Brazen New World

Let's cross the line

Photograph of a human by Bora Sözüer via Unsplash. No AI.

It is a law of Nature that the Alphas rule. The top predator, the Alpha male and female, the King and Queen, the Emperor, the Pharaoh, the Sheik and the Tsar, the CEO, the President, the one and only Ruler atop the pyramid of community, society, civilization. Great White, Queen Bee, Silverback, or Homo Sapiens, the Earth’s species innately understand the built-in order of things. Whether it is the food chain or the corporate ladder, social animals naturally organize for levels of hierarchies.

But there is no pre-ordained pathway that commands an individual to become the Alpha. It is, rather, a chaotic whirlwind of genetic predisposition to health, size, and aggression; of lived experience; of the external environment; and of the individual’s intelligence. Oh how we humans love to compare ourselves... to the Lion King, the Apex Predator, the Dominant Male. The Alpha. Oh how we admire power, wealth, aggression, intimidation, hubris. We forgive violence on the grounds that that is the natural way, the way of Nature, in all of her crushing force in whose face we are mere ants. We shrug our shoulders at greed, for without their ambition billionaires would not build their impossibly important companies — all far too big to fail. We accept inequality, injustice, and intolerance because we have allowed ourselves to be raised in a culture of fear and anxiety, to be nourished by foods processed into oblivion, and to have our minds molded by scholastic templates designed to crush independent critical thought and free will.

And we forget, ever too easily, that our societies are far more complex than those of our animal brethren. We fail to consider that the human mind produces a far more convoluted psychology than that of our fellow living beings. Where the experienced see paper-thin narcissism, the impressionable see leadership. Where the accomplished see insecurity, the uninitiated see bravado. Where the wise see psychopathy, the naïve see charisma. Reality walks a thin line.

The Betas, the Deltas, and all other subordinates far outnumber the Alphas. Man against man, woman against woman, there is no contest. In truth, often it is the less wealthy and powerful that are better trained, and certainly far more experienced, in survival tactics and street smarts. The suits would be the first to fall on the front lines.

This is why the Alphas rule by fear. Infect their minds, control their pain and their pleasure, and you shall have no need to fight. They will fight not you, but for you.

But do the Betas and the Deltas know they, too, could rise to the rank of Alpha, given the right and favorable mix of circumstances and timing? If four Alphas are killed in battle, by disease, or by old age, it is natural that the fifth individual, heretofore a mere subordinate, need to rise to the occasion and take on the newly minted role as leader. Yet a Beta, Delta, or even an Epsilon need not wait their turn—they could simply seize the Alpha’s place and position. This is what the Alpha fears, and this is why the Alpha turns that fear against the other.

It is, after all, the pen of the Privileged that decides whose song the centuries will sing as the dust of Time settles across the vast plains of History.

Civilization, disintegrated

The ancient peoples of the North American continent have lived on this land, in all of their cultural diversity, for what researchers now say extends over 20,000 years. In striking irony, this young nation we live in, the United States, is not yet two hundred and fifty years old, and we have already slipped off the rails. Our leaders say we are the protectors of democracy, but instead they have become the merchants of theft.

The first thing they stole was the very land they set foot on: America. Then the rights of the native people to live on their own land in their own way. Soon there came the theft of the bodies and the labor of the Other, Black bodies from another continent. Then gold, forests, water, and the rich resources this massive new world offered. Today, the kleptocrats are stealing our work, our wages, our homes, our health, our dreams, our rights, our future. One, by one, by many. And because we like a good parade, they dress up in fine clothes, travel the country giving impressive speeches and media interviews, and twist the words of the language we all use by social contract, until the words cry out in pain and submit to their torturers.

Today’s billionaires do not stand on the shoulders of giants. Their bellies full of the promise and effort of competitors they have bought out, taken over, outmaneuvered, undercut, and sued out of existence, they sit on a bed of false roses manufactured by an awestruck media they spent decades feeding by hand, that in turn feed on headlines designed to capture our most primal human emotions—those that feed on pleasure and pain, and derail our more complex faculties.

They do not stand, for to stand means to embody honor. To stand means to lead by example. To fight for justice. To protect the less powerful, the less fortunate, the less privileged. To stand means to face the Fates without fear or prejudice. To stand means to stay at the helm of your ship, the front lines of your troops—not in front of a television watching the young men you’ve sent to war die for a viral video.

