Central Planning or I Know What I Know?
May 19, 2024 Leave a comment
“If science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t – well, we’re done.”
That is Lord Feverstone speaking to Mark Studdock in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.
Feverstone, a shrewd sociopath, uses idealism to lure gullible Mark Studdock, an ambitious, self-centered and shallow intellectual looking to ‘upgrade’ his life. Feverstone wants Mark to join the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.)
N.I.C.E. is a scientific social engineering agency and a front for dark supernatural forces. It is bent on world domination through scientific management. Propagandistic media is used to persuade the educated, like Studdock, to join in disseminating N.I.C.E. propaganda:
One interesting feature in the effort toward totalistic control over society, as developed in That Hideous Strength, is the matter of influencing public opinion through the news media. Mark, the insecure protagonist in the story, finds himself drawn into the “inner ring” of the technocratic project; he eventually discerns his role to write stories that support the agenda of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.). -Ted Lewis, Jacques, Jack and the Technocrats | | The International Jacques Ellul Society
Feverstone continues working Mark . . .
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”
[Mark] “What sort of thing have you in mind?”
“Quite simple and obvious things, at first – sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biological conditioning in the end and the direct manipulation of the brain . . .”
“N. I. C. E.’s symbol, devoted as it was to “Technocratic and Objective Man” (That Hideous Strength, 259), was a muscular male nude grasping a thunderbolt (That Hideous Strength, p. 215).” – The Devils in Our World – Official Site | CSLewis.com
There were significant parallels to N.I.C.E.’s scientific management activity and the characters involved in 1945, when Lewis came out with the final book of his Ransom trilogy. Mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) the “father of scientific management”, could have been one of the characters in the technocratic project. And there’s Le Corbusier (1886–1965), a Swiss French architect, designer, and painter who was an urban planner.
Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.
-Theodore Dalrymple, Le Corbusier’s Baleful Influence: The Architect as Totalitarian (city-journal.org)
Today, there are significant parallels to N.I.C.E.’s scientific management activity and the characters involved. I suppose one could replace the Lord Feverstone character with a number of elites: Lord (Klaus) Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) or Lord (Tedros Adhanom) Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization (WHO) or with the infamous Lord Science, Anthony Fauci and his COVID boss Lord (Francis) Collins who now Confesses Lockdown Damage Was ‘Another Mistake We Made’.
The scientific management of COVID “to save a life” went in a horrible direction against humans. Many of my posts from March 2020 onward document the destructiveness of central public health planning and what other experts were saying.
Certainly, there are those today who want to rework humans with neural links, gene therapy, AI, and scientific management via central planning.
The following well-produced documentary Trust Us is an absolute must for understanding the central planners and the elites. Homeschoolers should show this video to the charges.
““Trust Us” traces the rise of American technocracy: governance by bureaucratic experts. Beginning in the early 20th century, “Trust Us” reveals how our leaders funneled power to unelected experts, who were convinced they could engineer solutions to all our nation’s problems. Not only did these experts fail to solve those problems, but in example after example, they caused irreversible damage to the country.
With The One Best Way – scientific management – Progressives “impose an ideology that not only can every corner of society be planned and controlled from the top down, but that it must be.”
Trust Us | The Rise of American Technocracy (youtube.com)
As we saw during COVID, the collusion of science and state powers forms a dangerous mix. We were told and made to “trust the science” about masks, lockdowns, social distancing, and the COVID vaccine for a flu virus that was 99.9 % survivable for healthy adults who were not very elderly.
The elites of public health central planning lied to us about immunity so that the vaccine could be pushed by the medical-industrial complex. They told us lies about hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin so that the vaccine could be pushed by the medical-industrial complex. They told us lies about the origins of COVID to protect the medical-industrial complex that created a gain-of function virus.
At the same time, you would be mocked as “misinformed” and as a “conspiracy theorist” if you questioned the elites of public health central planning. You would be punished by censorship or loss of license or worse.
See this link for the lies we were told and for the adverse and deadly effects of the COVID vaccine: Investigations Archives – DailyClout.
A world-renowned scientist and leading immunology expert has raised the alarm with an explosive warning to the public that everyone who has been vaccinated with Covid mRNA shots “will die within 3 to 5 years, even if they have had only one injection.”
The alert was issued by Professor Dr. Dolores Cahill.
Renowned Scientist: All Covid-Vaxxed ‘Will Die in 3 to 5 Years’ – Slay News
The Onrushing Death Wave – by Richard Sauder (substack.com)
C.S. Lewis tried to warn us about the collusion of science and state powers used against humanity for “the public good.” (Who determines what “the public good” is should concern us all. Should the Godless determine “the public good”?)
That Hideous Strength “is a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked scientific and technological advancement.
