What your about to read is neither new nor unheard of. In fact, rivers of ink have been spilled in attempt to solve this timeless enigma, what is known today as the world’s greatest unsolved crime mystery.

This specific theory we’re about to explore has been floating around as early as last century, it has even been published in magazines like The Criminologist as early as the 1970s.

The story goes like this:

During the execution of the murderers of Hiram Abiff, the three brothers also known as the three 'Juwes', were executed in very strange yet specific way. Their throats were cut across, their bodies were torn open and their entrails thrown over their shoulders.

Keep in mind that in this case ‘Juwes’ has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish people, but why is this important to the story anyways?

The Whitechapel Murders

In a dark cold night of 1888, Annie Chapman was found dead on an abandoned alley, her throat was cut across, her body was torn open and her entrails thrown over her right shoulder. The police started searching for evidence near the crime scene, but nothing substantial was to be found. It’s not like they could’ve called Gil Grissom from C.S.I.

What they didn’t expect on the other hand is that their lucky break was barely days away, delivered to them by the killer himself, Jack the Ripper.

Elizabeth "Long Liz" Stride was found dead also in a dark desolate alley. When the police arrived to inspect the gruesome murder, they discovered a cryptic writing in the wall. The message goes like this:

"The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing"

That sentence later became known as the Goulston Street graffito, one of the first ever clues to the Whitechapel murders to ever be discovered. One thing is clear the murderer(s) were playing mind games with the police.

Now, how did the police react to the cryptic message? Well, they assumed that the criminal surely miss-spelled and what he meant Jews, and started to look in that direction. And that was the starting point that knocked the rest dominoes over.

Better luck shooting your own foot before the race.

But here’s a crazy thought, what if the assassin (or assassins) didn’t misspell? What the act of replicating the Juwes murders was actually intentional? What if they were sending a message?

But hey! Criminals are stupid, so let’s go with miss-spelled.

During the night of 30 September 1888 Catherine Eddowes, was brutally murdered, she was strangled, her intestines were moved and placed on the right shoulder of the corpse.

Huh? Déjà vu!

After searching the area near the crime scene, a police officer named Alfred Long found a bloodstained piece of an apron in lying around…In Goulston Street.

This is the message in question:

That would explain the obsession for cutting the victims stomachs and throwing their entrails on their right shoulders after cutting their throat open.

Or…

So what? He miss-spelled again! Criminals are lazy.

Needless to say, the game was over before it has even started. No matter how precise your calculations are, if you make them based on erroneous data then you’ll probably end up chasing your own tail.

You find yourself lost, you start looking in all the wrong directions, and before you know it, 120 years have passed and you’re still chasing a murderer who by all certainty is dead and buried by now.

The sentence chasing a ghost have never been so accurate.

A hundred years later, they’re probably still looking elsewhere if they’re still strolling down the good ol’ orthography path.

Sometimes you can make all the right decisions in the world, but if the parameters you used are flawed, then you’ll probably end up in some sort of a wild goose chase.

Why Do You Keep Calling it Capitalism?

The sentence above is one of those phrases that you hear all the time but no one seems to press pause and think about it. It immediately fades away in the ether without getting the slightest shred of attention that it may or may not have deserved.

Every time there’s an independent a finance expert on TV, the presenters are bound to switch the subject as soon as the expert says something like the following: “This isn’t capitalism, this is something else”, or “I don’t know what’s this, but this isn’t capitalism”, or “we don’t have capitalism anymore” and most important of all: “Why do you keep calling it capitalism?”

What’s strange about the whole thing is that the presenters always seem to immediately ignore those words and pretend as if there were never pronounced, kind of like “I thought we already agreed on this and moved on already”.

After all, capitalism has already been established as this generation’s enemy numero uno. It has almost become like gravity, or surveillance… You know, things that nobody questions anymore.

Narrative, it’s a fascinating thing. But how much truth does the dominant narrative really hold?

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini

That particular quote is by a certain individual that goes by the name Benito Mussolini. And it’s wise to remember that if that guy knows about anything, that’s Fascism.

You look around and you see governments around the world bailing out their local banks. You take a deeper look, you see big corporations buying laws at every turn. New laws are being scripted every day, whether to bring clientele to the prison industrial complex, to apply restrictions to the competition, to invent new regulations so their competition wouldn’t be able to catch up.

