Dissonance to Informational Control in Technological Society: Part 6

A review of competing naturalistic explanations

Continued from Part 5…

This part examines possible theories of naturalistic explanations for the West’s decline, arguing that each proposed theory contains substantial flaws. It then explains that the establishment’s reaction to Trump unexpectedly winning the 2016 election and the worldwide coordinated response to COVID in 2020 as “mask off” moments that revealed the actual inner-workings of our elite’s system of control to those paying close attention.

WHY IS SOCIETY ON A MASSIVELY DOWNWARD TRAJECTORY?  A REVIEW OF COMPETING THEORIES

We have established that the quality of life for Westerners has been rapidly declining, that bureaucratic institutions make problems worse and that the establishment has many tools to prevent the population from effectuating change.  The next question is why is this happening?  Are there natural processes involved or are there deliberate actors with specific goals?  Before presenting a comprehensive theory in Section 4, let us review other possible explanations.

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Is the decline of the west part of an organic Spenglerian cycle?

Traditional models of history utilize either a Whig history-as-progress approach or a linear Eurocentric model of cause-and-effect, the latter of which is expressed as follows:

History as cause-and-effect.

On the other hand, Oswald Spengler argued that civilizations rise and fall naturally like the birth and death of an organism, and he wrote an influential book on the subject, The Decline of the West.  For Spengler - later echoed by others such as John Glubb¹ - civilizations experience an early phase, an adolescent phase, a climax, a budding, and then disintegration known as civilizational winter. 

Spengler’s civilizational cycles.

In 1918 Spengler believed western civilization had already entered civilizational winter.  He predicted:

The 20th century has and will continue to be…a period of imperialism and annihilation wars. Science will stop reaching certainties (although technology continues to accelerate…). The people reject common goals. Art is reduced to fashion, and innovation as a concept is cheapened and trivialized.  Between the 21st and 23rd centuries, Caesarism [will rise] again in the continuation of ‘civilizational winter'. The politics of brute force returns to break the stranglehold of money…it seems that tribal strength surges and ‘impersonal’ institutions decay. Weak ties and complex bureaucracies (fueled by “money”) are severed in favor of strong ties and absolutism (fueled by “blood”). Nuance and the essence of the high culture decays gently into the dirt.

If Spengler is correct and we are in for two more centuries of civilizational winter as part of a broader cycle, we would expect to see the rise of populism, failing institutions, increased chaos, and the rise of strongmen who could battle the entrenched bureaucracy.  One can see the start of such trends with Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, and Putin.  A counter to this argument, though, is that these strongmen are losing re-elections (Trump, Bolsonaro), they are weak on the world stage (Orban), and/or continuing massive cooperation with globohomo (Putin²).  It looks like this system, highly reliant on technology for ever increasing control, is rapidly advancing instead of buckling before populist politicians. If so, it would disprove Spengler’s thesis, although it remains to be seen if these trends continue.

Furthermore, to be explained in Section 4, the transnational elites are rapidly implementing technologies that will give them a historically unprecedented level of control over their citizens, technology that will enable them to micromanage billions of people on an individual basis using a combination of programmable CBDC technology and aggressive, woke AI.  If this vision is realized it’s hard to envision this as simply the winter phase of a civilizational cycle — it could look more like the deaths of multiple civilizations all at once.

Many other countries including Russia are resesarching and adopting CBDCs since the above 2020 analysis.

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Is the decline of the west due to a human version of the Calhoun experiments?

In John Calhoun’s 1962 experiments four pairs of mice were introduced into a utopian environment.  There was no shortage of food or water or nesting materials, no predators, with the only limit being limited space.  The population grew rapidly and reached 620 by day 315, after which the population growth starting decreasing rapidly.  Day 600 was the last surviving birth bringing the total population to 2,200 mice, even though the experiment setup allowed for as many as 3,840 mice in terms of nesting space.  The period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior.  Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and mating partners, increasing anger in both non-dominant males who didn’t mate and females who couldn’t nurse or raise pups properly, and the rise of “beautiful ones”, mice who didn’t do anything eat and groom and sleep.  After day 600 the population declined toward extinction where females ceased to reproduce and male counterparts withdrew completely - they ate, drank, slept and groomed themselves, all solitary pursuits.  The conclusions from the experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.

A picture of Calhoun in a mouse utopia in 1970.

The question then arises: is the breakdown in society and western civilization is experiencing simply a world-scale human version of the Calhoun experiments?  Like the phrase, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times”, perhaps human society has simply been in a period of prosperity for such a long time that it has removed Darwinian selection mechanisms and the killer instincts that keep people sharp, motivated and productive. 

The problem with this theory is that the breakdowns being experienced are not random — if they were then societal breakdowns would be experienced in multiple directions. However, these societal breakdowns all flow in one direction: toward the destruction of white Christians and the weakening of resistance to the transnational elites and toward centralizing wealth and power in the hands of a few, as described below and in Section 4. 

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Is the decline of the west simply related to the advancement of technology?

