The World Needs a Renaissance, Not a Reset: Will the Prometheans Finally Break the Chains?

By David Gosselin

In the beginning, seeing they saw amiss,
And hearing heard not, but, like phantoms huddled
In dreams, the perplexed story of their days
confounded;

Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus

As we began exploring in the first part of our series, writing a new chapter in one’s life begins by first understanding what has happened up until that moment. What we believe our story to be in many ways determines how we choose to write the next chapters. Today, this is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the United States, which has become the flash-point of a broader ideological war in which a re-definition of the past lies at the heart of the battle to shape the future. These developments serve as a great reminder that history is not something in the past—our understanding of history bears directly on our sense of self and the actions we take in the present. In a word: our understanding of history not only informs our sense of where we came from, but where we think we should be headed next.

Therefore, in order to cut through the many false frames, illusions of choice, and memory holes embedded within the Western narrative matrix, this installment will focus on “zooming out” of our current moment and re-winding to critical points in our broader story. In this way, we’ll be able to revisit recent chapters in a more nuanced and precise light.

In the briefest terms, humanity has gone from using primitive forms of “fire” for light, warmth, and cooking its food—with otherwise very limited control over its fate and the natural elements—to developing the ability to increasingly change the default conditions of early human life and the unbridled wilderness of nature. However, in recent times this more primitive and early stage in human history has been romanticized, treated as an Eden, a more “sustainable” age where humanity lived in harmony with “Mother Nature.” This was the time before man’s fall into the modern age of dirty technology, industrial pollution, and “over-population.”

In this respect, as a leading spokesman for the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its “Great Reset” agenda, heir to the British throne HRH Prince Charles recently spoke of how the wisdom of Canadian First Nations people might offer useful insights into how humankind might “reset” civilization and bring it back into balance with nature. Speaking on the BBC 4 in 2020, Charles said:

“I’ve been talking to quite a lot of the First Nations leaders in Canada over the last year, and it’s high time we paid more attention to their wisdom, and the wisdom of indigenous communities and First Nations people all around the world.

We can learn so much from them as to how we can re-right the balance and start to rediscover a sense of the sacred, because nature – Mother Nature – is our sustainer, we are part of nature. We are nature.”

Today, saving “Mother Nature” takes the form of humanity’s collective decision to either adopt the supranational and legally-binding governance structures of the UN COP26 and WEF “Great Reset” agenda, or prepare for the imminent biblical floods and fires, which we are told, will be the punishment exacted upon humankind for its hubris—its sins against “Mother Nature,”—and the foolish belief that mankind could freely wield Promethean “fire.”

So goes the story.

Saving “Mother Earth”

“Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her.“

-Pope Francis’ Opening Prayer – Laudato Si (2015)

Recently, Pope Francis has spearheaded the call for a redefinition of humanity’s relationship to nature. Going back to his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, Francis wrote:

“An inadequate presentation of Christian anthropology gave rise to a wrong understanding of the relationship between human beings and the world. Often, what was handed on was a Promethean vision of mastery over the world.”

For Francis, as for the WEF and Europe’s hereditary “blue bloods,” this Promethean vision is “old and obsolete.” Civilization must now return to a more “sustainable” age. Fortunately, the generous and beneficent Lynn Forester de Rothschild and other City of London-related financial circles have created the Council for Inclusive Capitalism to assist in these efforts.

