When I read "Forge the Future" I knew that old Master Confucius was right when he said that one must change the language before one can change the world. The global elites are doing this nicely, as this 'Forge the Future' slogan demonstrates. It's straight out of the propaganda handbook of the former soviet Union.
One book which impressed me hugely - and which I not just recommend but think is a must-read - is that by Viktor Klemperer: "Lingua Tertii Imperii", english: the language of the 3rd Reich. He analysed how words, looking innocent enough, transported Nazi ideology into everyday life.
So it is with this and other slogans: they transport communist/socialist ideology painlessly into everyday life. I believe it would be a great project if the older generation of citizens from the former soviet Union and the then Warsaw Pact states were combing through the proclamations of the New Elites and demonstrate the communist content of such proclamations by showing up the words and expressions used.
It is. I bought it decades ago in Berlin when it was published as paperback. I was a teenager then. It not only opened my eyes to use and abuse of language, it made me sensitive to those abuses and to the subliminal propaganda words can transport.
I believe there are english translations of Klemperer's diaries: worth reading as contemporary document of life in the 3rd Reich, and as document of resilience and resistance of just one, powerless, persecuted individual.
Interesting - but building on what you've written about Machiavelli's influence before (ie competence as the justification for governance) I wonder how far this fixation on the future is a byproduct of manifestly failing governance - incompetence - in the present? Those in authority *have* to talk about the future, for the present is a hostile witness against them. As you conclude, though, they are running out of future to play with. Do you ever read John Michael Greer? He analyses the emphasis upon 'the future' as a secularisation of the Christian heaven.
The "heavenly end-state" the UN proclaims seems to encompass goals which are not those of Islam : gender equality and the end of terrorism being two. Given that they do not address this glaring conflict of vision (with a quarter - and growing - of the world's population) tells you that the UN is simply grift. No-one voted for the so-called 'representatives' of the 'peoples of the world' - it is ridiculous theatre to cloak their boondoggle.
This is a great question that gets to an important insight: the irreconcilability of the goals is a feature, not a bug. Worth me writing more about, I think…..
There's a demented logic among elites that wealth casts them in that position to look to the future, while the poor are mired in the day to day. Those toiling in the mere day to day, of course, feel they are more in touch with realities, while these ungrounded elites play fantasy games regarding the insubstantial future.
It occurs to me that there's been an historical trend to perceive things as moving that we previously perceived as static. This trend in the history of ideas has affected our understanding of history, philosophy, law (as you've pointed out), geography, geology, the movement of the Earth, blood circulation, tectonic plates and the motion of continents, and of course the evolution of life. Without a doubt, the popularisation of the notion of evolution since Darwin, and its place at the centre of Liberal politics as the progressive essence of governance has everything to do with the futurism we're witnessing.
With present-day science as the political tool once played by divinatory priests in the Greco-Roman period, what we're getting is a sci-fi project to launch humanity (or a portion of it) into its next evolutionary phase as cyborg super scientists who know what's best because their computer-modelling AI counterparts supply them with the really true Truth about everything.
I think these factors--the elites who think they're most fit to lead; evolution as the guiding concept; and science as futurist magic--account for the flavour of our moment.
15 hrs ago·edited 14 hrs agoLiked by David McGrogan
Another fascinating article David.
Kojeve is a new name to me but very insightful.
They must already be aware that, in the real present, their predicted future is stubbornly refusing to pan out. Hence the deleting/re-writing of history (e.g. “re-calibration” of historic excess mortality and climate data) and sensationalising of meteorological norms by TV channels.
It’s possible we’ll witness a still more ruthless assault on free speech and thought than even most of us are currently fearing, to try to preserve their “Authority”; can we rule out Gulags even?
But in truth, this is the culmination (thankfully in the hands now of truly incompetent politicians, in Britain at least) of the seductive Blairite utilitarian creed of the “Greater Good” and “the ends justify the means”. De Tocqueville couldn’t name the soft despotism he foresaw but it was already espoused by Bentham.
