Category Archives: Sociology

Corrupt Science and Elite Power: Your Techno-Slavery is Now Imminent

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Do you like to believe that scientists are studying the evidence – whether in relation to Covid-19 or anything else – and delivering high quality knowledge that can be used to guide public policymaking so that it might better serve the interests of ordinary people?

It is certainly a comforting idea, isn’t it?

After all, we have long been told that science is an ‘evidence-based approach’ to understanding particular phenomena and thus providing accurate guidance on how to proceed to achieve productive outcomes.

Unfortunately, this claim is just propaganda for the unwary.

In his 2005 study of the validity of published medical research, John P. A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine who also studies scientific research itself, explained why ‘It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.’ Most? False? Here is what Professor Ioannidis concluded but you can read his entire article, cited below.

For starters, there are a range of what might be labeled methodological problems: inadequate sample size, outcomes so small that reliably gauging impact was impossible (leading, for example, to excessive ‘false positives’), and variability in research designs, definitions, outcomes and analytical modes. In addition, research in ‘hotter’ scientific fields – such as whether the SARS-Cov-2 virus exists or for a Covid-19 vaccine – may cause research teams to prioritize pursuing and disseminating their most impressive ‘positive’ results at the expense of rigor. But, importantly, Ioannidis also identified conflicts of financial and other interests (‘very common in biomedical research’) as well as prejudices (commitment to a particular theory or their own ‘findings’, research conducted purely to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure, and suppression via the peer review process of findings that refute their own, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma) as explanations why scientific research findings are ‘less likely’ to be true.

In essence, the ‘scientific research’ that avoided/survived all of these hurdles is considerably less than we might expect and certainly less than half. See ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’.

So that was in 2005. Do you think that the situation might have improved?

In an article just published in relation to Covid-19 in the British Medical Journal, Kamran Abbasi explains that ‘When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die.’ But is this happening?

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency – a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.

For a discussion of four examples of how the UK’s pandemic response involves suppression of science or scientists, including by simply preventing scientists keen to expose the truth from having access to appropriate mass media outlets, see ‘Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science’. (And if you want to read more about how this initial corruption was exploited for political and financial gain, see ‘Cronyism and Clientelism: The Tories’ outsourcing of the pandemic response’.)

The most important point of suppression, of course, is the fact that there is no scientific proof that a virus, labeled SARS-Cov-2 exists, as Dr Andrew Kaufman, among others, has been patiently and endlessly explaining from the beginning. For one of his more recent explanations, watch ‘ZERO Evidence that COVID Fulfills Koch’s 4 Germ Theory Postulates – Dr. Andrew Kaufman & Sayer Ji’.

Moreover, according to Dr Kaufman, ‘there is no evidence of anyone dying from any novel illness’. See ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. So what has happened?

As Dr Kaufman explains: Early scientific papers on the subject suggested an association (not causation) between a novel coronavirus ‘with human to human transmission and severe human infection’ whereas a subsequent key ‘scientific’ paper that made a claim which helped drive the global response to COVID-19 ‘flat out lied’ about their results: ‘Following the first outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the causative agent in January 2020.’ See ‘Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19’. In fact, Dr Kaufman points out: ‘they cannot reference any science to back that up whatsoever’.

Moreover, subsequently to this paper, another article – see ‘I study viruses: How our team isolated the new coronavirus to fight the global pandemic’ – declared ‘The emergence of a new coronavirus in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 set in motion the pandemic we are now witnessing in 160 countries around the world’. But again, Dr Kaufman counters, ‘no evidence was provided at all’ to support this claim: ‘just flat out lies’. For the details and citation of all the scientific sources for this explanation of how the Covid-19 ‘rumour mill’ got started, see ‘The Rooster in the River of Rats’ or ‘Koch’s Postulates: Have They Been Proven for Viruses?’

Of course, Dr Kaufman is not the only doctor or researcher who has worked tirelessly to expose this lie.

After extensively documenting his case in ‘Flaws in Coronavirus Pandemic Theory’, long-time medical researcher David Crowe noted shortly before his death mid-year that ‘despite the epidemic of testing…. There is no proof that a virus is being detected’. In fact: ‘What is being published in medical journals is not science, every paper has the goal of enhancing the panic by interpreting the data only in ways that benefit the viral theory, even when the data is confusing or contradictory. In other words, the medical papers are propaganda.’

Jon Rappoport, another long-time medical researcher who has been documenting medical fraud for decades, comes to the same conclusion after explaining, again, the complete failure of anyone in the medical industry to purify a unique virus which then causes a unique disease. See ‘Death by killing old people, not COVID – The Basic Deception’.

Meanwhile, do you know what you have? An unproven virus. A fake. A story about a virus.

Therefore, all your diagnostic tests ‘for the new virus’ are a sham. They’re based on something you never demonstrated in the first place.

Therefore, all those people, those elderly people dying for obvious reasons in nursing homes, and in their lonely apartments, and in hospitals all over the world? You obviously have no proof they’re dying from a virus. How could you? You never properly discovered a new virus.

Most notably, perhaps, Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter, the authors of ‘COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless’, wrote to the authors of four of the principal, early 2020 papers claiming discovery of a new coronavirus and each of them in their response ‘concede[d] they had no proof that the origin of the virus genome was viral-like particles or cellular debris, pure or impure, or particles of any kind. In other words, the existence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA is based on faith, not fact.’

Moreover, Engelbrecht and Demeter also wrote to Dr Charles Calisher, a prominent and veteran virologist, asking if he knew of ‘one single paper in which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and finally really purified’. His answer? ‘I know of no such a publication. I have kept an eye out for one.’

But you can read the paper by Engelbrecht and Demeter if you want to consider the other efforts they made, unsuccessfully, including by contacting prominent institutions such as the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, to locate documented proof that a purified SARS-CoV-2 virus had been isolated.

If you would like to read more about the non-existence of the virus, including fraudulent attempts to represent it, see ‘Only Poisoned Monkey Kidney Cells “Grew” the “Virus”’ or ‘Dr. Tom Cowan explores the COVID virus invented out of sheer nonsense’.

More fundamentally, according to Dr Stefan Lanka: ‘Contrary to what most people believe, there are no pathogenic viruses.… All claims about viruses as pathogens are wrong and are based on easily recognisable, understandable and verifiable misinterpretations…. A real and complete virus does not exist anywhere in the entire “scientific” literature.’ See ‘The Misconception Called “Virus”: Measles as an example’.

To reiterate in the words of two other authors: ‘there is no original scientific evidence that definitively demonstrates that any virus is the cause of any disease’. See What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong. But you can read more in ‘Dismantling the Virus Theory – The “measles virus” as an example’ and watch the video interview ‘The Real Science of Germs: Do Viruses Cause Disease?’

Another option you have if you are seriously interested in the truth is to spend the time to seek out the documented scientific proof that the ‘virus’ labeled SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated, purified and proven to cause a consistent set of disease symptoms among those it ‘infects’, which is then labeled Covid-19. So far, the many of us who have searched for this document – including some of the world’s leading virologists – have not found it.

Suppression of this fact – that there is no SARS-CoV-2 virus and, hence, no Covid-19 disease – is vital, of course, because if everyone knew that there is no Covid-19 disease (and there are simple explanations for the ill-health and deaths: see ‘Halting Our Descent into Tyranny: Defeating the Global Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’), it would be impossible to run the terror campaign that is being conducted to take complete control of our lives in accordance with the longstanding elite plan now manifesting as ‘The Great Reset’ of the World Economic Forum. See also: Covid-19 – The Great Reset.

So I invite you to read the above two WEF documents, both readily available, to see if you like the look of what has been planned for you without your knowledge, involvement or consent

The World Economic Forum and The Great Reset

What is the World Economic Forum and what does it mean by ‘The Great Reset’?

The British nonprofit social justice organization Winter Oak in their article ‘Klaus Schwab and His Great Fascist Reset’ answers the first question by referencing the WEF website:

The WEF describes itself as ‘the global platform for public-private cooperation’, with admirers describing how it creates ‘partnerships between businessmen, politicians, intellectuals and other leaders of society to “define, discuss and advance key issues on the global agenda”.’

The ‘partnerships’ which the WEF creates are aimed at replacing democracy with a global leadership of hand-picked and unelected individuals whose duty is not to serve the public, but to impose the rule of the 1% on that public with as little interference from the rest of us as possible.

So while the World Economic Forum ‘provides a platform for the world’s 1,000 leading companies to shape a better future’ – see ‘Our Partners’ – and pays lip service to its network of ‘communities’, you will find little more than tokenism when it comes to human constituencies that you and I might consider important in any forum genuinely representative of humanity. Constituencies either not represented or under-represented include women; indigenous peoples; people living in poverty or extreme poverty; Muslims; people from Africa, Asia and Central/South America; working class people; small-scale farmers; disabled people and members of the LGBTQIA community. There are others.

So what does ‘The Great Reset’ mean for those of us who are ‘ordinary people’ and, therefore, not involved in its planning? Here is a sample from authors with a non-elite perspective.

Jeremy Loffredo interviewed scholar, environmentalist, food sovereignty advocate and author Dr. Vandana Shiva, which he recorded in the article ‘World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” Plan for Big Food Benefits Industry, Not People’.