At this point, we should ask ourselves: who was this Prometheus whose vision is deemed “old and obsolete” by some of Europe’s most ancient institutions and hereditary bloodlines? From whence arises the very vocal and overt disdain for Promethean fire? To answer this question, consider the story of Prometheus as told by one of the greatest classical Greek tragedians, Aeschylus. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the Titan Prometheus describes the state of humanity before he gave it the gift of “fire”:

But listen to the tale
Of human sufferings, and how at first
Senseless as beasts I gave men sense, possessed them
Of mind. I speak not in contempt of man;
I do but tell of good gifts I conferred.
In the beginning, seeing they saw amiss,
And hearing heard not, but, like phantoms huddled
In dreams, the perplexed story of their days
Confounded; knowing neither timber-work
Nor brick-built dwellings basking in the light,
But dug for themselves holes, wherein like ants,
That hardly may contend against a breath,
They dwelt in burrows of their unsunned caves.
Neither of winter’s cold had they fixed sign,
Nor of the spring when she comes decked with flowers,
Nor yet of summer’s heat with melting fruits
Sure token: but utterly without knowledge
Moiled, until I the rising of the stars
Showed them, and when they set, though much obscure.
Moreover, number, the most excellent
Of all inventions, I for them devised,
And gave them writing that retaineth all,
The serviceable mother of the Muse.
I was the first that yoked unmanaged beasts,
To serve as slaves with collar and with pack,
And take upon themselves, to man’s relief,
The heaviest labour of his hands: and
Tamed to the rein and drove in wheeled cars
The horse, of sumptuous pride the ornament.
And those sea-wanderers with the wings of cloth,
The shipman’s waggons, none but I contrived.
These manifold inventions for mankind
I perfected.

Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus

The theme has been echoed throughout history, with many of the greatest poets and philosophers revisiting this old but ever youthful tale. These include Germany’s Goethe, America’s Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and England’s Percy Bysshe Shelley, to name a few.

Notably, even the leading Fabian intellectual and novelist, H.G. Wells, echoed a Promethean view as he witnessed humanity’s ascent into the twentieth-century industrial age:

“The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement of stone.”

H.G. Wells – “Prelude” to A World Set Free (1914)

However, with a burgeoning middle class and new generations of individuals who felt they could now have a genuine say in their own fate, that of their families, and their nations generally, as a stark British imperialist and leading Fabian within the upper echelons of the British Empire’s literary intelligentsia, Wells saw the necessity of re-tooling this Promethean vision. So his “fiction” quickly became the story of the many monsters unleashed by Promethean “fire,” from atomic weapons to mutant creatures and the many dystopian nightmares that have become the hallmark of the “science fiction” that has shaped the imagination of several generations.

Anticipating the coming qualitative transformations engendered by the widespread use of modern technology, the “sci-fi” author’s views were candidly shared in his non-fiction:

“It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.”

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)

Wells described the kind of ethical outlook that would be necessary to deal with the perceived issue:

“The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.”

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)

Wells’ prose very much sounds like it was written by Zeus himself, but he was not alone. Also among this liberal imperial intelligentsia was Lord Bertrand Russell—a descendant of one of England’s oldest hereditary “blue blood” families. Russell took great interest in what he called a “scientific” society:

“A totalitarian government with a scientific bent might do things that to us would seem horrifying. The Nazis were more scientific than the present rulers of Russia, and were more inclined towards the sort of atrocities than I have in mind. They were said – I do not know with what truth – to use prisoners in concentration camps as material for all kinds of experiments, some involving death after much pain. If they survived, they would probably have soon taken to scientific breeding. Any nation which adopts this practice will, within a generation, secure great military advantages. The system, one may surmise, will be something like this: except possibly in the governing aristocracy, all but 5 per cent of males and 30 percent of females will be expected to spend the years from 18 to forty in reproduction, in order to secure adequate cannon fodder. As a rule, artificial insemination will be preferred to the natural method. The unsterilized, if they desire the pleasures of love, will usually have to seek them with sterilized partners.”

-Bertrand Russell – The Impact of Science on Society (1951)

While Russell states that totalitarian governments might do things that seem “horrifying” to a Western audience, keen readers will observe that like many of his cohorts, Russell still held these views to be “scientific.” In the eyes of a Russell, Wells, their Fabian cohorts, and the pro-eugenics imperialists entrenched across the Anglo-American financial establishment, while such governments might seem cruel to the Western mind, the question of eugenics, controlled breeding, and population control were simply considered matters of “science.”

