The super-elite had two long-term goals. One we have covered at some length: that of gradually taking the West toward a socialist world government, whether by creating an Anglo-American empire, or through the U.N.

The other, a necessary flipside of the first goal, was social engineering, to create a population that would accept world government—either because they embraced, or had even learned to love the idea, or because they didn't care. We saw strong hints of this, in our account of the hijacking of the mainstream media and academic disciplines like history. But now our focus must be broadened, to middle America generally—the ordinary people working at ordinary jobs and attempting to raise ordinary families. For the social engineering project to work, its targets must learn as little as possible about the principles guiding our original Constitutional republic. They must have been educated—or, rather, trained—not to think, just to follow orders. They must be conditioned for an existence permeated by dependency of various sorts. And they must be continually distracted, so as never to be motivated to put two and two together and get four.

In other words, a "real matrix" had to be constructed around middle America, quietly, quietly. Or, as the idea was expressed openly at Carnegie Endowment facilities: "We must control education in the United States." Centralization, of course, makes control easier. It is far easier to impose policy or a single line of thought on a centralized, top-down educational system than it is to impose it on hundreds of privately owned, independent schools, and autonomous districts. The government school system was perfect for what the super-elite wanted.

The Founding Fathers simply assumed that education would not be a function of the federal government. The Constitution does not mention education. The Founding Fathers themselves were privately educated. It is clear, also, from such events as the publication of the Federalist Papers in the major New York newspaper of the time, or from the literature that was published, and sold well at the time (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper's difficult, philosophically dense novels) that early generations of Americans had a command of language and intellect that is superior to today's masses.

Government schools got their start in the 1840s, when Horace Mann returned from Prussia bearing news of an amazing school system. The Prussian system was also rooted in Hegelian thought. Hegel had believed we lived in a universe of Absolute Reason that would be expressed politically as the Absolute State—the exact opposite of the limited government the Founding Fathers had established. In the Prussian system, children were educated not for intellectual accomplishment, but for obedience to the state. The word kindergarten is, in fact, Prussian. It suggests growing children, as in a garden (which may recall that disturbing scene in The Matrix where, under the malevolent supervision of AI machines, humans "are no longer born, we are grown").

Massachusetts, Mann's home state, bought into the idea, and became the first state (in 1852) to enact a compulsory attendance law. Government schools did not catch on right away. A number of theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of their dangers. But very slowly, the American population began to accept them. Compulsory education laws were passed in one state after another. Numerous state constitutions (including my own state of South Carolina) adopted planks committing state governments to financing government school systems. The consolidation and centralization of education had begun.

The super-elite watched all this with great interest. They saw, in government schools, a path to a controlled population—a population of "sheeple." The earliest incarnation of what would become the Rockefeller Foundation, before the turn of the century, began with the meeting between John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and one Frederick Taylor Gates. Rockefeller, Sr. had begun giving money to a variety of causes, many of them very worthwhile. He had bankrolled the University of Chicago, for example. Gates had ideas of his own, about how to use Rockefeller money. He would lead Rockefeller's eldest son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., into an interest in education that would lead to the founding of the General Education Board in 1902. In his Occasional Letter No. 1, a publication of the General Education Board, Gates penned the following chilling two paragraphs:

"In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply.

The task we set before ourselves is very simple, as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them, to a perfectly ideal life, just where they are. So we will organize our children, and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops, on the farm."

Concealed within these words is a goal of social control—via a system of education that stresses vocationalism, at the expense of challenging students cognitively or intellectually. This system would eventually transform government schools into laboratories of social engineering in order to produce "sheeple" who would neither know, nor care about, much less challenge, the goal of socialist world government.

John Dewey was the lynchpin figure here. Dewey had doubtless come to the attention of the Round Table Groups very early. A youthful psychology professor at the University of Chicago, he had studied the new "experimental psychology" under G. Stanley Hall, who in turn, had been the first American student of the German philosopher-psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who had begun the "experimental psychology" movement at the University of Leipzig in the 1870s. Wundt's school promoted a militant empiricism: nothing counted for science except what could be directly observed in the laboratory. Since thoughts, free will, the soul, etc., could not be observed, it was pointless to theorize about them. "Experimental psychology"—the parent of behaviorism—eliminated them, in favor of ideas bound to interest would-be social engineers. Children were organic stimulus-response machines. Human beings, in this materialist view, are exclusively products of their environment. Change the environment, and you produce a new human being. A whole new way of "educating" seemed about to open up.