In Industrial Society and It’s Future Ted Kaczynski argues that the rapid advancement of technology has destabilized society, inflicted severe damage on the natural world and led to enormous human suffering.  He states that humans have something called a “power process” where people need goals whose attainment requires effort and one must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining those goals.  If a goal comes too easy or a goal is impossible to achieve an individual will not be satisfied.  The goal also needs to be meaningful, i.e. to contribute to the attainment of food, water, shelter, clothing, etc.  Unfortunately in industrial society only minimum effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs, and other needs, such as the need for security, are close to impossible to obtain (“We live in a world in which relatively few people - maybe 500 or 1,000 - make the important decisions” said Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995), so people focus instead on what Kaczynski called surrogate activities with their time.  Surrogate activities are hobbies which are not as meaningful or fulfilling as independently satisfying real needs.  The lack of fulfillment of the power process according to Kaczynski has been a main contribution to the mental illness that plagues society, along with excessive population density, isolation of man from nature, rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.³

According to Kaczynski, there have been numerous advancements in technology which strengthen the industrial system, but only at a high cost in individual freedom and autonomy: any changes designed to protect freedom from technology would be contrary to fundamental long-term trends moving in the opposite direction.  Technology as we know it follows a well-worn path: when it’s new it promises greater freedom for its users, but when the technology is perfected the freedom turns out to be an illusion; it disappears and the hard reality sets in, that the technological advancement is purely for increased governmental control and decreased freedoms, and it's here to stay.  One can see this with social media, with the internet in general, and with crypto and upcoming CBDCs which will be used to track and control all human actions.  Even something as innocuous as the interstate travel system ultimately furthered the atomization of society by encouraging families to live across the country from each other and drastically increasing commute times to work.  This isn’t even considering the moral corruption that technology causes — the ease of killing scores of people with the push of a button, the ease of massive financial theft, or the scale and impersonality of the industrialized meat production system which is worse than anything imagined in a horror film.  Technology is poison.

Technology as dystopia.

Kaczynski argues that the system must regulate human behavior closely in order to function (quoting at length):

The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits — just the sort of thing that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.

Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.

In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning. 

Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media, the modern health care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world. 

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity. Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extend that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system. Too much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.⁴

Industrial society has taken on a mind of its own.  The needs of the system will take precedent and result in tyranny, forcing extreme population modification in order to meet its requirements:

Whereas formerly the limits of human endurance have imposed limits on the development of societies, industrial-technological society will be able to pass those limits by modifying human beings, whether by psychological methods or biological methods or both. In the future, social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human being will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system.

Generally speaking, technological control over human behavior will probably not be introduced with a totalitarian intention or even through a conscious desire to restrict human freedom. Each new step in the assertion of control over the human mind will be taken as a rational response to a problem that faces society, such as curing alcoholism, reducing the crime rate or inducing young people to study science and engineering. In many cases there will be a humanitarian justification….

Assuming that industrial society survives, it is likely that technology will eventually acquire something approaching complete control over human behavior. It has been established beyond any rational doubt that human thought and behavior have a largely biological basis. As experimenters have demonstrated, feelings such as hunger, pleasure, anger and fear can be turned on and off by electrical stimulation of appropriate parts of the brain. Memories can be destroyed by damaging parts of the brain or they can be brought to the surface by electrical stimulation. Hallucinations can be induced or moods changed by drugs. There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it clearly is less powerful that the biological mechanisms of human behavior. For if that were not the case then researchers would not be able so easily to manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical currents….

Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public resistance.⁵

Kaczynski’s solution to the problems of increasing technology and decreasing freedom was to hope to inspire a mass movement against technology itself via terrorism.  His attempt was a complete failure.  There was some public discussion about his manifesto, but no societal changes.  As Kaczynski himself acknowledged history is one of ever increasing centralization, ever increasing control and decreasing freedoms.  This increased control gives elites leverage to extort populations for greater wealth centralization at the cost of declining quality of life for the masses.⁶  It is even becoming questionable to what extent, if any, the system needs the masses at all: increased automation is making more people unproductive, and it is unclear whether the system plans to remove those they call “useless eaters”⁷ or otherwise pacify them with limits on their consumption.⁸  

Regardless, Kaczynski’s rebellion against technology was also ideologically incorrect: technology must continue to its natural endpoint because technology provides power advantages over others, so if one country does not maximize its technology on its own, it will be dominated by a neighbor who will, just as western civilization was so thoroughly able to dominate other less advanced societies in the past four hundred years.  Additionally, individuals desperately seek out technology to make their own lives easier; people care about convenience and comfort more than they care about freedom.

Wall-E was a decent representation of mankind’s endless desire for increased comfort and convenience.

Therefore, the line of question of whether the advancement of technology is leading to the decline of the west is an irrelevant one.  Yes, it is at least in part the cause of the declining freedoms that Americans have been suffering under for many generations - but it is not going to end until it reaches its own endpoint, whatever it happens to be. 

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Is the decline of the west related to a lack of competition post-cold war?