Naturally, it was understood that the “scientific” society described by Wells, Russell et al would remain unthinkable, unless some kind of fundamental paradigm shift in the image of man occurred.

And this is where our story takes a turn.

A New “Sustainable” Order

With the rapid rise of industrial civilization and substantial population growth, with increasing rates of literacy and new middle classes pursuing their own hopes and desires for a better life without being burdened by the sheer struggle for survival, putting a check on the problem of “over-population” was seen as the major challenge for human society by those within the hereditary structures of the ancient City of London and its many financial tentacles—including Wall Street.

So intellectuals like Lord Russell wrote:

“But bad times, you may say, are exceptional, and can be dealt with by exceptional methods. This has been more or less true during the honeymoon period of industrialism, but it will not remain true unless the increase of population can be enormously diminished. At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.”

Without a change in fundamental outlook, the maintenance of a stable “scientific society” would remain forever out of reach, and lead to disaster. Russell viewed the Church and nationalism as two of the main powerful obstacles. And this is why he and others were above all interested in the kinds of “mass psychology” required for maintaining a truly “scientific society” in the West:

“I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically speaking, not a very advanced study, and so far its professors have not been in universities: they have been advertisers, politicians, and, above all, dictators. This study is immensely useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich or to acquire the government. It is, of course, as a science, founded upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has employed rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a kind of intuitive common sense. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modem methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.” Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.”

Bertrand Russell – The Impact of Science on Society (1951)

However, Russell did warn:

“Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

Bertrand Russell – The Impact of Science on Society (1951)

Fast-forward to our modern age of behavioral science and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)-infused mass psychology. In their latest embodiment, these methods take the form of advanced “behavioral nudging, NLP and hypnosis—much of whose effectiveness is due to their covert and subtle nature.

Thus, regardless of how many climate change doomsday stories are debunked, from showing billions of people misleading pictures of a skeletal polar bear hopelessly lurching through iceless lands to reporting about raging wild fires set by radical liberal arsonists from California, people have been given a story. Regardless of whether or not various biblical floods and fires are causally linked to CO2 levels, once adopted as one’s story, the introduction of new information may or may not translate into a newly adapted story.

It often doesn’t.

In reality, the modern narratives and empty platitudes about “saving the planet” and protecting “Mother Earth” repeated by Davos technocrats, “philanthropic” billionaires, and the hereditary “blue bloods” of Europe—typified by Prince Charles and his father’s role as co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) —are the outgrowth of precisely the kind of “behavioral science” and “mass psychology” which early twentieth-century liberal imperialists and City of London Fabians believed would be necessary to achieve the ultimate goals of empire, a “scientific society,” and global population control.

So Julian Huxley, who coined the term “transhumanism” which now serves as a guiding philosophy for the WEF, would go on to found the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1963, alongside Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (House of Orange-Nassau) and Prince Philip (House of Glucksberg). The funding for the WWF would be created using the “1001 Club: A Nature Trust.”

Not surprisingly, Julian Huxley collaborated with H.G. Wells in an attempt to create a new world religion with works such as The Outline of History and The Science of Life. Julian would also go on to run the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the WWF’s predecessor.

Despite the re-branding efforts, the hereditary nobility and ancient institutions of Europe have indeed remained at the helm of the efforts to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle, only this time under the guise of “conservation,” “sustainability,” and protecting “Mother Nature.” Of course, doing so required a new and precise means of coloring and reshaping the stories and imaginations of the populace. This took the form of combining humanity’s collective memory of ancient floods and fires with a new “humanistic” and “democratic” ethos, lest somebody suspect something were awry, or that this might be about more than “science.”

To fully appreciate the subtle nature of the machinations unleashed by the institutions of “Old Europe,” our story must take another turn, this time re-winding to a curious exchange between famed British novelist and H.G. Wells disciple, Aldous Huxley, and Huxley’s famous collaborator, Dr. Timothy Leary (of MK-Ultra and CIA “mind-control” infamy).

