Occult Capitalism Or Last Exit To Utopia

The Great Reset: a prelude

This is the first in a series. Part 2 is The Great Reset Is Complete — A future retrospective

We have been propositioned. Made an offer for our bodies and minds, to accept a new medical, civic, economic and constitutional order: the Great Moral Reset.

With innuendo, how explicit the offer depends on the situation, including the target’s vulnerability. Like any manipulator, The Investors have gamed the people’s consent.

In the next article we’ll wake up the next morning, in The Great Reset, as unveiled as soon as three months after the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, by the World Economic Forum and Prince Charles.

Leo Tanguma's mural: In Peace and Harmony with Nature. Permanent installation at Denver International Airport.

Nov 2, 2021

Does that image seem familiar — perhaps not the picture but the sentiment, ramping up fear, threatening death and destruction? The Great Reset, the Green New Deal, or is it Green Horizons, COP26 or Build Back Better: telling us they've got the technological fix. They'll take us back to when everything was natural, magical and pristine, just before the rapacity of industrial pollution.

How will they persuade us to accept this utopia? By falsely implying we can keep the conveniences of consumer society, travel less and pay a couple of extra energy taxes.

Did you see what they did there: "just before" the rapacity of industrial pollution. The owners are not proposing to return to some rural idyll or to abolish the hierarchy or give up control. They are not suggesting we go back to an era where we owed our life and blessings to our share of crops and soil. There is a gap between what the public imagines is being offered and the small print of the contract.

If there is “no going back to normal,” what do you think is on offer? A voluntary reduction in living standards? A change of lifestyle, ranging from giving up car ownership to living in a multi-family residence? Most westerners don’t know the definition of communal apartment or kommunalka. Perhaps it’s time to get acquainted with the Soviet kitchen experience.

In Europe the reduction in living standards might be less obvious at first, after all wages are lower, relative to taxes, than in the Americas. In the United States the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency means citizens have greater spending power — and are richer by, say, 30 per cent — based on the IMF’s figures that suggest the dollar is used in about 40 per cent of global trade and nearly 80 per cent of all global cross-border transactions. The adjustment would thus be more brutal. [1]

Lifestyles are about to be eroded by the inflation that, the central banks now admit, is not so transient. Some are warning that the Modern Monetary Theory — that governments have the power, right and duty to print money if it serves higher goals — is the high road to Weimar (proponents of MMT fail to distinguish between privately-owned central banks as the creators and lenders of money, and governments who are debtors).

What does the public imagine when it sees Greta, Extinction Rebellion or Insulate Britain? Mass social movements and governments with an ideological mission to reshape society tend to play upon popular myths and legends. Soviet imagery was full of carefree, plump Ruritanians even as the drive to communal agriculture resultedin famine. The National Socialists layered Nordic and Aryan legends upon the metropolis.

This ranged from the German tribes whom Tacitus wrote lived "entirely without artificial shelter" to those later "successive towns built around the same sacred place" in which residence was a contract with the soil and the deities who watched over it. We shaped the land for agriculture and homestead in return for duties and observances. The earth as mother and resource to be cherished and protected. What’s not to like?

Thomas Hardy chronicled the vanishing of a world that was very much real. Although sneering at Victorians is a modern sport we forget that they built much of our world. When I was a child, the sewer systems and water, the railway lines and the Underground, the fire stations and schools, the libraries and the town halls, the docks and the ports had all been bequeathed us.

Victorians were deeply aware of the destruction of rural life and the impact of industrialization on people. In The Dynasts Hardy presents the idea of “evolutionary meliorism,” the hope that human action could make life better.

Evolutionary implies the savage competition in the struggle for life, the harsh economy of suffering and waste enforced by the blind forces of nature, grimly divorced from questions of merit or moral worth.

