This essay, and no doubt some of the cited works, is an uplifting antidote to the increasingly frenetic, ongoing downward spiral described in Patrick Wood's book:
THE NEW ECONOMICS OF TECHNOCRACY: YOU WILL OWN NOTHING
Wood's book is recent enough to include the early stages of the current Hormuz operation aka Iranian conflict. The book describes what looks like a planned operation to implement all the elements of Technocracy that were laid out in 1937 in a course created at Columbia university. The roll-out began decades ago.
A key aim of Technocracy is to replace capitalism and debt-based currency with a new economic system. Wood argues that the runaway fiat debt levels since 1971 are a controlled demolition of the system. His book makes the Hormuz operation look like another part of that process.
As President Roosevelt said "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
“A key aim of Technocracy is to replace capitalism and debt-based currency with a new economic system.” Can you briefly describe what this “new economic system” will look like, based on that 1937 Columbia University course? Thanks in advance.
I follow Wood’s newsletter. This is the first time I’ve seen a reference to the 1937 Columbia University course that describes Technocracy. Does Patrick Wood go into this university course and what preceded it? I honestly don’t know.
The key elements of the course are the foundation for Wood's latest book I cited above. The book is right up to date and joins a lot of dots, including, for example, the redevelopment plan for Gaza as a prototype for the new economics.
You also asked whether Wood goes into what preceded the idea of Technocracy. He points out that "all economic systems in human history have been price-based systems. They differ in how they distribute that wealth and who controls the means of production, but the underlying architecture - prices, currency, markets, debt - is common to all of them. There is exactly one economic system ever devised that proposes to eliminate price altogether. One system that replaces currency with non-transferable certificates of distribution. One system that abolishes private property, debt, and the accumulation of savings. One system that demands continuous monitoring of all production, consumption, and all individuals. That system is Technocracy."
As Catherine Austin Fitts points out at every opportunity "They are building a digital prison in front of our eyes".
I’m of the opinion — perhaps a wrong one — that there are way too few of us common folk who understand this “digital prison” being built by governments in thrall to the technocrats.
As a fictional complement to Wood's book, I recommend This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. It's a 1970 dystopian novel set in a global society called "The Family," where uniformity is enforced by a supercomputer named UniComp. Citizens are chemically conditioned via monthly treatments to remain docile, with their lives entirely dictated by the machine, which controls everything from careers to reproduction. In essence, it is Huxley's Brave New World updated for the digital age.
“The subsequent phase of human existence, characterised by self-consciousness, was still “biocentric” in that humans still felt great love and veneration for nature. But then came a further separation from authentic living, for which Klages partly blames Greek philosophy.” — It's easy to draw a parallel here, between “human existence” and an individual's existence, where “self-consciousness” is adolescence, and “a further separation from authentic living” is adulthood.
Klages: “...a final overall state characterised by the insolent domination of a relatively small minority of parasites” = the YOU ARE HERE indicator on a map.
Very interesting. I agree that we need to return to things natural. Klages reads like an earth first, deep ecologist. I think venerating nature is something a majority of people would accept as a high moral value. Capitalism and the industrial society into which a predatory class has become the dominant force, has been ruinous for nature, and with the technological intrusion of high tech into schools and use of social media by way of smart phones in our personal lives, and rise of AI, humankind is at risk of losing our humanity to technology, and the technocrats that rule this realm. We as a people need to grow awareness of our modern predicament and make a plan for our collective destiny to avoid a technocratic fate. I discuss the idea that humankind is at a fork in the road; one path provides destiny, if we choose it, and fate, if we don't act. https://chuckfall.substack.com/p/society-must-choose-between-technocracy
Dearest Paul, I absolutely love that you wrote this! It's beautiful! It explains why I am like I am! There is a place in Japan where the people live in total harmony with the rhythm of life! This article explains it all and touches me deeply! I am so grateful for having read it and gotten in better touch with that part of myself that the world keeps trying to drag me away from that I know is my own true self and one with all that is! Thank you so very much! It explains so many things!
This is the first time I've listened to, rather than reading, your entire essay. It's like hearing a symphony conducted by the composer, or watching a play acted in by the playwright.
There is much in here, and I really need to sit down and digest it, but, for what they're worth, here are my initial reactions.
What in fact comprises that which is divine, spirit, soul will never be defined definitively. Not in this world. For my money, what they are is something undefined, but the controversy that will always rage around them, at least in this world, is whether or not these are things that emanate and are created by some force that is outside of us, a third party as it were; or whether they are the creation of what resides within us.
