This article was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt-Market.

EDITOR’S NOTE: It seems crazy in this day and age that we have to congratulate people for speaking up when they know they are likely to be censored or shadow banned, discredited, lied about, or worse. But SHTFPlan would like to thank Brandon Smith for his continued adherence to the principles of freedom and liberty.  He’s speaking and writing about those regularly.  The upcoming months will be difficult, not because of the pandemic, but because of tyranny and oppression and suppression of thoughts that go against the totalitarian control being put in place as I type this. Thank you, Smith, for staying the course.

A common phrase I have heard lately all around the internet as well as all around the area I live whenever the pandemic situation is broached is that “We are all in this together, and WE will get through this together….” The sentiment is repeated like a religious mantra and I believe it is rooted in a collectivist reaction in the minds of many.

The idea is that if we all comfort each other by repeating the lie that we’re all in the same boat, and if everyone believes it, then the threat of the outbreak along with the economic collapse will somehow simply “disappear”.

The notion that “we are going to get through this together” seems to be based on the assumption that the crisis is going to move quickly, and if we hold tight, our sacrifice will be minimal and all will go back to the way things were before. This is simply not so.

I highly respect the ideal of giving hope to others whenever possible (as Aragorn says in Return Of The King “I give hope to men.  I keep none for myself”). However, hope has to come from a legitimate place. It has to be based on some reality. There are too many lies driving public psychology right now to give concrete hope to anyone. The lies have to land, they have to touch the ground, and the facts have to hit people hard before we can then come to an understanding of what we have to do to survive this event. In the meantime, the majority of people are going to be trapped in fantasy land, hypnotized by delusions of magical cures and economic silver bullets that will lead to salvation “in just two more weeks”.

On top of all that, the American public has never been more divided than it is right now. Sure, we can soak in a bathtub of brain-dead dreams with worn-out elitist celebrities like Madonna, telling us that the virus “makes us all equal”, but does it really? I’m sorry, but the truth that not all people are equal is about to become more apparent than ever before.

The pandemic along with the economic collapse is going to separate people into clearly definable categories, and many of these groups will be in direct conflict with each other:

The Prepared

These are the people that saw this event coming ahead of time and spent many months if not many years stocking supplies and training to survive it. The Prepared were smarter and had more insight into the reality of the situation than most people. If we were to apply evolutionary standards then The Prepared would be at the top of the food chain, the alpha species, but let’s not let this go to our heads; there are many downsides to being a member of The Prepared.

In a just world, the masses would be going to The Prepared for answers to the crisis, and some do, but overall I think The Prepared will be more hated for their predictive capabilities than admired. This is why prepared people have to stick together, organize and protect one another; because the day is coming when they will be targeted as enemies of the collective.

The Unprepared

The Unprepared are not all alike. There are people who are arrogant and ignored all evidence of collapse presented to them ahead of time, and now they are going to suffer for that. These are the people I call “grasshoppers”, as in the fable of ‘The Ant And The Grasshopper’. They danced and played all summer and laughed at all the warnings of impending winter. These are the people who will act indignant and vicious when they are deprived of comfort, and they will demand that the ants give up their preps to save them (which is not going to happen).

There are other people who were merely oblivious to the situation and are mostly innocent in their lack of preparation They just weren’t exposed to the available information for whatever reason. They live decent hard-working lives and they are mostly innocent in all of this. They too will be faced with hard decisions in the near future – Some of them will try to prepare as best they can while the crisis is still in its early stages. Others will join the grasshoppers out of fear and demand a draconian government response.

The Independents

The Independents are people that will seek to solve the problems surrounding the crisis with their own ingenuity. They will not demand help from the government, nor will they demand that other people “share” their resources with them out of a sense of entitlement. They will ask for help where needed, but they will try to do the best they can to endure the crisis without trying to force others to make things easier for them.

The Independents will understand the difference between collectivism and voluntary organization. The first strategy requires force and fear, the second strategy does not. The Collectivists will try to interfere or even destroy The Independents, because if they are successful in organizing voluntarily and becoming prosperous through free market innovation then this will prove that the collectivist ideology is unnecessary and outdated. The Collectivists would rather “win” than be right in their thinking.

The Collectivists

Collectivist people will applaud the vast expansion of government power and control because within their cult religion government is god. To them, the pandemic is not a curse but a blessing, because it gives them a rationale to take part in a grand subjugation of other people and feel the power they have always wanted to feel. These are the people with inherent narcissistic and sociopathic traits within our culture. They represent only 1% to 5% of the total population, but they are predatory and single-minded in their goal to control others and feed off the world like parasites.

