America's Fight with the Shadow
An excerpt from my forthcoming book "The Coming World Nation"
This is an excerpt from my new book The Coming World Nation, which is now available on Amazon! It comes from the book’s first chapter, which is titled “How Capitalism Changed America”.
Revisiting our earlier discussion of Aztec mythology, we recall how Tezcatlipoca, the spirit of darkness, manifested its presence through the rise of an evil black cult, who fetishized power, instigated wars, corrupted the culture, and practiced human sacrifice. Are today’s capitalist oligarchs - with their insatiable thirst for power and wealth, their war profiteering, and all the economic hardship they cause - not guilty of the same crimes? Do they not embody, in the modern age, the same 'Shadow' archetype as Tezcatlipoca?
Like Tezcatlipoca, these oligarchs adhere to no moral imperative or sense of higher purpose. Their motivations are entirely egotistical and self-serving - dedicated to the expansion of their own power and wealth at everyone else's expense. They pursue their ambitions at any cost, even if it means sacrificing large numbers of human lives - their suffering and death perceived as nothing more than a means to an end.
As an example of the types of activities this capitalist Tezcatlipoca has been involved in, consider the story of how two of its most prominent banking houses, Rothschild and Morgan, deliberately conspired to orchestrate the Panic of 1893. After first working to trigger a financial panic in the railroad industry, they pushed their political asset President Grover Cleveland to position the dollar onto a gold standard - something the Wall Street Money Trust greatly desired but the country's farmers and populist base staunchly opposed. The new gold standard caused a severe contraction in credit, pulling the US into a four-year long deflationary spiral, when consumer spending collapsed, corporate profits plunged, bankruptcies skyrocketed, and mass unemployment and social unrest ensued.
At the time, the Morgans and Rothschilds were the dominant players in the international gold trade. They therefore stood to benefit the most from positioning the dollar onto a gold standard. In effect, this move gave them private control over the US money supply. Meanwhile, they took advantage of the mass bankruptcies that accompanied the four-year depression that resulted, using the occasion to consolidate their power over Wall Street, reinforce their domination of international finance, and gain monopolies in key industries like railroads.
Morgan in particular was adept as using the crisis as an opportunity to form corporate monopolies, creating not only a railroad monopoly but also a steel monopoly with US Steel, an electricity monopoly with General Electric Company, and an agricultural-supplies monopoly with International Harvester. As America's chief Robber Baron of the age, Morgan had positioned himself as the hierarch of the East Coast Establishment - a positioned he used to lay the groundwork for the establishment of the Federal Reserve 20 years alter.
Summarizing the situation that existed in America around the turn of the century, F. William Engdahl writes that, by the end of the 1890’s, figures like JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller “had become the giants of an increasingly powerful Money Trust controlling American industry and government policy. There was little room for the actual practice of democracy in their world. Power was the commodity of their trade.”
Symbolically, America’s new capitalist oligarchy ascended as a modern iteration of Tezcatlipoca: “an American aristocracy of blood and money”, as Engdahl put it. “It was an oligarchy, a plutocracy in every sense of the word - rule by the wealthiest in their self-interest.”
It should be emphasized: this modern American Tezcatlipoca was not a native creation of the United States. It was born from a style of capitalism that was ported into it from abroad. The US Constitution does not specify that America's economy should be controlled by a private central bank; this feature was hoisted upon America by a financial network that traces back to the Bank of England and the British Empire.
For the first century of its existence as a sovereign nation, the United States was able to successfully prevent the capture of its economy by these old-world capitalist networks. The situation finally changed after the Industrial Revolution took off: a new American aristocratic elite was formed as a result of the economic transformations brought about by the onset of the industrial age.
The scions of this new-money American capitalist class partnered with their old-money counterparts in Europe to permanently institutionalize financial capitalism within America by creating a privately-owned American central bank fashioned in the model of England. This plan required decades of careful plotting and strategizing before it finally succeeded, with the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913 marking the final victory of financial capitalism over American democracy.
This is how the feudal economic tradition of Europe was imported into America. Philosopher Manly Hall declares: “that mistake set us back two hundred years.” Writing in a 1944 article titled “Ours is the Blessed Land”, he explained that “our entire economic system is merely the transplanted European theory of coinage. We just moved it here. And that was a very serious error, for we created a conflict between traditions of the past and innovation.”
Instead of staying true to the high philosophical ideals of the Founding Fathers, the United States incrementally “fell back upon European tradition for everything. … What we call American civilization is therefore merely European culture transplanted to a new environment.” Hall wryly observes that “we fought the Revolutionary War to free ourselves of European interference, and then promptly accepted an economic system that was the supreme interference” - financial capitalism.
