By MADHUSUDAN RAJ on Mises India
Hollywood’s famous movie The Matrix shows that our visible world is a giant make-believe world of a matrix created by our machine overlords. The reality is something totally different than what we experience daily. The protagonist of the movie Neo is being exposed to this world of slavery by the rebel character Morpheus. He offers him two pills: red and blue. Red pill takes Neo into the ugly reality while the blue pill keeps him in the make believe happy world of the Matrix. In this article I am going to play the role of Morpheus for my readers. This article is like a dose of those red pills of ugly reality. Let’s begin our descent into the rabbit hole.
What is a racket?
Before we discuss different types of rackets running behind the happy facade of our make believe world of the Matrix, we need to define what a racket is. In his famous essay War is a Racket, US Army General Smedley Butler defined a racket as,
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.
Our present day world is full of such rackets. I am going to briefly discuss them below.
The State as a protection racket
The biggest racket of all rackets is the political system of the state. The state is a territorial monopolist who monopolizes the function of ‘use of violence’ over its physical territories. To perform this function it has supposedly been given total power. This power is negative in nature i.e., a power that is only to be used to stop two people from physically harming each other, and if there is an incidence of harm then to adjudicate that matter and use the negative force to punish the culprit. This it does to supposedly protect its citizens from any internal or external harm. Why is the state a racket? To understand this we have to quickly understand how the state arose historically.
Suppose there is a village called Pandora. Pandora is inhabited by peaceful farmers who are producing a surplus and selling that surplus in the markets of nearby villages to exchange whatever they need for their livelihood. Pandora and the villages nearby are living peacefully in a voluntary contractual market society. There is no ‘use of violence’ in Pandora and its surrounding villages. Now in a far distant place there arose another village called Andora which is inhabited by violent marauders. People of Andora are naturally war like and prone to violence. Once or twice in a year they attack the people of Pandora and nearby villages and loot and pillage them killing some of the inhabitants in every attack. As time goes by the pillagers realize that instead of killing and robbing the inhabitants and destroying everything, they would be better off coming and living in that area as their overlords and asking for annual booty, i.e., protection money, as a price of not robbing and killing them like before. That is the beginning of the state. As the conquest theory of the origin of the state tells us, every state on this earth has begun in such a conquest. Once formed via conquest, the apologists of the state (with whom the original state forming gang of bandits are eventually forced to share their power wirh, to stabilize internal rule and to achieve legitimacy) justify their existence by legitimizing it in the public’s eye by using theories like the social contract or the Leviathan needed for internal security from each other etc. These are fabricated lies. No one would voluntarily sign such a contract which will subjugate them to others; and if a human society is a war of wolf against wolf, then where will we find the peaceful wolf that will rule other wolves, with other wolves voluntarily agreeing to that wolf’s rule?
State apologists also use the foreign aggression excuse to justify the state and its depredation. One statist gang is basically fighting with other gang for geographic supremacy and to gain local support each gang is frightening their citizens by using the excuse of foreign attack in their absence! In reality the imaginary foreign aggression danger is not bigger than the daily exploitation done by the ruling statist gang.
The whole reason of the state’s existence for our protection is a lie. The State isn’t protecting us. It is only protecting itself by exploiting us. As Hans Hermann Hoppe has demonstrated, a private property rights expropriating private property right protector state is a giant contradiction in terms. The State cannot loot us first, via taxation and inflation etc., and then claim to protect us!
And, in the absence of the state we are not going to rob and kill each other. As researchers like Robert Axelrod and Matt Ridley have shown, cooperation among the members of human society is the natural norm. Over the course of time cooperation has evolved between humans to survive and thrive. Only a few psychopathic members among our society are exploitative in nature, and because some of them are so good at hiding their true psychopathic exploitative personalities they fool the public and become their rulers.
The state thus is a giant protection racket. It is better we realize this fact soon and start to develop alternatives so that one day the state can be removed from amidst us.
Schools as an education racket
Another giant racket is the system of public schooling, and this racket is actually a part of the state racket. As amply demonstrated by true teachers like John Taylor Gatto and John Holt etc., the aim of the public education system is not to educate our children and make them an independently thinking individual, but to make them docile so that they can easily fit into the given power structure without questioning authorities. As H L Mencken so rightly said,
The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
Most teachers who teach in this system are doing that work only for their paychecks and nothing much else. I call them public servants and not teachers. Their job is to spread the statist propaganda and prepare the standard citizenry. Instead of changing the culture of the society for better, the government schooling system reimposes the same culture on every generation making any kind of change impossible. Children become rote learners who are focused on getting good grades instead of learning something useful. The whole system breeds idiocy. The public school system is a giant racket which we must immediately pull our children out of if we want to give them a better life.
