Author: Kingsley Dennis

From New Dawn 184 (Jan-Feb 2021)

It is a tragic fact that humanity has been living amidst a regime of perpetual warfare since known history. From the last 100 years alone, we have seen (amongst many others), two major European world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the War on Terror, and now the Virus Wars. In line with the unfolding trend of technology, the ‘wars’ are shifting from inter-bodies (between bodies) to intra-body (within bodies). In this current state of ‘perpetual warfare’, there are now attempts to colonise the terrain within our most sacred space – the human biological body. 

In my previous essay on biopower (see New Dawn 183), I noted there had been a shift from the disciplinary societies as described by French philosopher Michel Foucault toward more fluid networks of biopower control. As Foucault noted, the biopower model functions to tax rather than organise production, and to rule on death rather than to administer life. The older biopower models focused on the exterior modes of enclosure – school, factory, hospital, prison, etc. – whereas what I put forth in this essay is that the new reign of biopower is about gaining access to our interior spaces. Older exterior institutions (school, factory, etc.) have an expiration date – the human being, in contrast, is an ongoing and continuous ‘body’ available for generational control. The new regime seeks an ongoing vested interest in the exterior and interior spaces. These are the reconfigured social-body politics of control – or, the politics of control-biology. The new reign of biopower is concerned with continual modulation, adapting to ongoing events more like a wavelength than a fixed broadcast.

The ‘virus wars’ (to use their terminology) represent an enemy that attacks and infiltrates not only inter-bodily but especially intra-bodily. Human societies exist in open, not closed, systems. As such, the emerging biopower regimes need to gain access through these porous social-body systems. To gain control, they thus need to have proprietary dominion over an individual’s body, outside and within. We only have to recognise the rise in molecular engineering, genetic manipulations, and pharmaceutical interventions to see how external systems have been increasingly gaining interior ground. 

The rapid rise in city and nationwide COVID-19 testing stations gives the impression of an open-society granting permission for mobile freedoms – yet they are the facades for the encroaching control systems. As an example of what is to come, Liverpool in the UK began a city-wide ‘mass testing’ program with walk-through and drive-through testing stations set up around the city.¹ Liverpool was chosen as the pilot for a new ‘Lateral Flow System’ testing scheme. Broadgreen International School is running a pilot scheme with Public Health England that will: 1) bring in the military to run COVID-19 tests; 2) test children without parental consent; 3) identify each individual with a “unique barcode,” and 4) “isolate” and “secure” anyone who tests positive.² 

No-one should be complacent under the illusion this is ‘one-off’ mass testing. It potentially represents the beginning of forms of continual control – persistent or ‘perpetual testing’.

Perpetual Testing, Tracking & Tracing

The new regimes of biopower are establishing continuous variations of ‘testing,’ with continual iterations of ‘being at risk’. If we are to be continually ‘at risk’, then we have to be perpetually monitored – the two concepts go hand in hand. And in the present age of heightened mobility, we cannot expect a fixed ‘administration of control’. Instead, it will come through the fluid flows of always-on, surveillant tracking/tracing. 

As I write this, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had placed himself in self-isolation after receiving notification from his track-and-tracing app. He stated in a video address, with a tone of deprecating ‘programming’ humour, that: “The good news is that NHS Test and Trace is working ever-more efficiently, but the bad news is that they’ve pinged me and I’ve got to self-isolate.”³

‘Track and trace’ record-keeping is now being imposed not only on the hospitality sectors but also places of worship, businesses, and other organisations. For example, governments in Australia are mandating businesses and organisations to collect data on “every person including staff, patrons and contractors entering the premises.”⁴ Further, any records collected on paper must, by law, be digitised within 24 hours. Similar measures have been implemented by the UK hospitality sector, although not yet across the whole board or fully digitised. Also being implemented is government access to card payment data for tracking people in “coronavirus hotspots,” as announced by the Australian government recently.⁵ 

In Spain, where this author currently lives, all arrivals into the country from 23 November will need to show certification of a negative COVID-19 test taken 72 hours prior to arrival. Such procedures are likely forerunners to the ‘soon to be expected’ arrival of digital health passports, such as CommonPass which is being trialled by a small number of passengers flying from the UK to the US.⁶ 

At the G20 summit – an online meeting of heads of state from the world’s 20 largest economies hosted by Saudi Arabia over the 21-22 November weekend – Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a “global mechanism” that would use QR codes to open up international travel.⁷ As if in direct response to this, a day later (23 November) the boss of Qantas Airways announced that international air travellers would, in the future, need proof they have taken a COVID-19 vaccine to board Qantas flights. He claims it will be a “necessity” once vaccines are available and that it’s going to be a “common thing” in other airlines around the globe.⁸ As with risk and monitoring, the tracking goes hand in hand with testing. And in order to undergo testing, people must succumb to giving up their biological data. Intra-body data will enter the burgeoning biometric data-machine of huge corporations. 

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in October 2020, the US administration’s appointed ‘vaccine czar’, Moncef Slaoui, stated that tech giants Google and Oracle were to “collect and track vaccine data.”⁹ In a previous interview, Slaoui referred to this tracking “data-driven timeline” as a “very active pharmacovigilance surveillance system.”¹⁰ 

This almost real-time biosecurity testing and tracking will soon be necessary for most everyday activities, such as going to a live music concert. Ticketmaster, which merged with Live Nation in 2010 to create the music industry’s foremost concert promotion and ticketing agent, announced in November 2020 that it would check the COVID-19 vaccination status of ticket buyers before issuing passes when live events return in 2021.¹¹ Ticketmaster has been working on developing what they call a system for “post-pandemic fan safety” to verify fans’ vaccination status or whether they’ve tested negative for the coronavirus within a 24 to 72-hour window. Ticketmaster plans to combine the Ticketmaster digital ticket app with third party health information companies like CLEAR Health Pass or IBM’s Digital Health Pass, and testing and vaccine distribution providers. When the person receives their test/vaccine certification via their “health pass company,” the health pass would verify COVID status to Ticketmaster. If all was ‘clean’, Ticketmaster will issue the fan the credentials needed to access the event. On the other hand, if a person tested positive or didn’t have a valid, up-to-date vaccine certificate, they would not receive a ticket. Ticketmaster president Mark Yovich is on record saying that he expects the demand for “digital screening services” will attract a new wave of investors and entrepreneurs to “fuel the growth of a new COVID-19 technology sector” (i.e. biopower capitalism). Marianne Herman, co-founder of a company that focuses on assisting entertainment companies develop COVID-19 strategies, stated: “In order for live events to return, technology and science are going to play huge roles in establishing integrated protocols so that fans, artists, and employees feel safe returning to venues.”¹² Welcome to the new biopower capitalism of “integrated protocols.”

Biopower ‘Good for Business’

Some major players in healthcare and business have already come together to declare what these “integrated protocols” may likely consist of. The Riyadh Declaration on Digital Health was formulated during the Riyadh Global Digital Health Summit, 11-12 August 2020. It called itself a “landmark forum” for highlighting the importance of digital technology, data, and innovation for “fighting pandemics.” According to their Health Summit webpage: “It aims to bring together leaders of healthcare systems, public health, digital health, academic institutions and businesses in order to discuss the vital role of digital health in the fight against current and future pandemics.”¹³

The Lancet medical journal did a feature on The Riyadh Declaration in which a “panel of 13 experts” articulated seven key priorities and nine recommendations “for data and digital health that need to be adopted by the global health community to address the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics.”¹⁴They outline that the first priority for the health and care sectors to adopt is applied health intelligence (HI). According to the report, “HI is used for the surveillance, monitoring, and improvement of population and patient outcomes.” The second priority relates to “interoperable digital technology” and for this technology to be scaled up and sustainable. The third priority is to support the adoption of artificial intelligence. 

