"Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. . . . There are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence." ~ HERMANN HESSE , Steppenwolf
It was 1973, when Polish-born Zbigniew Brzezinski was appointed as director of the Trilateral Commission, for which he became one of the primary organizers (with none other than David Rockefeller also at the helm), and as its new director, while writing his first article for the Council on Foreign Relations’ official journal (Foreign Affairs), he offered the following:
The world is not likely to unite [willingly] behind a common ideology or a super-government. The only practical hope is that it will now respond to a common concern for its own survival. ... The Atlantic [Union] concept was a creative response to the problems of the cold war era. Today, the Atlantic framework is too narrow to encompass the multitude of challenges—and opportunities—that confront the international community. It is a recognition of this reality to propose ... that the active promotion of such a trilateral cooperation must now become the central priority of U.S. policy.
It seems clear, in other words, Brzezinski was suggesting that voluntary union would never be achieved in time, and there was therefore a need to implement a different strategy. And just what was that “other strategy,” you ask? Simply stated, it was to impose the very same controls over nations that “(one-)world government” advocates were proposing, but this time to do it under the guise of solving economic, ecological, or energy problems.
It’s important we set the context here. You see, this was around the same period Maurice Strong, probably one of the richest men in all of Canadian history (and an oilman, no less!), and certainly one of the most (covertly) influential, commissioned the writing of Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, the year before the Club of Rome was to see the light, under his guidance and supervision.
In that sense, Strong (among other things) is literally one of the godfathers of the whole greenwashing and astroturfing we are drowning in today, becoming more openly involved only around the Rio Earth Summit days (i.e., over 20 years later!).
Those familiar with the whole SDG (sustainable development goals) set by the UN, and with, among others, the writings of Rosa Koire (Behind the Green Mask/Agenda 21), will also be familiar with the implications of all this.
Furthermore, it was also Brzezinski who predicted that we, the people, would have nothing left of our right to privacy; every little detail of our lives becoming known by government, and subject to instant recall from data banks. By the year 2000, he insisted, private citizens would be in the grip of government control as never before experienced by any other nation.
Sound familiar?
And yet, how many people do you know that are truly aware, that are even beginning to question these emergent systems of techno-enclosure in the context of digital colonization?
In order to ensure the required general state of docility, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who served as a counsellor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981, the same man who was also behind Osama bin Laden , even proposed the concept of tittytainement.
In the same tradition as Cicero’s “bread and circuses” (or is it now “beer and circuses?”) he offered the concept of “tittytainment,” which according to Brzezinski, implied a cocktail of mind-numbing entertainment and ample highly-palatable food, which would keep the world's frustrated population in good spirits. Such a hollow and infantilizing view of society was to come to fruition through what Brzezinski envisaged as the enclosure of populations in order to better control them, with the characteristics of a completely depoliticized virtual reality sort, a global Disneyland based on mere consumption and spectacle.
Much of this makes all the more sense once we come to the realization that Brzezinski spent his life studying geopolitical strategies, offering, in somewhat of a personal fashion:
I am not satisfied with the fragmented, microscopic understanding of the parts, and I feel the need for some—even if crude—approximation of a larger perspective.
Approximation, or orchestration?
Brzezinski thus later coined the term “technetronic,” which today has given birth to the various technocracies we are witnesses to. Through these, social changes are occurring at blistering speed, altering mores, social structure, values, and even the very fabric of global society.
Here’s Brzezinski, in “Between Two Ages - America's Role in the Technetronic Era” (reminder here: B2A was written in 1970!!!):
The postindustrial society is becoming a “technetronic” society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications. … In the technetronic society scientific and technical knowledge, in addition to enhancing production capabilities, quickly spills over to affect almost all aspects of life directly. Accordingly, both the growing capacity for the instant calculation of the most complex interactions and the increasing availability of biochemical means of human control augment the potential scope of consciously chosen direction, and thereby also the pressures to direct, to choose, and to change [what is he telling us he knows here, exactly?].
