SIGNS OF SYSTEMIC PANIC – PREPARING FOR COLLECTIVE IRRATIONALITY AS THE US GOVERNMENT AND POLITICAL SYSTEM DISINTEGRATES
by
Michael C. Ruppert
© Copyright 2010, Collapse Network, Inc. – All Rights Reserved
July 4, 2010, 1400 PDT – Panic robs a mind of the one thing it needs most to insure survival, the ability to accurately perceive and respond to reality. There is individual panic in which one person loses grip. It is contagious. That’s why military commanders and police officers react to control it instantly when they see it. Then there is a collective panic which is much more destructive and almost impossible to control. Once it sets in the only available survival option is to create distance and wait and pray for the dust to settle, for the fires to go out, and for those in panic to cease their self (and other)-destructive struggles – usually through exhaustion or death. One of the clearest signs of panic in both individual and collective settings is the absolute irrationality of responses to a real or imagined threat. It is like someone seeing a fire in their house that threatens family members and then throwing a bucket of gasoline on the fire believing it will extinguish the flames.
The signs of collective panic in the nation’s political and government arenas and around the world are now indisputable
Until one has been in a large-scale riot for real and seen, felt, tasted and smelled mass insanity, it’s not easy to get one’s head around how it functions as a senseless beast. During the eight years I worked for LAPD I witnessed it several times. But it was something I saw during the 1992 Rodney King Insurrection in L.A. that gave a full understanding of how best to respond. The first rule for me is always to mentally detach completely from the mind of the mob. The second rule is to get out of the area immediately.
On the day the Rodney King verdicts came in I was the Los Angeles County Press Spokesman for the Ross Perot Presidential campaign. At the time Perot was ahead of both Bush I and Bill Clinton in the polls. I had moderated our first live press conference in the run-up to the California primary that early afternoon as the verdicts came in and I watched quizzically as the news crews from CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the LA and New York Times started pulling away and packing up in the middle of the conference.. Someone whispered in my ear that the verdicts had just been announced in Simi Valley… not guilty.
Oh shit…
I was still in touch with many LAPD personnel including retired Assistant Chief Jesse Brewer, who was then serving as one of five Police Commissioners. Brewer, an African-American who had served on George Patton’s staff with the Third Army, had once been my CO and had become a great personal friend and mentor since I had resigned over CIA involvement in drug smuggling. Those with the eyes, ears and brains to comprehend, understood what was coming that day with no illusions.
Our Sherman Oaks campaign office was shut down early but I found myself still having a commitment to meet with a serious composer who wanted to write a rock opera about Ross Perot (go figure). We had a dinner appointment at a giant rotating restaurant high atop the Holiday Inn at Highland Ave. and Hollywood Boulevard at 7 PM. I had called and asked if he wanted to cancel but he said no. Riot or no, he said, this meeting was imperative – life and death. …Duty calls. (I made sure to put a Glock 22 under the front seat of my car before going.)
I sucked it up and went. As we sat at our table, with the restaurant giving us a 360 rotation every ten minutes or so, I could see a progression of large fires originating from South Central getting ever closer. My table mate could see the same fires but he was stark, raving oblivious. As the fires got closer I felt, saw and understood that danger was coming right at us. The composer was glassy-eyed and growing ever-more impassioned about dangling Whitney Houston from a helicopter as he sat in his white shirt with lace collar and sleeves gulping wine. As the fires reached Santa Monica Boulevard I simply got up, shook his hand, wished him good luck and promptly made an exfiltration for the relative safety of my apartment in Sherman Oaks. It was pointless to even try to explain to him why I was leaving.
I don’t know what happened to the guy but as I walked away he had grabbed the arm of a very nervous waiter and started telling him about the musical. The waiter gave me a “Gimme a break!” look as we both now could see actual mobs maybe ten blocks south on Highland. The waiter was right behind me on the way to the elevator. The composer ordered another wine from the ether.
A clear sign of panic in an individual is the inability of the mind to do anything even remotely responsive to the immediate threat because the mind cannot acknowledge the existence of the threat. When governments and institutions go into panic mode, the rule is that the cure will be worse than the ill.
This week I have witnessed the first clear signs of panic in the U.S. government and political establishment. They are always signaled by absolutely irrational statements and analyses.
- On Friday CNN reported on statements from the U.S. government saying that there was reason to celebrate because the unemployment numbers had shown a drop – even as more than 400,000 Americans had just filed first-time claims. The reason to cheer said CNN (and a government spokesman testifying on the Hill) was that the overall numbers of unemployed had dropped by more than 600,000 because that was the number of people who had given up looking for work (or exhausted their benefits). Having given up they were no longer statistically unemployed. They had ceased to exist.
- Then RNC Chairman Michael Steele was caught on tape saying that Afghan War was unwinnable and it was Barack Obama’s war, not the Republican Party’s. Steele said that Mr. Obama had started the war. Huh??? – WTF, over??? The Afghan war was started by Bush-Cheney in late 2001, nine long, bloody years ago.