For his Panopticon (Bentham’s architectural design for prisons, workhouses and even schools, whereby an unseen jailer could observe and effectively control all inmates, segregated according to threat - rejected by 19th century politicians as inconsistent with basic liberties), now read Digital ID, CBDCs, social credit scores (and all that accompany them) and, no doubt, 15 minute towns to which the subjects (only) will be confined. … and later????. any one for Soylent Green?
The picture has been foretold and vividly described by de Tocqueville and Orwell.
The ending? If enough people wake up to the real and present danger to their liberties, we have hope.
Arcticles like yours are so important to that end. Thank you.
It seems to me inevitable that things will continue to progress as you predict, but that will all end in tears for entirely predictable reasons. There is trouble ahead, but afterwards, sanity.
Masterful ! I’ve often mused upon the justification for acceptance of authority and concluded that it resulted from an acceptance that we are all individuals struggling to come to terms with the knowledge that we are a societal species which necessitates the imposition of a sufficiency of rules and regulations in order to prevent an otherwise chaotic existence.
I was then struck by your pointing to the Machiavellian concepts of governance in which those in authority must continually introduce measures of societal control in order to justify their positions of authority. Essentially, governance of every type must never stop imposing rules and regulations because that is its only raison d’être for existing and what better way of justifying the imposition than claiming to not only envision the future, but also to provide the requisite rules and regulations which will enable us to exist in that future ie a future which has been planned for us, not by us.
That the future is and always will be a matter of complete guesswork is made evident at the dawn of each new day. We can and do make plans which we may hope to put into practice, but those plans are continually subject to greater/lesser alterations, by virtue of the vicissitudes of every day life.
Governance is also subject to an even greater level of vicissitudes and their attempts at claiming to envision the future are nothing more than ridiculous justification for the imposition of a level of authority in order to avoid being discovered as false projectors, in effect mere fantasists who have been provided with a bottomless pit of debt with which to implement their stargazing fantasies
This was what drove me mad about the Covid projections. The initial Neil Ferguson forecast was a complete fantasy, based on the utterly daft idea that in human affairs matters progress linearly. They never do - whether in terms of biology or behaviour.
Too damn right!! The dependence upon computer modelling is founded upon humanity’s constant and desperate search for certainty about the future and any modelling in the name of medical science is based on the concept that human beings are, essentially, the same vide the use of generic medications.
However, everyone has arrived at where they are via a different route. A route which will have affected how their body reacts to whatever it is faced with at any given moment. What that reaction is may be benign - possibly as a result, if you’re lucky, of the body having gradually adapted to what it is faced with - or it may be malign. In which case medical science will provide another product to counteract the effects of the first one. All of which is the result of our misplaced trust in a medical profession which has been well and truly captured by Big Pharma, this being the future as envisioned by the Rockefeller Foundation. I no longer have any trust in GP surgeries, but am willing to continue to have faith in the skill of a surgeon should I find myself in need of ‘renovating’ a specific part of my body!!
Anyway, the lunacy on which the Covid era was built was evidence that the future being planned has no beneficence at its root.
The Gompertz curve was also known to play a basic role in epidemics: it was never exponential growth. More incompetence? I mean, how does one explain a gaff so massive? Plenty of high-profile MDs were pointing it out. What truly accounts for such imbecility? And why does Ferguson still have a job? Because he keeps doing such a good one?
In his latest book "Plunderers of the Earth" (august 2024) Julius Ruechel makes the point that whenever a society embraces centralized decision making, empowers a masterful administrative state, it creates perverse incentives that gradually hollow out once-thriving civilizations.
All the worst examples of centralized states of the past century, being the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Maoist China had grand visions of the future. Ruechels book points out just how devastating these visions turned out to be: Ukrains holodomor (7 mln deaths of hunger), Mao's Four Pests campaign which led to 55 million people's death of starvation... and he makes the case that the idiotic campaign of "climate change" will most likely have equally bad consequences for us all.
Very well written and well researched book, I can recommend it...
