After reading Robert F Kennedy, Jr.'s devastating article, "The Brave New World of Bill Gates and Big Telecom",
I went back in my files and found two pieces I'd written several years
ago on Gates as the new Pavlov. I've combined them, here, into one.
Under
the surface of this global civilization, a war is taking place. The
two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those
who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response;
on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called
freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response
people have made serious inroads. In Phase Two, people are waking up to
the far-reaching and grotesque consequences of the Pavlovian program.
From
the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took
charge, he busied himself with this question: 'What can I say and do
that will make my people react the way I want them to.' He was the first
Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the
first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then,
only the means and methods have changed.
A thought-form is a picture-plus concept in the mind that tends to guide behavior.
A
dominant thought-form in Earth civilization today is: universal rule
through gigantic, highly organized structures; e.g., mega-corporations
that owe no allegiance to any nation.
Imagine a few thousand such
corporations with interlocking boards and directorates; colluding with
super-regional governments and their honeycombed bureaucracies; combined
with regional armies, intelligence agencies and technological elites;
hooked to a global surveillance operation; in control of media;
cooperating with the largest organized religions on Earth.
Imagine all this as essentially one organization---and you see the thought-form in its wide-screen version.
Top-down as top-down has never been before.
Functions and compartments defined and specialized at every level, and coordinated in order to carry out policy decisions.
As to why such a thought-form should come to dominate human affairs, the simplest explanation is: because it works.
But beneath that answer, for those who can see, there is much, much more.
Individuals come to think that "effective" and "instrumental" and "efficient" are more important than any other issues.
Keep building, keep expanding, keep consolidating gains---and above all else, keep organizing.
Such notions and thought-forms replace life itself.
The
Machine has come to the fore. All official problems focus on how the
individual can be fitted into the structure and function of The Machine.
Are human beings supposed to be social constructs?
Populations
are undergoing a quiet revolution. We can cite some of the reasons:
television; education; job training and employment requirements; the
Surveillance State; government organizations who follow a "zero
tolerance" policy; inundation with advertising.
Yes, it's all geared to produce people who are artificial constructs.
And
this is just the beginning. There are a number of companies (see, for
example, affectiva[dot]com) who are dedicated to measuring "audience
response" to ads and other public messages. I'm talking about
electronic measuring. The use of bracelets, for instance, that record
students' emotional responses to teachers in classrooms, in real time.
(Bill Gates shoveled grant money into several of these studies.)
Then there is facial recognition geared to the task of revealing how people are reacting when they sit at their computers.
Push-pull, ring the bell, watch the dog drool for his food. Stimulus-response.
It's
not much of a stretch to envision, up the road a few years, whole
populations more than willing to volunteer for this kind of mass
experimentation. But further than that, we could see society itself
embrace, culturally, the ongoing measurement of stimuli and responses.
"Yes,
I want to live like this. I want to be inside the system. I want to
be analyzed. I want to be evaluated. I want to accept the results. I
want to be part of the new culture. Put bracelets on me and
nano-sensors in me. Measure my eye movements, my throat twitches that
indicate what I'm thinking, and my brain waves. Watching a movie should
include the experience of wearing electrodes that record my
second-to-second reactions to what's happening on the screen. I like
that. I look forward to it..."
In such a culture, "Surveillance State" would take on a whole new dimension.
"Sir,
I want to report a malfunction in my television set. I notice the
monitoring equipment that tracks my responses to programs has gone on
the blink. I want it reattached as soon as possible. Can you fix it
remotely, or do you need to send a repair person out to the house? I'll
be here all day..."
People will take pride in their ongoing role as social constructs, just as they now take pride in owning a quality brand of car.
The
thought process behind this, in so far as any thought at all takes
place, goes something like: "If I'm really a bundle of responses to
stimuli and nothing more, then I want to be inside a system that
champions that fact and records it...I don't want to be left out in the
cold."
Here is a sample school situation: for six months, Mr.
Jones, the teacher, has been video recorded, moment by moment, as he
instructs his class in English. All the students have been wearing
electronic bracelets, and their real time emotional responses (interest,
boredom, aversion) have also been recorded. A team of specialists has
analyzed the six months of video, matching it up, second by second, to
the students' responses. The teacher is called in for a conference.
"Mr.
Jones, we now know what you're doing that works and what you're doing
that doesn't work. We know exactly what students are positively
reacting to, and what bores them. Therefore, we're going to put you
into a re-ed seminar, where you'll learn precisely how to teach your
classes from now on, to maximize your effectiveness. We'll show you how
to move your hands, what tone of voice to use, how to stand, when to
make eye contact, and so on..."
Mr. Jones is now a quacking
duck. He will be trained how to quack "for the greater good." He is
now a machine toy. Whatever is left of his passion, his intelligence,
his free will, his spontaneous insights, his drive to make students
actually understand what they're learning...all subordinated for the
sake of supposed efficiency.
Think this is an extreme fantasy? See the Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2012, "Biosensors to monitor students' attentiveness":
"The
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has poured more than $4
billion into efforts to transform public education in the U.S., is
pushing to develop an 'engagement pedometer.' Biometric devices wrapped
around the wrists of students would identify which classroom moments
excite and interest them -- and which fall flat."
"The foundation
has given $1.4 million in grants to several university researchers to
begin testing the devices in middle-school classrooms this fall [2012]."
"The
biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company,
Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure
subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system
responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests
to gauge consumers' emotional response to advertising."
"Gates
officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common
classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are
tuned in and which are zoned out."
