Revealing the elephant

On elephants ... bulls in china shops ... and U.S. presidents.

In 1918 at the New York Hippodrome, Harry Houdini made a full-grown elephant vanish. It was a spectacular illusion. Houdini wrote of the elephant, who was called Jennie …

I introduce her as the first known Vanishing Elephant. She weighs over ten thousand pounds and is as gentle as a kitten.¹

The question, of course, is, how did he do it?

The successful carrying out of the illusion was the result of years of work by illusionists whose endeavours Houdini … how shall we say? … borrowed. The concept behind the illusion was simple, if rather less simple to carry off successfully.

I’ll come back to this but, first, let me introduce another topic.

(Elephant image at top courtesy Shutterstock)

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All too often, I start writing about something and whatever the topic is leads me to research that uncovers something else that bothers me, quite literally, to distraction. I admit it, I’m easily distracted!

In this instance, I started writing about the need, as I see it, for us all to reintegrate more subtle aspects of human behavior back into our everyday affairs (basically, paying more attention to, and valuing, individuals’ thoughts and opinions) rather than managing more and more stuff, particularly in working environments, from the top down.

A big example of Top-down Domination Management issues that was bugging me was globalization. Thinking about it led me to look up a speech from 2005, the keynote speech that the UK prime minister of the time, Tony Blair, gave to his Labour Party annual conference in Brighton on the south coast of England. I recalled that a particular nugget in the speech had featured prominently in the news. Ah, yes, there it was:

I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.

Sounds a tad tetchy, huh? Maybe, but whatever his tone, the words just shut down any conversation on the topic of globalization: no point debating it, it would appear, the whole issue was apparently so obvious and certain that you just had to accept it, get on with it and stop belly-aching.

There I was with a transcript of the speech up on the screen in front of me. So what did I do? Well, of course, I started scrolling. And the text continued:

They're not debating it [globalization] in China and India. They are seizing its possibilities, in a way that will transform their lives and ours. … these nations have labour costs a fraction of ours.

And I recalled that, back in the noughties, I had conversations with colleagues at a global consultancy about outsourcing to ever more countries. One issue, back then, was that when Country A started to benefit from work from Western companies, labour costs rose, necessitating a search for Country B, and so on and on.

Then I remembered Tim Cook’s comments from December 2017 when the Apple CEO said:

The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor costs. I’m not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago.

Hmm. So what was all of this really about?

Well, I suggest it was all about an idea or, really, two ideas that, together, provided cover for the unrestricted pursuit of a new world order:

Idea 1 was a compassionate vision of a world of peace and harmony: the antithesis of the wars and divisions of the world as it had existed for much of the twentieth century.

Idea 2 was a vision of Westerners making money on a hitherto unattainable scale.

Put ‘em together and what have you got?

Compassion + Greed = Virtuous Bonanza!

Irresistible, huh? So irresistible, in fact, as to justify overriding the democratic norms. But how was that to be achieved?

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Let’s jump back for a minute to Jennie the Elephant and the world of illusion.

The vanishing elephant illusion was achieved by creating a cabinet large enough to hold several elephants, with an internal wall that could swiftly be repositioned with Jennie tucked away behind it and with a mirror surface now facing into the open space. The whole thing was organized so that the image reflected in the mirror gave the audience the impression that they were looking at the full, unrestricted space.

My source of the information about Houdini’s trick is a wonderful book, Hiding the Elephant, by a chap called Jim Steinmeyer², himself an accomplished practitioner of the magic arts. In it, Steinmeyer writes:

The first time I was ever invisible, actually invisible, was at the Palmer House in Chicago in 1980.³

He had volunteered to help his friend, Bob Higa, “a skillful magician who specialized in performing magic for sales meetings”. Steinmeyer goes on …

When I was a performer standing on a stage, I always had the impression of being supremely, uncomfortably, surreally visible - the most illuminated person in the room … But that morning in Chicago, as I was standing on the stage, invisible, it was the exact opposite. The lights in the room made the audience visible to me. I was watching their eyes, but they couldn’t see me.⁴

It’s all a matter of lighting and rendering somebody or something invisible by overlaying them or it with an image of the background.

Plus, crucially, providing distraction. In the magic show this is normally the magician - the more brash, confident and theatrical the better.

With this in mind, let’s go back to the globalization issue and all the goings-on that follow in its wake.

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I’m suggesting that we - that is, everyone in the Western world - have, for nigh on the past thirty years, been subjected to an audacious vanishing trick.

Actual democracy has been switched with a different system operated without any democratic mandate by non-government organizations and quangos and other bureaucratic resources, all intent upon imposing a new world order - a culture-neutral, homogenized, global order, to host the Undifferentiated Human Matter (UHM) of Renaud Camus’ analysis.

Mentioning Camus, I cannot resist referencing his - how shall we say? - ebullient description of what he has termed The Great Replacement that leads to UHM:

What I called davocracy, the management of the human park by the great financiers, the banks, the pension funds, the multinationals, and the GAFAM⁵ empire, has two demands, each as contrary to any concern for ecology as the other: on the one hand, demographic growth, which, from the point of view of Davos, is nothing other than an indefinitely growing mass of consumers, this perpetual dodge or Ponzi scheme on which the maintenance of the economic bubble depends; on the other hand, the general interchangeability of the consumer-product man, that is, the fanatical reduction of human biodiversity.⁶

The new system has been kept as invisible as possible. Meanwhile a facsimile image of the actual democratic system was projected over it all.

So, across the Western world, elections have nominally taken place. But they were ‘mirror & projection’ versions of real elections.

Here in the UK, as elsewhere, there has been no new government in nearly thirty years. Sure, the people who are nominally in charge have changed - different political parties, different personalities - but underneath it all, always the same reality, always the same policies regardless of what might have been ‘promised’ out on the hustings.

And all the time, some things have been studiously ignored: chief among these, the fact that countries like China and Russia and India and Saudi Arabia and Iran and many, many more have consistently and unequivocally refused to buy in to the global, unipolar concept.

Surely no surprise, then, that over time more and more Westerners have questioned the changes being forced on them - even if, as so often, it results in their being reflexively labelled ‘far right’ and worse.

All of this until … well, You Know Who!

Bearing all of the foregoing in mind, it is surely not surprising that, in the U.S., a majority finally emerged to vote in a change agent.

And if you’re going for a significant reversal of policies who do you vote in? Surely, the biggest, most aggressive beast you can find. Someone who is, so to speak, a bull in a china shop. In other words President Donald Trump.

The above image, courtesy Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images is the 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast in which the Republican elephant first appeared.

Is President Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach, hooves kicking in all directions to smash all of the mirrors, the best way to tackle the issue? I don’t know. But it does seem to me that, after three decades of trying to impose a new system under a cloak of invisibility, one does need to be cautious about criticizing something that is being done by democratic consent.

Thanks for reading.

1. Jim Steinmeyer. Hiding the Elephant (2004)
(Thanks Eddie.)

2. Jim Steinmeyer. Ibid.

3. Jim Steinmeyer. Ibid.

4. Jim Steinmeyer. Ibid.

5. GAFAM is an acronym for the major technology companies = Google, Apple, Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Microsoft.

6. Renaud Camus, translated by Ethan Rundell. The Deep Murmur (2024)