Our Greatest Existential Threat

Is it disease? Climate change? Asteroid impact? Or something closer to home…

We are always being told about existential threats to humanity. It would seem they are lurking around every corner. We’ve heard a lot about existential threats in the past few years especially. Covid was, and according to some, still is an existential threat. Far right extremism has been earnestly dubbed an existential threat. ‘Whiteness’ is even an existential threat, didn’t you know? And of course, the big one – climate change!

Pandemics and other acts of God such as meteor strikes are popular tropes in the Hollywood pantheon. Malevolent AI comes up a lot too. Even alien invasion gets a look-in. They serve to terrify humans at the prosect of a threat from without – a cold and callous foe, advancing to destroy us for no discernible reason.

It’s the randomness of these threats that is so effective at scaring people – the way they can materialise out of nowhere like hideous apparitions, beyond our control, ruthless and inhuman and totally indifferent to our feelings. The spectre of terrorism was an effective political tool for this very reason.

We are scared of what we cannot see. Like the monster under the bed, the invisible pathogen, the undetected asteroid, and the anonymous hijacker drive fear into our hearts because they strike us as otherworldly, foreign, indeed – alien.

But what most fail to grasp is that the true existential threat to humanity is very visible, very familiar, and for many, loved and admired.

It’s true, AI is a worry, but the threat is still purely theoretical – much like climate change or aliens. And while pandemics do happen, experience (science) has shown us that they tend to burn themselves out before they can become truly existential.

The greatest and most imminent existential threat we humans face is none of the above, but the power elites who govern us.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the numbers.

To simplify things, let’s pick something that has actually happened and has an associated body count. Unlike the nebulous phantom of climate change, whose apocalyptic predictions are constantly revised, repackaged, and reimagined to keep us all guessing, pandemics have actually occurred.

Let’s look at the deaths associated with this favourite boogieman of the credulous classes and their overlords and compare these with deaths caused by war and genocide committed by human power elites in the past century.

We are told that in the last hundred or so years we have had two major pandemics: the Spanish flu of 1918, and of course, Covid. Now whether or not one wishes to class Covid as an act of God, or even as a legitimate pandemic, is another question – but so that we’re not seen to be twisting the facts to suit our own purpose, we’ll include Covid and its ostensible death toll.

The figures that follow are of course estimates, but I have used a range of sources and, where there is no clear historical consensus, cross referenced them to arrive at reasonable mid points.

It becomes immediately apparent that the number of human dead as a result of war and genocide committed by ruling elites since the early 20^th Century completely dwarfs those killed by our two big pandemics in the same timeframe. Indeed, the split is 84% to 16%.

Furthermore, these figures only consider the major wars and genocides, they do not count the thousands of smaller conflicts and political massacres that have occurred in the past century, and some of the estimates err on the side of extreme conservatism – the Iraq War for instance is said by many to have claimed a million Iraqi civilian lives alone.

Now, were one to take this a step further and declare that Covid was not an act of God, but a man-made pathogen (who could possibly believe such a crazy conspiracy theor… Uh, wait, what? https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a) then the numbers look more like this:

I want to stick with generally agreed upon statistics here but can’t resist taking it one step further.

The CDC reports that more than 672 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from 14 December 2020, through 1 March 2023, and VAERS received 19,476 preliminary reports of death (0.0029%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.

Let’s apply that percentage to the total number of vaccinated worldwide – 5.5 billion people.

5.5 billion x 0.0029% = 159,500.

Adverse events have been found to be underreported by 99%.

159,500 x 100 = 15,950,000.

Furthermore, in a situation such as we are facing – where virtually the entire global medical establishment is gaslighting its patients about the safety of the jab and in many cases (of which I’ve read scores of first-hand accounts here in Australia) outright refusing to report adverse events even when requested to – we may infer an ever greater margin of error.

But let’s just say 16 million.

Let this chart sink in for a minute:

Okay, 16 million dead from Covid jabs could be a stretch (for now, that is – we’ve yet to see what the long term effects will be).

But even if we were to take a more conservative estimate of a million or so, there is no shortage of other types of elite-engineered human carnage we could factor in to plug the gap, and then some, to bring the ratio up to an even nine-to-one.

We could lump in the hundreds of thousands of deaths from the opioid crisis – a direct result of Purdue Pharma’s criminal malfeasance in marketing oxycodone; and while we’re at it, why not the many millions worldwide who’ve died from dietary related diseases as a result of the sugar industry’s fraudulent fabrication of the Low-Fat fad, which drove obesity rates, heart disease and diabetes through the roof in the following decades.

Suffice to say, when compared to the spectre of PANDEMIC! so frenetically hyped by every pillar of the global establishment, deaths caused by the adventurism and gross profiteering of this very same establishment easily outstrip the former by 900%.

Yet generations have been massaged into believing that the greatest existential threats to humanity lurk in the dim periphery of the public sightline, in the netherworlds of microbiology, meteorology, and radical extremism. From the mouths of the very functionaries who deploy the B52s and the cruise missiles and who daily aggregate power away from the public and into the hands of the narrow stratum of bluebloods they truly represent, come ever shriller warnings about our impending existential crisis – a crisis that is always vague and elusive, and which only they have the power to protect us from.

People are becoming immune to the fear though. Like the addict, regular doses of any stimulus build tolerance in the brain of the recipient. Higher doses are then needed to elicit the same reaction.

This is why the climate change narrative is being so vigorously employed. It is the ultimate fear drug, so effective in its mechanism of action that incremental dosage increases are not even necessary. It remains highly potent at low, regular doses, so unthinkable is its implication. Yet it shares all the other traits of the popular existential threat: it is invisible, inhumane, imprecise, and implacable. It is always there, while not being there at all – a shadow on the wall, a rustle in the bushes, a monster under the bed of the petrified child.

But for this child the true danger most often lies not in the imagined terrors of the witching hour but in the smiling daylight approach of a regular looking person – a teacher perhaps, a family friend, or even a parent. And the same holds true for every demographic: most people are assaulted or killed by someone they know.

It is no different at the macro level: For we, the common people of this world, our greatest existential threat is not some far-off foreign boogieman, or one-in-a-billion act of nature, but our own familiar luminaries – both political and corporate.

The great irony is, they view us in exactly the same way.

This is why they are so invested in preventing us from coming to this realisation, and in bamboozling us with scary stories about killer microbes, trace gases, hoards of neo nazis, giant meteors and alien invasion. Because they know that if we identify the true threat, the party is over.

This is why every Hollywood disaster movie is about mankind uniting under the leadership of one three-letter agency or another to defeat some grotesque inhuman threat from without. Very rarely do we see a movie where human power elites themselves create a situation that poses an existential threat to the species – and if we do, they are always cast as cartoonish villains who are ultimately defeated by the man in the white hat from the government.

And even as Biden and NATO cling drunkenly to their Churchillian fantasies of unconditional surrender, shunting us closer to nuclear annihilation than we have ever been, we are still encouraged to believe that an inert gas which is fundamental to life on this planet is going to be the thing that ends us.

The body count to-date should speak for itself, but people have a funny way of rationalising mass murder, even enthusiastically applauding it.

Thus, I echo previous entreaties as I cry into the rising gale – put not your trust in princes, my friends, and never forget, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.