[Craic] Technocracy, Pandemic Responce and Laudato Si

[Arthur Blomme]

Hi all

I have been threatening to finish this essay for the past several 
weeks.  I believe that I have captured in it the inner truth of my 
reflections of Laudato Si in the context of this pandemic.  I hope that 
you have  time to give it  a read.  i invite comments. As I am not an 
academic I have no place to publish  accept these lists.

Kind Regards


Arthur Blomme

Mobile(Text) 647-719-7779
http://serpentgold.ca


Technocracy, Pandemic Response and Laudato Si

By Arthur Blomme

Notable on first reading of Laudato Si is that Pope Francis breaks with 
the expectation of the left and does not explicitly address Neo-Liberal 
Ideology.  Instead he warns of the Technocratic Paradigm:

/The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominate economic and political 
life. The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to 
profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human 
beings. Finance overwhelms the real economy.  Pope Francis Laudato 
Si/*[i]* <#_edn1>

This is quite the shift from the normal left and right parameters 
through which we discuss and analyze our future possibilities. world 
context and current events like the Covid19 crisis. The nuances afforded 
by an understanding of the technocratic paradigm offer some insight into 
a genuine faith response to this crisis.As confident as we are about our 
beliefs in the current situation, we must not confuse our faith in 
technology with reality.As Francis says,“Each age tends to have only a 
meagre awareness of its own limitations.” [ii] <#_edn2>

On the one hand Francis expresses gratitude for “the countless evils 
which used to harm and limit human beings” which have been remedied by 
technoscience especially in the fields of medicine, engineering, and 
communication.[iii] <#_edn3>

On the other hand Francis insists that we must recognise the tremendous 
power that nuclear technology, DNA manipulation, information technology 
and other abilities have given “those with the knowledge and especially 
the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the 
whole of humanity and the entire world.”[iv] <#_edn4> We need only think 
of the deadly arsenal of weapons available to the powerful:nuclear 
bombs, attack drones and weaponized viruses.Together with our increased 
ability to communicate and relate to others across the planet the 
technocratic elite also have centralized control of mass and social 
media,increased powers of surveillance and information technologies and 
increased knowledge of how to form and manipulate our belief systems. 
All this power is available to the billionaire class who have the means, 
motive, and opportunity to procure and utilize these abilities.


        The Technocratic Party

Technocracy is defined as the government or control of society or 
industry by an elite of technical experts.In contrast democracy is 
defined as government or control by the people.Many of us recognise the 
mechanisms of democracy and lament the superficiality of these 
mechanisms in bringing about a truly just society that restores the 
health of the planet for future generations. Yet few of us are aware of 
the mechanisms through which “Technocracy conditions our lifestyles and 
the social possibilities to suit the interests of certain powerful 
groups”[v] <#_edn5>.

While Francis does not specify these “certain powerful groups” there is 
a definite history of technocracy that fits with the papal notion of the 
Technocratic Paradigm.

Patrick Wood, a conservative economist, has spent his career studying 
and documenting the history of technocracy.He traces its origins to 
Henri de Saint-Simon, a French philosopher from around 1800. He quotes 
Simon: "A scientist … is a man who foresees. It is because science 
provides the means to predict, that it is useful, and the scientists are 
superior to all other men." [vi] <#_edn6>

According to Wood technocracy is an independent ideology not related to 
Marxism, Nazism or Capitalism.In the 1930’s the technocratic party was a 
membership organization with more than 500,000 card-carrying, 
dues-paying members in the United States and Canada with followings 
throughout Europe as well. While Hitler banned meetings of the 
technocratic party, he utilized the individual statistician, 
mathematician, physicist and engineer party members to enhance the power 
of his dictatorship.Wood documents that after the war, some 1,200 of 
these top scientists and engineers were secretly brought from Germany to 
the United Statesand given high positions of prestige, to continue to 
practice their science and engineering.

In 1973 Zbigniew Brzezinski with the financial support of David 
Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission representing the economic 
elites of USA, Europe and Japan. Consistent with the concept of 
technocracy, the Trilateral Commission openly declared that democracy 
was unworkable and an impediment to the new international economic 
orderthey wanted to foster.

Regardless of their party affiliations, U.S. presidents have been 
members of the Trilateral Commission. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, 
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were all members. While 
not a member, Barack Obama appointed 11 Trilateral Commission members to 
top-level positions in his administration.

Francis recognizes the global pervasiveness of technocracy which he 
considers an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm “that moves 
forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being 
of the human race. In the most radical sense of the term, power is its 
motive—a lordship over all.”[vii] <#_edn7>

Francis and Wood seem to share a similar perspective. Wood reckons that 
the Trilateral Commission “/wanted to get control of the economic engine 
of the world so that they could manipulate it for their own benefit and 
convert it, transform it if you will, into technocracy …"/


        The Pandemic Response as Pure Technocracy

I would like to suggest that the purest form of technocracy we have 
experienced to date is the response of global health organizations to 
the Covid19 pandemic. The Pandemic response is truly ruled by an elite 
of technical experts.

According to the International Labour Organization 
<https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo%20/newsroom/news/WCMS_743036/lang--en/index.htm>, 
‘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 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/22/covid-19-could-detonate-hunger-pandemic-with-millions-risk-world-must-act/>. 
These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a 
prescription for saving lives.

