Much is said about the evil intentions of the elites and how they are out to destroy the common folk. Some say, for example, that the global vaccination campaigns are designed to reduce population.
Its on both sides of the Hegemony. Some blame the incumbent hegemony for planning world domination and the destruction and enslavement of people, and some blame our "enemies." Famously the Nazis were blamed with every evil under the sun. When we hear this we do need take in account wartime propaganda. Often accusing people of great evils is done by their enemies for political gain. But I distract from the point.
It may or may not be true that there are great malevolent insidious plots afoot in the world, but before considering this there is one important thing to understand. Capitalism quite unintentionally creates evil.
Take tobacco. A wonder drug that gave rise to the practice of smoking in Europe after the 1500s. This burgeoned into a huge industry worth today $3/4 trillion a year.
But there was a problem. It started to become clear that smoking caused all kinds of lung conditions. As people started to live longer this became more and more apparent. So what did the heads of the tobacco industry do? Well they are run by Capitalists who invest in their company. And Capitalists demand profit else they take their money elsewhere. Indeed it is a law in the UK that companies on the stock exchange direct their efforts towards making profit. If you take investments from Capitalists then you are committed by law to return them a profit. Naturally the chiefs of the industry looked into this and ran studies to see if they could disprove the claims that tobacco made you ill. What they found was that indeed tobacco smoking was harmful to health (its kind of obvious in retrospect). So what did they do? Well perhaps naturally, given that this is Capitalism and profits are the goal, they took the shortest path and hid all the information, paid lawyers to hunt down people who made these claims to defame, threaten and discredit them and silenced the whole thing. Tobacco also worked on putting loyal people in power in regulatory boards, and government and lobbying for the industry to be protected. Having secured power they carried on as usual, kicking this can of the farm being done down the road.
Eventually the weight of evidence grew too strong and the tobacco industry was force to rethink. What did they do? They agreed a road map of gradually increasing public information on the damage that smoking does, so that the public at least had the choice. The tobacco industry knew that many people were addicted and this information alone would not do much to harm their income. But gradually the pressure mounted on people to quit smoking.
Meanwhile the industry was working on a safer form of smoking. Eventually "Vaping" was invented. It meant that the industry could carry on as before moving their customers and revenue streams over to the new technology. I assume they also have a stream from nicotine patches and other products aimed at helping people quit the very product that they themselves have been heavily marketing all along. Instead of compensation for the damage done, they get victims to pay even more.
Now that Vaping is taking over, the industry is "releasing" pressure on regulatory bodies and governments so that they can move to fully ban smoking. Its been illegal indoors for a while because of a thing called "secondary smoking" and so has advertising. Eventually it will become illegal. But only because the industry has been able to protect its assets and income through other means. And in that time some say a total of a billion people have been killed by the Tobacco industry. And people say that Capitalism is benign and Socialism is the thing we need be wary of! Actually it is Capitalism that is the thing we need be wary of. Tobacco is just one industry running out of control.
This is the model example of how Capitalism uses the structures of markets and government to protect the assets of the wealth investors. It is the customer who is the loser every time.
Now Socialism was invented to address these issues. As a result the Capitalists hate Socialism and if you look attempts at Socialism have been bombed out of existence across the globe. That is the level fo threat to the model used by the Tobacco Industry.
Now this model I will call the Tobacco Model. and it turns up everywhere.
A recent example is the aggressive marketing of OxyContin by Richard Sackler of Purdue Pharma. Because the money is stacked in Sackler's favour its actually very hard to prove anything. He has already amassed a fortune from the sales of the pain killer, which makes him very powerful. There simply is not the money on the customer side to challenge this. But its no secret really. Sackler is simply following the Tobacco Model.
Sell and addictive product, down play the risks, fund bad biased research, cover up the truth, pressure regulatory and government institutions to ignore claims and limit regulation, pay lawyers to kick everything out of court. Misuse the regulation that should be limited your practice to take out your competitors. Expand your industry unhindered and take profits. Use the profits to buy people and improve your credibility and repeat.
The Tobacco Model
Much, if not all, the controversy surrounding Vaccination is Tobacco Model. Vaccines are harmful, and they are not properly tested. During the Pandemic the Health Emergency justified cutting corners even more. You can see why profits from the two leading COVID vaccines are over $30 billion a year. With that sort of money just use the Tobacco Model. It makes more sense to steam ahead and payoff criticism, than to stop and do due diligence.
But what the anti-vax fraternity wants to discount is that vaccines work at all. Once you think they do nothing then you have argued yourself into a corner where the only possible reason to use them is to do harm. Its a bit silly. It forgets that vaccination or inoculation has been used since at least mediaeval times and the first nation wide mandatory vaccine was in Turkey in 1885 under Ottoman Rule. Perhaps the Ottoman sultans were part of the global vaccination conspiracy? There have been famous opponents to vaccination like Alfred Wallace famous for co-discovering the role of Natural Selection in Evolution with Darwin. And there is certainly debate. But its very extreme to suggest that all this surrounds a technique that has no value what-so-ever. Could you make a multi-billion dollar industry over injecting water? If not then how injecting something that is argued to be harmful. The only way around this is to believe in a powerful elite who have ordered the whole thing. Bus such an elite could order the extermination of people in much better way than this method so covert we hardly notice, if at all.
That said this does not make vaccine safe! There are 2 sides to this, and people in the West only seem to be able to do one or the other. Perhaps the influence of sports?
Vaccine companies argue that the benefits so outweigh the costs that we don't need to look at safety. But this is not due diligence. Even if you save a million people, this is no excuse to harm anyone if you can avoid it, especially with profits like that.
But it is Tobacco Model. Its cheaper to cover up problems than investigate and deal with them. But this is a long way from deliberately setting out to harm people.
Capitalism leads to harm, without anyone actually intending it. Perhaps the most famous examples of this come from Imperialism where simple trade led to power struggles and wars and the deaths of millions. Churchill was not sympathetic to the millions of Bengalis he killed, but I don't think he actually wanted to kill them. It was just a shorter path to fight his war and let them die.
Now in Buddhism "assets" comes by the name of Mara. The belief in the intrinsic existence and value of material things. Since Capitalism is based upon a demon its no surprise that it leads to harm and evil.
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