One of the major limitations on the United States’s power was the status of the Soviet Union as a peer competitor.  The Soviet Union argued in various ways to the world that communism reduced inequality and was therefore better than western-styled capitalism.  This argument applied pressure on American elites to keep them from becoming too greedy.  The veracity of the Soviet Union’s claim was looked at in a Polish study between 1892-2015.  The results demonstrated (1) inequality was high in Poland before World War 2, (2) inequality abruptly fell after the introduction of communism in 1947 and stayed at low levels during the whole communist period, and (3) inequality experienced a sharp rise with the return to capitalism in 1989.  In the United States income gains were widely shared in the early postwar decades, but starting in around 1980 inequality started to grow, and after the fall of the Soviet Union inequality grew much faster.    

It seems like the removal of the United States’ competition was a factor in the rise of inequality but, as discussed later, the removal of the U.S. from the Bretton Woods system tying monetary printing to gold reserves was a much larger reason.

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THE REVELATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT'S POWER AND CONTROL TO THE PUBLIC

When Donald Trump inadvertently won the presidency in 2016 with a margin of 107,000 votes across 3 states the hidden leaders behind America’s false democracy panicked.  Trump was a clown and a fool in their eyes and Hillary was winning consistently by 3-6 points in almost every pre-election poll; she took significant time off before the general election to relax and failed to campaign in crucial swing states.  

When Trump inexplicably won the hidden owners of the government and the media, panicking, decided on their strategy: oppose Trump at every turn for four years straight, call him the equivalent of a dictator and Hitler, call him a Russian stooge, cause the NPCs to short circuit with endless “Orange Man Bad”, illegally spy on him and his administration, frame and destroy his advisors (Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort (but not Manafort’s pro-globohomo senior partner, Tony Podesta, who avoided charges despite the same underlying actions)), run endless fake “unnamed sources” leak stories which have never stopped, bring out the fake Mueller investigation to tie Trump up even though it found nothing after a year and a half of “investigation”⁹, create two impeachments against him (one over Biden’s corruption, which was later proven conclusively by emails and documents found on Hunter Biden’s laptop — “10 for the big guy” - and one over an unarmed civil protest where one Trump supporter died).  All of this and a lot more which had to be lived and experienced to really understand it.  

Furthermore, Trump himself was close to the exact opposite of the “reincarnated Hitler” that the media portrayed him as - the gulf between that portrayal and reality was a wide chasm.  Trump was a dumb, bumbling doofus; a fat, lazy boomer who wanted to sit around watching TV for up to 8 hours a day and call into television stations, feud with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski over petty grievances; to eat fast food and play golf and to tweet mean things with no follow through or action behind it.  He betrayed his supporters at every turn; Charlottesville, 1/6, and plenty of others.  His own campaign staff were blocked from positions in the administration in 2017 after never-Trumper Johnny de Stefano was put in charge of hiring.  Not to mention that his daughter was a converted Jew and his grandchildren were Jewish!

Trump apparently watched television for up to eight hours a day.

For the whole world to see how this bumbling doofus was treated for four years while he sat back and absorbed it all, doing nothing illegal and nothing unsavory other than using language unbecoming of a president, to see the whole apparatus of the government weaponized against this man and how coordinated it all was — it was an inadvertent gift from a clown to America, perhaps the biggest gift he could have given America short of a successful challenge to globohomo.  America arguably wasn’t ready for such a fundamental change at that moment in time.  History will look back at the Trump presidency as the moment that conclusively revealed the existence of the deep state for all to see, and it can never be put back in the box.  And then the COVID nightmare supercharged the “mask-off” moment when the whole world coordinated in lockstep, unleashing the same lockdowns, required face-masks and then mandatory untested, dangerous, experimental mRNA poisons.

Trump will also forever be a symbol of white historic America because of his shocking 2016 election victory, which is why the establishment will always hate him and try to destroy him no matter how much he flails about helplessly post-presidency.

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This concludes Section 3, “Dissonance to Informational Control in Technological Society.” The next Section, “Goals, Motivations and Strategies of the Owners of Modern Society” argues that a handful of families own the central banks of the world, controlling society via unlimited fiat printing and a sophisticated propaganda and security apparatus.  It then offers a historical and psychological framework for their behavior and investigates their objectives.

1. John Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, available here.

2. Putin has a World Economic Forum puppet as the head of the Russian Central Bank, he was onboard with implementing globohomo COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, he is hard at work advancing central bank digital currencies, and his initial rise within Russia was due to his support of the West and his willingness to let them pillage Russia.

3. Kaczynski, 8.

4. Kaczynski, 14.

5. Kaczynski, 20.

6. If we lived in a society that was not purely focused on dialectical materialism and control it is a question to what extent the human race would be able to successfully assert a conscious mastery of technology to serve its ends rather than blindly and recklessly allowing technology to enslave humanity without consideration of the consequences, a concept explored by Carl Schmitt.  But this question remains theoretical.

7. Per World Economic Forum head Klaus Schwab's chief mentor Yuval Harari:

8. Kaczynski, 26: "On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite -- just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.”

9. The report concludes that the investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”.