Insight: Globalism And Mechanistic Materialism (Part 2)

A rationalist, dogmatic scientism hijacks the public square; deluded or deceptive?

Part 1: Globalism, Socialism, Fascism, Feudalism (Part 1) - Is globalism dead? (Sep 19, 2022)
Part 2: Globalism And Mechanistic Materialism (Part 2) - A rationalist, dogmatic scientism hijacks the public square; deluded or deceptive? (Sep 21, 2022)
See also:
Part 1: Occult Capitalism Or Last Exit To Utopia (Nov 02, 2021)
Part 2: The Great Reset Is Complete — A future retrospective (Nov 23, 2021)
The series: Rivals For Power
Guildsmen Trap Us in the Middle Ages - Rivals for Power, Part 1 (Jul 06, 2021)
Related:
Philanthropy Is The Third Pillar Of Fascism (May 7, 2022)
Supra-National Socialism And Revolutionary Virtue — diversity, equity and inclusion ( Aug 3, 2023)

Globalists draw on ideologies that advance interests; forestall technological progress.
Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO: “Markets like, actually, totalitarian governments.”

Socialism is not defined by ownership of business which may remain in private hands.
A political elite, in bed with owners, however, allocates, distributes, prices and rations.

Main aim of the rich is not to make money but to retain their wealth; to resist change.
Destruction of the middle class makes the Great Reset very different to fascism.

Green energy policies are de-industrializing; social relations may also revert.
People may accept a new hierarchy of rights and obligations: socialist or even feudal.

In part two:
Science as dogma and mechanistic ideology: globalists are misleading the public.
Environmentalists in lockstep with WEF seek digital isolation of humans from nature.

Mattias Desmet: individualist, rational societies can tip into irrational collectivism.
Science may ally with religion to defend doubt against rationalist pseudo-certainty.

(2,700 or 13 minutes of your time.)

Sep 21, 2022

After writing part one, I discovered that I’m not meant to use the word “globalist” because it may be a slur.

The Atlantic journal notes that Ernst Jäckh, an academic who fled 1930s Germany used the word to describe Hitler’s quest “as the God-sent leader of a ‘chosen people’ bred not for imperialism but for globalism — his world without end.”

Ouch! That’s perhaps a reason to bury the term but how else to distinguish the manipulation of the organic process of globalization by policies designed to shape it to an end? (The World Economic Forum (WEF) calls its youth league, Global Shapers.)

There is no doubt a messianic strand in globalism but I want to focus on the mechanistic, because this is more clearly on display in the declarations of today’s would-be shapers and policymakers.

We are told that dramatic global decisions must be taken urgently, based on Earth sciences (climate change, greenhouse gas, pollution and population) but also human sciences (social engineering, neural technologies, gender and transhumanism).

Globalists cite science specifically as the impulse for decisions — supposedly drawn up in a hurry although population and genomic policy has evolved over decades. This scientific certainty is used to justify managed outcomes, in which policy does not address needs but results.

The WEF’s pocket theorist, the historian Yuval Harari, assures us that most people would not notice the shift to totalitarianism.

As the Covid response took hold, psychology professor Mattias Desmet of Ghent University noticed how the bulk of the population bought into a narrative that was “blatantly wrong and utterly absurd,” complete with ritualistic behaviour. He called this process mass formation. People nowadays are often isolated and pained by uncertainty. Intelligent people try to find order in things; seeking the formula to security, which leaves them open to propaganda and manipulation.

Popular Mechanics

If people’s lives, not to mention bodies, are to be shaped by decisions that trample centuries of civic norms and universal rights, then those decisions had better be grounded in science.

The media, financed by privately-owned foundations, assures us the science is settled. Publications like Popular Mechanics, a Hearst outlet that is not in any way a scientific journal, are used as “experts” on network news to instill in the public mind a confidence in supposed certainties.

It’s not just a question of presentation, however. This mechanistic thinking has overtaken science itself, Desmet writes in his book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022). [2]

Mechanistic thinking says everything can be explained and seeks linear causality, as opposed to systems thinking that provides a philosophical foundation for knowledge and organization, which may ultimately be characterised as wisdom.