If the latter, then redemption is not something we crave from some force without, but is something that we must seek within ourselves. How, where, in what form, I cannot say. But it lies within us. For, if it lies without, then mankind will battle itself for ever more in order to achieve their own vision of what represents it, and that makes as much sense as battling for possession of all the world's resources.
Oddly, redemption is a word I have heard at every turn from childhood to adulthood. Jesus our Redeemer. Or redeem your coupons for a discount. But today, it is a word that I hear constantly. Maybe there is something other than filthy lucre that drives our animus.
While agreeing with much of this I am somewhat skeptical of the criticism of Christianity for the following reasons
(1) Much (all?) of Klages' criticism of Christianity (at least as described here) seems to be criticism which should be more accurately directed at the institution of the church rather than Christ's teachings.
(2) "The enemy" seems to perceive Christianity as the main obstacle to them achieving their goals.
(3) Christ himself seems to have dedicated his life to opposing this same group and ideology two thousand years ago.
I listened to your spoken version from the link on the Winter Oak e-mail. You have the knack of writing things with which I am seemingly naturally in accord. I say 'seemingly' because my reactions are immediate and emotional rather than 'rational'; it is in my nature to think that way rather than from received wisdom modified by experience. Very few writers leave me feeling energised because what they have written reflects so well what I believe and the way I think.
Thanks. Yes, I think that "rational" thinking amounts to a denial of common sense, of what we know deep down to be true. A deliberate denial, a deliberate suppression.
I can't help thinking that being rational is not a bad thing, but that it just can't be the only thing.
Put another way, rationalism must rest upon initial premises and cannot, by itself, be used to derive those premises. For that one needs logos - God. This is why the bible starts with logos, and why you get parables about building upon rocks and sand.
Rationalism alone provides no foundation and therefore in the end can prove nothing at all, and this is why enlightenment philosophy eventually devolves into nihilism. But rationalism when you start with God (or some other non rational concept if you must - obviously I prefer God) as your foundation can be used to derive great truths (provided of course that God is indeed logos).
You say the only thing we can do to save the world is to change our way of thinking, and pass it on to others. I understand and agree with your view of our culture and the state of the world in Ishmael. But I’m so afraid that in a week or two I’ll have read another book, and though I can’t stop thinking about Ishmael soon enough I will forget about it and have done nothing to help change the minds of those around me, other than asking my friends and family to read your book.
I’m just afraid that soon after we all read it, we’ll say, “yes hmm that’s very sad but I can’t do anything” and just forget about it. Even if I change my way of thinking, how will that help stop something like the explosive population expansion, or the way in which farmers destroy so many species to grow our food?
I know you think that if we all change our way of thinking, we will stop destroying the planet, but what can I personally do to help?
It’s really not about reading books but about changing minds. Once people understood that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, they didn’t drift back to thinking that the earth was a stationary object that all else revolved around.
Once they understood that the earth was round, they didn’t drift back to thinking it was flat. Once they understood that the universe is billions of years old, they didn’t drift back to thinking it was created all at once and in its final form in 4004 B.C. (unless they were Christian fundamentalists). Mind changes like these literally transformed the world. And right now we’re in desperate need of another mind change.
Like me, you’d like to see a renaissance occur in which “we will stop destroying the planet.” But this renaissance is not going to occur among people who imagine that humans belong to a species that is separate from the rest of the living community (and who therefore think, for example, that the mass extinctions we are bringing about are sad but not really life-threatening).
Until they know–with the same certainty that they know the earth is round—that humans are intimately bound up with (and completely dependent on) the rest of the living community, why would they “stop destroying the planet”? You can’t force them to stop; you can’t make them stop by passing laws or by shooting them. Once their minds are changed they WILL stop, just as back in the fifteenth century mariners stopped worrying about sailing off the edge of the earth.
If you want people to BEHAVE differently, then you must make them THINK differently. (For my best formulation of this, see my speech “The New Renaissance.”
But I know I haven’t really addressed what’s on your mind. If I read your letter rightly, you’re saying, “Changing people’s minds doesn’t produce any immediate, practical result. What can I do that WILL have an immediate, practical result?”
To counter the first of these, I’d refer you to “Taming the Big, Bad Wolf,” an essay on this point in which the story is told of a single individual, Ray Anderson, who transformed a global industry—because his mind was changed by reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce and Ishmael—a very immediate, practical result.
