It is a tale as old as the Cold War. The entire world was exhausted from the bloodshed and destruction of World War II. Soviet ambitions in the world incited responses from the West. Seeking to win the conflict with money and influence rather than atomic apocalypse, the United States presidency turned to the fledgling CIA, which had a plan.
Rather than fight for the world, America would dominate new civil societies through its formative organization, so that those civil societies of the various nations would be pro-American by nature. To this end, the United States advanced existing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and created new ones on an unprecedented scale. It was the 1950s, the ‘Era of the Experts’, the moment when scientists, psychologists, and corporate professionals achieved their present power in American society, government, and culture.
Jennica Pounds and Joshua Lisec begin their book with this act of patriotism, decades ago, and then explain how it became the complex of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) which increasingly run the world through ‘soft power’. I did not find a paranoid screed in this book, Unelected: How You Paid A Sinister Elite To Take Over America.
George Soros is a major actor in the narrative, and other individuals are named, their careers all summarized for readers. Yet these briefs are not aimed at personal reporting. They are data points in the authors’ narration. The achievement in this book is that the reader does not need to share religion or ideology with the writers to see the problem they explain in our world. “There is no ancient alien-illuminati tie-in here”, the authors explain.
Instead, they identify “the persistent belief in blank-slateism, humanity’s interchangeability, and the divine destiny of global harmony” as an ideological system that runs our institutions. We do not vote for the ‘think tanks’ that tell politicians what is real. The ‘campaigns’ of nonprofit organizations impose a discourse on the populace rather than expressing the will of the people. We are unable to directly influence the media sources we know are lying to us.
This is how Karl Popper’s “open society” became closed, forming a bubble that has hardened into resistance against outside information. “What Soros theorized for post-communist Europe in 1993 has long become the language America’s own leadership now uses against half its electorate.”
As this book is careful to show, however, the project has been bipartisan because it began with American bipartisanship. Today, however, the nongovernmental complex denounces its opposition as “populist” and “right wing” and its key project is the dismantling of the West in the name of global democracy. The people who do this to us think of themselves as ‘democracy’, or else its representatives, when they are in fact an unaccountable elite — a new aristocracy replacing the one that was destroyed in the 20th century.
At the heart of the argument in this book is Conway’s Law, which understands all organizations as communication systems that become architecture. A company is shaped by the collaboration that takes place inside it: put seven teams to work in seven different offices, and the final results will reflect the division of the work. Put zealots for sterilizing children in charge of the relevant committee at the American Medical Association, and watch as they declare puberty blockers a human right.
This is how ideology shapes institutions, and why every last NGO seems to share the same ideology. “The same small world keeps reappearing because the globalist system rewards those trained to speak its language — technocrats, academics, billionaires, and career diplomats”, the authors explain. The system intrinsically excludes critics, for “when legitimacy is defined as participation in expert forums, the result is a system that credentializes entry.” You can’t get in unless you recite the cant.
