New Dawn – World's Most Unusual Magazine

Category: Technology/Mind Control

  • Do Psychopaths Run the World?

    Do Psychopaths Run the World?

    From New Dawn 152 (Sept-Oct 2015)

    Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.
    – John Lennon (1940-1980), English singer and songwriter

    Lennon and others externalise the apparent paranoia that wells up inside us. “The world has gone mad!” More often than not we partition this voice off, content to view the world as others prescribe it. But who are these others, and what do they want?

    The term psychopath is often criminally misjudged, thanks largely to unhelpful portrayals of sick, twisted and violent psycho-character types in the popular media. This has led, by way of public ignorance, to the common belief that the psychopath has no function, role or place in open society. A swift offload that allows us, the apparent sane majority, to circumvent our worst fears.

    Any notion that the psychopath is incapable of functioning in open society is, according to M.E. Thomas1 – a self-confessed sociopath – flawed. The question is not the capacity to function, but rather what capacity or form that function takes. As Thomas says, psychopaths and sociopaths share an intertwined clinical history; both can function, they just do so differently. And though we are left to muse on what mask that function may take, in many social situations they excel.

    Competition Wins Out

    Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck was a French biologist who advocated a theory of evolution widely rebuked in establishment circles. Lamarck’s major work was published in the same year Charles Darwin was born – who would go on to supplant Lamarck’s theory 50 years later. In Lamarck’s world cooperation prevailed over Darwinian competition as the driving mechanism of evolution.

    According to authors G. Greenberg and M.M. Haraway,2 it was Darwin’s view that served to reflect and sustain a Victorian society tied to free market, capitalist and imperial values. His model supported a dog-eat-dog, life is hard, code of practice; the scientific valediction of the natural world as played out on a brutal, cold and insensitive landscape. Arguably the perfect environment for the aspiring modern day psychopath, and a prevailing view that the poet Tennyson described as nature, red in tooth and claw.

    Snakes & Ladders

    Although diagnosing definitive psychopathy in individuals remains somewhat of a grey area, attempts have been made to categorise psychological traits that set psychopathic personalities apart. Most prominent is the diagnostic check-list devised by renowned Canadian psychologist Robert Hare that is used to determine a categorical diagnosis of clinical psychopathy, or at best a category score.

    According to Hare’s list, psychopaths display superficial charm, unbridled ego, and pathological lying and cold, calculated cunning to entrance their prey. They are often impulsive and irresponsible, and exhibit an absence of empathy and remorseless lack of guilt. These and other attributes, such as criminal versatility and a marked capacity to manipulate, deceive and control, mark them out as dangerous. These are traits that enable psychopaths to move into high-ranking positions of power and influence.

    “We know much less about corporate psychopathy and its implications,” explains New York psychologist Paul Babiak, “in large part because of the difficulty in obtaining the active cooperation of business organisations for our research.”3 A dilemma that Hare disclosed to Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test. “Prisoners are easy,” states Hare. “They like meeting researchers. It breaks up the monotony of their day. But CEOs, politicians…”4 According to Hare, these sharks are a different kettle of fish.

    A rare study on psychopathy in the workplace conducted by Babiak, Neumann and Hare5 suggests that 1 in 25, or 4 per cent, of corporate executives display significant personality traits typical of psychopathy – an incidence four times that estimated in the general population. The study supports the claim that psychopaths can and in fact do achieve high ranking corporate status. We are left to speculate, but Hare concedes Wall Street may harbour 1 in 10 attracted to lucrative watering holes that are poorly regulated.6 Factor this in and it’s not hard to see how the very lifeblood and identity of corporations and financial institutions can often run cold.

    Arguably most startling, the study indicates that despite being classed as substandard managers, team players and attracting poor performance appraisals, executives that met the clinical threshold of psychopath were valued by their immediate superiors as creative and innovative, as good communicators and strategic thinkers.

    In short, they may not always fly under the radar. Despite the blips, it is clear to American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley7 that psychopaths possess the communication, persuasion and interpersonal skills to override any negative impacts on their career. A finding supported by the Babiak study: “some companies viewed psychopathic executives as having leadership potential, despite negative performance reviews and low ratings on leadership and management by subordinates.”8 According to the authors, this shows a proficiency to manipulate decision makers, a point made by psychologist Dennis Doren who observed in institutions the psychopath’s unerring ability to seek out and foster relationships with those of highest authority and demonstrate tremendous skill at influencing them.9

    In many instances the chameleon-like ability of the psychopath to mimic its surroundings by reading and influencing colleagues through the art of deception, be it through self promotion or subtle persuasion, allows the snake charmer to hide his true skin and pass unchecked through social customs. Studies suggest psychopathy, in body or by proxy, can entrench itself at the top, but is this phenomenon relatively isolated, or has this scenario over the course of human history always prevailed?

    As Above, So Below

    As vice president and director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, Darrell West analyses business and law school curricula, specifically, according to West “because business and law schools train the leaders of tomorrow.”10 In the course of his research West reviews course syllabi and conducts interviews with faculty members. He has also surveyed data on business and law school student perceptions. What he found was troubling.

    “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” states West, taking his lead from the title of a 1970 New York Times magazine article written by the highly-influential American economist and statistician, Milton Friedman. The article was unequivocal: according to Friedman, maximising shareholder value was a company’s sole responsibility.11

    “Many schools do not require stand alone courses that provide broad conceptions on the purpose of the corporation in society,” says West. Of those that do, “many focus on the purpose of the corporation, with emphasis on how to maximise shareholder value, especially in law schools.”12 Instruction therefore is key, notes West, and will colour a student’s view of the world. In fact, West concludes, “business school surveys show that after completing school, students are more likely to see shareholder value as the most important goal of the corporation.”13

    It was not that Friedman was a prophet. In hindsight, according to West, he helped shape the outlook of numerous business leaders, academics, and thought-leaders that ultimately served to affect America’s modern sense of purpose of the corporation. An inherent identity that helps shape the way business and law school students view their, often times, lack of responsibility to society even today.

    In the real world, inevitable coldly-calculated equations play out on the one side to maximise profit and on the other to minimise loss. And like most mathematical equations they make little or no sense to the layman.

    “Can you buy what you already own?” This was the equation facing all concerned when Canadian-based Nautilus Minerals Inc. purchased the licence in 2011 from the “Independent State of Papua New Guinea” (PNG) to mine deep-sea vent fields in sovereign waters off the country’s coastline. The answer, morally, of course, is no.

    According to Sir Julias Chan, current Governor of New Ireland province in PNG, ethics are an intangible commodity, and unlike cold hard currency rarely stack up. “First, the state cedes exploration and production rights to foreign companies for next to nothing,” says Chan. In the case of PNG 10,000 kina, equivalent to US$4,000. “For this pittance, the foreign developer gets full control of all the wealth that can be taken from the ground.”14

    “The next step is for the state to seek equity in the project, usually 30 percent in a mining project and 22.5 per cent in an oil or gas project,” explains Chan. “The state has ‘given away’ the entire resource to a foreign company, and now returns to buy what was already legally its own property, for a 30 percent interest in the project.” To PNG this meant 300 million kina, or US$118 million. “And, to do so, the state usually takes out a commercial loan rate that puts the country further into debt at high interest.”15 Today a common event whereby the state acts to castrate itself and its people to high finance.

    Joel Bakan is a professor of law at the University of British Columbia, Canada. While those that run corporations are for the most part, good, moral people, says Bakan, the duty of the corporate executive is to the corporation’s business interests first and foremost. “The money they manage is not theirs,” explains Bakan. “They can no sooner use it to heal the sick… or buy a villa in Tuscany.” In the corporate world, good people are encouraged to behave badly. In fact, the sum of corporate parts are “singularly self interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context. The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit.”16

    Under such terms it is not difficult to envisage how a system can soon come to value and mimic its most deviant parts. Equally, how the parts over time can come to be shaped by the whole.

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    It’s Behind You

    According to philosopher and author Aaron James, while the psychopath feigns moral action as a tool to manipulate others, the arsehole could well be a butt of equal contention. Unlike the prototypical psychopath, says James, the arsehole “traffics in and is moved by moral justification,” which leads to an “entrenched sense of special entitlement.”17

    The perfect example, according to James, is Apple founder Steve Jobs who saw his sole obligation to society as implicitly tied to producing the products his consumers desired. James notes what Jobs’s best friend, Jony Ive, once told Business Insider: “when he’s frustrated… his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that,” said Ive. “The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him.”18

    Worryingly, James says, “the arsehole’s reasoning is shaped by the moral justification his surrounding culture makes available to him.”19 For instance, according to Hare, many white-collar criminals are psychopaths. “They flourish because the characteristics that define the disorder are actually valued,” asserts Hare. “When they get caught, what happens? A slap on the wrist, a six-month ban from trading, [oh] and don’t give us the $100 million back.”20

    Accordingly, not only does corporate culture control net arsehole production, but the quality of butt-heads produced. And, depending on the culture, says James, “an arsehole can be better or worse behaved than a psychopath.”21 A consoling thought.

    Arguably it is no more comforting to know that the psychopath you had fingered all along is really an arsehole nurtured by a system that is, by way of inherent nature, socially deviant. If the reasoning of a typical arsehole is moved by moral justification, taken from his surrounding environment, then the ability of a psychopathic culture and/or system to shape its own governing class is implied.

    They Gave Us Their Mind

    The enduring strength of psychopathy lies in its ability to manipulate how others perceive it. But the innate ability of the psychopath or the system to shape our perceptions is not, in itself, entirely the reserve of the clinical psychopath.

    We all play our part in the masquerade. Many of us partake in cosmetic enhancements and props that support our ego’s waltz through this porcelain world. Whatever the score, the Hare check-list has a number picked out for us all. In its pursuit of ultimate control, this is the greatest achievement of psychopathy; after all, what better way to predict by response a person or group, than to give them your mind?

    The competitor’s urge to win at all cost is certainly pervasive. So, too, the trend of irresponsibility, most evident in the compensation culture that has crept into the social mindset, thanks to laws that restrict a person’s capacity to develop by way of ethics and moral concepts of right and wrong. How can you take responsibility for thoughts and concepts that are not your own? In the broad, rules and regulations teach us to hand over our power, a transaction that re-enforces itself in society according to Thomas. She says that given the choice between having power and giving it up to a ‘trusted’ entity, people often choose to give it up rather than take the responsibility that comes with it.22

    In its apparent, endless quest to reinvent society in its own image, psychopathy perhaps has more than one expression. Recent research into social media habits throws up disturbing correlations between heavy Facebook use and socially aggressive narcissism. In one study users that scored highly on a Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire, reports Damien Pearse, “had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their news-feeds more regularly.” The research, the report states, “comes amid mounting evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.”23

    In the same breath the media have ‘jokingly’ jumped on those abstaining from Facebook as highly suspicious and suspect – they could have something to hide. Facebook use is, of course, prevalent and ‘normal’.

