrong. Almost always, that incorrect information makes the homes seem cleaner and safer than they are.

• Some nursing homes inflate their staffing levels by, for example, including employees who are on vacation. The number of patients on dangerous antipsychotic medications is frequently understated. Residents’ accidents and health problems often go unreported.

• In one sign of the problems with the self-reported data, nursing homes that earn five stars for their quality of care are nearly as likely to flunk in-person inspections as to ace them. But the government rarely audits the nursing homes’ data.

• Data suggest that at least some nursing homes know in advance about what are supposed to be surprise inspections. Health inspectors still routinely found problems with abuse and neglect at five-star facilities, yet they rarely deemed the infractions serious enough to merit lower ratings.

• Of the more than 3,500 homes rated with 5 stars, over 2,400 were cited for problems with infection control or patient abuse.

The article goes on to note that: 

At homes whose five stars masked serious problems, residents developed bed sores so severe that their bones were exposed. Others lost the ability to move.

But the most important impact may be that the nursing home industry was ill equipped for the pandemic. The rating system allowed facilities to score high grades without upgrading the care they provided.

You should read the rest of the article yourself, but if you don't have time, the subheadings give you a pretty good sense of it:

Unaudited Data

In this segment, the article points out that the rating systems was developed in response to the fact that private equity firms -- the ultimate WRAITHs -- were buying up nursing homes.  It also points out that 70% of nursing homes are for profit -- i.e. unquestionably WRAITHs (of course, even nonprofit organizations are often WRAITHs but that's beyond the scope of this discussion). 

Not Disclosing Serious Falls

For example, between 2011 and 2015, 40% of falls requiring hospitalization were not reported to Medicare.  In one nursing home -- Clove Lakes in Staten Island -- only 15 of 72 falls requiring hospitalization were reported.

Exaggerating Nurses’ Hours

Before 2018, CMS relied on self-reporting of nurses hours, but then got the bright idea to check payroll records, after which nurses' hours plummeted.  But even after 2018, the NY Times found that the nursing homes were greatly exagerrating the amount of time the nurses actually spent with patients. 

‘I Wouldn’t Send My Dog There’

This is a quote from someone who checked into a 5 star nursing home and did not get a shower for a week, and where nobody responded to calls to help her get to the toilet.   

Overmedicating Patients

Apparently there has been a tendency to overmedicate with antipsychotic medications, which are known to cause bad reactions in the elderly.  We can guess that various pharmaceutical industry AISOs profited well from this practice, and may even have contributed to it.  Given Purdue Pharma's role in the opioid crisis, that stands to reason, although the article doesn't go there. 

Rape at Reo Vista

Multiple examples of rape and other forms of sexual abuse in nursing homes.  This section also describes one patient whose wound became infested with maggots when a bandage was not removed for several days.

Not-So-Surprise Inspections

One health inspector was convicted for taking $500,000 in bribes to let nursing homes know when inspections were coming.  Again, bribery like that is classic WRAITH behavior.  On average, homes increased staff time by 8% on days of inspections and for 800 facilities inspection day just happened to be the best-staffed day of the year (statistically impossible if random chance is assumed).

Outbreak

As already mentioned, the five star homes did no better than the one stars, since the ratings were based mainly on self-reporting and also on presenting their best face at inspections. 

Doctor Seuss, Racism, Copyright, and the Notorious RBG: A Story of Alt-QAnon and WRAITHs

A little bit of googling tells me that others had the same reaction as I did (feel free to Google it yourself, but here's a good one) but as usual, I put it better.  And I put it in Alt-QAnon terms.  This is really important because it's an-easy-to-understand example of how our country (and indeed much of the world) has been controlled for a very long time not by child molesting satanists, but by powerful real entities that are sociopathic and immortal and care even less about the public interest than child-molesting satanists.

The Dr. Seuss issue du jour is the fact that six of his books -- with publication dates going back to 1937 -- have images in them that are offensive to certain members of certain ethnic groups, and not necessarily just those depicted.  Suddenly, Seuss Enterprises -- the WRAITH that has been profiting off of the copyrights in these books since Dr. Suess's death 30 years ago in 1991-- is shocked, shocked to find those images and is now withdrawing the books from publication.

