The term ‘scienter’ is used to describe the calculus, awareness, and intent of a person who undertakes manipulation of another person (or targeted group) into a fraudulent loss.

Hell does not depend upon demons in order to function. Rather, it only requires a population of otherwise virtuous and detached human agency, a critical mass of whom merely seek their just and regular pound of flesh.

This last week, my son ventured into an Apple Store to have his older iPhone outfitted with a new battery. The Apple Genius glanced disdainfully (bearing zero interest in actually addressing the customer’s need) at the old model phone and said “Your service (Verizon) is offering a special deal right now, where you can trade in your old phone and upgrade to the new iPhone 15 for just $120, with no increase to your parent’s monthly phone plan charges.”

My son responded in the affirmative, at which point the Apple Genius put him on the phone with a Verizon representative who confirmed the offer. “That’s right Gray Jr., I can ship you a new iPhone 15 for just $120 and there will be no increase to your parent’s monthly phone plan charges.” My son elected to take the option of gaining a new iPhone 15 for $120, over a $90 battery replacement in his old iPhone.

Please note that flim flam artists do not actually look like the person shown to the upper right. Instead, they tend to look the part of upstanding citizen, adorned in current fad clothing, and even having attended the finest universities. Stripped of their humanity by academic mentors, now owing their very souls to job-offshoring, pluralistic ignorance, world economic citizens, earnings-extraction, and the virtue signaling of their paper-trading Party masters.

Later that day, I received an email from Verizon, thanking me for my iPhone 15 order and welcoming me to the ‘Exciting new 5G Start 1.0 Verizon Plan’. The fact that they addressed a no-change-in-service evolution as ‘exciting’, meant I was absolutely sure I could surmise just to whom this new plan would prove to be exciting. So I logged in to my billing account with Verizon, only to find that sure enough, my monthly charges had been increased by $63 per month – not temporarily, as if terms of a new hardware charge mind you, but through billing every single person on the plan $12.62 more per month, in perpetuity. No change in actual service was entailed.

Accordingly, I called Verizon to get this ‘fantastic deal’ reversed. My petition fell upon deaf ears however, because as the agent informed me, my old plan ‘no longer exists’ and I could not be placed back onto it. The $63 more-per-month plan was the right plan for me now. Of course she would be glad to see if she could ‘reduce our services’ in order to obtain a lower monthly cost. Things like placing all household members on a data limit (what amounted to maybe five or six YouTube videos, and billing obscene amounts per gigabyte once over that limit – nothing but an even larger and more surprising price increase in reality).

WEFlation

As minor as this type of expense-in-perpetuity might seem, the ten-year opportunity cost Net Future Value of this flim flam, inside my financial and retirement modeling, turned out to constitute a (NFV₁₀ =) $14,860 loss. That’s one hell of an expensive iPhone. No wonder it was ‘exciting’. Now multiply this number by millions of low-income and poor retiring citizens impacted by this same dollar figure, and you gain a sense of the level of misery imparted by such schemes. A few World Economic Forum Cronies with Greek islands villas, golden parachutes,¹ new yachts, and a few subservient vice presidents with new cars – versus tens of millions struggling and broke in their convalescent years. All of course in the name of ‘inclusion’ (aka ‘power reach’).

If I take this Plan Settlement Value ($14,900 above), wrap 10,000 of these plan executions inside a bond, and insure that bond-value with a Lloyd’s of London policy – I can then leverage this settlement value 30 to 1 in a German or Swiss bank trading account. That is a $4.5 billion leverage-flow to my crony sponsors. This is my duty as CEO – my fealty being part of the reason they appointed me to begin with.

As one can see, inflation is not a serendipitous ‘rise in prices’, but rather the rising cost of tyranny and burden of centralized economic domination. A principle I now cite as WEFlation.

The irony resides in this: the cost increase we undertook above will not even be recorded as economic inflation, since I ‘opted for a new product and better plan’ (not a trick I would let my clients get away with – identifying it as ‘horizontal inflation’). This too, is scienter.

Nonetheless, this is how suffering is formed at its inception – through a process called ‘crony extraction’. The company did not need this revenue boost in order to be fiscally healthy, rather it needed to pay its syndicate handlers their exorbitant cut. This is the tithe they believe that we owe them, as our protectors and Gods (gods who failed us miserably when we needed them most).

Hell does not depend upon demons in order to function. Rather, it only requires a population of otherwise virtuous and detached human agency, a critical mass of whom merely seek their just and regular pound of flesh.

Nice. The irony resides in this: the executives who crafted this complex and cross-company hustle, along with the sales people who executed it, probably regard them selves to be model citizens. If the customer is confused and makes the wrong choice, that’s not my fault. I was not aware that this program was actually harming most of the customer base. I did not bother to look at the program or its impact, but hey I was just following the instructions. After all, I have to make a living.

My family had been misled by both Apple and Verizon through an incentivized (I am sure a sourcing-fee commission was involved) appeal to ignorance hornswoggle. Both companies had lied to my son in order to enrich their cronies. No, this money in no way returned to the common citizen in the form of ‘jobs’ or tax revenues. This was a wealth-scam executed inside the fog of a theater called ‘scienter’.