    An infinite number of media streams exist that entice us to see our reflection, drawing us into powerful undercurrents, and buffeting us from one bank to the next. We surface only to take breath, disorientated and confused, disconnected from our natural cues. But perhaps that’s the idea. Certainly it is the innate need to control and the power to wield it, at whatever cost, and without care, that fractures the pathological mind from the rest of us.

    The God Complex

    Those who rise to power in the corporatocracy, are control freaks, addicted to the buzz of power over other human beings.
    Bruce Levine, social critic & psychologist

    In a competitive world there will always be those who actively seek out, justify or embrace traits of psychopathy as a route to success. For a surgeon, a cold detachment and cool head has its place. But glorifying the psychopath is a perilous path to tread. According to psychologist Linda Mealey, competition only serves to increase the use of antisocial and Machiavellian strategies and counteracts any increase in pro-social behaviour after success.

    Spiralling societal separation, and re-enforcing detachment, sets a dangerous precedent, what James refers to as a sense of “entitlement born of cosmic grandiosity.”24 He cites oil baron John D. Rockefeller who viewed his wealth not in some Wild West American capitalist context that gave him free rein, but unapologetically, by divine right: “God gave me my money,”25 said Rockefeller.

    This sense of divine entitlement, being chosen, as apart from society, has deeply disturbing parallels to contemporary wealth.

    Jeff Greene is a multi-billionaire property investor and entrepreneur, and owns reportedly America’s most expensive home. Greene, who made his fortune betting on sub-prime mortgages, says Americans need to have “less things”: “America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted, so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” lectured the 60-year old, who lets out the $195 million palatial estate in Beverly Hills to royal families and international dignitaries for hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.26

    At its heart, assuming it had one, departments within the system, be they political, corporate or financial, select by lineage this mind; one willing to create, support and maintain it. “Figures such as J.P. Morgan, Randolph Hearst, and Mayer Rothschild,” argues author Stefan Verstappen, “are professional psychopaths that reach the pinnacle of the financial stage where they cause no less misery and destruction as their political counterparts.”27

    As a result, examples of psychopathic conduct in high office are commonplace. Robert Kirkconnell is a decorated US Air Force combat veteran of 27 years, and an outspoken critic of the US government MK-ULTRA program that conducted a battery of callous psychological or ‘mind control’ tests on its own citizens. In American Heart of Darkness, Kirkconnell charges the presidential Rockefeller Commission, set up to investigate the CIA’s activities, which he says funded the program. Kirkconnell no longer sees his home as a constitutional republic, but as a pathocracy run by psychopaths.

    Contagious Psychopathic Worldviews?

    I had to win at all costs, sometimes allowing the costs to flow unchecked, just to see the volume of my power.
    – M.E. Thomas

    “Power is all I have ever really cared about in my life,” states Thomas. “Physical power, the power of being desired or admired, destructive power, knowledge, invisible influence. I like people enough that I want to touch them, mould them, ruin them,” says Thomas. “I want to exercise my power.”28 It’s nothing personal. It’s dietary. The idea of ruining people, she says, is simply delicious.

    Thomas is not unique. The psychopath invariably plays with its food. In the process actively seeking to visit misfortune or suffering on others. Thomas regards herself as a white tiger – a beautiful and exotic pet but inherently dangerous. And whilst in her own words she considers herself tamed, inside she continues to grapple with a primal urge to destroy.

    This mindset is not lost on society. In fact, it is a worldview captured succinctly in Michael Ellner’s personal state of the world address: “Just look at us,” he asks. “Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and governments destroy freedom.” You can see his point. But to what extent does this world talked of by Ellner stem solely from blind pursuit of power and profit?

    Is there a hidden systemic malevolence that creates fear and uncertainty; the chaos to warrant this chase? Is the malevolent mist, that evil intent we ascribe to heinous acts and misdeeds, illusory, an epiphenomena, a by-product of the psychopath brain? Or is it real, autonomous, and guiding the program? And does this distinction matter? Does it help us interpret, say, the rise in chronic illness, its origins and how the healing profession has become, as critics claim, a public relations buzz-term; managing symptoms for profit?

    The world of Kirkconnell swings into focus. Are we all victims of systemic programming; of disorientation; an imbalance the predator incites in us to maintain and enforce its position and status?

    Like a god, so much of what psychopathy is and does hides in plain sight. The psychopath appeals to its prey’s sense of empathy and faith in humanity. He is the blank slate onto which people project their hopes and ideals.

    This realisation must dawn if we are to expose systemic psychopathy and confront wildly sinister possibilities, not least the darker identities and underlying motives upon which it is based.

    Darwin Dorr is the director of research into psychopathology at Wichita State University, Kansas. “The majority of paedophiles are psychopathic,” says Dorr, “or at least manifest to a significant degree the psychological characteristics of psychopathy.”29

    Such ties that bind power to its perversions are historic, endemic and persist to this day. Investigations surrounding an elite Sydney paedophile ring are only the tip of a cold and callous iceberg that threatens to sink a titanic raft of untruths. In the UK, the reputation of once respected DJ, television presenter, and establishment confidante, Jimmy Savile, sank when his penchant for children, dead bodies, and satanic rituals and foreplay was disclosed to a shocked population.

    Questions are now being asked outside UK Home Office circles and its curious taste for celebrity trash cans. All of a sudden the term psychopath seems no longer sufficient. Are such people, the system they represent, and the entities they mimic and worship, beyond a check-list? Certainly UK and wider establishment attempts to stymie the truth only serve to disclose further the covert means and amoral control by which psychopathy operates as an integral part of the system.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 152.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding In Plain Sight, Crown Publishing Group, 2013
    2. G. Greenberg, M.M. Haraway, Comparative Psychology: A Handbook, Garland Reference Library of Social Science, Routledge, 1998
    3. P. Babiak, C.S. Neumann, R.D. Hare, “Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk,” Behavioural Sciences and the Law, at http://web.natur.cuni.cz/~houdek3/papers/Babiak et al 2010.pdf
    4. J. Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, Picador, 2011
    5. P. Babiak, C.S. Neumann, R.D. Hare, op. cit.
    6. R. Hare, www.hare.org/comments/comment2.html
    7. H.M. Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic Personality, Mosby, 1976
    8. P. Babiak, C.S. Neumann, R.D. Hare, op. cit.
    9. B.J. Board, K. Fritzon, “Disordered personalities at work,” Psychology, Crime and Law, Vol. 11(1), 17-32, with reference to D. Doren, Understanding and Treating the Psychopath, Wile, 1987
    10. D. West, “The purpose of the corporation in business and law school curricula,” Governance Studies at Brookings, www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/7/19 corporation west/0719_corporation_west.pdf
    11. M. Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970
    12. D. West, op. cit.
    13. D. West, op. cit.
    14. “PNG Leadership has been poor steward of resources,” The National, 20 April 2011, www.roland-seib.de/05/Seib-Pressespiegel-1.5.11.pdf
    15. Ibid.
    16. J. Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, 2004
    17. A. James, “Ass-holes: a theory,” Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2013
    18. D. Love, “16 Examples of Steve Jobs being a jerk,” Business Insider, 25 October 2011, www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
    19. A. James, op. cit.
    20. R. Hercz, “Psychopaths among us,” www.hare.org/links/saturday.html
    21. A. James, op. cit.
    22. M.E. Thomas, op. cit.
    23. D. Pearse, “Facebook’s dark side: study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism,” The Guardian, 17 March 2012, www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/17/facebook-dark-side-study-aggressive-narcissism
    24. A. James, op. cit.
    25. www.bartleby.com/73/1207.html
    26. J. Christie, “Multi-billionaire who gave a lecture about American’s ‘needing to have less things and live a smaller existence’ owns a staggering FIVE mansions…”, Daily Mail, 24 January 2015
    27. S. Verstappen, Defense Against the Psychopath: A Brief Introduction to Human Predators, Woodbridge Press, 2011
    28. M.E. Thomas, op. cit.
    29. D. Dorr, “The pedophile as psychopath,” 1998, in T. Millon, E. Simonsen, & M. Birket-Smith (Eds.), Psychopathy: Antisocial, Violent, and Criminal Behavior, 304-320, Guilford Press
    30. P. Gilbert, “An introduction to the theory and practice of compassion-focused therapy and compassionate mind training for shame based difficulties,” The Compassionate Mind Foundation, www.compassionatemind.co.uk/downloads/training_materials/1.Workbook_2010.pdf
    31. P. Gilbert, op. cit.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The People vs. the Hidden Hand: David Icke Speaks Out (Part 2)

    The People vs. the Hidden Hand: David Icke Speaks Out (Part 2)

    From New Dawn 157 (July-Aug 2016)

    The May-June 2016 issue of New Dawn featured the first part of David Icke’s interview with Marc Star. Here we present the second part of his interview (David’s surname is pronounced “ike”).

    MARC STAR (MS): You’ve noted that the current state of the world is only a reflection of the inner state of the individual. Humanity is at a spiritual roadblock reflected by a lack of awareness and the cutting off of our own spiritual essence. One might say we’ve gone mad, a chronic case of PTSD. Perhaps we never recovered from World War II. We’ve certainly never stopped being at war. Can this patient be cured?

    DAVID ICKE (DI): What is the patient? The patient is incarnate awareness disconnected from its infinite self – disconnected from inspiration, knowing, insight and intuition from its greater self operating at frequencies outside of this fake reality we call the world. As I’ll explain at the events, I say that what we call the universe is actually a quantum computer. It’s a fake reality. It’s a vast equivalent of, if you like, a computer game. It’s the same principle – which is why the physics of computer games and the physics of our world are basically the same.

    The patient is a patient in that term because people are disconnected from their true selves. What we call awakening is simply awakening from the program to tap into greater swathes of our true self. If you do it at first, and you just start to tap into some of the greater self, then you start to see that 9/11 was set up to create an excuse for what has followed – the war on terrorism, etc. You see that the banking system is basically that, the banking system, and individual banks are just agencies of that overall system controlled by a few people. And so it goes on. You start to understand the five-sense level of connection because you’re now looking at things from a more expanded state of awareness.

    Some stop at that point. And that’s where most of the alternative media is, frankly. When you move on and continue to expand your awareness, then everything is questioned. Everything comes under questioning in terms of what’s real and what’s true. You start to realise that the physical world is not physical at all. There is no physical, as quantum physics has shown. There is only the illusion of physical. Just like the computer in front of me decodes information in the tower and puts on the screen pictures, moving pictures, text, graphics because it’s decoded that information from the tower in that state, so we are decoding through what I call the biological computer – the body. We are decoding information from the unseen – what I call a cosmic wireless internet – into the reality we think is so real, so solid.

