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Alex Haslam - The psychology of tyranny

“The participants - far from thinking they’ve done something terrible - thought they’ve done something wonderful. THAT is frightening, THAT is shocking. And actually that I think is the most alarming element of Milgram’s research. So to conclude what I want to say: tyranny isn’t a product of natural or blind obedience. This is something Milgram himself recognized: “Even in this experiment we must disguise the character of obedience so that it appears to serve a productive end, therefore we’re not dealing with blind obedience.” he said. Rather it is a product of engaged followship that is predicated upon identification with those in authority - whose cause is believed to be right, and who are followed on this basis.”

“In order for men to do great evil, they must first believe they are doing good.” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

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Rebirth

“We can begin to recognize that the highly critical situation in which we find ourselves - ­­in our world as well as in our worldview - ­­closely resembles a critical phase in an archetypal initiation process of death and rebirth, a process that Jung explored both experientially and theoretically throughout his life, and that was subsequently illuminated by the work of others such as the psychoanalyst and transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof and the mythologist Joseph Campbell. (...) This initiation consists of a profound, very frightening encounter with the darkest aspects of existence: with death, with utter aloneness, with suffering, with a crisis of meaning, with a sense of despair, a leaving of the community. In a sense, it is a leaving not only of the safety of the maternal, familial, and community womb but of the entire community of life. (...) Perhaps we, as a civilization and a species, are undergoing a rite of passage of the most epochal and profound kind, acted out on the stage of history with, as it were the cosmos itself as the tribal matrix of the initiatory drama. I believe that humankind has entered into the most critical stages of a death-­rebirth mystery. In retrospect it seems that the entire path of Western civilization has taken humankind and the planet on a trajectory of initiatory transformation, into a state of spiritual alienation, into an encounter with mortality on a global scale that is no longer individual and personal but rather transpersonal, collective, planetary; into a state of radical fragmentation, into the "wasteland", into that crisis of existential meaning and purpose that informed so many of the most sensitive individuals of the past century. It is a collective dark night of the soul, a deep separation from the community of being, from the cosmos itself.  (...) We need ways of knowing that integrate the imagination, imaginal and archetypal insight, the intuition, the aesthetic sensibility, the revelatory or epiphanic capacity, the capacity for kinesthetic knowing, the capacity for empathic understanding, the capacity to open to the other, to listen.”

Richard Tarnas, “Is the modern psyche undergoing a rite of passage?”, source: https://cosmosandpsyche.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/revision-rite-of-passage.pdf

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Nobody can be sure they're always right. All of us would like to have been born infallible, but since we knew we weren't, it's better to attend to those who speak in honesty and good faith and learn from them.

Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes

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“The greater good”

“There has been a gradual philosophical shift in the Western world from a value system built around inalienable natural (individual) rights to a value system focused on maximising the “greater good” for the majority, known as utilitarianism. (...) To explain the catastrophic consequences of shifting to a value system based on utilitarianism, I'm going to start by returning to a simple moral riddle called the Trolley Problem (also known as the Bystander at the Switch). In case you’re not familiar with it, very briefly, the riddle goes like this: There is a runaway train hurtling towards a cluster of five people trapped on the tracks ahead. But you have the option to pull the switch and send the train down another track with only a single person trapped on it. You have the option of saving five lives by sacrificing one. Do you pull the switch? Anyone who believes in inalienable individual rights knows it is wrong to strip anyone of their rights for the benefit of others. You can do everything in your power to try to stop the train or to try to remove those five people trapped on the tracks, but you cannot knowingly sacrifice one person to save another. That would be murder. Just like you do not have the right to kidnap Junior off the street to harvest and transplant his heart, liver, kidney, lungs and pancreas to save five other sick patients. Society is not allowed to cancel inalienable individual rights in order to achieve positive mathematical outcomes. This idea of inalienable rights is best summed up by the mantra: “Your rights end where my begin, and vice versa.” This philosophy protects the rights of the minority from being violated for the benefit of the majority. It is the basis of all our constitutional rights and freedoms and the cornerstone of all liberal democracies. It prevents the greater good from being achieved at the expense of the few. The great horrors of the 20th century were all rationalized by their perpetrators as necessary to achieve some alleged greater good. When the inalienable individual rights of the minority conflicted with an alleged greater good for the majority, inalienable rights were swept aside. The end justified the means. With examples like these to warn us, society should have developed a strong immunity against abandoning the rights of the individual for the benefits of the herd.”

