THE BLOODY PYRAMID OF POWER

The shape of power is a pyramid: fact, full stop. Paradoxically, those on top of pyramids -people in power- never stop insisting that these pyramids do not exist. Yet our society
is constructed entirely of pyramids - pyramids of property, money and power. To observe and examine these pyramids -like the one which shows the distribution of money- is practically forbidden.  To even mention pyramids makes you a crazy conspiracy nut. Pyramids are only in your mind, scream the pyramid-builders.
However, at precisely the same time, these same people surround themselves with pyramids in the form of  images, symbols, sculptures and diagrams. Everyone with power stands on top of a pyramid of rapidly decreasing power which has been carefully constructed. Powerful people are in fact obsessed with pyramids, and have been for thousands of years.

There are reasons for this. Anything which is valued, from bread to gold, generates a competition. Competitions result in hierarchies of competence: the few who compete best win most. There are many more weak competitors than strong ones, and the stronger the competition gets, the fewer competitors there are. The best and simplest way to illustrate this universal truth is a pyramid.

Although most of us are permanently stuck near the bottom of the pyramids, so long as life isn't too awful, we generally don't mind.  But the pyramids we observe in society are not as simple as they appear. Looking up from the foothills, the peaks of power seem terribly far away-high in the clouds. We can only see dimly what's going on up there. Day after day the TV and radio fill our heads (if we let them) with tales from top - from what they call "the corridors of power".

But tales are all they are - fairy tales about powerless creatures whose importance vanishes the moment we stop looking at them. Because the pyramid of power - the one the media pretends to examine - is a fake. Parliament is not the peak of power - not even close. Indeed, the inhabitants of government -politicians- are no closer to real power than you or I would be if we hung around eating and drinking in expensive restaurants and bars, which is pretty much all that politicians do. I have had -and have -personal dealings with several chancers who elbowed their way into Parliament, and without exception they testify that from the Prime Minister to the lowest back-bench baboon, UK politicians have no more to offer history than pigeons crapping on a statue.

The actual power is held in the clenched fingers of the billionaires - the super-rich, the elite, choose your compliment.. These include individuals and families, corporations and kings - what they all have in common is a sneering indifference to elections and electors. These people are way too smart to gamble their awesome power on the whim of a public vote. They sit poised at the very top of the pyramid -the real pyramid - and point down at their political pets shouting - LOOK! LOOK! THEY  ARE TO BLAME! VOTE AGAINST THE CROOKS AND CHANGE THE WORLD!

And how very loudly they shout, amplified by their stooges in the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Mail, Mirror and Metro. Below you can see -in black and white- sixteen different tools of control. All of them are yelling at you all the time - yelling DIVERSITY! or ISLAMOPHOBIA! or SEXIST! or RACIST! Propaganda has only one voice, but many, many faces.

Millennials, of course, were too smart to be fooled by dinosaurs like the BBC and the Press, so they rushed into the octopus arms of Google, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, bless them. Wide-awake parents scampered to catch up and before you could tweet "OMG" the tech giants had a grip-lock on the entire public mind. Now the young fools are too busy swapping pictures to exchange words, while the old fools are too busy wrestling with androids to hear the bullshit.  

And the pyramid persists, just as it did pre-internet, pre-smartphone. In fact, the pyramid persists largely unchanged since pre-printing-press. Control of information has always been the key to power, which is why all the newest billionaires are social media tech-lords. From the point of view of those atop the power pyramid, the internet is just the latest threat to their dominance - a tool to be controlled and turned against the public it promised to serve. In exactly the same way, print, radio, telephones and television were all seized and controlled as soon as their development looked dangerous to those at the top. Viewed from the peak of a mountain, those at the bottom look tiny, unimportant, and need not be taken seriously until they pick up the wrong tools.

This is a key point. In the eyes of the power elite, your life does not matter at all.  It's not easy to accept -really take it at face value - that the most powerful people in the world would sweep you and your family aside like ants if you stood in their way. But this is the one, true lesson of human history.

You have spent your life looking up at the pyramid from the bottom, and the people around you matter more than those above or below you. But to the psychopaths of power, the rest of us are inferior, beneath them- lower creatures. To them, our ideas of morality and decency appear laughable and stupid.  And from their perspective, we prove this by our behaviour. When we vote for the 'parties' they own in the 'elections' they organise, they laugh at us. When we turn against the entire system (think Iraq / Brexit) they simply ignore us. 

To understand how fierce is their grip on our mindset, try this experiment. Try and go through 24 hours without experiencing any propaganda whatsoever. Try and spend just one entire day free from the voices and faces of social control. I recently managed three days in a row - but I had to spend eight hours a day in a canoe on the river Wye and my evenings in a tent to do it. 

The matrix of media grows tighter every day. Children carry the tools of their own enslavement- cellphones- in their pockets. From morning till night 'messages' are flung into their young hands, minds, memories. It is 'normal' to receive messages from strangers, corporations, salesmen and politicians. Each 'notification' eats another ten, twenty seconds; another thought is deferred, another idea stillborn. With each distraction another precious moment of concentration is shattered on the altar of "communication". 

Young minds are formed in the shape of experience, and all experience is being reduced to one-fingered signals for infants: thumbs-up, smiley face. Blind to the structure towering over our heads, we cleave to the zeitgeist, squawking in endless, pointless information loops at the base of an ever-growing pyramid. The source of the signals -an already distant peak- is vanishing into the clouds.   

Aztec pyramids were built upwards in steps of diminishing size - steps down which rivers of blood once ran. Blameless men, women and children (of the lower orders) were butchered to appease the will of gods who dwelt far above. That was centuries ago, but how remarkably similar were the bloodbaths of 1918 and 1945. We should have learned by now to beware of pyramids, and those who build them.