The reader can easily find examples of mechanistic thinking in the sphere of public policy, from Dr Anthony Fauci — “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science” — to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now a senior adviser to the Pentagon, who says a search engine should only give a single answer to any question.

Globalism is an ideology that seeks to govern population and production on a supra-national basis. Like other materialist ideologies it lusts after scientific certainty. The clearest example of this is Bill Gates’ TED Talk in which he reduces humanity to a formula. [1]

The likes of Fauci, Schmidt and Gates may shriek with indignation — actually, they pay journalists to do that for them — but their words reflect the fallacy of reducing everything to a zero-sum game. That is unless their words are a narrative for public consumption and the genuine reasoning is not disclosed.

We must take their words at face value, for to doubt their honesty would suggest they are actors on behalf of nefarious interests; and that the policies are not driven by science at all, but indeed by some messianic belief or moral relativism.

Mechanistic ideology

I was hoping that Desmet’s new book would apply his analysis to the globalist project and though he doesn’t use the word he does address the mechanistic ideology in a chapter entitled, The Artificial Society.

He begins with the fact that we cannot measure everything. The rational explanation of natural phenomenon, he says, is only an abstraction regardless of how comprehensive our theory may seem. The portion that remains unknown is not just statistical “noise” but often the “essence of the object. It is its living component.” For example, the variation in a pendulum’s swing has a pattern that mathematicians can describe with a formula, which is nonetheless unpredictable.

The familiar view of the universe as mechanism that we claim to understand fully — like a clock or today a computer — has distorted thought for centuries. Yet Edward Lorenz showed that matter is constantly reorganizing itself in unpredictable ways.

Whereas scientific theory adapts to reality, ideology seeks to adapt reality to theory. The 21st century environmental movement is marching in lockstep with the WEF’s proposed “digicosm,” a society in which human life is conducted online and indoors, to protect nature from man.

This intersects with transhumanism, as empathetic functions like feeding and even gestation in a womb may be replaced with synthetics, and language with a form of telepathy.

This ideology is urgent and global, we are told, and must be implemented in totality — thus it is globalist and totalitarian. In common with totalitarian experiments of the 20th century, the price must be paid today, for gains that will come later. The Utopian future is always just around the corner.

These costs are brought to you by globalist corporations that make products with known carcinogens, or injectables or electro-magnetic frequencies whose effects have not been tested because, as the Federal Communications Commission says, testing would slow down adoption of new technology.

Humans as a whole participated in the replacement of belief or shared consciousness as eternal or deeper meaning, in exchange for material comforts and a numbing of William Blake’s “mental strife.”

It is globalists who seek to manipulate Übermenschen (necessarily creating Untermenschen) whether of the National Socialist, Soviet, eugenic or tranhuman variety, or Wellsian Morlocks and Eloi.

Globalism is the practice of taking a system or process that may have limited benefits, and then imposing it on a large scale, seeking outsize opportunities to control resources or secure status by the social engineering of others.

Desmet states it thus: eugenics may lead to desirable results on a local basis — such as the elimination of genetic disorders in a country — but at scale the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

Tyranny of numbers

One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic, Joseph Stalin is reported as saying. Harry Lime made a fortune from trading in diluted penicillin in The Third Man (1949).

“If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

To the bureaucrat or the billionaire, the people unavoidably seem like so many dots: it fits their desire to manage outcomes with a global, 40,000-foot view but it also meets their ideological outlook that data is neutral, untainted by habit or superstition, and can allow the alleviation of human suffering in an unemotional, rational, clinical, technocratic and efficient manner.

Desmet cites the Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot to show that numbers are not, in fact, objective: results vary with the unit of measurement or category. The Covid response — a globalist endeavour bar none — shows how bureaucrats and pharmaceutical companies manipulated data to get the outcome they desired: high figures for viral fatalities; low numbers for vaccine side effects.

Finally the “allegiance effect” means that a member of a cohort or professional field tends to draw conclusions from statistics that support his or her sectoral or world view.

Rationalism vs empathy

The German philosopher Werner Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize for his uncertainty principle — “It’s not a matter that we’re not yet sure now; the point is that we can never be sure.”

An editorial in medical journal The Lancet in 2015 said, “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”