Anti-Empire – by Marko Marjanović
Are handshakes oh so slightly unhygienic? Of course, they are. That is the point!
That is why a handshake is the greeting of equals. A sign not just of respect, but of a measure of trust, and a sign of equality that is the prerequisite to exploring mutual interest.
A handshake established the participants as equal, or as equal enough that they can engage in mutual enterprise, or conspiracy for that matter.
It is not despite its faint germ-sharing quality that a handshake rose to become *the* greeting of the modern world, but because of it.
Our ancestors understood at an innate level that someone who thinks himself too pure, or too contaminated to grasp your hand could not be trusted.
The willingness to engage in a little germ-sharing was precisely what was required to establish the other was neither too alien nor too warped to work with.
Even today something as insignificant as buying a car is inescapably sealed by — sharing a few germs.
A handshake establishes so much more than a mutual bow or the moronic “elbow bump” ever could, and is a much better bridge between people and the starting point of every conspiracy.
And that is why they want to take it away.
There isn’t a smoky room where this was decided, but there doesn’t need to be one.
Humans have been jockeying for position and status long before they knew how to roll cigars.
Every human knows already at the primitive, non-vocal social ape level what in this competition is beneficial to him, and what is a threat.
(The higher level mainly exists to act as a PR agent for the self-interested ape. As part of that the lower level often deceives the higher level into believing the self-interested action is actually altruistic and good-for-everyone because protestations of innocence and virtue sound more convincing when the PR level actually believes them.)
The power elite doesn’t actually need to conference together to know, courtesy of their ape brain, that taking away the handshake from the masses would be a huge coup for them.
If an opportunity falls in their lap to make headway in this direction they will explore it automatically as would anyone in their position.
Of course the rich and the powerful would continue to shake hands in their own circles. That is just for the unwashed masses. They would not be so foolish to cast away such a powerful tool for relationship building and class cohesion.
The career of Jeffrey Epstein demonstrated clearly the depths of baseness the elite will plumb in their rather more elaborate rituals of trust.
To say they are not averse to sharing a few germs is an understatement.
The people who establish they are “all in this together” by having orgies with groomed 15-year olds on private islands and in front of Mossad cameras would ban your handshake as filthy.
Yeah.
Maybe there’s a different motive here at play.
To leave you atomized and less of a threat than ever.
Such a heavily stratified system as ours where a minority has all the coercive power against the rest can only be maintained by the application of intense, permanent, and never-ending class warfare of said power elite against the rest.
Taxation and regulation to demoralize you materially. Ideologies that demonize the common folk as sinful, wasteful, unwashed or diseased to demoralize you spiritually and morally.
The alienation of the very tools you use to build a society around you to demoralize you socially.
Until you’re just a battery in the matrix, incapable of resistance and counter-attack.
Happy elbow bumping!