Secret History #25: Capital of Evil

Capital owners and policymakers structure conditions that keep the working population anxious and focused on survival.

The medieval Assassins and their leaders use drugs and staged rituals to program recruits into fearless killers.

Stanley Milgram, laboratory participants, and authority figures demonstrate how ordinary people comply with harmful orders.

Private financiers, Parliament, and the English state create a hybrid institution that secures elite wealth while funding wars.

Calvinist believers, merchants, and emerging banking elites reinterpret salvation in ways that reward discipline and reinvestment.

Landlords, merchants, and peasants participate in changing forms of capital that alter how much effort people are willing to expend.

Landlord classes, capital owners, and the peasant or worker majority participate in systems that convert human attention into surplus for elite accumulation.

Dutch merchant elites and English political leaders negotiate a transfer of wealth and influence through the rise of William of Orange.

Solomon Asch, a lone volunteer, and a room of confederates reveal how group consensus can override individual perception.

Dutch merchants and Calvinist elites build a maritime republic that exploits Spanish wealth and dominates global trade.

Elite classes are portrayed as practicing a separate religious logic from the peasant majority, framing their actions through higher powers.

Financial elites and policy-makers influence economic cycles that determine how hard ordinary people must work to survive.

Enlightenment thinkers, American elites, and religious reformers reshape Western society by reducing God’s direct role in everyday life.

Employers, landlords, and managers design incentive structures that shape how workers perceive control over their own labor.

Merchant elites in city-states like Venice, the Dutch Republic, and England govern through private interests rather than royal hierarchy.

Modern workers, entrepreneurs, and elites orient their lives around money as the ultimate measure of success and security.

Catholic clergy, Protestant reformers, and ordinary believers challenge the church’s monopoly on salvation and reshape economic behavior.

Transnational elites rely on hidden networks to coordinate investment, migration, and policy across borders.

Elite initiates and inner-circle leaders form hierarchies by subjecting newcomers to extreme rituals that reshape loyalty.

Spartan boys, elder mentors, and military leaders participate in an education system designed to create absolute loyalty in a small ruling class.

Merchant elites in Venice, the Dutch Republic, England, and the United States successively refine the same oligarchic model.

Wealthy investors and landlord classes move across borders in response to taxation, social unrest, and political risk.

Handlers, initiates, and intelligence programs use trauma to create obedience that operates below conscious memory.

Venetian merchant families govern a city-state that survives by trade, diplomacy, and strategic alliances rather than territorial conquest.