Charles Eisenstein: Follies & Fallacies

What are the clues that someone might be paid to control the opposition? I look at family and work history, a culture that sees deception as not just permissible but required, attendance at elite universities, association with members of intelligence agencies and global organizations, evidence of known lies and usurping others’ work, pattern of using rhetorical tricks, apologist for political and financial perpetrators, and the pretty packaging of ideas with no real meaning.

Why does it matter whether someone is being paid to control the opposition? What joins all of our circle is that we saw through the Covid psyop. But what good did that do? We still suffered the social consequences of not getting vaccinated while everyone who could be tricked or coerced was. They won. The damage is done and all that's left now are the consequences.

No one thinks they've stopped there. How do we anticipate the next wave of psyops so that we're not reacting again? How do we protect our credibility for having seen through the Covid psyops so that others might listen to us this time? And last, can we use our foresight, not just to avoid what’s coming personally, but to use the crisis as leverage to implement the system we want? Assuming, of course, that we know what that is ahead of time.

I don't care about judging people as good or bad, which goes against my fundamental principle that all people are inherently good. I use the same methods of loving the person, challenging the ideas to respond to everyone. But when I know to my own satisfaction, without needing to convince anyone else, that someone is likely paid by the oligarchs, that's a gift. Now I can work backwards to figure out what the next psyops is and how they're doing it.

I will embed my other episodes on Charles Eisenstein at the end, including Deep Fakes: Charles Eisenstein & RFK, Tonic Masculinity Goes Viral! and Eisenstein & the Toxic Ten. These look at the evidence and logic that led me to suspect that Charles has been paid to control the opposition.

In this episode, I’ll look at whether what Charles is saying is helpful in communicating our hardwon foresight into a vision of what we want for the future. I’ll analyze a couple of his essays from the very start of the ‘pandemic’, a recent 9-point talk from Taiwan, a YT interview, and his 7 solutions for system change at the end of Sacred Economics.

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the start of it all

The essay that launched Charles’ reputation as a voice for the opposition was The Coronation in March 2020. It said many things I agreed with and made me a fan and follower. In retrospect, however, I notice paragraphs like this:

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last October), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

• The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)

• The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)

• The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)

• Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)

• The banning of cash (because coronavirus)

• Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)

• Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)

• The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA.

These are nuanced observations, and summarized what was happening in a way that let the reader decide for herself, and I appreciate that. Yet it has a similarity to Mattais Desmet that humanity is ‘rushing into its chains.’ It’s not being done to us, there’s no deliberate plan. There are opportunists among those in power but the problem is in our DNA and unconscious.

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conspiracy as myth

A May 2020 essay was titled The Conspiracy Myth, in which he continues this motif:

During the time of Covid-19, another level of conspiracy theory has risen to prominence that goes way beyond specific stories of collusion and corruption to posit conspiracy as a core explanatory principle for how the world works. Fuelled by the authoritarian response to the pandemic (justifiable or not, lockdown, quarantine, surveillance and tracking, censorship of misinformation, suspension of freedom of assembly and other civil liberties, and so on are indeed authoritarian), this arch-conspiracy theory holds that an evil, power-hungry cabal of insiders deliberately created the pandemic or is at least ruthlessly exploiting it to frighten the public into accepting a totalitarian world government under permanent medical martial law, a New World Order (NWO). Furthermore, this evil group, this illuminati, pulls the strings of all major governments, corporations, the United Nations, the WHO, the CDC, the media, the intelligence services, the banks, and the NGOs. In other words, they say, everything we are told is a lie, and the world is in the grip of evil.

So what do I think about that theory? I think it is a myth. And what is a myth? A myth is not the same thing as a fantasy or a delusion. Myths are vehicles of truth, and that truth needn’t be literal. The classical Greek myths, for example, seem like mere amusements until one decodes them by associating each god with psychosocial forces. In this way, myths bring light to the shadows and reveal what has been repressed. They take a truth about the psyche or society and form it into a story. The truth of a myth does not depend on whether it is objectively verifiable. That is one reason why, in The Coronation, I said my purpose is neither to advocate nor to debunk the conspiracy narrative, but rather to look at what it illuminates. It is, after all, neither provable nor falsifiable.

What is true about the conspiracy myth? Underneath its literalism, it conveys important information that we ignore at great peril.

Again presaging Mattais Desmet, the conspiracy theory reveals a psychosocial truth about us and our innate subconscious desire for control and authority, and projection of good vs. evil onto a cabal. It’s not literal truth and can’t be proven or falsified. Your mountain of evidence says more about you, conspiracy theorist, than about the facts.