The second I have to answer the same way I answer it for everyone: only you know what resources you have and only you know how to make the best use of those resources. I couldn’t have told Ray Anderson what was possible for him to achieve, and I can’t tell you what it’s possible for you to achieve. I know a lot, but I’m never going to know what every individual on this planet should be doing. You do what is in your power to do—and only you know what that is.
It is unfortunate that even the most brilliant thinkers in this field so often remain ensnared by one of the most pernicious and destructive of the Abrahamic myths: the Fall from Eden.
The "nastiness, cruelty, grudges, envy, and so on" are as much a part of nature as the ecstatic rhythm and harmony with which we have lost touch. They are found, not just in human behaviour, but in that of other animals, and all natural phenomena. What is a volcanic eruption but nature at her most brutal and capricious?
This is not to justify such behaviour, only accept that it exists, and is as integral to the whole as its joyous and peaceful aspects.
Just as racists and anti-racists are each other's mirror image, Klages' idyll is as much a Platonic Form as its technocratic inverse.
At root, we are still dealing the claim that our conception of how the world should be is better than the world as it really is.
Given the state of the modern industrial world today, I would say that there can be little doubt that the world that should be - that subsists in our collective unconscious - is completely superior to that which we find around us.
I’m not dismissing the whole of Klages’ work, only questioning this one aspect of it: there never was a perfect state of innocence. We did not suddenly mutate our worst qualities ex nihilo a few thousand years ago. They have always been there.
The “rational” progressive types claim to have transcended our lower, base natures. They reject spiritual practice as superstitious, and emotion as anachronism. And yet, when you listen to, for example, Yuval Harari speak, can you not feel the rage and hate?
We need to avoid making the same mistake.
Serious thinkers; mystics, philosophers, scientists, and even ordinary people on the street, well understand that dealing with our darker natures, our shadow, is a process of acceptance and integration. Denial and suppression will only cause these tendencies to be expressed in uglier and more destructive ways.
I think the "fall from Eden" speaks to progressivism - the drive to continually "improve" the world, when it was perfect just as it was provided to us.
This essay, and no doubt some of the cited works, is an uplifting antidote to the increasingly frenetic, ongoing downward spiral described in Patrick Wood's book:
THE NEW ECONOMICS OF TECHNOCRACY: YOU WILL OWN NOTHING
Wood's book is recent enough to include the early stages of the current Hormuz operation aka Iranian conflict. The book describes what looks like a planned operation to implement all the elements of Technocracy that were laid out in 1937 in a course created at Columbia university. The roll-out began decades ago.
A key aim of Technocracy is to replace capitalism and debt-based currency with a new economic system. Wood argues that the runaway fiat debt levels since 1971 are a controlled demolition of the system. His book makes the Hormuz operation look like another part of that process.
As President Roosevelt said "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."
“A key aim of Technocracy is to replace capitalism and debt-based currency with a new economic system.” Can you briefly describe what this “new economic system” will look like, based on that 1937 Columbia University course? Thanks in advance.
See Patrick Wood's technocracy.news and/or his books. He does a far better job of explaining it than I could.
I follow Wood’s newsletter. This is the first time I’ve seen a reference to the 1937 Columbia University course that describes Technocracy. Does Patrick Wood go into this university course and what preceded it? I honestly don’t know.
The key elements of the course are the foundation for Wood's latest book I cited above. The book is right up to date and joins a lot of dots, including, for example, the redevelopment plan for Gaza as a prototype for the new economics.
You also asked whether Wood goes into what preceded the idea of Technocracy. He points out that "all economic systems in human history have been price-based systems. They differ in how they distribute that wealth and who controls the means of production, but the underlying architecture - prices, currency, markets, debt - is common to all of them. There is exactly one economic system ever devised that proposes to eliminate price altogether. One system that replaces currency with non-transferable certificates of distribution. One system that abolishes private property, debt, and the accumulation of savings. One system that demands continuous monitoring of all production, consumption, and all individuals. That system is Technocracy."
As Catherine Austin Fitts points out at every opportunity "They are building a digital prison in front of our eyes".
I’m of the opinion — perhaps a wrong one — that there are way too few of us common folk who understand this “digital prison” being built by governments in thrall to the technocrats.
As a fictional complement to Wood's book, I recommend This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. It's a 1970 dystopian novel set in a global society called "The Family," where uniformity is enforced by a supercomputer named UniComp. Citizens are chemically conditioned via monthly treatments to remain docile, with their lives entirely dictated by the machine, which controls everything from careers to reproduction. In essence, it is Huxley's Brave New World updated for the digital age.
