by Edward Ring
On July 6, in an act of vandalism for which the culprits are still at large, one of the four “Georgia Guidestones” was blown apart. The damage was so severe that the entire monument was rendered too unstable to leave standing. For safety reasons, state officials almost immediately demolished the rest of the monument.
While the Georgia Guidestones are not as well known as, say, Stonehenge, among critics of globalism they had acquired a certain infamy because of the inscriptions on the stones. Carved into four massive blocks of granite, and rendered in eight languages, this is what was on the stones:
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the Earth—Leave room for nature—Leave room for nature.
Clearly some of these guidelines are more controversial than others. “Avoid petty laws and useless officials” is probably a sentiment to which even the Georgia Guidestones’ critics would not object. But the first inscription, calling for a reduction in global population from 8 billion to a half-billion, along with “unite humanity with a living new language,” and “be not a cancer on the earth,” left too much to the imagination.
For those of us who have in just the last few years had to watch hundreds of cherished monuments end up defaced or destroyed by leftist mobs, or removed by cowards unwilling to protect them, it’s hard to summon much regret over the loss of the Georgia Guidestones.
In a less polarized society, it might be preferable to leave all these monuments intact. But what was it about the Georgia Guidestones that made them a target?
To answer this, you first have to wonder—who is more paranoid, those anti-globalists who believe an international elite is determined to erase nationalities and reduce the population of humans to “sustainable” levels, or the Malthusian-environmentalist faction of the globalists themselves, who believe the planet is on the brink of total ecosystem collapse because of too many people consuming too many resources, and this must be corrected by any means necessary?
Upon this question rests two competing world views: The one that ought to dominate, espoused by critics of climate alarmism such as economist Bjorn Lomborg, or informed realists like energy expert Michael Shellenberger, is optimistic. These researchers and others have evaluated the trajectory of world population, resources, and technological innovation, and conclude—convincingly—that the overall standard of living and quality of life for people everywhere in the world has never been better, and that over the coming decades it can get better still. At the same time, optimistic technocrat and business titan Elon Musk correctly points out that humanity faces not a population explosion, but a population collapse, as more and more people everywhere decide not to have children.
The pessimistic worldview, unfortunately, is the dominant narrative. On every established media platform, and across the universities and government bureaucracies of the world, especially in the West, endless permutations of imminent doom is the consistent message. The “climate emergency” is upon us, and we must adapt or die. The prescribed modes of adaptation, conveniently, empower multinational corporations and international bureaucracies, while from Sri Lanka to the Netherlands to California and everywhere in between, manufactured scarcity imposes impoverishment on a disenfranchised populace.
Which brings up another, even more difficult question. Are these competing worldviews being debated honestly, or is something else at work?
To explore the possibility of a darker agenda, imagine you are a billionaire, with enough wealth and power to influence the course of human events significantly. Survey the world, bursting with billions of people who are quickly being rendered obsolete by robotics. Consider the aspirations of these multitudes, as, in all of their teeming billions, they acquire economic power and consume resources in exchange for their human work product of rapidly diminishing value. Would you view these burgeoning human swarms as beneficial, or as dangerous parasites?
Catherine Austin Fitts, an investment banker and former high-ranking official with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in a December 2020 interview that was censored by YouTube but continues to reappear online, attempted to make sense of this darker theory of what globalist billionaires have in store for humanity. In her analysis, the economic model for modern globalism began to take shape shortly after the end of the Cold War.
According to Fitts, in 1995, as neoliberal ideology took hold in both political parties in the United States, the decision was made to transfer most of the wealth out of the country. This is the hollowing out that Trump’s populism attempted to reverse. But now, with the process nearly complete, Pitt alleges the pandemic is the cover whereby this unsustainable financial situation—afflicting the United States and all other interdependent nations—will now be “reset.”
Fitts claimed there are five sectors working in tandem to reset the world order:
1) Technology industry building clouds.
2) Military doing space development.
3) Big pharma developing injections to modify human DNA.
4) Media providing propaganda.
5) Central bankers engineering a new crypto system of global currency.
What Fitts describes accentuates the negative, but after several years of Western governments and their surrogates spreading nonstop and escalating fear propaganda, demonizing and persecuting populist skeptics, and engineering politically contrived scarcity, her perspective gets more attention and credibility than it might otherwise attract. Enabling new technology in communications, security, medicine, media, and finance, have all made it much easier for an elite group of multibillionaires to orchestrate public policy on a global scale. And what they’re doing is not designed to improve the lot of most people in the world. For the first time since the 1940s, human prosperity and freedom everywhere are being systematically reduced.
But why? Fitts offers a logical answer: “If technology can make it possible for people to live 150 years, and it isn’t possible to keep this a secret, then why not downsize the population, integrate robots, and you can have a very wealthy and luxurious life without the management headaches?”
In one particularly chilling quote, Fitts says, “I was having a conversation with a venture capitalist, billionaire type, and he looked at me with these amazingly dead eyes and said ‘I can take every company and completely automate it with software and robotics and fire all the humans. We don’t need them anymore.’”
If you view the intentions of globalists through these lenses, every inscription on the Georgia Stones is of concern. For those hoping to find good intentions behind the establishment narrative, it doesn’t help that America’s institutions have repeatedly proven themselves to be agenda-driven and dishonest. To cite just one current example of this, why is it that virtually nothing is reported in America’s news media today about the farmer rebellion in the Netherlands, which is spreading to Poland and elsewhere in Europe? And who elected the bureaucrats who imposed these crippling restrictions on how they can farm? Why is it we have to turn to online “conspiracy theorist” websites in order to view video clips of the riots convulsing the Netherlands?
The internet, for all the coordinated attempts to suppress alternative news, remains the reason people can ask these questions. Globalization is inevitable. But the prevailing narrative of the globalists—we face doom and we must “reset”—is wrong and horrendously misanthropic. There are glorious alternatives whereby humanity can ascend to achieve even more prosperity and freedom. And that fact, that the world is not coming to an end, is why globalists today are not trusted, and why somebody felt compelled to destroy a symbol of their agenda.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also is a contributing editor and senior fellow with the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Photo “Georgia Guidestones” by Dina Eric. CC BY-SA 2.0.