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science as myth

A reader recommended a recent Charles Eisenstein post to me called At the Crossroads: Nine short recordings:

At the Crossroads: Nine short recordings

These are nine short snippets from the talk and my responses:

• Part 1: Science Through the Lens of Myth

Charles starts by giving examples of what we were told: masks will prevent viruses from getting through, injections will prevent infection and spread. He puts this in the language of archaic magic rituals. His conclusion is that science is a myth, like those conspiracies. Facts don’t exist, these are just superstitions.

Charles is reversing the logic we used to speak out against the vaccines at the time. I’ve linked at the end a pre-Substack video responding to Paul Kingsnorth where "I use his thesis, antithesis, synthesis model but show why it's backwards and it's the orthodox view that rejects science. I quote Robert F. Kennedy's chapter, HIV Heretics, on how science is not a consensus and tell about my realization, after 50 years of futile arguments, that my mother didn't believe in the existence of facts. I cite Dr. Amishi Jha's definition of science as "a pursuit through a process of understanding what is," and how that relates to peer-reviewed studies."

Anti-vaxxers, like myself, analyzed studies to show how they were flawed, like the data used to show the unvaxxed were dying at 4X the rate of the vaxxed—but they counted those vaxxed within two weeks as unvaxxed. A first-year stats student could debunk it. They were doing bad science.

Now that the real science is showing we were right, what does it mean to come in and say science is a religion, logic is a limitation, facts and reality don't exist? It seems to me that discredits us just when people might be ready to listen to us.

• Part 2: Why quantum physics has not changed us much

Charles sees quantum physics as a way that science took a halfway step to spiritual experience, as a way of explaining it, but those who see spiritual experience as reality were ahead of them.

• Part 3: Capitalism won't destroy itself

This ends with a curious twist, saying “Capitalism won’t save us from ourselves.” We’re the problem, not capitalism.

• Part 4: Our choices determine human nature

“There’s a powerful magic in these choices because it declares what a human being is.” Again, it’s up to us to make the right choice, not up to our circumstances to give us better choices.

• Part 5: When the logical mind gets in the way

“The logical mind is a treasure, especially when it’s able to recognize its own limitations … one-third of people haven’t experienced anything outside of their logical mind and there’s a reason—each of us is born into a set of circumstances, a drama, and it would spoil the drama to experience one of these miracles.”

A Course in Miracles says, “The spirit can use logic just as well as the ego.” In pointing out the inconsistencies of the CovidCon and other fallacies, I’ve found logic to be a girl’s best friend … and presumably, also a guy’s.

• Part 6: Valuing All Sources of Knowledge

The economic system used to support monks and nuns and artists. We should be supporting those who create value not calibrated by the market. And who should pay for that? You, I guess.

• Part 7: The Mindset of Force and Control

“As traditional Taoism knows, the gods are everywhere. There’s thousands of them, or hundreds anyway. … These are not just imaginary things but are intimately connected with places and lineages. … The colonial mind says that’s superstitious and they [Taiwan] will grow out of that and become like us. But who’s actually backwards here? Who’s ignorant? Look at the mess that science and technology have made.”

• Part 8: The Breakdown of Consensus Reality

Charles talks about his wife, who is an energy healer. Patients come to her who’ve lost hope and she uses her hands to redirect the energy and sometimes heals them in one session. Medicine is mere magic but energy healing is reality!

• Part 9: Development and the Myth of Progress

We in the West no longer believe in our own future. Not just from wealth inequality but even for the rich, there’s obesity, depression, environmental degradation. So let’s look next at how Charles proposes to solve those problems.

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do jews run the world?

But first, a commercial break on whether Jews run the world:

The interviewer, Dani Katz, starts by asking Charles if he’s experienced anti-Semitism. He says no but hasn’t traveled much in the Middle East—but when in Turkey and Indonesia, he hasn’t experienced any problem.

Dani: Are Jews responsible for everything that’s terrible in the world, as a lot of narratives are trying to convince us?

CE: No, I don’t believe that. That way of thinking is, at the deep level, the same way of thinking that generates the holocaust. It says that you identify the bad guys who are responsible for everything uncomfortable and painful in the world, and if you eliminate them, we won’t have any problems anymore. … It’s the same way the unvaccinated were treated … to locate evil in some subcategory of human beings. …

There are a lot of Jews in positions of power—banking, politics, a lot of the neocons are Jewish. But let’s not reverse cause and effect. It could be because of certain cultural traits that enable Jewish people to rise to high positions. It could be in elite institutions, academia, business … or auto dealer owners. Is that because of a conspiracy or maybe there’s some cultural thing like working hard or business savvy.