Loffredo noted that in Schwab’s book Covid-19 – The Great Reset, he writes ‘global food security will only be achieved if regulations on genetically modified foods are adapted to reflect the reality that gene editing offers a precise, efficient and safe method of improving crops’. In response Shiva disagreed, arguing that the ‘WEF is parading fake science’, and ‘for Mr. Schwab to promote these technologies as solutions proves that The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life.’

‘The Great Reset is about multinational corporate stakeholders at the World Economic Forum controlling as many elements of planetary life as they possibly can. From the digital data humans produce to each morsel of food we eat.’

Referring to the WEF’s partner organization the EAT Forum, an aim of which is ‘to replace wholesome nutritious foods with genetically modified lab creations’ framed as ‘healthy and sustainable’, Shiva observes that ‘EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.’

Shiva argued that ‘all of the science’ shows that diets should be centered around regional and geographical biodiversity.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky in his article ‘The Covid “Pandemic”: Destroying People’s Lives. Engineered Economic Depression. Global “Coup d’Etat”?’ outlines some essential elements of the nature of this global coup:

It’s the destruction of people’s lives. It is the destabilization of civil society. And for What?

The Lies are sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and repetitive ‘Covid alerts’ for the last ten months. … It is a process of social engineering…. The entire urban services economy is in crisis…. Free Speech is suppressed.

The lockdown narrative is supported by media disinformation, online censorship, social engineering and the fear campaign. Medical doctors who question the official narrative are threatened. They lose their jobs. Their careers are destroyed.

Those who oppose the government lockdown are categorized as ‘anti-social psychopaths’….

In colleges and universities, the teaching staff is pressured to conform and endorse the official covid narrative. Questioning the legitimacy of the lockdown in online ‘classrooms’ could lead to dismissal.

Google is marketing the Big Lie. The opinions of prominent scientists who question the lockdown, the face-mask or social distancing are ‘taken down’….

The March 11 2020 Lockdown project uses lies and deception to ultimately impose a Worldwide totalitarian regime, entitled ‘Global Governance’ (by unelected officials)…. All of which is spearheaded by the installation of a global totalitarian State which is intent upon breaking all forms of protest and resistance.

The Covid vaccination program (including the embedded digital passport) is an integral part of a global totalitarian regime….

The UN system is also complicit. It has endorsed ‘global governance’ and The Great Reset.

In his article ‘Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?’ Dr. Joseph Mercola explained that:

The Great Reset refers to a global agenda to monitor and control the world through digital surveillance. You’ll be tied to it through an electronic ID linked to your bank account and health records, and a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life.

Not one area of life will be left untouched by The Great Reset plan, which aims to reform everything from government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing – even how we interact with our fellow human beings.

The globalist technocracy is using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, override opposition, accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the public against our will.

Whitney Webb in her article ‘US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media’ has also written extensively on aspects of The Great Reset coup and in this article highlights the hazards associated with vaccination and the efforts to silence those critical of it.

In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives….

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s [November’s] end.

Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.

Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.

In an earlier article, ‘Coronavirus Gives a Dangerous Boost to DARPA’s Darkest Agenda’ Webb pointed out that:

Technology developed by the Pentagon’s controversial research branch [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] is getting a huge boost amid the current coronavirus crisis, with little attention going to the agency’s ulterior motives for developing said technologies, their potential for weaponization or their unintended consequences.…

Those who are fearful and desperate will not care that the vaccine may include nanotechnology or have the potential to genetically modify and re-program their very being, as they will only want the current crisis that has upended the world to stop.

In this context, the current coronavirus crisis appears to be the perfect storm that will allow DARPA’s dystopian vision to take hold and burst forth from the darkest recesses of the Pentagon into full public view. DARPA’s transhumanist vision for the military and for humanity presents an unprecedented threat, not just to human freedom, but an existential threat to human existence and the building blocks of biology itself.

Tessa Lena in her article ‘The Great Reset for Dummies: Where do we go from here?’ explains:

The practical aim of the Great Reset is to fundamentally restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations based on two assumptions: one, that every element of nature and every life form is a part of the global inventory (managed by the allegedly benevolent state, which, in turn, is owned by several suddenly benevolent wealthy people, via technology) – and two, that all inventory needs to be strictly accounted for: be registered in a central database, be readable by a scanner and easily ID’ed, and be managed by AI, using the latest ‘science.’ The goal is to count and then efficiently manage and control all resources, including people, on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented digital precision – all while the masters keep indulging, enjoying vast patches of conserved nature, free of unnecessary sovereign peasants and their unpredictability. The king’s world feels far more predictable and relaxed when the chaos of human subjectivity is contained for good.

Plus, as a potentially lucrative aside, a bunch of these tightly managed ‘assets’ can be also turned into new financial instruments and traded. Game on!

In other words, it’s an ‘efficient’ global feudalism that goes much farther than its medieval brother since the scanner is all-seeing: every person, every mineral, and every berry is digitally tagged and tracked. Under that framework, every peasant has a function that is derived not from the mystery of life, and not from their inner calling – but from AI, the master of efficiency and the servant of the king. Ideally, the peasants can be convinced that it’s good for them (or necessary to be safe, see ‘contact tracing’) and that this is what progress and happiness are like – but if not, there are other ways, from classic violence to virtual prisons to ‘morality pills.’

In his article ‘Analysis: Globalists’ reboot of the world and their plans for us’ Jacob Nordangård outlines his interpretation of what is happening:

The Corona crisis is the trigger for a global coup d’état of monumental dimensions. It is the beginning of a new era, with a new international economic order that risks completely destroying human freedoms. Tyrants have now taken over to forcibly steer us into a ‘climate smart’ and ‘healthy’ world through the World Economic Forum’s new techno-totalitarian roadmap – ‘The Great Reset’….

On June 13, 2019, Klaus Schwab, President of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and UN Secretary-General António Guterres signed a partnership between their two organisations….

The agreement includes six focus areas [and] also states that the WEF’s fourth industrial revolution is an important component in implementing the agenda. Digitisation is seen as the key….

This means that the world’s tech giants (which are part of the WEF working groups) will solve the world’s problems through the use of AI, satellites, robotics, drones and the Internet of Things, and with synthetic food on the menu….

We have paid and will have to pay a high price for something that has been exaggerated beyond all proportions and which has been used as a trigger to introduce a new techno-totalitarian order.

Sarah Westall’s video presentation of the research by Grace Van Berkum – see ‘We are Being Played’ – about the future of global governance in ‘Multi-Decade Globalist Plan’ offers a comprehensive and horrifying view, which is only touched upon here:

The New World Order where there are no borders and only one government…. It is an entire comprehensive, meticulous plan for changing our entire world. No detail has not been addressed…. Covid-19 starts the journey of world globalization.….It is impossible for this crisis to be made only in the last [eleven] months. The sections on global governance and the fourth industrial revolution have been planned for decades…. The plan is for one government to have complete control of all of us. Artificial intelligence controlling our business, our food, our money, our privacy. And our freedom is to be abolished forever…. Years and years and years of elite mastermind plotting and planning on how to take over the world come together on this one website.

Covid-19 is just the first step to get the ball rolling… A scared and divided world is easy to dominate, crushing the economy and installing fear-based reactions is how you get an entire world to behave and start from scratch. All of the data and all of the videos throughout the site are updated daily, supporting propaganda is published and released daily, written by those determined to take over the world and all 7.7 billion inhabitants. You have to be able to understand this feel-good language and read between the lines to know what is really being said. I have had to re-read some things ten times to truly understand what the bottom line was but also truly understand what they were not addressing….

Using Covid-19 to harness the power of revolution to change the economy… characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres…. In its most pessimistic, dehumanized form, the Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed have the potential to ‘robotize’ humanity and thus to deprive us of our heart and soul. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will change not only what we do but also who we are… and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation….

The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.

The bulk of humanity has become expendable. We were good for the elite to have around when they could exploit our labor and enjoy the fruits of humanity’s talents. But information technology research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that at least one-third of jobs now performed by humans will be replaced by software, robots, and smart machines by 2025.

Robots do not require food, health benefits nor do they require a minimum wage…. According to Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, by 2029 robots and other forms of technology will have reached human levels of intelligence and functionality….

Analysing the WEF’s Resetting the Future of Work Agenda: Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World former World Bank economist Peter Koenig in his article ‘The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” – After “The Great Reset”. A Horrifying Future’ outlines elements of the ‘horrifying future to some 80%-plus of the (surviving) population’ which ‘The Great Reset’ promises.

These elements include 84% digitization of work, 83% of people working remotely, automation of 50% of tasks, temporary and permanent reductions of the workforce resulting in massive, permanent unemployment for at least 30%, vaccination containing nanochips that combined with 5G and 6G technologies will enable control of your behaviour or kill you outright in accordance with the eugenicist plan to reduce the human population.

In his article ‘Dystopian “Great Reset”: “Own Nothing and Be Happy”, Being Human in 2030’, Colin Todhunter focuses on the fact that:

The Great Reset entails a transformation of society resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceuticals corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.

Using COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions to push through this transformation, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which older enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or absorbed into monopolies, effectively shutting down huge sections of the pre-COVID economy. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs will be carried out by AI-driven machines.

