Saturday Morning Thoughts on the Technocracy
How the Baby Formula Crisis of 2022 and the Melamine Pet Food Crisis of 2007 Teach us the Same Thing
I’ve been planting and thinking and planting some more, and getting caught up on reading.
Here are two pieces about The Technocracy that are not to be missed. The first is a critique of Michael Senger’s “Snake Oil.” Elevator pitch: it’s really the western technocrats behind China’s overweening covid response in particular, and its population control mechanisms in general.
Of course, one could easily argue against this thesis merely by pointing out that the Chinese have essentially been collectivists for 5,000 years. But the essential point is that Russia and China already have more control of their populations, so the west is using China as a model.
The second piece is longer and takes more time and intellectual energy, but is a fascinating deep dive into the disturbed psychology of western technocrats who are unable to confront their own terrors and mortality, and are thus driven to madness in their quest for immortality and escape from the human condition:
A key excerpt:
This is why transhumanism is often categorized as a form of new-age spirituality. It essentially serves as a kind of religion based in scientism; an escape hatch for the hyper-rational. If you can’t manage your fear of death by believing that your spirit will end up on a cloud plucking a harp after your flesh rots off your bones, then it stands to reason that you will seek alternative forms of comfort, like the notion that we can simply fix this troublesome little thing called death using the power of science.
In recent years, numerous institutions have sprung up, like SENS and Calico, offering to find a cure for death.
And then:
If humans are to be free of the oppression of our own genes, set our own drives, our own goals, our own purpose, and take control of everything that motivates us, then clearly, we must discard our bodies while preserving our minds intact.
This lays the finger on the reasons why endless scientific or mathematical explanations of covid vaccine danger, etc. and so on, are unlikely to rouse more people.
People who intensely believe in them are emotionally invested in the vaccines as savior.
Fellow commenter and Substacker Pamela Drew pointed out the following:
My response:
Sadly, I don’t think we’re going to defeat the technocracy — just another new blend of communism/fascism dressed up this century as Science!™ — with any kind of plan. Just like 20th century communism and fascism, it is naturally unsustainable from an economic, social, and biological perspective, which means it will collapse on its own.
I’m a sort of believer in the need for a reset. Not a Great Reset, but a Hard Reset. The school of hard knocks is the only way most people really learn. I don’t believe there will ever be a mass awakening. But there will be a reckoning, and after that, we can begin again.
It’s not a happy prospect, so I definitely hope I’m wrong. Because surviving a Stalinist/Maoist/Schwabian 5 year plan is really no mean feat. Are you tough enough for anarchy totalitarianism?
It’s really anyone’s guess as to how long this real life edition of Survivor goes on.
The people who best understand what we face at the present moment are those who lived through communist or fascist regimes in their lifetimes. I’m friends with a couple of GenX women who lived in these regimes in their childhoods before the Berlin wall came down and they became naturalized American citizens or residents. They see it all quite clearly. Unfortunately, in order for many naive native-born westerners to grok this concept, they may drag us through another living hell first.
Fourth turnings and all that.
I know that this seems too nihilistic for many of my allies, and they are keen to devise a plan to head off what many of us can see coming. “If we can just wake people up, we can head it off!” I feel torn between the “belief” vs. “works” schools of thought and I lean toward the latter. Changed belief is a way to implement action, but without action, belief is useless. And people often only learn through the school of hard knocks.
But on the other hand, the endless doom mongering isn’t terribly inspirational, either. “Modern humans are too stupid to survive and most will die” is self-affirming and cathartic in its self-righteousness, but it isn’t a positive vision. It’s just a sort of brutal acknowledgement of the facts that ironically are the very same facts motivating the religionists (whether they be technocrats or the old traditional religious adherents) toward escapist solutions.
That said, many of the answers are already there. If you’ve been following this Substack for some time, you know I’m a big fan of older forms of wisdom that are backed up by early forms of science (observation). Here are some older pieces discussing this concept:
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.” — Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
Let’s compare and contrast the baby formula crisis and the melamine pet food scares of 2007 to illustrate this.
Fifteen years ago the melamine pet food scandal in 2007 turned me into a “raw feeder” of my two cats — i.e. a person who feeds raw meaty bones, with some offal, to cats and dogs.
But along the way, I saw so much absurdity play out with people who couldn’t figure out what to feed their pets when there was no safe commercial pet food. The answer was obvious. A species appropriate diet as dictated by evolution (or nature or God, if you prefer those concepts).
These people on the internet were terrified of feeding their cats a can of tuna as even an emergency measure. It was fucking ridiculous.
As for raw food or even parboiled chicken, forget it. Imagine suffering from so much modern ignorance (i.e. technocracy) to think that human food in the grocery store is dangerous to cats and dogs. It never occurred to many of these people that “scientifically” formulated diets have only existed for 50 years.
The pets could get a bacterial infection!
Cat kidneys could explode from salt in tunafish cans!
ANYthing could happen!!
DANGER!!!
The endless doom mongering about how pets would descend into disease, death and decay in short order without their scientifically honed kibble was a little reminiscent of how modern babies supposedly can’t survive without formula.
Back to the pet food. Of course, you can argue that I was an idiot for not figuring all of this out before the age of thirty-two, and you’d be correct. In my 20s, I’d had an overbred labrador retriever who suffered from horrible food allergies and was on prednisone most of his life. The vet suggested endless types of commercial diets “designed” to correct food allergies. We started with turkey and beef. When that didn’t work, it gravitated to the more insane and ludicrously expensive. At one point I believed I tried a kangaroo meat kibble formulation. (I didn’t live in Australia at the time.)
The problem wasn’t any specific allergen. It was obviously the highly processed nature of the food, and it took no formal education whatsoever to see this obvious thing.
But persist I did.
For years.
When the fancy kangaroo kibbles didn’t work, I gravitated to a homemade cooked diet of fish and potato with some additional calcium and mineral supplements, because the veterinarian terrified me over feeding raw beef, even though I had seen a marked improvement in skin condition and fur regrowth after only one week of it.
Educated idiots (the veterinarian) were keeping other educated idiots (me, the mid-20s PhD student) in mortal fear of their pets choking on a bone. I got over this mentality eventually after my dog died in 2006, but it was too late for him to benefit.
When I started to ask “where did all the chalky white dog poop of the 1970s go?” I was on the road to an answer. But that took more curiosity and an acute crisis, and I didn’t experience that until the Great Melamine Pet Food Crisis of 2007, with my cats.
There are shades of all this in the baby formula crisis, of course. Will people search out a healthier alternative to feed their babies, such as a wet nurse or goat’s milk? Or will they be terrified and grossed out by our humanity, and adopt the technocratic billionaires’ next Soylent Solution?
Heh heh. Sorry for the visual assault. I just couldn’t avoid the obvious absurdity that this boob has the answers to humanity’s problems.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a breastfeeding fanatic. First of all, I’m not a mother because I don’t have the resources in any dimension, so I’m not in the position to be the least bit judgmental about feeding formula to babies. And I know breastfeeding is just impossible for many mothers. My own mother couldn’t get me to latch on and was very tormented by this, so formula was a saving grace at that time in 1975!
Still, the “breast is best” folks who haven’t weaned their kids til age four are more on the right side of this equation than their “cover thyself!” moralistic opponents.
But what if formula hadn’t been available to my mom? She’d have needed to gravitate to an older solution. If it didn’t work, I’d have died. Those are the stakes. That’s the ugly reality of life on planet Earth.
The big lie with formula decades ago was that the technocrats had it figured out for us.
It’s the same damned problem we face 40-70 years later, whether it’s tainted dog food or the poison spikeshots that were supposed to save us.
The broader lesson, the one in the many, is that in order to find real solutions, people will need to face their fears, their mortality, and the dirty business of being animals trying to survive on planet Earth.
No one is coming to save us. There is no plan. There will never be some universal epiphany, a mass awakening that will never, ever happen.
We don’t lack for information. It’s the internet age. Never has life-giving information been more abundant, even in this age of censorship. Sure, information is power, and that’s why they’re trying to censor it. But there is plenty of information already for those who choose to avail themselves of it. It’s never been easier to do so.
Unfortunately, escaping from the technocratic madness takes takes time because of the emotional angst, cognitive dissonance, and practical difficulties it causes for so many.
For now, I find solace in nature. I will plant more vegetable plants, and I’ll continue to attempt to stay two moves ahead of the technocrats on the chessboard in my long-range survival plans.
But living in the present is important, too. The lilies toil not, neither do they spin.
If I believed there was a secular or traditional religious escape (a substrate-free mind, or an eternal heaven), it might be more comforting. But despite finding some beauty in some of the poetry and prose of the religious texts, I don’t.
I’ve never been unafraid to state things bluntly or offend people, so there it is. I think this life here on this Earth is all we have. The inability to face that terror is why I believe so many seek an escape.
But life here on Earth certainly can be wonderful, in all its grubbiness. Cheers to life.
NOTE TO COMMENTERS IN NEED.
This looks like a good baby formula recipe! Definitely better than the others I see floating out there!
To health and life!
https://www.westonaprice.org/podcast/255-homemade-baby-formula/
BREAKING! Modern Stupidity Update: It's not SAFE to feed your infant homemade formula! LOL. Pretty much the exact same arguments against homemade pet food. No real answers, of course. Just as there weren't back then, and people had to figure it out on their own.
I hope we're reaching Peak Stupidity but I'm afraid we're nowhere close.
https://www.today.com/parents/parents/homemade-baby-formula-unsafe-rcna28771