That would be my go-to explanation but I haven’t done that much research into how prevalent Jewish people are in global power structures. And I’m not that interested in doing that. But if I did, that would be my first explanation.

DK: Yeah, of course (nodding throughout, follows with sales pitch to ‘tribe’)

For a different view of the ‘culture’ of hard work and business savvy, Julius Skoolafish linked this.

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sacred solutions vs. the caret

I hadn’t read Sacred Economics since it first came out 14 yrs ago, when I interviewed Charles. I pressed him on why I thought trading services didn’t work, when the banks owned all the houses and the third world made the goods and energy we depend on. He had no answer to my objections, or to my point that his perspective seemed taken from A Course in Miracles, which he claimed he never read. Here are his macroeconomic solutions with my commentary.

1. Negative-Interest Currency: Money that’s not at risk will lose value. Banks will hold it at -2% to -5% interest or have depreciating bank notes. There will be no way to grow money risk-free, even with gov’t bonds. So zero-interest loans rather than savings will be the primary financing vehicle. This ‘embodies the truth about the world, in which all things decay and return to their source. No longer is money an illusory exception to nature’s law.”

   1. The caret lowers the cost of housing for natives (born there) and long-term residents, reversing inflation. Because the Social Security Trust Fund and long-term savings capitalize the mortgages at a 1:10 rate, the former can be given a 7% return and the latter 4%. No one will need to put their retirement savings at risk of scams or market crashes. An individual can borrow against their own savings at 5% (leaving it there, so really paying 1%) for anything they want or need. All debt repayments are collectively distributed as targeted dividends.

2. Elimination of Economic Rents, and Compensation for Depletion of the Commons: Sales and income taxes will be reduced or eliminated and shifted onto property and resource taxes. Artists and intellectuals will not get royalties or consider their creations private property. A Georgist land-value tax will be instituted with depletion of resources only by common agreement for the common good.

   1. The caret, when spent for local goods, housing or services, has no income or sales tax, only the 15% pension contribution. Property taxes are based on the use-value, not speculative value, and have alternatives to monetary exchange. Resources that go above and below the land belong to the continent, with no exports and equal subsidies. All people can make a living equal to the cost of housing through local services, enabling their creative skills to be shared through a gift economy.

3. Internalization of Social and Environmental Costs: Central planning decides who gets how much emissions and pollution, with a cap-and-trade auction system. Supports industries in conservation, pollution control and toxic waste remediation. Manufactured items will become more expensive and miniaturized, cars, machines and appliances will be shared within the neighborhood, houses will get smaller and larger homes will house extended families and non-family. Income won’t be taxed, ‘freeing us from onerous record-keeping responsibilities and intrusive gov’t monitoring.’

   1. The caret distributes dividends for home improvement, enabling every family to make their house more functional and beautiful, expanding as they wish. Every generation should become more secure and comfortable in their homes, adding on or trading up for something that suits them better.

   2. The commonwealth can use eminent domain to buy out foreign owners or reclaim property from predatory corporations who’ve degraded it. They also will reclaim all federal land, which I’ve learned is 49% of California and 25% of the US. These land-based resources will be available to local residents for half their export price, of which they’ll get an equal dividend.

4. Economic and Monetary Localization: spiking energy costs and ecologic guilt will drive ‘buy local’ campaigns. When national currencies stop working, local gov’ts will step in with their own. Small businesses and locally produced food will thrive.

   1. This is the heart of the caret system, which puts in positive incentives rather than the negative drivers of Charles. He doesn’t say how this will happen while banks still siphon out all the money for housing and leave communities to fend for themselves. The caret is backed by the mortgages and can’t be expropriated or monopolized. The success of its model is measured by the increase in local exchanges, local homeownership, small local businesses and small local landlords.

5. The Social Dividend: This is essential Universal Basic Income so that ‘It frees work from the pressure of necessity; people would work because they want to, not because they have to.’ It would be funded by the demurrage charges taking the value of your savings and giving it to everyone else. Or pollution fees or payments to use the commons—that won’t be available without paying.