Scientific Paganism

Occurring in the 1960s at a pivotal moment in the West’s shift towards a new post-industrial utopia—today heralded as a “Great Reset”—we find Huxley and Leary musing about a “coming revolution.” Not only did Huxley explore the possibilities in his famous dystopian Brave New World, but also in his later works, including his final utopian novel, The Island. The invariant in both novels is a culture of eugenics, sex cults, and mass drug use. While in a Brave New World, these drugs are largely used to dull the pain, in The Island, they are a means of expanding one’s “spiritual” consciousness.

In his autobiographical account, Flashback, Dr. Leary recounted some of the exchanges he had with Aldous and the problems they identified as obstacles to any kind of “new age” enlightenment—the kind which a Brave New World seemed to resolve. Huxley first told Leary:

“These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.”

Leary reflected on the obstacles they encountered as they sought to develop and flesh out their vision of a new enlightened society:

“We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.”

A Judeo-Christian view of man and the universe, centered on the sacredness of the individual, has and always was understood to be incompatible with the kind of neo-pagan Malthusian or Gaia-centric order—now with a technocratic caveat— which the old imperial houses of Europe yearned to regain since the Promethean fire was first let out during the Golden Renaissance, and then again, thanks to the modern American Prometheus, Benjamin Franklin, and his organizing of the American Revolution.

The Gaia-centric pagan view has always emphasized the sacredness and “equality” of all life forms, with an abstracted “Mother Nature” and “Gaia System” held above and in opposition to a Promethean man, despite humanity itself being the only creature endowed with a unique spark of creative reason. To the materialist, determinist, and eugenicist, these are simply a matter of “chemicals” and “complexity,” which is precisely the door that opens the world of to all sorts of “unthinkable” realities. For, morality, virtue, Truth, and Justice figure nowhere in this “scientific outlook.” On the other hand, the Promethean view treated man as the being uniquely endowed with a creative spark, the only creature which could self-consciously strive towards what Plato called “the Good.” In this way, humanity’s impulse for a conscious self-perfection as imago viva dei and capax dei defined an unbounded and unique potential to consciously bring itself into an ever greater conformity with the “Logos.” In a word: humanity’s striving to better understand the laws of the universe and wrestle with its mysteries was an innately human quality, one that nourished its deepest desires and was the source of its greatest joy. On the other hand, the oligarchical view preached not science, but scientism—a valueless and radical materialism infused with the Gnosticism of pagan cults, from the time of ancient Babylon to the modern ecological movements.

And this is where our current story takes another turn.

Re-Framing Gaia

Alas, to remedy their “Promethean problem” the reigning Western oligarchy and its intellectual “brain trust” lodged deep within the bowels of the City of London did what empires have always done going back to ancient Rome, Greece, and Babylon: create and spread new pagan cults and gnostic ideologies, which by their nature bound the thoughts and belief structures of “the masses” within acceptable axiomatic frameworks.

Underlying the tradition of “conservation” was the assumption that there exists a universal equilibrium in nature—a sacred “balance”—which humanity was destined to submit to, as if humankind were just another animal living in a fixed ecosystem. For, the human species was no different from any other life-form, aside from being a more complex biological organism exhibiting new “emergent properties,” but ultimately composed of the same fundamental building blocks—and nothing more. So today we hear the high priest of the WEF, Yuval Hariri, preaching about the rise of a new “global useless class.” We are bombarded with the issue of Earth’s “carrying capacity,” which we are told can now be determined using computer models run by a special class of “scientific” experts who will be able to calculate precisely how many human beings the Earth can support.