Always a treat — thanks!
“The subsequent phase of human existence, characterised by self-consciousness, was still “biocentric” in that humans still felt great love and veneration for nature. But then came a further separation from authentic living, for which Klages partly blames Greek philosophy.” — It's easy to draw a parallel here, between “human existence” and an individual's existence, where “self-consciousness” is adolescence, and “a further separation from authentic living” is adulthood.
Klages: “...a final overall state characterised by the insolent domination of a relatively small minority of parasites” = the YOU ARE HERE indicator on a map.
Very interesting. I agree that we need to return to things natural. Klages reads like an earth first, deep ecologist. I think venerating nature is something a majority of people would accept as a high moral value. Capitalism and the industrial society into which a predatory class has become the dominant force, has been ruinous for nature, and with the technological intrusion of high tech into schools and use of social media by way of smart phones in our personal lives, and rise of AI, humankind is at risk of losing our humanity to technology, and the technocrats that rule this realm. We as a people need to grow awareness of our modern predicament and make a plan for our collective destiny to avoid a technocratic fate. I discuss the idea that humankind is at a fork in the road; one path provides destiny, if we choose it, and fate, if we don't act. https://chuckfall.substack.com/p/society-must-choose-between-technocracy
We all should become "technophobic," as it might deter the human species from devolving into cyborgs privately owned by corporations.🤑
Dearest Paul, I absolutely love that you wrote this! It's beautiful! It explains why I am like I am! There is a place in Japan where the people live in total harmony with the rhythm of life! This article explains it all and touches me deeply! I am so grateful for having read it and gotten in better touch with that part of myself that the world keeps trying to drag me away from that I know is my own true self and one with all that is! Thank you so very much! It explains so many things!
This is the first time I've listened to, rather than reading, your entire essay. It's like hearing a symphony conducted by the composer, or watching a play acted in by the playwright.
There is much in here, and I really need to sit down and digest it, but, for what they're worth, here are my initial reactions.
What in fact comprises that which is divine, spirit, soul will never be defined definitively. Not in this world. For my money, what they are is something undefined, but the controversy that will always rage around them, at least in this world, is whether or not these are things that emanate and are created by some force that is outside of us, a third party as it were; or whether they are the creation of what resides within us.
If the latter, then redemption is not something we crave from some force without, but is something that we must seek within ourselves. How, where, in what form, I cannot say. But it lies within us. For, if it lies without, then mankind will battle itself for ever more in order to achieve their own vision of what represents it, and that makes as much sense as battling for possession of all the world's resources.
Oddly, redemption is a word I have heard at every turn from childhood to adulthood. Jesus our Redeemer. Or redeem your coupons for a discount. But today, it is a word that I hear constantly. Maybe there is something other than filthy lucre that drives our animus.
While agreeing with much of this I am somewhat skeptical of the criticism of Christianity for the following reasons
(1) Much (all?) of Klages' criticism of Christianity (at least as described here) seems to be criticism which should be more accurately directed at the institution of the church rather than Christ's teachings.
(2) "The enemy" seems to perceive Christianity as the main obstacle to them achieving their goals.
(3) Christ himself seems to have dedicated his life to opposing this same group and ideology two thousand years ago.
Just my 2c.
I listened to your spoken version from the link on the Winter Oak e-mail. You have the knack of writing things with which I am seemingly naturally in accord. I say 'seemingly' because my reactions are immediate and emotional rather than 'rational'; it is in my nature to think that way rather than from received wisdom modified by experience. Very few writers leave me feeling energised because what they have written reflects so well what I believe and the way I think.
Thanks. Yes, I think that "rational" thinking amounts to a denial of common sense, of what we know deep down to be true. A deliberate denial, a deliberate suppression.
Indeed. Many times I have not done what my instincts told me and regretted doing what seemed 'rational'.
I think some caution might be warranted here.
I can't help thinking that being rational is not a bad thing, but that it just can't be the only thing.
Put another way, rationalism must rest upon initial premises and cannot, by itself, be used to derive those premises. For that one needs logos - God. This is why the bible starts with logos, and why you get parables about building upon rocks and sand.
Rationalism alone provides no foundation and therefore in the end can prove nothing at all, and this is why enlightenment philosophy eventually devolves into nihilism. But rationalism when you start with God (or some other non rational concept if you must - obviously I prefer God) as your foundation can be used to derive great truths (provided of course that God is indeed logos).