Julius Ruechel, “Preparing the ground for mass hysteria”

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We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of nature, this unity remains. Although we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these.

Ernest Everett Just

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Public-private partnerships

“In the past decade, economists and businessmen have figured out a way to monetize the success potential of social impact programs by analyzing the human behavioral data collected by social impact philanthropy and using it to speculate on social-innovation-finance-agreements futures. The Social Innovation Finance (SIF) model is a new funding mechanism designed to facilitate the large-scale implementation of successful results-oriented social interventions in a way that poses little financial risk to taxpayers. SIF combines two instruments: 1) a performance, or “Pay for Success” (PFS), contract that stipulates the specific results that constitute program “success,” and 2) a privately-issued “Social Impact Bond” (SIB), or operating loan, to cover the upfront costs of delivering the service intervention. (...) Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), a type of pay-for-success funding agreement, work by allowing private entities to provide upfront capital that government can repay later. This makes SIBs essentially a contract between a private entity and the public sector. The private party commits to pay for a program that leads to improved social results and public sector savings. The private investors are then repaid when contractually agreed upon objectives are achieved. (...) Because SIF pays for results achieved “outcomes” rather than “outputs,” the private funders who cover the up-front costs of service delivery have a financial incentive to ensure that social service providers know and employ the most effective methods for meeting performance expectations. One way to do this is to collect as much human behavioral data as possible in order to develop very accurate predictive algorithms. The SIF system encourages social impact investors to extract as much human data as possible – data about experiences, thoughts, choices, feelings, preferences, and any other factors that help investors predict and modify human behavior. This data may be collected from things like surveys, reports, camera and audio surveillance, access badges, web-based learning or record-keeping applications (such as educational technology and training programs), even video games. It is analyzed not simply to understand how or why people make the choices that they do, but also to determine how some choices may be encouraged and others discouraged. It has the potential to create a lucrative cycle of impact protocols that not only promote the mission-oriented outcomes that social impact investors support, but also generate an ROI for the social impact investors. (...) Social impact bonds, or pay-for-success contracts, become the stuff of behavioral futures markets for which investors and financial speculators may take a “short” or “long” position in the same way they would with any other type of financial instrument. Only in this case, the course of an individual’s life is the object of speculation. In this way, social impact philanthropy makes a commodity of the vulnerable people whom it claims to serve through their social programs. Program assessment data – the data harvested from the recipients of philanthropic social interventions and which is used to quantify impact – contributes to the development of more sophisticated and effective social interventions. It gives financial speculators a strategic advantage in selecting behavioral-futures investments positions (and these might be on the side of success or on the side of the failure of some interventions) that are most likely to generate maximum profits.” 

“"Impact" is a term that denotes a measurable change in some Environmental, Social, or Governance (ESG) metric (e.g. a "social determinant of health") that enables an institution or program to demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of its public "mission." The impacts are the basis for Social Impact Finance (SIF) - the "innovative financing" mechanism  that is at the heart of the Great Reset/Inclusive Capitalism. (...) The passports, surveillance, IoT sensors that are being deployed under the excuse of an emergency are, in fact, the impact tracking-tools that are so important within the new Social Impact Economy.”

Julianne M. Romanello, Ph.D.

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Human capital markets

“Efforts are now underway to “translate” the real world into a digital counterfeit that can provide financial markets with the figures and statistics it needs to execute the contracts of the incipient human capital markets - an insidious new form of capital assembled from our genetic code and other kinds of data that will form the basis of a financialized wonderland, enforced by blockchain technology and constantly monitored and updated through the burgeoning biosecurity state. Led by the world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations, the so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn humanity into datasets, which they can use to create more profits for themselves and their clients. (...) This new face of capitalism intends to function under the aegis of what is referred to as the “Impact Economy” - an idea that arose out of the ashes of the controlled demolition of the global financial system in 2008, which paved the way for hedge funds to replace banks as the dominant force in the world of global capital. That world is currently ruled by The Blackstone Group Inc., which controls a mind-boggling half trillion dollars under asset management, not to mention having the distinction of being the world’s biggest landlord and, ominously, the owner of the largest private DNA database on the planet (...) A social impact bond secures funding for a given social program from private investors, who “risk” their money for a return based upon the “successful” completion of the program’s stated goals. As with any bond, these forms of securitized debt can be traded on the open market just like a repackaged subprime mortgage loan. More specifically, social impact bonds are investment vehicles that are tied to the value of a social service provided by a government entity (...) Initiatives like the World Bank’s Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition (BSIC) are promoting the creation of “Ethereum blockchain solutions and applications that address global social and environmental issues” through its IXO protocol which “enables anyone to deliver, evaluate or invest in sustainable development impacts, with crypto-economic proof of Impact.” Outfits like SFI, founded by Sir Ronald Cohen, are driving the implementation of such protocols through multiple pilot programs to assess metrics like real-time data analytics, last-mile impact verification, and the viability of impact tokens (bond-specific cryptocurrencies) in education and other areas. This revolution entails the ability to “measure, evaluate, value, and tokenize verified impact data” obtained through our ubiquitous data-gathering, surveillance technologies, which will, in turn, hand it over to financial institutions to profit from the bets they make on poverty and misery around the world.”