In a short video, the WEF predicts that by 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’.

More fundamentally, as I explain in the article ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’ and as mentioned above, if the transhumanist agenda is successfully implemented as part of ‘The Great Reset’, individual human identity will vanish along with human volition.

Of course, it should not be forgotten that while this coup is taking place, there has already been a great number of disastrous outcomes. These include the staggering cost, in terms of everything from mental health, violence in the family home, loss of livelihood and hugely increased deaths from starvation – see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ – to an acceleration in the path to human extinction on four separate counts. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

What can we do to halt ‘The Great Reset’ and defend ourselves from the elite coup?

Fortunately, we can do a great deal, particularly if we recognize that many issues must be tackled simultaneously and while we cannot all participate in everything, we will maximize our impact if we support the vital role that others play and we act strategically.

Moreover, we only have to build on what is happening already. Despite being largely ignored or denigrated by the corporate media, resistance to one or other features of the coup is already substantial. For just one example, see this summary: ‘Anti-Lockdown Protests All Across Europe’. For an example of the legal challenges to the coup, which are set to proceed in many countries, watch this video interview of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich: ‘Lockdowns, masks & vaccines’.

So, first, if you still find it difficult to believe that people would do this, rest assured that those organizing this, and their agents, are not sane. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’. Complicating this, unfortunately, is the fact that many people are victims and easily conned by propaganda. See ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks?’

Nevertheless, as noted above, there is widespread resistance to what is happening already – awareness of which is suppressed by the corporate media, of course – so our task is to build on that resistance and increase its strategic impact.

So, if you would like to be part of the campaign to defeat the elite coup, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve this outcome here: Coup Strategic Aims.

If you wish to campaign to avert one or more of the four most immediate paths to human extinction, you can see a list of strategic goals for doing so here: Campaign Strategic Aims.

If you wish to nurture children to be better equipped to understand what is happening and far more able to critique it, see ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you wish to reduce your vulnerability to elite control, consider joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Finally, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

  1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
  2. I will not travel by plane
  3. I will not travel by car
  4. I will not eat meat and fish
  5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
  7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
  8. I will not buy rainforest timber
  9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
  12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

 

Conclusion

The coup currently being conducted by the global elite has been carefully planned and prepared over several decades. This is evident from documents published by the World Economic Forum and other elite organizations, many elite gatherings which have discussed the subject, interim measures adopted along the way and the extraordinary measures being taken to prevent any meaningful discussion or debate, in violation of our ‘right to free speech’, about the threat supposedly posed by Covid-19 and the merits or otherwise of ‘The Great Reset’. See ‘“Collective Narcissism” and the “Dark Triad”: Those Who Protest against the “Official” Covid-19 Narrative are Categorized as “Psychopaths”. Is It A Witch Hunt?’ and ‘There’s no vaccine for the infodemic – so how can we combat the virus of misinformation?’

Given that the fundamental aim of the coup is to substantially reduce the human population and keep those still alive, subject to permanent surveillance as well as mind and behavioural control, as ‘techno-slaves’ to the global elite, the time to resist is now.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?

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By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Source: Global Research

What is this “Great Reset” we’re now hearing about? In a nutshell, the Great Reset refers to a global agenda to monitor and control the world through digital surveillance.

As explained by journalist James Corbett in his October 16, 2020, Corbett Report below,1 the Great Reset is a new “social contract” that ties every person to it through an electronic ID linked to your bank account and health records, and a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life.

It’s about “getting rid of capitalism” and free enterprise, and replacing them with so-called “sustainable development” and “stakeholder capitalism” — terms that belie their nefarious, anti-humanity intents. As noted in the book, “Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order”:2

“… Sustainable Development is Technocracy … The Sustainable Development movement has taken careful steps to conceal its true identity, strategy and purpose, but once the veil is lifted, you will never see it any other way. Once its strategy is unmasked, everything else will start to make sense.”

The Grand Plan

In her blog post “The Great Reset for Dummies,” Tessa Lena summarizes the purpose behind the call for a global “reset”:3

“The mathematical reason for the Great Reset is that thanks to technology, the planet has gotten small, and the infinite expansion economic model is bust — but obviously, the super wealthy want to continue staying super wealthy, and so they need a miracle, another bubble, plus a surgically precise system for managing what they perceive as ‘their limited resources.’

Thus, they desperately want a bubble providing new growth out of thin air — literally — while simultaneously they seek to tighten the peasants’ belts, an effort that starts with ‘behavioral modification,’ a.k.a. resetting the western peasants’ sense of entitlement to high life standards and liberties (see awful ‘privilege’).

The psychological reason for the Great Reset is the fear of losing control of property, the planet. I suppose, if you own billions and move trillions, your perception of reality gets funky, and everything down below looks like an ant hill that exists for you. Just ants and numbers, your assets. Thus, the practical aim of the Great Reset is to fundamentally restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations based on two assumptions:

One, that every element of nature and every life form is a part of the global inventory (managed by the allegedly benevolent state, which, in turn, is owned by several suddenly benevolent wealthy people, via technology).

And two, that all inventory needs to be strictly accounted for: be registered in a central database, be readable by a scanner and easily ID’ed, and be managed by AI, using the latest ‘science.’

The goal is to count and then efficiently manage and control all resources, including people, on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented digital … precision — all while the masters keep indulging, enjoying vast patches of conserved nature, free of unnecessary sovereign peasants and their unpredictability.”

Global Asset Reallocations Will Not Benefit ‘the People’

These new global “assets” can also be turned into brand new financial instruments that can then be traded. An example of this was given by Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., in my interview with her.

In it, she explained how India is headed toward Zero-Budget Natural Farming — a brand-new concept of farming in which farmers must trade the carbon rate in their soil on the global market if they want to make a living. They’ll get no money at all for the crops they actually grow.

There’s not a single area of life that is left out of this Great Reset plan. The planned reform will affect everything from government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing and even how we interact with our fellow human beings in general.

Privacy protections, of course, are a major hurdle in this plan, which is why every effort is made to get people to loosen their views on the right for privacy. In the U.S., we also have the Constitution that stands in the way, which is why efforts to undermine, circumvent, ignore or nullify it are increasing.

“To sum it up, the desired end result is a giant, joyless, highly controlled global conveyor of everything and everybody where privacy is tremendously expensive, dissent is unthinkable, and spiritual submission is mandatory.

It’s like a 24/7 medicated reality, except the medications are both chemical and digital, and they are reporting you back to the mothership, which can then punish you for bad behavior by, say, blocking your access to certain places or by putting a hold on your digital bank account — perhaps without any human intervention at all,” Lena writes.4

Stakeholder Capitalism

An October 5, 2020, Winter Oak article5 addressed the “technocratic fascist vision” of professor Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum who wrote the book on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schwab announced the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset Initiative in June 2020, which includes stripping all people of their privately owned assets.

In addition to being a staunch technocrat, Schwab also has a strong transhumanist bend, and he has spoken of a near future in which humans merge with machines and in which law enforcement will be able to read our mind.6

Winter Oak — a British nonprofit social justice organization — points out that Schwab and his globalist accomplices are using the COVID-19 pandemic “to bypass democratic accountability, to override opposition, to accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the rest of humankind against our will.”

Ultimately, the Great Reset will result in two tiers or people: The technocratic elite, who have all the power and rule over all assets, and the rest of humanity, who have no power, no assets and no say-so in anything.

This is no conspiracy theory. The plan is out in the open. As noted by Time magazine,7 “The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to think about the kind of future we want.” The same statement has been delivered by a number of politicians and organizations around the world in recent months.

Schwab’s book,8,9 “COVID-19: The Great Reset” also urges industry leaders and decision makers to “make good use of the pandemic” and “not letting the crisis go to waste.” Incidentally, the owner of Time magazine and founder of Salesforce, Mark Benioff, is also a board member of the World Economic Forum,10 so he’s clearly familiar with the reset plan.

The problem is that while the plan is being sold as a way to, finally, make life fair and equitable for all people, the required sacrifices do not apply to the technocrats running the system. Ultimately, the Great Reset will result in two tiers or people: the technocratic elite, who have all the power and rule over all assets, and the rest of humanity, who have no power, no assets and no say-so in anything.

While technocracy is not a political system but an economic one, in practical terms it does resemble fascism. None of it is being sold under the banner of fascism, of course. Instead, they use financial terms like “stakeholder capitalism,” described by Forbes magazine11 as “the notion that a firm focuses on meeting the needs of all its stakeholders: customers, employees, partners, the community and society as a whole.”

In that same article, Forbes points out that this strategy has already been tried and failed. It failed because balancing conflicting stakeholder claims was near-impossible and only led to mass confusion and poor returns. The failure of this strategy is what led big businesses to focus on maximizing shareholder value instead.

Now, at a time when big business finds itself under attack for “single-mindedly shoveling money to its shareholders and its executives at the expense of customers, employees, the environment and society as a whole,” the answer, they say, is to return to stakeholder capitalism. But if it didn’t work before, what makes us think it will work now?

Great Reset Plan for Big Food

A November 9, 2020, article12 in The Defender, a new media platform by the Children’s Health Defense, also points out the problems with the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset plan for the food industry:

“The architects of the plan claim it will reduce food scarcity, hunger and disease, and even mitigate climate change. But a closer look at the corporations and think tanks the WEF is partnering with to usher in this global transformation suggests that the real motive is tighter corporate control over the food system by means of technological solutions.”