    The patients cure themselves by breaking out of the perception prison of the program and allowing their true self, infinite awareness, to enter the game, and enter the perception process – allowing people to tap into their true power, as opposed to their suppressed power of ‘phantom self’ [see Part 1]. More and more people are doing this. This is what the awakening is. And the more people awaken, the more people question things they took for absolute granted before – like the desk in front of me is solid. No it’s not. It appears to be but it’s not.

    This is a massive part of what I’m talking about in the events and in my new book Phantom Self, because there is no other way of bringing an end to all this nonsense that doesn’t involve people expanding their awareness out of the program and into their true self. Let’s think about it – this whole structure of human society, which is specifically designed to disconnect incarnate self from infinite self, is not done for a laugh. It’s not done for a bit of fun. It’s absolutely fundamental to the success of what they’re trying to achieve. So it must make basic common sense that the way to address that is to reverse what they want, and what they’re doing – i.e., reconnect incarnate self to infinite self.

    Much of the alternative media is focused on the five-sense world because it’s been through the program too, and thus can only see five-sense solutions to what it perceives to be five-sense problems and five-sense situations. Stockpile weapons, stockpile food, fight the system. The system depends in its entirety on the existence of phantom self. Without it, there is no system.

    I’m not saying sit cross-legged on a mountain, meditate for the rest of your life, do nothing and everything will be fine because you’re on a higher frequency now. No, no. Absolutely not. A lot of what is called ‘new age’ falls into that illusion because that means it doesn’t have to do anything that it actually doesn’t want to do – i.e., get its hands dirty and look this situation in the face, in the eye.

    By all means, meditate if you like, go into deeper levels of self, get insight, get inspiration, but then express that inspiration towards changing the world, or else there’s no point. I hear people say, “knowledge is power.” No it’s not. Knowledge is not power at all. The use of knowledge is power. Knowledge that you don’t use you might as well not have it at all.

    But everything, in terms of playing this out and doing what is necessary, comes from an expanded perception of self and the world. Then you’ll know what your individual unique contribution should be.

    All these things are connected. The awakening to a different view of the world and self is happening because those people are expanding their perception out of the program. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be re-evaluating the world of self. All this is moving in the right direction. It’s just a case of numbers.

    On the subject of the alternative media, I have enormous respect for people worldwide who take the trouble and often dedicate their lives to communicating this information. So much of the alternative media is itself stuck in phantom self – not all the alternative media, by any means. No. But vast chunks of it. Vast swathes of it are just like the mainstream media in a mindset of “here and no further” because they literally can’t get their head around going any further. It doesn’t make any sense to them. They can’t process it because phantom self has still got you.

    There is an incredible amount of ego in the alternative media and among people that follow the alternative media, which you see in the extraordinary levels of abuse on social media, the forums, the comment columns and all that stuff. Along with abuse between different researchers and what have you. It’s extraordinary. I’ve had as much abuse from the alternative media as I have from the mainstream media – which, given the scale of the abuse from the mainstream media, is saying something. Because the alternative media – again, not all of it, but a great chunk of it – is also an expression of the sheep and the sheepdog that I mentioned earlier [see Part 1]. Sheep keeping sheeple in line.

    I think the alternative media has to look at itself – that part of it that I’m talking about – and ask, too, if it’s not caught in the same conspiracy, the same perception deception that those which it targets are caught in. Once you think, “I know what’s going on” in the sense of its entirety, you’re kidding yourself and you’re kidding others because in the end there’s an infinity of awareness/knowledge/perception that never gets to the conscious mind.

    I’ve always done my work on the basis of a certain recurring theme. Socrates has a version of it. Confucius has a version of it. There are many versions of it. Basically the theme is: Wisdom is knowing how little we know. When you hold that then your mind is open to all possibility all the time, instead of closed off to possibility that doesn’t suit your current belief system. And the alternative media needs to be aware of that because much of it gets caught in that trap of “here and no further.” The rabbit hole is so deep, far deeper than almost anyone can imagine.

    MS: With Russia propagandised by the West as the aggressor in Ukraine, and Russia’s success against ISIL in Syria, it seems Vladimir Putin has become the leading face of global resistance against Empire. What are your thoughts on Putin and the role he is playing – knowingly or unknowingly – in the larger drama?

    DI: Obviously, if you look at Putin’s history, he’s not a nice man. But when I look at people like Obama, and of course his predecessor Bush, when I look at David Cameron, when I look at Hollande in France, and all these characters, one thing that shouts out about Putin is that he is phenomenally more intelligent than all of them put together. And Putin is clearly aware of what the agenda is for Russia.

    When I played on a football team managed by a guy named Jimmy Hill, a well-known guy in this country [UK], back in the 1960s, he used to say, when you start a match, get your retaliation in early. What he meant by that was take physical control of the game early. What Putin has been doing is getting his retaliation in early.

    He has, to an extent, thrown a spanner in the works – although there are other deeper levels of this. It depends on what level you’re actually looking at and talking about at the time. But he’s fully aware of the Western coup, the American coup in the Ukraine, where this puppet Poroshenko was put into power. And, of course, Wikileaks documents have come to light that talk many years ago, long before anyone heard of it in the Western public, that Poroshenko is a United States asset in Ukraine, and this asset of long years suddenly becomes president in a coup that was a classic George Soros colour revolution – what they call regime change. The idea was to create antagonism between Ukraine and Russia to try to justify the demonisation of Russia. In Syria, of course, the American/British/NATO-created terrorist groups – whether it be the so-called Free Syrian Army, or ISIL/ISIS, or whatever name is given – they were created as proxy armies for the West to take over country after country.

    And, of course, they have long wished to dethrone Assad, going back at least to documents in the pre-9/11 world, which listed the countries they wanted to take over – regime change. These countries have been ticked off – Iraq, Libya, Syria and so on.

    The idea was to let loose these proxy armies, funded and trained by the West, to remove Assad and tear Syria asunder. This is why, despite having the biggest military on Earth by a vast, vast distance, despite having European countries involved in the fight against ISIL, in the bombing of ISIL… actually ISIL were just expanding and expanding because they were being allowed to. The idea was not to stop them but just to give the illusion of trying to stop them. Assad reached the point where he was in imminent danger of losing control, including Damascus. Putin could see what was going on and got his retaliation in early, if you like. He went in there to turn that around and blatantly showed, by the success of pushing ISIL back, how the West has been systematically allowing ISIL to expand – because that’s just what they want. They’re a proxy army for the West.

    I’m sure that threw a spanner in the works of where they wanted to go. Assad is not gone. They thought Assad would go as quickly as Qadhafi, and he hasn’t. Largely that is because of Putin. So from here on in it’s going to be interesting to see where this goes in terms of Russia because Putin has been playing these other idiots, like Obama and Cameron and Hollande, etc., like a stringed instrument. It’s like a chess match and he’s been putting them in check all over the place. Interesting to see where it goes because the plan all along has been to create, at some point, a third world war with the West against Russia and China. I’ve been talking about that since the 1990s.

    Whether they can pull that off is another thing given that Putin will be absolutely aware of that agenda.

    MS: What about Brexit and the European Union?

    DI: The European Union is the forerunner for what they want around the world. The EU, as it’s become – a fascist/communist/bureaucratic dictatorship controlled by dark suit appointees in Brussels – was created originally as a free trade area because people back then would not have accepted the EU that it’s become now. What has happened is a classic and perfect example of what I call the totalitarian tiptoe.

    That free trade area has evolved through the incessant centralisation of more and more power in Brussels with the dark suits. It has been transformed from a free trade area – which is “good for jobs, mate” they said – into this bureaucratic prison state, in effect, where national laws are overridden by anything these dark suits come up with.

    Other trade areas around the world including Australia and New Zealand are planned to become their version of the European Union, because the structure of the ‘hunger games society’ is designed to be a world government, a world central bank, with a cashless world currency, dictating to all people everywhere – imposed by a world army which is what NATO is designed to evolve into. I mean, look how fast that’s coming in now. In books in the 1990s I was saying watch for NATO to start operating outside of its designated area of the North Atlantic region. Now, of course, NATO turns up in the Middle East, and all over the bloody place. It’s the evolving world army.

    Under that structure, at the global level, it’s designed to be versions of the European Union all over the world – in the Australia/New Zealand part of the world, in the Americas, in the Middle East. We’ve already got the African Union, and so on.

    The plan for the EU is to continue to absorb more and more countries. Goodness knows, when you see the European Union there are still countries that want to join. I’ve said before – wanting to join the EU and the European monetary system, having seen it for what it is now – which has been a disaster – wanting to join that is equivalent to looking up at a blazing apartment block and asking when you can move in. It’s insane.

    But the hidden hand, of course, is behind these countries, pushing them in. So the last thing they want are for countries to start to leave because that’s starting to reverse where they want to go.

    What’s happened in Britain is this moronic man, David Cameron, the prime minister, was coming up to an election last year, and opinion polls were showing big support for a party here called UKIP, the UK Independence Party, which was specifically created to campaign to leave the European Union.

    What they call here middle England invariably votes for Cameron’s Conservative Party over the decades. They are sick of the European Union and its impositions, and the incredible red tape it imposes upon small and medium size businesses – red tape which is simply designed to destroy them so the corporations can take over everything.

    Therefore, UKIP’s campaign to leave the European Union was getting more and more support in the polls from these otherwise natural conservative voters. And so Cameron panicked and said if he got elected again as prime minister he would have a referendum on giving people the opportunity to vote in or out of the EU.

    The polls also strongly suggested the Conservative Party would not win outright, but again, like the administration before, would have to share power with a second party in a coalition. The Liberal Democrats coalition was with the conservatives in the government before the election. And the Liberal Democrats are EU fanatics. Cameron obviously thought that in this coalition he’d have the excuse of saying the Liberal Democrats are blocking the referendum. In other words, he thought he could promise the referendum without any consequences.

    But unfortunately – unfortunate in one way, but in this way, fortunately – he got power without needing to be in a coalition, and thus he was stuck with a promise of the referendum. And this referendum coincides with this vast influx of migrants and refugees into Europe. The fear of the consequences of this influx of refugees has turned more and more people against EU membership – so they say Britain can control its own borders rather than having them dictated by the dark suits in Brussels.

    MS: In 2009, you began your Melbourne talk with a story of being held up by immigration officials at Melbourne airport who compelled you to sign a “character test” agreement. What aspects of Australia’s role in the hidden hand’s agenda most concern you?

    DI: Actually I had to sign something that said I read something. Bizarre. “Just sign and say you’ve read this.” Well okay, I’ve read it.