From the nine recommendations, the following are of particular interest: 2) Work with global stakeholders to confront propagation of misinformation or disinformation through social media platforms and mass media; 3) Implement a standard global minimum dataset for public health data reporting; 7) Ensure surveillance systems combine an effective public health response; and 9) Maintain, continue to fund, and innovate surveillance systems as a core component of the connected global health system for rapid preparedness and optimal global responses.

At the very least, these recommendations sound ominously like the framework for establishing a biosecurity apparatus of a biocapitalist consortium of healthcare businesses, digital health corporations, and governments.¹⁵ Do not think for a moment that the average working person will not need to pay for this apparatus. It was recently announced that Deutsche Bank researchers propose a 5% tax for people choosing to work from home rather than the office. The reality, as we know, is that many people will not be given a choice; yet, as per the new report from the German bank, the average person would be “no worse off if they paid this tax” because by working remotely “they save money on travel, food, and clothes.” One of the report’s authors (a research strategist at Deutsche Bank) said: “Working from home will be part of the ‘new normal’ well after the pandemic has passed. We argue that remote workers should pay a tax for the privilege… That means remote workers are contributing less to the infrastructure of the economy whilst still receiving its benefits.”¹⁶ In other words, within the new biopower regime, people may not be contributing enough ‘into the system’ if they are working from home – and so must be taxed for the privilege. 

What we are seeing through this increased regulation and intrusion between and within human bodies is a direct curtailing of human sovereignty. 

The Question of Human Sovereignty

The new enclosures are no longer disciplinary institutions (as identified by Foucault) but the fluid flows and networks of inter and intra-body spaces and the new regimes that are arising to govern these social-biological terrains. The individual human body is being fully incorporated into the global body politique. There are no ‘fixed markets’ for biopower; instead, there are flexible networks of exchange. Yet the question remains – who sets the parameters of legal authority on these exchanges? 

We have truly entered the age of the erosion of biological boundaries. We are all being targeted as possible mobile hosts for our own crippling disease – regardless of the true potency of the viruses – just as a person could be a suspect in the War on Terror. In both cases, the human being has been re-cast as a site of suspicion and risk. The body is now re-classified as a ‘site of weakness’ – which may itself play into a later transhumanism agenda. 

Becoming ever clearer is that the new reign of biopower will deny us our rights to keep the frontiers of the human body closed. The fundamental right to health (health safety) is being reconstituted as a legal obligation to health (biosecurity).¹⁷ This process, overtly and covertly, attempts to reorganise human citizenry in a way to create maximum obedience to institutions of governance and security. This is also a process that will eventually lead to denying each person their individual sovereignty. 

The rise of biosecurity amid the converging health intelligence (HI), along with tech-based “integrated protocols,” and increased reliance on Artificial Intelligence both within healthcare systems as well as state-sponsored surveillance, all point towards a worryingly cohesive ‘full spectrum dominance’ over human life. It is a biopower-enforced control system not only between bodies and within bodies but also within the human mind. 

Biopower is also, I propose, a control system for human consciousness. This is confirmed by rapid moves on the internet to censor any information that criticises or is contrary to consensus narratives and programming. A case in point: the UK Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth (Labour) is demanding a law be put into effect, with financial and criminal penalties, to “stamp out dangerous” anti-vaccine content online. It is time for all political parties, says Ashworth, “to work with the government on a cross-party basis to build trust and help promote take-up of the vaccine.”¹⁸ 

According to a report in the Sunday Times, UK ministers are preparing to launch a massive public information campaign to convince people to get vaccinated. The Times reported that the British Army mobilised the 77th Brigade’s Defence Cultural Specialist Unit to monitor and “counter online propaganda against vaccines.”¹⁹ The news report admits the 77th Brigade specialises in creating “behavioural change.”

The current biological ‘state of emergency’ is forcing people, on a global scale, to accept previously unimagined ideas to the point where the human psyche is tested to its limits. A new narrative is being established and seeded into mass human consciousness. The usual response to anomalous data is to try to fit it into pre-existing parameters of thought – our existing ‘reality boxes’ – to maintain a sense of stability. When the irrational encroaches upon consensus reality, a person is forced to accept the abnormalities as the ‘new normal’ or to undergo critical, often radical, change at a personal level. Which do you think is the easiest, most popular option?

Polarising events have the result of affecting both the conscious and the unconscious mind. A person can be both consciously and unconsciously torn between what they are told to believe and what actually is. This can easily create a schism in the human psyche and result in further social divisions and polarisations within familial and cultural groupings. This is not the time to be fostering mental, emotional, and socio-cultural dissociations. On the contrary, we should be asking ourselves: what does human sovereignty and empowerment mean to me? The question of human sovereignty applies to each and every one of us. It is not a privilege or a luxury – it is a basic right and necessity. 

As the reign of biopower continues to unfold, we are going to be seeing – and receiving – many more instances where control-biology situates itself into our daily lives. It is a calculating narrative because, after all, does not everyone wish for good health and well-being? The situation, though, is being managed and coerced into a state where each person will have no choice over how they make their own health decisions. Biopower forces dominion over our external and internal realms through the rhetoric (or double-talk) of representing the power of well-being. The end result is more on the side of controlling the human being, and few people, it seems, have an adequate response to this. Too many people continue to respond as if caught off-guard in the coming headlights. 

The very nature of how we recognise human well-being is at the core of what is transpiring now. This is the fundamental issue we need to address. It is no longer simply a matter of whether we need to wear masks or not – it is a question of our humanity being masked.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 184.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. https://liverpool.gov.uk/communities-and-safety/emergency-planning/coronavirus/how-to-get-tested/symptom-free-mass-testing/

2. https://off-guardian.org/2020/11/07/covid19-british-army-to-begin-testing-children-without-parental-consent/

3. www.bbc.com/news/uk-54956076

4. www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/covid-safe/customer-record-keeping

5. www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/card-payment-data-to-be-used-to-track-people-in-coronavirus-hotspots-20201113-p56eea.html

6. https://tottnews.com/2020/11/15/commonpass-digital-health-passport/

7. www.bbc.com/news/business-55039662

8. www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-55048438

9. www.wsj.com/articles/the-captain-of-operation-warp-speed-11602278486

10. www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-moncef-slaoui.html?showTranscript=1

11. www.billboard.com/articles/business/touring/9481166/ticketmaster-vaccine-check-concerts-plan/

12. www.billboard.com/articles/business/touring/9481166/ticketmaster-vaccine-check-concerts-plan/

13. https://rgdhs2020.com/

14. www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31978-4/fulltext

15. The renewed push for a biocapitalism agenda was discussed in my previous essay, ‘Biopower in the Age of the Great Reset’, New Dawn 183. 