Aside from the food industry, partners13 include data mining giants, telecommunications, weapons manufacturers, finance, drug companies and the biotechnology industry.

Looking at that list, it should come as no surprise that the World Economic Forum insists the future of food and public health hinges on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), laboratory-grown protein, drugs and industrial chemicals.

The EAT Forum and the Rise of Food Imperialism

To further the fake food takeover, the World Economic Forum has partnered with the EAT Forum, which will set the political agenda for global food production. The EAT Forum was cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, which in turn was established with the financial help of GlaxoSmithKline.

EAT currently collaborates with nearly 40 city governments across Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia, and maintains close relationships with imitation meat companies such as Impossible Foods, which was co-funded by Google, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.14

As noted by The Defender, the ultimate aim is to “replace wholesome nutritious foods with genetically modified lab creations.” To this end, EAT is working with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to establish global dietary guidelines and sustainable development initiatives.

The “Planetary Health Diet”15 developed by EAT is a diet that is supposed to replace all others. Federic Leroy, a food science and biotechnology professor at University of Brussels told The Defender:16

“The diet aims to cut the meat and dairy intake of the global population by as much as 90% in some cases and replaces it with lab-made foods, cereals and oil.”

Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., has raised harsh critique against the proposed diet saying it “is not about nutrition at all. It’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.”17 The Defender adds:18

“According to EAT’s own reports, the big adjustments the organization and its corporate partners want to make to the food system are ‘unlikely to be successful if left up to the individual,’ and the changes they wish to impose on societal eating habits and food ‘require reframing at the systemic level with hard policy interventions that include laws, fiscal measures, subsidies and penalties, trade reconfiguration and other economic and structural measures.’

But Shiva said this is the wrong approach, because ‘all of the science’ shows that diets should be centered around regional and geographical biodiversity. She explained that ‘EAT’s uniform global diet will be produced with western technology and agricultural chemicals. Forcing this onto sovereign nations by multinational lobbying is what I refer to as food imperialism.’”

The Future of Food and Health Care

You can get a feel for where the future of food is headed by analyzing the World Economic Forum’s strategic intelligence map.19 As you can see, this top-down approach ties food production to a wide range of sectors, including biotech, the chemical industry, artificial intelligence, the internet of things and the digital economy.

For more details on Schwab and the World Economic Forum’s strategic intelligence plan, see Covert Geopolitic’s article,20 “Breaking Down the Global Elite’s Great Reset Master Plan.”

If any of this raises your concern, you’re probably not going to like what the World Health Economic Forum has in store for health care reform either. As detailed on their website:21

“Our current capital intensive, hospital-centric model is unsustainable and ineffective. The Platform for Shaping the Future of Health and Healthcare leverages a data-enabled delivery system and virtual care, integrated across the continuum of care from precision prevention to personalized care delivery …”

Aiding the World Economic Forum in this health care transformation are the biggest corporate criminals in the history of the modern world, including Bill Gates, AstraZeneca,22 Bayer,23 Johnson & Johnson,24 Merck,25 Pfizer,26 Novartis27 and a host of others.28

These companies have at various times been found guilty of all sorts of crimes that they have paid tens of billions of dollars in fines for. They are also loaded with conflicts of interest in nearly every venture they are involved with. Yet we’re now supposed to believe these companies are going to put aside their profit incentives and fix the whole system?

Build Back Better

As noted in a July 21, 2020, World Economic Forum article,29 the economic devastation caused by COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns “has the potential to hobble global prosperity for generations to come.” The answer is to come up with stimulus measures, such as infrastructure development, that can allow countries to move forward.

But while at it, countries are urged to make sure the economic system is “built back better.” Make no mistake, this catchy slogan is part and parcel of the Great Reset plan and cannot be separated from it, no matter how altruistic it may sound. As reported by Fox News:30

“A radical movement called the Great Reset embraced by some Democrats poses a grave threat to liberty and free markets in the United States and around the world … The Great Reset is perhaps the biggest danger to capitalism and individual rights since the collapse of the Soviet Union …

It would destroy the current capitalist system and replace it with progressive and modern socialist systems, with a special emphasis placed on eco-socialist policies … Policy ideas offered by ‘Great Reset’ advocates include government-provided basic income programs, universal health care, massive tax increases and the Green New Deal …

For example, at a campaign event on July 9, Biden said we need to end the ‘era of shareholder capitalism,’ a major part of the Great Reset proposal that would alter how companies are evaluated, elevating social justice causes and climate change concerns over property rights …

The Build Back Better plan comes straight from the Great Reset’s playbook … As recently as July 13, the World Economic Forum promoted ‘building back better’ through ‘green’ infrastructure programs as part of the Great Reset …”

Part of the “building back better” is to shift the financial system over to an all-digital currency system, which in turn is part of the system of social control, as it can easily be used to incentivize desired behaviors and discourage undesired ones.

An August 13, 2020, article31 on the Federal Reserve website discusses the supposed benefits of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). There’s general agreement among experts that most major countries will implement CBDC within the next two to four years.

Many uninformed people believe that these new CBDCs will be very similar to existing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but they would be mistaken. Bitcoin is decentralized and a rational strategy to opt out of the existing central bank controlled system, while these CBDCs will be centralized and completely controlled by the central banks and will have smart contracts that allow the banks to surveil and control your life.

The Great Reset Psyops Guide

It goes without saying that to achieve the kind of radical transformation of every part of society has its challenges. No person in their right mind would agree to it if aware of the details of the whole plan. So, to roll this out, they had to use psychological manipulation, and fear is the most effective tool there is.

As explained by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, there’s an entire school of public health research that focuses on identifying the most effective ways to frighten people into accepting desired public health measures.

By adding confusion and uncertainty to the mix, you can bring an individual from fear to anxiety — a state of confusion in which you can no longer think logically — and in this state, you are more easily manipulated. The following graphic illustrates the central role of fearmongering for the successful rollout of the Great Reset.

Social Engineering Is Central to Technocratic Rule

In closing, keep in mind that technocracy is inherently a technological society run through social engineering. Fear is but one manipulation tool. The focus on “science” is another. Anytime someone dissents, they’re simply accused of being “anti-science,” and any science that conflicts with the status quo is declared “debunked science.”

The only science that matters is whatever the technocrats deem to be true, no matter how much evidence there is against it. We’ve seen this first hand during this pandemic, as Big Tech has censored and banned anything going against the opinions of the World Health Organization, which is just another cog in the technocratic machine.

If we allow this censorship to continue, the end result will be nothing short of devastating. We simply must keep pushing for transparency and truth. We must insist on medical freedom, personal liberty and the right to privacy.

One fight in particular that I don’t see us being able to evade is the fight against mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations. If we don’t take a firm stand against that and fight for the right to make our own choice, there will be no end to the medical tyranny that will follow. As noted in the Covert Geopolitics article:32

“As you might have guessed, ‘the most important anchor of recovery’ is for a COVID-19 vaccination … The implication is that without a vaccine the world will be unable to return to any sense of normality, particularly in terms of open interaction with your fellow man …

You can actually participate in the global efforts to cripple the Deep State organized criminal cabal’s ability for genocide, while enjoying healthcare freedom at the same time, by boycotting Big Pharma for good.”

*

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Notes

1 Corbett Report October 16, 2020

2, 20, 32 Geopolitics August 29, 2020

3, 4 Tessa.substack.com October 28, 2020

5, 6 Winter Oak October 5, 2020

7 Time Magazine The Great Reset

8 COVID-19: The Great Reset

9 Steven Guiness September 3, 2020

10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18 The Defender November 9, 2020

11 Forbes January 5, 2020

13, 28 Weforum.org Partners

15 Eatforum.com The Planetary Health Diet

19 World Economic Forum Strategic Intelligence Map, Future of Food

21 Weforum.org Shaping the Future and Health of Healthcare

22 Nordic Life Sciences October 14, 2014

23 Newspunch March 20, 2019

24 CBS News August 27, 2019

25 ABC.net.au August 20, 2005

26 Lawyers and Settlements Pfizer found guilty of Medicaid fraud

27 Medical Xpress July 2, 2020

29 World Economic Forum July 21, 2020

30 Fox News July 23, 2020

31 Federal Reserve August 13, 2020

Welcome To The Interregnum

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Your unease has a name: Zozobra

By Chris Martensen

Source: Peak Prosperity

We’re between things.  It’s an uncomfortable place.

We are transitioning from an old story into a new one and that has folks feeling anxious.   By “we” I mean everyone on the planet.  If you find yourself with a deep sense of unease, yet unable to quite pin it down, you will find this article extremely helpful.

The old story of endless growth on a finite planet is winding down.  Whatever replaces it won’t be a continuation of the past.  Things are going to have to change, whether we like it or not.

Put more bluntly: the easy times are over, and a period of disruption has begun.

It may be many years or even decades before thing truly settle into a new equilibrium (of sorts – there really isn’t any such thing in this ever-changing universe).  The old will fall away even before the new has arrived. That process has already begun, hence the nervousness, anger, and fear.

