Think like an intelligence agent - Masterclass

by Alexander Benesch

The reason for our collective failure is not that we have not tried hard enough to influence society along the lines of ordinary conservative, or left, or libertarian, ideas. The reason is not that we are too religious or not religious enough. The reason is certainly not that we don't buy enough "self help" and “finance bro” books and courses in which crooked investment bankers or influencers with sports cars convince us that their fortune cookie-level philosophies or online business strategies can bring us all great wealth. The reason for our failure is that the most powerful circles in the world have mastered intelligence techniques and can therefore best assess people and facts. They know exactly how to obtain information, filter it, evaluate it and classify it into an overall picture. And they know exactly how to keep the knowledge they have gained secret and spread false narratives and lay false trails to distract the public. The American, British, Russian and Chinese intelligence apparatuses remain almost completely invisible to us citizens. Our companies are going bankrupt and jobs are being lost because valuable design plans have been stolen and competing products are then offered in China at cheaper prices. Hedge funds are growing immeasurably and can buy everything from us because the owners have the right connections to people with access to information from the secret services. Politicians make strange decisions because they were recruited and promoted by a secret service early in their careers. We are paying huge amounts of money for the energy transition without anyone noticing that climate research is completely dominated by the USA and Britain and was primarily intended to produce secret, high-quality forecasts for the military. Satellites that are considered civilian and observe oceans or ice masses also provide data for enemy reconnaissance. Anyone who distrusts the mass media and looks for alternatives on the Internet will end up with common conspiracy propaganda, whose narratives can be traced back indirectly to Russian and British secret services and American PR specialists from the Republican Party, which needs fresh voters. Anyone who engages in political activism and is not particularly careful about legality ends up on an NSA list. It then doesn't matter which supposedly safe apps or devices the person uses. Anyone who puts their hopes in an alternative party will soon feel like they are in a rut where nothing is moving forward. You evaluate good and evil, true or false, based on one of the usual ideologies that are presented to you to choose from. Unfortunately, the supporters of the other ideologies behave just as stubbornly and even fanatically. Those who understand little about the world of secret services react to scandals that have become public, such as Edward Snowden's revelations in the press, with the attitude that they have nothing to hide. But the point is that countless politicians, authorities, corporations and other groups have a lot to hide and always want to be aware of how aware the average citizen is of this, or whether the citizen is even taking defensive and offensive countermeasures.

335 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 29, 2024