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For those who wish to explore more, we recommend George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 or to watch the movies Soylent Green or The Matrix.
In 1984, the ruling party’s slogans were: WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH The reverse of the truth was exactly what we saw in Part I (We Are Doing Well). The Pyramid: Let us consider the Pyramid a bit more. The Rat’s mental model is a base of Rats with an apex of Exploiters. The Exploiter’s mental model is quite different. They see themselves as the owner of all the resource in a country including all the Rats. These Rats are regarded as both an asset and a potential enemy. In their calculus, the Rat has to be subjugated through a constant programme of psychological warfare. They have to be kept divided among each other to prevent them from grouping and threatening the Exploiter’s hold on power. Any rebellion has to be ruthlessly put down but with as little bloodshed as possible. After all, if you are the owner of a flock of diary cows and you are milking them, you don’t want to shoot them at the first sign of trouble. You want to keep them in good shape as long as there is milk to be extracted. The Rat Race system has to meet these objectives. Remember this concept: To the Exploiter, the Rat is both an asset and a potential enemy that has to be constantly monitored and subject to brainwashing. The Exploiter’s Strategies: 1. The Boiling Frog Strategy The Exploiter will keep on squeezing, in small increments, the Rat to extract more and more output from it. If the Rat protests, the pressure will be let up temporarily. Then the Exploiter will go into placating-mode to calm the Rats down. When the Rat is not paying attention, the pressure resumes. The long-term objective never changes - maximum output from the Rat that will still keep the Rat alive. You don’t want to kill the goose that lays the Golden Eggs. 2. Draw the Rat into the Dollar Economy Get the Rat to work for money issued by the Exploiter. To the Exploiter, money is free, only paper and ink is needed. The money is backed by taxes, part of which is collected from levies on the Rat. 3. Train it to run in the Rat Race Train the Rat from young to run in the Rat Race for money. Effectively, the Rat is working for free. 4. Debt trap Induce the Rat to get into debt through the purchase of house, car, spending, credit cards, easy loans, etc 5. Tax Impose income tax on the Rat. Levy taxes on all goods consumed and on property owned by the Rat. Every step of the way, through the salami technique, steal the Rat’s money. Tax them on social security, health, accident, anything that could be gotten away with. 6. Inflation: Reduce the value of the money progressively through induced-inflation. This is achieved by printing money in excess of the economic growth. Eg. If growth is 4%, increase the money supply by 15% say. Excess money will result in too much money chasing too few goods leading to price increase. A very good example is property speculation. House prices rise. The early birds feel good. The Exploiter feels good. After all, he controls the land bank. The poor Rat panics and jumps in to buy before the prices shoot to the moon. Now, he is caught in the cycle of debt and the Rat Race. It works all the time. Inflation means that the Rat is paid less and less, ditto for the pensioners. 7. Baby Rats Encourage the Rat to produce baby Rats to increase the labour pool. The Rat even looks after and pay for the upkeep of the babies. Talk about having your cake and eat it. 8. Laws Impose laws to keep the Rats in line. Prevent them from building large social groups, networks and unions. 9. Secret Service Constantly monitor the Rats to pre-empt any move towards rebellion. Isolate any potential rebel leaders by detaining them and turning them over (brainwashing). The Secret Service’s job is to keep stirring the pot. Introduce new ideas to keep the Rats agitated and at each other’s throats constantly, but not enough to cause an outbreak of violence. Wounded Rats are not good for business. 10. Control of information Control all the news media. Use TV, radio and newspapers for mass propaganda and brainwashing of the Rats. 11. Thought Control The only ideas allowed are those that promote the Exploiters’ hold on power. Any idea or thought contrary to that or challenge the Exploiters’ version of the truth shall be suppressed. Eg: Promote the idea that only the Exploiter can run a nation. Create the belief that the Exploiter will always remain in power. (Read this article by Dr Azmi Sharom Don't Be Afraid Of Open Debate.) Once such mental habits are formed, it is very difficult to break out of it, especially for those with weak minds. Keep the Rats apathetic. Keep them distracted. Football and Malaysian Idol are perennial favourites. Do not encourage innovative thoughts. Promote a common religion, claim that it holds the Ultimate Truth. Do not allow any deviation or other versions of that religion to co-exist. Make use of collaborators to proselytize the Exploiters’ version of the Truth. Continuously suppress other religions. Create the specter of danger posed by other religions to the mainstream religion. This is a useful divide-and-rule tactic. 12. Other Mind-control Techniques Make use of all the mind-control discussed in Part IIIA. Doesn’t this sound like The Matrix? By now, most readers are ready to give up and say: This is just too difficult. It is easier to remain a Rat For those who are not prepared to accept their fate, let’s move on. Mental Model No. 2: The Circle First start with a simple model. Use the Cashflow Game as a guide. We recommend playing a few rounds of the game. In learning how to create mental models, we need to discard a life-time of mental conditioning and mental habits. It requires change but change is never comfortable…. easier to follow the rut, even though the rut leads us to ruin. Look at the following images of the Cashflow Board. Cashflow 1: Overview showing the Fast Track and the Slow Track. 