Dewey's progressive education picked up where "experimental psychology" left off. For Dewey—schooled in both Hegelian and Marxist thought, as well as Wundtian psychology—the purpose of education is not to communicate knowledge and the accumulated wisdom of our civilization, or to offer children intellectual challenges, but to adjust them to a "changing" society. To the progressive educators, even basic literacy was a mere option, and not a necessity. Dewey wrote that "it is one of the great mistakes of education to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of the school work for the first two years."

Essentially, under progressive educators government schools mounted a systematic attack on children's minds as those of unique individuals. Dewey also wrote:

"The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends, very naturally, to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat."

So education became socialization, the adjustment of the individual to the group and the adoption of the idea that truth equals consensus—which invariably bows to the authority of the strongest personality in the group (or operating behind the scenes).

What developed was an educational system where what mattered was the group, which takes priority over the individual. We encountered the term in passing above: collectivism, the philosophy at the heart of every form of socialism (and, in fairness, much of "capitalism" as it currently exists). Whether the individual learns anything beyond what is needed to adjust to the group, and serve the interests of the state, and the corporations is, in this view, irrelevant. Funded by Rockefeller dollars, via the General Education Board, Dewey took up residence at the newly created Columbia State Teacher's College at Columbia University in New York City, where he was able to surround himself with the "best and the brightest" of progressive educators.

Mr. O.A. Nelson, retired educator, has supplied the vitally important documentation needed to support the link-up between the textbooks and the Council on Foreign Relations. His letter was first printed in 'Young Parents Alert' (St. Elmo, Minnesota). His story is self-explanatory.

"I know from personal experience what I am talking about. In December 1928, I was asked to talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On December 27th, naïve and inexperienced, I agreed. I had done some special work in teaching functional physics in high school. That was to be my topic. The next day, the 28th, a Dr. Ziegler asked me if I would attend a special educational meeting in his room after the AAAS meeting. We met from 10 p.m. until after 2:30 a.m."

"We were 13 at the meeting. Two things caused Dr. Ziegler, who was Chairman of the Educational Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, to ask me to attend… my talk on the teaching of functional physics in high school, and the fact that I was a member of Progressive Educators of America, which was nothing but a Communist front. I thought the word 'progressive' meant progress for better schools. Eleven of those attending the meeting were leaders in education. Drs. John Dewey and Edward Thorndike, from Columbia University, were there, and the others were of equal rank. I checked later, and found that all were paid members of the Community Party of Russia. I was classified as a member of the Party, but I did not know it at the time."

"The sole work of the group was to destroy our schools! We spent one hour and forty-five minutes discussing the so-called 'Modern Math.' At one point, I objected because there was too much memory work, and math is reasoning; not memory. Dr. Ziegler turned to me and said, 'Nelson, wake up! That is what we want… a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations when they get out of school!' That math was not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical a change. A milder course by Dr. Brechner was substituted, but it was also worthless, as far as understanding math was concerned. The radical change was introduced in 1952. It was the one we are using now. So, if pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don't blame them. The results are supposed to be worthless." (The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, pp. 14-15)

This, of course, was the origin of the "new math" which left a generation of high school students unable to multiply and divide, understand fractions, or do other simple arithmetic operations without calculators! The "new math" was just one species of the more general attack on the individual's basic reasoning ability. Frustrated by bad teaching methods, many students doubtless decided they were "no good at math," and gave up. Others, schooled with destructive, whole-language approaches to reading, never became good readers. They gave up on subjects like history and civics, which require an ability to read and process information. Students would receive less and less, with each passing generation, about the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution. Finally, we reached the point where it became possible to focus on the fact that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, among the worst of sins in these politically correct times. Such matters would loom far larger in the academic portrayal of those who originally built our Constitutional republic than any ideas they might have had, especially about limited government. Such students, conditioned not to think, but to respond emotionally, became perfect cannon fodder for the School-To-Work and Workforce Investment programs of the 1990s—programs sometimes beginning as early as elementary school, designed to adjust them for a "global workforce"—under the watchful eye of emerging "global governance."

In this environment, it indeed became possible for two major presidential candidates—George W. Bush and John Kerry—to be members of the same supersecret organization, Skull & Bones, and it not be news! In the "real matrix," such an election becomes one of the most important in history, because of the vast differences in philosophies between the two. Democratic and Republican "sheeple" were practically at each other's throats prior to Decision 2004. In the real world—the "desert of the real"—Bush's and Kerry's agendas were more alike than they were different. Both were pledged to an internationalist foreign policy and to the U.N. Both planned to continue, and even expand, the Iraq War. Both accepted intrusive domestic policies such as the USA Patriot Act. Both would increase federal spending and expand entitlements, in a financial environment guaranteed to continue and even accelerate our nation's growing debt. And none of this was news!