Medical profession as a health racket
As doctors and scientists like Dr. Joel Wallach, Dr. Glidden Or Dr. Mercola etc., have shown, the modern medical system is a monopoly created by billionaires like Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller. Before this medical monopoly came into existence, there were many different alternative approaches to health care e.g., naturopathy, homeopathy, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, ancient shamanic medicine etc. Once this medical monopoly was established, it outlawed all other alternative health practices. Since the last 100 years and more people are told that the only cure for their ailment is a drug being produced by the mainstream medical monopoly pharmaceutical companies – anything else is quackery. But the fact of the matter is that drugs are no cure of any ailment. These chemical drugs only help to suppress the symptoms of the disease and not cure it by eliminating the root cause of that disease e.g., if you catch cold then some drug will only suppress the immune response, which is necessary in the healing process, so that you do not experience the unpleasant immune response symptoms. Another huge problem with the mainstream medical approach is that it is reductionist i.e., instead of seeing the whole body as one biological, and spiritual, organism it looks at different body parts in isolation. So when you have a heart problem, the Cardiologist will only try to treat your heart instead of understanding the real cause of the heart problem, which may lie in some other parts of the body. The holistic approach is missing and so millions of people unduly suffer from chronic diseases like diabetes, blood pressure, asthma etc., which can be cured by using holistic treatment.
In this ongoing Covid-19 pandemic (sic) situation we clearly see the dangers of mainstream medical monopoly. Big Pharma companies and their ally governments and media are trying to force their vaccines on the world’s population by hook or crook. In their desperation they are now on the verge of outright mandating these deadly vaccines, which is a clear violation of God given human rights as well as their own medical ethic codes like the Nuremberg code. They are implementing draconian moves like lockdowns and vaccine passports. In the name of health care they have destroyed millions of lives around the world. They are deliberately suppressing information of all alternative cures of Covid-19 disease e.g., when former US President Donald Trump talked about hydroxichloroquine as a possible cheap cure of Covid-19, the deep state establishment went after him and the cheap and safe drug itself was shamelessly demonized by them. They are aggressively suppressing Ivermectin also; many Western governments have gone as far as to ban Ivermectin! Even many dissenting mainstream medical doctors are facing censoring, and many, like the inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology himself, are even facing death threats. Medical mafias of the world want us to believe that the only cure for Covid-19 is their vaccines.
The name of science itself is now tainted and misused beyond any imagination. In the name of science, they are doing all kinds of evil things. Science has been politicized today like never before.
Our mainstream health care system is another giant racket which exists for the sake or benefit of governments, a few billionaires, and big Pharma companies. Public health is just an excuse to control and rule over us with an iron fist.
Socialism as a welfare racket
Another long running racket is the economic and political system of socialism. Socialism is touted by its proponents as the only system that cares for the poor and other such downtrodden people of our human society. They portray the competing system of Capitalism as pure evil which exploits the above mentioned groups of people. But history and theory both are evident that the fact of the matter is exactly opposite to what the proponents of socialism are saying. Socialism has single handily killed millions of people around the world in the past 20th century alone. Socialist dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara etc, have killed hundreds of thousands of people during their bloody regimes. This is the system which has systematically murdered all of its opponents and made billions of people poor, hungry, and desperate. All places where the system of socialism was implemented have turned into a living hell e.g., former USSR, former communist China, Cuba, North Korea, almost all Latin American countries and India etc. As Prof. Thomas DiLorenzo has demonstrated, socialism is a system of misery and death as opposite to prosperity. It is the system that also systematically pollutes the environment and adds into the problem of environmental damage.
Directly opposite of the allegations of the socialist leaders, the system of Capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty. Before the advent of our modern capitalist era with its industrial revolution in England in the later half of the eighteenth century, most of the world was living in extreme poverty and low population equilibrium. It was capitalism that dramatically improved the standard of living of people wherever it was implemented. Capitalism made the sustenance of a bigger population possible. Against the claims of socialist labor unions, it was the system of capitalism with its individual liberty that improved the condition of laborers all around the globe. Capitalism is the only system capable of producing the vast surplus that is necessary to build civilizations. Thus, it is the system of Capitalism that makes human life possible. Without it, there will be no surplus production and we all will be living a primitive life in a jungle.
Thus it is Capitalism that is the real welfare provider of the world and not socialism, which only impoverishes and kills people. Socialism is not what it seems. It appeals to human emotions and that is why so many people are fooled by its propaganda.
Conclusion
Our world is full of delusions. It is not what it seems. Most of it is an imaginary world created by those who rule us. The art of ruling is mostly in creating sense perception for the ruled. Our rulers have devised this Matrix to enslave us. Even languages are manipulated to create delusion. Rackets are everywhere, and above we only saw some of the major ones. The reason I talked about them is to expose them in front of all. It is important for all of us to see beyond these rackets if we want to free ourselves from our enslavement. Unless we take a heavy dose of the red pill of reality, our condition is not going to improve.