The middle classes are always the problem for totalitarians, because it is from the middle classes that the articulate dissent comes. That is what happened in the cultural revolution in China as I understand it, they went after intellectuals, and Stalin similarly purged people in his own party that he suspected might oppose him. They cannot win control through making good arguments, because there are no good arguments for totalitarian control, it always makes a mess.
The middle classes in the West have been in chronic decline during my lifetime, there has been a collapse in the birth rate that has been particularly acute in the middle classes, a subject I have written about before because I am very concerned about it. As I became more aware of how the media constantly pushes the message to have less children I realized that it is mainly the middle classes who are susceptible to this message, and at that point I began to wonder if this collapse was in fact not an accident but something that the powers that be were actually encouraging. We have seen the reverse program in Hungary can work, there is no necessity for this trend. This has been a key message in the manmade global warming propaganda, “we need to have fewer children”. This is not I believe about “wealth” nearly so much as power though, remember the elites already have a degree of wealth that they simply don’t know what to do with. The elites also think that though their wealth may have originated from the middle classes, the middle classes will no longer be crucial thanks to AI.
I could be wrong but I am under the impression that the same thing has even been happening in China thanks to the one child policy (I believe agricultural workers were exempt, need to check that). China had a big problem with dissent as seen with the Tiananmen Square demos, nowadays they seem to have that problem rather more under control (again this is just my impression though). Affluence has led the middle classes everywhere to have fewer children though anyway, including in China, so they didn’t need much encouragement.
There IS a huge problem with the current status quo in the West, and that is a huge part of the financial problems. The problem is modern Western democracy/universal suffrage, and the collective idiocy of the electorate (as ably demonstrated by the elites during the plandemic, they blatantly ignore their own rules, and laugh at us as they do so, as seen in Santagate). I am not suggesting that everybody who votes is an idiot, but rather that voters who don’t understand the system well make silly choices about who to vote for. This is not an elitist sort of argument, I myself was an idiot voter not so many years ago (I voted Green once believe it or not), before I had more time to study current affairs in depth, and before I became alarmed about the negative trends such as in particular the rise of Islam.
My own view is that the current system is indeed unsustainable, and we do indeed need a great reset of some kind, because the pensions, healthcare, and welfare more generally that people expect are simply not affordable. It is not just the powers that be that are at fault, we the electorate have been stupid and failed to recognize this simple reality. Until we start to vote responsibly (i.e. for people on the truly libertarian end of the political spectrum), we will continue to be exploited and the West will continue to go downhill. This Great Reset engineered by Klaus Schwab and co. however will be a disaster and it will plunge the world into a dark age which I fear may last for a very long time if they succeed.
The final point is the point about waking people up. Today I think it’s not so much their power over the military/industrial complex that we have to worry about, as their power over the media. AI is going to be critical in time, because AI may eventually allow a small elite to very effectively control the whole population (surveillance drones hovering overhead, our computers hacked etc). However the AI is not advanced enough yet to control us sufficiently, and I think this is why we still have a chance to stop the evil plot. We must not succumb to the digital currency plan (I do believe in this plan I think there are plenty of signs that it’s coming) because it will facilitate much greater control, as Wolff says. That is why the fact we few voices are speaking out now is so important, before the implementation of this plan, and I see the rise of websites like substack as being a glimmer of hope, as also the fact that high profile people like Joe Rogan seem to increasingly understand what’s really happening.