Remnant Review
This is a follow-up to a Remnant Review published one week ago. I will be deliberately vague in this presentation. There is a reason for my vagueness. Actually, there are two reasons. The first reason is that I am not in the organizational loop. I know only a few of the highlights of what I am about to discuss. Second, the individual involved has asked me not to go public with the details of this information. If I were to write the individual's biography, as I have told him, I would title it Under the Radar. I recognized that this was his strategy over 25 years ago. He has never deviated from it. I agree with his strategy.
He started out as a Marxist. He changed. But his organizational strategy has not changed. This is wise.
THE QUEST FOR INFLUENCE
There are always many groups that are attempting to gain influence in the world. Most of these groups never attain anything like influence. A few thousand of them may have marginal influence here and there, at least for a period of time. But the reality is that some sort of Pareto's law distribution exists in the realm of influence-peddling. There are very few groups that get close to the top, and fewer that stay there long.
You know some of them. One of them is the Council on Foreign Relations (founded in 1921). Another is the Trilateral Commission (founded in 1973). A third is the World Economic Forum, which is held every year in Davos, Switzerland. It was founded in 1971. Yet even in the case of the Council on Foreign Relations, it kept a deliberately low profile, from its founding until its exposure by Dan Smoot in 1960 in The Invisible Government, which sold a million copies by mail.
For every group at the top of the hierarchy, I have no doubt that there are thousands of groups all the way down. It is probably more like tens of thousands of groups.
Then there are the religious powerhouses. The Catholic Church is the big one in the West. The Vatican has great influence. But I think this is waning. It is about to go through a gigantic change this week. This is the first pope who has resigned in over 600 years. Furthermore, there is a rumor, denied by spokesmen in the Vatican, that his resignation is related to a scandal regarding a homosexual ring inside the Vatican itself. The details are beginning to leak out in Europe. This is actually called Vatileaks. There is a Wikipedia entry on it. Once something gets a Wikipedia entry, we can safely assume that it is not merely a rumor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatileaks_scandal. Still, it will be around for a long time. But whether the top can control the liberal factions in the hierarchy is not clear. (Read Malachi Martin's 1987 book, The Jesuits.)
I have no doubt that there are various groups in the Islamic world that are committed to expanding their influence in world affairs. With the kind of money that Saudi Arabia tosses around, it would be silly to conclude that there are not such groups.
There are multiple groups like this within Protestant Christianity. I am going to speak about a loose association of these groups in which one man is either at the center or at least familiar and respected by senior representatives of dozens of small leadership groups that represent millions of members. They are the Rodney Dangerfields of the religious world. But their Aretha Franklin day is coming. They will soon have the swing votes all over the Third World.
THE SUPERCLASS
I recommend that every member of this website community read the book Superclass. It is the best book I have read on the Pareto hierarchy of power that influences the officials who make key major decisions. I do not think that these decisions really do run this world. They shape it. They do not run it. I do think that these decisions have great influence in the world, especially in shaping the mistakes made at the top.
Centralization breeds arrogance, and arrogance produces mistakes. So, I do not look to these people as the dominant sources of progress in the world. Except insofar as they are rich because of their success in the free market, they are mostly liabilities, and they are mostly ignorant. They are ignorant in comparison with the decentralized knowledge that exists around the world. This is the knowledge that F. A. Hayek talked about in his famous essay in 1945, "The Use of Knowledge in Society." (See Chapter 4 of Individualism and Economic Order.
The author of Superclass argues that there are something in the range of 6,000 to 6,600 people who are members of the superclass. They do not all know each other, but there are groups of them that meet on a regular basis, and the main meeting is in Davos, Switzerland. It is held once a year. It was held this month. Here, about 1,500 of them meet with each other. There are some new faces every year. Even within this group, there is a Pareto hierarchy. Some of them are way at the top.
They hold meetings. They listen to lectures. This is the standard format. People get together, and they listen to lectures. They get to hear boring lectures, which are not on the same level of presentation quality as a TED lecture. The lectures are longer than 17 minutes. They would learn a great deal more if they would just stay home and watch a few TED lectures. But it is not about learning. It is about the network. The key is a verb: networking. The deals are made in the suites after the lectures are over.
I was once a member of the Council for National Policy. The same system exist there. You go to meetings and listen to boring speeches. In all the years I went, there was not one really memorable speech that I can recall. Of course, that was almost 30 years ago. I have been out of the loop. We met with colleagues in between the meetings. I recorded a lot of my Firestorm Chats taped interviews at CNP meetings. The taped interviews were a lot more interesting and a lot more relevant than the speeches. Yet the CNP was modeled after the CFR.
When I read Superclass, I looked for any name of anybody I knew. Only late in the book was there one name of somebody I personally knew. I knew him for six months in the fifth grade at Bromwell elementary school in Denver, Colorado. That was my sole contact with the superclass. You can safely conclude that I am out of the loop.