In the technetronic society audiovisual communications prompt more changeable, disparate views of reality, not compressible into formal systems, even as the requirements of science and the new computative techniques place a premium on mathematical logic and systematic reasoning. The resulting tension is felt most acutely by scientists, with the consequence that some seek to confine reason to science while expressing their emotions through politics. Moreover, the increasing ability to reduce social conflicts to quantifiable and measurable dimensions reinforces the trend toward a more pragmatic approach.
So if life appears more and more to lack cohesion, and human beings are becoming increasingly manipulable and malleable, with everything seemingly more transitory and temporary, this must have for inevitable consequence that our external reality becomes more fluid, “the human being more synthetic than authentic” (Brzezinski, B2A).
Caroll Quigley, an American historian out of Georgetown University, and one of Bill Clinton’s most important mentors, alludes to this very idea in his seminal work, “Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time”:
The old idea of communication as an exchange of concepts represented by symbols was junked. Instead, symbols had quite different connotations for everyone concerned simply because everyone had a different past experience. A symbol might have meaning for two persons but it did not have the same meaning. Soon it was regarded as proper that words represent only the writer’s meaning and need have no meaning at all for the reader. Thus appeared private poetry, personal prose, and meaningless art [this was by design, often largely funded by our largest covert institutions] in which the symbols used have ceased to be symbols because they do not reflect any common background of experience that could indicate their meaning as shared communication or experience. These productions, the fads of the day, were acclaimed by many as works of genius. Those who questioned them and asked their meaning were airily waved aside as unforgivable philistines; they were told that no one any longer sought “meaning” in literature or art but rather sought “experiences.” Thus to look at a meaningless painting became an experience. These fads followed one another, reflecting the same old pretenses, but under different names. Thus “Dada” following World War I eventually led to the “Absurd” following World War II.
[...]
The more recent form of this attack on future preference has appeared in the existentialist novel and the theatre of the absurd. Existentialism, by its belief that reality and life consist only of the specific, concrete personal experience of a given place and moment, ignores the context of each event and thus isolates it. But an event without context has no cause, meaning, or consequence; it is absurd, as anything is which has no relationship to any context. And such an event, with neither past nor future, can have no connection with tradition or with future preference.
And it goes farther than that.
Many of us have been made aware of how psychological and mind control operations of various nature have been and are continually being waged on an unsuspecting population. History is replete with documented proof of many such larges-scale operations.
But in 1970, again in Between Two ages, Brzezinski offers us another glimpse of the ruling classes’ strategies:
More important, there is already widespread concern about the possibility of biological and chemical tampering with what has until now been considered the immutable essence of man. Human conduct, some argue, can be predetermined and subjected to deliberate control. Man is increasingly acquiring the capacity to determine the sex of his children, to affect through drugs the extent of their intelligence, and to modify and control their personalities. Speaking of a future at most only decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, “I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.”
And later again, in said book:
Instead of accepting himself as a spontaneous given, man in the most advanced societies may become more concerned with conscious self-analysis according to external, explicit criteria: What is my IQ? What are my aptitudes, personality traits, capabilities, attractions, and negative features? The "internal man"— spontaneously accepting his own spontaneity—will more and more be challenged by the "external man"— consciously seeking his self-conscious image; and the transition from one to the other may not be easy. It will also give rise to difficult problems in determining the legitimate scope of social control. The possibility of extensive chemical mind control, the danger of loss of individuality inherent in extensive transplantation, the feasibility of manipulating the genetic structure will call for the social definition of common criteria of use and restraint. As the previously cited, writer put it, “. . . while the chemical affects the individual, the person is significant to himself and to society in his social context —at work, at home, at play. The consequences are social consequences. In deciding how to deal with such alterers of the ego and of experience (and consequently alterers of the personality after the experience), and in deciding how to deal with the 'changed' human beings, we will have to face new questions such as 'Who am I?' 'When am I who?" 'Who are they in relation to me?'”