    Australia is a very obvious example of the fact that this agenda is global, and therefore globally coordinated. The things that are happening in Australia – more and more surveillance, even the exposure of elite paedophilia rings, etc. – they’re everywhere. I won’t get into it now, but paedophilia among the elite is everywhere, all over the world, for reasons I explain. Thus for it to come up in Australia as it’s come up in Britain – and they’re trying to desperately put the lid on it in Britain and other places – is because it’s a global phenomenon. So is this increasing surveillance that Australians are being put under. The same is happening here, the same is happening in America, the same is happening in Europe – because it’s a global agenda.

    The thing that stands out for me, in recent times, in Australia – and should send alarm bells and big red flashing lights everywhere – is the law that says you can’t get benefits if your children aren’t vaccinated. This is another global phenomenon – mandatory vaccinations. This Australian law, in effect, targets people who survive because of those benefits. It is a stepping stone – and only a stepping stone – to a fully fledged mandatory program of vaccinations for everybody.

    In California, and in other parts of America, there is this theme coming of mandatory vaccinations because this awakening, even on that level, is causing more and more people to look, for instance, at what’s in vaccines and the evidence of their effect. The fact is vaccines are demolishing developing immune systems in kids less than 2 who are being subjected to this tidal wave of toxic shite – called vaccines – which is ensuring their immune systems will never be the same as they could be. And they’re adding more and more all the time. But because of the awakening, people, in greater and greater numbers, are rejecting vaccinations.

    There are two things they plan to do. First of all – and this is happening more and more – they have to outlaw, censor and block information that exposes what’s going on and that helps people awaken to what’s going on. Where people are awakening and saying, “we’re not having this,” then they introduce laws that say, “you are having it and you’ve got no choice.”

    The scale of fascism, the scale of arrogance, that believes it can dictate what human beings put into their own bodies and what is allowed into their children’s bodies is so unspeakable, almost unimaginable to anyone with a sense of decency, a sense of fairness and a sense of justice.

    From what I read, there’s been a big vaccination take-up as people have been forced into it, otherwise lose benefits. The people of Australia need to open their minds to what’s going on and what the connections are because the vaccine agenda is just part of the larger agenda. It’s one strand in the web, and a very important one.

    Because Australia has such a small population, comparatively, to so many other countries, it has the opportunity to take back control of the country from that which hijacked it – going back to the British empire. You look at excess of 300 million people in America – well that takes some turning around. But you look at the population of Australia. You’ve got a great chance there, if enough people say enough, realise what’s going on and respond to it with unity. And I hope that going to Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and onto Auckland will stimulate awareness of not just the nature of what’s happening, but the scale of it and how all these apparent unconnected dots connect to show a very clear picture.

    I hope – and this is the whole idea – that when I leave, this information is in greater circulation and being talked about more than when I arrived. That’s the whole point of doing it. And I do pay great tribute to the work that New Dawn and everyone involved in it has done because it’s great more and more people are getting involved, more and more people are becoming researchers, more and more people are starting websites to circulate this information.

    But it was a lonely road some time ago, trying to make heard what people were dismissing and being called every name you can think of. And New Dawn was there. I’ve got enormous respect for what that publication has done when, as you well know, there weren’t a lot of people compared with now that were interested in hearing it. It’s the pioneers that start the change. New Dawn in Australia has absolutely been one of the pioneers.

    David Icke’s book Phantom Self (and how to find the real one) is available through https://shop.davidicke.com.

    The first part of this interview appears in New Dawn 156 (May-June 2016)..

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 157.[/alert]

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  • Technetronic Enslavement: Life Inside the Matrix of Control

    Technetronic Enslavement: Life Inside the Matrix of Control

    From New Dawn 156 (May-June 2016)

    The march of modern progress has brought forth many advances for humanity, and yet man is lost. Technology, automation, and miniaturisation, along with the micro-processing revolution, allow things to happen that were unimaginable only ten years ago, let alone a century before. These rapid advances have brought with them a number of complex problems, some of which challenge the very notion of progress.

    If you define the level of an advanced civilisation by how much freedom its citizens experience in their day to day lives – along with the protection of individual liberties as we have come to expect in the 21st century – then the march of the mass surveillance state over the last 15 years should be of serious concern. Despite public pleas from our leaders that, ‘if only we pass this next law or security measure’, or ‘if we can just launch one more month of airstrikes’, or ‘if the public will allow just a bit more access to their personal information…’ and so on, the state and its corporate partners have developed a firm grip on power over, and intrusions into, our personal lives that is only increasing.

    In the West, a type of cognitive dissonance has already set in regard to this and other related issues – partly due to the sheer dominance of the ‘war on terror’ and national security narratives that overtook society after 11 September 2001. Since then, it seems that every six months or so the narrative is revised; as one perceived threat subsides, another emerges in its place.

    What remains is a stark picture; a society where real time monitoring of every aspect of day to day home and work life is now expected, and where thought conformity is rampant. It’s a self-policing, self-perpetuating interdependent, paranoid system of globalised capitalism governed by the ruling class’s Thatcheresque trope known as the T.I.N.A. principle1 which stands for: There Is No Alternative. When challenged on the efficacy of this master default position, most bureaucrats, technocrats and neoliberal financiers will loyally cling to this mantra as if it were the only commandment etched in Moses’s stone tablets.

    Welcome to the technetronic age.

    Sleepwalking Into a Technetronic Nightmare

    Since its inception, the dream of technological progress was sold to the West as the new liberation, embodied by breathtaking advances in automation and increased consumer convenience.

    The trap has been sprung. The micro-processing revolution gave way to the Internet and the information technology revolution, but it didn’t take long for our most celebrated advances to turn on society.

    A primary exhibit would be the NSA-Snowden revelations of 2013. For the first time, the mainstream media and the public at large got a broad scope look at the actual scale and reach of the digital surveillance state. Instead of fighting back, or demanding reform, the public cowed instead, as people began self-policing their speech on social networks. The mass psychological ‘chilling effect’ that so many contemporary futurists and writers warned us about has finally come to pass. A century and a half later after his death it seems Jeremy Bentham was right – the Panopticon actually works.2 20th century prophets like Eric Blair aka George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and others all issued vivid warnings about this dark prospect, but in the end it seems the intense glimmer of technology has somehow blinded society to its inherent risks.

    It’s true that history often repeats itself but never in the exact same way. During the post-WWII Cold War era, Soviet citizens maintained a rigid hyper-socialised system because they feared an existential threat – in this case the possibility of nuclear attack from its ideological nemesis, the so-called ‘capitalist’ countries. North Americans and western Europeans backed a fifty year-long arms race because of a perceived existential threat from its ideological opposite commonly referred to as ‘Communist Russia’ or the Soviet Union. The United States also used this perceived threat to project power on every continent, and in nearly every country on the planet. This shaped America’s idea of itself, and also of its role in the world as a benevolent force for freedom and democracy.

    In today’s Western threat matrix, yesterday’s communists have been replaced by today’s Islamic terrorists. Who will it be tomorrow?

    How much of this was true or just public perception is beside the point because the systems of control erected during this long and dark era are with us today – a full spectrum of total information awareness, and a technetronic society driven by a highly mechanised military industrial complex economy.

    As technology advances the fundamental questions remain: are we smarter now than we used to be? Are we living longer and more fruitful lives? Is this true progress?

    What’s lost cannot easily be regained.

    Smart Machines, Obsolete Man

    It’s not as if philosophical and social critics didn’t see it coming. Many did in fact.

    Orwell and others recognised the potential power of applied behavioural science and its dystopian clinical applications. Should the state ever have the ability and technology to claim preeminent domain over the technosphere, then a social malaise might set in not unlike that depicted in the novel 1984, or in Philip K. Dick’s story The Minority Report. What Orwell and other futurist visionaries could not fully calculate, however, was the intimacy that has developed between technology and the ‘user’. So deep is the personal relationship between these two seemingly opposite parties that the user becomes one with the technology.

    The complete inversion of their relationship becomes apparent when technology is awarded a personality by society, as it’s widely celebrated for being ‘personalised’ and ‘smart’ (technological algorithms appear to predict what the user wants next). Conversely, the human is stripped of his or her individuality by being labelled a ‘user’. Here the human side of this transaction is characterised as a mechanised party, while the robotic or automated actor is celebrated as the ‘smart’ side of this interactive equation.

    As man becomes increasingly dependent on technology, the difference between man and machine will become narrower. As artificial intelligence, big data and algorithm modelling amplify inside the matrix, this fusion of man and machine will beg the question: Are humans interacting with technology, or is technology interacting with the ‘user’?

    This is an important fundamental point to consider because it means the difference between who is considered a superior form – man or machine. Already, today, many argue that machines have certain distinct advantages over their human creators. As technology advances, the machines become increasingly independent of man to perform certain basic functions and tasks. This can be as simple as turning itself ‘off’ and ‘on’, or as complicated as self-regulating its energy output, parsing out operational tasks, and processing and self-analysing data streams in real-time. All of these things were once considered the job of the human ‘operator’ of the machine who has been steadily replaced by programming instructions in the form of customised software ‘apps’.

    Considering this phenomenon of the changing relationship between man and technology in the context of the relationship between the state and its citizens, immediately we can see certain areas that cause concern.

    When a Bureaucracy Becomes a Technocracy

    It’s important to both understand and recognise the technocrat and his or her mindset.

    A bureaucrat can be characterised as a human administrator performing highly impersonal administrative processes. Bureaucrats will quietly celebrate delays and ‘red tape’ as proof of the primacy of ‘the process’.

    The technocrat takes this management concept level higher and proselytises about seemingly omnipotent abilities of technology in performing administrative tasks, all in real time. With these new ‘smart’ tools of the future in hand, the old bureaucrat will soon be obsolete. One form of bureaucratic tyranny is replaced by another.

    Here the technocrat engages in a kind of infatuation with his or her machines. For the technocrat, there is a certain beauty in the perfection and perception of infallibility of the machine. The bureaucrat’s archaic world of carbon copies, notaries and stamps seems almost organic in comparison.

    Once again, the machine is elevated to a higher station than human.

    Between Two Ages

    When viewed with a wider social and culture lens, a clearer, albeit more disturbing picture comes into focus. In this new world, be it a progressive or free market capitalist future (depending on which new religion you subscribe to), society’s values are clearly shifting away from past traditions that were underpinned by introspection and the inherent spiritual and organic aspects of individual experience. Regardless of your political or social position, it’s a near given that most people have become acutely aware of this phenomenon at some point. That something is happening is not in question, but rather what are we shifting towards is perhaps a much more profound question. The answer isn’t hard to find. In fact, it’s right at our finger tips – every hour of every day.

