The Science of Social Engineering

 

"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” – Edward Bernays

Socialengineeringisthe intentional use of propaganda and other manipulative techniques to influence public attitudes and behavior on a mass scale with the goal of arriving at whatever outcomes have been specified by the social engineers.

Because technocracy originally labeled itself as the “science of social engineering,” we should not be surprised that today’s technocrats and their allies are still practicing this dark skill for the purpose of achieving their own ends.

During the pandemic, the world has been overtaken by these social engineers, who seem to slither out of the woodwork. Their carefully constructed propaganda, spewed nonstop all day, every day, has convinced many millions of frightened people to wear face masks, practice social distancing, stay locked in their homes, shut down their businesses, close schools, and, finally, obediently submit to being injected with FDA-un approved, experimental mRNA shots.

How could this have happened? Has the world gone mad? Let’s examine.

In the 1930s, early technocrat dreams of social engineering were emerging. Foundational research had already been conducted by Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), a Russian neurologist and physiologist who was determined to unravel the cause of human behavior. His experiments on dogs’ drooling response to the sight of food enabled him to develop his well-known theory of classical conditioning. He found that a dog can be conditioned to salivate upon simply seeing a food dish, even if there’s no food in it. Another of Pavlov’s experiments resulted in dogs drooling whenever their dog-feeder walked into the room.

Does the theory of classical conditioning apply to humans, too? Of course, and it works like this: If a dad always dons a certain ball cap just before taking his child to the park to play, eventually the child will anticipate playtime whenever Dad wears the same cap, no matter what the setting or circumstance.

American psychologist and behaviorist B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) came on the scene a bit later than Pavlov. Skinner promoted the idea that human nature is mostly a product of a person’s environment. But he also contended that human nature follows certain laws that, if discovered, could be used for the purpose of manipulation and control. In experiments using rats, he developed theories of positive and negative reinforcement, as well as outright punishment, to control behavior. Skinner’s theories about rodents jumped the track to humans when he realized that “the species of the organism has made surprisingly little difference.”[1] His 1948 book, Walden Two , described a utopia in which the free will of the human spirit or soul is rejected and systematic altering of environmental variables controls all human behavior.

Both Skinner and Pavlov held to a mechanistic[2] world view. They attempted to understand human behavior through a process of scientific study. Humans, they reasoned, are accidental beings that have progressed according to Darwin’s theories on the survival of the fittest. Their mechanistic philosophy fit perfectly with the mindset of early technocrats and ended up as a major theme of the Technocracy Study Course that was published in 1934.

The danger in this type of thinking is that it reduces humans to having no free will and no spirit or soul that will help them to make moral and ethical life choices. Instead, external conditions and stimuli are necessary to produce better behavior. Of course, technocrats reasoned that they could apply their “science of social engineering” to do just that.

Those early technocrats didn’t need to write long expositions about how to operate machines and factories or about how to build roads and cities. Taylorism[3] and systems theory[4] had already done that—and technocrats were steeped in both doctrines. What the technocrats couldn’t deal with, though, was human nature. They found people to be far less reliable than physical machines. Nevertheless, they were forced to depend upon unreliable, unpredictable humans in order to actually build the cities and roads and operate the machines and factories.

Can you see the technocrats’ dilemma?

Their only solution, as they saw it, was to recast humans in the image of machinery and manage them as such. In fact, people were the one big obstacle technocrats faced whenever they attempted to control anything and everything —which was all the time . Thus, it should be no surprise that when they dreamed up the definition of technocracy in 1937, their ability to control human behavior got top billing: “Technocracy is the science of social engineering.”[5]

We can see how the behavioral theories of both Pavlov and Skinner provided salvation to the early technocrats. For if humans can be controlled externally, like physical machines, and if that discipline can be recast as a “science,” then the “science of social engineering” is legitimately in the technocrats’ wheelhouse, isn’t it?

Yes, except for the simple fact that the science of engineering human behavior is not a real science. It’s a pseudoscience. People cannot be “engineered.” And even if they could be, the development of the principles of social engineering is a bastardization of the true scientific method that has always served authentic scientists so well, both in the past and in the present.

You may remember that at the end of Chapter 1 we called “scientism” a “speculative, metaphysical, upside-down worldview about the nature of the universe and man’s relation to it.” The fact that “upside-down” scientism plays such a huge role in technocracy reinforces the fact that social engineering is pseudoscientific—and should never be equated with the word “science.”

