Illumination: the Secret Religion

The Dialectic

Illuminism is based on dialectical thinking, so it's crucial for those who seek to understand the religion of the Illuminati to first understand the nature of dialectics. Dialectical logic - based on the synthesis of opposites and the resolution of contradictions - is usually contrasted with Aristotelian logic, which is analytical rather than synthetic, and is based on highlighting and emphasizing contradictions.

Aristotelian logic is centred on two key concepts: the Principle of Non-Contradiction and the Principle of Excluded Middle.

Bertrand Russell asserted that there are three "Laws of Thought":

1. Law of Identity: 'Whatever is, is.'

2. Law of Non-Contradiction: 'Nothing can both be and not be.' (For example, it cannot both be raining and not raining.)

3. Law of Excluded Middle: 'Everything must either be or not be.' (For example, it is either raining or it is not.)

Simple-minded people are fixated on such Laws, but they are in fact the Laws of Being and they themselves are contradicted by the Laws of Becoming. Aristotelian logic, the bedrock of Western thinking, lends itself to reductive, analytical thinking - in breaking everything down, and separating it from everything else. But this is an illusion. The universe, as Eastern thinking has always emphasized, is an interconnected whole. The type of logic that best deals with "becoming" rather than "being" is dialectical logic.

The Illuminist Heraclitus is known as the father of dialectical thinking. His type of thinking reached its apex in the philosophy of another great Illuminist, Hegel. Dialectical thinking is all about synthesis, about unifying opposites. The key idea of Hegelian dialectics is that everything contains a fundamental inner, implicit contradiction that will lead to the contradiction eventually being explicitly expressed. Thus when it is raining, the implicit contradiction that it will stop raining is already starting to manifest itself, and, in due course, the rain will indeed stop. There will be a time during the transition between raining and not raining when the distinction between the two states cannot be clearly drawn. Aristotelian logic emphasizes the separate phases of the process, while dialectical logic emphasizes the interconnectedness of the apparent contradictions - they are part of an ongoing process of becoming rather than separate types of being.

So, those people who are obsessed with "contradiction", those who think they're clever when they identify contradictions and try to use them as weapons in some sort of logical battle, merely demonstrate that they are locked into one type of reductive thinking and fail to understand the big picture. People who can't see beyond Aristotelian logic will never understand Illuminism. In the world of dialectics - of becoming - none of Russell's three laws of thought truly apply. They are black and white limits whereas "becoming" is concerned with shades of grey.

There is a famous problem of logic known as the Heap Paradox. It concerns removing grains of sand from a heap. The issue is at what point will the heap no longer be a heap? How will Aristotelian logic help you to solve that?

"Fuzzy logic" abandons the binary opposition of true and false and instead introduces new categories such as "very true", "fairly true", "reasonably false", "completely false" etc. It is far more nuanced, introducing shades of grey where only black and white existed before.

Quantum Logic introduces a new form of logic based on Quantum Mechanics where a "superposition of states" applies. Quantum particles can be in two or more places at once; they can be in two or more states, no matter how contradictory. So much for Aristotelian logic.

If you want to understand life, you have to be able to use different types of logic; whatever is most appropriate to the situation. If "contradiction" is the only tool in your box, you will get nowhere. So, please, to all those people who comb our site looking for contradictions, why don't you do yourself a big favour and try to tune into the higher logic of becoming, the logic of dialectics?

A final aspect of dialectical thinking that must be appreciated is that it can lead to higher and higher states of synthesis where the contradictions (thesis and antithesis) present in each dialectical cycle are progressively refined and resolved until, eventually, a complete synthesis is achieved where contradiction is, finally, properly abolished. This represents the apex, the Absolute, of the dialectical process.

9/11 - What Really Happened?

The "neocon" agenda of America and its support for Zionism is well known, but that doesn't mean that the American government was behind 9/11.

In fact the truth of 9/11 could not be simpler. Osama bin Laden did it and Bush and company were hoping he would do something of that nature to give them a pretext to invade oil-rich Iraq, give regional support to Israel, and try to start converting Islamic countries to puppet capitalist democracies under America's control, thus extending the OWO's power to regions of the world not yet fully under its heel.

The key to the whole controversy is the collapse of the Twin Towers and Tower 7. The conspiracy theorists say that the hijacked planes couldn't possibly have brought the towers down, therefore they must have been expertly demolished. Therefore it was an inside job and therefore the American government was responsible.

But the collapse of the towers is completely irrelevant. America would have relied on the fact that four airplanes were hijacked and used in suicide operations as sufficient pretext for their subsequent foreign policy (military) response. Whether the twin towers fell down or not would not have made the slightest difference and therefore could not have been part of any conspiracy.

To repeat, if everything had happened exactly as it did, except the Twin Towers and Tower 7 did not come down, the American response would not have been one iota different. The hijacked planes slamming into highly symbolic American buildings and killing American citizens was the only excuse the American government needed to carry out its policy. In other words, the collapse of the Twin Towers and Tower 7 - the so-called smoking gun - is completely irrelevant in terms of the government's alleged conspiracy. Since the smoking gun is irrelevant, it's crazy to conclude that it furnishes certain proof of government involvement.

Why would the government be so dumb as to carry out needless and dangerous demolitions when it already had the excuse it needed for a war? Any American officials allegedly sitting in a room planning a false flag attack would never have said, "Right, it's not good enough simply to hijack planes and crash them into buildings, horrifically killing hundreds of people; we also need to demolish the Twin Towers, and, hey, why not demolish Tower 7 and Tower 5 while we're at it, even though nothing is actually going to hit them and it will look as suspicious as hell?"

It's INSANE.

The collapse of the Twin Towers and Tower 7 is the biggest red herring in history. The buildings collapsed for reasons that are now quite well understood in engineering terms. No demolitions took place.

American policy would have to have been dependent on the collapse of the Twin Towers for a conspiracy theory to have any credibility i.e. it is being asserted by the "Truth Movement" that America would not have responded as it did if the Towers did not fall. Clearly, this is entirely false - whether the Towers fell or not was neither here nor there in terms of providing a pretext for a war. Hence there was no government conspiracy.

American support for Israel is a disgrace, and the invasion of Iraq was a disgrace, but that doesn't mean that the American government committed 9/11. The fact that 9/11 suited their agenda doesn't make them guilty.

All thinking people should analyze the facts rationally. Any intelligent person should be able to detect a myriad of holes in the 9/11 conspiracy theory.

9/11 was, in truth, an unsophisticated, low-tech attack by 19 Muslim suicide bombers. Bin Laden wanted to strike back against America and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Airplanes had never been used as suicide weapons before, so America was taken by surprise. What's so hard to grasp about that?

