Conspiracy Theories. Middle Nation Podcast (E:20)

This is Shahid Bolson. Welcome to the Middle Nation podcast. This is episode number 20. Let me talk for a moment about conspiracy theories because this is a fairly common phenomenon in the Muslim world, and the term is also used to any sort of non mainstream analysis of global power dynamics that recognize any degree of organization or coordinated uses of power to achieve particular outcomes. Now first of all, there are some completely far fetched conspiracy theories, some of which are the result of lazy thinking, some are the result of people misconstruing the evidence that they're looking at, or maybe they just exaggerate the importance of connections that they find between people or institutions and so on.

These types of conspiracy theories oversimplify, and they usually only serve to solidify feelings of helplessness and futility because they put forward this idea that the whole world is in the grip of some secret cabal of powerful men who are basically It seems like every generation has its own version of who that cabal is. It's either the Masons, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, the Jews, or the most recent one being the World Economic Forum. Now all of these groups exist, and all of them have their degree of influence. But are any of them actually controlling all world events and so on? Obviously not.

Now the reality is that there are some people and institutions that do wield disproportionate power in the world. Wealth has become increasingly concentrated over the past several decades, and the same is true of corporate ownership. A study from 2011 by the Swiss Institute of Technology looked at a database of 37,000,000 companies and investors worldwide. Among them, 43,060 multinational corporations, and they analyzed the ownership relations between them. They found that just 737 companies owned 80% of total wealth in the network, and half of that was owned by just a 147 of those companies.

Okay. That was over ten years ago, and the trend of consolidation has only increased in the interim. So there are a few dozen multinational corporations that possess economic power both of incredible depth and breadth across the global economy. And then you have asset management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and UBS, which have combined holdings that equal approximately 20,000,000,000,000. They control about 20% of the companies listed on the S and P five hundred stock index, and they have the dominant shareholder vote, including veto power, over nearly all of the companies that they own.

Three firms control corporate governance in the biggest companies in the world, which in turn control roughly 80% of the rest of the major businesses on earth. Considering this level of consolidation of economic power, it should not be surprising that we see coordination and a significant degree of centralized planning taking place to serve the interests of these interlocked networks of corporations and investors. BlackRock, Vanguard, and UBS comprise an economic entity roughly equivalent to the entire GDP of The United States. This is essentially a nonstate private sector economic superpower bigger than China. And when you consider that these companies are responsible for most of the American GDP, they actually represent the world's biggest economy.

There's nothing particularly conspiratorial about that nor about the fact that this private sector superpower exerts coordinated influence over the policies of states across the globe in ways that will predictably favor overall profitability. Does that mean that they possess absolute control? No. Of course not. But they do wield dominant influence because these are companies, corporations, investors, and industries that every state in the world relies upon for their own economic survival within the existing framework of the prevailing philosophy of what constitutes a successful society, which is to say the materialistic philosophy in which civilizational value is monetized.

We're talking about entities of power, institutions that operate according to a fixed logical framework, and the individuals within these institutions subscribe to that internal logic. This is not a conspiracy. This is rational adherence to a logical framework. Now geopolitical realities, demographics, societal trends and conditions, management of resources, all of these things are gonna be processed through that system of internal logic whose prime objective is sustained profitability. And the influence wielded by this collective economic superpower will be directed towards molding the realities on the ground through policies both in the private sector and in the policies of states to create optimal conditions for achieving that prime objective.

If there's anything conspiratorial about this, it is that the prime objective of sustained profitability is never gonna be the publicly stated rationale for these policies. This is where think tanks like the World Economic Forum come in. Their function is to translate the profit motive into philosophically acceptable language that can give moral credibility to policies that are pursued purely for materialistic reasons. We have to save the environment. We have to protect democracy.

We have to promote sustainability. We have to secure the public health and so on. None of these rationales have anything to do with the real policy objectives, and that can be easily demonstrated. For example, as I wrote recently in a community post, the actual worst climate offenders responsible for almost all carbon emissions and consumption of fossil fuels are not regular people, but companies and billionaires. The carbon footprint of the average billionaire is roughly 1,000 times that of the average person, and 70% of global emissions come down to a handful of companies.

So if protecting the environment was the real objective, policy would focus on these culprits, not on regular people, but it's just PR. Organizations like the World Economic Forum do not drive policy, they package policy. There is a rational consensus among the coalitions of power that the post World War two global order is no longer viable, and that is largely due to the fact that the baby boom generation in the West is either dying or retiring and because the Soviet Union no longer exists. Drastic changes are necessary, but the populations will resist. The logical strategy, therefore, is to preemptively enforce severe measures to habituate the population to acquiescence, deprivation, and austerity, thereby making civil unrest less likely.

Destabilization and manufactured conflicts like the war in Ukraine and the strife that is likely to spill over from it are on one hand diversionary, and on the other hand, help to create facts on the ground that further support the consolidation of power and the prime objective of maximizing profit. War is profitable. Conflict is profitable. This all makes perfect sense according to the internal logic I was talking about. Now let me talk about an actual conspiracy, the only one I believe in.

That's the conspiracy of Iblis. Because we do have certain people in the world who possess disproportionate power, it makes sense to me that Shaytaan would exert maximum effort in influencing these people. While I have outlined the concentration of power among the biggest multinational corporations and asset management companies like BlackRock, I do not mean to suggest that they have the independent capacity to coordinate global affairs to the extent to which we do see global affairs being coordinated. However, Iblis does have that capacity. Shaitan can recruit, manipulate, and organize human resources across sectors, across ideologies, across nations, whispering to each of them whatever is needed to motivate them to act in furtherance of his goals of humiliating, degrading, corrupting, and subjugating mankind, and combating Islam and the Muslims.

For each, he will make the evil seem good, exploiting their individual systems of internal logic and their ideologies to make blatantly immoral and wicked policies and objectives seem wise and in the best interests of humanity. I have no doubt that people like Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, or Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, or someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, genuinely believe that they are pursuing the right thing, and that's from the manipulation of Shaitan. Iblis fundamentally believes that human beings are inferior and inadequate, and the materialistic philosophies that underpin modern economic and political policy derive from this belief. The endless pursuit of wealth accumulation is symptomatic of a disbelief in inherent human value, and we have created an economic system under the influence of Iblis which is based on this disbelief. The potential rise of Muslim nations therefore poses an existential threat to this system and to Shaitan's centuries long effort to solidify our self devaluation.

So when we see a conspicuous and an almost unfathomable level of coordination in global affairs, as if states, civil society, and the private sector are all moving in lockstep, I do not attribute this to any cabal of conspirators in a backroom somewhere, not the Illuminati, not the Masons, not the Jews, not the World Economic Forum, or not George Soros. I attribute this to the machinations of Iblis and his army of Sheyatin, mobilizing across multiple levels of society from classrooms to boardrooms to the halls of power, with each manipulated individual in his campaign not necessarily even knowing that they are serving his strategy against Bani Adam. This to me is the only plausible conspiracy theory, and it is not one against which we are powerless. But I think it is important for us to understand that this is what is going on, that Shaytan is not only an irritation and a source of misguidance and discord in our personal lives, but is also a major factor in global politics and economics. We have to consider this dimension when analyzing current events and when we are developing our approaches to them.