All efforts to create a utopia through social engineering (think Walden Two by Skinner) have failed miserably. Marxists, communists, and socialists have tried it and failed. So have fascists. Technocrats likewise have failed thus far and will fail in the end as well. However, in the meantime, society is damaged by the hubris of these self-selected social engineers, who practice a warped pseudoscience that will never work because it is . . . not scientific.

The eminent historian Richard G. Olson, author of Science and Scientism in the Nineteenth-Century Europe , notes in his Introduction the subtle shift in thinking that preceded the original technocrat movement:

I have persistently thought of those early thinkers who sought to bring insights, especially methodological insights, from the natural sciences into the human social domain as engaging in scientism – a term that I intended to indicate the transfer of ideas, practices, attitudes, and methodologies from the context of the study of the natural world (which was assumed to be independent of human needs and expectations) into the study of humans and their social institutions, without imposing any judgement on the legitimacy of such an appropriation .[6]

Scientism is still practiced by today’s technocrats, as attested to by the prominent presence of pseudoscience in every walk of life. Instead of improving society along the way, scientism invariably ends up making a bigger mess of everything it touches.

Turning back to the Technocracy Study Course , we can now see how the “science of social engineering” has influenced the technocrat mind—both then and now:

This gives us a clue to the most fundamental social control technique that exists. No other single item exerts more than a small percentage of the influence exerted by the immediate physical environment upon the activities of human beings. Leave the physical environment unaltered, or the industrial rates of operation unchanged, and any effort to alter the fundamental modes of behavior of human beings is doomed largely to failure; alter the immediate physical environment of human beings, and their modes of behavior change automatically.[7]

Ever since that study course was introduced in 1934, technocrats have been attempting to perfect reliable methods of social control. Below we will cite a few such methods.

Propaganda

The intellectual father of modern propaganda was Edward L. Bernays (1891–1995), nephew of Sigmund Freud. His seminal book, Propaganda , appeared in 1928, just in time for technocrats to integrate it into their science of social engineering toolkit. Bernays was always direct, as evidenced in the opening of his book’s Chapter I, Organizing Chaos:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.[8]

The last statement in his book was just as pointed:

Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.[9]

Productive ends? Order out of chaos? This is the stuff technocrat dreams are made of.

Everything between the first page and the last page of Propaganda served as a catalyst for what would become an immense industry designed to manipulate and control the masses. Today, the three intertwined but distinct parts of that industry are “public relations” (or publicity), “marketing,” and “advertising.” Their respective experts spin reality in various directions for the purpose of promoting products that fetch handsome profits. Without PR flacks and marketing gurus and ad copywriters, how would a brewer sell suds successfully? Who’d come up with the perfect scene: a pool party teeming with big-abs blokes and blondes in bikinis?

Bernays had a technocrat’s mind and was authoritatively described in those terms. An article in an MIT journal captured his persona perfectly:

Right up to the end of his life (Bernays died in 1995), he held fast to his belief that the masses needed leadership, and that leadership would come from an elite, technocratic few who would shape the masses’ reality and thus produce a better society.[10]

Propaganda became such an influential tool that academia adopted it and taught it in schools of journalism, social studies, political science, marketing, and other disciplines. Since Bernays’ seminal work, a bevy of books have been written examining every aspect of what makes propaganda, well, propaganda.

In 2020, I looked at several college textbooks that dealt with propaganda and was surprised to see remarkably similar lists of techniques in each. Below, I’ve summarized the most common propaganda techniques just to make a point of how the subject has become standardized:

Fear: The most powerful emotion, fear of loss or of physical harm, opens the mind to accept the solutions provided by the propagandist—solutions that would not otherwise have been accepted. The technique of fear has been the foundation of all pandemic-related propaganda.

The Bandwagon: A claim is made that, because everyone else is doing it, so should you. This assertion is often combined with other propaganda techniques. You’ll recognize this all-too-familiar bandwagon entreaty: “Everyone is taking the shot because it is safe and effective; you should take it, too.”

Card Stacking: This technique highlights all the “good” information and leaves out the “bad.” In other words, only the facts that support the propagandist’s agenda are presented, while everything else is intentionally suppressed. This blatant censorship is rampant in the mainstream media, social media, and search engines these days.

