On March 6, 1991, President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress in the wake of the U.S. triumph in the first Gulf War—and just as the implosion of the Soviet Union began to gain momentum—uttered the phrase that has since become the mantra for an unprecedented wave of paranoia. “Until now, the world we’ve known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict, and cold war,” Bush said. “Now, we can see a new world coming into view, a world in which there is the very real prospect of a New World Order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a ‘world order’ in which ‘the principles of justice and fairplay... protect the weak against the strong...’ The Gulf War put this new world to its first test, and, my fellow Americans, we passed that test.”

Since that now infamous speech, the mightiest weapons of popular culture—movies such as Conspiracy Theory and The Matrix, in addition to an avalanche of books and websites—have brought a different perspective to the forefront on the notion of a “New World Order” and whether justice and fair play have, indeed, protected the weak from the strong.

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has perhaps defined the mythology of a New World Order most succinctly. It refers to “a conspiracy in which a powerful and secretive group is said to be conspiring to eventually rule the world via an autonomous world government, which would replace sovereign states and other checks and balances in world power struggles. In the New World Order, many significant events are caused by a powerful secret group. Historical and current events are seen as steps in an ongoing plot to rule the world primarily through a combination of political finance, social engineering, mind control, and fear-based propaganda.”

As a result, small army of conspiracy theorists has argued that forces such as globalization, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and the Freemasons, as well as an ancient elite group known as the Illuminati and modern institutions such as the United Nations and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), are in concert behind a dark and sinister New World Order that has prompted a growing number of Americans to believe that their phones are tapped and that they are about to be implanted with electronic ID chips and dispatched to FEMA forced labor camps as “work units.” Concerned Christians go a step further and consider such chips “the mark of the beast,” predicted in the Book of Revelation as a precursor to Armageddon.

But juicy, Hollywood-worthy conspiracy theories and apocalyptic scriptures aside, what might a real, genuinely nefarious New World Order actually look like? What could actually lead us to our doom?

The answer is remarkably simple: A reality where free people, forgetful of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, abdicated their right to self-determination. Simple as that—and that is exactly what has happened in the United States in the 21st century. True conspiracy theorists account for only a minority of the American populace, but those who openly confess their view that “we the people” have lost control of our government and our rightful destiny represent a clear and nonpartisan majority.

Walk into any office, classroom, VFW hall, bingo parlor, or 7-Eleven store and pose a simple question: “Who really owns the U.S. government, ‘we the people’ or the Fortune500?” Almost 100 percent of those answers—whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative—will tell you, without hesitation, that giant transnational corporate interests control our country and the world. Add to that the fact that everyone knows Congress is incompetent at best and corrupt at worst and that corporate-controlled mass media aid and abet what amounts to the criminal rape of our republic from a common citizen’s point of view, and you have the three legs of a sturdy stool upon which only one thing can sit: the ugly realization that a New World Order is indeed upon us and that it is of our creation. It is not the Federal Reserve or the Freemasons or the Illuminati that are to blame. It is us. Apathy and a loss of will for the common good have marked us for obsolescence.

As the perfect metaphor for our sorry state of affairs, one must look no further than two notorious elections, one in 2000 that brought George W. Bush to power, the other in 2004, which prevented Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych from winning reelection. What the two elections had in common was clear evidence of fraud; brazen attempts to subvert the democratic process at its most fundamental level. What set them apart was the disparate reactions of the electorates. In the U.S., angry voters who challenged the results of the Florida recount and subsequent U.S. Supreme Court ruling threw in the towel. In Ukraine, they took to the streets. In the U.S., we ended up with what some historians are calling the worst President in American history, a “cowboy” who has damaged America’s standing in the world for generations to come. Or was he, now that we have Obama to compare him to? In the Ukraine, the people got a bona fide hero, Viktor Yushcenko, wholed a massive rally of open revolt in Independence Square in Kiev and said to his supporters, “We will not leave this place until we win. The people’s will cannot be broken. People’s votes cannot be stolen.”

The rest, in both the U.S. and Ukraine, is history.

The people get what the people deserve if they are willing to die for it. That is the lesson of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and all revolutions, large and small, ever since. That is the lesson of all human struggle.

Meanwhile, in modern-day America, we get a dumbed-down, disenfranchised, alienated population that is content to sit idly by as everything our country has ever stood for in the world withers away. The powerful promise of immortal words from our founders has given way to the empty rhetoric of partisan politics and the meaningless hyperbole of professional punditry that teaches us we do not need to think for ourselves.

“A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy—or perhaps both,” James Madison wrote in an 1822 letter. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” By that simple standard, Americans are no longer worthy of any claim to self-government. When the average male knows more about his favorite sports team than he does his Congressional delegation, and when the average woman knows more about her favorite fashion designer than she does the Bill of Rights, freedom and democracy are threatened almost beyond our capacity to comprehend.

Knowing that things are terribly wrong, but feeling helpless to do anything about our plight, we have lived up to a negative standard set by Thomas Paine in 1779: “Silence becomes a kind of crime when it operates as a cover or an encouragement to the guilty.”

To look at it another way, we have fallen short of a noble standard John Adams set in 1776:“There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest… or there can be no republican government nor any real liberty.” By that measurement, are we not a dismal collective failure?

Fewer than half of us vote, giving renewed relevance to something Plato said more than 2000 years ago: “The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.” More recently, Hitler offered an important companion point that is more true today than it was in 1932: “How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.” 

The biggest irony of all, of course, is that to address and solve our problems, we do not need to do anything but be loyal to our heritage, to the simple, eternal standards established by our founders. It is then a troubling commentary on our present that we so easily have forgotten our past. With an unprecedented opportunity to influence the world for the common good, we instead plod blindly toward our potential self-destruction, guided not by the forces that have made us great, but by instincts that have made us weak.

No great accomplishment has ever come easily in America. Not the end of slavery, not the right of women to vote, not the end of the Vietnam War, or the expulsion of Richard Nixon from office. But guided by a time-honored tradition of duty, honor, and country, we have, in prior generations, accomplished all of those things and more.

Today; however, too many of us hide behind the hopelessness of an imagined New World Order, engineered in secrecy by the Federal Reserve, Freemasons, and Illuminati, or the terminal cynicism to believe that our voice and our vote no longer matter. And too few of us remember or invoke the words of James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Paine. Most of us, if challenged, couldn’t quote a single word anyone of them ever spoke or wrote.

The biggest, biggest irony of all, another nugget of forgotten history lost on most Americans, is that in 1940, one year before the U.S. entered the war that would shape all future history, the great visionary and science fiction writer H.G. Wells wrote in his optimistic book, The New World Order, that “... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system … When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.”

Can the same be said of conspiracy theorists who believe that an ancient order of Illuminati have spun a web of subjugation that can never be escaped? In the future, if we have one, the gallant and graceful-looking among us will stand up for a New World Order founded on truth, justice, and the American way. Then the Illuminati will be banished to the ancient, dank catacombs of fear-based imagination—and Madison, Adams, and Paine will have triumphed once again, from beyond the grave.