Coupled to the above comes one of the most interesting paradoxes of our time in that humanity can be characterized by increasing unification and homogenization, combined with further fragmentation. Although it may appear as if there are more opportunities for interwoven forms of cooperation (even if often as extreme forms of virtue signalling), at the same time we are seeing increasing levels of dissolution (institutional, ideological and traditional) and isolation, which further facilitates the whole process of “techno-enclosure” (which will eventually lead to the creation of our very own digital prisons). As such, the whole of human activity is becoming less private, but also less (truly) intimate. As Bzrezinki explains, this leads to “circumstances [where] proximity, instead of promoting unity, gives rise to tensions prompted by [this] new sense of global congestion.”
This, in turn, leads to further dehumanization and depersonalization of individual life, as more and more of our “freedoms” are now perceived through the lens of collectivism. There is much in there to say, in terms of how this leads to further breakdown in communication. As social media and technology in general lead to an extraordinarily interwoven society whose members are in continuous and “close” contact (either constantly interacting, instantly sharing the most intense social experiences, and prompted towards increased personal involvement in even the most distant problems), modern humans see a shift in how, in turn, they come to define their world.
That is part of the reason understanding Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “global village” bears so much importance. With the loss of personal stability, interpersonal intimacy, implicitly shared values, and traditions that had historically been the backbone of traditional societies we instead, today, get a “nervous, agitated, tense, and fragmented web of interdependent relations” with that interdependence, however, better characterized by the constant interaction rather than by intimacy. And this, of course, is by design, and explains the whole “build back better” “one world government” refrain that every country leader has been parroting for the last two+ years.
In “Imagined Communities,” Benedict Anderson presents a very similar case, one where increasingly, nations and meta-nations become mere social constructs, imagined by the people who “perceive themselves as part of a group.”
More importantly though, he proposes that it is the media and the entertainment industry that creates these imagined communities, in essence shaping each individual's social psyche.
Foreign and international affairs have progressively and continually been intruding upon us in the form of disparate, sporadic, isolated—but involving—events: natural catastrophes and wars, both abroad and at home, become interwoven, and more and more of us become invested in aspects of modern life that should truly have very little bearing on our everyday local life.
And yet…
What’s more, there is a science explosion which, as I have often argued, intensifies, rather than reduces, many feelings of insecurity. It has become an impossible task for the average person to assimilate and meaningfully organize the flow of knowledge for themselves. In fact, in every scientific field, we are constantly dealing with a barrage of reports, research papers, and academic articles, combined to the incessant proliferation of professional journals, which make it impossible for individuals to avoid becoming either narrow-minded specialists or superficial generalists. This is nowhere truer than in the field of medicine and public health, where politics and elitism essentially have antecedence over any semblance of decency and commonsense.
As things tend towards increased complexification, there has also been an inordinate amount of resources being deployed in convincing the average citizen that they would be better off outsourcing their traditional knowledge and hard-earned commonsense to (presumably unbiased) institutions and (so-called) experts that have been put in place for the purpose of serving the greater and collective good.
We are, in effect, caught between two ages. Unlike the earlier transition from industrial societies to techetronic ones, the current shift is along slightly different lines, one where the same technologies, albeit more evolved, have taken on a life of their own. Rather than mere tools in the service of man, they are now, as Illich might have suggested, a means by which we derive our self-image and the conception of our own societies.
The issue at hand is not the juridical ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which makes it impossible for anybody to ‘own’ them. The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that cannot be controlled [or, in the case of ‘Big Tech-related technology’, controlled by a few] … Certain tools are destructive no matter who owns them … [and] must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence, exploitation, or impotence, and rob not only the rich but also the poor of conviviality [the latter, paradoxically, being the usual/actual aim of technology]. ~ Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality