Four Horsemen
As an elite class rules with unparalleled power and unchecked corruption, and a general population sits narcotized by a widespread sense of apathy, America seems doomed to fall as many other empires have done throughout history. So say the filmmakers behind the award-winning feature-length documentary Four Horsemen. This compelling film provides a thorough diagnosis of the country's massive societal and organizational ills, and offers several thoughtful remedies along the way.
Are we really experiencing the death gasps of the American dream? As a means of comparison, the filmmakers set forth the blueprint of Ancient Rome's demise. This tumultuous period was characterized by a growing disparity between the rich and the poor, unabated abuses of power, a debasement of currency, and a desire among the masses to be controlled. Sound familiar? While some of these comparisons presented in the film are downright ridiculous - are celebrity chefs really a sign of America's oncoming apocalypse? - much of the analogy rings true and resonant.
This is not a religious documentary, but the disaster it outlines is almost biblical in its scope. The four horsemen of the title refers to US-led financial wrongdoings, escalating violence, deplorable conditions of poverty, and looming environmental catastrophe. The film contends that the driving force behind this doomsday plot is the new morality in America: money. The country has gone far afield from a true free market system where wealth is shared and benefits all. Capitalism may be on the brink of extinction. Today, in the midst of massive deregulation and corporate greed, the country's financial institutions are operating only in their own self-interests. Politicians are owned by corporations, and the wars they wage are merely vehicles to drive profits.
In the film's estimation, the real threat lies with an American public that generally accepts the misinformation they're fed without question or protest. Millions have lost their homes and life savings, and their children are being killed in unnecessary wars. Are the American people fearful of taking a stand, or simply not understanding of the complexities at play? Whatever the reason, Four Horsemen hopes to educate this audience, rally their collective outcry, and inspire a movement for change.
Everybody points fingers and blames something. It is money. It is corporate greed! But nobody has a viable answer. What we have now, we just need to make it work somehow; and it does work. We can't just throw everything away, give up ownership of all our properties, and live in a love commune, taking care of one another. Humans don't work that way.
Why was President Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain marked as irrelevant? When all of us matter? The other Presidents dropped bombs and started wars. Why not show them?
Then you showed President Obama again. What's that all about????
The world needs sound money, but it doesn't have to be gold, it COULD BE Bitcoin.
Humanity evolves driven by a basic and insatiable need for pleasure and comfort in a material world revealed to us through our senses. First we seek basic food, shelter and sex in order to survive physically as other animals do. Then we desire wealth to ensure our survival without expending as much effort as before. Once wealth is accomplished, we seek power and control over others and become as parasites feeding off the labor of others.
Unless we evolve to a state of consciousness that perceives a spiritual component to our reality which exists beyond that perceived by our 5 senses we will fail to achieve our potential as human beings and destroy ourselves.
Great documentary! It’s hard to know how to incentivize the ‘winners’ in this game to change their tactics (as if it’s played all the way out everyone loses).
the human animal has taken the organism's need for acquisition in order to feel secure to an absurd level which threatens to destroy life on earth as we know it. Can the species overcome this need before it destroys itself and all complex life along with it? Who the **** knows. But the fact that it is on the precipice may initiate the change. We have to be on the brink in order to have the will to change.
And they're even lying in the docu....
One of the best documentaries on economics I have seen. Highly recommend this to anyone who is interested to know the problems facing the human society. The philosophical approach to explaining the ills of human society is amazing.
RICH people LOVE their money- and are LOATHE to share it.. it really is that simple, from the top down... I have yet to meet one rich man, who could do something nice for nothing; and who does it, out of compassion when asked.... all expecting you to 'earn' your dollar, whilst they sit and count their profits... hypocrisy rules, why does anyone expect poverty to ever be eradicated under a regime this brutal?
Our government and corporate masters do not want us to succeed individually. Succeeding individually is not mutually exclusive to having good bonds: look at Star Trek for example. The problem is we're not allowed to achieve our individual successes, we are only allowed to strive for them. After a number of lessons, Learned Helplessness is complete and the Masters like it that way - nice complacent cogs to boss around and exploit for pleasure and profit while we exist and then thrown away or replaced with cheaper labor - forcing us all to become sociopaths in order to "get" money. It's all baloney.
We do not have a flawed democracy as much as we have a democracy that has been tied, gagged, bounded and rapped by capitalism - a twisted and perverted system that has greed and poverty built-in. CAPITALISM is Las Vegas in 2 piece suits. A pyramid scheme (it's on our dollar bills)! The House (1% percenters) always win. They've paid (lobbyists) to win. FOR THEM MONEY rules NOT life, decency, honesty, morality, community, race, religion, greed, culture, kindness, unity or compassion matters. ONLY MONEY TO BUY POWER AND CONTROL.