    In his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era,3 globalist luminary and geostrategist Zbigniew Brzeziński described (back in 1970) the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries:

    “The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

    Arguably, Brzeziński’s vision was stunningly accurate, and some might argue this globalist architect was speaking with the certainty of a deep state insider. Indeed, recent state measures in both Australia and the United Kingdom are indicative of the very system outlined in Between Two Ages. In both instances, the technocrat state’s over-reliance on both signature and algorithmical data, coupled with an unhealthy fixation on computer modelling. Undoubtedly, this has resulted in some cold and brutal social applications.

    In Australia, odious counter-terrorism laws brought in under former PM Tony Abbott seem to be going from bad to worse – with the latest power grab being the extension of “control orders” for children as young as 14 years old.

    Writer Daniel Hurst of The Guardian describes Australia’s disturbing new legislation rolled out only this year.4 New draconian control order laws would allow the court to consider evidence that is hidden from the suspect – a reversal of the basic principles of habeas corpus and due process. This new regressive law would “provide the subject of a control order and their lawyer with a censored or summarised form of ‘national security information’ against them even if the court considers other, secret details when making its decision; or, Provide the subject and lawyer with none of the information in the source document, even if the court considers all of that information when making its decision.”

    In the UK, through a new scheme called ‘Prevent’, an obsessive security state has been attempting to indirectly draft secondary and high school level teachers into the role of spies in order to profile and report on any young students, namely Muslims, who “might be candidates for radicalisation.” The Guardian reports that:

    “Since last summer, Prevent has obliged teachers to refer to police pupils they suspect of engaging in some sort of terrorist activity or radical behaviour. The duty has been largely considered a failure by teaching leaders, partly because about 90% of referrals end without action being taken.”5

    In both examples, our freedoms are now being stripped by technocrats and their computer models.

    The Quantification of Everything

    In the 21st century, people have been reduced to numbers, literally. While in the recent past you may have often felt like a number, and you sometimes objected to being treated like a number, today you really are a number. As society moves along the Maglev track of progress and the hyper reality of computerisation, now at the very cusp of artificial intelligence (AI), those old traditional values and deeper human ethics have been replaced with one singular, all-encompassing, all-knowing and all-powerful principle of modernity: functionality.

    Writer and philosopher Jay Dyer describes this cultural chasm:

    “The trek of modernity from the Enlightenment has resulted in the mechanisation of society to such an extent, everything is viewed through that lens. This is the overriding Grand narrative now – that everything is a version of technology, including nature itself and so everything is there to be quantified and measured. This is what the philosopher René Girard talked about in his work – when you mechanise everything, everything becomes just merely some statistic or quantity and this is a reflection of the binary aspect of computers. So if everything is viewed as statistics or quantities within bureaucratic processes, then you have a kind of atomisation where everything is broken apart.”

    In this new world order, this is the primary principle for all value judgments and remains the only interest of any technocrat inquiry: is it functional? How well does it function? Can the outcome be measured? Can we model the data in order to profile the subject? Welcome to the brave world that is a world of mechanisation.

    Notice how most capital and wealth has flowed into areas of the economy where investors place the highest value: areas integral to functionality. Big data, digital apps, social networks and automated computerised trading and transactions. As the technology becomes faster and more advanced, less emphasis is placed on the human element, which also means less value is allocated there too.

    Dyer adds: “This is what the dominant mindset of Western imperialism has led to, where everything is broken apart and it’s then left to the power blocks – corporate, banking, security, media and social engineering, to take all the broken pieces and put them back together in a new form by design, and that results in the notion that you no longer have any collective belongings such as gender, or a tribe, or family, and by extension, you are no longer part of something called humanity, because there’s no such thing as human nature anymore.”

    Such is the unstoppable evolution of technology, and only a few visionaries have had the foresight to see it coming and pose some warning of the inevitable evolutionary tribulation which is already taking place.

    Humanity is in the process of transformation, from what it used to be – spiritual individuals part of a family, to what he or she eventually will become – a component part of a larger mechanised design.

    In this new technetronic age, humans reside below and are subservient to technology within the mechanised society’s social hierarchy.

    Technetronic End Game

    Who shoulders the blame in this dystopian scenario – humans or machines?

    One might argue that once the AI horizon is eclipsed, it’s simply too late to lament, much less analyse the merits of such advanced technology. The answer to this question may emerge from a careful psychological analysis of post-modern man.

    Author Jay Dyer explains the dangers that could result from the fetish or perversion characterised by the blind acceptance of technology as an omnipotent force in the world, where society and its leaders are unable to question the manifestation of a new technology. He explains:

    “This dovetails with the idea of techno fetishism, and the idea that technology can solve all our problems. The grand narrative that [Richard] Dawkins presents, this is the generic idea that we are all on this grand track of progress where technology fits into this scheme where everything is automatically progressive. This fetishism can be extended even to military applications. For instance, someone detonates a nuclear bomb and this is seen as high technology, and therefore progressive.”

    Dyer is not merely exaggerating by introducing the prospect of thermonuclear warfare. Partly due to a mainstream media that is either afraid or too ignorant to address this issue, the majority of the public are unaware of recent advances and increased stockpiles of next generation nuclear weaponry, held primarily by the United States. In all likelihood, these will be eventually sold and distributed to its strategic geopolitical partners.

    Enter the next generation of nuclear weapons, courtesy of the Pentagon. This year’s $8 billion upgrade includes the new guided B61-12 nuclear bomb which adds features such as the nuclear yield of the bomb can be adjusted before deployment. Previously, this fell under the banner of ‘tactical’ or ‘battlefield nukes’, but now under the heading of ‘smart’ bombs.

    Plans are already underway in Washington to spread these new weapons across the planet from the year 2024. The Guardian reports: “The issue has a particular significance for Europe where a stockpile of 180 B61’s is held in six bases in five countries. If there is no change in that deployment by the time the upgraded B61-12’s enter the stockpile in 2024, many of them will be flown out to the bases in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey.”12

    Former head of US Strategic Command, US Marine General James Cartwright, reveals what is perhaps the most insidious aspect of this new generation military tech:

    “If I can drive down the yield, drive down, therefore, the likelihood of fallout, etc, does that make it more usable in the eyes of some – some president or national security decision-making process? And the answer is, it likely could be more usable.”

    The Guardian article’s author Julian Borger concludes: “The great thing about nuclear weapons was that their use was supposed to be unthinkable and they were therefore a deterrent to contemplation of a new world war. Once they become ‘thinkable’ we are in a different, and much more dangerous, universe.”

    Imagine that. If you consider this ‘usability’ talking point within the context of the previously mentioned prophetic statements about artificial intelligence by an esteemed panel of innovators, philosophers and scientists, then any sane person might be concerned we are passing over a dangerous threshold in human history.

    It’s an epic tale, echoed in biblical lore and throughout ancient mythology. Mankind is now, again, in danger of falling prey to his own creation.

    Is jumping ship an option, at least out of North America or Europe, and other urban centres around the globe? While fleeing to the remains of the old ‘free world’ in places like South America, Asia or Africa may provide temporary respite from a pernicious globalised system, it is in no way a long term solution. The long arm of progress knows no borders and if left unimpeded, it will colonise even the most remote location.

    For those who truly value their freedom and want to pass on a positive legacy to their progeny, the final battle is unavoidable: standing up to, and confronting the machine.

    Nine out of ten experts agree: this very well could be mankind’s last stand.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 156.[/alert]

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    Footnotes

    1. TINA Principle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
    2. For more on the Panopticon, see Oceania Forever: Rise of the Global Police State by Patrick Henningsen, New Dawn 153 (Nov-Dec 2015)
    3. Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Praeger, 1970
    4. ‘Call for lawyers to speak up for terrorism suspects in closed courts’ by Daniel Hurst, The Guardian, 15 Feb 2016
    5. ‘Teachers back motion calling for Prevent strategy to be scrapped’ by Richard Adams, The Guardian, 28 Mar 2016
    6. ‘Flying the Flag, Faking the News’ by John Pilger, http://johnpilger.com/articles/flying-the-flag-faking-the-news
    7. Collectivization and Social Engineering by Zeev Levin, Brill 2015
    8. ‘Google’s Gods of Truth’, http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/05/06/behold-googles-new-gods-of-truth/
    9. ‘Apple co-founder on artificial intelligence: “The future is scary and very bad for people”’ by Peter Holley, The Washington Post, 24 Mar 2015
    10. ‘Stephen Hawking just got an artificial intelligence upgrade, but still thinks AI could bring an end to mankind’ by Peter Holley, The Washington Post, 2 Dec 2014
    11. ‘The 21st Century Matrix: Technocracy and the Rise of the Machines’, http://21stcenturywire.com/2010/08/02/what-is-the-21st-century-matrix/
    12. ‘America’s new, more “usable”, nuclear bomb in Europe’ by Julian Borger, The Guardian, 11 Nov 2015

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • [Trapped] in The Net: What They Don’t Tell You About  the Internet & Social Media

    [Trapped] in The Net: What They Don’t Tell You About the Internet & Social Media

    This article was published in New Dawn 158 (Sept-Oct 2016)

    “Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster.”
    – Theodore J. Kaczynski (a.k.a. ‘The Unabomber’)

    Flawed, to a depth unlike any other beast in the animal kingdom, human beings rapaciously despoil their own environment and continue to conduct activities that appear to threaten the very existence of the biosphere – our home, planet Earth.

    Through the latter half of the 20th century an insatiable technological race to develop weapons of mass annihilation resulted in nuclear standoff among a handful of belligerent nations and an incongruous co-operative policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.). That dire policy still stands today, a shadow cast unthinkingly over all human endeavour and indeed life itself.

    The very idea that humanity willingly chose to pursue a scientific course that delivered the capacity to destroy the world many times over should be breathtakingly troubling, yet inspires relatively little comment. From the very same tumultuous technological crucible that produced the enduring madness of nuclear weaponry came a more recent development – the Internet. The online world promises an ‘abundance of riches’ (as its techno-evangelists constantly assure) but it also has a profound (and profoundly under acknowledged) dark side.

    Birthed from the Pentagon’s desire to be able to maintain communications through the early stages of a nuclear assault (by spreading the electronic and telephonic communications load over a labyrinth of interconnected routes and servers), what we today call the Internet (which at one point was called ARPANET) was shepherded into existence by D.A.R.P.A. (the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in partnership with the scientific, academic and corporate communities.

    In these times of giddy techno-utopianism (sleekly designed Apple products are fetishized throughout our entire culture, social media is worshipped as the new frontier in community ‘cohesion’ and ‘inclusive’ communication – to name just a few examples) it would seem important to remember that the architecture of the Internet (and all the associated soft and hard-ware) was parented by a nexus of the Military Industrial Complex, the Secret State, the Corporate Leviathan and deliriously utopian elements of the scientific and academic worlds.

    Many have noted the deleterious relationship between humankind and technological development, where humanity acts as virtual slave to a misdirected and essentially unstoppable scientific progression.