Just bought it! Read his article last week promoting the book and I was hooked. It fits well with my own thinking on these matters. Fascinating that the issue is water and water vapour rather than CO2 (which never made sense). I find the idea that we're dealing with local climate issues rather than a global phenomenon more realistic and resolvable. It's sad to find so many blindly blathering on about carbon and global climate change when the issue is local and can be remediated through basic landscape design practices and smart farming. Everyone can be restoring water tables in their backyards. Farmers can switch to polyculture and permaculture practices. And housing development needs to change its deforestation methods.
Excellent, David. Modern governance may well "collapse like a house of cards", but that is a horrid prospect, and we should think about practical ways to avert it. Kojève's tale of the apples rests on more than just the wizzo idea. It also matters that the rest of the gang is ready to accept it. As you say, there is a sticky end in prospect. To avoid that, the gang must be less ready to fall in line in the first place. The fuhrer and his idea are a force of nature; the gang need to stand up to him. Today's gang (demos) cannot do that very well. Spoonfed for a century, we know only how to complain. Indeed we have institutions - unions, quangos, activists - to assist us in doing that. As the elite won't change, at least half of the solution must lie with we, the people. We need to be stronger, more confident, less gullible. The two traditional methods of becoming so, are education and wealth. Education, of course, is paid for and supplied by the state, so I will assume both the danger and the solution are obvious. On wealth, we can see that western citizens are very rich - meaning they get a large part of their income without having to work. But they do not feel rich, because the state tells them how and when to spend it, by a tangle of rules, taxes, and pensions. What is required is clear and simple; I will not suggest it would be easy.
When I read "Forge the Future" I knew that old Master Confucius was right when he said that one must change the language before one can change the world. The global elites are doing this nicely, as this 'Forge the Future' slogan demonstrates. It's straight out of the propaganda handbook of the former soviet Union.
One book which impressed me hugely - and which I not just recommend but think is a must-read - is that by Viktor Klemperer: "Lingua Tertii Imperii", english: the language of the 3rd Reich. He analysed how words, looking innocent enough, transported Nazi ideology into everyday life.
So it is with this and other slogans: they transport communist/socialist ideology painlessly into everyday life. I believe it would be a great project if the older generation of citizens from the former soviet Union and the then Warsaw Pact states were combing through the proclamations of the New Elites and demonstrate the communist content of such proclamations by showing up the words and expressions used.
Words matter ...
I know of Viktor Klemperer from having read Richard Evans' excellent trilogy on the Third Reich. Sounds like a great book.
It is. I bought it decades ago in Berlin when it was published as paperback. I was a teenager then. It not only opened my eyes to use and abuse of language, it made me sensitive to those abuses and to the subliminal propaganda words can transport.
I believe there are english translations of Klemperer's diaries: worth reading as contemporary document of life in the 3rd Reich, and as document of resilience and resistance of just one, powerless, persecuted individual.
Interesting - but building on what you've written about Machiavelli's influence before (ie competence as the justification for governance) I wonder how far this fixation on the future is a byproduct of manifestly failing governance - incompetence - in the present? Those in authority *have* to talk about the future, for the present is a hostile witness against them. As you conclude, though, they are running out of future to play with. Do you ever read John Michael Greer? He analyses the emphasis upon 'the future' as a secularisation of the Christian heaven.
I clearly ought to! Thanks.
The "heavenly end-state" the UN proclaims seems to encompass goals which are not those of Islam : gender equality and the end of terrorism being two. Given that they do not address this glaring conflict of vision (with a quarter - and growing - of the world's population) tells you that the UN is simply grift. No-one voted for the so-called 'representatives' of the 'peoples of the world' - it is ridiculous theatre to cloak their boondoggle.
This is a great question that gets to an important insight: the irreconcilability of the goals is a feature, not a bug. Worth me writing more about, I think…..
Some wonderful observations here, David. Reminds me of the shotgun graph from the Club of Rome's book, *The Limits to Growth* (which you can see here: https://analogymagazine.substack.com/p/stats-delusions-and-psy-ops).
There's a demented logic among elites that wealth casts them in that position to look to the future, while the poor are mired in the day to day. Those toiling in the mere day to day, of course, feel they are more in touch with realities, while these ungrounded elites play fantasy games regarding the insubstantial future.