16. www.businessinsider.com/deutsche-bank-working-from-home-tax-staff-workers-businesses-2020-11

17. See the work of Patrick Zylberman, Tempêtes microbiennes, Gallimard 2013.

18. www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54947661

19. www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/army-spies-to-take-on-antivax-militants-mfzsj66w2

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 183 (Nov-Dec 2020)

A reconfiguration of power has been in process for some time and is now rapidly emerging as part of a medical-political-economic institutionalised complex that I will refer to as biopower. 

The current lockdowns and quarantine travel measures are only a foretaste of what is to come once new regimes of biopower become fully established. Biopower is now knocking on our doors and gaining entry and dominion over the whole domain of personal sovereignty. 

What we are seeing unfold – after the ‘trigger’ of COVID-19 was pulled – is a radical alteration of legal and power narratives that control and categorise life and death. With the “pandemic landscape” now being formed,¹ we are witness to a post-sovereign world where biopolitics legitimises a network of socialising regimes from biocapitalism to biosecurity. 

The World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab says these “COVID times” are “our defining moment” and that “we will be dealing with its fallout for years, and many things will change forever.” In the pages of his book The Great Reset, he brazenly declares the coming “economic disruption of monumental proportions, creating a dangerous and volatile period on multiple fronts – politically, socially, geopolitically – raising deep concerns about the environment and also extending the reach of technology into our lives.” We are told that life for many of us is “unravelling at alarming speed.”² 

I contend that we shall see newly defined, and pervasively employed, forms of biopower in the age of this ‘Great Reset’.

A Post-Sovereign Era

The French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault is credited with coining the term biopower in his work in the mid-to-late 1970s. Foucault traced the development and application of power to the rise of “disciplinary” measures and institutions set up by governments to regulate populations in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

An array of “corrective institutions” started spreading across the social field – asylums, prisons, factories, schools, hospitals, universities, etc. – each serving to inculcate a mode of human conduct and consciousness. 

Above these socialising institutions stood the Sovereign (the Monarch) which later became the State. According to Foucault, the classical privilege of sovereign power is the “right to take life or let live.” It was the model codified in classical politics and remained essentially unaltered during the transition from traditional sovereign power (monarchical) to modern State power. 

“For Foucault, biopower is a technology of power for managing humans in large groups; the distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations,” notes the scholar Mark Kelly.³ 

Foucault’s description of disciplinary power as exercised by institutions is again relevant to what is happening now. We see a pervasive, fluid, almost free-floating, administration of power – on the State and global levels – to control societies in the post-sovereign era. Welcome to a new age of biopower.

Producing what Foucault called “docile bodies” (the masses of people) – the basic unit of disciplinary power – is now the purview of modern States. The modern human condition is such that the individual is not the object but rather the subject of biopower. 

Biopower

Within the context of a biological threat, the subsequent ‘pandemic’ is establishing a social-political engineered construct – the ‘new normal’ – for human society. This overly hyped ‘new normal’ is being enacted by a series of measures granting biopower authority over the individual and the collective body. In short, biopower exercises control over the administration of life.

Biopower over the human body means the State has the legal right to place individuals under surveillance and punish by incarceration. We have seen this in numerous cases as in the 28-year-old Perth woman who broke the Western Australian quarantine rules and was handed a six-month prison sentence.⁴ The form of biopower exercised under the pandemic ‘state of emergency’ is concerned with mapping all of life – social, political, and economic. 

Biopower has come into existence today via the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It utilises a language of ‘health risks’ for intervention and intrusion in private lives. This includes jurisdiction to enter a person’s house without permission to forcibly remove people either considered a health risk or who are failing to ‘obey’ quarantine measures. 

Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program, on 30 March 2020 stated that authorities might have to enter people’s homes to remove suspected family members to an “isolated designated facility.” Such measures have now been enacted into law. For example, under the New Zealand state of emergency, police officers now have the power to enter homes to enforce self-isolation rules.⁵ In a similar move, the Australian State of Victoria deployed 2,000 military personnel to enforce what they refer to as “virus-control measures.”⁶ 

In an ironic twist, citizens opposing such draconian measures are negatively labelled “sovereign citizens.” The term sovereign individual used to mean the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity and maintain exclusive control of their own body and life. Here we see a deliberate twisting of language to support and enforce the regimes of biopower. 

Biopower refers to a range of strategies backed by “specialised medical knowledge” and adopted by the State along with a supporting network of institutions, agencies, and non-State actors. One disturbing trend is the empowerment of private military actors and ‘authorised officers’ to enforce new public health directions.⁷ In the future, these officers might be given police-level powers to impose State directives such as searching homes and cars without a warrant (for example, such officers could detain and imprison someone they believe represents a health ‘threat’). This emerging state of affairs has already led to many reports of overreach and overzealous policing (especially in the State of Victoria, Australia). 

Continuous localised lockdowns, track-and-trace impositions, constant surveillance, the loss of the right to protest, and other such measures are now becoming established in the ‘new normal’ regime of biopower exercised by States across the world. These forms of control and regulation are without precedent and serve to increasingly affect the psychological well-being of citizens. 

Biopower is also seen in the regulation of social life (mask-wearing, social distancing, ‘dobbing in’ and reporting violations of rules, etc.), and the self-policing of the mental landscape (right thinking, self-censorship). 

Severe financial penalties are yet another way biopower will intrude into everyday life, for example, the new coronavirus rules enacted in the Australian State of Victoria in early October. ‘Illegal gatherings’ such as bringing people into a household above the limit set by the State, or more than five people meeting in a local park (even from the same family), can attract a $5,000 fine per breach. 

Biopolitics

The new field of biopolitics binds the individual and the collective into a strengthening mix of the technological, the political, the legal, and the financial. Modern biopolitics ties into the global restructuring of power (‘The Great Reset’ – covered in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 14 No 5) and new regimes rendered into existence in response to the pandemic emergency. 

We are being lined up for a twenty-first century medical totalitarianism. Biopower and biopolitics, along with biocapital and biosecurity, combining to create a totalised and singular form of power. 

In terms of collective humanity, the biopoliticising of the human race is developing new forms of population management. To be clear, the biopolitical agenda is the control of societies and the rendering of human life as “docile bodies” that do not resist intervention. To frame human life under a regime of total biopolitical power, State authorities seek to render conscious life under its rule. What we ‘think’ and who we are in the physical sense is being brought under State jurisdiction. The State automatically assumes the power to dictate our thinking from birth. 

From this perspective, we see why the current regime of censorship (in particular, across the internet where information can freely circulate across the globe) and curtailing of free speech has been so dominant and heavy-handed. Total power requires total domination – external control over an individual’s body and their thought processes – mental (conditioning, programming) and biological (health treatment, vaccination). 

The biopolitical agenda incorporates non-State bodies to enact strategies – most notably philanthropic organisations, social pressure groups, NGOs, and assorted globalist organisations. This field extends from annual health check-ups, health insurance, and preventive medicine to incorporate pandemic measures of random testing, forced isolation, and vaccination. 

All human life is ‘biopoliticised’. There is no refuge from its reach when both the exterior and interior life of an individual falls under the jurisdiction of total State control. A person’s body, health, and happiness – even their right as an ‘individual sovereign self’ – is to be subsumed into the realm of authoritarian biopower. 

Biopower and biopolitics is a dangerous mix of narratives based upon a monopoly of so-called ‘scientific knowledge’. In this sense, biopolitics harnesses ‘science’ and an array of ‘experts’ to formulate ‘evidence’ that justifies policymaking. 

