The Journey 43. Alfred Claassen: Deliberate Wreckage

Kris Millegan and Alfred Claassen discuss ““Gamers,” Multiculturalists, and the Great Coming Apart: The United States Since 1965,” Alfred’s book about the paradigm shift from 1965 to 1975, “gamers” – the new upper class of the country’s most talented people who, vacuous and narrowly focused, organized their entire lives for their own power and success and sacrificed morality and concern for the public good – and multiculturalism, which, Alfred says, makes us unsure what to believe and afraid to speak up, which divides us and gives the field to demagogues.

K: What do you think the Kennedy assassination has meant to America?

A: It’s really meant a lot, that’s for sure. It’s part of a cluster of major events that brought on the global era that I address in most of this book, the 51-year period from 1965 to 2016. That period [was when] the time of paradigm conflict began. I named my two natural-born sons John and Robert.

K: What led you to the posit of your book? You think this was designed, for us to come apart?

A: I think it was deliberate wreckage by gamers. And the degree of deliberateness varied and became fuller as time went on. And the gravity of the situation as increased in time as well.

K: Can you give me your definition of gamers? Because most people are going to think of the video-gamers.

A: The gamers are the new upper class that began forming already in the ‘60s and really congealed in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. And they are characterized by these sort of drudges who were extremely ambitious for the top grades, for the top jobs, and more and more of the most talented in the country got themselves in that frame of mind, where they just didn’t care about their country anymore, much. Or they didn’t care about morality or even accept the definitions of it anymore. They’re organizing their whole lives systematically for their own wealth and power. They just don’t give a shit about anyone else.

You know, the Harvard Medical School, where they’re sabotaging each other’s experiments in the biology lab. The budding politicians who are watching for every little slip that somebody makes, noting the facts, and then jabbing them, knocking them out of the way when the time presents itself.

K: What do you think brought this about?

A: I think it was a part of loss of morality. Most of us who lived through the sixties had some exposure to the fast and free experience of lifestyle change and all of that. But decades later on reflection upon all of that, I think they threw out morality and what came was the almighty self. “I’m out for myself.” That became the creed of the most successful in our country. I see the gamers having been dominant in the country right up till 2016. Since then, it’s the top gamers who are the decisive class. So it’s the elite among the gamers who have been running this show. The problem with the gamers is that they were so vacuous, in a way. They’ve been so narrowly focused their whole lives and remain such, they don’t have anything that they believe in, so why would they stand up against the really tricky ones at the very top, which would be the top fifty thousand Americans and their families.