There are many videos and articles on the internet that debunk those who claim that the American government carried out this act. The people who hold the belief that the American government was responsible tend to be libertarian fanatics (Ayn Rand's mad fan club) who hate the American government and wish it nothing but harm. They are prepared to believe anything that points towards the guilt of the American government, and to ignore anything that does not. They are not "truth seekers", but merely people with a political axe to grind and a burning hatred of the American government and any interference by the state in their lives.

We are not in any way sympathetic towards the American government - quite the reverse - but that does not mean we will support any theory that is refuted by all available evidence. There is not one shred of credible evidence that the American government carried out this act. There is, however, a great deal of evidence that they knew something like this was being planned, and they took no serious steps to prevent it. But these are two very different positions.

However, it's no disaster that many Americans believe that their government was capable of perpetrating 9/11. And this is exactly what Zeitgeist plays on. The "game" is to bring as many people as possible to a point where they no longer have any confidence in their government and no faith in the system. Only then is real change possible.

The Zeitgeist 9/11 sequence is designed to provoke you and get you to think. It has proved entirely successful. But anyone who, after some reflection, really believes that these buildings were rigged for demolition has lost the plot.

Here is a debate between a member of the Illuminati and an expert conspiracy theorist. Judge for yourself who gets the better of the argument:

Twin Towers

Conspiracy Theorist (CT): There is NO WAY that the twin towers came down as a result of the plane impacts. Preposterous. Jet fuel does not burn hot enough to cut steel. Thermite does. It's the standard demolition explosive and the collapses do indeed look like demolitions. You can see the flashes of the thermite charges going off in sequence and there are photos of the site afterwards showing thermite-cut steel girders among the wreckage. Then there's the smoke; jet fuel burns with black smoke, thermite with white. The black smoke dissipates, then the white smoke goes off and the towers come down. And that's without any Conspiracy Theory. That's just common sense.

That's the other reason I don't believe in terrorists; if they meant it, they wouldn't concoct some wacky super-villain scheme involving four simultaneous hijacked suicide planes. It's far too elaborate; why not put three teams of four guys in vans, equipped with appropriate explosives, to do a complete circuit of a city and cut every road, bridge and rail line in a single night? Billions in economic damage, low to zero loss of life, minimal logistics. For the effort and resources that went into 9/11, they could do that to every city in England in one night; War on Terror over and they won.

OUR COMMENT (OC): Imagine the planning committee for the 9/11 conspiracy (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc)…

"Right, guys, we're going to use 20 Muslim fanatics to hijack four planes using, er, box cutters. Then we're going to have the twin towers rigged to blow. Those rag heads had better do a good job or our demolition squad will look a bit dumb! We'll also have the Pentagon rigged for explosion, and the White House and Capitol Hill too (glad no one noticed while the demolition squad were setting up their stuff). Right, we'll also take out Tower 7 because we have some dodgy Enron records there. Might as well get rid of Tower 5 while we're at it. In fact, let's clear the whole site. We took out insurance, guys, didn't we? How many deaths do we want? - er, anything over 100 will be fine, but thousands would be much better. Better make sure all of the important guys are out of the Pentagon, and - obviously - the White House - don't want to be hoist with our own petard, huh? Then we can launch a full-scale attack on those Muslim bastards in Afghanistan and Iraq and grab their oil, and anything else they've got. We'll be helping our Zionist buddies, of course. It's the ultimate win-win situation. A few of our people will have to be sacrificed, but big deal."

Doesn't this sound a bit far-fetched? No sophisticated conspiracy plan would ever involve something as primitive as box cutters, yet we know these were the weapons used (together with fake bombs). This was no grand, well-oiled, massively funded operation. It was a bunch of near-amateurs using whatever they could smuggle past airport security. If there had been a genuine conspiracy they would have been allowed to take guns and real bombs on board.

And the twentieth hijacker never even made it, having been previously arrested by the authorities. (Strange how the American conspirators sabotaged their own conspiracy by arresting this man.) He's in jail now - having confessed to the whole thing. If his case had been properly handled, 9/11 would never have happened:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacarias_Moussaoui#Capture

"Had that happened, the Report opined, the U.S. might conceivably have disrupted or derailed the September 11 attacks altogether."

The fact that George W Bush was visibly astonished when he heard the 9/11 news demonstrates that he was fully in on the plan and gave it his personal authorization, doesn't it? Er, doh!

The Muslims had previously targeted the Twin Towers - the failed truck-bomb attack of 1993. Was that part of the conspiracy too?

CT: For me, the War on Terror stands or falls on 9/11. If the official story is true then everything that's happened since, massively profitable as it has been for the supposedly aggrieved party, the US, and much as it has cost us in 'Civil Liberties', which used to be called 'Rights', is totally reasonable.

If it were true, then OF COURSE we'd embark on the current course. Except that line of thinking leads pretty quickly to the idea that a good deal of modern history is actually wrong, governments don't lie to people, the only wars we've ever fought are just wars and Johnny Foreigner has it coming for one reason or another; in this case, "They hate our freedom."

OC: Your entire stance seems to be predicated on the necessity of false flag attacks in order for governments to justify their actions. Are you actually willing to accept that Western nations can ever be attacked by non-Westerners? Don't you think plenty of people have plenty of reasons for wanting to attack America and the West? The West doesn't need to perform any false flag attacks, frankly.

CT: What we're being told is that Osama and Omar were sitting in their cave one day, having a bit of a break from oppressing women and worshipping Allah, when they conceived a grand scheme to destroy the Great Satan.

OC: It was a propaganda stunt for the TV cameras and to rally and inspire the Islamic holy warriors all over the world. Slamming hijacked planes into prestigious buildings isn't a "grand scheme". It's a crude extension of the pro-Palestinian plane hijackings of the 1970s and 80s.

CT: Perhaps they were smoking opium, I don't know, but they're these two guys who just happen to be ex-mercenaries each in command of a gang of fanatical followers, and they start kicking this idea around for blowing up the World Trade Center. And all the basic questions get answered; fanatical suicide commandos: CHECK; network of agents already in place in US to ease infiltration: CHECK; insider with a commercial airline to get intel and flying lessons: CHECK; budget for all this: CHECK; and they're ready to go just like that; America is doomed. Until Omar says to Osama, "Hey, after the WTC goes down what then?" Osama replies, "Why then, all praise to Allah!"

OC: That's pretty much how it went down! Except this had been planned for years. Ever heard of sleeper cells? How expensive is it to send twenty Muslims to America? Bin Laden's millions would certainly have covered it. Suicide bombers? There are thousands of them queuing up to martyr themselves! Have you not been watching the news for the last ten years?