So writes Norman Vance in Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God. But meliorism, perhaps influenced by Hardy’s reading of Comte, suggests progress towards a better mode of existence. It implies that the evolutionary process, however bleak, might have ultimately positive consequences: that eventually circumstances and institutions will get better. [2]

They contended with much greater change, even compared with us on the cusp of the purported Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Theirs was an operating system that took its architecture from nature. They knew the wild was harsh and that people had struggled for thousands of years to ameliorate it. That struggle produced most of the benefits for which the technocrats take credit.

Most of the great advances in human health, for example, are due to sanitation not medicine. The great technological advances, from horse power to water, from waterwheel to steam, from burning wood to oil, from boiler tanks to combustion engines... and in communications, from pigeons to telegraph wire to undersea cable… these are what built finance capital and enabled the industrial age. Yes it is also true that slavery, arbitrage, narcotics and lending to governments for war built fortunes faster than cotton ginnies and looms — and that these banking and shipping dynasties controlled the City of London and the Bank of England.

The industrial cities, however, could only exist because they were fed by the countryside that pursued agricultural innovation over hundreds of years. Both the industrial and agricultural revolutions began, by the way, in the monasteries.

This is not the world the technocracy wants to restore. It does not want you to know the history. Technocracy aims to supplant the old priesthood. Technocracy has magic. Above all, technocracy has hierarchy based on jealously-guarded science and mysteries incomprehensible to the rest of us — and patents. Scrolls and screeds of patents. See: The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind by Robert Laughlin. [3]

These possessors of magical knowledge, having eaten of the tree of knowledge in biblical terms, propose "to apply all their newly acquired arts to constructing a facsimile of the Garden of Eden, a model paradise." (John Michell). We fail to see this because we ignore and deny the beginning of the rise of the cryptocracy.

Fire as religion

The impulse for “change, now” itself changes over time. It is facile to note how the new Ice Age of the 1970s became global warming in the 1980s and then was dumped for climate “change” in the 1990s. The Club of Rome’s discussions as to why they chose climate as the tool to push the public towards depopulation are widely known.

The desire for renewable energy cannot be condemned, though one can point out similarities with alchemy and the millennia-long search for machines of perpetual motion.

The fact is renewables can currently supply about 10 per cent of energy needs while The Great Reset hides a massive hike in demand for energy. Data centers and cloud computing, the panopticon of cameras and facial recognition is the fastest-growing consumer of energy. Smart cities, electric vehicles, electric heating, digital ID, lessons by Zoom and telemedicine are only the visible portion of energy consumption. State security and surveillance capitalism are even more hungry. The numbers do not add up and I will not provide a link. The imbalance, the non-compute is so evident it hurts the brain.

The proof is that we are in the midst of an energy crisis and it is man-made. The Investors, hidden behind their asset management funds, have chosen this moment to speak: Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman warns energy prices will cause unrest. BlackRock's Larry Fink says we must suffer the cost of going Green. The European Union and NATO continue to obstruct Russia’s latest gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, while accusing Russia of holding the continent hostage.

In the 21’st century, politics meets witch trials and nobody bats an eyelid. Except the bats, of course.

Cryptocrat as priest

The cryptocracy, at its simplest, is the observation that the elite empower themselves by hoarding knowledge in order to rule, and denying it to those they control. In the same way the elite schools today still teach the classics, the philosophers (especially Plato) and techniques of government (cybernetics) down the ages, giving their children the mindset of ruler. They believe in knowledge for them and ignorance for the rest.

The translation of the Bible into the vernacular, the cultural appropriation of paper from the Chinese (if you are to believe Critical Theory) along with the invention of the printing press shattered the authority of the religious priesthood. It was a slow transition, however.

It is historically incorrect to think of the Reformation and even the Enlightenment as a path to knowledge for all. Gutenberg invented his press in 1440 but the elite fiercely opposed the spread of newspapers. While Protestant German towns had daily newspapers in 1605, the Tudors resisted until 1665 and newspapers only flourished under the Stuarts.

The several Enlightenments (English, Scottish and French, for example) proved a mixed blessing for different social ranks. Immanuel Kant quickly saw the limitations:

"Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which… it is not able to answer."

