I have been slowly making my way through Zeitgeist : An Addendum, the sequel to Zeitgeist : The Movie, which I have also seen, and I thought I would share some of the thoughts it has generated with you nice people tonight.

It is slow going because between the things it says which are stupid and wrong and the things that it says that are depressing and true, it is not what one would call a fun ride. It offers a wildly oversimplified view of how the world works, which is almost always the case when people try to come up with a single coherent view of everything. Suddenly, the facts are shaped to fit the theory, not the other way around.

But it has me thinking about corruption and the current world situation where everything seems rigged to pump money up to the top and keep it there. This nightmare of a fraud of a system is clearly in need of comprehensive reform, yet nobody seems to know what to do about it. A lot of people are angry, as they should be, but there is also a great deal of fatalistic apathy. People saying “Yeah, it sucks, but whatcha gonna do?”

The revolutionary in me replies “Band together against them and act as one! They are stronger than you, but not stronger than all of us working together! The elite always govern by divide and conquer. We need to unite and reform! SOLIDAT! ”

Sorry, I always get a little excited when I talk like that. Did you know I share a birthday with Pol Pot?

Anyhow, even if we had our revolutionary army, we would still need a battle plan, and I think that means that we have to contemplate all options, no matter how distasteful, in order to find the one most likely to be effective.

The biggest problem with any kind of reform movement, from the Protestant Revolution to the new rules for D&D, is that those who current benefit from the system, no matter what that system is, will use their wealth, power, and social status in order to fight reform tooth and nail, and the problem is they have more teeth and nails than any of us common folk.

This is not an ethical decision on their part. They are not defending any sort of ideal, despite what they say. They are greedy, spoiled children fully in the grips of the corrupting power of money and power and therefore they are not even truly capable of supporting any sort of moral philosophy because those sometimes involve doing things you don’t want to do and to the spoiled brats who run the world, nothing could possibly be worse than that.

It is also true that human beings react to any threat of lowered social status as if it was death, which in a sense it is, because it is a threat to their identity.

So any plan that involves the cooperation of the elite is doomed to failure. Any plan which relies on being able to overthrow them by force is going to mean a protracted war of ants versus elephants. They are few but mighty, and we are many but weak. For something like that to succeed will require a lot more solidarity and self-sacrifice than modern life ever requires of us.

We work, and we amuse ourselves. And that’s it.

There has to be a third way, and I think I have found it, but people are not going to like it at all. It will fly in the face of fairness and justice and a lot of people will reject it out of hand as unthinkable.

We have to pay them off. We have to rig it so that the people currently acting as oligarchs not only lose nothing, they gain quite a lot from our reforms.

We can use their shortsightedness and childishness to our advantage. We can dismantle the system that got them where they are while we have them distracted with the shiny big rewards we are offering them.

And they won’t fight us over it because it doesn’t threaten them. They have, as a group, blinded themselves to all the details of how people like them get where they are because by the time the corruption has truly got them in its grips, they believe that they are where they are out of the sheer wonderfulness of themselves, and so they lack the kind of vision it takes to care what happens to the future ambitions of others who want to be like them.

In fact, to be honest, they are not fond of the competition to start with. They will be more than happy to destroy the ladder of success once they have climbed it. Serves all those greedy bastards right for trying to take what’s theirs!

And yeah… this plan does not make me flip with joy. We all want these awful brats punished for what they have done to the world and we sure as hell do not want to see them rewarded for their crimes. They deserve to be pulled from their positions of power and cast down into poverty for the rest of their lives, so they can see what it is really like under the system they have built and profited from.

The only virtue of my plan is that it might actually work. If you can assure the people in power that they will keep their money, their social status, and their luxuries, they will be indifferent to what you do to the rest of society, and will bus themselves with all their usual self-congratulatory bullshit while we the people get on with making the system work for us for a change. It could be that simple.

Heck, maybe we could work my “new aristocracy” plan in there somewhere.

In order to win the war, we might just have to cut a deal with the Devil.

But if it gets the Devil out of power, it will be worth it.