Plain Folks: The propagandist implies that he’s just an ordinary person like you, with the same dreams and desires, and therefore you should believe him.

The Testimonial: A person unrelated to a product testifies that the propaganda about the product is true and that you can trust his word. Often the ideal testifier is a likeable, credible celebrity. Other times the person giving the testimonial is a “nobody” who is chosen because he comes off as one of the “plain folks” described above.

Glittering Generalities: Propaganda is sometimes unquestioningly accepted simply because the sweeping statements it makes cannot be defined and often contain vague “virtue words.” Examples: “This anti-discrimination program will ensure equity for all” and “We will create millions of green jobs with this budget.”

Name-Calling/Deflection: Ad hominem attacks leveled by a propagandist can serve to deflect negative attention away from himself and toward someone else. For example, global warming scaremonger Al Gore once said threateningly, “Deniers deserved to be punished.” Today’s name-callers claim that America has a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and they target for ad hominem attacks whoever resists being jabbed.

Transfer: This technique transfers an organization’s prestige to the propagandist’s program or product—thus giving that program or product the same degree of prestige. This propaganda tactic takes advantage of an organization’s desire to maintain its reputation, to follow the crowd, to obey the rules, to acquiesce to authority. Look at what happened when public health officials and political leaders persuaded the pastors of many US churches to promote pandemic propaganda to their congregations. Of course, church members eagerly complied with whatever “protection measures” pastors urged them to take.

False Analogy: When two concepts are linked together despite having no actual cause-and-effect relationship, it is called a false analogy or false equivalence. Here’s an attempt to do just that: “People who question vaccines are anti-vaxxers. Mary does not want to take the COVID vaccine. Thus, Mary is an anti-vaxxer.”

Either/Or Fallacy: “Black-and-white” thinking offers only two choices, even though there might be other admissible answers. The either/or fallacy polarizes people and forces them to accept the outcome desired by the fallacy-promoter. Which of us wants to agree with “You are either for science or against it” when our understanding of “science” is antithetical to the propagandist’s?

Faulty Cause and Effect: This technique suggests that because A follows B, A must cause B. For example, (A) Joe supports gun ownership, and (B) murderers often use guns to kill people; therefore, Joe must be a murderer himself—or at least a fan of murderers.

Euphemisms: It isn’t uncommon for propagandists to use a word or phrase that pretends to communicate truth but in fact does the opposite. One rhetorical device they employ to that end is the euphemism, which “replaces accurate language that may be offensive with language that is more palatable, to instill a positive association,” as The Propwatch Project puts it. Thus, the propagandist’s euphemistic “alternative facts” really means “outright false or misleading claims.” Likewise, the propagandistic UN uses the euphemism “sustainable development” to hide its true technocratic intentions: “social engineering” of the masses.

Loaded Words: Related to name-calling, loaded words are what the propagandist uses to describe perfectly normal actions and completely ordinary circumstances. You may remember the egregious, extremist language the US government used when it labeled parents who rightfully protest at school board meetings “domestic terrorists” who commit “hate crimes.”

Scapegoat: Quite simply, the age-old scapegoat technique assigns blame to someone who is not a party to something. Two examples of scapegoating will suffice: (1) every presidential administration typically blames current economic woes on the previous administration; (2) after COVID vaccines were offered to the public, only the unvaccinated were blamed for the ongoing pandemic.

Logical Disconnect: The World Economic Forum is now famous for its ad campaign, “You will own nothing and be happy.” What a typical propagandist ploy, to say that happiness is the result of owning nothing, when everyone knows from experience that such a statement is totally illogical and untrue. A corollary to the WEF’s absurd claim might as well be: “Homeless people own nothing, therefore they must be happy.”[11]

At this point you might be thinking that whoever owns or influences the media would be smart to use these propaganda techniques in various combinations to achieve any conceivable end. You would be correct. The sad truth is, media owners and influencers are already employing this strategy. The sadder truth: It is the technocrats and their transhumanist twins who control Big Media—that is, all the legacy print media and television and radio stations plus all social media (think Facebook and Twitter and YouTube) in America.

Once we know the sources of propaganda and have examined the specific techniques, we can pinpoint the real objectives for promulgating the propaganda.