It's sad that these "men of industry" (Ha!) see the majority of the American population as a bunch of ignorant fools!
Don't blame the baby boomers...put the blame on crooked business owners and politicians.
Things will only change for the majority of the people when we demand the system of capitalism be replaced with something that works for more than the 1% while 99% of the population struggles!
What kind of system would you want that only works 1% of the time? Your water sanitation system only working 1% of the time? You're medicine working only 1% of the time? You car brakes working only 1% of the time? Why would you want a government or business that only works 1% of the time? CAPITALISM (1%) is the very OPPOSITE of DEMOCRACY (99%)!
One of the hidden propaganda objectives of this doc.,is to worry you about overpopulation.
Having read most all of the comments thus far, it is clear most people see/hear what they want, very few see what is.
Skipping the several falsehoods presented as accepted fact or knowledge and going straight to the easy in concept solutions, so many prefer to avoid, because of what they require them to do, even though it is really so very little, even that is thought too much. Not only do they want someone else to give them money of high value, they want someone else to solve the problems they created by doing nothing.
What would happen if there was NO govt? Suppose you had a clean slate and could design something reasonable. Is it reasonable to take from one group and hand it over to another group? Or does that cut the legs out of the incentive for both groups to do anything? Those who forever whine about the poor and needy, set you emotions aside for a moment because they can be taken care of, but not by creating more govt programs for them (more govt).
[The usa has done that for over 60 years, the poor keep voting democrat and the result is more govt and more poor people, by design of course, its called buying votes cheaply and pocketing the rest. Republican politicians are equally guilty since they don't stop the BS and devise a workable system. Both parties have been overtaken and have become minions of the Progressive elitist globalists who desire a Communist one world govt which they control.] There is not one thing stopping all the emotional whiners from personally helping a truly needy person. The real problems is that these emotional whiners ARE to greedy to cough up their own cash and/or time. They think everyone is like them, so they decide they must pass laws to take the shirt off someone else back to help the poor.
The framers of The Constitution For the United States of America had seen much more and read much more of history than we see and read today. These problems are not new, (as this docu stated early on). The framers addressed this in The Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and The Constitution. The problem is that selfish greedy people have wormed their way into subverting the Constitution. They hide behind such names as The Federal Reserve Bank, Bankers, Corporations, Lawyers, Politicians, Generals, Military suppliers, Socialists, Progressives, etc.
You cannot fix Economic/Corruption problems without first fixing the Political problems that caused them. You really cannot have so much corruption without Congress and Legislators voting for it and govt agencies protecting the corruptors; without lawyers making too much of it legal.
I know a couple of Legislators, have sat and talked with a Congressman. Some start out good and some never were. They all need to be changed on a similar frequency as diapers and for the same reason. If you want to even start to fix things YOU must see to it One Term limits are enacted. It would be much more efficient to change the House side to 3yr Terms, the Senate side to 4yr terms, and the President to a 5 year term. No re-elections for ANY of them. Lawyers must be banned from Politics. If you want to go into the law, then you cannot be in govt, period. Not a judge, nor a politician, law schools teach the morals right out of them. Never vote for a lawyer for anything, lying is first nature to them.
How can these thing be accomplished when Congress itself holds the power to enact Term Limits and the rest, and are not going to eliminate their own cushy positions?
As always and in every way, the problem is YOU. Until you decide to spend an hour a month gathering together with others to see to it wise, decent, honorable candidates are running for all offices from all parties, in numbers, so someone good will get in, supported by "the people". When you do this the parties could drop away because it will be everybody agreeing to some very basic things. And somebody is going to know the truth about each of these candidates. No more nice sounding weasels slipping by. That is the purpose of gathering together.
Of course you would have to boot out the socialists, communists, progressives, marxists, corporatists, etc. because they have no intellectual honesty (govt causes problems it doesn't solve them, more govt = more problems. lawyers write laws to enable more litigation) nor integrity and would corrupt and disrupt the gathered group. They are forever protecting and re electing the corrupt weasels, because they are "their weasels!"
The proposed candidates "the people" find, would sign a contract in order to obtain the support of that huge mass of "the people" which states, among other things, that they will propose and vote for Term Limits, a low maximum contribution limit by any entity or person to a candidate, Limits on the size of a corporation, jail time for fraud, only the people who are going to fight a war are allowed to vote whether we go to war, all wages and income for everyone in the country is reduced to that of the wages of the war time soldier -- the excess put into a pool for the war effort and their rehabilitation etc. (my take on "War Is a Racket" by Major General Smedley Butler) thus taking the profit out of war thus ending most war thus ending the largest of the drains on resources of most every type. Police kill more people in the usa every year than any foreign terrorist has. What to do about the fake news major media propaganda networks which limit the information to what the banksters want you to know so you will come to the conclusions they desire, who make vast profits from war and your ignorance about a great many things? By gathering together much of that "lack of accurate information" will be auto-eliminated. Some will take longer than others to come around, that is as it always is. A similar minded means of taking the profit out of welfare and vote buying.