Biocapitalism

Non-State bodies play a key role in the biopolitical agenda, especially with the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, global healthcare strategies, and tech giants. The field of biocapitalism covers the strategies and policies that develop and maximise profits for pharmaceutical markets and other healthcare interventions. 

With COVID-19, the administration of biocapital policies upon the majority of the world’s population is technologically feasible in ways not possible in the past. This should give every thinking person cause for concern. It is now urgent that we develop conceptual tools for critically analysing how biopolitics will play out in relation to biocapital. This is the merger of health (and health economics) with the data of surveillance capitalism. 

With the accelerating expansion of datasets – data tracing and tracking – we see a burgeoning rise of surveillance capitalism.⁸ Contact-tracing applications developed by the likes of Google and Apple are gathering colossal amounts of new data, adding to the escalating data supply chains. Healthcare and biomedical data collection is doubling every 12-14 months. Back in 2012, a Ponemon Institute study found that the healthcare industry utilised 30% of all the digital data storage in the world.⁹ Imagine how much that figure has increased in the intervening years. The move to digital has been rapid over the past decade; for example, Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) adoption rates for US hospitals rose from 10 to 90% in that time.¹⁰ The range of medical wearables on the market is extensive and growing. It is now possible to monitor most aspects of an individual’s health. It is estimated that remote patient monitoring and health trackers will generate $20 billion annually by 2023.¹¹ 

Analysis of digital healthcare data and its use for predictive analytics is profoundly changing the way patients are managed as health wearables are part of patients’ treatment plans. Patient health data will heavily influence the business models of the biocapital market. This data will only increase from the track & trace apps that most governments are pushing upon their populations. 

Biocapitalism is firmly embedded in the portfolio expansion of the tech giants. A cursory glance at the list of projects owned or invested in by the FAMGA (Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple) tech giants reveals an unsettling array of healthcare projects – medical patient databases, hospital research data, pharmacy retail collaborations, AI research facilities, and insurance. In autumn 2018, Google’s parent company Alphabet invested $375 million in Oscar Health, a ‘next-generation’ health insurance company.¹² According to CEO Oscar Health, it aims to manage people’s health care from a reinvented and rebuilt technological perspective.¹³

Biocapitalism is wedded to biopolitics. In March 2020, the UK government’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, signed an agreement to provide legal backing for the National Health Service (NHS) which sets aside its duty of confidentiality in data-sharing arrangements. The so-called ‘Covid-19 Purpose’ is a new data-sharing agreement for NHS organisations and general medical practitioners (GPs) to share patient data with any organisation they choose, as long as it’s for the purpose of “fighting the coronavirus outbreak.”¹⁴

The pharmaceutical industry is also clearly at the forefront of biocapitalism. Big Pharma will make huge profits from the current pandemic situation, especially from vaccination. Big Pharma’s warning to governments that they need substantial upfront funding – if vaccines and testing are to be rolled out faster – has been heeded.¹⁵ Most COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing costs are expected to be offset by government funding. One example is pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca which reached agreement with Europe’s Inclusive Vaccines Alliance (IVA) to supply up to 400 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine. AstraZeneca also completed similar agreements with the UK, US, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, for 700 million doses. The Australian government, which is aiming for a 95% vaccination rate, has secured 85 million doses of a vaccine (34 million from AstraZeneca and 51 million from CSL, Queensland), although only having a population of 25 million. AstraZeneca has agreed on a license with the Serum Institute of India for the supply of an additional one billion doses. This is one company out of many, and this is likely the first vaccine out of many more to come. 

In a 2020 report,¹⁶ public ‘health expert’ Tony Fauci and epidemiologist David Morens claimed that humanity has “entered a pandemic era.” The report states that the current pandemic is only the first of more to come and we are likely to see an accelerating rate of future outbreaks in the years ahead.¹⁷ What this indicates is that the future of vaccine rollouts must be secured alongside a continuation of emergency powers. 

A consequence of lockdowns is the huge economic bombshell for struggling business. Many businesses, particularly in the middle-to-small scale, are on the cusp of collapse, or have folded. Larger players are likely to seek State financial intervention. Some major corporate enterprises – especially if they are seen as providing critical supplies or services – might come under the control of the State. A trajectory that mimics China’s State control of the commercial sector. 

The changing biopolitical arena of the 21^st century, with its biocapitalist economic agenda, implies a rising need for biosecurity.

Biosecurity

It is no surprise that State institutions are determined to preserve a monopoly over the use of force to ensure biosecurity of the population. 

On 18March 2020, the Governor-General of Australia declared that a ‘human biosecurity emergency’ existed. This declaration gave the Minister for Health unprecedented power to issue any requirement or direction under the Biosecurity Act 2015. 

For example, during the human biosecurity emergency period, the Health Minister may issue any direction to any person and determine any requirement the State considers is necessary to prevent or control the spread of COVID-19 in Australia. Each and all individuals must comply with the emergency requirements. Any person found engaging in conduct that “contravenes a requirement or a direction” can face a maximum penalty of imprisonment for five years and/or a fine of 300 penalty units ($63,000).¹⁸ 

These new powers under the Biosecurity Act 2015 were quickly put into effect. In July, 3,000 people living in public housing tower blocks in Melbourne were confined to a police-guard lockdown without prior warning. Food parcels were left on doorsteps for the most vulnerable tenants. 

In the new biosecurity regime, no-one is granted liberty unless they succumb to the new rules of ‘immunity’ jurisdiction, likely to include an ‘immunity passport’. This will create reconfigured spaces of mobility and access in which travel, public and social events, and State services, may be closed to those who, without verified biosecure immunity, are persona non grata. 

Travel within nations and across international boundaries will become possible only through a highly regulated architecture of surveillance and on-body tracking. If a person does not submit live bio-data, travel is likely to be disallowed or highly curtailed. The early signs of this exercise of biosecurity is already emerging in States such as Singapore which is tagging citizens for bio-surveillance.¹⁹

The danger is these draconian strategies silence and stifle life for people, including basic rights to free speech and protest. The threat and fear of being ‘cut off’ or punished for noncompliance place us on course for an unhealthy relationship with power. Biosecurity measures become the instruments of a biopowered authoritarian dictatorship operating through the façade of health and safety. Human biological life is merged with the physical-digital structures of State biopower.

What is a Human Life? 

We move perilously toward a future in which, in the words of one CEO, “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”²⁰ The citizen is subjected to external authority in ways never before possible. Humans are targeted as objects – or ‘units’ – to be controlled, both our bodies and minds – the new colonies to be conquered. 

Does this mean that the only way to escape is renouncing one’s citizenship – to be a ‘non-citizen’? Could stateless places exist in the contemporary world? Will this trigger the rise of new people’s ‘republics’? In light of recent events, we are compelled to ask – what is an authentic human? Is it possible to live authentically when subjected to the external power regimes of authority that deny a person individual sovereignty? 

We should recognise there exists the ‘biopower’ of the human collective that stands in opposition to top-down State control. As individuals, we have our very real human power. 

Biopolitics is fast being used to turn us into the “docile bodies” for the ‘Great Reset’ agenda and its technocratic future. It is not an overstatement that the future of humanity is on the table. How the next years unfold will determine not only the direction of our human future but also, importantly, the physical and mental environment of thathuman future.