I'm not here to judge that particular decision or to take sides in the debate over political correctness that it has re-ignited.  I'm just here to point out how ridiculous it is that we got here in the first place, and also to use it as irrefutable evidence in support of Alt-QAnon:  A clear example of how WRAITHs dictate public policy in ways that suit their needs, not ours.

The first U.S. Copyright Act (of 1790) provided protection to maps, charts and books for a period of 14 years from recordation, plus the right to renew for an additional 14 years.  In other words, 28 and done in some cases; 14 and done in the rest.  The founders, in their wisdom, thought the prospect of a 28-year monopoly was enough to motivate learned people to put pen to paper and produce maps, charts, and books for the edification of humankind: the creators get 28 years of monopoly profits from their labor, but after that, the price of their work falls to the cost of production -- like everything else in a functioning capitalistic, free-market society.

Note also the wisdom of the renewal provision: the popularity of any publication will be highest at publication and will rapidly fade, and it would often not be worth the author's time and trouble to even bother renewing a copyright to receive the second 14 years.  As a result, most copyrighted works would naturally fall into the public domain after the first 14-year term.

And back then, as now, a book whose copyright had any significant value after 28 years was the one-in-a-million exception, not the rule.  So nobody -- I mean NOBODY -- decided NOT to write a book or make a map or a chart on the basis that 28 years was not long enough.

So why is it that again and again since then, any time Congress considered the appropriate length of a copyright term, it made the term even longer, such that Dr. Seuss's 1937 book will still be under monopoly protection for another decade?  If copyright was truly a bargain with creators on behalf of the public -- a 28-year monopoly as motivation to create work -- then shouldn't the terms have gotten shorter, as population, markets, and wealth expanded, thereby vastly increasing the "value" of the temporary monopoly?  Would authors really have refused to write books knowing they would only get, say, 10 years of protection, while also knowing that in those ten years, their books could be marketed to hundreds of millions of people, the world over?

Alt-QAnon explains it easily.  It was the "wish" of the WRAITHs (wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hives) -- corporations and political parties -- that have been in control of this country since late in the Nineteenth Century.  Corporations -- in recent times most notably Disney -- that owned a few valuable copyrights have lobbied hard for copyright term extensions that would extend their huge passive income streams by decades.  And members of both political parties eagerly accepted the paltry bribes since their true constituents -- corporations and trade associations -- either were giving the bribes or didn't care.

This culminated in the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended copyrights to 70 years from the death of the author, or 95 years for a work for hire, and extended the term for subsisting copyrights (like Dr. Seuss's) to 95 years (when it was originally obtained in 1937, it had a term of 28 years plus a 28 year renewal period, so would have expired in 1993).

You might have heard that Congress enacted the extension to "harmonize" US law with those of other countries.  That was a purported rationale, but there was no requirement to harmonize the law retroactively.  But beyond that, the reason the other countries had expanded their copyright terms to ridiculous lengths (and abolished the renewal term before we did), was just because the WRAITHs over there (including some of the same WRAITHs as here) were able to accomplish it there first.  That's one of their tricks -- get something enacted overseas, and then come back here and tell our Congress that we need to do the same, in the name of harmonization.

And where was the Supreme Court during all this?  Led by Justice Ginsburg -- who, incidentally, despite her many fine qualities was, during her time on the high bench, a leading shill for the pro-copyright WRAITHs in numerous cases -- they upheld the Copyright Term Extension Act on the basis that Congress could "rationally" have thought that copyright term extension was a good thing, because, for example, it would motivate owners of decaying films to restore them.  

Justice Ginsburg also trampled over the Petitioners' first amendment argument, by claiming that since Copyright itself is an "engine of free expression" and has built-in accommodations for free speech (e.g. fair use and the idea-expression dichotomy), copyright legislation like this does not cause first amendment problems.  In other words, even though the Act uniformly extended the terms of subsisting copyrights by 20 years, it was still perfectly fine under the first amendment.