My day job is serving as an information scout, an ambassador of the unknown, and because of that I’m acutely aware of the degree to which people are already worn down, burnt out, and unable to process any more.

Folks are so exhausted by the trials and tribulations dished up by the crazy-making machine fondly referred to as “2020,” that many are paralyzed.  Unable to take new actions because they are overwhelmed.

Yet, as I wrote recently, no choice IS a choice.  When so much is changing and so much is on the line, remaining frozen with anxiety is as much a determinant of your future prospects as taking swift action – each sets one down different paths promising different outcomes.

Truthfully, there is much that can be done that will contribute to a more resilient future for yourself and for the world.  But first we have to know where we are.  We have to sketch out the map as best we can, even if the edges remain blanks with little more than “there be monsters” scribed at the borders.

To orient properly, you must be aware of the idea that the Age of Growth is over.  We are now entering a Post-Growth era. Our task now is to settle into a very different existence – one with fewer ‘things’ and less ‘stuff’, but also offering more meaning and worthy challenges.

Like any good adventure, a little danger is involved.  But nothing quite so dangerous to your soul’s journey as wasting your life on trivial pursuits.

The Interregnum

The gap between reigns when the old king has died but the new successor has yet to be decided is called an interregnum.  It can also refer to the gap between first learning of something and then finally understanding its deeper significance:

in·ter·reg·num, noun

a period when normal government is suspended, especially between successive reigns or regimes.

– an interval or pause between two periods of office or other things. “the interregnum between the discovery of radioactivity and its detailed understanding”

I love this word because it perfectly matches our current state.

One feature of an interregnum, where power hangs in the balance, is that it’s a very uncertain time.  Anxiety rules the day because nobody knows how things might land.  It could be good for them personally, or very bad.  The old king was good.  His successor son is an already hated petty tyrant.  Perhaps a different, better successor will somehow manage to claim the throne instead…

This sort of uncertainty is a potent source of anxiety. Which is why an interregnum is the cradle of people’s most deep-seated fears.

The old king is gone.  Nobody knows who or what is in charge right now.  Is it humanity’s deep technological prowess or is it Mother Nature herself?

Does our destiny lie in our own hands or have the die already been cast and we’re simply awaiting to see how unfortunate of a roll it’s going to be?

Is there still time to sort out a decent solution to our many predicaments and problems, or have those moments already been wasted?

Nobody knows at this moment.  But the uncertainty is hanging thick.  Corrosive.  Emotional.  Explosive.

Welcome to the interregnum.  May the odds ever be in your favor.

Demoralization

Now while the above may sound depressing, as I’ve written before the better term is demoralizing, and there’s a very important distinction between the two terms.

Depression is a reaction to current circumstances. It can be treated with talk therapy to resolve an inner conflict, or temporary chemical rebalancing.

Demoralization, on the other hand, is what you experience when your cognitive map no longer aligns with the actual circumstances of life:

Rather than a depressive disorder, demoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s ‘cognitive map’. It is an overarching psycho-spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfilment.

The world loses its credibility, and former beliefs and convictions dissolve into doubt, uncertainty and loss of direction.

Frustration, anger and bitterness are usual accompaniments, as well as an underlying sense of being part of a lost cause or losing battle. The label ‘existential depression’ is not appropriate since, unlike most forms of depression, demoralization is a realistic response to the circumstances impinging on the person’s life.

(Source)

Did you catch that? Demoralization is actually a realistic response under certain conditions.

Those conditions are manifesting themselves now. Which means that the waves of dispiriting statistics we’re seeing are not ‘bad’; they are telling us something important.

People are right to be deeply disturbed by the ways in which the main narrative of their culture no longer maps to reality.  Worse, the Endless Growth narrative is killing life on this planet and therefore harming each of us in ways both overt and subtle.

More and more people are detecting that, and that’s a good thing. Because that’s the necessary first step in crafting a new narrative and adopting a different model that hopefully serves us better.

We often say here at Peak Prosperity that if you’re feeling anxiety (or demoralization), it means that there’s a gap between what you know and what you’re doing.  Since you can’t unlearn something, your best course of action is to change your behavior.

To take action to better align what you know with what you do.

I totally get the frustration, anger and bitterness on display in politics all across the West right now, but these are almost universally misdirected at the wrong targets.  Whether by intent or accident, this is usually the case and heavily supported by a media system that actually promotes divisiveness over unity, and isolation over connection.

(Source – PeakProsperity – The End of Growth)

Bottom line: If you are demoralized there’s nothing wrong with you.  But there is definitely something wrong with the larger situation.

If you know someone who is demoralized, don’t try to ‘fix’ them by helping them fit back into their old lives better.  The problem isn’t with their ability to adapt.  The problem is they are already adapting to what is coming.  They’re ahead of the curve, not behind it.  They just see the new curve before you do.

With that critical framing for the word demoralization, we can now go a bit deeper.  But first, I want to introduce an important term relating to demoralization: Zozobra.  It describes a potent sensation one might experience during an interregnum, especially if demoralization is in play.

Zozobra

I came across this article very recently and have now read it a few times. It’s pitch perfect.

It neatly captures the context of demoralization.  By naming it we can begin to understand it, know its presence, and reduce its unconscious hold on us:

There’s a word for your overwhelming anxiety, and it’s “zozobra”

Nov 3rd, 2020

Ever had the feeling that you can’t make sense of what’s happening? One moment everything seems normal, then suddenly the frame shifts to reveal a world on fire, struggling with pandemic, recession, climate change, and political upheaval.

That’s “zozobra,” the peculiar form of anxiety that comes from being unable to settle into a single point of view, leaving you with questions like: Is it a lovely autumn day, or an alarming moment of converging historical catastrophes?

The word “zozobra” is an ordinary Spanish term for “anxiety” but with connotations that call to mind the wobbling of a ship about to capsize. The term emerged as a key concept among Mexican intellectuals in the early 20th century to describe the sense of having no stable ground and feeling out of place in the world.

This feeling of zozobra is commonly experienced by people who visit or immigrate to a foreign country: the rhythms of life, the way people interact, everything just seems “off” – unfamiliar, disorienting and vaguely alienating.

According to the philosopher Emilio Uranga (1921-1988), the telltale sign of zozobra is wobbling and toggling between perspectives, being unable to relax into a single framework to make sense of things. As Uranga describes it in his 1952 book “Analysis of Mexican Being”:

“Zozobra refers to a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on … indiscriminately dismissing one extreme in favor of the other. In this to and fro the soul suffers, it feels torn and wounded.”

What makes zozobra so difficult to address is that its source is intangible. It is a soul-sickness not caused by any personal failing, nor by any of the particular events that we can point to.

Instead, it comes from cracks in the frameworks of meaning that we rely on to make sense of our world — the shared understanding of what is real and who is trustworthy, what risks we face and how to meet them, what basic decency requires of us and what ideals our nation aspires to.

(Source)

What ‘cracks in the framework of meaning’ could be more profound than facing the collapse of – well – everything?  Our many predicaments exist at all levels from top to bottom.  There’s no safe level on which to ride out the coming storm.  There’s nowhere to run.  There’s only right where you are.

When everything seems “off” – unfamiliar, disorienting and vaguely alienating, then you’re in some sort of foreign land.  You are out of bounds, off all of your known maps.  There’s no sense of place, nowhere to settle down. Zozobra.

When everything is wobbling and up for grabs, you wouldn’t be entirely human if you weren’t experiencing some sort of emotional unease.  AS with the adjustment reaction, an emotional arc is simply a part of the process.  Both unavoidable and necessary.

Those who navigate uncertainty best are those who process the quickest.  As always, having a good mental map, and the right terms, is helpful to that process.

Conclusion

If you are feeling nervous, angry or fearful – congratulations! – there’s nothing at all wrong with you.  In fact, your senses are operating normally, and your cognition is on the mark.  You are having an adjustment reaction, your cognitive map has a better grasp on reality than your culture, and zozobra is par for the course.

The most valuable part of naming and understanding these things is that they lose their ability to paralyze you with dread.

Our emotions are not “the truth”, but rather uncomfortable sensations that serve as an early warning system.  They are like a quantum processor able to parse through massively complex systems and situations way before our cortex can offer any guidance.

There’s also a comfort – a relief – that comes from understanding that our reactions are both perfectly normal and perfectly healthy.

There’s nothing that requires treatment. Nothing that requires medication. Nothing at all to be done about any of it.  Except knowing what it is, getting past whatever paralysis might exist as rapidly as possible, and then taking action.

Because you alone can’t alter the larger trends of ecological destruction, monetary printing, insane political responses, etc. and so forth, all that truly remains is for you to align your actions with what you know to be true.

And there’s so much to be done.  Soils need to be rebuilt.  Waste streams reformed into nutrient loops.  Energy efficiency to be built into the next generation of – everything.

The lists are as endless as they are exciting. And you can play a role, both at the individual level as well as contributing positively at the collective one.

Yes, there’s a “great reset” coming.  Whether it will be controlled and precise or a nature-driven chaotic mess remains to be seen.

But right now, you need to make a choice: You can either actively shape your future or wait to be shaped by it.

I’m all about controlling what I can and leaving the rest behind.  Maybe you are, too.

If so, then you’re part of our tribe here at Peak Prosperity.  We’re busying preparing for what is increasingly likely to consist of more macro chaos than control.