They did it for the same reason that Palestinian suicide bombers go to Israel and achieve counterproductive outcomes - pure desperation. Also, news flash - these people really believe in martyrdom and in getting on the fast-track to Allah for their allocation of virgins! Winning isn't the point - it's showing Allah that you have faith that is the most important thing. Christians worship a Jewish carpenter who was hung on a cross - great plan, that one. Shia Muslims idolise a guy who was surrounded and slaughtered by his enemies. The Serbians revere Kosova - a battle they lost, the British the Somme, the Scots Flodden and Culloden etc. Look at the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Little Big Horn, Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, the Irish Easter uprising etc. Glorious defeat is inspirational and can often trigger real and meaningful change in the long term. It's better than getting shafted forever.

The charge that the American government perpetrated 9/11 could not be more serious. It is high treason demanding the death penalty and the overthrow of the whole American system of government. Why would anyone buy into the most disturbing conclusion imaginable if the evidence is weak? The official story doesn't seem wacky - the idea of the American government deliberately killing its own innocent citizens certainly does.

CT: I don't think that 9/11 was a grand conspiracy concocted by Bush et al, so much as that the origins of it were in Washington and that the CIA had a hand in it all; otherwise I don't see how these Afghani troglodytes could possibly have pulled it off. and I don't think putting thermite in the building would have been a big deal; Navy SEALS dressed as workmen? Special Forces guys would not talk. But I'm speculating as to how; I just see those explosives going off inside the windows and I see how the buildings fell, and I know that jet fuel cannot bring down a skyscraper. Were they piloting the plane? Different question, obviously someone was, and he must have been suicidal. It would just be so much easier to get him in there and teach him to fly if the CIA helped.

OC: The Taliban didn't do anything apart from provide training camps to Bin Laden, and give him a guarantee of protection. Bin Laden sent a small group of his suicide fanatics (like the Islamic Assassins of history) to the States to carry out a low-tech attack using a brand new weapon sure to take the enemy by complete surprise - suicide hijacking. There's no mystery, no puzzle, no false flag component. Bin Laden had both the capability (the money, the resources, the suicide hijackers), and the motive - he was already one of America's most wanted enemies before 9/11. Bill Clinton had tried to assassinate him. He was behind the bombings of the American embassies in Africa. This guy's fingerprints were all over 9/11 in an irrefutable way. You could argue, in Conspiracy Theory world, that he was actually a CIA operative, ordered by Bush to carry out this attack against America. Then again, you can argue anything you like in CT world.

CT: And then, next question, how? By hijacking four planes... desperate and daft.

OC: Desperate, yes. Daft? How so? It worked brilliantly. It is still hailed by Muslims everywhere as a great blow against the Satanic West. And are you implying that the hijackings had nothing to do with the American government's conspiracy? After all, why would they make a dangerous and daft act the sine qua non of the conspiracy? But haven't you just shot yourself in the foot?

CT: These guys are desert fighters, they fight in the desert; crossing half the world in an elaborate plot worthy of Sax Rohmer to strike a purely symbolic blow against the Great Satan... it's like something cooked up by Fu Manchu, the opener to a grand scheme involving the heroine trade and the bold forces of Interpol, backed up by our Yankee allies, the CIA, off to shoulder the 'White Man's Burden'.

OC: The hijackers were middle-class, westernised Saudi Arabians. The Palestinians hijacked loads of planes. Aren't they Arabs like the Saudi Arabians? The only new ingredient was the suicide angle. Bin Laden would have been delighted with this plan, and with its outcome. He's not Fu Manchu!

CT: There are some who think it was a huge media scam, the towers were hit by missiles or nuked from the basement, and that the planes were put in by CGI on the news. Now that's a Conspiracy. I have a friend who thinks they were demolished afterwards, that the smoke and so-on was literally a smokescreen. I've tried to convince him otherwise.

OC: This is exactly what happens when CTers are let loose.

CT: Israel IS allied to the Great Satan and much nearer, besides being smaller and hated in its own right by 99% of the Muslim world. Why didn't they attack Israel?

OC: They've been trying to get Israel since 1948!!!!! The time had come when they decided that it was better to attack the paymaster - the USA.

CT: And if Bush, Cheney et al are callous enough to spin a big fat dollar out of the War on Terror, simply using 9/11 as an excuse handed to them by happy chance, then they're more than nasty enough to engineer the plot in the first place.

OC: That's hardly an airtight argument!

CT: Bush needn't even have known; we could be looking at a modern Thomas Beckett scenario; an unguarded remark by Bush to the wrong CIA agent (and he has dropped some clangers), and all those Black Ops guys swing into action.

OC: There was no accident about Beckett's death!!! And no one would take a decision like 9/11 without the highest possible authority, signed in triplicate. There are no rogue units doing ludicrous things on that scale. It would mean the death penalty and perpetual infamy for you if you got it wrong and were caught. What's your excuse going to be? - "Oh, I thought the President had given me an order by winking at me!" Yeah, right.

CT: I don't see how these Afghani troglodytes could possibly have pulled it off.

OC: They didn't. It was middle class, well-educated Saudi Arabian fanatics.

CT: And I don't think putting thermite in the building would have been a big deal; Navy SEALS dressed as workmen?

OC: You think blowing up three thousand of your own citizens is standard Special Forces drill, do you? "Hi dear, just back from work - boy, that thermite is good. Killed three thousand scumbag Americans today."

"But, honey...you're an American too."

"Well, I was given my orders. You know what it's like."

"Sure I do, honey. Put your feet up. Bottle of Bud? Want to watch American Idol?"

Yeah, right.

CT: I simply don't believe the official story on 9/11; skyscrapers don't collapse from fire. Everything else is detail, the basic fact is it would be a freakish miracle, on top of the attacks happening at all, for the towers to collapse.

OC: So, now we have it. The entire basis of your case is that you are a self-proclaimed expert on civil engineering and materials science. If a jet were flown into any tower on earth, the tower wouldn't collapse, you say. You know that for a fact. So, all of the recognized civil engineers and material scientists who support the official version are liars and are part of the conspiracy. I think I'd be more inclined to support the experts than the speculators.

Because you don't believe in skyscrapers collapsing after being hit at high speed by jets with full fuel-loads, you are prepared to believe that America hired Bin Laden to get a group of suicidal hijackers together to attack America - to destroy the Twin Towers, the White House/Capitol Hill and the Pentagon? (Oh, and the Navy Seals had to be inside the Twin Towers soon afterwards with thermite to bring the buildings down. Er, why exactly? The false flag attack had already worked. Why bring the towers down? Gilding the lily, surely? American reaction would have been exactly the same regardless of whether the towers came down so deliberately bringing the towers down is, frankly, absurd, pointless and incredibly risky. Which great American strategist said, months in advance of 9/11, "Oh once our guy Bin Laden's done his stuff, let's bring the frigging towers down. That 'ill show 'em.") I think I'll go with the skyscrapers falling down on their own scenario.