Let's take a minute to think about that as we return to Dr. Seuss.  Without the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, Dr. Seuss's "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street" would have fallen into the public domain in 2012.  At that point in time, people would have been absolutely free to republish it, sell posters or t-shirts with its pictures, or make derivative works like musicals or movies out of it.  But with the Copyright Term Extension Act, nobody except Seuss Enterprises gets to do that until 2032.  When you multiply that across all of the millions of works whose copyrights were extended by the CTEA, you can see that massive amounts of speech that would otherwise have been permissible was simply impermissible, thanks to the CTEA.  

But, you might say, the first amendment says that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." And the CTEA clearly "abridged" the right of just about everybody to use Dr. Seuss's copyrighted works when the copyrights were set to expire, didn't it?  That was not a first amendment violation, according to the Notorious RBG and the majority of the rest of the Supreme Court, since copyright and the first amendment serve the same basic purposes.

Justice Ginsburg later doubled down on this shockingly unthinking first amendment analysis in Golan v. Holder, where she found the first amendment equally irrelevant on the question of whether Congress could "restore" copyright protection to works that had fallen into the public domain.

Aside:  This is essentially the same court that has, somewhat bizarrely, recently extended its first amendment jurisprudence to find a first amendment right in trademarks that either disparage ethnic or racial groups or else are simply offensive (e.g. use the f-word).  In other words, in those cases the Supreme Court was solicitous of first amendment interests where there truly shouldn't have been any -- trademarks are supposed to indicate the source of goods, not be a platform for expression; any "statement" made by a trademark only beclouds the source-indicating purpose of the mark; if anything, allowing trademarks on the basis of "free speech" suppresses more speech than it promotes, since the holders of those trademarks can then use them to inhibit the speech of others.

But back to the main point here:  As Alt-QAnon explains, the WRAITHs saw to it that copyright terms were extended, with the effect that the public's speech was vastly suppressed, for a period of  20 years.  In the case of Dr. Seuss, this whole controversy simply wouldn't have arisen -- the books would have been in the public domain, and would presumably have been published by multiple generic publishers, and available for free download on the internet, and no single entity would be able to control whether or not the public gets to even buy them.  

It seems pretty obvious that such a scenario would better serve the free speech interests that the copyright system (according to the Notorious RBG) supposedly promotes: as with other racist or offensive speech that first amendment jurisprudence goes out of its way to tolerate, these books would end up in the marketplace, where they would be in competition with more modern, less racist, less offensive books, and where the "marketplace of ideas" is already doing a pretty good job of teaching the next generation that racism is wrong.  

In fact, the books -- like other books of their time as well as previous times (Huckleberry Finn, for example) -- are extremely valuable in demonstrating to all of us how far we have come.  The fact that the books are offensive is exactly what makes them interesting, and why they should be free to all to examine and consider, and, if people are so inclined, to Bowdlerize or use as anti-racism teaching tools.  It is only the bizarre fact of WRAITH-induced excessive copyright term extensions that these books -- which have far outlived their relevance as books for children and are valuable for historical and instructive interests only -- are now essentially banned, as a result of the desire of a WRAITH -- Seuss Enterprises -- not to offend, and thus to sell more Dr. Seuss books.

The last sentence of the preceding paragraph is yet more evidence of Alt-QAnon.  Seuss Enterprises is a WRAITH that has found itself in control of a very lucrative publishing monopoly -- the ability to publish and profit from the books of a revered children's author.  For a WRAITH like Seuss Enterprises, pandering to the voices of political correctness was a no-brainer.  There was a real possibility that continuing to publish those books would have tarnished the Dr. Seuss brand, and it might even have resulted in boycotts of all of Seuss Enterprises' books.  So the right thing to do -- according to the profit maximizing algorithm that drives decisionmaking in WRAITHs -- was to stop publishing the offending titles, with great fanfare.

Like I said, I'm not going to weigh in on the controversy itself.  I do understand that the images are offensive to modern sensibilities, perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes, and that a child of one ethnicity reared solely on the basis of such images might well end up having stereotypical attitudes toward people of certain other ethnicities.  And children of the certain other ethnicities, seeing only such images, might development inferiority -- or at least "otherness" -- complexes.

I'm just hoping that those who support Suess Enterprises' decision don't take the next step and start supporting unlimited copyright term extensions.  That would be playing into Alt-QAnon and the WRAITHs' hands, big time.