You know, to avoid being demoralized with an overwhelming sense of zozobra during this interregnum.

Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks?

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By Robert J. Burrowes

In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World Carl Sagan lamented as follows:

I have a foreboding of [a] time when… awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down… is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media… but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance…. The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just of science, but of anything – are avoidable, even undesirable.

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements… profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. See The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

While it is 25 years since these words of Sagan’s were published a year before his death, one can only lament the ongoing decline of what might simply be labeled the capacity for critical thinking, whether in relation to society and politics, or the science and technology that so concerned Sagan.

At a time in human history when so much is at stake, why is it so difficult to engage most people in anything resembling a thoughtful investigation, consideration and analysis of what is taking place? Why is it that more people do not question what they are told, what they read and what they are shown? In short, why is it that most people do not seek out the evidence for themselves rather than simply believing what is presented to them?

In one sense, the answer to this question might seem simple. People are daily bombarded with ‘information’, in various guises, and a lifetime of submissively accepting what they are told leaves few with any inclination, or energy, to question anything. But let me offer a fuller explanation given the critical importance of this issue if we are to mobilize an effective response to the challenges confronting humanity.

So first: What is propaganda? A false flag attack? Why do most people simply believe what they are told without investigating, carefully, for themselves? And why are those who challenge the elite-driven narrative often labeled ‘conspiracy theorists’ or, depending on the issue, some other pejorative such as ‘peddling debunked science’, ‘anti-vaxxer’ or ‘anti-semitic’ for example?

What is Propaganda?

Propaganda is the deliberate and systematic effort, using a variety of means, to manipulate people into believing and behaving in accordance with something that is not true. For one comprehensive explanation of how this is done, see Trust Us, We’re Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, a book which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observes ‘shows how giant corporations employ sophisticated psychiatric techniques, unscrupulous public figures, junk science, tainted studies and clever PR mercenaries in a relentless effort to market products that routinely kill, maim, deform and poison consumers and our environment’. See ‘Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future’.

While some people argue that propaganda can be used for good, the fact is that something that is simply true should appeal to people anyway, even if it is unpleasant. This is because the truth is the only powerful place from which to start to address any circumstance, including unpleasant and difficult ones.

Propaganda is delivered by a variety of means. Aside from that issued, in various ways, by governments and corporations, propaganda is delivered by education systems as ‘knowledge’, by the corporate media as ‘news’ and by the entertainment industry as films, television programs, video games, music, literature and in other forms. But all propaganda is designed to instill and reinforce a limited set of fears, approved beliefs and endorsed behaviours so that the ‘individual’ responds submissively within the carefully managed system of elite political, social and economic control.

For example, education is designed to teach the individual a limited range of technical functions intended to help create, maintain but essentially serve the emerging technocratic tyranny (as it supersedes the existing version of industrial capitalism), make the individual a passive consumer and politically submissive, while ensuring that an intelligent mind capable of seeking out relevant evidence for themselves, critiquing society and responding powerfully does not develop. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

What is a False Flag Attack?

A false flag attack occurs when a government carries out a terror attack against its own population and then falsely blames an enemy to justify a political course of action, such as going to war against the country or countries it blames. While, again, those who question false flag attacks are often denounced by elite propagandists as ‘conspiracy theorists’, in fact the documentation of false flag attacks that have later been admitted is quite long. For one list, see ‘53 Admitted False Flag Attacks’. Of course, plenty of false flag attacks have not been admitted, even when the evidence is overwhelming, as in the case of 9/11 for example.

So Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda?

In an early book on propaganda written in 1928 by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, he opened with this paragraph:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an

important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. See Propaganda.

As Bernays makes clear from the outset, his preoccupation is the manipulation of people to do the bidding of others: clearly, a debased and cynical view of the human individual on which many of humanity’s less morally committed characters have capitalized since Bernays wrote the book.

For example, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945 and an avid reader of Bernays’ work, observed that ‘Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.’

But to understand why the approach of Bernays and his disciples such as Goebbels even works, we need to consider why it is that most people are so gullible in the first place. Why don’t more people ask deeper questions about what is taking place rather than simply accepting, without serious question, whatever is presented to them (whether by parents, teachers, religious figures, doctors, propagandists, marketing agents, governments or the corporate media)?

The fundamental problem is simply this: parents, teachers, religious figures and other significant adults in the child’s life require obedience. And obedience means that the child not only behaves as directed by the adult but also that the child believes what the adult believes. This latter point is easily overlooked but is actually the key issue. Why? Because a child who does not believe what the adult believes might think and behave in a way that scares the adult. And demanding obedience is essentially about eliminating beliefs (and their consequent behaviours) that would frighten the parent, teacher or other adult.

Parents require obedience virtually from the moment of birth, doing everything from comforting a child to stop them crying – see ‘Comforting a Baby is Violent’ – to punishing them for acting contrary to parental will once they start moving independently. Of course, once the child starts to think or believe differently, especially if this ‘difference’ is too far from a belief of the child’s parents, teachers or religious leaders (or a widely-accepted belief within their society), the child is quickly pulled back into line with some combination of inducements and/or violence. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

Despite legal conventions meaninglessly affirming versions of it – such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 18 declaring ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought…’ – the freedom to think for oneself is not a human right in any meaningful sense of the term and, even if it were, it would really only mean the freedom to think for oneself within certain clearly defined and narrow parameters. And only if you are an adult.

This is why, for example, a child who decides not to go to school does not emerge. Such a possibility would be frightening to virtually every parent, so no child is given that option, let alone allowed the opportunity to come up with, consider and act on that option for themself. Why? Because attendance at school, wherever it exists, is legally compulsory (meaning punishment will be inflicted for failure to comply), and only the rarest parent has the vaguest concept of freedom themselves, let alone the courage to defend their child’s freedom, including the freedom to choose how they spend the bulk of their time for the 8-13 years of ‘school age’.

Consequently, the freedom to think for oneself and act accordingly is strangled at a very young age and certainly by the time a child is compelled to attend a prison for children, also known as ‘school’. As a result the child’s concept of freedom, should they ever come across the notion, can only be a parody of the real thing. And the adult who emerges from this childhood is simply incapable of comprehending what freedom might mean for the obvious reason that to be meaningfully understood, freedom must be experienced.

Of course, is it not just parental authority and school that denies any child the experience of liberty. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted in his treatise The Social Contract in 1762, ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’. Every institution in society is designed to circumscribe freedom, one way or another. It is just that a childhood spent living under the control of their parents and then teachers and religious figures leaves all children devoid of the experience of freedom and so any subsequent limits are not even noticed. In fact, they are expected and ‘taken for granted’.

So with parents, teachers and religious figures endlessly inflicting ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence on the child in the name of ‘socialization’ (which includes requiring obedience under threat of violence for non-compliance), the child progressively and rapidly loses several innate capacities, notably including a sense of their own Self-will, the capacities to think and feel for themselves, as well as conscience. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. Anything that is too far from the dominant narrative simply becomes ‘unthinkable’ because the child’s innate capacity to perceive the truth is suppressed along with other mental capacities.

But soon it is not just parents, teachers and religious leaders that are the accepted ‘authority figures’ in the child’s life. No longer able to seriously question the imperatives of parents, teachers and religious figures because they have been terrorized out of doing so, the child has also unconsciously ‘learned’ that virtually any information with which they are presented must be true, even when the source is simply a government or corporate media outlet presenting elite propaganda. For the vast bulk of adult humans, the idea of questioning a dominant narrative does not even occur to them and it is certainly not something they can do with any intelligence, persistent research effort or courage.

So just as Hitler, ably supported by his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, was able to direct most Germans prior to and into World War II, it is quite straightforward for the global elite to be able to direct the bulk of the human population to believe, for example, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the ‘lone gunman’ Lee Harvey Oswald, that the ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident’ justified the United States war on Vietnam, that a ‘virus’ labeled HIV caused a ‘disease’ labeled AIDS, that the three buildings 1,2 and 7 of the World Trade Center were destroyed by two aircraft flown by novice pilots into the top stories of the Twin Towers and justified the subsequently launched US ‘War on Terror’, that a ‘virus’ labeled SARS-Cov-2 exists and causes a ‘disease’ labeled Covid-19 that has justified the destruction of everything from a range of human rights to the global economy while accelerating four distinct paths to human extinction, that we live in a democracy in which each adult has a say in how they are governed, or even that ongoing effort is being made to bring a greater degree of shared prosperity to the people of the world.

For just a taste of the extensive evidence to debunk each of these propaganda-driven delusions, see these respective analyses of what the evidence actually demonstrates: On the Trail of the Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy, the Pentagon Papers, AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’, ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’, ‘America After the Election: A Few Hard Truths About the Things That Won’t Change’ and ‘The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families’.

In essence: my point is that is it is not the power of the propaganda, increasingly sophisticated though it has become, that makes people believe it, but a ‘socialization’ model designed to produce submissively obedient ‘individuals’ who gullibly interpret what is happening, and even their own ‘experience’, in terms of the information or scenario (that is, propaganda) with which they are presented. And because of the deeply-seated and unconscious fear of holding a divergent view, most people simply believe the widely-promulgated propaganda narrative with which they become familiar and, hence, comfortable. Moreover, those who challenge the elite-driven narrative frighten them, particularly when elite agents in government and the corporate media label them ‘conspiracy theorists’. For one explanation of why the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ emerged to denigrate those who challenge elite orthodoxy, see ‘In defence of conspiracy theories (and why the term is a misnomer)’.