The National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) embodies the perils of divorcing knowledge from ethics. Their vision of progress, which seeks to dominate and control nature, starkly contrasts the traditional Christian understanding of humanity’s role as stewards of creation. In this, Lewis critiques a growing cultural trend that prioritizes technological advancement at the expense of moral and spiritual values.” Manrado Gorgio
I am not against technological advancements. I have worked in engineering for many years. Experts are needed and should be given a platform but not the power to coerce.
Do not become so desperate and afraid that you beg government to do something.
I am against technological advancements tied to bureaucratic machinations and coercion by the state. I am against top-down scientific management central planning of my life. I am against elites telling me how to live my life. I am against being experimented on.
We, of Middle Earth America, are sick and tired of elites telling us how to think, speak and act!
~~~
Currently, there are organizations plotting world domination in terms of scientific management. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is one such cabal of elites chomping at the bit to control every corner of our lives. Another is the World Health Organization (WHO), the public health arm of the UN with more elites hankering to centrally plan our health under One Health.
Be aware! May 27th – June 1st, the Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly is being held in Geneva, Switzerland. The theme of this year’s Health Assembly is: All for Health, Health for All. There will be scheduled votes on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) pandemic treaty and the proposed changes to the International Health Regulations (IHR). The votes on this treaty and the IHR won’t be the end of an attempt at a global health security state; they mark just the beginning.
I do not want WHO oversight of my health/life. Nor do I want a Federal or State apparatus that has oversight of my health/life. I don’t want to exchange one authoritarian central planning system for another. I don’t want to live under a health technocracy. I prefer practical wisdom over central planning.
“. . .an unlettered peasant is considered ignorant, however much he may know about nature and man, and a Ph.D. is never considered ignorant, however barren his mind might be outside his narrow specialty and however little he grasps about human feelings or social complexities.” Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions
In the video you will learn:
The status and legality of the WHO treaty and IHR votes.
How we got here.
What’s in the ever-shifting documents.
What states are doing about it.
How state AGs and U.S. senators are stepping up for health freedom.
WHO Update 5/13/24: The votes are still on! (rumble.com)
WHO Update 5/13/24 – STAND FOR HEALTH FREEDOM
~~~~~
If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left. – Thomas Sowell
Government central planning means over-riding other people’s plans. – Thomas Sowell
“What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.”
― James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play
“Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs, “the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities … is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Here’s an inciteful brief description of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed:
“. . . the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry?
“The author [James Scott] builds a persuasive case against “development theory” and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a “high-modernist ideology” that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.” (Emphasis mine.)
What remains of hubristic endeavors. . .
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819
31 reasons why central planning failed in the Soviet Union | by Charles Orton-Jones | Medium
~~~~~
That Hideous Strength: Is technology dangerous?
Alister McGrath explores how CS Lewis addresses the perceived conflict between God and science in That Hideous Strength. What insights can Lewis give about pertinent issues such as the atomic age, eugenics and Artificial Intelligence? When does technology becomes technocracy and why was Tolkien so anti tech? What are some of the ways religion is being challenged and how does Lewis expose these critiques?
#143 That Hideous Strength: Is technology dangerous? – ThriveCast
John J. Miller is joined by Michael Ward of the University of Oxford to discuss C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.
The Great Books — Episode 224: ‘That Hideous Strength’ by C. S. Lewis | National Review
~~~~~
Cindy Wity 
And the Beat Down Goes On
May 4, 2026 Leave a comment
“. . . the terror of the night
or the arrow that flies by day
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.” Psalm 91
Fires, floods and extreme weather will imperil a third of all life on land in the next 60 years.
Nobel Physicist Predicts END DATE For Modern Civilization: And it’s quite soon…
The New York Times’s Resident Catastrophist Delivers Another Subscription to the End of the World
You wake up in a news cycle that never sleeps. With a cup of coffee, you read what ‘doomcasters’ are saying about end-of-life scenarios appearing on the horizon. Now you are fully awake and wondering what to do with these high alert headlines? Do you let existential crisis into your life?
You sip your coffee and remember that not long ago the world was subjected to pandemic hysteria. Coronavirus, the “global crisis of unprecedented reach and proportion,” started making headlines at the beginning of 2020.
You recall the WHO declaring the coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern.” And the headlines declaring surges in COVID-19 cases attributed to the Omicron variant, a “tripledemic” – COVID combined with flu and RSV, and of overwhelmed hospitals and healthcare systems and dancing nurses.
How could you forget that Biden imposed OSHA vaccination and testing emergency standards on your business or the reality-warping restrictive policies involving mandated lockdowns, masking, social distancing, fines, and vaccines, or the CDC predicting people will die?