It seems many have forgotten the Hippocratic oath that states: “Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.” The politics of life (and death) are being usurped by an agenda that shows little, if no, human compassion and fellowship. 

State biopower is concerned with power over life rather than life itself. The World Economic Forum’s envisioned ‘Great Reset’ speaks of renewal and recalibration, but this technology-dominated era is voiding the core qualities of being human in a living, organic world. We face the central question: What does being human mean to me? Hopefully from the answer to this question we can each find our own source of power and inner strength. 

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 183.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. See my article “Post-Pandemic Landscapes” in New Dawn 182

2. See www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid19-this-is-how-to-get-the-great-reset-right & COVID-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret

3. https://iep.utm.edu/fouc-pol/

4. www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-25/woman-who-snuck-into-wa-on-truck-handed-six-month-jail-sentence/12592832

5. www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120577868/coronavirus-police-can-now-enter-homes-to-look-for-people-gathering

6. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/04/australian-state-impose-hefty-fines-compel-covid-19-isolation/

7. www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/21/overreach-and-overzealous-concerns-over-victorias-proposed-new-police-powers

8. For a detailed description, see The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.

9. www.forbes.com/sites/stewartsouthey/2019/06/30/medical-wearables-surveillance-capitalism-and-global-health/ 

10. Ibid

11. Ibid

12. Oscar Health was founded in 2012 by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law.

13. https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/14/technology/google-oscar-health-insurance/index.html

14. www.computerweekly.com/feature/Surveillance-capitalism-in-the-age-of-Covid-19

15. www.ft.com/content/000a129e-780e-11ea-bd25-7fd923850377

16. www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)31012-6#%20

17. www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/more-coronavirus-pandemics-warning

18. www.harrisonpublications.org/covid-19-plandemic-profit-fallout.html

19. https://21stcenturywire.com/2020/09/23/bio-surveillance-singapore-issuing-bluetooth-tracking-tag-for-citizens/20. See my article “Post-Pandemic Landscapes” in New Dawn 182

20. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 182 (Sept-Oct 2020)

The ‘COVID Event’ handed the unreal world its great coup over the place of the real. This perception intervention gave the final stimulus necessary to tip the twenty-first century into an awaiting technologically manipulated reality. A new landscape is emerging where, for the first time, the human mind is finding itself out-of-place within its own territory. Emerging ‘post-pandemic’ landscapes are likely to be hazardous territory for our mental, emotional and physical states. The human condition is under modification. 

New forms of power are rising, embedded within structures of health security, re-imagining our social lives, living and workspaces, and our physical and digital movements. Until now, the spider’s web of social control mainly operated below the waterline in a space where an almost intangible world existed beyond governance or accountability. Now the Kraken awakes and unashamedly rises to the surface. The beast of behaviour modification spreads its tentacles through our established social and cultural landscape without shame – all in the name of health security (the new nom de plume for social management). It is encroaching upon our media, city life, the office, and – perhaps most of all – the online digital world. The modification of these spaces is set to further desensitise, anaesthetise, and dehumanise us – the collective human mind is being groomed and prepared for a new consensus reality of “normalised dissonance.” 

The post-pandemic landscape is merging physical world pandemics with its own viral digital epidemics that now infect the human psyche. The Italian philosopher Franco Berardi has noted that our “electronic mediascape” places “the sensitive organism in a state of permanent electrocution.”¹ The social body is deliberately targeted by strategies that cause anxiety, fragmentation, exhaustion, confusion, polarisation and fear. We can see this happening through national and local lockdowns; social distancing; anti-social interaction; social ostracisation; loss of economic independence, and more. 

In early July, Prof Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society (the UK’s national academy of science) stated publicly that face masks should be worn in all public spaces (as they already are in many places in Europe and worldwide). Not wearing a face covering, he added, “should be regarded as ‘anti-social’ in the same way as drink driving or failing to wear a seatbelt.”² This is nothing short of encouraging a regime of public shaming. The human condition subjected to a new rhythm of the modern power-machine that breaks down social alliances. 

The established conditions that maintain a sense of social reality are being dissolved and replaced with a regime aimed at managing the masses through forms of separation and quantification. That is, techniques necessary to form a technologised humanity. These processes seek to reduce human life, and its environment, to something measurable and predictable – a life ordained by algorithms. These imposed changes are creating disequilibrium in the human psyche – a fragmentation of the human self. Furthermore, they are breaking down our trusted social relations. 

Something insidious creeps into the global collective that is attempting to create a world of sleepwalkers, plied with fear-pills, updated with vaccines, programmed with nonsense, and dismissive of alternative thinking. As a conscious, biological organism, we are being prepared to mimic the automation of the machine. Humanity is mentally sleeping and slipping into the void where a new form of the ‘social collective’ awaits us. 

Techniques are being devised and employed to produce normalised and standardised behaviour for a socially manageable populace. The collective human mind is being adapted and adopted into an infrastructure of control that operates largely through modes of digital connectivity. I refer to this rising mechanism of social engineering as the modern power-machine (MPM) that exerts control over human expression and autonomy of behaviour. To enact this, a consortium of institutions have been selected to structure contemporary societies toward specific functions that offer the promise of security and human well-being whilst developing increased social dependency. This is the post-pandemic landscape now rapidly arising and to which all future generations shall be born into. 

Childhood’s End

Luciano Floridi, a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, believes that human civilisation is shifting into a phase of “hyperhistory.” A hyperhistorical society that is dependent upon integrative technologies, says Floridi, could also become human-independent – that is, not needing us. Life on this planet is to be incorporated into an infrastructure that favours machinic intelligence and artificial organisms, thus de-territorialising the human experience. Our urban environments may soon be more conducive to artificial ‘life’ than biological life. No one is yet ready for the mutation at hand. Are we being programmed to take a new position in the world that erodes the possibility of human transcendence – a world where the ‘flesh robot’ eventually dominates the reality consensus? 

We are witnessing an unprecedented migration of humanity from the physical space to the digital-sphere – an environment of surveillance and technocratic social management. Incoming generations will recognise no fundamental difference between the digital-sphere and the physical world as this merging will form the reality they are born into. To the new generations, the digital-physical-sphere will be their only reality for they will have been born without the offline-online distinction. In the words of Luciano Floridi, they are born onlife. This is their reality, and it is ‘onlife’. The world that many of us recognise as being human will never be the same again. With the ‘onlife’ mode, a new era of history begins. Childhood ends when you stop being a child and become a user. The user inhabits whole new realities – realities believed to be ‘user-generated’ when in fact the reverse is likely the case. 

Connectivity and access will be part of the new power-machine regime. The rights of access are going to be a matter of consensus health security (as addressed in New Dawn #180/#181). Aligning with the power-machine will mean opting-in to its sanctioned and on-surveillance connections. Opting out will be an almost impossible alternative. Connecting into the power-machine will become the new cartography of ‘human reality’. Living ‘manually’ – offline – will become one of the last ways of resistance as human life becomes regulated-by-automation. 

The City as Machine Cradle

Modern living, especially within dense urban metropolises, as well as within poverty-stricken neighbourhoods, severely affects the human psychological condition and the nervous system. Journalist Naomi Klein has noted how a form of ‘Pandemic Shock Doctrine’ is emerging where city metropolises are forming suspicious partnerships with large tech conglomerates to re-design city living. 

