Marketing the Desteni Lifestyle with Equal Money System

Ivan Rauscher

System? What system?

Supporters of the Equal Money System (EMS) say that within the next ten years by ‘walking the Desteni process’ they will form an ‘Equal Life Party’, run for political office and thereby EMS will bring about ‘heaven on earth’.

Supporters of EMS claim it is an alternative to capitalism, yet EMS has not been shown to have any relevance to anyone not involved in the Desteni process who might, broadly speaking, be critical of capitalism. If ‘equal money’ was a ‘system’ it would be recognised and treated as such, not just by its proponents, but by independent third parties. It would have a recognisable presence in the political sphere and be discussed amongst real-life, off-line communities and in the media, whether mainstream or alternative.

But EMS does not exist outside the realms of Desteni websites or the Desteni farm in South Africa. The proposals they make for EMS have no actual political context. At least four years after it was announced, EMS is only ever taken seriously and openly supported by those people who call themselves Destonians on their own websites, blogs, Facebook and YouTube pages. They make it plain they are not interested in spreading their message any further than their obscure corner of the Internet. Supporters of EMS are also openly opposed to political activism yet they talk about ‘standing up’ for EMS as if it were a form of online consumer activism. 

The Destonians say that purification and perfection of themselves will lead to ultimate transformation and improvement of the whole wide world but they do not demonstrate their claims in any concrete way. In their blogs, if they're not writing about petty personal concerns then they often cut and paste poverty statistics and other data to do with corruption or social problems or select news items highlighting a given social problem, discuss it all in a superficial manner using the somewhat incomprehensible Desteni jargon, and then just claim that the solution is EMS.

All their system amounts to is repeating ‘join us’ and ‘investigate EMS’ in so many v-logs and blogs as if this is somehow going to overload the Internet and achieve the effect of forcing the capitalist system to give way to everyone in the world becoming Destonian. 

Cyber-Mania

Addiction to the Internet induces a state of existential delirium. The sense of the body disappears outside of real time, subdued by the hypnotic consumption of information. The digital market exploits language and emotions at the expense of thinking, doing bodies and actual personalities with real characteristics. It achieves this through cybercultural conditioning which harnesses subjectivity to computers.

For the Internet-centric Destonians, this same state of distraction reaches such a peak that on their multiple Facebook pages, YouTube channels and blogs they talk and write as if they were not already living, breathing physical bodies. They are working towards ‘birthing life as the physical’, or ‘breathing equal and one with the physical’, while their stated aim is to eventually ‘stop the mind’ and delete their personalities, which they claim will help bring about EMS in the future.

It seems they are expressing a psychological state of cyber-mania in which their subjectivity has been made dependent on, and is dictated by, content of websites the aim of which is to get them to keep returning to the same websites at the expense of getting on with their own lives.

Psych-Training

The main EMS website is supposed to represent a worthy democratic political project. However, the actual purpose of EMS is to promote the sale of Desteni products.

EMS centres on psychological modification of personal behaviour by strict adherence to elaborate instructions from the core Desteni group, all of which are based on ideas taken from occultism and New Age philosophy. Destonians are solely preoccupied with meaningless New Age style buzz words, formulaic slogans and techniques as repeated in 1000s of YouTube videos of their oracle, Sunette Spies. The New Age parlour trick known as channelling, which Desteni re-name ‘portalling’ (dead people and imaginary entities from other dimensions) is central to the EMS.

All EMS supporters are big fans of Spies' self-help pop psychology as it has been communicated through these slightly sinister videos and manufactured into consumer ‘products’ for what they call a ‘Life-Style concept that is simply achieving financial freedom slowly but surely’. EMS is of no practical relevance to equality or any political issue at all. It is essentially a marketing tool to promote online training in reinterpretations of New Age occultism centred on weird ideas about the mind, the self, subjectivity and transcendence. 

Any questions Destonians attempt to raise about economic exploitation and inequitable chances in life revolve around the template Desteni offers to individuals for minor celebrity status amongst other people calling themselves ‘Destonians’. They provide the chance to build an online presence centred on trivia of personal behaviour, self-confession and superficial discussion of seemingly controversial themes as prescribed by Desteni.