Local economies are being destroyed along with small business and 
start-ups. The poor are being driven into greater destitution to face 
possible starvation.Our Social relations have been disrupted.The youth 
are demonized for congregating with their friends.//

Dissent against injustice has been relegated to virtual theaters that 
are likely to be censored in the social media. Fear of the virus has 
major populations in lockstep to the official story.

The Pandemic response is not dictated by the evidence of scientific 
investigation but by recognized institutions of quasi scientific 
authority. Peer reviewed, double blind, clinical trials are ridiculed if 
they are not published in the New England Journal of Medicine.CDC 
executives, WHO officials and even Bill Gates make proclamations without 
providing evidence and it is treated as infallible truth.

In this Context the billionaire class is thriving.For many, access to 
food is increasingly concentrated to Amazon, Walmart and 
Costco.Developed countries are creating money to enable it citizens to 
nourish the profits these large corporations and creativity is being 
stifled as increased automation becomes the norm.

Francis notes in the initial quote of this essay; it is profit that 
distorts the creative goodness of technology.When technology is governed 
by self interest and the quest for power it cannot be relied on to 
resolve our Covid19 epidemic. The Technocracy overwhelms the integral 
relationship between humans.

*Vandana Shiva writes./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/.*[viii]* <#_edn8> When Francis speaks of Integral Ecology he is 
expressing a similar sentiment. *

Any technical solution which science claims to offer will be powerless 
to solve the serious problems of our world if humanity loses its 
compass, if we lose sight of the great motivations which make it 
possible for us to live in harmony, to make sacrifices and to treat 
others well.*[ix]* <#_edn9>

The medical establishment has had a long relationship with 
technocracy.Medical schools have long been funded by the Carnegie and 
Rockefeller foundations. These early technocrats benefited greatly from 
their philanthropy toward medical research and the training of doctors 
and nurses who reciprocated by promoting big pharma and mechanized 
interventions and therapy. Today technocratic interests in the medical 
industry are purveyed by Bill Gates. A major funder of the WHO, he is on 
record for years planning for a pandemic. He who pays the piper calls 
the tune.The medical profession are taught a narrative that is tied to 
their skills which conditions health care outcomes in a direction 
serving the interests of their historical benefactors.


        The Limits to Medicine

In the 1970’s Ivan Illych wrote in the Limits to Medicine:/“The medical 
establishment has become a major threat to health."/ Illych explained 
how hospitals and technology when depersonalized created conditions that 
did not support life.He wrote of death through neglect and uncaring in 
hospitals. An anecdote of an emergency care nurse in the New York 
Covid19 crisis back in March reports on this phenomenon.Patients were 
directed unnecessarily to respirators because the hospital received more 
insurance money for suspected Covid19 cases escalated to this level. 
/People are dying daily as a direct result of COVID policies through 
limited access to hospitals, health screening and timely cancer 
treatments. Otyhers experience economic ruin driving people to make poor 
life choices and turning to alcohol, drugs or suicide as the solution to 
the problems dealt to them by COVID policies./

Most important, Ilych wrote about how the focus on industrial output of 
new treatment creates a dependence on hospitals and medicines and 
insurance that prevent citizens from understanding their own power for 
self-care. Instead and this is proving to be the case with Covid, our 
society ends up dumping ever more resources into a system that in fact 
is now harming, rather than helping, health. Francis writes, “/The 
technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult 
to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them 
without being dominated by their internal logic/.[x] <#_edn10>”It is 
precisely the resistance to understanding our own power for self care 
that justifies Francis’ judgement of the technocratic paradigm as 
undifferentiated and one-dimensional.

Public Health should be seeking the best helath outcomes for the 
population as a whole.The World Health Organization should be seeking 
solutions that work in developing countries as well as the developed 
world.In both cases global public health has failed immensely.Despite 
indisputable evidence that Covid19 preys upon indivduals with 
compromised immune systems; correlative data and clinical trials 
indicating measures that can be taken to improve our metabolic and 
immune responces, public health is mute about self care.In fact, large 
sectors of the health establishment are in militant denial of evidence 
for remedial self care as they wait in fear for Vaccination Salvation.

There is no profit in self care.The Covid19 response appears to serve 
only the possibilities of the powerful technocracies and billionaire 
class.Dr. Vandana Shiva writes:

/*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 … The extended coronavirus 
lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanit*y/*[xi]* 
<#_edn11>.

COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing measures have repeatedly been 
referred to as "the new normal." If technocracy is successfully 
implemented, we will live in a brave new world with three classes: The 
ruling billionaire expert class, digital slaves, and disposables — 
people who have no value in this new digital empire. If this is not the 
outcome we desire, we must, as Shiva proposes, resist now.

/"*/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,/*/[xii] <#_edn12>/"/


------------------------------------------------------------------------

[i] <#_ednref1>Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 109

[ii] <#_ednref2>Ibid,105

[iii] <#_ednref3>Ibid. 102

[iv] <#_ednref4> Ibid 104

[v] <#_ednref5> Ibid. 107

[vi] <#_ednref6> Patrick Wood - The Pressing Dangers of Technocracy 
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/08/30/patrick-wood-technocracy.aspx?cid_medium=etaf&cid=share

[vii] <#_ednref7> Francis, 108

[viii] <#_ednref8> Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His 
War on Life

https://independentsciencenews.org/biotechnology/bill-gates-global-agenda-and-how-we-can-resist-his-war-on-life/

By Vandana Shiva

[ix] <#_ednref9> Francis,200

[x] <#_ednref10> Ibid.

[xi] <#_ednref11> Shiva

[xii] <#_ednref12> Ibid.



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