Four Horsemen (2012)

"You can never get enough of what you don't need."
The baby boomer generation has performed the most misguided allocation of capital in human history. This combined with a collapsing world system of power, shifting as it is amidst a last determined effort by the most wealthy in our societies to preserve an extraction based, colonial and imperialist system. This system is dying violently. Climate Change, the result of an economic system based on surplus and symbolic measures of wealth, is going to change everything. There will be no negotiations. It will not be able to oppress or silence the biosphere. The finacial system alone will not survive 4 degrees celcius of average warming. This is what is behind, to put it simply, the current wave of Fascism 2.0.

There are of course alternatives to the corrupt militarised, neoliberal, survaillance, commercial/industrial, centralised state power apparatus. We will be forced to choose one very soon. “To really understand something is to be liberated from it. Humanity's greatest ally is the self-educated individual, who has read, understood, delays their gratification, and walks around with their eyes wide open.”
― Ross Ashcroft

Four Horsemen is a 2012 British documentary film directed by Ross Ashcroft (3 October 1977 – 13 December 2024). The film criticises the system of fractional reserve banking, debt-based economy and political lobbying by banks, which it regards as a serious threat to Western civilisation. It criticises the war on terror, which it maintains is not fought to eliminate al-Qaeda and other militant organizations, but to create larger debt to the banks. As an alternative, the film promotes a return to classical economics and the gold standard. Among those interviewed are Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank; Noam Chomsky, linguistics professor; John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man; ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly, formerly at the World Bank; and Max Keiser, TV host and former trader. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 14 March 2012. A book based on the film has been published. Ross Ashcroft's directorial debut, the film Four Horsemen premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. It won 'Best International Documentary' at the Galway Film Fleadh and 'Best International Film' at the Tehran Film Festival.

The film fundamentally attacks neoclassical economics and asks why the neoclassical ideology, after such systemic failure, is still taught in almost all universities still today. The film is 14 years old but is more relevant today than ever. This is the rise of technofeudalism in the service of profit and order.