A ‘buddy system’ is available to all participants. The possibility of opportunities for any masochists with a peculiar fetish for sexual encounters ‘within and as’ Destonians are offered through a course in re-defining relationships as agreements. They are supplied with ready-made catch phrases to repeat such as ‘applying the tools’, ‘a dignified life for all’, ‘within and as the current system of abuse’, ‘all as one as equal as life’ or ‘equal money system’, all of which have the function of advertising these so-called ‘Desteni I Process’ courses in ‘Life Skills and Self-Mastery’.   

Working for the Charity Corporation

As is standard in capitalist business, some stuff is offered to consumers for free as a teaser and more advanced products have to be purchased. Alternatively, they can be bought in exchange for blogging to promote the company and/or other favours. To help boost self-esteem and increase productivity, the ‘tools’ of the Desteni I Process are said to help its promoters take ‘self-responsibility’, as though they are supposed to be model workers serving a corporation with the best interests of its employees at heart. Desteni are opposed to corporatism yet a key part of their plan is to establish an Equality Corporation. Destonians are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to help this private corporation come to fruition. 

Destonians use images of starving and poverty-stricken people to promote EMS, as if it is a charitable concern that helps the disadvantaged. In their self-contradictory fashion, Desteni call charity capitalistic and evil yet ask for donations. All Destonians are unpaid or paying volunteers working to raise money for Desteni, which is a capitalist for-profit business, or for their apparently non-profit making front organisation, the Equal Life Foundation. They are operating exactly like a charity but do nothing to help the disadvantaged, the starving or poverty-stricken. They appear to be more interested in making money out of getting potential customers to identify with the EMS and Desteni brand names as if they were somehow signifiers of a trendy, eco-friendly lifestyle with a radical edge. 

Sentiments of social justice, anti-capitalism, equal rights and equality are summoned up by Desteni to persuade potential recruits into working as full-time salespersons for a consumer marketing business. EMS is an advertising slogan for an online money-making scam. EMS has been contrived to make it seem like Desteni is for the greater good when it is a hierarchical, authoritarian sect that follows a creed of ‘self-perfection’, views outsiders as degenerates and scapegoats for ‘evil’ and its recruits as easy meat for psychological and social control.

EMS is promoted as a solution to capitalism but it is a capitalist business solution as to how to market a worthless product. While they make an unconvincing attempt at seeming to oppose it, Destonians are effectively mimicking the prevailing capitalist consumer ideology as it feigns to appeal to humanistic instincts or values when its only instinct is to make money and its values are monetary. Destonians commodify their interior lives for the profit and entertainment of the core Desteni group in South Africa. Their constant emphasis on ‘self-forgiveness’ as the key to freedom appeals to the same trivial and obsequious self-centredness glorified by the demands of corporate consumerist society as it tries to turn everything and everyone into a commodity.

Useless Junk

The pseudo-radical supporters of EMS exemplify how neoliberal capitalist ideology holds the alienated and oppressed hostage to their own exploitation. Their assumed attitude about being opposed to consumerism is such that all they have to offer is investment in the consumer marketing of a corporate brand of anti-human New Age conspiracism. The Desteni material, with its second-hand occultism, pseudo-history and pseudo-science; and the Destonians' hypnotised angst, their drone-like complacency and cultic mumbo jumbo doubletalk are a retreat into escapist fantasy.  

As long as they stick to the rules and propagandise for Desteni and ‘equal money system’ they won't be taking any initiative for social or political change. Instead they will be pretending they are ‘stopping the mind’, stopping thinking, feeling or having emotions while typing pre-programmed catch phrases on to computer screens until they are ‘birthing life as the physical’. They will be composing advertising jingles, churning out spam blogs and videos of themselves talking about narcissistic neuroses and items they've read in the news. They will be touting ‘self-purification’ and the sale of baseball caps, stickers, mp3s of rambling speeches by Sunette Spies and Bernard Poolman, selling branded aprons, hoodies, ringtones and other useless junk. They will try and convince themselves that it all makes sense when they already know it has just been designed to con certain kinds of idealistic, misinformed or naive people such as themselves into parting with their money and doing what the Desteni core group tells them to do.

Related posts:

Does Desteni Equality = Equality?

Eqafe Blues

Desteni clique incest

Equal Money System: spreading the FAQ?

Equal Money Book!!!! Pre-Order Now!!!! - Hilarious