What is Scienter?

While the relatively minor scenario above does not constitute scienter in a legal sense, let’s start by examining that definition as our reference point. The legal definition and precedent regarding ‘scienter’ is as follows:²

1. The mental state of one who intends to deceive or defraud another person.
2. The term ‘scienter’ is used to describe the calculus, awareness, and intent of a person who undertakes manipulation of another person (or targeted group) into a fraudulent loss. An act is performed ‘knowingly’ if it is done voluntarily and deliberately. The accused cannot be proven to have ‘guilty knowledge’ of the results of his actions if those results were from a mistake or accident (unless Nelsonian/Constructive in origin). The accused must have been in such a mindset as to have set out with the intention to defraud or deceive the other party.

While I have been a successful legal plaintiff, seeking restitution from a party which stole money from my family ‘with scienter’, and am aware of many of the key litmus in establishing such complaint; in general, I identify three species of scienter as the term applies to social conduct and ethics:

Actual Scienter – knowingly and intentionally engaging in an action with full awareness of its wrongfulness.

1. Reckless Indifference – the thief who knows they are stealing, but does so out of perceived basic need.
2. Malice Aforethought – the abuser, who enacts harm because of hatred and/or the exhilaration they experience through harming others (to include spiritual loosh as reward) – I have known billionaire clients who reacted with abject glee, when they crafted a scheme to harm those of lesser means. We identify this personality type in The Ex Post Fact Mindset of The Predator and How to Detect a Griefer.

Constructive Scienter – by function or expertise, should have known the wrongful nature of their actions, even under a condition of Nelsonian knowledge or intent.

Imputed Actual Scienter – when the party who establishes or exploits a condition of ignorance, thereafter appeals to that ignorance (to include syndicated consensus, confusion, or reliance upon a partial truth) as justification for a wrongful action founded upon that appeal.

Scienter of Chaos and The Crowd

Most embezzlers, academics, fake skeptics, degree-holding, executive, and other high-intelligence persons, will exploit this third type of scienter when plying their fraud or harm. It is this condition of scienter which interests the ethical skeptic the most. For instance, climate and vaccine science both fall under this form of legal scienter. Large scale banking fraud does as well. This species of scienter is not simply indicative of one who intends harm, but moreover of one who regards them self as not in need of future redemption – a person who has made a kind of a priori god-declaration on their part. They have ‘burned their ships’ in the Hernán Cortés sense, being 100% committed to their plan – for good or for evil. An apocryphal mythology expounds on this style of scienter in what is called the First Book of Enoch.

Thus it came to pass when the children of men began to multiply upon the Earth, that in those days daughters were born unto them who were both beautiful and sexually alluring. Eventually the Archons, those who had been expelled from the heavens, watched and lusted after them, plotting one to another: “Let us choose consorts from among the children of men, who will beget us children in their stead.”

But Semjaza, the one who was their leader, said unto them: “I fear many of you will be disinclined to agree in advance to do this wrongful deed, and I alone shall bear the burden of having to pay the penalty for this grievous sin.”

So they all reassured Semjaza of their allegiance and proclaimed: “Let us all swear an oath aforethought, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan, but to do this thing.”

Therefore, swore they all together, bound by mutual imprecations upon the deed to be undertaken. In all there were two hundred of those who descended upon the summit of Mount Hermon in the days of Jared. They called it Mount Hermon because they had sworn and bound themselves upon it, by these very mutual imprecations.

~ Enoch I, Chapter 3 – (The Scienter of) The Fallen Ones

Inside this myth, a type of syndicated scienter is framed, a species of scienter for which the entailed potential suffering is enormous – the ‘guilty’ typically being many in number and collective in nature (an aspect of its exculpatory allure). There exists a key signature note of the soul inside this particular style of scienter. One much darker than that of the mere thief.

The thief acts alone and in the shadows, but the sycophant boldly defends his swindle by crowd’s decree.

Just as in the instance of the mobile phone hardware and services executives in my mild case-example above (pale in comparison to medical and pharmaceutical industry fraud), the intelligent person holds that, if they can establish enough of a cloud of confusion, ignorance, virtuous cause, or large enough numbers of persons involved, then they cannot be held liable or accountable by any party for the harm done in the name of that appeal to ignorance/confusion/partial truth. Surely they can’t come after all of us in this confusing fray, can they? Surely I cannot blame myself for simply following what everyone else was doing?

Much of harm and oppression executed in the name of science is conducted under just such a cloud of plausible deniability and exculpability. The ‘courage’ of the sycophant and the ‘wisdom’ of the crowd inevitably ferment into a toxic elixir of human suffering. The Covid pandemic merely served to expose such charlatans for who they really were.

The Ethical Skeptic, “What is Scienter?”; The Ethical Skeptic, WordPress, 16 Sep 2023; Web, https://theethicalskeptic.com/?p=75655