By David Gosselin

We suffer more in imagination than in reality 
—Seneca 

From apocalyptic Day After Tomorrow doomsday scenarios to predictions of imminent cyber attacks with “covid-like characteristics,” while there is no shortage of doomsday scenarios in our age, the promise of a hopeful future or prospect of revival seems almost non-existent.

But might this be by design?

Is the world as countless Hollywood, Netflix and MSM narratives suggest, a soon-to-be dystopian “hunger games” in which hoards of renegade humans struggle for survival in a Mad Max eco-nightmare, or are we the victims of predictive programming and self-fulfilling prophecies? Is it possible that while ostensibly eschewing these narratives on a conscious level, many of us are nonetheless acting them out unconsciously? And if the future isn’t as the many predictive models suggest, what could it look like?

As the Tavistock Institute’s Brigadier John Rawlings Rees once observed, winning wars is not about killing, but destroying the enemy’s morale while maintaining one’s own. As one of the founding members of the Tavistock Clinic—the mother of Anglo-American psychological warfare across the Five Eyes—Rees knew a thing or two about psychological operations. Since that time, the imagination has long been understood as one of the key battlegrounds for modern information warfare. Today, demoralization and “flooding the field” with information is one of the chief psychological weapons used to induce populations to disassociate, escape reality, and set aside their ideals in the interest of more immediate survival.

But what happens when there is no practical solution out of a dead and dying system? What if the only practical solution is to leave behind one’s own most entrenched conceits and assumptions about the world and imagine something completely different?

From the triumph of a humble Christian movement over a mammoth pantheon of Roman imperial gods and the Renaissance’s flourishing from the ashes of medieval feudalism and Satanic crusading vampire cults masquerading as Christians, we are reminded that the history of Western civilization involves a series of qualitative leaps in man’s conceptual power, vision, and ability to love—often in the face of dire and hellish circumstances. In this very real sense, imagining and doing the impossible has been at the very heart of what makes Western civilization great.

Of course, like the poet Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy, breaking into the higher spheres means first descending into the bowels of Hell. For, only once we’ve confronted the darkness can we truly regain the stars. So, rather than being a cause for demoralization, confronting the darkness today should be seen for what it is: we are ready and willing to do so because we do have faith in our humanity and that of ours, we know our deeper story, and we are ready to do what it takes to make it to the other side—knowing we’ve already come too far to turn back now.

So, let’s see if we can make it to the other side.

Event 201, Cyber Polygon and the Future

The recent history of predictive programming suggests mankind’s future is forever pre-determined. For instance, on October 19th, 2019 a simulation was run by John Hopkin’s University’s Center for Health Security. It was called event 201 and organized in partnership with the World Economic Forum and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The event simulated a deadly corona virus outbreak across the world, and then rehearsed the ensuing government response and emergency measures enacted by governments and intelligence agencies to manage the supposed “emergency.” A few months later, the actual COVID-19 pandemic was declared, on March 11th, 2020.

Event 201 was followed up by the 2021 Cyber Polygon simulation, which envisioned the outbreak of a cyber pandemic that would wreak havoc upon society and cripple its critical infrastructure, financial institutions and supply chains.

The latter Cyber Polygon simulation seems to have foreshadowed a string of now steadily growing cyber attacks on banks, public infrastructure, and government bodies. Such stories have now increasingly become part of the regular news cycle.

But Event 201 and Cyber Polygon were “fictional” scenarios.

However, given these fictions seem to overlap with many real-world events, and were overseen by many of the actual officials tasked with shaping the government response to the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps one isn’t jumping the gun by entertaining what some of the latest “fictional” scenarios might entail, especially considering the fact that they were run by the same John Hopkins University, World Economic Forum and other entities that oversaw the last fictional scenarios turned reality.

SPARS 2025-2028: Predictive Programming, the Future and You

As if past simulations weren’t enough, a new “Futuristic Scenario for Public Health Officials” was just recently published by the John Hopkins Center for Health Security. Here, we find the latest fictional scenario for a new pandemic outbreak of “SPARS” in the years 2025-2028.

It begins with a disclaimer:

In full form, the new John Hopkins Center for Health Security report describes a “futuristic scenario” tasked with the challenge of resolving a series of “communication dilemmas” necessary for overcoming an “echo chamber” that would hinder the possibility of enacting new future pandemic responses.