Your whole case is that it was somehow necessary for the Twin Towers to be brought down. As if anyone cares. It wouldn't have made ANY DIFFERENCE AT ALL to me whether the towers came down, and nor to the American people. It was the hijacked suicide planes crashing into the towers that 9/11 was all about. Your whole conspiracy theory is based on a meaningless technical curiosity that the twin towers collapsed in the manner of a controlled demolition. So what? Are you telling me that the American reaction was based on the collapse of the Twin Towers and not on the fact that they were struck by suicidal Islamic hijackers? That's what I call a crazy theory. Since the American reaction was not predicated on the fall of the towers - everything would have proceeded in precisely the same way had they not collapsed - the authorities plainly weren't involved. Same goes for Tower 7. You've been chasing the wrong hare.

Just to reiterate. Your case is based on a disbelief that steel acts as if cut when subjected to a massive impact, a huge explosion, an intense jet-fuel fire, and the weight of a hundred floors of incredibly heavy concrete. But, as I've said, the collapse of the towers is irrelevant, and clearly would have formed no part of any false flag operation. So, there is no reason to disbelieve the official story, is there? You don't disagree that the planes that slammed into the twin towers were viable killing machines that slaughtered hundreds on their own account. So, were the hijackers fake Islamic terrorists bravely giving their lives for the great CIA? What planet do CTers inhabit? Whatever happened to Occam's Razor?

CT: The Towers were built to resist an airplane crash and fires.

OC: CTers have a touchingly high regard for the infallibility of engineers and scientists, except of course when they contradict the CTers, at which point they become part of the conspiracy. Impact tests and fire predictions are based on many assumptions and computer simulations. The more data that goes into the models the better. Next time, the models will be much more accurate since they have all that 9/11 data now.

As everyone knows, a structure is only as strong as its weakest link. What's wrong with the official version?...

"The report concluded that the fireproofing on the Twin Towers' steel infrastructures was blown off by the initial impact of the planes and that, if this had not occurred, the towers would likely have remained standing. This was confirmed by an independent study by Purdue University. W. Gene Corley, the director of the original investigation, commented that 'the towers really did amazingly well. The terrorist aircraft didn't bring the buildings down; it was the fire which followed. It was proven that you could take out two thirds of the columns in a tower and the building would still stand.' The fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, making the floors sag. The sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns to the point where exterior columns bowed inward. With the damage to the core columns, the buckling exterior columns could no longer support the buildings, causing them to collapse.

CT: Special Forces guys would not talk.

OT: Yes they would. An American helicopter pilot turned his guns on his own troops at the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam. He reported them all to the authorities. Do you think Special Forces guys are psychopaths? They're elite soldiers, not people who unquestioningly go around killing their own friends, relatives and fellow citizens.

CT: If my argument boils down to a non-sequitur then yours is based on a fallaciously high burden of proof. You're working from the position that the official story is automatically the truth and requiring a level of evidence to refute it far in excess of what you could present in its support.

OC: The official story has been verified in the following ways:

1) Government commissions.

2) The trial of the "20th hijacker".

3) The court of general public opinion.

4) The prima facie events of the day.

5) The admissions of Osama bin Laden.

6) The delighted reaction of PLO supporters on 9/11.

7) The extensive debunking of the debunkers.

8) General scientific and engineering opinion of the academic community.

9) Common sense.

10) The prevailing political situation.

11) Occam's Razor.

None of these is infallible, of course...but they constitute a high bar for the CTers to surpass. The CTers can't offer a case that amounts to much less than the evidence supplied by the official position and expect to be taken seriously. You are being challenged to present a case that is as persuasive as the official version. You are not being subjected to a higher requirement.

All of the points you have put forward have already been comprehensively debunked. Look at these, for example:

Your Thermite theory:

Your Tower 7 theory:

Your Pentagon theory:

These are just a small sample, but they are vastly more persuasive than the CT case.

Here's a one minute debunking:

Also, if the CTers show themselves susceptible to the sort of thinking that lends itself to invisible, pan-dimensional aliens, hollow earth, Nibiru, etc...they have put themselves outside the bounds of logic and science and placed themselves firmly in the religious camp. The official case does not rely on anything outwith conventional, widely accepted science and engineering practice.

CT: Am I required to be an expert in engineering (or indeed military history, politics, guerrilla warfare, etc, etc) to make common sense observations? No, not at all. My assertion was not that steel does not behave as if cut etc; jet fuel does not burn at a sufficiently high temperature to cut steel. That is a fact. To obviate that, you would need to prove that back draft from the fireball combined with the air-con in the building to focus the flame to a cutting torch. Conceivable, but entirely impossible to prove and highly unlikely to occur in both buildings, while giving no explanation for Tower 7. But that's what would have to happen for burning jet fuel to cut steel.

OC: The common sense case is the opposite of your one. Where's your evidence that steel was cut? That's supposition, not fact. Check the debunking material which shows that 9/11 workers used high-temperature torches in the clean-up operation. How can you differentiate this type of steel cutting from what you propose? See, for example:

http://www.motorsportsartist.com/911truthiness/?p=9

CT: Jet fuel does not burn at a sufficiently high temperature to cut steel.

OC: No one said it did. The question is whether the circumstances of the event can lead to the collapse of the steel framework. You have to establish that they cannot: a commission of experts has already found that they can. Rather than address the findings of the commission, you will simply claim that they are part of the conspiracy. You are refusing to engage with the facts. There is no evidence that any steel was cut prior to clean-up operations commencing. Also...how would you differentiate cut steel (thermite does not produce laser cuts as you seem to believe) from steel that has been severed by a huge shearing force? (a tower collapsing!)

CT: I also made no mention of Navy SEALS in the building AFTER the planes; that's just silly. It would be quite simple for special forces to enter the building months in advance among genuine contractors during normal renovation. That's easy; lay the charges in advance. The other idea is that high-tech modern Ninjas assailed the burning towers in the midst of the crisis (possibly parachuting in from the invisible fifth plane), to set thermite charges and somehow escape the building's subsequent collapse. That would be a suicide mission or the plot of a really bad action movie (I'm imagining a team-up featuring Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, Brad Pitt, Vin Diesel and The Rock). The argument that special ops couldn't or wouldn't do that is fallacious; they can and do perform those kind of missions on enemy nations. If ordered to do so, they would attack a friendly target; soldiers are trained not to reason why, just to obey. The question is were those orders given, and if so, why?