They do not stand, for to stand means to protect your people, treat them with dignity, and reward them for their work and their efforts.

They do not stand—they sit, carried by oceans of the effort and labor of others, by thousands of hands and thousands of hours that would rather be spent elsewhere and engaged in more rewarding endeavors. Yea they sit on beds of false roses, carried aloft by our own willful and unwitting complicity. Without us, the Betas, the Deltas, or the Gammas, the Alphas would never see their A’s capitalized.

And those who would be truly King instead languish in prisons of non disclosure agreements, bankrupted by limitless litigation, their rightful place among the celebrated, among the honored, among the respected, denied. Stolen. Disrupted. For this is what “disruption” really means. It is what the ambition-crazed men of ancient and modern times alike have carried out, forcing their behemoth dreams upon the flesh of millions. They would disrupt the desired flow of others’ lives. Then as now, the bodies fall, the blood soaks the earth, screams shred the night. And still fresh new believers offer their minds and bodies, the Deltas and the Epsilons, to sacrifice their brief moment on Earth for the almighty Alphas they fear without cause. The Alphas of old would turn a greener shade of envy were they to glimpse the weapons unimagined at the disposal of their present-day ideological inheritors. Today, raw ambition retains not only its mortal cost of bone and blood; it now extracts electrons from power lines and streams of rain from the rivers, and has fallen victim to a deranged new thirst—the economic and social entanglement of every human connected to the Network.

Data.

The blood of the new world order.

Photograph by cottonbro studio via Pexels.com

Books paintings movies songs plays words images sounds voice movement biometrics likes comments emails posts shares searches site visits clicks views names passwords phone numbers physical locations personal contacts family members home addresses resumés driving histories store purchases medications time of waking time of sleep heartbeat footsteps height weight blood pressure color of skin hair and eyes emotions dreams and yes our very thoughts...

Extracted, scraped, parsed, remixed, digested, bundled, prompted, output. Sold.

Unwitting slaves whose every breath and every thought is bled for its economic value, we are.

We have all become the horseshoe crab, bled for its noble blood. All we need to do to return to the rich, nourishing ocean whence we came, is to cut the line. Yet we remain tethered, for so we have been taught, for so we have grown up—and for so, too, we retain our life lines to each other. The tethers at once bleed us and nourish us. Which one will win out? Who is to blame, the tether, the bot, or the billionaire? Who among us will be the first to cut the line?

Temptations of belief

So many tethers and so few blades willing to cut... Facts flipped lies, left turned right, hot ran cold, law bent sideways, friend made foe and enemies embraced, our wine fermented backwards. They’ve long created our reality.

And we, the simple people, who dare dream of not world domination but a rewarding life, of travel and love and time in the sun, believed them. We believed them then and we believe them still a little now. We spin the spider silk that shimmers at us from our screens. We try to touch the smoke curling at us from their mirrors. If only, just once...

The Alphas know each other well. They dine at each other’s houses, fly each other’s planes, back each other’s Congressmen, buy each other’s judges. And they build the walls to keep us off their stolen lands.

Even when we know they lie, we believe them. Even when the very same media that upheld them before the pedestals cracked, turn against them in all of their delayed, useless outrage, we believe them. When they play that old game, dancing for our votes with music they know we want to hear—music that stops the moment the ballot drops—we believe them. And when they enchant us , in the basements of their empty mansions with sparkling champagne flutes of new technologies fermented with vast volumes of venture capital, we believe them.

For it is so comfortable, so easy, so convenient to believe.

Disbelief takes work. It requires thought, critically so. Disbelief calls for a daily exercise regimen—one hundred eyebrow raises, fifty mouth curls, four-hundred-pound pushbacks. It calls for keeping your pulse on the culture wars, confirming truckfuls of facts we thought fake but found instead to be painted true, searching for needles in bales of purple hay, all, all of it on your own because our support structures of education, science, and communications have crumbled to the ground. And they’re still ahead, because spinning wild-haired lies scales faster than prying truth from its stone.