The fictional account looks and sounds like it could have been taken out of any actual MSM narrative about the last pandemic (or simply Event 201 fan-fiction).

But remember: it’s only fiction.

The report goes on to detail the government response and public messaging campaigns that would be used to manage the fictional crisis, presumably learning from mistakes made in managing the supposed “disinformation” crisis which occurred in the wake of the last pandemic response.

Reality Primed

While often feeling like a script taken from some Orwellian novel or H.G. Wells fantasy, the responses and tools used to manage the official COVID-19 narrative are by no means fiction. As the 2011 MINDSPACE document produced by the Behavioral Insights Team outlined—the same team that created the behavioral science frameworks used to shape public messaging and media narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic—the art of priming the population’s imagination has been at the heart of “nudging” our reality into a seemingly pre-determined direction.

For instance, the MINDSPACE report details various ways in which subtle behavioral “nudges” could be used to significantly alter the outcome of individual decision-making, without ever eliciting the intervention of conscious “reflective systems.” Instead, individuals aresimply guided by a series of clever unconscious “nudges” and subliminal “cues” which leverage “mental shortcuts” and other “automatic motivations.”

The authors include a convenient graph mapping out the essentials of MINSPACE, conceived as a mnemonic to make the implementation of behavior change strategies easy to remember for policymakers.

Figure 1 – breakdown of the MINDSPACE acronym (p. 18)

One of these techniques is called priming.

The MINDSPACE authors describe the importance of “salience and priming” when getting populations to make pre-determined decisions without eliciting the need for conscious decision-making i.e. “reflective processes”:

The food you chose and how much you took was substantially shaped by what happened in the canteen. The smell primed your hunger, but so too did the size of your plate and the fact that you had a tray. Larger plates can make us take larger portions, and trays substantially increase the total of volume of food we take. And perhaps there is slightly more chance that you would have chosen the vegetarian option if it had come first. (MINDSPACE, 11)

As a more detailed explanation of priming, the report offers the following description:

A few interesting examples of priming are then presented:

Of course, the use of priming and “fictional” scenarios extends far beyond the realm of health, defense and science. Education has also been a chief target.

Take the “Future Skills: Four Scenarios for the World of Tomorrow” report published by the Jacob’s Foundation, an endowment created by Swiss billionaire Klaus J. Jacobs for the purpose of “improving the education and development of children around the world.”

The Future Skills report offers several scenarios that educators might want to envision as they plan the future of education for the children of Switzerland. The authors offer four different scenarios which:

“…are not predictions with 25% probability of becoming reality but rather end points of a space of possibility. For each of these worlds, we determine skills and qualities that are necessary to function and prosper in them. In a survey, Swiss teachers assessed to what extent these skills are taught at their schools. (Future Skills, 11)”

The reason for this choice of forecasting is that:

“The uncertain nature of the future and the heterogeneity of the four scenarios suggest that it is impossible to prepare children and young people for one specific future. The more the future deviates from the world of today, the less existing institutions and experiences can provide orientation – and the more future generations will be left to their own devices. Skills of self-determination such as self-motivation, self-efficacy and the ability to make decisions in groups are consequently important in all scenarios.”

“However, “Future skills” does not only mean being able to react flexibly to any potential future. It also means shaping the future. The creative freedom of society is barely acknowledged in the Western world, because latest since the end of the Cold War we have privatised the future. Social goals have become personal ambitions. This means that the future has turned into something that happens to us and we have to cope with.” (Future Skills, 4)

Thus, the authors describe four possible “end points of a space of possibility”:

We cope with this unpredictability by outlining four different scenarios for Switzerland in the year 2050:

> Collapse. International trade is almost non-existent. Local communities are no longer integrated into national or supranational organisations and have to reorganise amidst the ruins of a globalised and industrialised world.

> Gig Economy Precariat. Machines have taken over many jobs and have caused technological unemployment. Instead of switching to other sectors, the people affected turn to a new type of employment: the gig economy. As digital day labourers, they fight for rare jobs in a thoroughly commercialised world.

> Net Zero. The hope to slow climate change with progress and technology has vanished. Only severe personal restrictions have an effect. The goal with the highest priority is reducing CO2 emissions to zero. How this is achieved differs from region to region. To ensure readiness for and acceptance of personal restrictions, these measures are defined as locally as possible.