Yet I know one man who was not only in the loop for decades, he trained many of the people who are in that loop. I have mentioned him before. He is the son-in-law of Colonel von Trapp. He was in charge of the Austrian school that trained the diplomats of the West and non-aligned countries in the immediate post-World War II era. He was a high official with the U.N. He knew the Soviet rulers. He knew the Chinese Communist leaders. His intervention probably saved Deng's life. He served under General Patton in the spring of 1945. He met Henry Kissinger when they worked together in 1945. He is a dedicated Christian. He has some interesting stories to tell about Kissinger. When Kissinger is dead, I may repeat a few of them. In any case, he was wise enough to distance himself in later years from the people he had trained.
His assessment: the superclass cannot continue to rule. A new system will emerge.
THE NON-SUPERCLASS
What is not known is this. At the other end of the spectrum of influence there is a loosely associated group comparable to the World Economic Forum. It does not meet at one place every year. It is much more decentralized than this. There are a series of meetings that are held, and they are held very often outside the United States. These are meetings of Pentecostal leaders. You would not think that these meetings would amount to anything. You would be wrong. There is a Pentecostal revival going on that now includes hundreds of millions of people. It gets little attention. The one scholar who has paid much attention to it is Philip Jenkins. He is a Catholic, so he is on the fringes of what is going on. But he has talked about it for over a decade. It is much bigger than Jenkins thinks.
There is no formal hierarchy of leadership. There is extensive networking -- the key organizational technique of the superclass.
I do not think there is any single individual out there who is the key figure uniting all of them. They are far too decentralized. There are hundreds of groups of them. They represent millions of members. These are the social thinkers and strategists. They are not well known. They are way below the radar, even within the fundamentalist world.
The ex-Marxist is a major player, because has has spend 30 years networking. The others listen to him. On most issues, he and I agree. Through him and a few others, my books circulate. But this is limited to the leadership. The masses remain unaware of all this.
Pentecostals are not rich people. They are scattered across the globe. But they are dedicated. They are multiplying rapidly both by evangelism and birthrates. They are in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and especially in the Chinese home churches.
As you can imagine, most of them are socially conservative. To the extent that they have any economic ideology, it tends to be favorable towards local business enterprise. They are not impressed by the people who meet annually in Davos. They are not impressed by the superclass. They believe that final power does not reside in human institutions. They do not believe that the hierarchy of power that is represented by the superclass is trustworthy.
Because of the Internet, it is now possible to provide training for millions of people. This is not being done effectively by the churches, but I think this will change eventually. I am doing what I can to change it. Again, I am on the fringes of all this. I am not a Pentecostal. But Pentecostals, once they get into leadership positions, begin looking for materials to support their position. Presbyterians have always been in the footnote business. This has been the unique service proposition of Presbyterianism since the middle of the 16th century. The equivalent group on the other side is the Jesuit order, but it has been undermined by theological liberalism over the last 40 years. It is no longer a significant factor.
As I told my friend last week, Presbyterians are not good at holding meetings, and Pentecostals are not good at writing books. Presbyterians think that the great breakthrough will come as a result of the next book. Pentecostals think that the great breakthrough will come as a result of the next meeting. At some point, there will be a meeting of the minds. Back in 1987, he made an attempt to put together such a meeting. It did not produce anything of substance. Since that time, there has been no comparable attempt to bring the groups from multiple denominational backgrounds. The meetings have been limited to Pentecostals. There have been many meetings.
The Internet favors decentralization. This is a crucial factor of the Internet. It is truly open access. Anybody can get his two cents' worth into the pot if he is willing to produce a YouTube video. Anybody can get his book published in a matter of seconds if he is willing to publish it as a PDF or ePub or Kindle book.
Ideas have consequences. This is why at all of these gatherings, there are speeches. There are forums. There are discussion groups. Everybody knows that the central fact of social change is going to come through two things: new ideas and networking.
In the fundamentalist Protestant world, new ideas generally come from the Presbyterians, and meetings are universal. Any group that has neither meetings nor footnotes has to rely on the other groups to supply what is missing. Footnotes are in much shorter supply than meetings. But people who spend their lives producing footnotes tend not to spend a lot of time at meetings. There have been a few exceptions in history. The main one was the Prime Minister of the Netherlands in the first half decade of the last century, Abraham Kuyper. There has never been anybody like him in combining meetings, footnotes, and political power. He preached for 20 years, founded a denomination, a university, two newspapers, a political party, wrote 16,000 editorials and a dozen major books, and taught for 10 years. Then he served as Prime Minister. But he was one-of-a-kind, and there has never been anybody else like him.
My friend is now involved in what he believes will be the final closed meeting before they begin going public locally around the world. This meeting will lead to a series of meetings that will have greater coordination than before. They will go public judiciously. There will be no fanfare.