Other areas that have gone into the construction of our "real matrix" include the sexual revolution, the build-up of Hollywood and the entertainment industry generally, the growth of movements such as Sustainable Development, and the continued manipulation of the country's finances and of employment patterns. Here the field enlarges rapidly, so we must limit ourselves to a few remarks. Consider the first. One may begin with the Kinsey reports, one of which was published in 1949 and the other in 1952. "Sexologist" Alfred C. Kinsey's so-called "research" (which we now know involved the criminal sexual torture of children and even infants by Kinsey's group of homosexuals and pedophiles) was also bankrolled by Rockefeller Foundation dollars. Kinsey claimed to have demonstrated—on the basis of what is clearly a biased sample (a blatant statistical fallacy) that behind the facade of Judeo-Christian sexual morality was a vast diversity of sexual practices, including homosexuality and pedophilia, and that even small children were sexual beings. The result was the undermining of the Judeo-Christian ethic that until then, had governed accepted sexual conduct, and confined it to marriage between a man and a woman.

There can be no doubt that the sexual urge is one of the most powerful in human biology. Its control by a moral view of sexuality, is therefore, imperative. The Kinseyite view, however, is that there is no connection whatsoever between sexuality and morality. This became standard sex education dogma, also introduced into government schools, alongside the dumbing down of reading and math curricula. The divorce between Judeo-Christian morality and sexual conduct entered popular culture with a vengeance when Hugh Hefner embraced the Kinseyite view of sex and founded Playboy, which quickly became a financial empire, launching the age of permissiveness that took off in the 1960s.

Sex has been a distraction in our culture ever since. This doubtless vastly understates the case. Sexuality permeates Hollywood, and via Hollywood, much of the entertainment industry. A people preoccupied with sex—whose educational system has already been undermined by other forms of anti-intellectualism—is unlikely to be alert to the dangers spelled out in essays like this one! Most will be more focused on the bedroom exploits of a constantly changing parade of celebrities!

Now consider Sustainable Development. Agenda 21, dating from 1991 and mentioned above, is the bible of the Sustainable Development movement. It is an enormous, book-length blueprint for control of the world's resources—land, oceans, rivers, forests, air, oil, minerals, other natural resources, human resources, and so on—at the global level. That's right—according to the worldview of Sustainable Development, human beings are a resource, like any other resource, which is why nearly every large enterprise in the country in the business of employing others has its human resources department, not its personnel department.

Sustainable Development has incurred suspicion and even opposition here and there, so when implemented at a local level, it seldom goes by that name. In my home town of Columbia, for example, it is called Town and Country; in neighboring Greenville, to the north, it is called Vision 2025. Such projects often have the backing of the local Chamber of Commerce. Business and community leaders are encouraged to believe that they are in control, at the local level. This, again, is life inside the "real matrix." In the real world, the "desert of the real," business and community leaders caught up in such movements are advancing the goals of the U.N. and the super-elite, as spelled out in Agenda 21.

Whenever you hear phrases like smart growth, open spaces, biodiversity, wildlife preserves, habitats, urban ecology, etc., you may know you are dealing with Sustainable Development, regardless of what it is called.

Finally, we should speak to the manipulation of global markets from the highest level, best exemplified in international agreements masquerading as "free trade." In instances of genuine free trade, if I have something you want, and we are both able and willing to pay for, we trade for perceived mutual benefit. No one else—especially government—need get involved. Such a thing has not existed anywhere in the Western world on any large scale for well over a century. NAFTA, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA, which could come up for a vote on the floor of Congress in early 2005), are not genuine free trade agreements.

One does not need tens of thousands of pages to have a free trade agreement; but one might need this many pages if one's real goal is to create a huge globalist bureaucracy, aimed at outlining regulations and implementing complex compliance procedures.

One should keep this in mind as we document the number of good-paying American jobs that went to Mexico following the passage of NAFTA in 1994, and the "outsourcing" of jobs to China and India that has occurred more recently. High taxes and burdensome regulations have made it increasingly difficult to conduct business in the United States, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford the cost of compliance. They must choose between "outsourcing" jobs for cheaper labor, and operating at a loss. Yet, it is perplexing that few businesses will stand up to the regulatory state. Moreover, not all the businesses "outsourcing" jobs are small. Even Microsoft has done it. Wal-Mart, of course, relies almost exclusively on foreign labor to ensure low prices.