    Though now used as a term of derision, the original Luddites rightly feared the impact of encroaching technology on their livelihoods and sought means to disable it. Thinkers from Karl Marx to Marshall McLuhan also addressed and questioned mankind’s enthralled relationship with technological innovation. For whom shall be the servant and whom shall be the master?

    The New Dark Age of Mediocrity & Narcissism

    Since the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press five centuries ago, the linear/literary mind has evolved and shaped prodigious developments in art, science and culture. We may now have entered an era of far more seismic – though not necessarily positive – changes. Acclaimed neuroscientists like Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel suggest that the Digital Revolution’s hyper-stimulating and overtly transient landscape may be responsible for ‘re-wiring’ our neural circuitry to a more ‘efficient’ and industrialised state (producing more, more quickly) that also downgrades our capacity for concentration (the locus of education) and even wisdom.

    Writer Nicholas Carr warns in The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains that “the seductions of technology are hard to resist” but, as German philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, the advance of technology dictates that a new, superficial “calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practised as the only way of thinking.”

    Carr also notes that a raft of recent research indicates that the “more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion and other emotions.” Bombarded by endless linked options and stimuli, we reduce our human qualities and become more machinelike – simply fleshy automata.

    Most online experiences are mediated by algorithms that expedite efficiency in searching the web, comparing products and offering connections to calculated similar content. They advance easy options, rarely subjecting us to the discomfort of a differing opinion or intellectual challenges (as may happen in the real world). If the World Wide Web is an infinite digital library, search algorithms are most likely to fill that library only with volumes chosen to please us. An endless feedback loop of gratifying, self-serving opinions and subtle reinforcement – a mirrored cubicle of refracting self-reflection, an echo-chamber of recycled automatic sound bites. An apocalypse for the enquiring soul.

    A cursory scan of Facebook, Instagram or Tumblr will produce mountainous evidence that we are enduring The Age Of The Ego. Current digital technologies have been designed by fevered armies of psychologists to appeal to the very weakest flaws in human nature – self-obsession and flagrant narcissism. Can there be a sadder, more alienating device than the ubiquitous ‘selfie-stick’? Surely the end is nigh.

    Another question posed by Carr was, “Is Google making us stupid?” Forever distracted by the digital avalanche, research and voluminous anecdotal evidence suggests that we are already drowning under the online tsunami – vast amounts of information at our fingertips, yet unable (or unwilling) to analyse, prioritise, sift and evaluate – we simply consume and regurgitate.

    Obesity of the Mind

    Richmond, Virginia author Matthew Crawford proposed in his book The World Beyond Your Head that we are seeing a social crisis as more and more people lose touch with physical reality and escape into the online matrix.

    According to Crawford: “Figuring out ways to capture and hold people’s attention is the centre of contemporary capitalism. There is this invisible and ubiquitous grabbing at something that’s the most intimate thing you have, because it determines what’s present to your consciousness.” In the clamour to advertise in every mental space (and monetise every social interaction), we are fast losing the room to think, be creative, be playful – to ponder. “Attention is a resource, convertible into actual money,” and we need to reclaim our own senses and resources, “because when you talk about attention, you’re talking about the faculty by which you encounter the world.”

    Crawford continues… “the media has become expert at making irresistible mental stimuli” and systems are designed to encourage “playing till extinction,” a cognitive science and “social engineering project” facilitated by “mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations.”

    Crawford has found respite, peace and fulfilment in discovering working with his hands again – between writing projects he restores vintage motorbikes in a local repair shop and eschews the seductive online experience.

    The Creeping Tide

    A creeping tide of evidence now suggests that the online experience itself (aside from the content) may also affect direct cognitive damage.

    Research conducted in 2012 at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (in Wulan, China) scanned the brains of 35 men and women (between the ages of 14 and 21). Those classed as suffering from Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) were shown to have notable changes to the white matter of the brain (the nerve fibres/connections) compared to those that did not suffer from IAD. The researchers noted “abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.” The neurological damage observed shared “psychological and neural mechanisms with other types of substance addiction and impulse control disorders” and was comparable to the effects seen in alcoholics, drug addicts, video game addicts and those with other behavioural afflictions.

    As a multitude of libraries close (or partially divest their collections to make room for the ubiquitous computer terminals and Wi-Fi routers) scholars from University College London conducted a five-year research programme examining evolving reading and research habits. They logged the activity of visitors to two popular research sites (one a British Library site and one the portal of a UK educational group) that offered journal articles, e-books, and other information. The study found a notable “form of skimming activity” as students and researchers bounced from one source to another, rarely reading more than a page or two and almost never returning to an earlier source. As the study concluded: “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

    What is suggested here is a ‘pancaking’ of intelligence, as cognition is spread wider, but also thinner, with a more superficial comprehension and understanding.

    The deluge of multitasking and ‘multi-screening’ (having numerous windows or devices open and active at once) is, according to scientists, shattering focus and rewiring our brains. Eyal Ophir, after stints in Israeli intelligence and the airforce, joined Stanford University in 2004. He sought to challenge (through research) the traditional view that the human brain can only competently process a single stream of information at any given moment. Devising tests involving the timed comprehension and filtering of patterns of red rectangles from patterns of blue rectangles, what Ophir and his colleagues found shocked them. Those who identified in the study as ‘multitaskers’ were significantly worse at sorting the shapes and thus filtering out what was deemed as irrelevant information. Also multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems, taking longer to switch between simple tasks. It’s possible that technological overload may be confusing the brain’s systems for determining priorities, marking every form of digital stimulation as urgent, creating a haze of constant, buzzing panic and distraction.

    A study conducted at the University of California indicated that constant interruptions from email alerts and pinging phones contributed significantly to stress levels. Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University, noted that stress hormones can affect short-term memory loss and promote debilitating mental ‘fog’. According to studies conducted at the University of Utah, only a fraction of people (possibly around 3%) are capable of operating calmly with regular digital disruption.

    Numerous studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators now show that ‘hyper-texting’ (the ability to click highlighted sections of text linked to sources or further information) actually decreases comprehension significantly. Interestingly, even the appearance of a hypertext (whether clicked or not) erodes understanding by offering the disorientating opportunity for distraction. A 2001 Canadian study tasked subjects with reading the Elizabeth Bowden short story ‘The Demon Lover’. The control group read the story in traditional linear text, the test group read a version dotted with hyperlinks. It took the test group longer to read the story and they were an extraordinary seven times more likely to report ‘confusion’ in their comprehension of it. A further 2007 academic review of related experiments concluded that bouncing between digital documents and linked pages seriously undermined understanding. Today’s Internet landscape of pop-up ads, competing videos and flashing, bouncing images can only yield to more mental maelstrom.

    As pointed out by Nicholas Carr: “When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

    The available pool of information entering our working memory is referred to by psychologists as the ‘cognitive load’. The Internet turns this steady ‘drip’ of ideas into a ‘blast’, overwhelming our limited cognitive abilities and thence disabling vital components of them. As Carr noted, “The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it.”

    The Long Shadow of the Surveillance State

    In June of 2013 the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden seized headlines around the world. Snowden confirmed what many have long suspected: built over decades, we now exist under a vast and omniscient surveillance infrastructure. Ostensibly constructed under the rubric of combatting ‘terrorism’, it doesn’t take much imagination to see that the real target is domestic dissent and any and all threats to capital and authority.

    Much like Jeremy Bentham’s 19th century design of the guard-less prison (the Panopticon), today’s admitted (and much publicised) Surveillance State leads directly and unequivocally to mass self-censorship and reflexive self-regulation.

    An Oxford University study conducted by Jonathon Penney reported a notable ‘chilling effect’ on the Internet habits of American adults directly related to the Snowden revelations. Monitoring Wikipedia searches after June of 2013 (the date Snowden surfaced) Penney noted “a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned ‘al-Qaeda’, ‘car bomb’ or ‘Taliban’,” as compared to prior to that date. Page views continued to decline over a year, suggesting a “longer-term impact from the revelations.”

    “This is measuring regular people who are being spooked by the idea of government surveillance online,” Penney opined. “You want to have informed citizens. If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate.”

    Other research from MIT indicated that “users were less likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in trouble with the US government,” and a recent study conducted for the US Department of Congress noted that respondents reported that “29 percent of households concerned about government data collection said they did not express controversial or political opinions online due to privacy or security concerns.”

    The ‘chilling effect’ has also spread to the legal profession and substantially impinged on press freedoms. A 2014 report from the ACLU and Human Rights Watch was based on interviews with lawyers and journalists “covering intelligence, national security, and law enforcement for outlets including the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC, and NPR.” According to the report, it has become apparent that lawyers, journalists and their sources are now considerably more fearful of surveillance and their ability to protect sources and attorney/client privilege. Examples cited include:

    “[Journalists’] techniques ranged from using encryption and air-gapped computers (which stay completely isolated from unsecured networks, including the Internet), to communicating with sources through disposable ‘burner’ phones, to abandoning electronic communications altogether… As with the journalists, lawyers increasingly feel pressure to adopt strategies to avoid leaving a digital trail that could be monitored. Some use burner phones, others seek out technologies designed to provide security, and still others reported travelling more for in-person meetings. Like journalists, some feel frustrated, and even offended, that they are in this situation. ‘I’ll be damned if I have to start acting like a drug dealer in order to protect my client’s confidentiality’, said one.”

    If the Snowden revelations were, perchance, designed to stun, cower and silence the general population (and perhaps even potentially problematic professions) for the advantage of the Security State, then one can only marvel at their resounding success.

    In April of 2014, speaking at a St. Petersburg media conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin described the Internet dubiously as a “CIA Project.” Despite the expected howls of denial from the dutiful Western press, it should be noted that Putin is a former KGB official and probably has some inkling of what he speaks.

    In a remarkable (and remarkably overlooked) piece for The Medium (entitled ‘How The CIA Made Google’) journalist Nafeez Ahmed charted the labyrinthine connections between the entire functional architecture of the Internet and the National Security State. Not only entwined through injections of start-up capital and seed funding, the ostensibly ‘private’ mega-corporations of the online experience (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo et. al.) boast an extraordinary overlap of board and executive personnel with the Security State (NSA, CIA, DIA, DoD etc.) but also a co-operative and synergistic culture that appears more like a corporate family structure than an adversarial private/public relationship. Likewise, the CIA’s capital investment arm (In-Q-Tel) has been there since the beginning for Facebook (a fact curiously absent from the Hollywood version) and the entire spectrum of social media appear to be nothing less than an extraordinarily enthusiastic data harvesting and social engineering project (data being delivered willingly and on an incredible, in fact, unimaginable scale).

