Welcome to another edition of our sometime-series, The Contrarian’s Old-Time Conspiracy Hour! Today, we’re going to look at a pair of subjects closer to the truth than your average intrigue: The Great Pirates and the Gross Universal Cash Heist (GRUNCH). These two concepts were originally put forth by intellectual rapscallion R. Buckminster Fuller, a man whose genius knew few bounds.
Devised decades ago, Bucky’s hypotheses have never been more timely, what with the Occupy Wall Street protests and a tottering global economy. Great Pirates and GRUNCH are best taken as informed allegory, not hard fact. This is why they often get slapped with the “conspiracy” label. But unlike, say, reptilian shapeshifters who secretly run the world, the Great Pirates and GRUNCH are based on actual dynamics in trade, information and governance.
Let’s start with GRUNCH. Basically, this is the overarching strategy of the Great Pirates (more on them in a second). The theory posits that the nations of the world are actually “sponsored entities” of a few select financial networks. World governments (and their subjects) are kept in place through debts, which is why politicians are always going to raise taxes, no matter what they promise — they have to contain rising interest. Of course, even in politics, you have to pay to play. In 1980, Bucky estimated that it cost $100 million to run for president, $30 million to run for Senate and $10 million for the House of representatives. Obviously, the price tag is much higher now, but the story is the same: politicians are “sponsored” by the financial networks and their overlords, who invest in campaigns. The Supreme Court supports this arrangement, as demonstrated by the Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission ruling.
Now, Bucky didn’t think that there was any single gang of Great Pirates running the show; he believed that there were likely a number of them, often tugging in different directions. As an engineer, he found such shoddy staging inefficient, and therefore unacceptable.
So who are these Great Pirates? The late, great, Robert Anton Wilson has a typically elegant summation:
The Great Pirates signify those men combining elements of what ethologists call the alpha male, historians call the despot and sociologists call the sociopath… our primitive ancestors, Fuller says, were conquered by wave after wave of these despotic-sociopathic Great Pirates, until all humans became accustomed to being ruled by Great Pirates, since the only other choice was to be murdered by them.
The Great Pirates then discovered that other people were working at science, and hired the scientists to produce gadgets to suit their own needs. Therefore, Bucky says, science knows more about weaponry than about “livingry.” Fuller’s experimental geometry and housing were attempts to contribute to the livingry he felt science had largely ignored.
If you to accept the basic outline here — and I do, to a fair degree — you’ll quickly recognize where the far right and far left get it wrong. The right sees government as invasive and liberty-depriving, but they fail to grok that the majority of today’s governments are merely puppets of a corporate behemoth that seeks only increased profits. Today’s left views government as the only entity that can tame the corporate beast, completely missing that policymakers are already ensnared by the financial/corporate apparatus.
Until a critical mass of people realize the nexus of criminality here, we are likely to remain in bondage. So listen up, lefties and Tea Partiers: you can yell about freedom or the corporatocracy until you’re blue in the face — the fact of the matter is, you are only dividing yourselves. And guess who benefits from that? Why do you think “wedge issues” exist? Because the people running the campaigns don’t want you to pay attention to the real issues.
Is Occupy Wall Street the commencement of a new understanding? I have no idea, but the cynic in me highly doubts it. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong.
If you want to learn more about the Great Pirates and GRUNCH, I recommend you check out Bucky’s book GRUNCH of Giants — available free at the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