I have heard stories like this before. Such turning-point meetings are rare. There were two in 1980: Washington for Jesus and the National Affairs Briefing Conference in Dallas. They launched the New Christian Right. Yet there is almost no trace of either meeting. The taped lectures at the second disappeared years ago. I lost my set. So did everyone else I have contacted who spoke there. They went down the memory hole.
There were a series of broader evangelical meetings in the mid-1980s. The main one has received little attention: COR's Washington, D.C. meeting in 1986. At that meeting, about 200 leaders of the Protestant Right who were in some way interested in politics and social issues gathered together, and they produced a series of position papers. Those papers still represent the best that the conservative evangelical Protestant world has ever produced. They were the product of the division of intellectual labor. They were basically free-market oriented. I know this, because I was on the committee that did the paper on economics, as was my friend Calvin Beisner, who I regard as my intellectual colleague in such matters. This meeting was "hidden in plain sight." It is now hidden in plain site: http://www.reformation.net/Pages/COR_Docs_History.htm
I can honestly say that these documents have had no direct impact on any institution that I am aware of. Yet they still are in the back of the minds of people who participated. The papers sit there, unused. They are not taught in any fundamentalist college. I do not think they are used in any curriculum anywhere. Yet these documents do represent the best and the brightest of the late 20th-century world of fundamentalist and evangelical social theory.
If the humanist Left wanted to have one set of documents which represent this segment of modern life, this would be where to start. Of course, there is virtually nobody out there who knows about these documents, and I have never seen any analysis of them, point by point, in any book.
The individual with whom I am in contact was at that meeting. He still regards these documents as foundational. His own worldview was shaped by them. He is now in a position of being able to teach Pentecostal leaders from around the world the basics of this worldview. He has been working on this for over 25 years. He has built up a network, and in those circles, networks are even more important than they are among the superclass. Face-to-face meetings are basic to the fastest-growing religious movement that we have seen ever since the rise of Islam in the century after 632.
All of this is taking place under the radar. All of this is hidden in plain sight. There is a vague awareness among humanist specialists in religious trends that something strange is going on. But because of the ideological outlook of the humanist community, nobody inside really thinks that this is important. This is why it is important. If the rulers of the Third World really understood what is going on, they would recognize this as the greatest potential threat to their power in modern times.
This is a new phenomenon. It has emerged in the last 40 years. It is no longer an American-based phenomenon. It is international. It is not as large as Catholicism, but it is catching up fast. It has far less baggage than any other large movement.
It lacks intellectual leadership. I think this is about to change.
THE FALL OF THE NATION-STATE
We come now to a theme that I have hammered on for years: the breakup of the nation-state. This has been forecasted by a number of people, but the two volumes I always go back to appeared over a decade ago. One of them was by Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence (2000). The other was written by Martin van Creveld: The Rise and Decline of the State (1999). The books were published by mainstream publishing houses. They offered in their concluding chapters very similar analyses. The modern nation-state is going bankrupt, because it cannot deliver on its promises, especially regarding retirement income and low-cost medical care. Also, they are losing their ability to provide safety domestically. The rise in crime is a major threat to the legitimacy of all modern nation-states. Both men think that there will be a move toward decentralization. I have summarized them here.
If we read carefully about the superclass, they are convinced of the same thing. They are convinced that the nation-state is in terminal decline. They meet together in the hope that they will be able to put together an international nation-state, which will parallel the international division of labor. The rich members (other than the heads of state of oil-exporting nations) are in charge of gigantic multinational corporations, which operate all over the world.
They think that they can create a political structure with comparable sanctions and legitimacy to match the economic structure which is provided by the free market, free pricing, competitive entry, and entrepreneurship. They are wrong. Inherently, the nation-state is less efficient than local governments. It is only because of power that the nation-state can compete with local governments. Knowledge is not at the center. Knowledge is in the extremities. Knowledge is local. This is true in every field.
This means that the attempt of the superclass to consolidate power in an international body that will take on the characteristics of a nation-state, but which will represent a multitude of nation-states, is inherently doomed. They are going to push for this, but they are going to fail.
In contrast to this movement is the movement toward decentralization. This is not exclusively a Christian phenomenon. We are beginning to see this kind of movement in the social theory of humanism. A few people within the humanist camp are beginning to understand that the nation-state is sclerotic. It is close to the end of the road. It has had a 500-year run, but the end is nigh.
These theorists are trying to figure out how to retain local influence. This will take place in a world of decentralized power and decentralized financing. They want to discover a program that will make the transition from the power of the nation-state back to the local communities. But most of the humanists have concentrated all of their efforts on the nation-state for the last 500 years. They are not equipped to deal with opinions and diversity that are implied by local governments. The push of humanism, with the exception of free market economists, has always been toward greater centralization.