- A little later a segment came on about how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was openly challenging the Obama administration’s conduct of that same war. -- Both parties are in a schizophrenic and psychotic meltdown in the run up to midterms this November as they try to shoehorn collapse into a Republican/Democrat construct. Both parties are train wrecks.
- Throughout the week I saw many stories, often juxtaposed, starting to reveal the almost unfathomable toxicity of the Gulf as fracked and recombined toxic hydrocarbons reformed into innumerable poisons, then reacted with millions of gallons of the uberpoison Corexit 9500 (banned in Europe) and billions of cubic meters of methane streaming out of the seabed, along stories showing people swimming in and even eating seafood from those same waters. Yum!
- And then we have Iran as the US government moved to impose stronger sanctions and military deployments indicate that Israel really intends to launch a strike… and soon.
- The last straw was the revelation that FEMA had moved the same formaldehyde infested trailers into the Gulf to house oil spill workers that had been rejected after Katrina in 2005. Those workers are being told by BP that they don’t need full protective gear and that it’s OK to breathe the air into which the Corexit and other chemicals were evaporating then sending them back to sleep in trailers filled with yet another poison. – Eichmann and Himmler might have been impressed.
Remember that great epiphany in the movie Collapse where I said, “Oh s—t, oh f—k. cut. I’m having a major realization.” That was filmed on the last of our five shoots in June of 2009. I saw clearly that the United States government had become (and would remain) totally useless in helping its citizens prepare for collapse. I also saw that as time passed, it would inevitably become an agent of collapse, accelerating the loss rates and preventing real solutions that might save lives. (The scorpion and the turtle.)
Suspicions confirmed. A mass evacuation order for the region should have been issued weeks ago. And I reemphasize my call for all who are exposed, especially pregnant and nursing women, to get out of the area immediately. I am seeing millions of displaced persons leaving the region by the end of summer – especially after a major hurricane turns the environmental blender onto “purée”.
Systemic panic is a precursor to governmental and political collapse, the third stage in Dmitry Orlov’s five stages of collapse. (Financial, Commercial, Political, Social and Cultural). It’s happening in Greece right now. It signals the beginnings of the end. And even though systemic panic is far more devastating than individual panic, the adaptive response in both cases is the same. Get out of the way, “get small”, and stay out of the psychosis.
The problem is global. Just yesterday a news story out of Saudi Arabia announced that Saudi King Abdullah had decided to stop oil exploration in the country holding an estimated 25% of the world’s recoverable oil; a country with an exploding, poor and restive population who do not like the universal corruption they see in their rulers. King Abdullah’s message: “We will save that oil for future generations.” – Those who have followed our Key Stories from Around the World will recall us posting links showing that members of the Saudi royal family were recently being denied loans or forced to provide collateral for the first time in history. The only thing that can keep the royals in power is vast new discoveries and that’s not going to happen.
In his panic King Abdullah has left-handedly and disingenuously admitted that Saudi Arabia has passed peak, something it has lied about for years. Were expensive exploration to continue, resulting in only dry holes, that would certainly become known in short order. Secrets like that cannot be kept. The panicked mind says, “Let’s try to make the people believe that there’s still plenty”, when no one in their right mind will accept that. – Let them eat cake.
Here's a new prediction. The Saudi Royal Family is between three and eight months from running for its life. Now consider the massive military upheavals that must take place when that happens. Remember you saw it here that Saudi Prince Turki recently told the royals to get out of Dodge or face revolution.
On top of that we need 195 Californias or 74 Texases to replace offshore drilling that has been halted by Barack Obama. The brain-dead green activists who insist on a permanent moratorium on offshore drilling are incapable of seeing that there is nothing that can replace oil and they irrationally insist that windmills and solar panels will power the trucks and cars, provide the fertilizers, pesticides and plastic this nation depends upon. The poor oil rig workers who want to go back to work in the Gulf cannot see the reality of Peak Oil right in front of their faces or comprehend the fact that the species must go into deeper and more dangerous places where we now understand we face challenges beyond our technology.
The White House is useless, unresponsive, and incapable of accepting the reality of what is happening. I do not see how this can be corrected. And the continuing transparent lunacy of the government’s actions is only going to guarantee massive civil unrest and loss of confidence in the political system as a whole as things inevitably deteriorate.
When millions of displaced, bitter and hungry people start fleeing the region within a month or two; when they start getting incurably ill; as the foreclosure rate explodes and food prices skyrocket; as Florida enters all-too-obvious death throes it will be clear to most that a national and global panic has been loosed. I’m afraid that the United States government has lost its ability to respond with anything other than force and solutions that will help no one. I am not advocating a change in the government, a new political agenda, or a campaign platform.
Avec nous, le deluge. The pin of a hand grenade has been pulled in the middle of an ammunition dump… and I just heard the spoon kick out. For those fortunate enough to understand it the only option is to get out of the way and take cover. From here on out anything that comes out of Washington cannot be trusted. No campaign promises from either Democratic or Republican candidates will be fulfilled. And the anger can only be directed in one direction now – at Washington. All of recorded history tells us that this is the only way the waters of rage flow when things get this far out of control.
Just ask Marie Antoinette.
MCR