OC: If the thermite explosives were planted beforehand, how could the bombers be sure that the bombs wouldn't malfunction and detonate unexpectedly, as many do? How could the government possibly explain that one? What if the materials degraded? What is your timescale for when the thermite was planted? The day before? (What if the weather was bad next day and planes couldn't fly?) Six months before? Were they to be detonated by timer or remote control? What if something went wrong with the timers or detonation signal? Also, why didn't the bombers detonate the thermite as soon as the planes hit (in an attempt to make it look as though the impact and explosion brought down the towers)? Why wait an hour? What agenda did a delay serve?

Soldiers are trained to obey lawful orders...not insane orders that would represent high treason against their nation and merit the death penalty if they were caught. You have an extremely odd idea about soldiers. Do you imagine the SS would have exterminated ordinary German citizens in the death camps? It's ridiculous. You kill your perceived enemies, not your fellow citizens. There is no military group on earth that would obey orders to kill its own people, other than in incidents involving serious riots and widespread disorder. Give me a single example from history where, in peacetime, soldiers have killed their own citizens on a huge scale without one iota of provocation. Sure, soldiers are not the friends of the people and will kill them in certain situations, but not in the circumstances of 9/11.

No one gave any such orders...no soldier would ever carry out such orders to kill thousands of his own countrymen without any attempt at justification...so there is no "why" except in the minds of the CTers. If 9/11 was in fact a false flag attack, no conceivable purpose would have been served by bringing down the towers. The pretext for an aggressive response by America was furnished by the two planes hitting the two towers, not by the towers coming down. No covert operation would carry out needless and highly risky actions. What if the hijackings failed and no planes stuck? What would the covert ops group have done then? Detonated regardless? Left their explosives indefinitely? Tried another hijacking another day? None of this makes any sense. Think it through. Provide a sensible scenario in accordance with sane covert operations thinking. What was the contingency plan? Why demolish towers for no useful reason? Remember, elite soldiers would have to sign up to this and carry out the detailed planning. So, once again, why was the collapse of the twin towers a necessary component of this plot? Could it have succeeded without this being done? If so, why do it? Weren't the plane strikes sufficient? Why not? What was the military reason for bringing down the towers? Why expend resources and take risks on this task? You must plausibly demonstrate why the whole operation hinged on this - because the main part of your case seems to be your disbelief that towers can collapse.

CT: The 'why' would be money; you said you can see no reason why America would want to stage a false flag attack and no benefit derived since. Strange, because it should be pretty obvious that the budgets of police, military and intelligence agencies have sky-rocketted since 9/11, and 'Anti-Terrorism' can now be used by any petty official to enforce any petty injunction (such as banning trainspotters because photographing trains poses a 'security risk'). I should have thought these were taken as read, that 9/11 was the catalyst event to the War on Terror and has been used to justify the immensely profitable wars of invasion being waged worldwide.

OC: After an attack on America, all of the things you have mentioned would happen i.e. budgets would go up for all of these groups. You can't argue that because budgets have gone up this must mean that a false flag attack was carried out. America is withdrawing from Iraq having failed in all of its strategic objectives...Iraq has not become a puppet American state in the Middle East, a friend and ally of Israel, a beacon of glorious American capitalist democracy in the Islamic world, a supplier of copious cheap oil to America. America will also withdraw from Afghanistan. The wars, especially in Iraq, were exceptionally unpopular...and extremely costly in terms of the hard-pressed taxpayers. The American military has emerged with little credit. The CIA has been mocked and ridiculed. America was following a neocon agenda that, in particular, was very keen to target Iraq. If conspirators were conducting a false flag attack, they would have made sure that Iraq was the unambiguous main suspect with its hands all over the murder weapon - the 9/11 event. In fact, there are no links between Iraq and 9/11.

What you describe is the most half-arsed, unbelievable, sloppy, ill-defined, confused and confusing false flag operation ever launched in human history. No expert in covert operations would ever subscribe to such a shambles. Read Clausewitz. They teach him at West Point. For 9/11 to be a false flag attack would mean that every part of military wisdom had been flouted. No military person would ever carry out 9/11, on military grounds alone never mind anything else.

CT: Motive, I can prove; 'Mens Rea', guilty mind, our suspects (Bush or Bin Laden)... both have that; money, money, money.

OC: Money is "guilty mind"? Do you mean that Bush and Bin Laden were in desperate need of money, hence had to carry out this action to get money? How would Bin Laden get any money out of this, and wasn't he a rich man anyway? Clearly, the desire for money was no part of Bin Laden's thinking. As for Bush - a very rich man from a very rich family, what does he need money for?

CT: Actus Reas is the problem; guilty deed. The only actual facts are that the WTC towers were hit by two planes and subsequently collapsed. Those are facts because virtually the whole world saw the events unfold on the news and there's a bloody big crater to prove that the towers are indeed gone. Everything else is speculation, supposition and rumour. I personally think that the impossibility of cutting steel with jet fuel is a fact, but I'm aware that experts have come forward on both sides to support or refute that."

OC: Far more experts are on the side of the official verdict. Far more evidence is on the side of the official verdict. The conspiracy theory makes no sense.

CT: On the other you have a conspiracy theory. That the official story is in itself a conspiracy theory goes unremarked.

OC: There is no such situation. The official version makes perfect sense. The conspiracy theory is nothing more than a bizarre assemblage of minor details, virtually all of which have been accounted for, and the remainder are covered by the fog of any massive disaster where, for sure, odd, unexpected things will happen.

Why is the official version itself a conspiracy theory if it accords with all known facts and is supported by virtually everyone other than the CTers? There's only one conspiracy theory...and it's yours.

At most, 9/11 might be called a concealed false flag attack. Bush wanted something like that to happen to justify his neocon agenda in the Middle East, but he certainly wasn't the Prime Mover of 9/11. That was Osama bin Laden.

Pentagon

CT: Are we seriously expected to believe that a rogue plane can get close enough to crash on the Pentagon's lawn? Utterly ridiculous; it's the most heavily defended building on the face of the Earth, the entire Chinese Air Force would have a hard time getting in sight of the place. It's ringed with SAM sites and AA guns for miles, not to mention having a massive garrison and the entire USAF waiting quite literally in the wings. And yet somehow there was not even one soldier with a rocket launcher available to shoot down a low-flying rogue passenger plane. The "Official Story" is so full of holes, I could use it as a net.

OC: Why would the Pentagon be the most heavily defended building on earth? Defended from whom? Are America's neighbours, the Mexicans and the Canadians, likely to attack it any time soon? By the time the Chinese Air Force got within thousands of miles of the USA, the two nations would be in a full-scale war with each other. A hostile aircraft carrier couldn't get anywhere near the USA. Submarine missile launch would be dealt with at the coast. It would be a complete waste of time and money to give the Pentagon special security. Besides, it's a reinforced building and it takes a hell of a lot to do any damage to it. They have little more than the usual barriers and security checks. They were taken completely by surprise by the hijacked plane attack, and who wants to shoot down a commercial airline over central Washington DC? It made complete sense to allow the Pentagon to be struck rather than shoot down the plane - little damage was done and far fewer people died than if the plane had been shot down over the city. No country at the time viewed internal flights with any degree of suspicion. That's what made the attack so effective.