The humanists can get internationalism by way of the free market. Lower tariffs, a gold coin standard, and private property will combine to create an international division of labor. There can be coherence without the nation-state. But the superclass does not want this coherence, because it is essentially decentralized. It comes from little people at the bottom making innovative transformations of their businesses, which better serve customers.
The superclass is made up of a bunch of rich people. They want to preserve their positions of leadership, which means they want intervention by the state to protect them from the local entrepreneurs who are biting at their heels. This has been true for the last century. The whole movement toward federal regulation was based primarily on a combination politically. At the top, very rich people wanted federal regulation to protect them against competing businesses coming up from the bottom. They organized politically, and got front men to promote the idea that centralization at the top would protect the little guy. The little guys voted for it, and from Teddy Roosevelt onward, the Progressives have sought to centralize political power. This has been done in the name of consumerism, and it has effectively created the superclass. The old boy network knows how to run the system. But the system that it runs is political and centralized. The old boy network does not know how to deal with thousands of counties in the United States, and it does not know how to deal with the equivalent system of local jurisdictions in all the other countries in the world.
The old boy network is skilled at centralization, deception, and political manipulation. These skills get their highest payoff in units of centralized government. But these units are now about to break apart. The superclass is scrambling desperately to create international organizations which are beyond the power of voters nationally and regionally to change. They want bureaucratic rather than democratic government. This has been the push for over a century.
LEGITIMACY LOST
The central banks are the central institutions that have backstopped all this. Central banks have served insurance policies for the largest fractional reserve banks. The central banks are now frantically producing fiat money, because the largest fractional reserve banks have lent money to clearly bankrupt national governments. The alliance among central banks, fractional reserve banks, and nation-states is being threatened by the free market. The bubbles have popped. The nation-states are busted. The unfunded liabilities are overwhelming. The whole system is going to go down, and the superclass is frantically attempting to create an institutional alternative. They are going to fail.
When they fail, there is going to be a loss of legitimacy at the national level. The nation-state is going to lose legitimacy, because the nation-state is going to be involved in the Great Default. At that point, the game really is going to change. The battle ideologically today is between the globalists, who want some kind of global political regime which is in fact a global bureaucratic regime, and on the other side are the decentralists.
The decentralists do not have much money. They do not have much influence. They are out of step with the centralization mania that has gone on for the past 500 years. They are not taken seriously. But that is not going to change the fact that there will be a Great Default. At that point, there will be a mad scramble for power at the local level across the face of the earth. In this battle, the graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton have no competitive advantage over the graduates of Boondocks State University.
At the local level, there are now a couple of hundred million Pentecostals. They have no influence. They have poor educations. But they have a belief that hard work, devotion to family, and private property are fundamental aspects of personal success in life. They have a competitive advantage over the standard graduate of an inner-city public school. They have the votes. Above all, they have the votes. If they can learn to mobilize these votes, they are going to be a force to be reckoned with across the face of the earth.
There is no central organization that can be infiltrated. There is no central organization that can be bought off by buying off the leaders. There is no central organization. The humanist Left has not dealt with anything like this in the past.
The Pentecostals began in 1906 in an obscure little church in Los Angeles. They dropped off the radar almost immediately, and they did not reappear until the 1990s. As far as most of the humanist Left is concerned, they are all pathetic rubes. Nobody in power pays any attention to them. But they have the swing votes. In a world in which salvation is perceived to be essentially political, having the swing votes counts for a great deal.
If the meetings that are going on across the face of the earth transmit the outlook of the 17 position papers of that 1984 meeting, the world is going to look very different in half a century. The people with the votes, if they can mobilize the votes, can veto the attempt of the superclass to create a legitimate alternative to the collapsing nation-state. The veto will be crucial.
It is true that you cannot beat something with nothing. But when the central governments' finances collapse, it does not take very much something to replace nothing. The superclass has relied on something, namely, centralized political power. A gigantic bureaucracy that has been built up by political power. Its staffs cannot be fired. But if this bureaucracy loses access to money with purchasing power, the whole process of centralization that has accelerated rapidly over the last century will hit a brick wall. In the aftermath of that collision, there is going to be international competition at the local level to establish an alternative system of legitimate civil government. The Internet is going to help this. Communications will be possible among groups that did not effectively communicate before.
If these groups get their footnotes together, they are going to be in a position to offer an alternative to the worldview promoted by the superclass. The crucial issue is legitimacy, the basis of political sovereignty. The superclass has a lot of money, but it has gained this money in a competitive market. A competitive market can take that money away. This is why they are completely dependent on the nation-state to preserve their position. When the nation-state goes down, they are going to be dependent on their own entrepreneurial ability to maintain control, and that control will be market-based rather than state-based. That will completely change the nature of the competition. At that point, the superclass is going to be replaced.
Ideas do have consequences. So will the Great Default.
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