Wait, did I say buying? I meant lobbying. Excuse me for forgetting to apply the proper dose of sugar-coat.

And then you hear all kinds of people being angry at the injustices around them, that the middle class is being squeezed, that people are losing their homes to the banks, that inflation is getting higher, and their purchasing power is declining.

And these are valid concerns, all of them in fact are on one level or another fairly accurate, but here’s a question: What if the blame was misdirected from the get-go?

Think about it, off of the top of your head, can you come up with any purely capitalist country in the world?

Hong Kong? Singapore? Is there some country lefy that even slightly still resembles a free-market capitalist economy?

Whether it’s in Europe, Australia, North America... What you find is that certain big banks and certain big conglomerations are actually teaming up with their local politicians to pass their laws.

Yes, this is the merger of state and corporate power in question, and yes, it’s a déjà vu from a movie we’ve seen before, the one with Italian sub-titles.

The Italian Job

Emotions aside, one cannot help but wonder: What if we’ve been looking to assign blame in the wrong direction? What if started looking in the wrong place to begin with? What if we have been baited with yet another spin-off of the always contagious, always creepy, the eternal deception of “divide and conquer”.

Have you ever wondered why they say “We the 98%” and at the same time always blame the “1%”?

Whatever happened to math? Did they tax that too?

The answer is very simple, it doesn’t matter. The last thing you would wanna do is to bite on the bait, because when your hooked, your emotions start revolve around that “perceived” enemy and latch onto it like last raft in a sinking boat.

But in the end of the day, all these divisions remain purely artificial. There is no rich Vs poor, no Socialists Vs Capitalists, and more importantly there is no Us Vs Them.

Personally, I try to learn from people who are coming up with ideas and experiments to solve those problems, not those who are pointing at another group of people and say: It’s their fault.

Decentralization of power is the most direct way to address those issues, buying into the divide and conquer on the other hand.. Well, I don’t have to tell you. Thousands of years of human history should be enough of a spoiler alert.

But here’s what happens, many people have their emotional sandbag already directed towards capitalism and those capitalist “pigs” who “hoard” the “root” of all evil.

That hate is then constantly nurtured and re-enforced, like a fire fueled by frustration and impotence, and inevitably some of them fall prey to those negative emotions and so they remain playing a blame game who has a subject target that was mistakenly assigned as a consequence of using erroneous data to begin with.

Take the bank bailouts for example, in capitalism when you take risks and you lose, you lose. That’s it. You lost Bobby! It’s like life, you risk, you fail, you fall, you stand up, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you try again.

There is no do-overs, no insert coin moments of any kind. Is that the system we leave under? No.

Assigning the fear and blame on capitalism is to be literally chasing ghosts. And just as our protagonists in the beginning of the story, the calculations and post-analysis may very well be as solid as they come, but if the first data you base your study on is inaccurate, then chances are that you’re gonna spend your time chasing ghosts.

Something to Fear

Now I know, Capitalism, it has a scary word, the big C. We are bombarded with negative connotations of capitalism every day of the year.

How come the guy who doesn’t declare two clients at his restaurant is a criminal, and at the same time the praise goes to the ones who use trillions of tax dollars to bomb the living crap out of hospitals filled with sick innocent kids, now that’s a hero.

Let’s dive back to the beginning of this post, what if we’re like those cops from the beginning of the story, what if our calculations are based on wrong data from the get go?

Remember when the word entrepreneur was almost like a dirty word barely a few years ago?

Now we see pockets of capitalism are popping everywhere. Whether it’s Uber, Airbnb, Kickstarter… It’s the market that decides.

And I personally trust the market over politicians any day. The market doesn’t care if you’re black or white, Asian or Latino... If you solve a problem for people, make their life easier, or provide value, then you’re going to benefit accordingly.

Aren’t these the things that make the world better?

I know that for some of you, it’s scary, I know that there is a lot of blame attached to it. But think about it, are you sure you’re not waiting on another story? What if the game is played on another table? What if we’ve been led to chase a ghost?

But here’s the best part, blame or no blame, ghost or no ghost, the future is decentralized. Let’s contribute in building something beautiful. Maybe there is no need to wait for the world to change, maybe you can act like we’re already in voluntary society and the rest will follow.

After all, it’s hard to catch the innovation train when you’re busy chasing ghosts.

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