> Fully Automated AI Luxury. Machines have taken over many jobs previously done by people. Everyone benefits from the fruits of this labour. People can do anything, but they do not have to. This gives rise to the challenge of generating purpose in their lives and maintaining their individual autonomy when faced with the superiority of artificial intelligence.

Naturally, the “science-fiction” dimension of their report is never lost:

“Following the quote from science-fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” we need to assume that, in the future also, not all humans will live in the same scenario. Rather, different people will live in different manifestations of these scenarios. Individuals may even experience several scenarios depending on the situation they are in. Accordingly, contradictory scenarios may be equally relevant for the future.”

If much of this sounds like it was taken from a page out of an H.G. Wells novel, you’re not alone. In Wells’ novel The Time Machine, the self-avowed Fabian Socialist who dedicated his life to the cause of world governance and strict Malthusian eugenic practices presents a world in which the human species has split off into two races or worlds: the savage and dirty Morlochs who are responsible for the world’s intensive physical labor; and the fair, indolent Eloi, an aristocratic race living in luxury above the chasms of the Earth.

Interestingly, more recent H.G. Wells-inspired Hollywood sci-fi like Elysium, starring Matt Damon, reflect the Future Skills’ imaginative “end points of a space of possibility.” There we find a fictional world set in the year 2154 in which “two classes of people exist: the very wealthy, who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an over-populated, ruined Earth.”

At this point, some readers might find that these “fictional” scenarios and “end points of a space of possibility” sound a lot like the words of the World Economic Forum’s own guru-in-chief, Yuval Hariri. The WEF guru envisions the rise of a new “global useless class” in which much of the human population is rendered useless by advanced AI technology, leaving the majority of “useless” people struggling to survive in a post-human world.

Supposedly analyzing company trends, long-term government plans, NGO studies and science fiction, further on in the report the Future Skills authors outline “four categories to which most of the predictions and visions of the future can be assigned”:

> Continuous Growth. According to Dator et al., Continuous Growth is the “official” view of the future towards which governments, companies and educational institutions are oriented. It assumes a non-disruptive, continuous evolution towards the future, in which individual technologies will change, but things will generally stay as they are today.

> Collapse. A second category features narratives of the future describing a sudden end of growth. The Collapse scenarios can be of an environmental, economic, health-related and moral nature. What they have in common is that all of them describe a regression to a “lower” level of development. In most cases, this is described as a less complex world and reaches from an economic crisis to regression into a new “dark age”, to the complete extinction of all life by an asteroid, for example.

> Discipline. The Discipline narratives frequently include a voluntary renunciation of materialism and consumerism. Life is oriented towards basic values of religion, spiritualism, politics or culture. In most of these scenarios, materialism and consumerism are environmentally and/or spiritually unsustainable or even immoral.

> Transformation. The Transformation category comprises narratives of the future marked by disruptive technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence or genetic engineering. These narratives not only describe a revolutionary technology, but at times also a modification of humans themselves. Such futures are then described as posthuman or transhuman.

Given the purpose of the report is the outline the needed “future skills” for children in any of the possible scenarios, the authors describe the form of education most appropriate for each scenario. In the case of the “collapse” scenario, education supposedly looks something like this:

To give readers an idea of the quality of imagination found in those contributing to such journals and “research,” consider Sophie von Stumm. She now works at England’s York University under the supervision of global Behavioral Genetics guru Robert Plomin. Von Stumm is author of peer-reviewed articles such as, “Predicting Educational Achievement from DNA” and has been heavily involved in research which, we are told, allows scientists to “predict at birth who will have academic success.”

At this point, we can observe that the imagination is indeed one of the chief battlegrounds in a modern age of information warfare. How and for what purposes we imagine man’s future can in many ways shapes how we choose to act in the present, often without thinking about it. Defining in images and narratives what people are capable, ready or willing to imagine in many ways primes our world of possibility, what we may be willing or unwilling to accept. Of course, such tricks assume the population is incapable of imagining any alternative future beyond the “choices” presented.

Not surprisingly, models that prime academics to think in terms of closed systems with pre-determined outcomes and “Limits to Growth” have proliferated across the world of academia, education and policy-making for the last 60 years. Worlds defined by scarcity rather than abundance have been help up as the inevitable realities that everyone must prepare for in opposition to the supposedly outmoded traditional or “orthodox” open systems that have characterized the development of Western civilization, especially since the advent of the Golden Renaissance.