"Existing measures of student
engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply
asking kids what they liked in a lesson, 'only get us so far,' said
Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly
improve teaching and learning, she said, 'we need universal, valid,
reliable and practical instruments' such as the biosensors."
"The
Gates Foundation has spent two years videotaping 20,000 classroom
lessons and breaking them down, minute by minute, to analyze how each
teacher presents material and how those techniques affect student test
scores."
"Clemson received about $500,000 in Gates funding.
Another $620,000 will support an MIT scientist, John Gabrieli, who aims
to develop a scale to measure degrees of student engagement by comparing
biosensor data to functional MRI brain scans [!] (using college
students as subjects)."
When you boil it down, the world-view
represented here has nothing to do with "caring about students." It has
everything to do with the Pavlovian view of humans as biological
machines.
What input yields what response? How can people be shaped into predictable constructs?
As far as Gates is concerned, the underlying theme, as always, is: control.
In
this brave new world, the process of thinking and comparing and
independently judging, and the freedom to make individual
choices...well, for whatever that was worth, we can't encourage it for a
whole society. It's too unpredictable. We don't have time for that
sort of thing. No, we have to achieve reduction. We have to seek out
lowest common denominators.
This is what universal surveillance
is all about; the observation of those denominators and the variances
from them---the outlying and therefore dangerous departures from the
norm.
"Well, we've tracked Mr. Jones' classroom for a year now,
and we've collated all the measurements of reactions from the students.
It was a wonderful study. But we did notice one thing. All the
students showed similar patterns of reactions over time...except two
students. We couldn't fit them into the algorithms. They seemed to be
responding oppositely. It was almost as if they were intentionally
defecting from the group. This signals some kind of disorder. We need a
name for it. Is it Oppositional Defiance Disorder, or is it new? We
recommend attaching electrodes to those two students' skulls, so we can
get a deeper readout of their brain activity in real time."
Those
two students are suffering from a brain problem. They must be.
Because if they aren't, if they have the ability to choose and decide
how to respond, then they have free will, and that can't be measured.
This
suggests an X-factor in humans, wherein the flow of chemicals and atoms
and quarks and mesons and photons don't tell the whole story. The rest
of the story would imply the existence of something that
is...non-material...above and beyond push-pull cause and effect.
The
gatekeepers of this world are obsessed with ruling that out. They
guard Reality itself, which is to say, their conception of Reality.
They are willing to spend untold amounts of money to make a Pavlovian
conception universally accepted and universally loved.
Because they own that conception. They are the self-appointed title holders. They are the kings of that domain.
I
feel obligated to inform them their domain is much, much smaller than
they think it is. And in the fullness of time, which is very long, the
domain is going to fall and crack and collapse and disintegrate. And
all their horses and all their men won't be able to put it back
together.
Eventually, a man like Bill Gates will be forgotten.
He'll be a small footnote on a dusty page in a crumbling book in a dark
room on a remote island.
A morbid venal fool who chased, for a brief moment, fool's gold.
There is an irreducible thing. It's called freedom. It is native to every individual.
Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes.
And he asks himself: what is my freedom for?
And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze.
If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth.
Pavlov
wrote: "Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary
control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be
able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would
employ for any natural object..."
Pavlov was promoting the idea
that whatever an individual perceives and feels about his own experience
is a confused mess and an obstruction.
Rather, the individual
should ignore all that tripe, and instead, allow himself to be a
"natural object," see himself as a clean and simple response mechanism,
as planned inputs cause him to behave in various ways.
In other words, then he will have no life.
Bill Gates and other elite planners are working toward this end.
When
Ray Kurzweil talks about hooking brains up to super-computers, he is
envisioning a process of downloading that goes beyond choice. Somehow,
automatically, the brain and the individual (he apparently believes they
are the same thing) will receive inputs which translate into IMPOSED
knowledge. This is another fatuous version of Pavlov.
In Brave
New World, Huxley wrote: "Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels.
Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the
time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were
predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner[s] and acetate silk
spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to
endorse the judgment of their bodies. 'We condition them to thrive on
heat', concluded Mr. Foster. 'Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to
love it'."
Stimulus-response.
If researchers developed
this technology, who could doubt that elite planners would push it
forward? It would be the culmination of their dream.
The freedom of the individual, his innate capacity to make wide-ranging choices, is the monkey wrench in the program.
This
is why you would have to search far and wide to find, in one school,
anywhere, on any level, a course that deeply examines and promotes
individual freedom.
It is anathema to the plan.
It is the silver bullet for the werewolf.
Freedom comes from Within the individual, not from Without.
On the level of political control, freedom emerged and broke through during centuries of struggle.
Now, and in the future, every individual carries that torch or douses it.
---Crack the egg of the stimulus-response empire.
A
popular piece of received wisdom: 'everything is connected to
everything.' This is supposed to carry very positive connotations, but
it actually describes how mass reality is built and the intention behind
it. Each piece is hooked up to every other part. The parts all
'confirm the truth of the whole.' Constructing such a closed system
that is internally consistent is like building a hospital where the
treatments for patients ensure they will never leave---except in a box.
The
true basis of an android is: he tries to solve the problems with which
he's presented. He does nothing else. Eventually, he sees problems
that need solving everywhere. That's all he sees. That is his basic
program. Without it, he wouldn't know what to do. And on top of all
this, he is fed answers to problems. He is educated to look for pre-set
solutions.
'Every dog has his day.' But not the Pavlovian dog. He has the same day over and over.
The very worst news for some, and the best news for others is, the individual is an artist of reality. |
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