    Theodore Kaczynski (the notorious ‘Unabomber’) wrote a remarkably prescient document circa 1995 called ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’. In it, the author (‘F.C’ – assumed to be the convict Kaczynski) decried the apparently endless march of scientific technology to dehumanise and demean humankind and separate us from the ‘power process’ and the fulfilling fundamentals of human survival.

    Kaczynski may have been a terrorist or murderer – but he was certainly no armchair hypocrite – calling in his manifesto for “a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society.” And he had admirers in unlikely places, famed Silicon Valley alumni Bill Joy allowing that, “As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw merit in the reasoning in (Kaczynski’s writing).”

    Indeed, perhaps it is time to turn our backs on giddy techno-utopianism and revolt against our fevered technological servitude (before we become too stupid, disempowered or lethargic to do so).

    Time to wind back, or even destroy, our Internet addictions, turn off the candy-coated Information Superhighway and reclaim some vestige of our flawed but fleshy independence before we are subsumed in a deluge of mediocrity and totalitarianism. Before we are Pokémon Go-ed into a virtual net of moribund surveillance capitalism.

    But who, dear friends, has the courage for that?

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 158.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    Sources/Recommended Reading

    Ted Kaczynski, Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, Feral House 2010

    Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, Norton 2010

    A. Keen, The Internet Is Not The Answer, Atlantic Books 2015

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • The People vs. the Hidden Hand: David Icke Speaks Out (Part 1)

    The People vs. the Hidden Hand: David Icke Speaks Out (Part 1)

    From New Dawn 156 (May-June 2016)

    Among those who’ve chosen to question mainstream belief systems, David Icke is an icon, a one-man alarm clock who has probably woken up more people to the global conspiracy than any other individual. He is a natural orator with a compelling and engaging style of both writing and speaking who has managed – in ways unlike any before him – to connect a vast web of seemingly disparate dots into a single, unified picture. It is a picture that, when he explains it to a freshly opened mind, enables that mind to see a single image in a fog of pixels. He has probably been the cause of more “ah-ha!” moments than any other researcher in his field.

    David Icke certainly had that effect on this writer, who, after watching his 2009 Melbourne presentation, finally understood how the events of 9/11 fit into a much larger paradigm – how 9/11 was simply a turning point in a complex, yet at the same time, rather straightforward narrative. It is a narrative of increasingly consolidating global power – a power that David Icke has researched and tracked for the past 26 years. But unlike many other researchers who pieced together the history of this global conspiracy, David Icke is not only able to join the dots, he sees where this agenda leads. His books and speeches foretold many aspects of the global conspiracy that have since come true or been exposed – the ‘war on terror’, global financial collapse, elite paedophile rings, emerging police states, the cashless society, implantable microchips, and the West’s brinkmanship against Russia and China with intent to ignite a third world war.

    David Icke began speaking truth to power 26 years ago, following a set of mighty synchronicities and epiphanies that prophesied the path to the world stage on which he currently stands. At that time, the world was far from ready to have its cherished beliefs dismantled, and David found himself the target of both ridicule and professional disgrace. But he persevered. He continued to research, to write and to speak. Perhaps if it hadn’t have been for 9/11, he might still have remained a cult hero. Amidst the confusion and dust of the world’s most influential terrorist attack, no one was better positioned and better prepared to make sense of the absolute insanity that followed. And make sense of it he did, exposing in clear and succinct terms the much larger agenda that the 9/11 attack served.

    New Dawn has been a longtime supporter of David Icke, and with the release of his newest book, Phantom Self (and how to find the real one), we are eager to welcome him back to Australia on his latest speaking tour. This magazine has been on somewhat of a similar journey in its 25 years of publishing, growing from humble beginnings to be one of the few reliable bastions of truth that dare strike at the heart of the matter – the gathering storm of the global conspiracy. It’s a stance that has won this magazine its share of attacks from the mainstream press. But as David Icke noted before the interview began, “That’s just confirmation you’re on the right track.”

    – Marc Star

    MARC STAR (MS): For over two decades, you’ve exposed a hidden agenda to enslave humanity via a fascist world government that intends to rule over all via centralised banking, a one world army and a vast surveillance infrastructure. In that time, you’ve been a major voice empowering and waking up people across the entire planet. At this point, the global elites are openly and brazenly devising new ways to protect and increase their power by ‘false flag’ incidents and the legal destruction of hard-won freedoms – and this is all happening as we stand on the verge of the inevitable – mass awakening. We are racing to the finish line: the people vs. the hidden hand. Who’s winning?

    DAVID ICKE (DI): If you just looked at the world through the eyes of world events and the mainstream media, then you would likely say that the hidden hand is continuing its vast and long planned agenda of creating a globally centralised fascist/communist dictatorship designed to impose itself on the fine detail of everybody’s life.

    I started this journey 26 years ago this month. I think it was the 31st of March 1990. That was the day that I walked into a psychic’s front room and was told I was going to go out onto the world stage, reveal great secrets that would eventually make me world famous, and I would face enormous opposition. But “they” would always be there to protect me.

    So that happened 26 years ago this month, and when I started out, well it was a very lonely place. Obviously I faced fantastic – historic in Britain – levels of ridicule and abuse. If you talked to people then – and I did, or tried to – about the kind of information that’s circulating today through what is called the alternative media, then there were very few who wanted to listen, and very few that weren’t instantly, reflex-action, dismissing the whole idea. But over these 26 years I’ve seen an extraordinary change in vast numbers of people. It’s a change that is going on and on – and is expanding all the time.

    Through the 90s the expansion was small, comparatively. But after 9/11 and after weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq – despite all the devastation that was justified by that lie – people did start, in a more obvious way in terms of numbers, to question the world they’d been told to believe in. What is happening now – in my experience anyway – is we’re moving in this expansion of awareness, this expansion of re-evaluating what people think of the world and how they see the world. It’s going into another level.

    Now of course it’s not the majority. It’s nothing like the majority, yet. But compared with 26 years ago, for people like me, it’s dreamland, not just in terms of the numbers of people who are looking at this information, but in terms of the kind of people who are doing it. What I’m seeing now are people that would have dismissed me and all this information with a wave of the hand 26 years ago – 20 years ago, 15 years ago, even 10 years ago – people who are, if you like, of the system, people in the system, people in the structure of the system, people who have up to this point believed in the system and think that anyone who questions or challenges the system must be some kind of anarchist or communist or whatever. These are the kind of people more and more who are looking at the world and saying, “Hold on a minute. Maybe it’s not like I thought it was” – in a number of different ways.

    For reasons I explain in the book Phantom Self, and will explain at length at the events in Australia and New Zealand, the middle classes, as they’re called, are being targeted by this hidden hand, because the idea – and it has been the plan along – is to create a global structure in which eventually less than one percent will control everything. And the rest of the population – that which survives – will be in servitude, poverty and deprivation. The idea behind this blatantly gathering global police state is to create the structure that holds in place that status quo of control by the less-than-one percent. I’ve dubbed it the Hunger Games Society, because the structure in that movie series, the structure of that society – never-mind the hunger games themselves – is very much along the lines of what this plan is seeking to impose.

    You have to get to the people who currently consider themselves pretty well off, many who would consider themselves even very wealthy, who think that austerity programs and attacks on the poor have nothing to do with them, not their business, doesn’t affect them. What I have been seeking to get across is that it does affect them, because in this hunger games society structure, they are part of the poverty stricken masses as well. Now to do that you have to remove the current wealth, and to a certain extent, the independence of these people.

    You are having this targeting of the middle strata of society – and higher. If you’re not in the one percent, they want your money too. They want your wealth. They want your independence too if you’re not in that, well, less-than-one percent, eventually. The United States’ version of the middle class, for instance, has been targeted massively with the outsourcing of jobs overseas. But the key, for me, of parting these people from their money, wealth and independence is what is called the “bail-in.”

    We had the outrageous bailouts after the engineered banking crash of 2008. Phenomenal, breathtaking amounts of what is called money were transferred from the people, via governments, to this less-than-one-percent elite – via bailouts of the so-called too-big-to-fail banks. That transfer of wealth was by government funds, or government borrowing, which the people are stuck with paying back. It was a transfer of wealth from the people through governments to the banking elite. And this has created an extraordinary situation in which governments, which are ultimately controlled by the same web, have justified austerity programs upon so many of the population – justified by the lack of money resulting from the banking bailout.

    Even with that you have this big strata of people who are still okay – many of them doing very well, certainly by comparison. But the hidden hand wants them too. And so we’ve had this move since the collapse of the banks in Cyprus, in which they’ve moved from a policy of bank bailouts to bail-ins, as they’re called. Instead of governments and institutions of government bailing out banks when they get into trouble, the bail-in goes straight to the bank accounts of those in the banks.

    People think that because they’ve got money in the bank it’s safe. But when you put money in a bank, all you are is an unsecured creditor. That’s all you are. And so the idea is to have, at some point – it may be in 2016, it may be in 2017, but at some point in this cycle of imposition and control – they’re planning a massive financial crash, bigger than 2008, which will give them the excuse to have the mass bail-in, which will simply use money that people have in their bank accounts to bailout the bank in question.

    If you look at the Cyprus example, which basically kicked this off, there were people – not in the least Russian people – with a lot of money in those Cyprus banks and they lost virtually all of it because the European Union, the European Central Bank, etc., put this so-called deal together – all manipulation – to bailout the banks by taking the people’s money.

    Now, more and more people in this middle strata of society – in my experience, anyway – are starting to see that all is not well and that actually they’re not as safe and above it all as they thought they were. Of course it’s not all of them. But now significant numbers of them are starting to look at my information, for instance, because it’s starting to make sense of the world that they see. And that’s the point.

    I said many years ago there was going to come a time when what had been hidden would have to break the surface and enter the scene, for a simple reason. If your covert plan is to transform global society via a global centralisation of power and police state imposition, then you can only do it completely covertly up to a point. At some point what you’re doing has to break the surface – in terms of changes to society that people see and experience – because otherwise you’re not going to transform society. You have to bring it into the scene to change the scene in the way that you want.

    So we have entered this period now where what is happening in terms of people’s daily experience, what they see on the news, is that a plan, which has been up to this point hidden, is being put in their faces. This is a dangerous and crucial time for the hidden hand because it can’t hide what it’s doing anymore.

    I hear people say, “Oh they’re just putting it in your face, now. They don’t care if you know.” There is some truth in that, but only some truth. I think the bigger truth is they don’t have any choice. They have to put it in our faces so that the world that our faces see is transformed into the world they want. Otherwise there’s no point in what they’re doing.

    It’s a dangerous time for the global agenda because now people can see more blatantly what’s happening, and they can start to see the patterns. One of the things I focus on, and I certainly will do so during my talks in Australia and New Zealand, is to connect the dots between a vast spectrum of world events so that the pixels become the picture and people see that it’s all connected.