CT: The Pentagon is the HQ of the US Armed Forces; it's the nerve centre of the world's second biggest war-machine. China has quietly outgrown the US in raw military force in recent years. It better be the most heavily defended building on Earth!

It's certainly heavily defended; there will be air AA guns and SAM sites for miles around, doubtless very well concealed. Likewise, there is a huge staff and armed garrison there, and most infantrymen are trained in man-launched SAM missiles. The Pentagon of course has direct and immediate contact with the HQ of the US Air Force, not to mention the White House and the US Navy. So if they did decide to shoot down a rogue jet, they could, what with all flights being identified by radio transponder and easily distinguishable, even considering heavy air traffic.

So why didn't they shoot down the plane? It could be that the PR issues relating to shooting down a civilian plane, even a hijacked one, outweighed the other costs of just letting it hit; fair point, although I don't think that anyone who might have seen it that way (are there many PR media gurus wandering around the Pentagon?) would have been near enough to the Big Red Phone to call off the airstrike in time. Plus, the official story was that the entire US Air Force was on maneuvers (what, ALL of them?) and the AA guns, SAM sites and rocket-troopers where left unmentioned. I simply do not believe that there wasn't even a single semper-fi-do-or-die wannabe Rambo Yankee meathead marine with a rocket launcher to try and shoot down the plane on the Pentagon lawn. And the lawn is a case in itself, having survived an alleged air-crash completely unscorched and without a scrap of debris visible; unchanged before, during and after. Just an observation. I could get really paranoid and ask where the wings of the plane went. Disintegrated. Allegedly.

OC: This is the Pentagon's "defence force":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Protective_Service

The Pentagon is really just an office block full of bureaucrats. Everything in it is duplicated elsewhere, especially in huge underground nuclear bunkers under mountains. Do you think the President would hide in the Pentagon during an emergency? Not a chance!!! In the Cold War, it was expected the Pentagon would be destroyed in a Soviet nuclear strike, so it already has inbuilt redundancy. We have the Internet now and excellent mobile communications. No one needs the Pentagon!!

No one in their right mind would blow up a plane over a city. Thousands would die, fires would erupt everywhere, a whole zone of the city would be totalled. You shoot it down over farmland - not over a city. Unless you were in a war, no sane person would be deploying SAM missiles in city environments. You wouldn't even contemplate having them around in case they fell into the wrong hands!

And who's going to pay for all this alleged security? Even the Pentagon has a budget.

Yes, of course the wings disintegrated. How robust is a wing compared with incredibly thick reinforced concrete? It would be miraculous if they did anything other than disintegrate.

Debris was visible and there was minor scorching. Anyway, even if someone fired a missile into the Pentagon, as some people claimed, where's the scorched grass that followed the explosion? You can't have it both ways. No one disagrees there was an explosion, so why didn't the heat and fire scorch the grass much more visibly? Who knows? But this certainly isn't a point in favour of the Truthers. Or have the Pentagon come up with new non-scorching explosives, or non-scorching grass?

CT: Good counter evidence, but "an office building"?

There are two stories behind why it's called "The Pentagon"; the first is that it was designed, like so many other famous American buildings, by Satanists. I give that idea as much credit as you do, which is to say none.

The second story goes that the design is based on Roman principles of defence; it's a five sided building (so that its hard to attack one face of the building head-on without coming under fire from one of the other angled overlooking walls), and each face consists of five reinforced concrete and steel walls, staggered through the building in concentric pentagons to resist HEAP missiles. Allegedly the 'plane' (whose wings totally disintegrated, remember), drove straight through three of those layers of concrete and steel like an arrow, drilling a tunnel deep inside before exploding. I'm not saying it was a High Explosive Armour Piercing Missile, just that the damage is not consistent with a plane.

Its a fortress. The notion that it only has a garrison since 9/11... sure, ok. Official records tell us that there is no garrison, no infantry, no air defences at the Pentagon. Sure, I'll buy that. Remember when the British govt denied the existence of the SAS and MI6? The US still denies the existence of Delta Force (they're the elite presidential guard; they wear raybans as part of the uniform, no joke). Military personnel at the Pentagon? What a strange idea.

The argument about shooting planes down over cities and the PR effect is a good one; the idea that Pentagon is less well defended than any army base of equivalent size though... no, I can't credit that. On SAM sites; they're either buried in mini-bunkers on wooded hills, or the man-launched missiles are kept in the armoury. Standard design for an armoury (at least for British military) is a buried concrete room, a solid steel cell door, and a steel cage inside the room bracing the walls; they're very secure, what with the armed guards and alarms and all.

The question I'd raise on shooting down the plane or not; why didn't they shoot down the Camp David plane? Besides the obvious fact that it crashed when passengers stormed the cockpit.

Note that I'm not for a moment denying the planes or the incident; what I'm saying is that the orders came from within the US govt. No, obviously most of the people involved wouldn't have known, or the truth really would be out there already. But governments have performed false flag attacks before (Hitler, Reichstag), and as I said at the outset, I don't believe that the Taliban have either the ability or indeed the motivation to attack the US. They arrived in Afghanistan as US mercenaries, for one, having been hired off the Saudis.

OC: The physical construction of the Pentagon demonstrates the symbolic power of the American military, but it is nevertheless just a glorified office, full of paper shufflers and people getting home by five to pick up their kids etc.

What's so great about conspiracy theorists is that they all seem to be experts in plane design, building design, civil engineering, architecture, explosive effects, physics, chemistry, metallurgy etc. Weren't we just saying just the other day that most people don't have a clue what gravity is? So how come we're all experts on the precise effects of unprecedented explosions in places and situations that have never been tested before? Most people have no idea what a plane does when it hits a building like the Pentagon - what makes any uninformed person think they know? Since when have we had any empirical data? A computer simulation of what happened looked perfectly plausible...one of the first things that happened was that the wings started disintegrating and folding into the fuselage.

The Pentagon isn't a functional military site - it's not on the frontline of anything. It's a building in the capital of the USA where bureaucrats go. It has minimal defences because there are minimal threats to it. Until not so long ago, you could walk up to the front door of Downing Street or the White House. Does Langley have SAM missiles all around it? FBI HQ? Capitol Hill? The White House? Naval headquarters? Air Fleet HQ? Delta Force HQ? Marines HQ? Submarine HQ? Do the Americans have unlimited budgets for once in a century events? Imagine being the Pentagon's SAM missile operator from 1960 to 2001? I bet he wrote very long novels!