 

Alt-QAnon: Quotes to inspire action

 Archibald MacLeish, after the first photos of earth came back from space:

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night -- brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

This is extraordinary.  The universe is made up of unthinkable quantities of mass, energy, and space.  But "we" all ended up on this one tiny microscopic dot, and we have to share it.

Henry Hazlitt:

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. 

The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

The bolded quote is all one needs to know about politics, especially if one understands that the "groups" we are talking about are artificially intelligent superorganisms.

Thomas Gray, sitting in a Churchyard, wrote:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
         Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
         Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
         Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
         And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
         The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
         And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
         The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
         Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

This reminds us that it's not just the "famous" people out there who have the potential for greatness -- any of us might.  And if we have something to say or do -- and we have the means to say or do it, which so many of us have these days -- we should say or do it before it's too late.

More recently, Denzel Washington gave a similar piece of advice to the 2011 graduating class at U.Penn:

Imagine you’re on your deathbed—and standing around your bed are the ghosts representing your unfilled potential. The ghosts of the ideas you never acted on. The ghosts of the talents you didn’t use. And they’re standing around your bed. Angry. Disappointed. Upset. ‘We came to you because you could have brought us to life,’ they say. ‘And now we go to the grave together.’ So I ask you today: How many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes? You invested a lot in your education. And people invested in you. And let me tell you, the world needs your talents.

And Maya Angelou makes a similar point:

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

On a concluding note, here's one from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that could be the underlying credo of Alt-QAnon:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. 

The point being that people should be inspired to "find" confirmation for Alt-QAnon and report it wherever they can, so that we might build a better world, where we harness the AISOs that we have for so long been permitting to harness us.

Alt-QAnon: Political Parties as WRAITHs

One of the easiest to prove examples of the "collective" forming an "intelligence" "greater" (haha) than its constituent parts is the institution of the political party.  A political party has certain views that are expressed in general terms in a platform, and candidates who wish to win public office normally have to pick a party and agree to support the platform.  I learned in high school that the platform of the Democratic party places primary emphasis on the value of "equality" whereas the Republican platform places emphasis on "liberty."  Many of the policies of the parties can be traced to these core values; for Republicans, one can see "liberty" in the extreme belief in "free markets," minimal regulation (except where regulation suits the donors), and gun ownership; for Democrats, one sees equality in the "free education and health care for all" and "soak the rich" messages.

But what is the party?  Who directs it?  It has a chairperson typically, but that person can change.  Clearly the Clintons had considerable influence over the Democratic party for many years, and Donald Trump managed to gain considerable control over the Republican party as well.  But it's still a quid pro quo -- those people have influence because they are thought to control votes, which is what the party feeds on. 

All is well and good if nothing unexpected happens.  The politicians act, speak, and vote in consonance with their party's platform, and typically accept whatever donations they can that do not require them to act inconsistently with the platform.  The overarching "intelligence" of the organization provides structure -- which may be subject to change, as occurred in the Trump takeover -- and within that structure the politicians do what they do -- pontificate, speechify, vote for measures that please or at least don't offend their donors, and most importantly, run for reelection, which is something they seem to spend most of their time doing.

Things get interesting when something unexpected happens.  Like an impeachment proceeding.  this is where the party takes over almost completely and the individuals -- who were never much more than drones in a hive to begin with -- get in line behind the party. No matter how strong or weak the case against the president, all but a very few of these individuals will line up not for the best interest of the country -- to try to arrive at a collective determination of whether or not that person is fit for office -- but for the good of the party.

We've seen that twice now. 

Yuval Noah Harari and Alt-QAnon

I picked up a copy of Sapiens because I heard that Yuval Noah Harari was a deep thinker who had something to say about corporations and their relationship to humans, which made me think of him as a possible candidate for high priesthood of alt-QAnon.  There may still be a place for him in the movement -- Sapiens is full of some of the same ideas I have had or wish I had had -- but it won't be because of his discussion of humans and corporations.  

I had high hopes for him when he started talking about human institutions:

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.”

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

People easily acknowledge that ‘primitive tribes’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern businesspeople and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.