For instance, throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022, Big Media delivered a non-stop tsunami of propaganda urging everyone to get the COVID-19 mRNA injection to fight the virus. Before long it was discovered that the injections were ineffective and, in many cases, harmful. Turns out the goal of Big Pharma and the complicit captured agencies—in other words, their real objective—was not to prevent contagion but to introduce a new medical therapy. This therapy does something no vaccine ever did: It hacks the human immune system via genetic sequences that are engineered into the mRNA and in doing so ultimately edits the human genome. Not that the propagandists ever came out and said as much!

When we analyze the COVID “ vaccine” propaganda, it becomes clear that its source is the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, both of which are heavily influenced, if not dominated, by transhumanists and technocrats. It also becomes obvious that their promises have been at best disingenuous and at worst patently false. Many of its takers have suffered severely and become either permanently injured or a fatal statistic. The cause of their illness or death has been irrefutably determined to be one or more rounds of the COVID shot.

Is there a lesson we can take from this dangerous—often fatal—lie and apply it to our future run-ins with propaganda? Yes. Not just one lesson, but many lessons. One I propose we all heed is this: Whenever we detect propaganda at play, our knee-jerk reaction should always be to ask, “What is the product being sold to us by the propagandists?” and “What do those same propagandists say the product will do for us?” Invariably, the product is actually designed to do something far different from the propagandists’ plug—something far worse.

The Nudge

In 2008, Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago professor of behavioral economics, co-authored a book titled The Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. His “nudge theory” was quickly picked up by many governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations, who began using it as an influential policy tool to manipulate the behavior of employees, customers, and citizens. Nine years later, Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on psychological biases in behavioral economics.[12]

Now let’s look—through the eyes of Henry Farrell, who teaches political science and international affairs at George Washington University—at the fallout from Thaler’s nudge theory, shall we? In a Vox article, Farrell provides a critical analysis of what has become known as “nudgeocracy,” or the practice of nudging. He writes:

Indeed, there are many circumstances under which nudges are a good idea. But the fad for nudgeocracy has hidden implications. Thaler and [co-author Cass] Sunstein describe the philosophy that underlies nudging as “libertarian paternalism” — libertarian because it lets people make the choices that they want to, paternalist because it provides them with a father’s guiding hand. Behind nudgeocracy lies the assumption that daddy knows best.

For Thaler and Sunstein, daddy is a “choice architect” — a skilled and intelligent technocrat who uses good data, good social science and his own intelligence to figure out what people would really want to do, if only they were as smart and well informed as the choice architect.”

Farrell concludes that nudging “amounts to a kind of technocracy, which assumes that experts will know which choices are in the interests of ordinary people better than those people know themselves. This may be true under some circumstances,” he continues, “but it will not be true all of the time, or even most of the time, if there are no good opportunities for those ordinary people to voice their preferences.”

Thaler and Sunstein apparently don’t believe that the “ordinary people” Farrell describes know how to “voice their preferences”—or that they even have the ability and the right to make their own choices. Hence:

Our goal, in short, is to help people make the choices that they would have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive ability, and complete self-control.

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.[13]

The nudging mechanism that controls people’s behavior is very subtle. As Thaler and Sunstein explain it, “nudge architects”—who fit my description of technocrats to a T—first determine what the most rational choice or decision should be in a given situation. Then they design a “nudge” to steer the target, without his conscious knowledge, to that outcome.

Fascinating, isn’t it, that Thaler and Sunstein believe they and their fellow practitioners always pay full attention, always possess complete information, always have unlimited cognitive ability and complete self-control. By contrast, they deem the rest of us perpetually deficient in attention, information, cognitive ability and self-control. Paternalism, indeed.

Similar to the standardized techniques of propaganda we listed above, nudging has developed its own behavior-influencing strategies—among them are social proof, numerical anchors, option restriction, and competition. It’s not necessary to know all the details of these nudging techniques, but it is important to recognize that nudging has become a highly developed discipline.

Much as I dislike referring to it, Google’s search engine provides a good example of nudging in action. When you type in a few letters to begin a new search, a tailored type-ahead list of choices is presented to you, offering one-click suggestions. Google’s nudge architects know you are much more likely to pick one of their completed suggestions than you are to type in your original search idea. What you may not realize is that Google very likely had already compiled information about your previous searches, preferences, purchases, etc. The autotype options it presents to you are nuanced by that data to trick you into selecting a certain destination of Google’s choosing. While your data can be used to sell you products, it can just as easily be used to nudge you to vote for certain political candidates.