    People say, “Oh, you see conspiracies everywhere.” No I don’t. I see one conspiracy, with many endless facets and faces. And that’s what I do in the talks. I connect those dots. And I’ll do it on a scale this time around that I’ve never done before – because as you move on, of course, you know more, things become clearer, and that clarity makes it much simpler to explain. But obviously I’ll also be talking about the nature of reality and the transhumanist agenda.

    I’m extremely encouraged by the numbers of people now who are opening their minds to this information, as well as the kind of people – the kind of people who still have influence within the system, who still have influence at those levels of society that can impact upon society in general.

    People say, “Oh, it’s not enough, there aren’t enough people awakening to this.” Well for those that can see what’s going on, or at least some of it, it will never be enough, because they know the scale of what’s unfolding and what’s behind it. But because I’ve been doing this for so long – over a quarter of a century – my point of reference is not the numbers that are awakening now, it’s how many were awakened 26 years ago. Because I have this reference point, coming from personal experience, I am extremely encouraged at the difference in numbers between 26 years ago and now. The more people awaken, the more people that talk about it, the more people point things out, the more people hear it, and so the whole thing expands.

    The reason that I’m going on this open-ended world tour – which goes into 2017, and will continue for as long as people want me to speak – is because, as I’ve been saying for many years, 2016, 2017 and 2018 are crucial years in deciding which direction human society takes. If we go on as we are, by 2018/2019, when this three–year period is complete, this world will be in serious lockdown in terms of freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and even freedom of movement in many areas. It will be much more difficult then to communicate what’s going on and turn this around than it is now. So I’m giving it everything I can in the next three years to make sure that the awareness of the world as it really is will be put before as many people as possible so this outcome can be headed off.

    In the end, of course, we have billions having their lives dictated and manipulated by a ludicrous few, in full knowledge of what they’re doing. And they can only do that while the billions are in ignorance and in apathy.

    MS: Your new book is titled Phantom Self. What is the Phantom Self?

    DI: I coined the term “phantom self” in the title and the text of my latest book to describe the fake self that people are manipulated into believing is who they are throughout a human life. Phantom self is the self we give a name to, we give a life history to, we give a family history to, we give a race to, and all these labels that people give themselves. Phantom self is a download, basically – a download from the system. We, in our true infinite state, are simply awareness – the state of being aware. Forget the body, forget form. These are all vehicles for this awareness to experience different realities. But the core doesn’t have two legs, two arms, a head and a body. It’s pure awareness. The system, appropriately, systematically has created a structure that we call human life to isolate incarnate awareness from the rest of our infinite awareness. It does this by so focusing attention on the five-sense world of physical illusion that nothing else can get in – i.e., the infinite wisdom, knowledge, and knowing of our true self.

    If you look at the system and human life, it’s virtually all focused on the five senses, stimulating the five senses, enticing the five senses, pulling in the five senses. We have this process where we come into this world and immediately we are under the influence of parents, in terms of our sense of reality, our sense of self. And the parents have been through the same system that you are about to go through, and they’ve downloaded the program – not every time, but the vast overwhelming majority of the time. And so you’re immediately influenced in your sense of reality by parents who have downloaded their sense of reality from the system. We accept normals that are completely insane, and we think they’re sane because they’re normal – normal being simply what we experience as what normally happens.

    Extraordinarily, within three or four years this incarnate awareness finds itself sitting at a desk with an authority figure representing the system telling the three-, four- or five-year-old when they have to be there, when they can leave, when they can eat, when they can talk, when they can go to the toilet, and so on. It tells them what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s true, what’s not true. And it gives them the system’s version of everything. This goes on year after year after year after year – right into the teenage years as adulthood approaches. At least five days a week, this newly arrived awareness incarnate is downloading the system’s version of everything.

    Now they even have this scam when you go from school into college/university education, you actually now have to take out vast loans to pay for your own programming. And so you come out at the end of this long time of downloading the system’s version of life and the world, you come out and you go off into politics, journalism, law, medicine, corporate jobs and positions, and you take with you into all those areas this core programming which everyone goes through. Some reject it because they can see through it. But the vast majority accepts it.

    There is a consensus on reality. Some people might call them left wing. Some people might call them right wing. But there is a consensus reality on all the basic things. This is why you get people of the left in politics and people of the right condemning alternative explanations of the world and life, when in every other way they are at loggerheads with each other, because that core programming is there. So a journalist who’s been through that core programming, when there is a health story, they won’t go to someone who has spent, say, 25 years studying other ways of treating people for various ailments. They won’t go to them to get information on the story. They’ll go to a doctor, because the programming says doctors are the only people that know anything about the body. But they’re often the last people that know anything about the body in terms of its real holographic nature. If they want to do a story about reality, they won’t go to someone like me who has spent 26 years studying reality with an open mind. They’ll go to a scientist who’ll give them the sum sheet from the system.

    What happens is, once you’ve been through this download, you then become an agent of the system without even realising that’s what you’re doing, because you’re passing on your programming to others. It’s called peer pressure. That’s another level of it. Then you’ve got the mainstream media that’s constantly pouring out the system’s version of everything – which you’ve been told is real through the education system. And so it’s no surprise that people in enormous numbers – billions and billions – go through their entire life believing in a version of self and a version of the world that’s complete crap. But the fact they believe in it means they perceive in a certain way. And thus they behave in a certain way. Thus they oppose things and support things on the basis of their perception of reality.

    When you put all of these elements together – the labels people give themselves, the life story, the family history, the racial history and all this programming – what that forms is what I call phantom self. It’s a self identity that believes that what we are is what we see in the mirror, what job we have, what colour we are, what income bracket we are, and so on. But that belief, that sense of self, is a belief in nothing more than a construct, a fake you who has been persuaded that this construct is you. Though there are endless elements of it that I talk about in the books, what overwhelmingly infects the whole perception is a sense of limitation, a sense of “I can’t,” a myopic sense of the possible.

    We have a situation then where phantom self, having taken the download, then polices other phantom selves. I use the following analogy in some of my books: We laugh at sheep because they follow the one in front and just run away from the sheep dog. But humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because we don’t need the sheep dog. Humans police each other. It’s like prisoners sitting in a cell, and one prisoner goes to open the door to get out, and the other prisoners run to stop him. That’s how the world of phantom self polices other phantom selves, and keeps them in line.

    What we need to do – and again, all this stuff will be talked about in the events in Australia and New Zealand – we need to break out of phantom self by seeing that phantom self is phantom self.

    MS: In the book you’ve coined the word transphantomism, as a counterpoint to the transhumanist agenda. What is transphantomism, and what does the world need to know about the transhumanist agenda?

    DI: I have a chapter in the book called transphantomism. Transphantomism is a term, obviously, related to transhumanism. The reason I call it transphantomism is because it is the next stage – even beyond phantom self – of isolating awareness in the tiny, tiny, microscopic world of the five senses.

    The idea of transhumanism is to get technology, most of it nanotechnology, into the body and connect us in mind/body/perception to what PR men for Frankenstein, like Google’s Ray Kurzweil, call the cloud. He is at the forefront of selling transhumanism as a means of creating the so-called super human. What he is really selling, and Kurzweil will know that, is the sub-human. Kurzweil, for instance, has said he expects that by 2030 most human thinking will not come through the human mind but will come from the cloud, because the human mind/brain will be connected to this cloud just as the computer in front of me now connects to the Internet.

    I’ve been writing in the books for a long time about the plan for what I’ve called the technological sub-reality. This is precisely what Kurzweil and his ilk call the cloud. The idea is that we will be technologically attached to, in effect, a version of the Internet and it will do our thinking for us. He is saying that more and more in this process human thinking and perception will come from the cloud, and less and less from what we call human, until there is no human – only the cloud.

    Like I say, they are trying to sell this outrageous, blatant, almost ultimate control mechanism as people becoming super human.

    I would ask this question: Why would people, representatives of this hidden, global network, that have spent, if you look at it, thousands of years through the generations, who seek to completely control and dictate to humanity, right down to their very thoughts and emotional responses, why on earth does anyone believe they would want to make humans super human. That is the last thing they want.

    What we’re seeing is what I call totalitarian tiptoe, where you start at “a” and you know you’re going to “zed,” but you go in steps so the direction you’re actually heading is not obvious to the vast majority of people. But if you track it every day as I do, then you see it. You see the direction it’s going. So the idea first of all was to get people addicted to technology. I say to anyone, “look around you.” Go on a train station, go through an airport, go through any public place where there are a lot people. Look around you. The addiction to technology is extraordinary – usually technology which has “smart” in its name, which is very significant as I explain in the book and explain in the events. So you get people addicted; that’s a step on the totalitarian tiptoe. Then you go to the next stage, which of course is well underway now, and you go to what are termed “wearables.” These are the smart watches, Google Glass, the Bluetooth thing on your ear, burning your brain, etc. There are more and more versions of these so-called wearables.

    The next stage after that are what they call “implantables.” And the implantables are getting this technology in the body. The implantables are the level that you can see, but much of this, for reasons I explain at length, is actually being done through nanotechnology and something they call smart dust, which are microscopic robot-type technology that can replicate themselves, that can build systems, that can transform the body into something that is synthetic rather than what we call natural. That is what’s happening. Our world is being turned into a synthetic version of what was before, for reasons I explain.

    Once people are technologically attached to this so-called cloud – this technological sub-reality, this fake reality – then the disconnection between incarnate awareness and infinite awareness will be extended, expanded, and made infinitely more extreme than it is even now, through the vehicle of phantom self. This is what we need to alert people to, because if we don’t, then three or four years from now, this transhumanism agenda will be far ahead of where it is now. You’ve only got to look around to see the way technological change is increasingly replacing humans with robots, with machines – straight out of the Matrix that is.

    The technology has been known for a long time; they’re just putting it into society in line with their agenda. And this technological “advancement” is getting quicker and quicker. Three years from now, this thing is going to be further along the road. Big time.

    In fact, I read an article in Forbes magazine a few months ago when I was writing Phantom Self that talked about implantables being commonplace in three or four years from now. Of course, the rest of the system – like the cashless society, etc. – is moving in the direction of making it harder and harder to function in society without this technology. It’s all part of the plan.

    We have a massive job in the next three years or so to expose this transhumanist agenda for what it really is: the assimilation of what we call human into the technological prison cell of artificial intelligence. And what is this artificial intelligence? No one seems to ask that. What is this artificial intelligence that will be dictating to human minds through the cloud? I say that this artificial intelligence is actually the force that’s been and is behind all this – as I explain in Phantom Self and will explain in the events.

     The second part of this interview appears in New Dawn 157 (July-August 2016) and can be read online here https://newdawnmagazine.dreamsites.io/articles/the-people-vs-the-hidden-hand-david-icke-speaks-out-part-2

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