Another candidate contract would be to get rid of most govt agencies. They are there to protect corporations from you, the opposite of their title which was designed to fool you. As with the Constitution, only corporations and those working for or contracting with govt would be taxed for that privilege or corp protection. What about the environment and lots of other things? This book is long enough but suffice it to say that there are solutions.
All in all this is a relatively easy thing to do, clean house, get better people and you will have better govt and consequently a much better economic outcome for all. All you have to do is rise up from you chair and put one foot in front of the other. If you can't get started on your own get a capable friend to help. That is the beginning of "gathering together." You may also enjoy freedom force international org.
The downfall of western society is assured through the prophetic course of Cultural Marxism that these countries unknowingly practice, the United States more than the others. It just so happens that I live in the U.S., and can see the result of our own brand of Cultural Marxism. So, if you were to google Cultural Marxism right now you would most likely find some alt right nonsense. However, underneath the nonsense is the truth that through an ever growing divide of people and religion, the death of the nuclear family, playing the race card for everything, and many other factors that promised in the prison notebooks that culture was the key to crushing the west. When Nikita Khrushchev said; "we will bury you", he was right.
Love the doc, they tell things so simply!
Though what they were not that aware of in 2011/2012 is seemingly the strong mechanisation and automatization of a lott of production processes and services => how are you going to employ millions of people who are actually not needed in a lot of production processes?
great documentary did any one knows the titile of the closing song
Steve Job's University of Standford address stands out for his reflection on how it was only years later that he was able to "connect-the-dots" of his seemingly random choices that at the time seems to bear no bearing to any of his future endeavours. This video is such an attempt to connect the dots.
I cannot help but be preoccupied with thinking of what kind of world will my little girl be living in. What decisions can be made now to make that future a slightly better one? This video in no way offers that answer but it helps to connect yet another dot.
There are many things to take away from this documentary but what stands out is the message that to exact any change in the socio-economic ecosystem you are part of requires as a pre-requisiste to become self aware. This is within the power of anyone to enact.
The following quote striked a chord:
"I have never let my schooling intefere with my education" - Mark Twain
The video is rich in content for further exploration. Here is a list of individuals interviewed as authorities to support the video's main thesis (in order of appearance and presentation). Hope this helps you to explore the topic further:
Gillian Tett (Assistant Editor - Financial Times)
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (Former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell)
David Morgan (Silver Investor)
Prof Noam Chomsky (Professor of Linguistics, MIT)
Satish Kumar (Founder - Schumacher College)
Prof. Simon Johnson (Former IMF Chief Economist)
Tarek El Diwany (Former Derivative Trader)
Prof Herman Daly (Former Senior World Bank Economist)
Max Keiser (Former Wall Street Trader)
John Perkins (Former Economic Hit-Man)
Hugo Salinas Price (President - Mexican Civic - Association Pro Silver)
George Nilson (Baltimore City Council Lawyer)
Prof Joseph Stiglitz (Former World Bank Chief Economist)
James Turk (GoldMoney Foundation)
Prof. Michael Hudson (Government Policy Advisor)
Rev'd Donal Reeves MBE (Founder - The Soul of Europe)
Lord Ahmed of Rotherham (First UK Muslim Life Peer)
Kaiser Bengali (Economist)
Najma Sadeque (Researcher and Journalist)
Prof. Richard Wilkinson (Professor of Social Epidemiology)
Philip Blond (Director - ResPublica)
Camila Batmanghelidjh (Founder - Kids Company)
Dr. Ha-Joon Chang (Faulty of Economics, Cambridge University)
Interesting Sub-Topics (not exhaustive but what peeked my interest):
The Royal Dutch Shell's world scenarios for 2075 Blueprint or Scramble.
Classical vs Neo-Classical Economic Theories
You are a having a conversation that can be best quantified as a classroom of "special needs" children, arguing over who is the smartest. There is NO monetary system that will ever suit the needs of what truly needs nurturing, Humanity. Yes, gold served its purposes, but this cycle has repeated itself since the even before the fall of the Roman empire. People would entrust the "care" of their gold to "gold keepers" who would issue out receipts of deposit, it became aware very quickly that people didn't first go get their gold to then go out and conduct trade, they just traded the receipts of deposit, therein creating the flaw in the system that has repeated itself so many times before where MORE receipts than deposits would be issued out.