It occurs to me that there's been an historical trend to perceive things as moving that we previously perceived as static. This trend in the history of ideas has affected our understanding of history, philosophy, law (as you've pointed out), geography, geology, the movement of the Earth, blood circulation, tectonic plates and the motion of continents, and of course the evolution of life. Without a doubt, the popularisation of the notion of evolution since Darwin, and its place at the centre of Liberal politics as the progressive essence of governance has everything to do with the futurism we're witnessing.
With present-day science as the political tool once played by divinatory priests in the Greco-Roman period, what we're getting is a sci-fi project to launch humanity (or a portion of it) into its next evolutionary phase as cyborg super scientists who know what's best because their computer-modelling AI counterparts supply them with the really true Truth about everything.
I think these factors--the elites who think they're most fit to lead; evolution as the guiding concept; and science as futurist magic--account for the flavour of our moment.
Without wishing to blow my own trumpet too much: https://newsfromuncibal.substack.com/p/the-circulation-state-people-energy
Another fascinating article David.
Kojeve is a new name to me but very insightful.
They must already be aware that, in the real present, their predicted future is stubbornly refusing to pan out. Hence the deleting/re-writing of history (e.g. “re-calibration” of historic excess mortality and climate data) and sensationalising of meteorological norms by TV channels.
It’s possible we’ll witness a still more ruthless assault on free speech and thought than even most of us are currently fearing, to try to preserve their “Authority”; can we rule out Gulags even?
But in truth, this is the culmination (thankfully in the hands now of truly incompetent politicians, in Britain at least) of the seductive Blairite utilitarian creed of the “Greater Good” and “the ends justify the means”. De Tocqueville couldn’t name the soft despotism he foresaw but it was already espoused by Bentham.
For his Panopticon (Bentham’s architectural design for prisons, workhouses and even schools, whereby an unseen jailer could observe and effectively control all inmates, segregated according to threat - rejected by 19th century politicians as inconsistent with basic liberties), now read Digital ID, CBDCs, social credit scores (and all that accompany them) and, no doubt, 15 minute towns to which the subjects (only) will be confined. … and later????. any one for Soylent Green?
The picture has been foretold and vividly described by de Tocqueville and Orwell.
The ending? If enough people wake up to the real and present danger to their liberties, we have hope.
Arcticles like yours are so important to that end. Thank you.
It seems to me inevitable that things will continue to progress as you predict, but that will all end in tears for entirely predictable reasons. There is trouble ahead, but afterwards, sanity.
Masterful ! I’ve often mused upon the justification for acceptance of authority and concluded that it resulted from an acceptance that we are all individuals struggling to come to terms with the knowledge that we are a societal species which necessitates the imposition of a sufficiency of rules and regulations in order to prevent an otherwise chaotic existence.
I was then struck by your pointing to the Machiavellian concepts of governance in which those in authority must continually introduce measures of societal control in order to justify their positions of authority. Essentially, governance of every type must never stop imposing rules and regulations because that is its only raison d’être for existing and what better way of justifying the imposition than claiming to not only envision the future, but also to provide the requisite rules and regulations which will enable us to exist in that future ie a future which has been planned for us, not by us.
That the future is and always will be a matter of complete guesswork is made evident at the dawn of each new day. We can and do make plans which we may hope to put into practice, but those plans are continually subject to greater/lesser alterations, by virtue of the vicissitudes of every day life.
Governance is also subject to an even greater level of vicissitudes and their attempts at claiming to envision the future are nothing more than ridiculous justification for the imposition of a level of authority in order to avoid being discovered as false projectors, in effect mere fantasists who have been provided with a bottomless pit of debt with which to implement their stargazing fantasies
This was what drove me mad about the Covid projections. The initial Neil Ferguson forecast was a complete fantasy, based on the utterly daft idea that in human affairs matters progress linearly. They never do - whether in terms of biology or behaviour.