He was talking about metaphysical questions of the soul but the Enlightenment was also a period of continuity in areas like the study of alchemy which proceeded unalloyed. Freemasonry continued to expand through the period we call the Enlightenment.

The rulers of the C17th and C18th fought hard for their influence over the flow of information just as today. Bills to censor and shadow-ban content on the basis of online “hate” (undefined) have been passed in Australia, are in the parliamentary committee stage in Britain and are being considered in the U.S. and Canada.

The elite of the Enlightenment worked hard to kick away the ladders and keep the populace in their place. Despite the public perception, there was no one-way road to reason, writes David Riggs in The World of Christopher Marlowe. [4]

Before the Reformation, cathedral schools were an avenue of social mobility for poor boys. Cardinal Wolsey, who became the second richest man in England while in the service of King Henry VIII, was the son of a butcher. After the Reformation, however, the interests of the Church of England merged with those of the hierarchical nation state. The dissenting commissioners told Archbishop Cranmer that ‘it was meet [fitting] for the ploughman’s son to go to plough, and the artificer’s son to apply the trade of his parent’s vocation,’ while ‘gentleman’s children are meet to have the knowledge of government and rule in the commonwealth.’

Even at university level "the study of humanities was a feature of liberal education before the splintering effect of specialization destroyed the vision of the unity of all knowledge" (Thoughts on University Education, by Sunderrao Ramrao Dongerkery).

Until the Enlightenment, the people understood the concept of all that is seen and unseen, the latter belonging to the metaphysical, the religious and the occult (simply meaning that which is not visible to the eye). After the Enlightenment the people were increasingly driven into specialized labor while a ruling elite retained to itself the "unity of knowledge"

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. (Woodrow Wilson)

The ruling class never abandoned the complete sphere of knowledge. They just constrained the rest of us and introduced the concept of specialization. Education was narrowed to the needs of the job. This has led in modern society to alienation, to workplace dissatisfaction, to what David Graeber identified as the predominance of Bullshit Jobs.

The abuse of specialization renders the rest of one's humanity invisible. The worker becomes a drone. Just as the rationalism allowed the extinction of the metaphysical, the religious, and the unseen, the rational worker, his labor, his time, his life is reduced to a calculus of inputs and outputs in which value is simply a cost-benefit analysis.

Enlightenment and liberty

In a way, the Enlightenment was a period of intellectual expansion for the elite while it was one of further oppression for the worker.

Jonathan Israel points out that the push for civil rights, social justice and democratic representation was the campaign of a small minority of activists. By no means was it a natural outcome of the Enlightenment nor did it initially find wide support. Thomas Paine was forced into exile, as the most famous writer of tracts between 1770 and 1790. The elite persisted with their occult interests making a celebrity figure of the magician Alessandro Cagliostro.

The embrace of the occult does not stop at philosophy of the ancients or the arts or government. It explores the Will but not for all. The unfit will be suppressed while the illumined will be ranked, inducted into the skills of the master, but only within a pyramid of hierarchy and knowledge, one that keeps the tiers of retainers firmly at their level of ignorance and feudal loyalty. This was similar in its trappings to the medieval guilds but far more religious or occult in its operation.

Technocrats, occultists and fascists

Foucault criticized the fetishization of reason, and Adorno and Horkheimer see the roots of fascism in a dialectic between the domination of external nature and society: “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”

This expressed itself in the Nazi technocracy within months of seizing power. Gottfried Benn wrote that the new German race would be “neither gods nor mediocre human beings” but would “issue forth from the purity of a new people’.”

Ernst Junger (Der Arbeiter, 1932) saw a new being, born of “mother soil of the race” who would experience “the total character of work.” Julius Evola wrote that in WWI:

“Technology in its elemental aspect operated like a non-human force awakened and set in motion by man. He must face up to this force, become the instrument of the machine, and yet at the same time master it, not just physically but spiritually.