Remember Pearl Harbor? That happened while America was profoundly alarmed about Japanese intentions and a full scale war was raging in Europe, yet still they were caught sleeping. So much for security.

9/11 was an "under-the-radar" low-tech attack that took a superpower by surprise. America was always a target for Muslims because of its absurd support of Israel. It was logical it would be targeted.

CT: I don't actually have the Pentagon blueprints to hand; I'm going on a documentary I saw and what seems like common sense in defending the US Military HQ, e.g. SAM sites and a garrison. Naval headquarters, Air Force HQ, Delta Force HQ? Marines HQ, Submarine HQ... yes, they would have SAM sites. The White House might, the others probably don't. Downing Street doesn't, but there are several garrisons of infantry within rapid response range, who would have access to LAW Rockets, which are standard issue to the British Army Infantryman.

OC: No one said the Pentagon was undefended. The point was that until 9/11 it had little more than police-level perimeter security. You couldn't walk in without authorization, obviously. But it would be a complete waste of tax dollars to heavily defend installations that are unlikely ever to come under a concerted attack by a major hostile force unless an actual war were in progress. Seriously, do you think every possible target should be heavily defended at all times regardless of the likelihood of an attack? Part of the CT analysis is that everyone has unlimited budgets and resources. They don't. Look at the MI5 and MI6 HQs. There's no sign of heavy security. They have nothing more than a few security men hanging around. Who would want their taxes spent on loads of guys who never have to do anything!

So, why did the US government attack the Pentagon then? What was the point? Why not leave it as just the Twin Towers if they wanted to perform a false flag attack?

The White House/Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the Twin Towers are exactly what I would attack if I were a Muslim fanatic. I would do the Twin Towers on their own if I were a false flagger conspirator. The more targets, the bigger the operation has to be, and the higher the chances of it being compromised. There was simply no sensible point in attacking the Pentagon as well.

CT: Good point, not every military or government building is a 'hard-target'; but HQs, such as the Pentagon or MI6 will be very secure. Even the normal level of defence at a police station is extreme; most large UK police stations have armouries and ALL American ones do, alongside all their riot gear. So even minimal police-force security is a pretty tough nut to crack; even turning down the security level at the Pentagon way below what I think is feasible, we're still talking Military Police, which means that their men are soldiers and their riot gear includes rocket launchers. And I know that for a fact. Even for prestige value, the Pentagon would warrant top-notch security, certainly enough to mobilise a response. The most effective argument you've come up with, and that I am considering, is that strategically it would be better to take the hit and then retaliate with full public support.

OC: Imagine it's August, 2001. An unknown number of hijacked aircraft are in London airspace. Air traffic control have been ordered to ground every plane. No one's sure who the hijackers are, where they're going, what they want or what they're going to do. No clear instructions are coming from Downing Street. Confusion reigns. There are rumours flying everywhere. An aircraft is detected heading straight towards Parliament. You're seriously telling me that you think some soldier/cop/security guard is going to pop out of a guardroom in Parliament with a rocket launcher and shoot down a commercial jet with hundreds of people in it? That's just madness. It would never happen. NEVER. That kind of decision is way beyond any soldier's paygrade. Imagine if he called it wrong?!! The scenario you envisage is impossible on every level. No one at the Pentagon on 9/11 would ever have done what you suggest.

No soldier would have contemplated firing missiles at a civilian plane. Would YOU shoot down a plane without direct orders?! The plane came in really fast, at ground level. There was virtually no time to react. No one knew for sure what was going on.

An order to shoot down a commercial plane would have to come from Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld - and they were all getting rushed to safe zones while the Pentagon attack was going down. Our idiot western leaders are so inept and indecisive that they didn't know what to do. Remember Michael Moore's famous footage of Bush sitting in the classroom? That's what a clown way out of his depth looks like - and his entire administration were every bit as inept.

PR had nothing to do with it - it was just sheer confusion and incompetence ...headless chickens running around.

Of course governments are wicked and are conspiring against the people - just common sense as you say...but they can't manage anything sophisticated. Their conspiracies are mostly about feathering their own nests...not blowing up their own citizens (though they would if they absolutely had to!).

The first Twin Towers attack by a Muslim nut proves that the Muslims were very interested in bringing down the Twin Towers. That was their dry run.

And think of this - the British police are so inept that they shot dead a completely innocent man in Stockwell underground station. Every part of the Stockwell operation demonstrated staggering ineptitude. And you think people like that, and their American counterparts, can manage elaborate conspiracies? This is fantasy land.

Anyone who was part of a conspiracy would spill the beans in a best-selling book and be on Oprah Winfrey. You can't keep a conspiracy as huge as that secret. Hundreds of people would have known about it. Someone would have talked.

Tower 5

OC: So, what about Tower 5?

Tower 5 was not hit by a plane, and, unlike Tower 7, it didn't collapse (but was demolished later). Clearly, a huge and intense fire is raging. The huge fireballs that erupted from the twin towers obviously set fire to buildings all around. Why wouldn't they?

You can't argue that all skyscraper fires are the same. How do you know if the materials used were the same, or the heights of the skyscrapers, or the base areas, or the tolerances, or any special design features? There are loads of factors involved. The fact that no one fought the fire is another huge point. Also, the collapse of the two towers must have sent massive shockwaves through the whole site. It would have been the equivalent of a strong localized earthquake. The foundations of all the towers in the area would have received a devastating shock. How do you know what such a shock would do to a building already with strong fires blazing in its core?

No one on earth would know in advance what effects the 9/11 circumstances would have. These are things that need to be studied by engineers, architects, scientists, demolition experts - not by a bunch of paranoid CTers with no technical qualifications but very fertile minds. This CT stuff makes a complete mockery of the scientific method. Science progresses by experts carefully collecting data, forming hypotheses, testing them and verifying them, refining where necessary. It doesn't involve non-experts with an axe to grind trying to look at anomalous photos and videos and saying - "Look, that can't be right!" That's more like how religions work - people who can see the face of Jesus in a slice of toast etc!!

It's surprising that you didn't mention that the CIA/FBI or some such other organization had offices in Tower 7.

CT: I don't know about Tower 5, but it looks like enough fire damage to warrant demolishing afterwards. And engineers have come forward, a good number of them, to testify that skyscrapers don't fall down from fire or earthquakes; they're built to resist both. Notice no one questions that the tower withstood impacts from planes; that didn't bring them down, but apparently burning jet fuel did. Again; jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel.

Tower 7

CT: Tower 7 wasn't hit by a plane. It wasn't even on fire. What's far fetched is that it collapsed at all. Somehow, the tax records for the Enron scandal happened to disintegrate in the freak collapse, which just happened, completely coincidentally, at the same time as the, ahem, terrorist attack.

