The Notions of Empire: Why pay when you can bombard and plunder

The role of the creative intelligentsia is to reproduce the culture and ideas that help the empires maintain their state of rule, to loosely paraphrase Chris Hedges and Karl Marx.

Their effect is pervasive; yet curiously, surprisingly so un-intrusive... to the conditioned eyes, ears, minds of the masses, and to their peers and protégées.

Valid career paths

Various subsystems comprising the creative intelligentsia as a whole (a.k.a. valid career paths) include:

• setting the style, tone and official outlooks for news that comes in from the empires' brutal crusades against the peoples of the world ('journalism')
• providing entertainment, in the form of mindless pop culture, to both stimulate & lull the ennui and persistent vague anxiety that comes with a successfully obedient life ('sports entertainment' & 'the arts')
• inventing new strategies to efficiently exploit the peoples and resources of the world, in the form of think-tanks, academia and economic expectations
• becoming useful public puppets ('politician' is the official term) to be a public front and/or fall-guy for the empires' machinations (e.g. the CIA pins the blame on Biden for the Nord Stream bombings)
• starting and funding businesses that contribute to ever more ways that the empires can consolidate their rule ('entrepreneur' and 'investors' are the official terms, again)
• educating future generations to internalise the empires' desires (the ideal 'teacher who follows the curriculum')
• etc.

Other valid career paths outside the creative intelligentsia include:

• working in the army or police force to get any rebels to succumb to empire
• toiling for the needs of empires' citizens (including food, clothes, etc.)
• etc.

Invalid career paths

Invalid career paths — which may or may not almost certainly see you threatened with assassinations, indefinite jail time, pre-dawn raids, poverty, name-trashing and much more — include:

• fighting back the empire that invaded your country (this is called 'terrorism')
• helping the colonised peoples of the world regain their independence
• exposing the crimes of the empires ('Belmarsh Prison is your next destination')
• writing material that challenges the superior system of the empire ('those cultural Marxists who don't know that communism failed' – despite it helping many third-world nations rid themselves of colonisers, because colonialism is among the most developed forms of capitalism)
• building programs or making alliances that enable self-sufficiency for oppressed peoples of the world (pre-dawn raids for you as for Uhuru)
• being a politician of a country and not taking cues from the CIA (such a 'dictator' may encounter either 'colour revolutions' or assassinations)
• etc.

How To Become Successful

So what makes a successful member of the creative intelligentsia?

Outside of these basic ideas,

• Don't question the empire too much
• Don't support those who question the empire too much

the networks of creative intelligentsia throughout the empires are so sophisticated, that the reason that the empires are constantly waging war, is that it's probably just self-apparently more cost-effective to funnel money into weapons than it is to actually pay somewhat decent prices for the enormous amounts of goods and labour and lives that you are taking.

For a random benchmark, 25-30 million people were abducted as slaves from Africa to the Americas as part of many empires' official state policies.

For another benchmark, France benefits hundreds of billions of dollars a year from its CFA Franc currency, in place in 14 countries in Africa that had been explicitly colonies of France in the past.

And yet another benchmark, the U.S. is estimated to have stolen about $100 billion worth of oil from Syria.

The motto, in other words, is: Why pay when you can bombard and plunder?

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the U.S. had stolen more than $200 billion worth of oil from Syria. The corrected amount is over $100 billion.