Klein has stated that the quarantine lockdowns were not so much to save lives “but as a living laboratory for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future.”³ One technology company CEO told Klein: “There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology… Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”⁴ Several local city governments are in negotiations with large private tech companies to create a “seamless integration” between city government, education, health and policing operations. Further, the individual home will become a smart-enclosed hub for the urban dweller. All this, and more, as a part of the “frontline pandemic response.” 

Online learning, the home office, telehealth, and online commerce/shopping are all now part of an emerging investment landscape to convert existing physical-digital infrastructures to ‘cloud’-based run by now-under-construction 5G networks. All in the name of providing citizens with a securitised ‘virus-free’ landscape. 

Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google/Alphabet and now chair of the Defense Innovation Board that advises the US Department of Defense on military Artificial Intelligence (AI), recently stated: “The benefit of these corporations, which we love to malign, in terms of the ability to communicate, the ability to deal with health, the ability to get information, is profound. Think about what your life would be like in America without Amazon.”⁵

Schmidt has been hired to head up the task force commissioned to reimagine New York’s post-COVID reality. And he won’t be alone. High-tech is now jumping to get into partnerships with local governments in order to bring a safer, more ‘securitised’ landscape into civil society – all for ‘our’ benefit.

Part of this process is modifying the behaviour of people working in business environments, with the office landscape set to be re-organised to regulate further and isolate the social interactions of working colleagues. Jeff Green and Michelle F. Davis in a recent Bloomberg business analysis suggested: “The pre-COVID workplace, with its shared desks and common areas designed for ‘creative collisions’, is getting a makeover for the social distancing era. So far, what employers have come up with is a mash-up of airport security style entrance protocols and surveillance combined with precautions already seen at grocery stores, like sneeze guards and partitions.”⁶

The authors also foresee that the newly returned office worker will likely be encased in a makeshift cubicle of plexiglass sheets. A new mode of interaction-prevention is clearly in the works. 

Hundreds of major companies have already announced they plan what they call “employee re-orientation programs” and are hiring “thermal scanners” to monitor employees for fevers, according to the article’s sources. The authors also noted that there had been a spike in job postings for “tracers” – who would track down the contacts of anyone testing positive for the virus. In short, companies are now looking for a range of solutions to keep people away from one another throughout the working day. IBM, for example, is looking to use existing sensors or find new technology to detect when people are too close or “trending” in that direction. Another report from the UK noted how companies may develop their own specialist employee smartphone apps that would operate elevators hands-free.⁷ Employers are discussing the creation of “safe bubbles” around employees with monitoring so bubbles do not overlap. How would they manage such monitoring? 

Various companies, the UK report goes on to say, are looking to teach AI to monitor the video cameras that monitor employees. Dr Mahesh Saptharishi, Motorola Solutions’ chief technology officer, explained that AI algorithms can offer feedback about “pinch points” where people are too close together. Instead of employers (read ‘humans’) having to spend time (read ‘waste time’) monitoring video surveillance feeds, they can ‘ask’ AI if social distancing is being observed and any problem points.⁸ Issue solved! We’ll just rely on AI algorithms to tell us how to ‘social distance’ in our non-interacting bubbles, and we can modify our behaviour accordingly. Job done!

Importantly, this also signifies that to modify our behaviour, machine intelligence will need to gather ever greater datasets about us – all of us. ‘Smart cities’ and ‘secure offices’ means increased surveillance that translates into expanded datasets. The “Black Iron Prison” that science fiction writer Philip K. Dick saw coming is now hitting us squarely in the form of surveillance capitalism. 

Surveillance Capitalism

Professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of the widely acclaimed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, says that digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. With the rapid rise of data collection for commercial gain, Zuboff explains, “the result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information.”⁹ People are reduced to less than products because they are rendered into a mere ‘input’ for the creation of the real product which is the data. People are reduced to “prediction products” that are designed to “anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.” Your life as a product, writes Zuboff, is then sold off in “behavioural futures markets.” Zuboff considers surveillance capitalism to be, at its core, parasitic and self-referential – a parasite that feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.

“Surveillance capitalism,” notes Zuboff, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.” It then becomes a product of value. Using this material, organisations can intervene in our lives to shape and modify our behaviour in order to favour outcomes most desirable for their commercial gain. Behaviour modification in the hands of private capital and undertaken with minimal external oversight. 

At its most basic, humans have been reduced to ‘batteries’ that produce datasets for algorithms and machine learning. By and large, and somewhat of a worry, the general population is ignorant of what is going on quite literally beneath their fingertips. People are unknowingly funding their own manipulation says Zuboff.

Through its operations of technocratic ‘normalisation’ and the deliberate breaking up of social groupings, the power-machine age wants to manufacture a new standardisation of the human body and mind. With the encroachment of socially managed interventions, people are made vulnerable to the increased destabilising of the human self. The human sense of ‘self’ and identity has become a fragile thing; it is analysed, scrutinised, and criticised through social media; it is modified through surveillance capitalism; and it is increasingly being rendered by AI facial recognition systems such as Clearview (see New Dawn #180). As these post-pandemic landscapes roll out into our social environments, we are likely to see, as a consequence, an ever-greater fragmentation of the human self.

The Fragmented Self

It is no exaggeration that humanity is entering a period of existential crisis, perhaps not witnessed since the Middle Ages. But this time we don’t have the religious institutions to offer us salvation. The responsibility is upon our shoulders to find salvation by becoming fully human in the face of dehumanising forces. At present, we are being bombarded with such contradictory information leaving many people unable to find coherence or make a whole picture out of the shards. That is, the human mind is finding it increasingly difficult to see the patterns and connect the dots. Many people will also now be experiencing forms of cognitive dissonance: “Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviours to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.”¹⁰

The result is that the mind desperately wishes to reduce this discomfort and restore balance by seeking – or being provided with – a coherent picture, or closure. This ‘closure’ or ‘coherent picture’ may be provided by an institution or body (a structure of orthodox ‘authority’), and many people will accept it as a way of gaining closure, and thus comfort. In truth, we need to find this coherence and closure within ourselves – through our own resources. 

With the increasing breakdown of social relations and a massively changing human environment, people’s consciousness is being further fragmented so that events are seen as random rather than interrelated and meaningful. Virtual attractions will be offered to compensate this lack of meaningfulness as the digital-sphere increasingly becomes the ‘safe and secure’ home for people. Critical thinking, perceptive observation and intuitive knowing will face the onslaught of nullifying behaviour modification. 

As we are now seeing in the public space, self-identity (race, sexuality, etc.) is becoming a target of division, creating doubt, anxiety and social polarisation. Psychologically, people are being pushed to acquiesce, submit and accept measures implemented in the ‘new normal’ post-pandemic landscapes. And the more we submit, the more we become vulnerable to further submission and disempowerment. 

Bureaucratic regimes and administrative structures will encroach deeper into our living, work and leisure until a form of what French philosopher Michel Foucault calls disciplinary power will dominate over the human condition. New forms of social discipline and collective obedience fostering an artificial and engineered state of perception. 

We are right in the middle of a time of intense “enforced socialisation,” or what Edward Snowden recently referred to as an “architecture of oppression.” For some, the only response to this overwhelming “architecture of oppression” will be to find their comfort zones – such as sitting at home with their ‘surrogates’ roaming the digital-physical landscape on their part.¹¹ Or, as the 2008 computer-animated sci-fi film Wall-E depicted, growing lazy and obese, indulging in infantile entertainments, while robots cater to every need. We can only hope this shall never be the case. 