In the hands of technocrats and their transhumanist twins, the practice of nudge theory has exploded since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. Nudging has caused people to dutifully accept public health policies such as wearing masks, social distancing, working from home, and, ultimately, submitting to experimental mRNA-based injections. In other cases, where nudging alone didn’t get the job done, outright mandates were put in place to force compliance.

One journal reported on the effect of nudging in Great Britain during 2020–2022:

This politics of behavior has given rise to a new form of technocratic governance. Then prime minister David Cameron gave this technocracy its most explicit form when he helped set up the Nudge Unit in 2010. This was charged with the task of developing policies that could shape people’s thoughts, choices and actions. As far as the nudgers were concerned, subliminal psychological techniques were preferable to democratic debate and argument.[14]

The article goes on to say:

A government that substitutes its own preferences in place of people’s free will is clearly one which does not take freedom seriously. In effect, nudging allows experts to try to colonize people’s internal life and attempt to make their decisions for them .[15]

When the cunning, crafty art of nudging and the devious, deceptive art of propaganda are employed together to achieve specific outcomes, they represent the height of technocracy’s “science of social engineering.” This is not to say that there are no other tools available, but the combination of nudging and propagandizing is a solid one-two knockout punch.

What, then, is the role of newly popularized “mass formation”?

Mass Formation

How many times in the past three years have you heard the question, “Why are people so gullible?” They usually go on to describe a driver who is alone in the car with the windows rolled up and a face mask on—for protection from a virus the mask cannot possibly protect against.

One man who has attempted to answer that question is Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and one of the world’s leading experts on totalitarianism and mass formation.

Desmet published his much-anticipated book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism , in June 2022. In it, he lays out his theory of mass formation, a subject he had been interviewed about and had written articles about—bringing him much attention—over the previous twenty-four months. According to Desmet, “mass formation is, in essence, a kind of group hypnosis that destroys individuals’ ethical self-awareness and robs them of their ability to think critically.” He points out that today’s totalitarianism is led not by iconic dictators like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler but by “dull bureaucrats and technocrats.”[16]

To his credit, Desmet accurately explains the “narrative of mechanistic science, in which man is reduced to a biological organism” and becomes an “insignificant by-product of mechanistic processes”[17] :

Man may not realize it, but his humanity does not really matter, it is nothing essential. His whole existence, his longing and his lust, his romantic lamentations and his most superficial needs, his joy and his sorrow, his doubt and his choices, his anger and unreasonableness, his pleasure and his suffering, his deepest aversion and his most lofty aesthetic appreciations, in short, the entire drama of his existence, can ultimately be reduced to elementary particles that interact according to the laws of mechanics.[18]

This is, of course, the essence of both technocracy and transhumanism.

Desmet believes there are four simultaneous conditions necessary for a group to form and fall into mass formation. All the individuals in that group must:

Experience a lack of social bonds and isolation 

See life as meaningless or senseless 

Have free-floating anxiety (be anxious but unable to pinpoint why) 

Have free-floating frustration and aggression [19] 

When these four conditions exist in an individual who is then presented with a narrative that identifies the object of his anxiety, frustration, and aggression, that individual is prone to falling into mass formation. Doing so enables him to regain both meaning in his life and social bonds with like-minded persons. This temporary psychological state satisfies him but is extremely dangerous, because he has forfeited his ability to think critically, independently.

Desmet’s theory of mass formation perfectly explains events like the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, where 909 followers were led by Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones to drink a poison-laced suicide concoction that sent them all to an instant and early death.

Where Desmet errs, however, is in his answer to the question he pointedly asks, “Should we consider mass formation the result of a conspiracy?” Desmet says no. Instead, he posits, authoritarian leaders are drawn into the mass formation themselves and they then solidify and perpetuate their condition. He further suggests:

As such, in a certain sense, conspiracy thinking — the thinking that reduces all world events to one big conspiracy — fulfills the same function as mass formation. As with mass formation, conspiracy theorizing fills humans with a kind of enthusiasm. The anxiety, anger, and discontent that are now associated with a few simple mental images transform a strongly negative state into a (symptomatic) positive one .[20]

Apparently Desmet has not considered: Who creates and distributes the narrative that causes the mass formation in the first place? Is it possible to use social engineering techniques to artificially create the four conditions that he says are necessary for spontaneous mass formation? Are the social engineers who actively set out to deceive and subjugate people more to blame than the victims whom they induce into the condition of mass formation?