Despite the global climate and natural landscape having consistently changed over its history, and life itself having consistently redefined the boundary conditions of the biosphere in a fundamentally non-linear way, and humankind’s unique ability to mirror this very principle consciously within a qualitatively different space-time; despite Heraclitus having uttered his famous aphorism “nothing is constant but constant change” thousands of years earlier, the current dominant narrative of ecological science and conservation—re-branded as “environmentalism”—specifically defines ecosystems as fundamentally closed systems with fixed inputs and outputs i.e. their “natural” states. Anything that fundamentally alters this “natural” state is by definition framed as a deviation from or unnatural act against “Mother Nature.”

So today, using dubious mathematical modelling and advanced behavioral science and “re-framing” techniques, scientism has not only been ushered into mainstream sciences, but also treated as a genuinely new “Green” religion—a “scientific paganism.” In reality, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled Malthusian dogma framed using carefully curated linguistic models which suggest that any other conclusion is either pure anti-science “conspiracy theorizing” or the blind religious dogma of “science deniers.” These pre-set conclusions are determined by simple linguistic models which are by default left with only two options: adopt new sweeping supranational world governance structures under the auspices of “saving the planet” from human-caused global warming, or unleash the biblical floods and fires.

Unfortunately, today’s scientific “consensus” marks the culmination of a long tradition of pseudo-scientific doomsday computer modelling going back to Stanford University’s Limits to Growth studies by Forest and Meadows, and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.

According to these experts, under a scientifically-managed society, the world would be able to calculate in the most precise terms what the Earth’s “carrying capacity” is, how many human beings should be allowed to live on any given surface area, and in this way determine acceptable living standards, family sizes, and ultimately the access to the scientific and technological progress necessary for providing the infrastructure, skilled labor, and resources to power humanity’s future projects—all in the name of “science.”

However, these arguments in reality rely more on the use of language and behavioral science than they do actual science. We can identify what neuro linguistic programmers and social engineers call the “surface structure” of official “sustainability” and “carrying capacity” narratives i.e. the out-loud parts, but also the unspoken “deep structure” i.e. the quiet part. But a good deal of “the quiet part” spoken out loud can found by any curious mind. Take for instance a candid passage by the author of The Population Bomb (1968), Professor Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich was one of the leading researchers in the 1960s to herald the coming new Malthusian post-industrial paradigm, writing:

“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

-Paul Ehrlich – The Population Bomb (1968)

Professor Ehrlich serves as a patron for Population Matters (formerly the UN Optimum Population Trust), where he serves alongside some of the world’s leading advocates for population control, including James Lovelock of “Gaia Theory” renown,

Sir Alexander King, the former director of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote:

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

(The First Global Revolution – Sir Alexander King 1991)

Notably, Ehrlich’s protégé, John Holdren, served as former president Barrack Obama`s science Czar and was another example of someone comfortable saying the quiet part out loud. Writing on p.942 in his 1977 book Ecoscience, Holdrensaid:

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime- sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or non-renewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

These are the czars and experts of population matters in a “scientific society.”

Unchaining Prometheus

The choice of twenty-first century narrative for humanity becomes clear when we’ve considered humanity’s broader story—one not captured and poisoned by twentieth century Malthusian dogmas, ancient Babylonian myths, and Pagan Earth-Goddess cults framed as an innocent love for nature for the credulous.

While myth-making and storytelling is often associated with ancient primitive societies or bygone faery lands and classical civilizations, the reality is stories are still very real today, and most people live by them, whether they know it or not. So knowing our more nuanced story, we should ask: how should the next chapters be written? How might our narrative be adapted? What happens to those who aren’t willing to change their story?

Despite their own challenges, other nations outside the West have already rejected the anti-Promethean and Malthusian dogmas. They have chosen survival, growth, and the further development of their civilizations via economic transformations and a rediscovery of their own timeless traditions in our modern age. Various nations have rejected Gaia and kindled Promethean fires, but will we?

How would such a chapter read? What would unchaining Prometheus look like today?

This part of our story remains unwritten.

Bio.

David B. Gosselin is a writer, researcher, and poet based in Montreal. He is the founding editor of The Chained Muse and New Lyre.