TECHNOCRACY AND THE HARD ROAD TO WORLD ORDER

Reflecting on current developments, many people have been returning to the dystopian prophecies of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, who both happened to be scholars of Eton. Patrick Wood is the author of a number of books on technocracy and globalisation, and edits the informative digest Technocracy News. He worked with Antony Sutton in the 1970s on the plans by the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission for a New International Economic Order, which is now being proposed under the banner of the Great Reset. The origins of technocracy go back to the 1930s, and the philosophy underlying it is that of scientism and social engineering where humans are biological machines to be modified, controlled and even upgraded in terms of operating systems – a paradigm that is reflected in pharmaceutical technocracy of the past year. All questions are to be answered only by science, even though the postulate of scientism is not scientific but philosophical. The first technocracy study course was put together in 1934 and postulates the superiority of the scientist while envisaging the transformation of education into human conditioning 'to prepare them for a lifetime of work chosen for them by the Technate' – in other words its aspirations are already authoritarian and dictatorial based on mastery and control.

China is already a fully functional technocracy and is as such an indication of emerging global trends. As of 2020, it had over 600 million facial recognition cameras, and a recent experiment in Guiyang, a 'Smart City' of 3.5 million people, was conducted to see how long it would take the police to apprehend a BBC reporter after his picture was fed into a massive AI facial recognition database – the answer is seven minutes! People are controlled through the social credit system linked to digital ID and based on massive data collection further enabled by 5G and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). We are already subject to data mining and tracking through our mobile phones to the extent that casual conversations can result in pop-up ad within a few hours – soon this will be a few minutes, all without our consent. The future will bring total surveillance and predictive policing whereby people can risk arrest just by having an unwelcome thought. Cash is likely to be abolished so that all purchases can be tracked. Hence, in the Smart City of tomorrow, 'people will indeed be living in a fishbowl: tracked, monitored, analysed, nudged, limited and directed. They will be told what to think, how to think, when to think and how they are allowed to speak. Nonconformists will be conformed or shunned. Trouble makers will simply be excluded altogether.' (p. 133) The current Internet censorship is giving us a taste of things to come.

A controversial thesis is the equating of sustainable development – and specifically the UN SDGs – with technocracy and economic development. The author links these with the New Urban Agenda to show how the concept and implementation of the Smart City is in fact driving a process, which, while it is collaborative is not constitutional. The prevalence of Public – Private Partnerships (P3) and Collaborative Governance create the kind of stakeholder capitalism where cities are beholden to investors and corporations rather than voters, readdressing 'the way we plan, finance, develop, govern and manage cities and human settlements.' The author regards this as entirely unconstitutional and a means of structuring the world through connectivity and supply chains linking smart cities in ways that are entirely independent of central government, all the more so since widespread deregulation. China is well aware of this with its Belt and Road initiative buying up global infrastructure 'in order to achieve economic and trade domination.' Underlying all this is a way of thinking bringing 'more growth, more trade, more aid, more science, more technology and more management' that stands in sharp contrast to self-organising principles in nature, as pointed out in my review of Vandana Shiva's book above good. So we should be wary of fine inclusive rhetoric and question political motivations, even if many of the aspirations are in themselves admirable.

Technocratic developments are incompatible with the fourth amendment of the US Constitution: 'the rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.' This means freedom under the law, which also enshrines freedom of expression and hence diversity while recognising our interdependence and reciprocity. No single view should be universally imposed, yet the attempted enforcement of uniformity through censorship is now enabled by Internet algorithms with no consideration for tolerance and respect for differences. I parted company with the author in his chapter on spirituality. He criticises the Esalen Institute for speaking of global transformation and a community of mindfulness, accusing them of pointedly excluding and disallowing Christian input. He also criticises religions for green statements that support the SDGs, while not proposing any solutions of his own. He is right to call out the implications of technocracy and its relationship to sustainable development, but wrong in rejecting every form of globalism that goes beyond our currently inadequate structures, as I discuss in my review of David Griffin below.