It is rooted in an economic tradition that once “belonged to medieval Europe” - the Venetian Empire in particular. And before that, to the Roman Empire, whose economics was dominated by a capitalistic oligarchy that made its fortunes through trade, war, and slavery. It is a style of economics tailor-made for the Kali Yuga: it always coincides with the rise of oligarchies and empires, who in their initial ascent rise to vast heights like the Tower of Babel, before inevitably destroying themselves from within and crashing out.
The American Empire is the latest example of this pattern: a private banking cartel - the Federal Reserve - has seized control over the US economy and engineers it to support the buildout of a vast military-industrial complex, whose assets are positioned around the world to enforce the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This gives the American banking cartel de facto control over the global financial system, a privilege it wields to solidify its global hegemony.
For the past century, this empire has been the dominant force in geopolitics. But for reasons we'll be discussing in future chapters, its grip on power is slipping. The system of financial capitalism that has fueled its rise up until now looks to be finally reaching its breaking point. The timing of this ordeal is significant: it’s playing out right as the Kali Yuga is reaching its endgame. This suggests that the fate of American Empire is heavily tied to the major global transformations that are set to occur as the Yuga cycle shifts into a new phase of its evolutionary development.
If the American Empire and the Kali Yuga are indeed karmically intertwined, this suggests that the oligarchy who runs this empire should embody key themes and trends from it . An it does: it emerges as the end product of the Kali Yuga’s long and troubled history with financial capitalism. America is the last and greatest in a long line of capitalist empires, and the corruption, suffering and and death its ruling oligarchy have brought about in its quest to make it a global superpower make them fitting personifications of the Collective Shadow.
In the initiation degrees of the ancient Mysteries, there came a time when each candidate had to undergo a confrontation with the Shadow. This adversary is born from the suppressed, unintegrated, and unassimilated aspects ourselves. These disrupt the mind’s ability to function at the level of wholeness. They block up and distort its psychic patterns, driving it into all manner of fixations, fetishes, and compulsive behaviors. Collectively, they serve as barrier blocking evolutionary growth and periodically we are forced to cleanse these blockages in the form of a Fight with the Shadow.
Mother Nature has a way of forcing mankind to evolve - to address the shortcomings and negative karma he has accumulated and brought forward with him from past. One of these ways she does this is through the periodic emergence of a person or event that confronts you as a perfect symbolic representation of your inner Shadow complexes. The Adversary is what ancient philosophers used to call the Dweller on the Threshold. It poses a real external threat to you, but the form it takes is highly symbolic of your own inner karmic baggage. This means that the key to defeating it outside is to first move inward and clear away the baggage it is personifying. You have the right the wrongs within before you can defeat the enemy who is guarding the gateway to the ladder of transcendence.
The oligarchy behind American Empire functions as a collective version of this Shadow adversary, representing on an institutional level the greed, egotism, and drive to power that most of us harbor within ourselves in some form or fashion. Therefore, to overcome the barrier it poses to the forward progression of our civilization, we will each at some point have to go through a personal process of self-exploration where we take a critical look at our personal relationship to this Adversary and consider what elements within ourselves it is projecting back at us.
From a philosophical standpoint, the Deep State behind American Empire functions as an initiatory instrument - the archetypal Dweller - designed to pose an existential test to humanity at the moment it prepares to transition into a new phase of its evolutionary development (signified by the Kali Yuga ending and a new Yuga sub-cycle beginning). Our civilization is set to undergo a significant transformation during this period; but before this transformation can occur, the Dweller must first be confronted and dealt with.
Without the widespread existence of the character flaws within ourselves that the Deep State personifies, its grip over us could not occur. This means that, to overcome the challenge it poses, we must turn inward and confront our own relationship with the evil that it represents. Building on this point, Manly Hall emphasizes that “we have to break up the old patterns. It is the only way we can free ourselves to build new patterns.” This requires “a complete breaking up of most of the intolerances we cherish.”
While the karmic roots of the Adversary we face today has its roots in Europe, the epicenter of its operations is now in America. Consequently, it is within the United States that the final battle against the Shadow must be fought and won.
Hall believes that “the natural temperament of our people is to be the greatest inventive and constructive genius of any people on Earth.” This genius “comes from the very earth beneath us here in the New World.” Preventing our realization of this potential is the Collective Shadow of financial capitalism, a parasite which has latched itself onto America and threatens to drive our civilization into self-destruction.
In this way, America finds itself torn between two opposing forces: “We have a competitive system coming down from the top, and a cooperative theory coming up from the very Earth beneath our feet. The struggle between these two forces is one of the greatest in the Western world, and that struggle must continue until the destiny or fate for which this continent was originally devised is fulfilled.”
Hall declares that “it is here, on this Western continent, that a great world sociological experiment must take place. By a curious destiny beyond human control, this continent demands, by reason of its vibratory forces, by the very archetypal pattern that caused this land to emerge from the primordial polar continent, that here the great economic experiment of the world must be played out." This is the “supreme challenge” we face - and "the international nation cannot be developed from a possibility into an actuality until it is solved, nor can world peace be achieved.”