And then he went on to explain Peugeot SA -- the carmaker -- in Alt-Anonesque terms:

In what sense can we say that Peugeot SA (the company’s official name) exists? There are many Peugeot vehicles, but these are obviously not the company. Even if every Peugeot in the world were simultaneously junked and sold for scrap metal, Peugeot SA would not disappear. It would continue to manufacture new cars and issue its annual report. The company owns factories, machinery and showrooms, and employs mechanics, accountants and secretaries, but all these together do not comprise Peugeot. A disaster might kill every single one of Peugeot’s employees, and go on to destroy all of its assembly lines and executive offices. Even then, the company could borrow money, hire new employees, build new factories and buy new machinery. Peugeot has managers and shareholders, but neither do they constitute the company. All the managers could be dismissed and all its shares sold, but the company itself would remain intact.

Pausing for a moment to note that Peugeot is not actually immortal -- a judge could order its dissolution, and that would be the end of Peugeot, Harari then explains:

Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a ‘legal fiction’. It can’t be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity. Just like you or me, it is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates. It can open a bank account and own property. It pays taxes, and it can be sued and even prosecuted separately from any of the people who own or work for it.

He then goes on to explain that Peugeot is a limited liability company, and that he idea of an LLC "is among humanity’s most ingenious inventions." Until it came along, people going into business were personally liable for anything that might go wrong, and if things did go wrong, they'd have to pay for it from their own assets -- their houses, their cattle, their land, or even their children (selling them into servitude).  And if he simply couldn't pay, there was debtor's prison or enslavement for him.  Those risks were 

why people began collectively to imagine the existence of limited liability companies. Such companies were legally independent of the people who set them up, or invested money in them, or managed them. Over the last few centuries such companies have become the main players in the economic arena, and we have grown so used to them that we forget they exist only in our imagination. In the US, the technical term for a limited liability company is a ‘corporation’, which is ironic, because the term derives from ‘corpus’ (‘body’ in Latin) – the one thing these corporations lack. Despite their having no real bodies, the American legal system treats corporations as legal persons, as if they were flesh-and-blood human beings.

And he goes on to explain that that's where Peugeot came from -- back in 1896 Armand Peugeot set up an LLC so he could make automobiles without risking his own assets.  And the company lived on after he died in 1915.  He goes on:

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history, and in which thousands of French curés were still creating Christ’s body every Sunday in the parish churches. It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them. In the case of the French curés, the crucial story was that of Christ’s life and death as told by the Catholic Church. According to this story, if a Catholic priest dressed in his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine turned into God’s flesh and blood. The priest exclaimed ‘Hoc est corpus meum!’ (Latin for ‘This is my body!’) and hocus pocus – the bread turned into Christ’s flesh. Seeing that the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures, millions of devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the consecrated bread and wine.

In the case of Peugeot SA the crucial story was the French legal code, as written by the French parliament. According to the French legislators, if a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated. When in 1896 Armand Peugeot wanted to create his company, he paid a lawyer to go through all these sacred procedures. Once the lawyer had performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths, millions of upright French citizens behaved as if the Peugeot company really existed.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees and lions.

Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. Within this network, fictions such as Peugeot not only exist, but also accumulate immense power. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’, or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. There is nothing special about lies. Green monkeys and chimpanzees can lie. A green monkey, for example, has been observed calling ‘Careful! A lion!’ when there was no lion around. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself.

Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. The sculptor from the Stadel Cave may sincerely have believed in the existence of the lion-man guardian spirit. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights. No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imaginations.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations.

I started off wanting to paraphrase more, but I feel like I had to let Harari speak for himself just so you can follow his exact argument, because I'm still a bit confused about it.  Yes, it is true that a "corporation" is a legal concept that in and of itself has no physical form.  And one might say it has no "reality" -- certainly not the same kind of reality a a river or a mountain -- apart from the imagined reality of its legal statuus.  But as Harari points out, the law treats it as a "person."  And as Jeremy Lent and Alt-QAnon hold, a large corporation is like an extremely powerful and sociopathic person.  

So while I'm not disagreeing with Harari, and perhaps its a useful insight to say that the cognitive revolution gave rise to stories which first gave rise to religions and ultimately gave rise to corporations, it doesn't really help us understand what a corporation is, and how to control them.