Too damn right!! The dependence upon computer modelling is founded upon humanity’s constant and desperate search for certainty about the future and any modelling in the name of medical science is based on the concept that human beings are, essentially, the same vide the use of generic medications.
However, everyone has arrived at where they are via a different route. A route which will have affected how their body reacts to whatever it is faced with at any given moment. What that reaction is may be benign - possibly as a result, if you’re lucky, of the body having gradually adapted to what it is faced with - or it may be malign. In which case medical science will provide another product to counteract the effects of the first one. All of which is the result of our misplaced trust in a medical profession which has been well and truly captured by Big Pharma, this being the future as envisioned by the Rockefeller Foundation. I no longer have any trust in GP surgeries, but am willing to continue to have faith in the skill of a surgeon should I find myself in need of ‘renovating’ a specific part of my body!!
Anyway, the lunacy on which the Covid era was built was evidence that the future being planned has no beneficence at its root.
The Gompertz curve was also known to play a basic role in epidemics: it was never exponential growth. More incompetence? I mean, how does one explain a gaff so massive? Plenty of high-profile MDs were pointing it out. What truly accounts for such imbecility? And why does Ferguson still have a job? Because he keeps doing such a good one?
" [...] telling us a great deal about what the future has in store: uncertainty, mystery, struggle, hope."
I accept those terms gladly -- they sound to me like the eternal, human condition.
Indeed!
In his latest book "Plunderers of the Earth" (august 2024) Julius Ruechel makes the point that whenever a society embraces centralized decision making, empowers a masterful administrative state, it creates perverse incentives that gradually hollow out once-thriving civilizations.
All the worst examples of centralized states of the past century, being the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Maoist China had grand visions of the future. Ruechels book points out just how devastating these visions turned out to be: Ukrains holodomor (7 mln deaths of hunger), Mao's Four Pests campaign which led to 55 million people's death of starvation... and he makes the case that the idiotic campaign of "climate change" will most likely have equally bad consequences for us all.
Very well written and well researched book, I can recommend it...
https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/Julius-Ruechel/dp/B0DDCHYTNK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UUZ1SCBIKANM&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pOgGGRSJnFGXJrV1XJVULmoctSZFhB5Dr_UwacEufPyyYc7Cfdhn3hRvumgP5zbO.1ONrRL7lri_t4YReA7sZD2PmkRTH0Bas917x8nzv_4I&dib_tag=se&keywords=julius+ruechel&qid=1727170526&sprefix=julius+ruechel%2Caps%2C98&sr=8-1
Just bought it! Read his article last week promoting the book and I was hooked. It fits well with my own thinking on these matters. Fascinating that the issue is water and water vapour rather than CO2 (which never made sense). I find the idea that we're dealing with local climate issues rather than a global phenomenon more realistic and resolvable. It's sad to find so many blindly blathering on about carbon and global climate change when the issue is local and can be remediated through basic landscape design practices and smart farming. Everyone can be restoring water tables in their backyards. Farmers can switch to polyculture and permaculture practices. And housing development needs to change its deforestation methods.
On my shelf and looking forward to reading it.
Excellent, David. Modern governance may well "collapse like a house of cards", but that is a horrid prospect, and we should think about practical ways to avert it. Kojève's tale of the apples rests on more than just the wizzo idea. It also matters that the rest of the gang is ready to accept it. As you say, there is a sticky end in prospect. To avoid that, the gang must be less ready to fall in line in the first place. The fuhrer and his idea are a force of nature; the gang need to stand up to him. Today's gang (demos) cannot do that very well. Spoonfed for a century, we know only how to complain. Indeed we have institutions - unions, quangos, activists - to assist us in doing that. As the elite won't change, at least half of the solution must lie with we, the people. We need to be stronger, more confident, less gullible. The two traditional methods of becoming so, are education and wealth. Education, of course, is paid for and supplied by the state, so I will assume both the danger and the solution are obvious. On wealth, we can see that western citizens are very rich - meaning they get a large part of their income without having to work. But they do not feel rich, because the state tells them how and when to spend it, by a tangle of rules, taxes, and pensions. What is required is clear and simple; I will not suggest it would be easy.