The Love of Gold: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 49-55

Conspiracy theorists love gold. It makes the world go around...well the love of gold--according to David Mamet's 2001 film Heist. From their perspective paper currency is a fiction. Sure, you can have the paper money in your pocket, but you cannot tell another person what it is worth. The value of the money is based on something mysterious which they interpret as fiction because they do not understand it. It's strange because they also do not understand how the price of gold is set either. In the time that I am writing but a concept that would be utterly foreign to Cooper, they love crypto-currencies for the same reason. It somehow seems less arbitrary to them. 

Yet if you ask them the very basic question, "what is gold?" You'll get a response that gold is immune to inflation and thus gold-backed currencies are also immune to inflation. However, they are not. You can have inflation with gold-backed currencies all you have to do is keep printing more currency while not increasing the gold supply. There's some economic position that gold-backed economies are immune to the kind of hyperinflation that has been seen in places like Weimar Germany (the conspiracist's favorite example). Gold, though, is just as arbitrarily priced as anything else. Gold does have what Adam Smith would call a natural price in that you can use it for stuff. Gold is a metal which means it can be shaped into various tools, it conducts electricity, and it heavily resists corrosion. This last function is one appeal of its use as ornamentation. As a metal it is too soft to use as a reliable tool, it would break or bend to easily (just ask a Minecraft player), and other metals are much more plentiful that can conduct electricity at a better rate. Gold has a value beyond its use, this is the value in exchange. Gold has both, Crypto only has the latter. The perception is that gold's value is intrinsic to it, and that is why humans have fought wars, committed atrocities, and created empires around the substance. It could be that humans just like shiny things...but to the conspiracy theorist gold has a value given to it by the gods. Which is why they focus so hard on economic manipulation. It's easy to explain to one of their readers that the reason the economy is trash is because "they" won't let us use gold. 

Cooper is trying really hard to explain his worldview, and I'm going to give him credit on one thing: he's not demonizing Rothschild. He's just explaining, in a relatively moderate tone, what he thinks that Rothschild did. All Rothschild did was create a banking system that ran on currency rather than gold...but Rothschild did not do this. Banking is an old institution, no one person invented it. While I'll give him credit for not trotting out anti-Semitic tropes about the evil Jewish banker, it's absurd to claim that Rothschild invented a system to manipulate economies. This whole section is a mess of unrelated claims about shocking economies to...something. Even Cooper loses the thread here. He does make a swipe at UPC symbols. Claiming that they will be tattooed on us for identification. It's a nice reminder of a time when people were seriously afraid of those things...and I think up until recently Hobby Lobby was as well. 

Cooper wraps up his economic theories by claiming that what the Harvard Economic Research Project discovered was that economies obeyed the same laws as electricity. Here is his example, "human life in [sic] is measured in dollars, and that the electric spark generated when opening a switch connected to an active inductor is mathematically analogous to the initiation of war."

I thought we were talking about economies? I get what he, a Vietnam Vet, is trying to say. He's trying to say the same thing that American Socialists were saying in their resistance to World War I--those in charge measure war not by lives lost but by money spent. I'm sympathetic to this position. If we, as a state, had to measure war by the lives lost, had to read the names and look at the faces of those who died we might cease our tepid "support the troops" slogan and actually try to prevent war. 

Just like every conspiracy theorist, Cooper starts off with a good point and then goes in a weird direction with it. 

"Finally, because problems in theoretical economics can be translated very easily into problems in theoretical electronics, and the solution translated back again, it follows that only a book of language translation and concept definition needed to be written for economics. The remainder could be gotten from standard works on mathematics and electronics. This makes the publication of books on advanced economics unnecessary, and greatly simplifies project security."

I haven't skipped anything which would connect those two quotations. The intervening paragraph talks about the need for economics to create a model of the household. This is ironic because in Aristotle's book on economics, wherein he creates the subject (Adam Smith would make economics into what we understand the word to be now), he discusses solely the operation of a household. 

This long "observation" by Cooper, which we have to remind ourselves is allegedly from a secret government directive about silent wars. Even within the Cooper-verse this document doesn't make sense. The only people reading this first chapter are supposed to be recruits in the "silent war." Cooper was in the military, while imagine his first day in the Navy might have contained some historical information about the history of the Navy I doubt it contained a history of Naval theory and oceanic life. We're supposed to believe that recruits in the silent war need all of this information. 

The only thing that Cooper has right, is that high-powered computer devices make it easier to monitor economies, again though, he gets it wrong because he thinks that this is necessarily malicious. Cooper may have made this a bit personal, his finances were always in trouble. What electronic networking did was allow creditors to find people easier. In the past, credit card receipts were on paper. Your credit purchases took weeks to be processed by the banks and companies. Filmmaker Kevin Smith famously used this gap to buy film stock because a person could max out their card buying film at one store and immediately drive to another to buy more. There was no instant check on purchases. Cooper is complaining about this system, this is my speculation, because in tracking him they can deny him credit faster. 

Credit is the real target of Cooper's problem. His radio show "Hour of the Time" will also sell gold certificates in the same way that Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, and the doomsday set all do as well. He thinks he understands the economic information here but he doesn't. He's just grinding an axe at a system that he thinks has screwed him. The goal here, that he's laid out is, "Take control of the world by the use of economic "silent weapons" in a form of "quiet warfare" and reduce the economic inductance of the world to a safe level by a process of benevolent slavery and genocide."

This "conclusion" isn't borne out by anything he's written so far. He's just saying the word "silent weapon" but he hasn't described a single one of them. Either "they" do this or they create an open war destroying the world in the process. So even the evil conspirators believe that the world should be preserved, but I'm unsure of how quiet a war can be when it involves slavery and genocide.