   1. Rather than taking the money from your savings, the caret takes the ability to issue money from private bankers and distributes that as targeted dividends. They can be used for locally produced food, wellcare, education or home improvements but not for rent or mortgage without earning them. Therefore, they incentivize at least one exchange of goods and services, raising self-reliance. UBI is for permanent adolescents who want to play video games and order pizza—if anyone is still making it.

6. Economic Degrowth: People will consume less. With 20% unemployment now in developed countries, people will instead work 20% less and ‘experience greater affluence’ as ‘the unquantifiable grows.’ This will happen naturally because people will share, lend and give what they have as what they have shrinks.

   1. Isn’t this another phrase for recession? It sounds a lot like ‘You will own nothing and be happy.’ OR you’ll take drugs and play video games, as Yuval predicts. Under the caret system, the cost of the Unaffordable 4H—Housing, Healthcare, Higher Education and Hope for Retirement—will be cut in half. But available income for producing the (formerly) Cheap EFG—Energy, Food and Goods—will be doubled. We will produce more and consume better.

7. Gift Culture and P2P Economics: As money shrinks it ‘allows new space for gift economies.’ This is Charles’ signature solution. We’ll give gifts face-to-face! Online! We’ll provide for people’s needs! The internet and global P2P networks will exchange ‘currencies’ of recognition and gratitude! I’m sure the banks will accept these for your mortgage!

   1. Utterly lacking in a mechanism, Charles’ plan relies on goodwill and generosity to ‘allow the quality of life to improve even as the economy shrinks.’ The caret takes back the local economy from the banks.

It seems darn convenient to blame ourselves and each other for not providing each others’ needs and wants. But don’t blame the evil banking cabal, because that’s just a projection of your own selfish mindset of force and control. Deal with your psychosocial unconscious and escape the shackles of your limiting logic. Maybe you’re just not evolved enough for the spiritual experience, with your pitiful consensus reality drama. Give up your superstitious beliefs in the myths of medicine and money; embrace the magic.

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Here are the videos linked in this episode:

Alison McDowell's Camelot Corner analyzes Charles Eisenstein's talk at Bretton Woods and his deep connections in cryptocurrencies. She looks at RFK's talk at a Bitcoin conference and the false story of how the two met. I give my own experiences and observations that led me to conclude both are complicit in what they say that they're against.

In Nov 2022, I posted a comment on Charles Eisenstein making up the term Tonic Masculinity. I've since posted seven videos about the nine Substack guys who stole it and turned it around to mean its opposite. It's now appeared in WaPo to describe Tim Walz. Articles on Medium and Substack try to trace its origin. In the course of my investigation, I find another word thief—Charles Eisenstein! I state that tonic means healing, not stealing.

First the Toxic Ten stole my term, Tonic Masculinity, and made it anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-feminist, anti-feminine men and anti-women. Then it got stolen from them by the gender equity woke police! Charles Eisenstein plagiarized it from where I coined it on his article. Just when RFK, for whom he's campaign advisor, throws his support to Trump, the Kamala campaign uses it to give the amorphous Walz a personality. Poetic karma?

Are We Being Manipulated? on Paul Kingsnorth

On Unherd, Freddie Sayers interviewed philosopher and writer Paul Kingsnorth on "Why I Changed My Mind in the Vaccine Wars." I use his thesis, antithesis, synthesis model but show why it's backwards and it's the orthodox view that rejects science. I quote Robert F. Kennedy's chapter, HIV Heretics, on how science is not a consensus and tell about my realization, after 50 years of futile arguments, that my mother didn't believe in the existence of facts. I cite Dr. Amishi Jha's definition of science as "a pursuit through a process of understanding what is," and how that relates to peer-reviewed studies. I look at the deeper questions of "are we being manipulated?" and "how can this end well?" I conclude that Paul's example of a person changing their mind is one of the most powerful forces on earth, and hope that #IWasWrong goes viral.

Love the person, challenge the ideas. Women are good at the first but not the second. Men are good at the second but not the first. If we’re going to get out of this rat race, we need to be doing both. I’m on a mission to make women more argumentative and claim logic as their friend. And perhaps a mission to make men less judgmental, which is to say more loving. I look at two discussions on moral superiority and semantics of anti-Semitism to make my point.

For Mother's Day, here are my hopes and dreams for five feminine economies. I develop a subsistence economy with neighborhoods involved with farming and animal husbandry. A reciprocal economy for local goods and services, as explained in my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. An edu-travel economy for a lifetime of learning around the world. A hosting economy with travel vouchers and sibling cities. And a gift economy for all things infinitely replicable like ideas, writing, music and open source software.