When we stop, finally, believing them, we remain predisposed to forgive them. For they are our father figures, our mother models. They are our Alphas, our leaders, our role models, our heroes. We allow them to make larger, graver, more consequential transgressions, because they have made so many grander, bolder, more ambitious advances. Brazen, yet admired. Bold, and envied. Unethical, but forgiven. Immoral, and overlooked. Criminal, too late indicted.

To our own detriment, we snap sharper than a metal whip when at long last the love affair ends, our pent-up, held-back, repressed fury rushing at them like a misdirected missile, like a slingshot, like a Katama sword slicing through the air. We spray swastikas on the hoods of electric cars, we set ablaze charging stations, we shatter the glass of storefront windows, we hurl expletives at our fellow citizens who lack the backbone to do our bidding. Sell your car! Dump your stock! Boycott all their products! If you don’t we’ll dox you.

You know, of course, that is what the Alphas want. All of the lower letters fighting their battle for them, amongst themselves. The blues against the reds, the left against the right, color vs white, one faith against the other, all those pronouns, the poor against the not-yet-rich. Saves the Alphas their billions and their staff critical planning time.

Oh but that’s not “us,” of course. Those are other people. “We” would never... and yet secretly we rejoice. Behind closed doors, inside our bedrooms, in our cars, in our own heads, we celebrate the violence. Eye for an eye is still the most respected social equation.

If only. If only we had had the foresight and the temperament to prepare, to train. To study the art of war and practice the dictates of stoicism. To apprentice in the strategies of business and politics, as the Alphas had. To learn how to wield power and persuade our fellow citizens to see us, all of us, as the rightful inheritors of the Alphasphere. Perhaps we would have been pulled into the same whirlpool as those we seek to displace. Or perhaps we would have built a stronger body politic.

Phoenix rising

And yet, enough of us do question. Those of us not poisoned by weakness of spirit or insecurity of mind. Those of us buoyed by uplifting others, fulfilled by familiarity with facts, guided by the wisdom of lived experience. Those of us unconcerned with the hoarding of capital, the securing of power, the solidification of influence. We focus less on personal wealth and more on personal legacy. Less on status, more on impact. We are the ones who strive for less hierarchy and more democracy. We seek equality, liberty, and equal opportunity. The more oppressed, suppressed, repressed we are, the more we value these ideals. We strive to rise above the mean, the average, the mediocre. We strive for free will and the freedom to choose. The United States is said to be built upon this very idea—if only on paper. If only for some—of the right color and race.

Is our Constitution now only worth the paper it was written on?

Extend your hand across the aisle, my friend. Put down the brushes we’ve used to paint each other blue or red. You’ll stay blind until you learn to see with your heart instead of your eyes. You’ll remain deaf until you learn to listen instead of judging. And you’ll stay paralyzed until your mind connects all the dots. Look up from your rage and your fear... and you’ll see your nemesis isn’t the human standing in front of you.

The ruling One Percent, the Alpha, teeter on a razor’s edge atop the pyramid. A solid base of bedrock that moves with the Earth itself, the pyramid has withstood the ravages of millennia. It upholds the structure of civilization. No Alpha will eat without the hands that grow their food, wheels that deliver their goods, fingers that swipe across their screens. Their wealth defies gravity, pulling their plunder from the base of the pyramid up its four glittering faces, but the higher you go, the narrower the path, the slipperier the surface, the more blinding the sunlight, the more rarefied the air, the stronger—in all of its irony—gravity’s pull back down to Earth.

When you stand on a razor’s edge, the smallest of missteps sends you tumbling. Gravity cares nothing for your stock holdings, how many heads of state know you by first name, or the titles you hold.

We who’ve lived at the base of the pyramid all of our lives, we are the ones who built it. We are the architects, the stone masons, the painters, the scribes... and the embalmers and the robbers of our kings. We’ve broken our backs hauling the stone, parched our lungs in the desert air, watched death dry out in the heat. We know where every block sits, where every fault line runs. We know the secret passageways, and we know which way the sands will blow when the winds pick up.

The long game is nearing its end. When will the Alphas see they need the rest of the alphabet?

It is a law of Nature that corrupted DNA be flushed out of the gene pool. It is a law of History that empires fall. It is a law of Economics that stock markets plummet. But the least forgiving law of them all is one of our own making: that those morally bankrupt, those bloated with power and racked by greed, be consumed by their own cancer. From Alpha to Omega.

Pyramids do invert.

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