And so this combination of dysfunctional parenting, education and religious exposure leaves the child devoid of their intuitive ‘truth register’ as well as the other mental faculties that would make them question explanations that obviously lack credibility while investigating and analyzing the evidence for themself. In fact, the idea of doing so never even occurs to them. Hence, a terrorized, gullible and easily manipulated individual enters adulthood. And, as the elite intends, galvanizing an effective response by such people to the truth hidden behind the propaganda is very difficult.

Resisting Propaganda

There is no point hoping that the global elite will discontinue their use of propaganda to shape the course of human events. This is largely because the global elite is insane. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’. Moreover, attempts to curb the use of propaganda must inevitably run into the institutions and organizations that the elite controls. And while we can strategically resist these if we choose, the most powerful defence we have against elite propaganda is the human mind that can perceive and critique it. Hence, as a priority, I would profoundly alter our parenting model to achieve this outcome. See ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you are uncertain of your own capacity to critique propaganda, you can expand your capacity to do so by feeling the fear (to release it) that limits your mental faculties. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you are interested in planning or participating in a strategy to achieve a peace, environmental or social justice outcome (particularly in relation to those issues that threaten human extinction), or to resist the elite coup currently taking place under cover of Covid-19, you can read sets of strategic goals for doing so in Campaign Strategic Aims or Coup Strategic Aims.

Moreover, if you wish to tackle the environmental threats to human existence while also strengthening your self-reliant capacity to resist the latest elite onslaught to take (much) greater control of your life, consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. The greater your dependence on elite systems and processes of any kind, the less power you will have to resist as the noose tightens.

If you are interested in participating in the worldwide effort to resist elite and other violence, you are also welcome to sign the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

  1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
  2. I will not travel by plane
  3. I will not travel by car
  4. I will not eat meat and fish
  5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
  7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
  8. I will not buy rainforest timber
  9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
  12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

The world is complex: it is difficult to understand and requires enormous effort.

Propaganda is designed to give people information that is easy to understand (and sometimes frightening) while distracting them from the truth and offering a simple ‘choice’ (or command) designed to mobilize action in support of an elite-driven narrative.

For example, by telling people they are threatened by a virus, most will be scared into focusing their attention on the ‘virus’. They will pay no attention to the many more complex and dangerous things that are taking place under cover of the ‘virus’: a technocratic/transhumanist coup that is utterly transforming the very essence of human society, economy and even the human individual. See ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’ and ‘Klaus Schwab and His Great Fascist Reset’.

Only a tiny proportion of the human population has even the vaguest idea of how the world actually works. But not even a tiny proportion of these people recognize that terrorizing children into obedience is the fundamental explanation of why the world works in the way that it does.

Unless we can mobilize greater recognition of our responsibility for giving the global elite the control over us that it has, and tackle this problem at its core – by fundamentally revising existing parenting and education models so that we produce powerful individuals – it will continue to be enormously difficult to mobilize sufficient strategic response to the challenges that confront humanity.

And while we are now fast-tracking four distinct paths to human extinction, there is an urgency about our predicament that accelerates daily.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

THE RISE OF THE CYBORGIAN CONSUMER

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By Elva Thompson

Source: Waking Times

“You don’t take over the world with gaudy displays of violence. Real control is surgical, and invisible.” ~ John Greer – Person of Interest, Season 4, Episode: YHVH

The Posthuman (or Transhuman) Movement was formally established in California in the early 1980s. A central figure within the movement, Nick Bostrom, declared that Posthumanism holds to the belief that human nature is an improvable structure, and all its capacities can be enhanced through the use of ‘applied science’. The proposition is that human beings should use technology to transcend the limits of body and mind. Posthumanists do not see humanity as isolated physical entities but as distributed processes within a system. ‘THE BODY IS OBSOLETE’ is their battle cry, but the Posthuman seems to be defined by a lack of definition.

Stephen Brown, the doyen of marketing and interpretive consumer research, introduced the term apophasis. This is a curious choice of word, as it is a theological term which refers to knowing God through negation, or what God is not. Apophasis is from the ancient Greek, meaning to deny or negate. The problem seems to be that we can happily describe what a human being does or performs, but there is a difficulty when it comes to describing what a human being is. This lays bare the profound incapacity of language to penetrate into the very essence of things. In other words, to fully express Being, (I bet humpback whales don’t have this problem).

I Consume, Therefore I Am

To the Posthumanist technocrats, ‘natural man’ is a failed project that desperately needs to be improved upon. But before this can happen radical changes need to be made to our current conceptions of what it means to be human. Traditional accounts of the state of being human are based upon Cartesian worldviews, which regard external reality as objectively recordable and expressed primarily through mathematical laws.

People, as physically isolated thinking mammals, are viewed as necessary consumers within a society that is imagined to be ever abundant and fruitful. This is the Gaia of Classical thought, an ever-producing cornucopia of unquenchable life. Consuming this bounty is our essential function, and God-given right. Not only that, but the mind, or disembodied consciousness, is now theorized to be nothing more than an information processor. This data collecting ‘machine’, being rational and scientific, is external to the fixed social reality which it continually observes and records.

Posthumanism, conversely, puts the emphasis on socio-cultural and technological contexts, and the individual consciousnesses are but processes within this contextual framework. These are socially constructed “hybrid marketplace matrices” using a variety of social, economic and technological systems to control and manoeuvre the population through their insatiable desire to consume. The boundary between the individual and society is seen as being porous and amorphous. Reality becomes protean, as nothing is stable, and it becomes difficult to draw a clear line between the human, the animal and the machine. This is viewed as a natural societal progression, the next phase of an ever-evolving humanity.

“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” ~ Donna J. Haraway

The rational consumer is now replaced by a bio-technological symbiont, or cyborg. As the “proto-typical posthumanist consumer”, the cyborg is seen as the most popular manifestation of the posthuman. This image contains a dichotomy, though, as it is both liberatory and oppressive. The hope is that it can liberate mankind from organic failures, such as ageing and disease, yet contains the fear of a powerful hierarchical elite of technologized bio-machines lording it over the general unmodified masses.

Yet, the cyborg is a hybrid, a bio-technological chimera, and cannot exist without social, economic and technological systems. It is fundamentally a process (or even a product) rather than a Being, a verb rather than a noun. It has lost its essential individuality and become subsumed in the process itself. A cyborg is a Golem by any other name. The Golem is one of the oldest legends of artificial creation, barring Hermetic tales of Egyptian magic instilling stone statues with the consciousness of their gods or neters.

Similarly, through the power of Jewish cabbalism, a model of stone or metal could be infused with life (the root of the word golem is golmi, meaning ‘unformed limbs’). The modern attempt to create consciousness within digital constructs is no different.

Ironically, Descartes himself was fascinated by the automaton, comparing it favourably with the human body. In the late 1980s Hans Moravec, a faculty member of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, proposed that human identity is essentially an informational pattern. He suggested that this proposition can be demonstrated by downloading human consciousness into a computer, thus proving that machines can become human. He believed that robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030 – 2040.

Almost 30 years later, a large percent of human communication is mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the creation of identity that it can no longer be meaningfully separated from the human subject. In other words, we are in the initial stages of becoming cyborgs. We may not be physically augmented by technology, but we are beginning to think in the same manner as machines, or the algorithms that run them. The more we use computers, and spend our valuable time prowling around the internet, the more we embody becoming Posthuman. We are already well on the way to becoming cyborg.

“Beam me up, Scotty.” Captain James T. Kirk, any original Star Trek episode.

In 1948, the mathematician Norbert Weiner published a book entitled ‘Cybernetics: control and communication in the animal and machine’. Here he proposed it was possible to telegraph a human being, imagining that the body can be dematerialised into an informational pattern and rematerialised at a different location. More recently, molecular biology treats information as the essential code the body expresses, what we know as DNA. This is termed the ‘impossible inversion’, where information becomes primary and materiality secondary.

During our present cultural moment the belief is that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates. “Beam me up, Scotty” has become a cultural icon for the global information age. Information has now come to be conceptualised as an entity in itself, existing separately from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded.

As such, information can be considered the thoughts of the machine and a biological body is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitable consequence of material life. In his book ‘The Order of Things’ (1973), the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested that “man” is no more than a historical construct whose era is about to end. The Posthuman view considers consciousness as an epiphenomenon, an evolutionary by-product or secondary effect. The physical body is considered as the original prosthesis we, as a species, learned to manipulate.

Extending or replacing the biological body with artificial prostheses is therefore a continuation of an evolutionary process. This view, in turn, configures the human being to be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the Posthuman world there is no essential demarcation between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism.

Posthumanism does away with the ‘natural self’, rejecting the arguments that the social philosophers Hobbes and Locke constructed about humans being originally in a ‘state of nature’, and therefore owing nothing to society, as that was an after-effect. Instead, the Posthuman is an amalgamation of diverse components, a material-information entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.

Chaos out of Order?

