Energy: Behold a Pale Horse; pg. 45-47

I often tell people that I have to be a little bit of an expert in everything. The claim here isn't that I am the smartest person in the room, but that I have to know about so many different subjects because I study conspiracy theories. My fellow PhDs who study the metaphysics of personal identity just have to know that one subject. They do know other things, because they teach other courses sure, I'm not ragging on them. For their work, the thing that is their chosen subject is just the one subject. The problem that I have is that I can't just know about conspiracy theories. I have to know about their subjects, the mainstream story that they are in opposition to. and the academic research on the meta-topic itself. In some cases, it's too much, people will ask me about conspiracy theory minutiae that takes me a long time to remember because there is so much. 

The further complication is that the conspiracy theorist themselves think that they are experts in everything. They aren't speculating they are declaring the truth. These declarations are the most infuriating when they make outlandish claims that are so general that they are not really saying anything.  Cooper is trying to tell us that there has been this war going on for 25 years, not only that, but it has been winning victories. Cooper has given us no details, only the general sense that something is being done to the public. C'mon, man, get to the point. 

Cooper claims that the center of this fight is energy. Which, ok, in the nuclear age that is going to be important. However, he threads together a strange description: 

"Energy is recognized as the key to activity on Earth. Natural science is the study of sources and control of natural energy, and social science, theoretically expressed as economics, is the study of sources and control of social energy. Both are bookkeeping systems: mathematics. Therefore, mathematics is the primary energy science. And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping."

What?! Cooper makes a large leap here in that he is claiming that if economics was the study of the social sciences or the study of the source and control of social energy (he is making both claims in the same sentence) that is how one could become a king since no one understands the math. Yet, none of that is true. Economics is the study of the movement and effect of financial wealth. I didn't read the entirety of Adam Smtih to not know that. Calling it a social science is kind of stretch, but that's a minor point. 

This is also frustrating because Cooper could make a good point here. He could point out that the rampant materialism which engulfed American culture has essentially put economics in charge via the bankers. Not "the bankers" but the actual bankers. Instead, he assigns a fictional definition to it so that it sounds ominous to people who don't understand the complicated math--which I include myself as a person who doesn't understand the math. I don't even know what to call the thing he's doing--is it posturing? Is it fear mongering? I honestly couldn't say. 

The goal of this quiet war is to shift the economy from the incompetent few to the competent elite and create a controlled economy. They will do this by: 

"In order to achieve a totally predictable economy, the low-class elements of the society must be brought under total control, i.e., must be housebroken, trained, and assigned a yoke and long-term social duties from a very early age, before they have an opportunity to question the propriety of the matter. In order to achieve such conformity, the lower-class family unit must be disintegrated by a process of increasing preoccupation of the parents and the establishment of government-operated day-care centers for the occupationally orphaned children."

Again, he starts strong and then completely fumbles at the end. I've been taught my entire life that my credit score was important for some reason. Having debt was bad, but without a certain amount of debt my credit score actually suffers. This strange balance is something that commercials indoctrinate us into so that we never question it. Why is new home construction part of the economic forecast on Planet Money but not the wage rate of the average worker? The system isn't questioned, but Cooper then goes on to discuss government operated orphanages for abandoned children. Perhaps Cooper realizes that he's toeing a socialist line here and has to create the weird Plato's republic style child rearing fantasy to remind his reader that they are opposing the destruction of American families. 

So far, this book is very weird. If you skip every other paragraph, it's almost a reasonable criticism of American society:

 "The quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort, so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible to the inferior class. With such an initial handicap, even bright lower class individuals have little if any hope of extricating themselves from their assigned lot in life."

Part of the system's goal is to underfund education amongst the lower classes. Yes, Cooper is right, but it's not part of a plan. The harm here does not come from evil it comes from indifference. Years and years of cutting taxes and spending on every program but the local police create just the problem that Cooper is describing. The difference is that he's ascribing malice where banality is the answer.

Now we finally, finally, get to the silent weapons in a section titled "Descriptive Introduction of the Silent Weapon." That's weird because the chapter is titled "Silent Weapons..." as in more than one. That's a minor problem but all Cooper tells us is that these weapons are social rather than physical and nearly impossible to defend against because we do not recognize them as weapons. He never explains what they are or even defines them but makes vague accusations about what they can do. Sigh, I long for hard claims rather than these boring generalities.  

He calls it a type of biological warfare but even that would be a physical thing. I'm beginning to think that Cooper's problem is just that he doesn't like the kids these days or that the world became a little too complicated for him and he wants to shift the blame for his ignorance on something malicious. It is a little too early to tell but so far this chapter is pointing at one of those two things.