You pour yourself another cup of coffee and look out the kitchen window. You see the couple next store – Vivian and Zoe – walking their dog Baxter. The other day, when you took the garbage can to the curb, the apoplectic twosome accosted you with “Democracy is threatened by the likes of you extremists, fascists, racists, homophobe Christian nationalists!” and “Trump is Hitler!” They saw you going to church last Sunday.
You drink your coffee troubled that Viv and Zoe had been beaten down by another media existential crisis campaign, akin to the rollout of the COVID-19 marketing campaign that told us to worry about it, and how to worry about it.
Under the spell of the “Democracy is threatened” campaign, Viv and Zoe were in a state of emotional panic. And that had them beat down on the closest person who didn’t share their views or the views of the commercial-sponsored media. The media’s inordinate influence has you very concerned about the collective fear and confusion its campaigns were causing to psyches.
The beat down goes on . . . in our heads.
~~~
How shall we then live in the context of existential dread?
Day after day imagination is battered with dire predictions– the end of this and that unless we do this and that. The steady beat of amplified headlines overwhelms one’s patience, strength, and soul.
Climate change, pandemics, wars, “Democracy!” AI Could Make Humans Irrelevant!
How do we respond to headlines telling us that we are done for? Should we let fear and helplessness dominate our lives? Can we live in terms of “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it”? This last way of going forward is the directive C.S. Lewis prescribes in his essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.”
Published in post-war 1948 and at the beginning of the atomic age, the essay provides a reality-check perspective and presents a scenario of how to live in life-ending times.
The following is an excerpt from the opening of Lewis’ short essay. During COVID the excerpt was passed around on the internet, with “atomic” replaced with “coronavirus.” Certainly, the essay can be applied to any dire life-threatening circumstances.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
The full essay, in the document below, contains questions and positions Lewis maintains, such as
Are we “accepting disharmony from the outset and defying it?”
Do we “hold up our own human standards against the idiocy of the universe?”
Are we the product of blind physical forces and therefore unable to provide answers to questions of a fatalist existence?
“But suppose we really are spirits? Suppose we are not the offspring of Nature…?”
“We must go back to a much earlier view.”
“We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it.”
“If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?”
“Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs.”
https://www.matthewaglaser.com/living-in-an-atomic-age
“On Living in an Atomic Age” (first published 1948) by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) From: Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis (edited by Walter Hooper; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pages 73–80
Born a few years after the above essay was published, I became well aware of ‘doomcasting’ headlines. I recalled some of the headlines in my January 2025 post Surface Readings.
The post began with the words of poet W H Auden – “Now is the age of anxiety” and my own take on things: “Impending doom has been in the news during my entire lifetime.” I wrote about the headlines and pronouncements of those anxious times which included the book The Late great Planet Earth based on the modern and heretical notion of dispensationalism.
~~~
Imagination Reset
Taking in the spirit of the times, imaginations are exposed to the negation of life and dire predictions often made for political ends that use fear to move power into the hands of the few.
Taking in the digital tabloid times is the “WHAAM!” of a Roy Lichtenstein Ben-Day dots painting. Imagination is amped up and ready to pop with a Pow!
What happens to our imaginations when we are constantly confronted with crisis? And, how do we live with dire predictions?
With the 24/7/365 news cycle, it’s little wonder that “News Avoidance” is becoming a common way to deal with the constant specter of troubling things, as Thaddeus G. McCotter writes in I Didn’t Read the News Today, Oh Boy: Embracing the ‘News Avoidance’ Pandemic
“If you live today, you breath in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” ― Flannery O’Connor
What we shouldn’t avoid are resources such as poetry, art, classical literature and music to help us cope with and see beyond the terrors of the modern age. We need the signal of those who came before and dealt with all kinds of things and not the clamoring noise of influencers.
Poet Wallace Stevens, in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” writes that poetry, as it interacts with reality and the imagination, can shape our perspective and provide meaning and comfort in a world that often feels overwhelming and harsh.
Wallace emphasizes the role of imagination in countering the beat down of life. If you are a Christian, you already know that the poetry of the Psalms does just that, e.g., Psalm 91.
In the video below, Dr. Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis discusses his book, Why Literature Still Matters.
Why Literature Still Matters: An Interview with Dr. Jason Baxter | Classical Home Education
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If you need a quick antidote to climate hysteria, Itxu Díaz provides his take on the news of impending doom: Climate Change Scientists Set a Date for the Arrival of Hell on Earth: the Year 2085.
~~~
Naomi Wolf with Outspoke: “I’m here tonight to talk about a huge news story that broke in the last couple of days. It could be thread that unravels the whole COVID virus/vaccine perpetrator issue.
“A criminal syndicate, essentially.
“Even just this initial gesture is so transformational. It breaks the spell of, “No one can be held accountable, no one can be investigated from the untouchable third rail COVID vaccine rollout, COVID virus rollout.””
“The Shocking Story of NIH Secretly Funding COVID”
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