Indeed, the situation just described seems to contradict the oft touted phrase of the elite: Ordo Ab Chao, or order out of chaos. The beliefs of the Posthumanists appear to reverse the above declaration. Instead of an ordered reality complete with clearly defined boundaries and roles for the inhabitants of society, they appear to offer an amalgamated mass of ever-changing variables that resemble the protean, but infinitely fecund, primal Chaos that preceded the manifestation of this physical universe. Is it the intentional creation of a universal Chaos (alchemically merging mineral with vegetable, namely silicon with carbon) from which a new level of Order can be produced?

Addendum: it struck me that posthuman is nearly posthumous, and thus denoting the death-knell of the natural human being.

The 2020 Election Bamboozle: We Are All Victims of the Deep State’s Con Game

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don’t revolt we’ll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche…. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we’re at their mercy… We all live in a little Village. Your Village may be different from other people’s Villages, but we are all prisoners.”— Patrick McGoohan

This is not an election.

This is a con game, a scam, a grift, a hustle, a bunko, a swindle, a flimflam, a gaffle, and a bamboozle.

In this carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” are nothing more than marks, suckers, stooges, mugs, rubes, or gulls.

We are victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.

Every confidence game has six essential stages: 1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion; 2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted; 3) the build-up to make the victim feel like they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome; 4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up; 5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early “wins”; and 6) the “hurrah”— a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency.  

In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political savior—including Donald Trump and Joe Biden—is part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.

In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, it’s the Deep State rigging the outcome.

Terrorist attacks, pandemics, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesn’t change much in the long term.

No matter who wins this election, we’ll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.

We just haven’t learned to recognize our prison walls as such.

It’s like that old British television series The Prisoner, which takes place in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner (17 episodes in all) centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in The Village, a beautiful resort with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked. Residents of the Village are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.

First broadcast in Great Britain 50-some years ago, The Prisoner dystopian television series —described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

The series’ protagonist, played by Patrick McGoohan is Number Six.

Number Two, the Village administrator, acts as an agent for the unseen and all-powerful Number One, whose identity is not revealed until the final episode.

“I am not a number. I am a free man,” was the mantra chanted on each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role.

In the opening episode (“The Arrival”), Number Six meets Number Two, who explains to him that he is in The Village because information stored “inside” his head has made him too valuable to be allowed to roam free “outside.”

Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

Number Six refuses to comply.

In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.

Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.” Still, he refuses to give up. “Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”

Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.

As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”

The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”

The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

The American Police State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.

Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the new mantra of the architects of the Deep State and their corporate collaborators (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Instagram, etc.).

Government eyes are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between obeying the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.

It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

None of this will change, no matter who wins this upcoming presidential election.

And that’s the hustle, you see: because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, the day after a new president is sworn in, we’ll still find ourselves prisoners of the Village.

This should come as no surprise to those who haven’t been taking the escapist blue pill, who haven’t fallen for the Deep State’s phony rhetoric, who haven’t been lured in by the promise of a political savior: we never stopped being prisoners.

So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.

Think for yourself. Be an individual. As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”

You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), you’ll never be free.

Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life

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By Vandana Shiva

Source: resilience

The following excerpt is from Vandana Shiva’s new book Oneness vs. the 1% (Chelsea Green Publishing, August 31, 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’.

‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said.

In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.

The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.

New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity, integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans, we are connected through disease.

According to the International Labour Organization, ‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’ According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.

Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism.

The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity.

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coronavirus pandemic and in the midst of the lockdown, Microsoft was granted a patent by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ‘Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….’

The ‘body activity’ that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees, or any other information or data.

The patent is an intellectual property claim over our bodies and minds. In colonialism, colonisers assign themselves the right to take the land and resources of indigenous people, extinguish their cultures and sovereignty, and in extreme cases exterminate them. Patent WO 060606 is a declaration by Microsoft that our bodies and minds are its new colonies. We are mines of ‘raw material’—the data extracted from our bodies. Rather than sovereign, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings making decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part, and to which we are inextricably related, we are ‘users.’ A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire.

But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable.

In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to ‘reinvent education.’ Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created ‘a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why with all the technology you have?’

In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades. For him students are mines for data. That is why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test, because these can be easily quantified and mined. In reimagining education, children will be monitored through surveillance systems to check if they are attentive while they are forced to take classes remotely, alone at home. The dystopia is one where children never return to schools, do not have a chance to play, do not have friends. It is a world without society, without relationships, without love and friendship.

As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’ people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves.

Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we must fight for. It is one we must claim.

We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?

Why We’re Doomed: Our Delusional Faith in Incremental Change

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Better not to risk any radical evolution that might fail, and so failure is thus assured.

When times are good, modest reforms are all that’s needed to maintain the ship’s course. By “good times,” I mean eras of rising prosperity which generate bigger budgets, profits, tax revenues, paychecks, etc., eras characterized by high levels of stability and predictability.

Since stability has been the norm for 75 years, institutions and conventional thinking have both been optimized for incremental change. This is an analog of natural selection in Nature: when the organism’s environment is stable, there’s little pressure to favor random mutations, as these can be risky.

Why risk big changes when everything’s working fine as is?

Absent any big changes in their environment, organisms’ genetic programming remains stable. Unlike natural selection’s process of generating random mutations and testing their efficacy and advantages over the existing programming, human organizations quickly habituate to stable eras by institutionalizing incremental changes as the only available process for reform / change.

Radical reforms are not just frowned on as 1) unneccesary and 2) needlessly risky, there is no institutionalized process to propose, test and adopt radical changes because there is no need for such a process.

Nature has such a process: punctuated equilibirium. When faced with a rapidly changing environment, organisms face intense evolutionary pressure to adapt or die. Mutations which confer a significant advantage in the new environment become part of the species’ genetic programming as those with the adaptation bear offspring who carry the advantageous adaptation. Those without the advantageous adaptation die and those with the adaptation thrive and multiply.

Once the environment stabilizes in “the new normal,” the evolutionary pressure lets up and the species returns to the stability of relatively few changes in its genetic programming.

Organisms which have lost the ability to adapt to rapid change die off once they encounter instability. Species that constantly face instability and rapid change will selectively favor genetic traits which optimize rapid evolution.

Nature tends to retain a basement closet full of fast-evolution tricks just in case the organism faces novel challenges.

Alas, human organizations and conventional thinking have no such closet of fast-evolution tricks. Rather, human organizations and conventional thinking marshal formidable forces to suppress anything which threatens the status quo, because why risk upsetting the feeding trough unless it’s absolutely necessary?

Therein lies the fatal problem: radical adaptation is never absolutely necessary in human organizations and conventional thinking until it’s too late–and even then, the leadership and conventional thinking will fatalistically accept oblivion rather than opt for a risky strategy of testing every mutation and fast-tracking whatever has promise, even though the odds of failure are high since 1) the challenge is novel and therefore unpredictable and 2) most mutations will fail to provide the radical advantages needed to meet the challenge.

In other words, what’s absolutely necessary to human organizations and conventional thinking is the suppression of potentially dangerous novel ideas because the worst-case scenario is that the novel ideas upset the feeding trough all the insiders have come to depend on.

Unfortunately for human organizations and conventional thinking, novel challenges demand precisely what they’re incapable of: risky rapid evolution. The risks will never seem worth it because some insiders might lose their spot at the feeding trough.

Since this loss is viewed as catastrophic by those at risk, they will fight with everything they have to stymie any radical reforms. Ironically, their resistance to rapid evolution only guarantees the demise of the entire organization / status quo, including the spot at the trough they were so eager to defend at all costs.

As the crisis deepens, the default setting in organizations and conventional thinking is that incremental changes and reforms will be enough, because they’ve been enough for four generations. I call this entirely natural default setting the delusional faith in incremental change because this faith isn’t guided by history or the logic of causality; it’s simply convenient and easy.

Nobody gets fired or demoted for agreeing to do more of what’s failed spectacularly.

I’ve prepared a chart of the delusional faith in incremental change showing how each new crisis is met by incremental institutionalized defaults that are completely inadequate to the novel challenges that have arisen. The blindness to the need for radical adaption has been institutionalized as well: this is what worked in the past, so it will work now. Why risk everything when we have procedures that have worked well?

Each stage of the crisis draws whatever conventional response causes the least pain. First, the “rainy day fund” is drained to keep everyone at the feeding trough. Studies of options are funded, and so on.

The recommendations are either too timid and clearly inadequate or they’re too bold and risky. So incremental policy and budget tweaks are adopted as acceptable institutional defaults.

But rifts open in the leadership as the farsighted few demand rapid, radical adaptations and the conventional risk-averse crowd digs in their heels. The farsighted few are pushed out or quit / retire, eliminating the only people who had the ability and experience to actually pull off a radical change of course.

A reshuffling of leadership evokes hope that the modest reforms will work magic. Alas, incremental tweaks only work in eras of stability. They fail miserably in unstable eras of rapidly-evolving challenges.

As everything runs to failure, the only acceptable path is to do more of what’s failed spectacularly, a default to low-risk incrementalism that only accelerates the final inevitable collapse.

The delusional faith in incremental change guarantees systemic failure. Better not to risk any radical evolution that might fail, and so failure is thus assured.

This is why our status quo is doomed: