The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism

I reviewed Patrick Wood’s previous book, Technocracy and the Hard Road to World Order, two years ago (PE 135, pp. 57-8) and have since been subscribing to his informative daily articles feed to keep up-to-date with developments – see URL above. Over 40 years ago, he was the co-author of the two-volume Trilaterals over Washington with Anthony C. Sutton. The Trilateral Commission was founded 50 years ago by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski with the intention of installing a new international economic order designed to restructure our systems along technocratic lines and shaped by elite financial and business interests that are also collaborating through other associations such as the Bilderberg Group and the much more visible World Economic Forum.

The Trilateral Commission draws its members from North America, Japan and Europe, including ‘establishment lawyers, high-ranking politicians, influential journalists, globalist think tank scholars, International bankers, and academics.’ (p. 25). In his influential 1970 book, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, Brzezinski writes that we will see the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society: ‘Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behaviour and keeping society under close surveillance and control’ (p. 35) – a chillingly accurate prediction of what we are now experiencing. He adds that international banks and multinational corporations will supplant the centrality and the sovereignty of the nation-state. A later chapter explains how the Commission and the WEF have three principal arms: corporate, political and academic. The whole process is driven by corporate interests and their corresponding foundations making grants to academics (for instance the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations), who in turn write books and reports that are publicised in the media – owned by the same people. This creates official narratives that can be promulgated and upheld through censorship of any contra-narratives (pp. 148 ff.). The grand narrative, for instance on the coronavirus or climate change, conveys a dire situation requiring immediate action to develop vaccines or curtail carbon emissions, also proposed in the same narrative.

The book explains how technocracy is transforming the world while transhumanism is aiming to take over evolution and to transform us through the merging of human and machine by means of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (pp. 57 ff.). The author recaps the history of technocracy and its connection to scientism, originating at Columbia University in the 1930s (pp 39 ff.). Technocracy purports to be the science of social engineering – a scientific dictatorship - and is an expression of the mechanistic and behaviourist view of life. We are currently living through a period of rapidly converging sciences involving nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science – NBIC for short. As C.S. Lewis was already predicting in the 1940s, this inherently dehumanising process will ultimately entail the ‘abolition of man’. It also reflects the ideology of mastery and control expressed in ‘precision engineering’ metaphors.

One of the most eye-opening insights elaborated with references to primary sources is the real meaning of biodiversity and its relationship to genetic manipulation. This goes back to the Brundtland Report of 1987 and the subsequent Biodiversity Convention Summit. The World Commission on Environment and Development Report actually states that ‘the main stake raised by the Biodiversity Convention is the issue of ownership and control over biological diversity… the major concern was protecting the pharmaceutical and emerging biotechnology industries...through patents and biotechnology.’ (p. 65) They observe that ‘biotechnology depends on biodiversity for its raw material’, hence the value of genetic resources will grow with the industry. Since 2020, the term genetic resources has been replaced by ‘digital sequence information on genetic resources’ (DSR) and in 2022, President Biden issued an executive order called the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, including the sentence ‘We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably programme biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.’ (p. 141) The EO stresses the importance of scaling up production and reducing obstacles to commercialisation ‘so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.’ The whole tenor of the document reflects agency capture by worldwide forces of transhumanism.

Gro Harlem Brundtland – a Trilateral Commission Member and later Director-General of the WHO – was assisted by James MacNeill, author of a 1991 text written for the Commission, Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World’s Economy and the Earth’s Ecology. He and Brundtland were the chief architects of the concept of Sustainable Development. Critics highlight how the 1992 Earth Summit in fact promoted the interests of business and industry where diversity of life is equated with a diversity of genetic codes that can be manipulated for commercial use. (pp. 132 ff.) Advances in genetic engineering are designed to exploit genetic variability, resulting in patents – these have expanded exponentially over the last 30 years, especially in agriculture.

The last two themes I would like to cover are dataism (pp. 166 ff.) and the digitisation (pp. 175 ff.). Yuval Noah Harari has presented dataism as the new form of religion to supplant humanism. This legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data where organisms are biochemical algorithms into which they will ultimately merge. He sees the global data-processing system as becoming all-knowing and all-powerful, adding, incredibly: ‘so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning.’ Dataism does not regard humans as intrinsically valuable but, in the words of Rubin Rapose, ‘humans are merely tools for creating the Internet of all Things.’ This is scientism reducing persons to things, whereby algorithms will make our decisions for us.

Digitising the world is about collection and control, based on rapidly expanding capacities for data storage and manipulation. All DNA will be sequenced for use in gene editing projects, while digital twinning can potentially enable an interactive data flow whereby real-time sensors will mean that changes to the twin will be reflected in the original object or body, for instance through behavioural nudges. Wood takes the view that the current crises involving energy and food, intensified by the war in Ukraine, are designed to accelerate changes to the systems. Klaus Schwab recently said: ‘Reimagine, redesign, then execute’. Overall, the book provides an essential briefing on the planned implementation of technocracy and transhumanism where the word inclusive may be a shorthand for compulsory. Understanding these trends is the first step to maintaining freedom of speech and expression by standing up and speaking out for a different understanding of what it is to be human, and a more heart-centred future.