The Meta Terror State: A Do-It-Yourself Guide for Aspiring Dictators

photo: Conrado Junior

Most Americans wonder why Democrats are sitting idle as the Far Right plunders the country, when this should be no surprise whatsoever to anyone. Democracy died decades ago, becoming the best-preserved display corpse of the same political taxidermy craft that originally disfigured the country’s history. Every 4 years the corpse of democracy is dusted, painted, propped up on stilts and paraded on the shoulders of the corporate sponsors which fund both political mobs like leeches refusing to abandon a decomposing carcass. The stench may be indescribably horrifying, but the perfumed promises shrouding each election have everyone begging for a morsel from this knackered cadaver.

You see, the most effective way to undermine a democracy today is to purchase it, and at the same time force all citizens to buy shares in it. In a single, magical step you have both seized power and eliminated potential opposition. This type of coup is not a new type of political system. It is the end of politics altogether.

Power today has been relinquished from ordinary humans to global capital and the ruthless masterminds of our cleptocratic algorithmocracy. Global capital controls everything because it owns everything: the media, politicians, and consumers. We have been paralyzed into subordination via the threat of losing our job and the fear that we won’t get to buy all the things this system convinced us we need. We thus became complicit in the ongoing crimes of global capital responsible for our escalating polycrises. It is just what the oligarchs want. As long as we remain in a perpetual state of pursuit, financial blackmail, confusion, distraction and consumatronic narcissism, we won’t even blink an eye at the car crash waiting for us around the corner.

Dictator’s note: collaborate with the oligarchs

It is about time we recognise that both politics and democracy are holographic constructs curated by a regime of capital which has reigned for decades. Hostages to money within a global economic terror state, we are too codependent to bring ourselves to admit we have been blackmailed. Instead, we sink into denial, prepared to defend this self-destructive economic system to our death, pledging our allegiance as we opt to perish in the company of sheep rather than suffer the loneliness of a truth sticking out like a sore thumb. When you cannot fight your master, you side with them like a battered wife afraid to assert herself, doing what all other battered wives do: shut up and take it. She convinces herself that she has full control of her black and blue situation, perhaps even some bizarre power over her aggressor. The best, and the only protection we have against the chilling truth of our predicament is a warm blanket of denial. This of course, only guarantees even worse times ahead.

To take stock of what exactly this system is, we need to first understand that it is far worse than fascism or any other totalitarianism we may be familiar with from college textbooks. Our modern totalitarianism manages to hide in plain sight by putting us in charge of our own censorship. There is no “dictator” or tyrant in charge here, but something much more sinister: a semi-sentient incarnation of profit presiding at the global level, irrespective of national or cultural borders, time zones or party affiliations. It dictates its own prices, appoints its own puppets, and ex-communicates its critics at the drop of a chat GPT request. Given its nebulous and algorithmic nature, it cannot be eliminated the way you would eliminate a normal dictator. You may get rid of the tyrant, but the economic system which selects, rewards and promotes the most psychopathic mobsters remains at large. We live in an economic terror state where profit is God, growth is a dogma, and society and the planet are nothing but disposable collateral.

Profit is in fact an internal parasite, because we depend on it for our livelihoods. We nourish the parasite, keeping our head down so that we don’t make it angry while it takes all our decisions: infecting our parliamentary process, judicial system, the media, what we think, and who we end up voting for – that is, if we we’re not too distracted by Netflix to go vote. To put it simply, there is no “dictator vs the people” anymore. Each of us has become our own dictator.

Most of us will never realise that capital owns every bit of our existence. We are living an illusion of freedom confined within the strict black lines of the consumer colouring book. Why seek real freedom when you can have products instead? We have bought so many shares into this system that we are stakeholders to our own demise, whatever we may say otherwise. Humanity has reached a cognitive cul de sac where it is unable to even imagine a life without capitalism. This does not mean that such a life cannot exist. It only means that this system owns so much of who we are that we are incapable of asking for a divorce. Yet the only chance this species has of continuing to exist is, in fact, if it expels this self-destructive system altogether.

Dictator’s note: keep calling it a Democracy

The other clever attribute of the meta dictatorship is how effortlessly it masquerades as a democracy. The most effective way to keep democracy permanently disabled is to maintain the illusion that it exists: rather than dissolving democratic institutions, global capital zombifies them much like a deep fake steals your voice, your face, and your reputation. This pseudo-democracy sounds like an oxymoron, but it isn’t. Technically people can still vote, but their votes are the result of microtargeted brainwashing by media empires owned by global capital. Decision-making and debate continue to take place via “democratic” parliamentary procedures, but all MPs are prostitutes to corporate entities they have barely ever interacted with, other than through a wire transfer.

Rather than dismantling democracy therefore, as previous, more overt types of fascism may have done, this system infects it instead. It is a parasite nested within the democratic apparatus so successfully that, parasite and host have unavoidably co-evolved: capital cannot function anymore without the illusion of democracy, and “democracy” can no longer function without selling itself to capital. This was a very predictable outcome of neoliberalism. Because once you surrender all privileges to capital, eventually capital becomes your master. It becomes your politics, your judicial system, your media.

Dictator’s note: treat society as you would treat a business

But how did we get here? At some point in our history, we were forced to buy shares into this system. The industrial revolution was the age when we officially became converted to consumatrons: a low-intelligence humanoid whose purpose is only to work, consume, and financially support an ever-strengthening, exploitative, colonialist, racist, ecocidal and genocidal system.

