Is society and civilization just one giant ponzi scheme?
Yes. 
Except the scheme is by your beliefs, your dreams, who you trust, what you want.
The scheme is constructed by the 10% in power that historically manipulates the rest of the populace.
With that post replace investment with labor or social services and the answer becomes crystal clear.
More like top 1-5%. The oligarchy does admit newcomers and challengers without great reluctance.
They also create ideologies which perpetuate the active and willful enslavement of the masses. They do this primarily using the “education” system, and religion.
5% sounds like a great number but then again a additional 5% creating 10% symbolizes all their various managers and lackeys that keep the system orderly for them.
Don’t forget politics and various other institutions guided by a centralized government bureaucracy.
Do you know that Carleas, the administrator of this website, works for them, the centralized government bureaucracy?
Nothing would surprise me.
The greatest masterful deception of all human history is the persuasion of all individuals to be self deceived into thinking that they are ‘free’ in order that they be distracted from realizing the very few who really do control, command, or direct their very lives and that reality they call civilization that they constantly take for granted everyday of their lives that they limit themselves obediently to.
Not realizing that the entire world built up around them are nothing more than legalized abstracted deception where it practically revolves around theft individuals only find themselves having returns from their own labor or the subsequent labors of others rather than actual profitable returns from those at the top of the ponzi directing it all.
The ponzi society entices newer generations by offering higher profitable returns for their labors than the older generations before them sweet talking them with visions, dreams, and ideas by that of short term profitable returns guided by the political process that is either abnormally high or unusually consistent. Perpetuation of the high profitable returns require an ever increasing flow of obedient whole entire new younger generations of individuals to keep this scheme going.
The system being a slave to entropy like all other things are always destined to collapse because the earnings of the laborers, if any, are less that the payments to those that run the ponzi society.
Like all declining ponzi societies and civilizations that came before in the history of humanity the scheme becomes interrupted by those who awaken to the realization that they have become had. As more individuals become involved within greater population density the likelihood of that realization increases as structural collapse becomes imminent destroying the very fabric of its entire integrity.
In the ponzi the masters control the maze leaving everybody else as the rats that crawl within it.
The ponzi is operated much like any other prison where you have three types of people living within it.
The three kinds of people consists of wardens, guards, and the imprisoned inmates. Within this prison everybody competes against one another in order to become a guard or warden of the ponzi maze that is society because nobody wants to be one of it’s inmate prisoners and trapped rats crawling along.
The wardens and guards know that the ponzi maze is a designed prison but they understand it’s better to run it and benefit from it rather than to be cast away as one of the imprisoned rats that occupies it’s vast spaces as one of the many slaves that exist within.
Yeesh trajicomic, again you prove to have an accute understanding of the problem. Maybe that’s why I hate you… but I’m just a hypocritical “anarchist” anyway :p.
Nice thread James, you really hit the nail on the head.
Two things:
The doors to the jail are open, the prisoners prefer being prisoners than toughing it out in the wild with no cage or prison food (shitty as it may be).
Also, like any ponzi scheme, it will continue to work as long as it can grow in production capacity and the pool of potential dupes doesn’t run out.
To all socialists one might say: Do you really want to take control of a jail?
Yes. A apt observation.
The most perfect kind of prison, wouldn’t you agree?
Or until those running the prison figure out that infinite expansion on a finite world is quite impossible where the whole 3500 year old ponzi comes crashing down. Unsustainability is becoming my new favorite word in the month of this January.
good thing too, otherwise we’d be even more fucked
Well, don’t assume anything quite yet. 
This humanity full of collective naivety and hubris has plenty of time to fuck up the world as we know it. Give it time.
Advanced technology or the mere capacity of technological expansion in the hands of human beings is like watching a five year old playing with a loaded pistol that has the safety off.
No Shit!
Now your getting the hand at it! 
Guys, guys… this technological boom was thousands of years in the making. Don’t underestimate the proficiency of our highly compartmentalized and compartmentalizing power structures.
In other words, scientists know their shit, and politicians have been properly trained, specially after the cold war, to trust them when they say “yo! wait! don’t touch that yet!!”
And if you are talking about climate change, do you really think that these technological smarty-pantses can’t figure out a way to survive it?
They will not destroy themselves. We need to join them or figure out a way to make it happen ourselves. Or, I dunno… something, but they won’t do themselves in. We are moving more towards 1984 than Mad Max if you catch my drift.
After 1984 reaches its climax Mad Max will be what is left over.
Yep. I always laugh at all the people that think these assholes are complicated. There is nothing complicated in what they pursue. on the one hand greed that lets them facilitate their ends, and on the other hand power that lets them fulfill them. There is no stop switch because its in their nature to keep taking and taking until they destroy themselves. They are nothing but an empty void and a scourge upon this planet. Ultimately they are destroyed through their own bullshit and hypocrisy more than anything else.
Heed my warning
Underestimate your foe at your own expence…
Haven’t you ever played chess?!?
havent you ever paid attention in history class?