{"id":26611,"date":"2017-10-09T08:56:35","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T13:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=26611"},"modified":"2017-10-09T08:56:35","modified_gmt":"2017-10-09T13:56:35","slug":"the-consent-of-the-conned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=26611","title":{"rendered":"The Consent of the Conned"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/blogoct17\/conned10-17.html\">The Consent of the Conned<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><i>Every single line item in our entire <b>Bernie Madoff scam of a system<\/b> is cooked.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><b>My theme this week is <i>The Great Unraveling<\/i>, by which I mean the unraveling of our social-political-economic system of hierarchical, centralized power.<\/b> Let&#8217;s start by looking at how the basis of governance has transmogrified from <i>consent of the governed<\/i> to <b><i>consent of the conned<\/i><\/b>.<\/p>\n<p><b>In effect, our leadership leads by lying.<\/b> As we know, <i>when it gets serious, you have to lie<\/i> to preserve the perquisites and power of those atop the wealth-power pyramid, and well, it&#8217;s serious all the time now, so lies are the default setting of the entire status quo.<\/p>\n<p>But all too many of us are willing to accept the lies because they&#8217;re what we want to hear.<\/p>\n<p><b>As any competent con-man knows, you can only con those who want to be conned.<\/b> You can only scam the marks who want to believe that what&#8217;s obviously <i>too good to be true<\/i> is in fact true.<\/p>\n<p><b>The story of scams such as Bernie Madoff&#8217;s isn&#8217;t that canny Bernie victimized helpless wealthy people;<\/b> the untold story is that all those &#8220;victims&#8221; wanted to believe that something that was obviously too good to be true&#8211;incredibly high returns, logged month after month and year after year like clockwork&#8211;was in fact true <i>because their greed made them more than just vulnerable to being scammed&#8211;they wanted to be bamboozled by Bernie<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><b>Victims of scams naturally deny their own culpability.<\/b> It&#8217;s extremely uncomfortable to admit that greed didn&#8217;t just blind us to a patently impossible yield; we <i>wanted to be conned because it felt so wonderful to believe we richly deserved unearned wealth<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Consent of the Conned Every single line item in our entire Bernie Madoff scam of a system is cooked. My theme this week is The Great Unraveling, by which I mean the unraveling of our social-political-economic system of hierarchical, centralized power. Let&#8217;s start by looking at how the basis of governance has transmogrified from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[15704,1670,127,10544,1426,587,2942,655,16371],"class_list":["post-26611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-bernie-madoff","tag-centralization","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-great-unraveling","tag-misinformation","tag-of-two-minds","tag-ponzi","tag-propaganda","tag-pyramid-scheme"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26612,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26611\/revisions\/26612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}