This didn’t happen overnight. Unlike traditional fascism where you take control of the military and scare the hell out of everyone into subordination within 24 hours, establishing a capitalist terror state is a slow process which takes decades to root, as parasite and host co-evolve. The parasite must creep and grow ever so slowly in order to go unnoticed by its host. It maintains the illusion of democracy through consumeristic distractions, all the while as it erodes the rights to protest, the judicial system, public consultation on government projects, and all elements of a real democracy. We’re almost there.

Much of the tactical machinery of the meta dictatorship originates directly in the corporation. Corporations were the hothouses of the modern capitalist terror state, where this system was first conceived, introduced and beta-tested within small populations of salary slaves. It was there where it was perfected before eventually breaking out into society, infecting central governments and popular cultures worldwide.

We can now see how this system works in its pure, unadulterated form by simply looking at corporate environments. A culture of toxic positivity and self-censorship reigns large in all corporations today. If you challenge, question, or appear “inflexible” towards client needs or the company’s strategy, then you have directly attacked the “profit god”. Employees are strictly forbidden from expressing their personal opinion, especially if this opinion may remotely suggest a potential threat to the company’s profits. This level of censorship and disempowerment of employees is easy when everyone in the company depends on a salary. Highly educated people in these companies have fully accepted being seen and treated as working machines, not the intelligent humans that most of them are. Ethics-based opinions are automatically dismissed and at the very least laughed upon as “unprofessional”, “naive”, “personal” and “irrelevant”, given that any type of ethics, not just DEI, is a significant overhead to any corporation. The only ethics followed is the minimum and inadequate level required by law, allowing the corporation to get away with as much unethical activity as possible, at minimum litigation risk.

Governments today have successfully replicated the corporate terror state within broader society. Rather than terrorising their subjects with the loss of a salary, they terrorise them with the loss of the consumerism theme park corporations have addicted them to: if the economy tanks, everyone will suffer. “The economy” is the number one entity to be protected at all costs. Environment, human rights, justice are secondary priorities, ready to be sacrificed at the altar of the economy to appease the profit god. All the while the illusion of democracy is maintained through expert optics originally developed by corporations: they had years of practice to perfect the art of marketing, deceiving, branding and re-branding, communications strategy and media buying and selling so they can promote their cheap, toxic and often defective products to consumers the world over. They have taught our governments how to use these strategies to maintain the illusion of democracy, just as they maintained the illusion of choice and product quality among their own consumer base. In fact, many of these politicians are former successful businesspeople, so they know very well how all this works.

Dictator’s note: keep playing with the algorithm till you get it right

But along with the illusion of democracy comes the illusion of politics altogether – that is, the illusion that people have choices when they enter the voting booth. We think that our vote still counts for something because we fail to question this system. We may have more plurality than ever, but it is different flavours of the same narrative. While old fascism dismantled political parties, the meta terror state has made them identical, effectively achieving the same result. Voting is pointless when the necrosystem owns us, the media have rendered truth irrelevant, and choice is limited to one corrupt cleptocrat over another.

Every truth, however self-evident or irrefutable, can instantly perish once there is no one left to acknowledge it. While old totalitarianism censored the truth, our clever digital dystopia drowns it out in a deluge of product placements and false debates. Reality has been rendered irrelevant, and the search for truth a futility. As Netflix and TikTok play dance videos and binge programs 24/7, those who dare to look away from their screen and into the real world are living the most surreal experience as they watch everyone else fall asleep like sheep on drugs. Anyone who tries to warn people and shake them out of their coma is labelled “the boy who cried wolf”.

But while old fascism distracted people from real crises with football, the meta terror state is so reality-bending that it doesn’t need to rely as much on distractions. The entirety of modern human existence has become one, big distraction. As climate chaos and social inequality ramp up in a world devastated by capital, the terror state’s marketing departments are hard at work, bending reality. Any social activism and protest is increasingly shadow banned or condemned by the media, and in the rare event this fails, shut down by force.

This should come as no surprise. The corporate entities and their media employees are the big polluters and the masterminds behind the very inequality vital to their profit margins. They do not want to see people fighting for human rights, nature’s rights, pollution or the climate crisis, all of which are very expensive overheads within the economic necrosystem. Those who dare to protest are imprisoned with long sentences to terrorise the rest of us away from questioning, challenging, and dissenting against the capitalist terror state. And yes, we are slowly beginning to see images of old fascism: activists’ houses raided and people who protested for Palestine or the climate crisis being taken straight to prison by a system which deems their arguments “irrelevant” and “personal”. In the UK, and soon all over the world, “the climate apocalypse” will be banned from being used as an argument for protest, or defence in a court of law, even as the facts on the ground unequivocally prove that this planet is in free fall. Prisons are filling up with climate protesters as the system does everything it can to protect its profitable illusion of democracy. Meanwhile real criminals, the billionaires and their puppet leaders, continue to rake in billions. As we begin to experience the worst of this system, don’t expect tanks and sieg heils on the streets. We won’t need them, because we’ll all be asleep watching TikTok dance videos, probably created by a central meta state-owned AI.

The climate crisis will bring tremendous death, destruction and destitution. As long as humanity is motivated by profit, we are on a path of no return from an Earth so devastated, so unrecognisable, violent and unsurvivable that the average person struggles to even imagine. But this Ponzi economic system is incredibly resilient. As resources run out, it will attempt to profit from its own disasters and steal from its own victims, as it has done numerous times before. This is why it is a necrosystem: it creates, markets, and monetizes the death of everything. It is up to us to recognize the necrocapitalist terror state rather than succumb to the messaging of a system profiting from its own catastrophes.

Fascism, genocide and greed will always change their masks, merge into the crowd, and only become noticed too late. As the meta terror state begins to morph into full-blown fascism, we cannot sit back and wait for it to complete its transition. A revolt is necessary. Not against our new fascist governments, but against the parasitic system which gave birth to them in the first place.

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