What is the explanation? Many business leaders today are products of the kind of education outlined above, aimed at adjustment to an environment. They have become good "global citizens," with no loyalty to their country, much less to their employees. They will support, e.g., the naturalization of illegal immigrants, because such people will work for peanuts. As a result, good-paying jobs are disappearing for Americans. In the past, entire occupations were wiped out, and replaced by better ones. Today, entire occupations are being wiped out, and not being replaced (at least, for those qualified to do more than flip burgers, work as store clerks, or in call centers). We are threatened with the slow diminution of the prosperity achieved in the 1950s and 1960s, until we become the first high-tech third world nation.

It is important to understand the origin of the predicament we are in. It began when the super-elite was able to seize control of the finances of our nation and, by extension, its economic system. Most people probably believe our economy really is capitalist—that "capitalism" triumphed over "communism." We won the Cold War, correct? Most people probably believe that they have property rights in their homes, automobiles, the money in their wallets, bank accounts, stock portfolios, etc., and in other possessions. They manage to rationalize property taxes, automobile taxes, capital gains taxes, and myriad other instances where they must answer regularly to the central government. Outside the "real matrix," in the "desert of the real," dichotomies such as "capitalism" vs. "communism" have become increasingly meaningless. They do not reflect reality. Our economic system is highly centralized, with all important activity regulated to the teeth. There are no substantive "property rights," as becomes evident, if one studies real estate even superficially. There is no such thing as a real estate transaction today, without government involvement.

Control is a matter of degree, of course. The super-elite and its minions do not care whether you buy Bach or the Beatles when you buy CDs. They do not care whether you purchase The Matrix or Dumb and Dumber. They will not make you turn off Oprah and turn on PBS instead. They will not move to stop anyone's enjoyment of sports, or of fashion, or of nightclubs, or probably even of pornography, unless the latter can be used as an excuse to impose control over the Internet. These all constitute distractions—and, perhaps, outlets. At this level, our economy is free. But in the "desert of the real," all the important decisions are being made at the financial power centers: Washington, D.C., and to a lesser extent, in other metropolises like Chicago, Los Angeles, and possibly, Atlanta.

Thomas Jefferson once warned,

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless, on the continent their Fathers conquered."

This, of course, is very likely the goal of the super-elite. Its members knew all along that because of the strength of the Protestant work ethic here, and that of the Judeo-Christian worldview, breaking the back of America would be difficult, and that the American public would probably be the last public to accept the coming of world government. They substituted real, gold-backed dollars with fiat money, and began a process of devaluing the currency. The dollar has lost 96 percent of its value since 1913. The super-elite undermined all the ideas and intellectualism on which both political and economic liberty in the United States was founded. The majority of high school graduates today have no idea what is in the Constitution, although they may know how to put on a condom, and they know the exploits of sports teams and, in a lot of cases, which celebrity is sleeping with which other celebrity.

With various forms of relativism and subjectivism now dominant in academia, with the sexual revolution permeating popular culture, and with the overall dumbing down of the educational system, and its manipulation to produce human worker bees, rather than citizens of a free society, the super-elite's work is almost complete.

If the FTAA should pass, we will see the merging of all the economies of the Western Hemisphere and borders between nations effectively dissolved. Control over trade will be placed in the hands of globalist bureaucrats. Foreign wars such as the Bush Administration's misguided effort in Iraq will continue to drain our resources, as our own national debt continues to skyrocket. The last step will be the merging of the globalist bureaucracies overseeing the European Union with those of Great Britain and the United States. The kind of empire envisioned by Cecil Rhodes and the early Round Table Groups will come to pass, at last. Today, the most current term for it is the New World Order.

Although fixing specific dates is hazardous—predicting the future has never been an exact science—if nothing happens to alter or impede the goals of the super-elite, we can probably expect to see all this happen during the lifetimes of many people reading this article. After all, with the quantum leap into larger and more intrusive government taken by the Bush Administration following the 9/11 attacks, events are happening quickly. Almost every new policy, whether coming from government or developed by big business (or via the "public-private partnerships" that are the legacy of the Reinventing Government movement of the noxious 1990s), is taking us into a more and more centralized world.

In this world, individuals have less and less room to maneuver. Should the country experience another major crisis, be it another massive terrorist attack, or a sudden hyper-inflationary spiral, we may well see martial law declared, and the Constitution suspended. Then all bets will be off, as those in power will be able to do as they please, without restriction.