The fault of any Monetary system is that it is based off a principle that in order to create wealth, or maybe achieve "greater" wealth, that there is a debt component needed. This is preposterous. We are literally about the enter an age where technology is going to take over EVER FACET of our society. Where having a "job" will be rare if not obsolete. The only real reason individuals are motivated to work particular jobs are they have found a task that they are somewhat good at or have got a knack for, and they have "bills" to pay. When literally every job has finally had the technological/autonomous aspect developed to take over, what job will really be available to the common man to earn this magical thing called "money" to pay for their living? The whole notion of "capital wealth" will collapse.
We can already see how the current oil glut, fabricated in my eye, has caused the price of crude commodities to plunge to its lowest price in a decade. All these multi leveraged tiered derivative debt structures that were built around this seemingly ever increasing price of crude are now collapsing, and the organizations that were built around them are facing the same fate. I find it funny that the best "mind opener" when talking about the monetary system could be taken from South Park, an episode they aired that had some "bank robber" crash land on earth with a so perceived crazy amount of "space bucks" stolen from the galactic community. So Earth's governments diving up the spoils and start fighting over it to which finally the aliens that had been watching come to earth and basically call everyone "expletive" retarded and subsequently isolate Earth from the rest of the universe. Yes, a bit of a stretch, but if you think about it, this whole notion of "debt" is completely made up in our mind.
Even gold, while the argument for its "value" bases itself on that it is rare, difficult to locate and procreate, of tangible and accountable quantity and hard to transport. However any "value" we give gold is still really just an intangible exercise of "consumer confidence." Gold has value because we GIVE it value, I could just as well use dirt to use as money as I could gold, although actually dirt might actually be MORE valuable as I can actually plant a crop and provide for myself with dirt, gold does what for me, gets really shiny if I polish it? The only "item" that has any REAL value for the society of humanity is "intelligence." Intelligence is the one commodity that is a living manifestation of the "time value of money." Taking the same principle of the faulty monetary system that bestows the virtue of a dollar in my pocket today being multiples of more value to me than a dollar in my pocket ten years from now. (this is fabricated due to the fractional reserve banking system and fiat currency which really makes money/currency lose purchasing power over time).
But how much more an education, not to be confused with a schooling, today, as opposed to an education ten years from now. That TRULY is a time value equation manifesting itself, and intelligence can be manipulated as well, as you can see with the corruption of the American Schooling system that producing mindless drones ready to incorporate themselves like good little cogs into the machinery, so once an individual achieves true education and gain a bit of intelligence, it is their moral obligation to share that with as many as they can. Knowing the world was round was a worthless idea, until the WHOLE world was able to see the evidence and understand. Unlike currency, where the more you duplicate it, it looses its value, the more you duplicate intelligence, the more you MULTIPLY its value.
okay rant done
I'm sorry but you can't compare the past empires to the ones today.
where could I get a text version of the 4 Horsemen?
brilliant!
Awesome!
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Integrate the information in this documentary into middle school and high school curriculum.
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Corporate Industrial Complex = I am in business and therefore my enterprise is a person in and of itself.......As a person I would like to contribute up to 100 million dollars in your endeavor - How does that sound?!
I can't find the post now, sorry, but no one 'has' to be rich. As humans and mammals, we share with other life forms the need for food and water to live. Moving up, we can recognize shelter and tools as part of our evolution, and other inexplicable things like song and dance which all humans everywhere seem to do.
As the beings that we are, I'd also say that we are driven for other things as well. Unfortunately, our drive for greatness always seems to disintegrate into the chaos of misconstrued and destructive myths- that 'being rich is good' being amongst the most time-defying and stubborn of them all.
At the same time, I think we all 'know,' somehow, without moralizing about it, that the greatest good goes, or ought to go, to the greatest number of people. Freedom of speech and information, health care, education, protection from exploitation and slavery- these are but of few of the values that are not necessary for our digestive system but that we regard as universal rights nevertheless. While the holding of such values dear satiates our heart and provides for emotional happiness, I don't recall hearing any convincing argument that being rich did anything at all for the heart or the stomach. So the question becomes then why do people long for 'affluence?' Is the urge itself a symptom of the disease? If so, what can cure it. Will the human race survive long enough to find out?
The next time we look at what the left hand of Wall Street is doing, we ought to be brushing up on our knowledge of the U.N. Charter on Human Rights as well. Ignored and abused, it nevertheless supersedes all nations' individual constitutions and is the law of the land. A legitimate body of law that waits implementation.
Like it or not, deny it or not, aware of it or not, there is no escaping the essential fact that you are changing the world.