Humanity has entered unprecedented times. Such times demand an unprecedented response. It appears we are now being asked to ‘step up’ to accept our responsibility for our human becoming – to become fully human. By doing nothing, we allow our behaviour to be modified and our self-identities to be splintered. 

In these post-pandemic landscapes, the choices we make will be choices that, like never before, determine our future as a human species. I suggest it is time to declare our unity as an empowered fully human species and not accept the push of the power-machine for distanced and disempowered individuals. 

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 182.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. Berardi, Franco. 2015. AND: Phenomenology of the End. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 88

2. Coronavirus: Wear masks in crowded public spaces, says science body, www.bbc.com/news/uk-53316491

3. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/

4. Ibid

5. Ibid

6. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-01/the-office-you-left-is-not-going-to-be-the-office-you-return-to

7. ‘Horrible’ offices look to tempt back workers, www.bbc.com/news/business-53056585

8. Ibid

9. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/01/surveillance-capitalism-book-shoshana-zuboff-naomi-klein/

10. From www.simplypsychology.org

11. See the sci-fi film Surrogates (2009) or read the book Kiln People (2002) by David Brin

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 181 (Jul-Aug 2020)

Many of us are asking – is reality broken? This is the question I posed at the beginning of my ‘Year Ahead 2020’ piece published in New Dawn 178 (Jan-Feb 2020). In my review of the year ahead, which I titled ‘Consensus Reality Meltdown,’ I wrote: 

What we have come to regard as ‘reality’ will officially become intangible and fluid, leading to the rise of adverse ideologies… We are increasingly losing our bearings, our fixed moorings, and this is likely to lead to further anxiety as people try to cling to invested beliefs. My sense is that throughout 2020 many of us will experience discomfort in one form or another. 

The fluidity and changeability of reality that I suspected would emerge came suddenly, and not in a trickle but with the bursting of the dam. 

In my review of the consensus reality meltdown, I noted that a certain rootlessness would creep into the world – a rootlessness of frantic uncertainty mixed with desperate tech-salvation. Things would become increasingly more liquid-like as older, established social forms dissolved faster than new ones could replace them. As the full COVID-19 pandemic began to arrive upon our shores, I wondered whether during the consensus reality meltdown there would be a reshuffling, allowing each person to take this time to listen to themselves. In the reshuffling, I considered that new pathways of connection could be forged. In a follow-up essay, I wrote: 

After the consensus reality meltdown – after the reset button has been pressed – life will not be the same again. We will begin a new historical era. People across the world will climb out of their quarantined cocoons into a new time. Today as I write these words it is the day of the Spring Equinox – it is when a new year begins. The reset button was pressed before this Spring Equinox. Afterwards, there will be no Anno Domini, no Common Era. It shall be a New Era (N.E.).

It now appears evident that a rising confusion is entering into the world ‘reality-bubble’. Our social and political systems seem so full of abstract madness partly because they have lost their relation to anything tangible or remotely truthful. The writer Elias Canetti recognised this situation when he wrote: 

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer “real.” Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice.

We are now beginning that gradual climb out of our quarantined cocoons and seeing the world anew. What now faces us is the question of how we accept, or allow, our collective future to unfold. The ‘COVID Consciousness’ that has infected us globally, through the entire human species, can have the effect of awakening us into a stimulated frame of mind, with new perceptions triggered – or it can force us into accepting a new consensus reality (the ‘new normal’) for the foreseeable future. Do we come out of our cocoons with a butterfly consciousness, or do we retain the caterpillar’s mind?

We are presently not out of our ‘cocooned lockdown’ – not fully yet. And this, I feel, is a good thing as many of us still have time for a reconsideration of where we are, what we are doing, and where we wish to go. This is not a story about viruses or dead infectious parasites – this is a tale of contagious sentient life. 

Global ‘Stop’ Exercise

What I see is that human life has been radically halted – the brakes applied – as if being placed under a microscope of our own viewing. We have been compelled to view and to see ourselves in a way that has never been done before. We have entered into humanity’s largest experiment, and we are the test cases. Before we can take our further steps into what will become the most significant era for humanity’s future – into a phase of rapid evolutionary acceleration – we first need to take a ‘stop’ and to examine ourselves. 

This forced stoppage reminds me of a physical-psychological exercise used by the Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. He named this his ‘stop’ exercise. According to Gurdjieff’s own words:

…at the command “stop,” or at a previously arranged signal, every student must instantly stop all movement, wherever he may be and whatever he may be doing… while he is in this state of arrested movement, the student must also arrest the flow of his thoughts, not admitting any new thoughts whatever… this is simply a movement interrupted at the moment of passage from one posture to another… generally we pass from one posture to another so rapidly that we do not notice the attitudes we take in passing. The “stop” exercise gives us the possibility of seeing and feeling our own body in postures and attitudes which are entirely unaccustomed and unnatural to it… the style of the movements and postures of every epoch, every race and every class is indissolubly connected with distinctive forms of thought and of feeling. And they are so closely bound together that a man can change neither the form of his thought nor the form of his feeling without having changed his repertory of postures…

This extract illustrates that its function was to give the ‘student’ a necessary moment for unhindered self-observation. A person, remarked Gurdjieff, is generally not aware as they pass from one posture to another – we are ‘entirely unaccustomed’ to this point of observation to the extent that it is unnatural to us. The only way to enforce this is through an externally produced state of arrested movement. Interestingly, Gurdjieff states that every epoch, race, and class have their distinctive forms of thought which are so tightly bound to their ‘posture’ that they cannot be changed. Later in this description it is remarked that, 

psychological analysis and the study of the psychomotor functions, applied in a certain manner, demonstrate that each of our movements, voluntary or involuntary, is an unconscious transition from one automatically fixed posture to another, equally automatic…

If we now consider this at the larger scale, it implies that people are culturally bound to particular ‘postures’ of thought (aka, social conditioning); and that these thoughts and feelings are automatic (programmed). Gurdjieff’s method of breaking down these automatisms so that they could be observed was through imposing an external command of ‘stop’ that had to be obeyed. Now, what if we are to apply this to the current global social quarantines and the halt on global trade and business. Have we not just experienced a ‘stop’ command enforced upon us by an external impact in response to the 2020 pandemic?

For the first time in our known history, human civilisation in most of its forms came to a halt. We were stopped in mid-posture – a state of arrested movement – and placed in a space we are totally unaccustomed to. Time now, is it not, to ‘arrest the flow of thoughts’ – i.e., our regular social programming – in order to enter into a period of self-observation? What are we likely to find in this moment of ‘frozen’ introspection? What are the implications of the reset button being pressed?

Similarly, we may consider this as an act of force majeure, whereby humanity is now free from its prior commitments to a way of life it had contracted itself into. If we are free from our past contract, then whilst the world’s politicians are speaking of a ‘Second Wave’ of the virus, perhaps we should be considering this as allowing a ‘Second Wave’ for our human experiment – to begin a new trajectory, a new timeline for a human-planetary future. The past contract that humanity got itself involved in came to represent dysfunctional systems, damaging ideals and beliefs, and a ruinous path to a destructive future. If there was ever a time to break with this contract and to agree upon a new manner of collaboration and reciprocal maintenance, then this force majeure offers us a unique opportunity.

