[Craic] Technocracy, Pandemic Responce and Laudato Si

Wed Oct 14 17:23:20 PDT 2020

Hi Art;

Lots for me to think about here - I cannot give you a thoughtful response immediately, but I’ll try later.
Thanks for sharing this with us.
There are appropriate quotations from Vandana Shiva.
Allan

> On Oct 14, 2020, at 4:26 PM, Arthur Blomme <art at integralshift.ca> wrote:
> 
> 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 <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] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_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 States and 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 order they 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] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_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 humanity[xi] <x-msg://381/#_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] <x-msg://381/#_edn12>"
> 
> 
> 
> [i] <x-msg://381/#_ednref1> Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 109
> 
> [ii] <x-msg://381/#_ednref2> Ibid,105
> 
> [iii] <x-msg://381/#_ednref3> Ibid. 102
> 
> [iv] <x-msg://381/#_ednref4> Ibid 104
> 
> [v] <x-msg://381/#_ednref5> Ibid. 107
> 
> [vi] <x-msg://381/#_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 <https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/08/30/patrick-wood-technocracy.aspx?cid_medium=etaf&cid=share>
> 
> [vii] <x-msg://381/#_ednref7> Francis, 108
> 
> [viii] <x-msg://381/#_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/ <https://independentsciencenews.org/biotechnology/bill-gates-global-agenda-and-how-we-can-resist-his-war-on-life/>
> 
> By Vandana Shiva
> 
> [ix] <x-msg://381/#_ednref9> Francis,200 
> 
> [x] <x-msg://381/#_ednref10> Ibid. 
> 
> [xi] <x-msg://381/#_ednref11> Shiva
> [xii] <x-msg://381/#_ednref12> Ibid.
> 
> 
> 
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