Central Planning or I Know What I Know?

“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 shotswill 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

C. S. Lewis’s Blend of Sci-Fi and Theology: ‘That Hideous Strength’ Analysis (sciencefictionclassics.com)

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!

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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

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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

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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

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Small Moves of Faith, Giant Leaps For the Soul

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzTHC6JSUvM&feature=related

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 The video clip above is from the movie CONTACT.  It depicts a scientist, Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, traveling through space and time. Leading up to this journey Ellie had been listening for many years for any space ‘noise’, ‘noise’ which would provide evidence of life (ETs) on another planet.   One day she finally hears a regular series of pulses coming from Vega the brightest star in the constellation Lyra. 

 After deciphering the signal – prime numbers – with the help of a ‘quack’ entrepreneur/scientist Ellie discovers that the aliens have offered our planet a means to visit them – blueprints for a space ship.

 In short, the US government, after debate about science and religion and some personal politics playing out provides the money and the manpower to build the gyroscope-looking launcher and the personnel capsule. I won’t give away anymore of the story.  As you will see, Ellie gets to make the uncertain voyage into space.

 Out in the universe Ellie appears to arrive on a distant planet. More likely, though, she has entered a parallel universe where everything around her, the space-time gelatin, is simulated to be a reminder of her home and her memories.  She is in a parallel home of sorts where there are recognizable connections with earth. In her conversation with the alien she is told that life is itself bearable with the contact and company of others. Though this wasn’t the point of Carl Sagan’s story these pastoral words are truly reminiscent of the words spoken in the garden of Eden:  “It is not good for man to live alone.”

 I have watched this movie several times over the course of ten years. It is not an A-list movie but it has held my interest because of its use of astronomy and astrophysics. Also, some of the visuals are stunning, as you will see in the above clip.  Beyond this I like the movie because it deals with a science vs. religion aspect.  Yet, the movie story line wanders around too much and the antagonists are Hollywood stereotypes. Hollywood’s storyline rubric seems to be to debase religion at all costs to increase secularism & atheism.

The most over the top Hollywood stereotypes are saved for the religious antagonists:  a long-haired fiery revival preacher who denounces any quest for knowledge beyond what is ‘religiously’ known, an uncaring, ineffectual Catholic priest who is dismissive of Ellie’s pain and tells her when she loses her father that, in effect, that “these things are hard to understand but they are God’s will” and a liberal “man-of-the cloth-without-the-cloth” woman baiter who is a mishmash with regard to the metaphysical but totally driven by what he feels physically for Ellie. The amalgam of ‘religious’ space ‘junk’ floating in this movie is all way too bad for a movie which could take us places, to deep and far away places not understood before.  Instead the depiction of religion is more of the Hollywood meme of discounting a belief in God for hard cold cinema science (and box-office cash).

 There are many, as I say, interesting themes and subjects broached.  Not the least of which, is making contact and a connection with another human being, someone beyond yourself – a problem for a broad spectrum of people, including scientists like Ellie.

 But there is more here. As a Christian I know that science and a belief in God are not at odds. They are completely compatible.  But, science could never prove God’s existence.  God is outside of our reality.  In fact, He is reality and we are the finely tuned creatures, if you will, which God has chosen to love. And, He made the first point of contact when He sent His Son Jesus into our world.

Science via empiricism and reason can only take you so far. One needs faith to see beyond what is revealed.  God is there and He is not silent. He is waiting to make contact with you. Small moves or any move towards God will yield a response from God. You must first believe that He exists.

BTW: I enjoy this type of science fiction: known science encountering what it doesn’t know and venturing forward.

I wish a Christian film producer would produce a quality science fiction film using the themes of science and faith, reason and risk, encounter between God and creatures. The screen play could take its lead from C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy : Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.