The barbarians are in the saddle,

And galloping… over us !

Nedd Willard

But they are not the hordes of the past intent on seizing women and all the gold and silver they can carry.

The loot they want is all on paper or e-mail. Some of it can be translated into private jet planes, huge houses that can be built and surrounded by full grown trees and gardens in a few days. But the pleasures the new barbarians take there are not even those of the roaring gluttonous table and certainly not the riches of the shared bed. Only eating to keep fit and exchanging recognition of each other’s importance takes place there.

Outwardly ascetic and verbally moralistic they snatch some furtive joys from sex, but mainly from the exercise of power and the acknowledgement of their prestige. And all of this requires access to uncountable quantities of money in whatever denomination is needed. It also requires keeping the captive peoples under tight control.

The societies they dominate are composed mainly of impotent people pursuing passive pleasures like watching professional athletes display their skill at insignificant activities in which speed or the manipulation of inflated balls predominate. Only a few in that public can afford to practice extreme sports where the body plunges or defies gravity, speed, death and injury for a short while and the mind goes blank.

Most people ruled by barbarians live in spreading globs of urban sprawl. They are not citizens, only inhabitants. They live in constant anxiety and have been persuaded or forced to confide their personal security to the callous agents of the barbarians.

Some agents are uniformed but others work secretly and only reveal themselves when they use battering rams to break down doors at night behind which the unarmed citizens live. They employ brute force to obtain the submission of the chosen scapegoats and potential dissidents whom they may beat or kill with impunity.

More and more people today are living in atomised communities and cannot act as full citizens there because they are not truly informed of the actions of those at the centres of power who dominate them. They have no access to information about what their rulers do that will directly or indirectly affects their lives. So-called democratic elections have become loud empty farces, since the citizen’s choice of who can be elected is so limited.

The public are not treated as citizens since they have no inalienable rights. They and their children may have their homes and even their bodies tested and violated without proof that they have committed any crime. Their property can be seized on whatever pretexts the barbarians and their paid employees masquerading as representative of the people can and do invent.

Most important of all, the vast majority of people in this world have been deprived of independence. They own little land, and so cannot grow their own food or set the price for what they must buy. Instead they are dependent on low wages that can be withdrawn at any moment. If they fall sick and need treatment they must pay for it if they can, or go without if they can’t.

The barbarians use and manipulate the mass media to distract, to confuse, and to keep the public ignorant. Television, now the main source of news, seeks the lowest common denominator and finds it.

Like the media, political discourse arouses raw emotion using it like a whip to maintain fear and hate. On the screen or in print scapegoats, like the terrorists or the drug dealers, are shown as deadly and inhuman. Meanwhile, the governments and their media allies featuring the unknown plotter and killer who appears from the shadows whenever needed regularly create a vague miasmic fear.

Recent studies show that people today have less close friends than before and do less together. Even card games or parent teachers meetings lack participants. To compensate, many people take keen interest in the strangers whom they see only on their TV screens. Barbarians also help in producing films that help the dispossessed feel better by presenting ignorance and lowly status as loveable virtues.

Barbarians themselves are not innocently ignorant since they actively repress most critical expressions of intelligence that represent values that threaten their prestige, money and power. Although most of the new barbarians are from highly developed countries, their counterparts in more illiterate societies, who rely on dogmatic religions based on unquestioning obedience and violence, are tied to them by the secret cords of money.

Barbarians are in the saddle and galloping over our globe and over us. Who will join with others like us to stop them?