These people are not always elites. In fact, most of them are just like you and me in terms of status and income.  In times of great crisis, these creatures tend to rise to the surface and reveal themselves.  They feel particularly energized within environments that fuel tyranny; they love the feeling of power and will exploit crisis events as an excuse to act as evil as they always wanted to but could not during normal times.  Take for example Doctor John Rademaker in Louisville, Kentucky who attacked a group of girls and tried to strangle one of them for “not social distancing”.  Once we consider the fact that by attacking the girls he was also breaking social distancing guidelines, it becomes clear that people like this don’t actually care about their own rules, they only care that OTHER PEOPLE follow those rules.

They want to be the observers like the Soviet Cheka.  They know will never be at the top of the power totem pole, so they ride the coattails of tyranny and feed on whatever scraps of power they can get.

These people seem like they would not work well with others, but they do tend to congregate in groups as long as there is mutual gain to be had.  They have all the character qualities of global elites including a complete lack of empathy, a penchant for self-worship and idolization, zero belief in anything greater than themselves, a propensity towards deceit and violence to get what they want, and using disasters to their advantage.

The Global Elites

This is a tiny group of creatures that benefit the most from the pandemic crisis.  Through this disaster they will be able to absorb vast amounts of hard assets for pennies on the dollar, devouring wealth and property from the middle class and changing the entire economy into something unrecognizable.  The elites don’t want your property and wealth simply because they are greedy; they want your property and wealth because they don’t want YOU to have any.  They want to end the concept of private property for all time, for without property and the ability to accumulate wealth through our labors the masses are always dependent on the government for their survival.

Beyond this, the ultimate goal of the elites is a one-world cashless society, as well as a one-world government.  Already, the US Senate is considering a bill that would create a digital dollar and a digital wallet system to replace paper currency.  Other nations have begun going cashless, and the coronavirus is being used as an excuse to speed up the process.  The UN’s World Health Organization has specifically called for going cashless as well.  Once the public is trapped into a digital system, they will never be able to trade without using the banks as the middle-men, and all transactions will be tracked.  Nothing will be private ever again, and with the push of a button what little wealth you are allowed to accumulate can be frozen within the new socialist control culture.  You will be at the mercy of the government and the banks.

Moving past the economic the elites have bigger dreams of a massive surveillance society in which every person is tracked 24 hours a day.  Bill Gates is all over the mainstream news lately promoting the idea of tracking apps (like those already being used in China) to “fight the coronavirus”.  Apple and Google are pushing the agenda as well and are ready to launch tracking apps whenever the government is ready to write them into law.

The Global Elites do not care about saving lives.  They do not care about saving the economy as we know it.  They do not care about political affiliations.  They are on their own side, and they only care about power.  Like I said, we are NOT all in this together.

The Sheeple

Sheeple are people that have no capacity for self-leadership. They will follow whoever they think has the best chance of securing their survival, even if those people have evil intentions. Sheeple are not necessarily nefarious minded, they just don’t care about the bigger picture and they only see what is right in front of them. This is a different mindset from those of us that look for leadership in people that display integrity, experience, and competence; Sheeple don’t care about any of that. They just want to feel protected and secure no matter what, even if they have to sacrifice their freedoms in exchange for that feeling. They are a prime target for The Collectivists and The Global Elites.

Trying to talk sense to sheeple is almost impossible. They will not listen. You probably know a few Sheeple in your life who even now in the midst of a global collapse still think this crisis will be over in a matter of weeks and that the government will save them. Attempting to convince them otherwise is a waste of time.

All you can do is provide a better solution than the collectivists and hope The Sheeple follow your lead instead of the evil empire’s when the crash hits hardest.

Irreconcilable Differences

These different types of people are mostly at odds with each other. There is no “we”, there is no “us” and there is no “getting through this thing together”. I will say that the vast majority of people do have a conscience, unlike the globalists that created this calamity in the first place, but that does not mean we will all end up on the same team. The dark magic of chaos is that it can be used to convince otherwise peaceful people to support horrifying tyranny in the name of the “greater good”.

Beware anyone promoting the notion that we are “all in this together”; this is the gateway to collectivism and it is a blatant lie. As mentioned, there are establishment elites that plan to gain from this event while the rest of us suffer; they are NOT on our side or in our boat. They will use the pandemic and the simultaneous economic collapse (which they have engineered) to maneuver the public into abandoning their freedoms in the name of collective safety.

There are useful idiots and narcopaths out there that thrive in these types of unstable environments. They too are vampires seeking to bleed people dry while using the disaster as cover. These are the people screaming at strangers walking down the street that they need to “go back home” and “flatten the curve”. These are the people calling the cops on their neighbors for talking in a group bigger than two or three. These are the local government officials calling for bans on church services even when they are held outside and follow the “guidelines” of social distancing. These are the people calling preppers “hoarders” and demanding that their supplies be redistributed. These are the people that revel in authoritarianism.

Understand that there are many sides to this conflict and very few of them are honorable. Listen to your conscience, listen to evidence, truth and reason, and choose your side wisely