Cashflow 2 & 3: Top and side view of the Rat Race. 
We see many Rats rushing around two blue circles either carrying a hand-phone or a briefcase. There is an inner ring with many stations – Pay check, Opportunity (Big deal/small deal), The Market, Charity, Doodads (expenditure on unnecessary stuff), Downsizing and Baby. At the core is King Rat, the Banker. He controls all the money, the land, the properties, the Opportunities, the Market, the Pay Checks. The little Rats receive their Pay Checks from King Rat, buys and sells everything through King Rat….. It’s too complicated to explain everything here. Just go and play the game and things will become clearer. We just want to use this board to illustrate some of the ideas in our mental model. The Rat moves on the basis of a dice throw. The maximum no. of steps is 6. So, there is an element of luck involved. For every revolution that the Rat makes, he receives 3 Pay Checks. That means, a complete revolution represents 3 months of work. For the typical Rat, 120 to 160 revolutions will represent a life-time of working before they can retire. Some never stop running. They either don’t know how to stop or they cannot afford to stop! Here’s a thought. In Part I We Are Doing Well, we spoke about thinking of our salaries in terms of gold. That provides us with a stable bench mark. Here’s another way of looking at money. Think of buying stuff in terms of months of salary. Eg. In 1970, a school teacher with a salary of RM 500 could pay off a terrace house in SS 2, Petaling Jaya (Part I We Are Doing Well) with 78 months of salary. Today, that teacher with a corresponding salary of RM 1200, say, will need 500 months of working to pay for the same house! 500 months is 42 years! (King Rat has a strong interest to inflate property prices. After all, he controls the largest land bank – public land, which by the way is held in trust on behalf of the Rats. We can expand that idea to include timber, minerals, water, oil, etc.). King Rat will point to the salaries and claim: Look, the teacher has increased her salary by 240% in 38 years. She is doing well. In other words, instead of thinking of our wealth in dollars and cents, think in terms of months or days of working. And King Rat wants to own your time. Doesn’t that sound like slavery? King Rat’s strategy is to make the Rats run continuously, then to extract money from them through taxes or to reduce the value of their Pay Check through inflation.. He encourages the Rats to buy property on which he can levy property tax and house assessment. Once the poor Rat gets a mortgage to buy the property, he is caught in another trap - the debt-trap.. On top of the debt is compound interest which can result in the debt doubling or tripling. And this is the biggest trap of all and can take a lifetime to get out off, if ever happens. Is it a wonder that teachers like Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhammad PBUH condemned usury and money lenders? The central idea is to get the Rats involved in the dollar economy. (There is another aspect of the Cashflow Game – The Income Statement. This is intended to teach financial literacy, to help the Rat to think of money in terms of cash flow. A better way would be to think as a corporation instead of an individual. We will need to prepare annual reports to assess our financial progress. That will require another mental model, which we won’t go into here, … maybe at the end of this series when we discuss how to get out of the Rat Race.) Here is a slight change to the Cashflow model. The race track (blue ring) is rotating anti-clockwise. That means the Rat has to run more to reach the stations than before. The rotation of the ring accelerates with time. That is the effect of inflation. And inflation is how the King Rat gets the Rat do more for less. (Imagine, if a government were to chop the civil servants salaries by 5% every year, there will be a revolt. But if a government was to reduce the value of the currency by 5% a year and under-report the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the employees would not notice. Boiled frogs never notice. On top of that, the government would save money in their pension bill.) Cash economy For the system to work, the Rats must be plugged into the paper money economy and they must trust it. What happens when the money breaks down or people lose trust? We get the1923 Weimar republic Germany, or Hyperinflation Next change: USA 2009 USD crash and along with it, the RM. (Watch this closely. This is coming and could be the reason for an early election in Malaysia (8th Mar 2008). It is always best to get such inconveniences out of the way first before all hell breaks out.) This, dear readers, is a simplified mental model of the Rat Race – The Circle. Admittedly, it is not perfect. But it does not have to be. Use it as a template and consider your personal situation. See whether it fits? To summarise: There is a constant psychological war waged by the Exploiter over our mind using the Boiling Frog Strategy The Exploiter sits on top of a power structure called the Pyramid They use the Rat Race System, which we depicted using a Circle as a mental model, to entrap the Rats and extract work out of them.
In the next article, we will be going back in history to explain The Rat Race Part IV – The Pyramid. The rat race part IIIA: how the system works
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