This is only possible if human beings make themselves capable of a new form of existence, forging themselves into a new type of human being who, precisely in the midst of situations which are lethal to anyone else, is able to derive from them an absolute sense of being alive. To this end it is however necessary to transcend entirely the way of being, the ideals, the values and the whole world view cultivated by the bourgeoisie.”

Guillaume Faye called this ‘archeofuturism’. In Nazism, technocracy met occultism.

In the guise of the World Economic Forum the technocrat thrusts before us a false choice, tapping his watch and demanding our answer. Democracy has had its day, he says. We are told to choose something different: chaos or technocracy. Dozens of articles pop up telling us that democracy gave us populism and can no longer be trusted, starting 20 years ago with journalist Fareed Zakaria: "Democracy is flourishing… liberalism is not."

Technocratic wonder-workers

Democracy was always managed and now civil liberties are being retired and stashed away before our eyes. The technocrats are proposing to roll back democracy, as they roll back modern industrial society. But to what? Those who warned these rights were only temporary concessions to Communism seem to have been largely correct.

It was the French revolution that replaced a “feudal economic and social order with a market system based on private property and equality before the law." But economists and political theorists appropriated those developments to their own idea of a capitalist economy and to homo oeconomicus.

Technocrats suffer from a mundane version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as they quantify one aspect of something but cannot simultaneously quantify another. We end up with a clattering competition of stakeholders. The manager is to set aside the primacy of profits and short-term, quarterly results for stakeholder values that serve some higher social purpose — but which, whose and in what order of priority?

Outcomes management is all the rage. The worker is measured not by outputs (what he makes) but outcomes (appointed by the bureaucrat) that increase the distance between the act of his hand and the measured result — in other words it increases alienation.

Both manager and worker are working like a banker with negative interest rates except that the the banker holds collateral on the asset and they don’t. This is a fundamental shift of power to the banker.

Consider the value of work in a world of negative interest rates. To the worker, not-working has many and valuable meanings: rest from activity; activity with friends and family; perhaps even harder work such as thinking intensively, or composing or indeed any skill for which one is not directly paid.

Along comes the technocrat and reduces not-work to less than negative. The technocrat kills life in order to put it to work. The technocrat seems to regard not-medicine in a similar way, given the different attitudes of western and eastern society to prevention rather than cure. The technocrat has a special problem measuring social values as expressed by psychologist and social scientist Donald Campbell:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor (Campbell's Law).

To what world will they return us, those who propose a global economic reset to save the climate, who propose population reduction and the abolition of cash and the proscription of large parts of the earth's surface from human habitation? In the face of apocalyptic extinction they propose simply to accelerate extinction.

We can take their word for it. For a start, even the best technocratic expositions contain a mix of Millenarian and marketing language that is intended to persuade on an emotional not intellectual level. Secondly it is born not from inventions and technical advance (which is what feeds people) but from a desire to force a Great Leap Forward, a five-year plan, a social and economic reset that proponents hope will be a kind of positive Armageddon, a creative destruction the need for which is never openly discussed.

Generally in the history of invention, new technologies come along incrementally. Countries were still using waterwheels when steam engines were used to heat water and produce greater pressure and wheels became gears and created more torque. Homing pigeons perched on telegraph wires while the first telephones were connected. The Internet is an evolution of data over wires that began with Samuel Morse in 1844.

Those inventions reshaped society yet at no stage did anyone say "systems and pathways must be redesigned to advance net zero transitions; catalytic breakthroughs will alter our view of what is possible and profitable in the framework of a sustainable future" — but this is the language of UN Agenda 21.

[1] Kathy Jones, Charles Schwab, Mar 2021 — Will the U.S. Dollar Lose its Reserve Status?

[2] Norman Vance, Oxford UP, 2013 — Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God

[3] Robert Laughlin, 2008 — The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind

[4] David Riggs, 2004 — The World of Christopher Marlowe