Raul Diego, “The bits and bytes of the Great Reset”

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Suggestibility

“How can people be induced to believe in what may contradict obvious facts? A general distinction should be made between the more gradual changes of outlook and behaviour due to increasing age, experience and reason and the abrupt total re-orientations of viewpoint, often brought about by others, which involve the surrender of strongly held beliefs and the adoption of new beliefs often diametrically opposed to them. (...) Various types of belief can be implanted in many people, after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgement and heightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of “herd instinct” and appear most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger, which increase anxiety and so individual and mass suggestibility. Another result of overstimulation can be the occurrence of the “equivalent”, “paradoxical” and “ultra-paradoxical” phases of abnormal brain activity, discussed in previous chapters, which reverses the subject's normal patterns of behaviour. If a complete sudden collapse can be produced by prolonging or intensifying emotional stress, the brain slate may be wiped clean temporarily of its more recently implanted patterns of behaviour, perhaps allowing others to be substituted for them more easily. (...) It is a fallacy that intellectual awareness of what is happening can always prevent a man from being indoctrinated. Once he becomes exhausted and suggestible, or the brain enters the paradoxical or ultra-paradoxical phases, insight can be disturbed. (...) Although there will generally be dissenters uninfluenced by any particular method used, the mechanics of indoctrinating large and small groups of people can be relatively simple, and that is why they should be better understood by all those who may be subjected to them. The historical accuracy or logical coherence of the belief implanted can sometimes be unrelated to the amount of success achieved if only the disruptive human emotions of fear and anger are invoked, and kept going long enough to increase suggestibility.”

Dr. William Sargant, “Battle for the mind”

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Only someone who is actually walking their path can truly speak of it and this implacable truth will always recognize the sacredness of everyone else’s unique path. When very special parallel resonances line up, people can actually help each other on their paths. The intelligent coherent universe knows this and will place such people at key intersecting junctures so they can meet, share gnosis, support and inspire each other. The extraordinary relevance and specificity of these encounters is always a signature of this universal dynamic. It is most heartening.

Neil Kramer

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The open society and its new enemies

"It is not primarily evil people who do evil, but often good people who, out of concern for what they believe to be a threatened and important value for our existence, do things that ultimately have devastating consequences. This mechanism strikes the open society at its heart, because one plays out a well-known problem, namely the one of negative externalities. The problem is this one: the freedom of one person ends where it threatens the freedom of others. Actions of one person, including the contracts she enters into, have an impact on third parties who are outside of these relationships, but whose freedom to shape their lives can be impaired by these actions. The boundary beyond which the free shaping of one’s life causes harm to the free shaping of the lives of others is not fixed from the outset. It can be defined in a broad or a narrow way. The mentioned mechanism consists in spreading fear and exploiting the moral value of solidarity to define this boundary in so narrow a manner that, in the end, there is no room for the free shaping of one’s life left: every exercise of freedom can be construed as generating negative externalities that pose a threat to the freedom of others. (...) In this manner, everybody is placed under a general suspicion of potentially harming others with everything they do. The burden of proof thus is reversed: it is no longer required to provide concrete evidence that someone impairs the freedom of others with certain of their actions. Rather, everyone must prove from the outset that their actions cannot have unintended consequences that potentially harm others. Accordingly, people can free themselves from this general suspicion only by acquiring a certificate that clears them. This is a kind of modern sale of indulgences. One thereby abolishes freedom and installs a new totalitarianism: the exercise of freedom and the grant of fundamental rights depends on a licence that an elite of experts grants – or refuses to grant. (...) This totalitarianism can only be countered by a substantial conception of persons that is based on their freedom and their dignity. Such a conception recognizes fundamental rights that apply unconditionally in the following sense: their validity cannot be subordinated to a higher goal."

Prof. Michael Esfeld, "The open society and its new enemies"

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