We entered a ‘stop’ phase upon an individual, community, and global level. Never before has this occurred, nor has it been possible. For most of humanity’s evolution, we existed as localised aspects of psyche and consciousness. We participated in the ‘mental life’ of those around us, the community; and later, the country. Only within a relatively short span of time has our species gained a global perspective. Whilst a collective unconscious species mind has existed, this lay beneath the conscious awareness of most people. This has now ‘flipped over’ into a physical presence in that so many more people are currently aware of psychical fluctuations across the world. We are presently experiencing these fluctuations during the 2020 pandemic. This was not possible before, even at the time of the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918–20. Why does this matter? It matters because the effects of consciousness, although seemingly intangible, are just as important as those tangible, physical effects we are generally more aware of. 

Contagions of Consciousness

Consciousness is just as contagious as any biological virus. Perhaps more so, as it is not bound by physical parameters of movement. Consciousness is an open arena – and it spreads like ripples across fluid and intangible, interconnected fields. Each person, too, creates these ripples, which are then strengthened by the larger community and national consciousness fields. Similar to what Gurdjieff spoke of, we are creating thought postures that belong to collectives of human thought. As many people are aware, like things attract and resonate with like things. It is the same with thought. This is the reason why so many ‘like-minded’ people group together. They share a common bond in their thinking. At the same time, these physical groupings create collective fields of consciousness. These fields can become powerful and very influential. They have operated throughout extreme cases, such as warfare, where people behaved against their ‘better judgement’. Likewise, they have operated during moments of mob violence and mob psychosis. Such collectives of thought are easy to be caught up within – that’s why they are contagious. And now, as our species’ collective psyche is growing and developing, such ‘contagions of consciousness’ are extremely powerful. 

Generally, as a person becomes ‘socially programmed’ by layers of conditioning, they are absorbed into the ‘national psyche’ of their respective country. This has always operated as a useful function of social management. As a person learns to de-condition themselves, and to throw off these layers of their psychological conditioning, they create more expansive states of awareness by having access to a broader range of consciousness fields. We are each of us affected by the ‘consciousness ripples’ emanating from others. It is how the ecology of consciousness operates. And since it is an interconnected ecology, individual awakening – or expansion of awareness – does not just remain at the individual level. As transpersonal researcher Chris Bache puts it, the ecology of consciousness is an inherently collective ecology. What we feed into our localised fields of consciousness will then go on to form part of a larger body or consciousness field. And this, ultimately, will form part of a grander resonating field of collective consciousness – at the community, national, and global level. Therefore, what and how we think is indeed part of our responsibility. 

What we are experiencing now is not only a biological pandemic but also a psychological one. How we feed into this, and what is fed into this, will establish the tone of an overall psychic resonance. And this overall field of resonance can be coherent or dissonant, and many other degrees in-between. That is, if a psychological environment of fear, panic, and anxiety is created through thousands, or even millions, of individualised fields of consciousness, these will ripple out to congeal into a grander collective field of increased psychic density. The resonance of disturbance will be on a scale far exceeding the individual level. Similarly, if localised ripples of coherence, hope, trust, and empowerment are transmitted, these will not only influence local and community environments at the psychological level but also the larger global psyche. This is not voodoo or magical thinking – it reflects how the intangible realm of thoughts and human consciousness operates. Psychologically, we are not alone. Each person lives as a part of the world, and not apart from it. Each person has a responsibility to manage their thoughts – what they receive and process as well as what they transmit. 

This present moment of a global ‘stop’ phase should give us time for reflection and consideration. Our automated movements and our automatic thinking patterns have been put on hold. We should take advantage of this unique opportunity. It may never happen again. It is likely we shall receive external impacts in our lives that momentarily make us pause as individuals – yet global ones are a very, very rare occurrence. In this exceptional moment, we should consider carefully. We will have questions now that are of great importance. It is crucial that people do not fall back into a heightened state of cultural programming swayed by external agents/systems that compete for increased control and social management. The ‘COVID Consciousness’ is an opportunity for a contagion of awakening, or it can be used as a strategy for managing a controlled consensus reality. It is now very much a question of our human freedom.

Human freedom, with genuine conscious awareness, also recognises the need for the social community, but not as an unconscious community. The human community needs to come together with at least a minimum of psychological insight. When communities and individuals lack psychological insight, they are open and vulnerable to the impulses of the unconscious from within as without. That is, manifestations of the unconscious do not just occur within an individual’s mind but also within the mass psyche of the collective. Unawareness of such forces can bring about emotional, mental, and physical instability. It is a psychological trait that when our minds recognise a repressed force within ourselves, a corresponding expression manifests in our outer, physical world. The source for so many ills resides within us. This is because the psychic or soul reality is real. We are conditioned into thinking that ‘psychic’ elements or things of the spirit are inferior to the physical things of life because they are non-material. The images we have within us, however, can be just as powerful as those without. It is a necessity that human civilisation returns to the fundamental recognition of the person as a human being; also, as a being with psychical force. We need to get back to ourselves in so many ways.

In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, it is written that Jesus pronounced: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” The inner resources each person has within them can bring insight, conscious awareness, and experiential knowing onto contemporary issues and their distress. It is essential to bring the inner world to bear onto the physical, material world. Both realms must participate and be in congruence. In order to achieve genuine solutions, each of us must be prepared to change and transform from within, and not just by changing our ideas. Each person has a responsibility not only to the outer world but also to their individual inner life. 

Resist Conditioned Conventions of Mass Mind

A person cannot live by the conventions of society alone, or from the impacts and influences of everyday life. We need sustenance from a source that is beyond all social institutions, and from beyond the distractions and attractions of physical life. It is necessary to create a distance from the tirades that life brings us. Ironically, the newly imposed rules of social distancing may assist indirectly by triggering an awareness of a form of distancing in terms of unhealthy energetic attachment and identification. In this, perhaps, a more acute state of self-awareness can develop as an antidote to the general state of social unconsciousness. Of importance now is how to resist the conditioned conventions of the mass mind by cultivating new faculties of perception. It is a question of personal freedom of thought and perspective. Our choice is thus twofold: between recognising the unconscious forces of the mass mind; and aiming for the personal development of our awareness to act as individuals. 

What humanity is largely experiencing today is the moral uncertainty that precedes a new understanding as the old morality enters its death phase. As long as the majority of people expect all problems to be solved outside of themselves then our societies will continue to be dominated by unruly forces. The question of human freedom from these forces depends upon people willing to assume the responsibility of conscious awareness. 

The great perennial task of humanity has always been the same: to become what we have always been and to show others the way by our own individual presence and behaviour. When we are finally able to heal ourselves from within then, and only then, can we heal others and the world without. The power for change begins and ends with us, the individual – not from the hand of a minority elite. 

The question of human responsibility is to resist the forces of dehumanisation. If we do not awaken to our potentials during this space of ‘COVID consciousness,’ then we are vulnerable to the encroaching forces of dehumanising social-technological control, as I shall explore in the second part of this essay in the next issue of New Dawn.

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Footnotes

1. https://kingsleydennis.com/the-reset-button/

2. Taken from his collection of personal writings from 1942 to 1972 called The Human Province.

3. Taken from ‘Talks with Gurdjieff’ – various online sources.

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