Who gets to plan the world’s future? Not just the men in the room

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Who gets to plan the world’s future? Not just the men in the room

An old teacher’s talk of secret societies turned out to be less far-fetched than we thought. Here’s why the response isn’t fear, but imagination.

By Janet Marugg | FāVS News Columnist

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. 

Decades before the pedantic antics of “The Da Vinci Code” sleuth Robert Langdon, or the passions and perils of Indiana Jones, there was just boring old Mr. Knowles. We called him Mr. “know-less” because he was a teacher and junior high brains are smooth and lazy. 

As a polygamist, Mr. Knowles was already fringed in my mind. He was a believer of strange ideas, a performer of strange actions. A conspiracist. And in his class, he was not-so-secret about those secret societies. He was pre-internet Chans and Qanon with its deep state and shadow governments controlling things. 

Mr. Knowles had a lot of strange certainties, a collection of weird, often conflicting ideas. He lectured on the most well-known “secret” groups — the Illuminati, the Order of the Skull and Crossbones, the Bilderberg Meetings and called it U.S. History. Eye-Roll City. 

The cabal has a mailing address

For decades, Mr. Knowles stayed forgotten. Then a favorite garden podcaster, of all people, spoke of a hacked list and details of a secret society called “Dialog,” meeting in August 2026 to plan what to do with “this degenerate society.” 

Why are permaculturalists talking about this newly exposed secret society? Because this Dialog group is 20 years old now and doing a bang-up job of degenerating things. 

Serious question: “who is degenerate in Earth’s evolutionary system?” Who are these insecure hiders, these underchallenged by their group of yes-sayers, the unimaginative men (only a handful of women are invited into the Dialog), these weak, wrong and broken degenerate dialogers stuck in Mr. Knowles’ class mything out on themselves? 

This August, at Dialog, nearly all the money in the world will be workshopping “Navigating WWIII” and “Battlefield Technologies.” And because “yes” can never be enough, there is a session at this annual Dialog event, called “How to Build a Cult” (led by the guy who built pray.com) and “How to Build a Party,” led by a former Whitehouse official. 

Mr. Knowles, I apologize. I will never go along with your polygamy, but your cabal conspiracy was spot on. Eye-Roll City’s been blown right off the map. There really is a deep-pocketed, deep state. 

This Dialog thing is not some long-disbanded Knights Templar or Illuminati. I can pick up a phone and call these Dialog people. They have a physical address, financial records of purchased politicians, digital footprints, a physical office. (From which they should be expelled by their boards as a fiduciary duty. A company interested in continued existence and positive future quarterlies, cannot have a CEO planning world destruction.) 

Sessions for the smooth-brained

It is demonstrative stagnant minds that requires a class called “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness.” Look at those weak parentheses — like two sides of a smooth brain. Clearly a class for the unimaginative, the visionless and unwise.

People this unwise should not be in charge of anything. Money might buy stuff, but it doesn’t make a person smart. Think about it: Dialog attendees are having sessions called “How’s Your Sex Life?” sponsored by a data collector. A data collector. 

Secret societies of degenerates cannot be trusted to make public policy. We do not have to consent to giving the future to doomsday lovers. We can replace the banality of evil with our own plans for how we want to live. We can have our own dialog. 

We don’t need a secret invitation to conceive of a future and claim our right to it. We can start dialoging today. Instead of “Navigating WWIII” we can plan to “Avoid WWIII.” We can seriously discuss “Using Tech for Peace” as easily as “Battlefield Technology.” Instead of studying “How to Build a Cult” we can concern ourselves with “How to Build Strong Minds.” And such. 

We cannot surrender our right to love one another — we need to care for each other to remain generative in an ever-expanding universe. It’s an evolutionary system. To care is to be interested in a future — the very future that is dependent on interesting people. 

I like to imagine people without private planes rolling up their sleeves for solutions to travel problems. Or family carers and household budget stretchers making livable public policy. The best people to make public policy are not a cabal of mostly men with smooth pubescent brains, stuck in Mr. Knowles’ junior high class mything out on themselves. Eye-Roll City. 

Somehow, in the absence of sabertooth tigers we’ve survived cabals of cavemen. We’ll likely keep doing so, because we can. The natural thing to do – out-evolve the frictionless weak, the unimaginative degenerates, the psychologically unable to figure out that John Carter on Mars is fiction, even if Edgar Rice Burroughs’ father was a Freemason. Right, Mr. Knowles? 

We can have our own dialog

It turns out, human beings are capable of conceiving of a future on Earth. We love it here — it fits our feet, feeds our bellies and fills our lungs. So I’d like to keep it. We’ve evolved to be here together, meeting modernity with visionary heads and hearts. And the only dialog worth having is the one between our heads and our hearts. Let’s have that dialog. 

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