OC: What is far-fetched about this account of Tower 7:

"On August 21, 2008, NIST released its draft report on the causes of the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, beginning a period for public comments. In its investigation, NIST utilized ANSYS to model events leading up to collapse initiation and LS-DYNA models to simulate the global response to the initiating events. NIST determined that diesel fuel did not play an important role, nor did the structural damage from the collapse of the twin towers. But the lack of water to fight the fire was an important factor. The fires burned out of control during the afternoon, including on floor 13, where a critical interior column buckled. With the buckling of that column, adjacent columns also failed along with the floor structure above. This triggered a vertical progression of floor failures to the roof. The collapse then progressed east-to-west across the structure, and ultimately the entire structure collapsed. The fires, fuelled by office contents, along with the lack of water, were the key reasons for the collapse."

In Summary

There is no smoking gun. There is no hard evidence. The logic of the alleged false flag conspiracy theory is absurd. None of it makes sense. The official version is much more plausible. Occam's Razor supports the official version.

To be opposed to the Old World Order does not mean that you should accuse them of everything under the sun. They are vile, dangerous, greedy, evil people, but that doesn't mean that they carried out 9/11. As we have indicated in the article at the foot of the page, the OWO knew 9/11 was coming and did nothing about it. That was their crime, and it is an extremely serious one for which they should be held to account. Instead, they have been let off the hook by all the ridiculous claims of the "Truth Movement". There is every reason to believe that the CIA started the "Truth Movement" as a means to distract people from asking the serious question: why was a red carpet laid out for terrorists? There were many opportunities to stop 9/11 and none were taken. Why not? Because the government wanted a pretext to launch a Middle East war. That is the true scandal.

*****

We are often asked about 9/11. Was the American government involved, or not?

Acts of Omission

If we were to say that the American government took no explicit part in any conspiracy to kill its own citizens, would that indicate that the American government had no culpability? There are several ways to skin a cat. Governments often choose to use the tactic of omission rather than commission. In other words, rather than do something themselves, they wait for their enemy to do it, and deliberately omit to take the steps necessary to prevent it. They know it is about to happen, but they choose not to stop it because it is, in fact, precisely what they want.

If one asks the most important question of all in any conspiracy scenario - cui bono? (to whose benefit?) - one can see that numerous American neocon foreign policy and economic objectives were satisfied in the aftermath of 9/11.

Acts of omission are almost impossible to prove. Incompetence and negligence are always cited rather than conscious intent on the part of a government to allow the slaughter of its own citizens to take place Therefore, governments frequently employ this tactic. It permits "plausible deniability".

No one should forget that the CIA had extensive contacts with the mujahedeen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and provided them with arms and intelligence. It is inconceivable that they did not come into contact with such a prominent figure as Osama bin Laden, and many of the future leaders of the Taliban. Either the CIA are one of the most inept organisations on earth (they aren't!), or they were well aware of what was happening in Afghanistan. In which case, why did they do nothing?

During WWII, the British broke German secret codes. Several times, they permitted disastrous events to happen, with thousands of their own people dying, even though they could have stopped any of those disasters. But to stop them would have alerted the Germans that their codes had been cracked. The 'greater good' dictated that it was preferable for innocent citizens to be killed than for the enemy to learn that its secret codes had been compromised. Be in no doubt - governments are always prepared to sacrifice their own citizens if they think it is in the greater interest of their policy aims. No one is protecting you. Your lives are dispensable.

The "Broke" Agenda

"DF" sent us a message saying, "There is growing dissension in this country and talk of marching on Washington to 'protest'. Give me a clue how one broke man can organize this into a non-violent overthrow of the soap opera and its oligarchy and begin moving society in the right direction."

Now, DF is a smart guy. Arguably the reason he's broke is that he's too smart. "Society" is an entity based on averageness. Most people slot into well-defined boxes. Anyone who doesn't fit one of the neat boxes is potentially in big trouble. If you're a clever person from an unprivileged background, you're likely to be too smart for the environment you're in, and not well enough connected socially to get invited into a nice, safe professional job. So, you become an outsider, and maybe you do jobs way beneath your talents, and maybe you turn to drink and drugs to numb the pain, and maybe you eventually fall completely out of the system.

Being broke is obviously not a desirable state, but that is not to say that it does not have peculiar advantages. For one thing, you have nothing to lose. No one can make things much worse for you, so you can be outspoken, fearless and daring. St Francis of Assisi, a true saint if ever there was one, was a privileged, rich kid who gave up everything to become a wandering beggar. He could have had it all, yet he gave it all away. A beggar by choice, not by force of circumstances. He is one of the most revered figures in religious history. His poverty and humility were the most eloquent statement against the pretensions and glory seeking of popes and princes. His own life became an example of anti-materialism, of a wondrous spiritual life.

The famed Cynic Diogenes, who lived in a tub in a street in ancient Athens, was also a beggar by choice. He had a drinking bowl, but when he saw a beggar using his hands to cup water, he then threw his bowl away since he now saw that it was unnecessary. He went around in daylight with a lamp, saying that he was searching for an honest man. All he ever found were crooks, charlatans, fakes and scoundrels. Diogenes set such a powerful example of simplicity and contempt for the vanities of life that even the great conqueror Alexander the Great was in awe of him.

Many Buddhist monks are wandering beggars. They are completely respected within their culture. Over a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Almost three billion live on less than two dollars a day. The reality is that most people in the world are broke.

In a sense, being broke is a state of mind. If you let it, it can be like a deadly disease eating away at you, destroying your self-esteem and ability to get things done. But people such as St Francis and Diogenes, admittedly extremely rare types, show that this mentality can be transcended. "There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn," Albert Camus said.

The world is looking for leadership in these dark, chaotic times. People have lost all confidence in established authority. It has become plain for everyone to see that the current leaders of our society are only in it for themselves. Money is their only God. They command no respect.

New leaders will soon emerge, and being broke is no barrier. In fact it lends an air of complete authenticity. No one can accuse a broke person of being in it for the money. No one can say they're playing the status game.

So, to any broke person, we say use your cleverness to transcend the condition you've found yourself in. Get a metaphorical (or literal) tub, and, just like Diogenes, denounce the junk of our modern society, denounce the oligarchy, denounce the soap opera, denounce the brainwashing. What's the worst they can do to you?

And, bizarrely, in this world where freakish novelty is so prized, you will soon become a YouTube star. News channels will want to do a story about you. Publishers will ask you to write a book. Soon, you will be famous and you could even choose to be quite rich - though you would then instantly destroy your credibility.

Strength of character, and having something powerful to say, are all you really need. It's not an easy option to become a campaigner when you're broke, but no one's stopping you. Through sheer force of will, virtually anything can be achieved. The issue is: can you summon your inner God, just as St Francis and Diogenes did?

Then all things become possible.