As the co-author of two books on the globalist Trilateral Commission and the sole author of three books on the globalist technocratic movement (this book being the third), I have followed the process of globalization and the perpetrators of that process for the past forty-five years. In that time, I have observed that there are most definitely despotic figures who conspire together to lay out strategies that achieve certain ends—ends that inevitably and I dare say purposefully target many innocent victims.

When, for instance, United Nations executive Christiana Figueres stated that the UN intended to overthrow capitalism and free market economics, that it had created a timetable to achieve it, that it had the means to do so, and that it was taking immediate action to start the process—she was defining a classic conspiracy. Could Figueres be called a victim of mass formation? As an ideologue, yes. But as one of its hypnotized subjects, no, most certainly not. She was a witting fellow conspirator in a globalist plot, pure and simple.

I will concede that partial blame must be accepted by every adult who has fallen into mass formation. The hundreds of men and women who died in the Jonestown Massacre should never have entered the trap in the first place. (Of course the innocent children whose parents brought them into the cult are excused from all blame.) That said, I acknowledge that it was their cult leader alone who mixed the mass suicide cocktail and ordered them to drink it.

As a psychoanalyst and researcher, Desmet is able to conceive of the mechanics involved in creating and perpetuating mass formation. He is a cogent observer and explicator of the subject. His warnings against mass formation should be taken to heart.

Why? Because the creators and perpetuators of mass formation turn out to be technocrats and transhumanists—the very ones who have dedicated their entire careers to implementing and enforcing the science of social engineering. Thus, in this writer’s opinion, mass formation in the hands of today’s technocrats and transhumanists is as dangerous to civilization as the invention of the atomic bomb.

The evidence, especially since 2020, suggests that those technocrats and transhumanists are deploying the tools of social engineering against rest of the world to the fullest extent. They are conspiring to bring about the most dangerous period of mass formation in human history.

Footnotes

[1] B. F. Skinner, Cumulative Record (B. F. Skinner Foundation, 1999) p. 182.

[2] Britannica’s definition of mechanism: “In philosophy, mechanism is the predominant form of Materialism, which holds that natural phenomena can and should be explained by reference to matter and motion and their laws. It rejected the notion of organisms by reducing biological functions to physical and chemical processes, thus putting an end to spirit–body dualism.”

https://www.britannica.com/topic/mechanism-philosophy .

[3] Britannica’s definition of Taylorism: A “system of scientific management advocated by Fred W. Taylor. In Taylor’s view, the task of factory management was to determine the best way for the worker to do the job, to provide the proper tools and training, and to provide incentives for good performance.” https://www.britannica.com/science/Taylorism .

[4] Britannica’s definition of systems theory (also called social systems theory): “In social science, the study of society as a complex arrangement of elements, including individuals and their beliefs, as they relate to a whole (e.g., a country).” https://www.britannica.com/topic/systems-theory .

[5] “What is Technocracy,” The Technocrat , 1938.

[6] Richard C. Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe , (University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 1.

[7] Op cit., p. 242–243.

[8] Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Horace Liveright, Inc., 1928), p. 8.

[9] Ibid., p. 159.

[10] Gehl, Robert and Lawson, Sean, “Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering,” The MIT Press Reader. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/masters-of-crowds-the-rise-of-mass-social-engineering .

[11] Wood, Patrick, “Exposing Propaganda: The Vaccine For Liberty, Truth And Reason,” Technocracy News & Trends, January 17, 2022. https://www.technocracy.news/exposing-propaganda-the-vaccine-for-liberty-truth-and-reason .

[12] Farrell, Henry, “This year’s economics Nobel winner invented a tool that’s both brilliant and undemocratic,” Vox , October 16, 2017. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/10/16/16481836/nudges-thaler-nobel-economics-prize-undemocratic-tool .

[13] Ibid., p. 9.

[14] Furedi, Frank, “’Nudge’ has no place in our democracy,” spiked , January 14, 2022. https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/14/nudge-has-no-place-in-our-democracy

[15] Ibid.

[16] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022), p. 2.

[17] Ibid., p. 17.

[18] Ibid., p. 17.

[19] Ibid., p. 94–96

[20] Ibid., p. 128.

The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism

Patrick Wood