Technocracy and Totalitarianism

 Posted by Dennis Mulcare

The Epoch Times dated Nov.30-Dec.6, 2022 presented a full-page essay entitled “Technocracy and Totalitarianism,” which originally appeared on the American Mind website. Its author, Aaron Kheriaty M.D., adapted it from his book entitled The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Bio-medical Security State. This essay can still be accessed on-line, including its reposting by the Brownstone Institute. The following is a selective synopsis of that essay, along with a few qualifications regarding its content. In all, the message he renders is quite on target; but of crucial significance, its content is actually rather more topically and historically encompassing than just the rise of the bio-medical security state. That circumstance is affirmed by the fact that the essay’s initial content centers on Augusto Del Noce’s post-WW2 political philosophy, especially with its prescient and timeless warnings. Del Noce then projected the prospect of disturbing trends in governance and culture as now evident in both the United States and the western world. In the interim, these have been sedulously if subtly fostered in a top-down manner. In consequence, the objectivization of the human person, and the concomitant foreclosure on inherent personal integrity, have led to a marked degree of dehumanization via cultural decline and government initiatives. As the essay asserts, such life-world disintegration leads ultimately to hopeless nihilism, and sets the stage for totalitarian domination. With personhood and social comity greatly diminished, the human being thereby becomes an unrooted social atom, readily manipulated and arbitrarily controlled. Perhaps the ultimate in such dehumanization is the commoditization of human persons, as a resource for government deployment or economic utilization. Here for example, we arrive at a prospect of far surpassing the positive eugenics program of the Nazis through initiatives of our present bio-medical establishment and its protocols and subserving technologies. Or as the author points out: the Marxists keyed on economics and history, the Nazis on race and eugenics, and the emerging new world order on a totally managed society of denatured human persons. In actuality then, the essay’s coverage on the overreaching and ineffectual Covid response by governments addresses just the first major manifestation of large-scale authoritarian suppression in an unfolding agenda of an ostensive international neo-fascist governing structure. Seemingly, the successful long-term investment in dumbing down the US educational system has facilitated the widespread acceptance of specious invocations of so-called science to intimidate and to deceive the public at large. One ongoing example of such purposeful deception is the scientistic fabrication and pronouncements of purported cataclysmic human-caused damage to the climate. Such publicly foisted pseudoscience parallels, as well as predates, the ongoing Covid debacle and its misinformation blitz, which has been so bluntly pursued by the government-medical care axis. In both cases, any opposing views have been substantially and deceitfully misrepresented, if not effectively suppressed altogether. Regarding the essay’s title, it should be noted that technocracy is a system of governance where functionaries who purportedly have some relevant competencies oversee government activities in corresponding areas. By definition, a functionary is person serving as an agent in a bureaucracy who carries out rote functions with no allowance for discretion. Of course today, the US experiences a plague of unwarranted or illicit discretionary actions on the part of bureaucrats, but in most severe cases, they do not themselves dictate such deviations. As agents, they still mainly just conform to top-down direction. And here in sum we meet the operational marriage of technocracy and totalitarianism - a marriage made in Hell itself - perhaps Dante’s Circle 9 of the Inferno! Toward the end of the essay, the author gets to the core of the overall situation - why the oppressive/ineffectual Covid response is merely a tactical tip of the new world order’s strategic iceberg. In its enactment, the scientistic-technocratic regime “leaves the entire field of human life wide open to domination by global corporations and their suborned political agents....States (national governments) as instruments of worldspanning corporations, which operate like fiefdoms, is an apt definition of corporatism - the melding of state and corporate power...which coincides perfectly with Mussolini’s original definition of fascism.” Do read and ponder this essay yourself, or perhaps his book itself. The former is available at either: 

https://americanmind.org/features/technocracy-and-totalitarianism/

https://brownstone.org/articles/technocracy-and-totalitarianism/

 Dr. Aaron Kheriaty has extensive prominence in both academia and governmental affairs, and now he is heavily involved in diverse affairs of private sector institutions. Such activities are recounted at his website:

 https://www.aaronkheriaty.com 

Moreover, the Brownstone Institute archives many of his very thoughtful essays: 

https://brownstone.org/author/aaron-kheriaty/