Daniel Quinn:
You say the only thing we can do to save the world is to change our way of thinking, and pass it on to others. I understand and agree with your view of our culture and the state of the world in Ishmael. But I’m so afraid that in a week or two I’ll have read another book, and though I can’t stop thinking about Ishmael soon enough I will forget about it and have done nothing to help change the minds of those around me, other than asking my friends and family to read your book.
I’m just afraid that soon after we all read it, we’ll say, “yes hmm that’s very sad but I can’t do anything” and just forget about it. Even if I change my way of thinking, how will that help stop something like the explosive population expansion, or the way in which farmers destroy so many species to grow our food?
I know you think that if we all change our way of thinking, we will stop destroying the planet, but what can I personally do to help?
It’s really not about reading books but about changing minds. Once people understood that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, they didn’t drift back to thinking that the earth was a stationary object that all else revolved around.
Once they understood that the earth was round, they didn’t drift back to thinking it was flat. Once they understood that the universe is billions of years old, they didn’t drift back to thinking it was created all at once and in its final form in 4004 B.C. (unless they were Christian fundamentalists). Mind changes like these literally transformed the world. And right now we’re in desperate need of another mind change.
Like me, you’d like to see a renaissance occur in which “we will stop destroying the planet.” But this renaissance is not going to occur among people who imagine that humans belong to a species that is separate from the rest of the living community (and who therefore think, for example, that the mass extinctions we are bringing about are sad but not really life-threatening).
Until they know–with the same certainty that they know the earth is round—that humans are intimately bound up with (and completely dependent on) the rest of the living community, why would they “stop destroying the planet”? You can’t force them to stop; you can’t make them stop by passing laws or by shooting them. Once their minds are changed they WILL stop, just as back in the fifteenth century mariners stopped worrying about sailing off the edge of the earth.
If you want people to BEHAVE differently, then you must make them THINK differently. (For my best formulation of this, see my speech “The New Renaissance.”
But I know I haven’t really addressed what’s on your mind. If I read your letter rightly, you’re saying, “Changing people’s minds doesn’t produce any immediate, practical result. What can I do that WILL have an immediate, practical result?”
To counter the first of these, I’d refer you to “Taming the Big, Bad Wolf,” an essay on this point in which the story is told of a single individual, Ray Anderson, who transformed a global industry—because his mind was changed by reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce and Ishmael—a very immediate, practical result.
The second I have to answer the same way I answer it for everyone: only you know what resources you have and only you know how to make the best use of those resources. I couldn’t have told Ray Anderson what was possible for him to achieve, and I can’t tell you what it’s possible for you to achieve. I know a lot, but I’m never going to know what every individual on this planet should be doing. You do what is in your power to do—and only you know what that is.
https://www.ishmael.org/daniel-quinn/essays/the-new-renaissance/
another good one!
so much to say ...
It is unfortunate that even the most brilliant thinkers in this field so often remain ensnared by one of the most pernicious and destructive of the Abrahamic myths: the Fall from Eden.
The "nastiness, cruelty, grudges, envy, and so on" are as much a part of nature as the ecstatic rhythm and harmony with which we have lost touch. They are found, not just in human behaviour, but in that of other animals, and all natural phenomena. What is a volcanic eruption but nature at her most brutal and capricious?
This is not to justify such behaviour, only accept that it exists, and is as integral to the whole as its joyous and peaceful aspects.
Just as racists and anti-racists are each other's mirror image, Klages' idyll is as much a Platonic Form as its technocratic inverse.
At root, we are still dealing the claim that our conception of how the world should be is better than the world as it really is.
Given the state of the modern industrial world today, I would say that there can be little doubt that the world that should be - that subsists in our collective unconscious - is completely superior to that which we find around us.
No doubt; modernity is an abomination.
I’m not dismissing the whole of Klages’ work, only questioning this one aspect of it: there never was a perfect state of innocence. We did not suddenly mutate our worst qualities ex nihilo a few thousand years ago. They have always been there.
The “rational” progressive types claim to have transcended our lower, base natures. They reject spiritual practice as superstitious, and emotion as anachronism. And yet, when you listen to, for example, Yuval Harari speak, can you not feel the rage and hate?
We need to avoid making the same mistake.
Serious thinkers; mystics, philosophers, scientists, and even ordinary people on the street, well understand that dealing with our darker natures, our shadow, is a process of acceptance and integration. Denial and suppression will only cause these tendencies to be expressed in uglier and more destructive ways.
I think the "fall from Eden" speaks to progressivism - the drive to continually "improve" the world, when it was perfect just as it was provided to us.