However, we can be more specific about exactly what this means in 2024. For example, the tradition specifically targeted for replacement by the chief brain trusts of the vast industrial entertainment and priming complex is the specific tradition that blossomed with the advent of the Golden Renaissance. As we’ve already seen with the Stanford Research Institute’s (SRI) Changing Images of Man report, at the heart of Western civilization’s problems, we are told, lay a so-called “rationalist man”, which the authors rightly observe came to full fruition with the advent of the European Golden Renaissance:

“In contrast to the Greek notion of “man,” the Judeo-Christian view holds that “man” is essentially separate from [and] the rightful master over nature. This view inspired a sharp rate of increase in technological advances in Western Europe throughout the Medieval period. On the other hand, the severe limitations of scholastic methodology, and the restrictive views of the Church, prevented the formulation of an adequate scientific paradigm. It was not until the Renaissance brought a new climate of individualism and free inquiry that the necessary conditions for a new paradigm were provided. “

Interestingly, the Renaissance scholars turned to the Greeks to rediscover the empirical method. The Greeks possessed an objective science of things “out there,” which D. Campbell (1959) terms the “epistemology of the other.” This was the basic notion that nature was governed by laws and principles which could be discovered, and it was this that the Renaissance scholars then developed into science as we have come to know it. (The Changing Images of Man, 104)

The dominant image of man became “imago viva dei” (a living image of God) and “capax dei” (possessing a god-like spark) in which man could act as a willfully creative living image of God. This unique characteristic and creative spark was understood as the distinguishing factor between man and all other creatures on Earth. In contrast, the Luciferian ethos has always been premised on rejecting this fundamental distinction, insisting on man’s fundamentally animal nature as the only basis for a coherent worldview in which man is simply another aspect of a sacred Gaia system. In this system, knowledge and creativity are only a special kind of “gnosis” reserved for true “initiates” and those lucky enough to experience magical “altered states” of consciousness through drug-infused mysticism, secret rituals and orgiastic frenzies.

We find this worldview continuously reflected by the authors of the SRI’s Changing Images of Man report:

Because the Gnostic path was condemned as heretical, of necessity it went underground, and hence its influence on our culture is much less visible than are the effects of the orthodox views. It and views like it, however, have been kept alive by secret societies such as the Sufis, Freemasons, and Rosicrucians, whose influence on the founding of the United States is attested to by the symbolism of the Great Seal of the United States, on the back of the dollar bill. The Semitic/Zoroastrian/orthodox Christian image meanwhile came into dominance in Western Europe. This image of the “human as separate” laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution to come. (The Changing Images of Man, 24)

So, we find the theoretical framework for reframing the “images of man” around a more pagan Gaia-centric universe, ultimately laying out the images that would be needed to prime mankind for a New Age and “paradigm shift.” This would be an age in which Malthusian predictive programming operations would proliferate across the world in countless forms and across all mediums. It would perhaps be typified by the countless new forms of “science fiction” and pseudo-academic “research,” all of which would be used to shape and color the imagination, thanks to the pioneering work of Fabian Socialists like H.G. Wells and his many devotees, whose “sci-fi” would shape the imaginations of generations (including Charles Manson).

But remember: it’s only fiction.

Masters of Our Fates?

Rather than a revival of pagan mystery cults, gnostic Earth worship, or just living out a bad sci-fi movie, what does a world look like in which classical education and a timeless Western tradition finds new life today? Can we imagine a world where a multi-polar reality of nations emerges and triumphs over satanic Atlanticist demi-gods, or where man once again consciously wields the Promethean fire gifted to him and him alone? To the degree we cannot, should we be surprised if the future doesn’t appear friendly?

Rather than believing modern behavioral models and predictive programming are sure signs of man’s predestined fate, what if 2024 is the year that humanity finally starts imagining something different?

Instead of taking a page from John Hopkins’ Center for Health Security or H.G. Wells’ sci-novels, what if we took a page from Solon’s reforms, or a line from Shakespeare?

Men at some times are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

(Julius Caesar – Act I, scene ii)

And here indeed, all the world is a stage.

David Gosselin is a poet and essayist who publishes regularly on Age of the Muses and The New Lyre. In 2020 he founded The Chained Muse and publishes seasonal editions of The New Lyre Journal.

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