We, the people, are losing. We are the people who serve. We pick up the garbage, cook the food, create the algorithms, pump the gas or script the play. We lie in hospital beds hoping someone will remember what we need or that we are even here. We want to go home. We party all night in clubs until daylight shatters the alcohol/narcotic illusion/delusion of fantasy and escape. Escape from what? And to where? We fill out forms. And we conform. We no longer believe our elected representatives represent us. Some of us play the game and vote. Many don’t. We are losing at the money game being peddled in casinos, back rooms and banks.

We are here, citizens of Orwell’s 1984 Oceania and only now are we beginning to recognize where we are. We are not completely sure how we got here and we know of no way out. It’s every man for himself, whether that means stealing from you, cheating on taxes or exploiting the vulnerable, such as the under- or unemployed, the weak or the elderly. We are faux citizens of corporate nations. We have a new ruling class, unprecedented in history. This ruling class, super-rich corporate elite, like monarchies that preceded them, know no country and know all countries. Like the monarchies, they travel from court to court, but unlike the monarchies, they pay little lip service to any authority (metaphysical or otherwise), higher than their own.

In America, we have the right to bear arms. Now, not as protection against repressive government (the reason the Constitutional right was created), but as protection from each other, be that in dark alleys, shopping malls, our bedrooms or in the office cafeteria. The arms we would need to combat today’s authorities are unattainable by the common citizen whom we no longer call a citizen but refer to as a “consumer”. It’s all about the money.

We all are brands. We must have a logo, a font, a colour palette and a Twitter account. Even the individual must be a corporation. Collectively, we are the white noise of desperation. The “I , me, my” culture is a festering zit. When we turn to God, it is often with a smug belief that those who do not believe in the God we invented will be punished with varying degrees of eternal torture. We call this “God’s will” whether we are Christians, Muslims or Jews.

Peel the onion in Oceania and what you find is money. Greed is the fuel of Oceania. It is for money that we invade nations under false pretense and hypocritical values. We are not “righting wrongs” in nations across Africa where slaughter is an everyday fact of life. No, we choose to “right the wrongs” in oil- and mineral-rich environments.

Every once in a while someone or something comes along that allows us to hold it up as proof that we are the champions and defenders of esteemed standards and the moral high ground. The latest opportunity is Hungary. This EU country, despite its thousand-year history, is an infant. It’s a child. It has a limited if any track record in democracy. It was all but absent from the last half of the 20th Century. Most here don’t know how to play the international political game. They are babes in the woods in diplomacy. They have a history of politically shooting themselves in the foot. They so desperately want to hold on to what is impossible for anyone to hold on to: the past. Many Hungarians, here and abroad, lament the dissipation of Hungarian culture. But so much of what is mourned in passing is wrapped in 19th Century culture, civility and history. Hungary makes an easy target for Western indignation. Interestingly, the ones who seem to know how to play the media game here the best are the former communists. (Could we please stop calling them socialists? There is a difference.) Where is the West’s indignation at Saudi Arabia? A regime of billionaire barbarians. Where is the outrage, not of the political arm of Hungary reaching into its banking system but the outrage in the West for its failure to do exactly that? Did anyone catch the judge who threw out the agreement between the SEC and Citigroup because it was too lenient? Too cozy? So the SEC and Citi join forces to fight the judge.

The most brilliant branding ever done (in my opinion) was the naming of the most powerful private bank in the world. What was it called in order to placate and dupe the population? The Federal Reserve. What percentage of Americans do you think are aware that the Federal Reserve is a private bank?

A BBC reporter was in Budapest recently, (apparently reporting). As he strolled along the shores the Danube, parliament in the background, he rattled off criticisms of Hungary including the gosh-they’re-terrible media laws. If there is any country in the West who has lost her credibility when it comes to criticizing a nation’s handling of media, it’s the UK with her high-paid hack journalists, phone-hacking for tabloids, free speech and everyone’s right to know everything about anyone they really have no right to know at all. Have a nice recorded day. And exactly why did it take the police three years to act on that?

Hungary is in tatters, to be sure. She has no friends. She is being punished. She is junk. She is an easy target because she is small and insignificant on the grand global financial stage. She is easy to criticize because the world can demand she play by the rules they themselves are exceptionally good at breaking without consequence. Bags of money pass under tables everywhere, from New York to Calgary, but politicians there are better at concealing it. Hungary is desperately trying to cling to her past glory and her distinct culture but it will be in vain. She is desolate, lonely, defiant and sorrowful. She is being accused of dismantling sacred democracy and we should be alarmed. But it is not on the Hungarian shores of the Danube where we should be lamenting democracy’s apparent swan song but rather, we should be singing that song loud and clear while we float aimlessly in the middle of the ocean that laps the shores of our homeland, Oceania.