Those descriptions are just a few I pulled from the 2015 book of the Roadmap co-creator called Smart Citizens, Smarter State. Its view of the role of governments, at all levels, is that they are in charge of planning and managing social systems, like cities, people, and the economy. Citizens have a right to participate and be consulted, but as individuals they are bound nonetheless. Honestly, this vision made me wonder precisely what classes the author took at Harvard undergrad and then Yale Law, but somewhere she learned to have a very lofty view of institutions and their function for the 21st Century. (my bolding).

“differences in economic growth can be traced to one thing…It is not culture or the plague, but institutions: institutions that are inclusive and promote the use of citizens’ talent, ingenuity, ambition and ability. When rulers become extractive, seeking to oppress their people to the end of achieving economic gain, they guarantee decline. But when regimes advance human capacity, they progress.”

I am a little old to have to be exclaiming “you’re not the boss of me” as if we are on a playground arguing over toys, but no, these stakes are so much higher as we saw in the Roadmap from the last post. Where does mind arson come in though? A couple of places actually. Noveck introduces us to a new word–epistocracy. That’s the idea that people who know more will be in charge. She points out that “If some have significantly better epistemic capabilities–relevant knowledge and skills–than others, this creates a tension with democratic equality.” They might also read that Roadmap, authored books, cited documents, and then piece together what is actually being contemplated in an unapproved way. That will not do in a vision where public policy wants to steer society and “Governments aspire to be the brain of their societies” as the report from an annual Oxford conference on policymaking sponsored by the same McKinsey Consulting that helped fund that Roadmap.

Another lost invite in other words, but the authors of the Roadmap touted that conference last week after the previous post and we can take a look too. http://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/files/documents/BSG-OxfordGovernmentReview.pdf

Before we discuss that conference that should have a subtitle “there’s nothing governments cannot do once they marry public policy and the behavioral sciences,” I pulled a quote from George Orwell that one of my cybernetics books. It was used to explain that no governmental authority with aspirations of complete power over people and social systems can afford not to manipulate the news and permissible everyday knowledge. Here’s Orwell: “freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt and not be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.” So what a wanna-be steering government in the 21st century needs is to control those perceived facts and feelings via the type of education available, without that actual intent being recognized.

My analysis is that this is what School Choice does when its documentable history is followed through and its declared goals are actually tracked. My insistence that there is in fact a Left/Right Pincer action going on has been based on what is actually being said in articles and books too few read. We can thankfully get beyond that now as Ms Noveck tweeted on the blog tied to her book to a September 9 article called “A Revolutionary Toolbox” that a Costa Rican think tank had launched that thanked her for her help as well as a number of listed officials identified as being with the Atlas Network. If, like me, you search out those individual names you will find several are also tied to executive positions at the World Bank. Ding. Ding. Another cited influence is an MIT poli sci prof, Nazli Choucri, who is the Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development.

If you have time, do look up GSSD as well as it provides yet more evidence that steering and Sustainable Development need Mind Arson. The site reads like a blueprint for the specified categories of knowledge that everyone must know and no more. Good way to keep anyone from grasping they are now being fed politically useful facts and guiding fictions with no means of knowing what is imaginary or not. So not only do “governments aspire to be the brains of their societies,” which gets so much easier if you circumscribe available information into a “knowledge system,” but another speaker at that conference, Eldar Shafir, a Princeton prof who also has ties to Harvard, seemed to have an aim that would go a long way toward creating any needed ‘imaginary feelings’ without that aim being accurately perceived.

“Leaders in the 21st century need to understand human psychology rather than make false assumptions about it. [won’t state prescribed social emotional learning standards come in ever so handy then?] Humans are driven by a richer set of motivations than economists used to assume…Better data and analytics can combine with greater empathy and better psychology to shape more powerful and effective public policy.” A different conference attendee, Elizabeth Linos, gave even more incentive for governments at every level to actually want Mind Arson to fit with their expressed desire to plan, manage, and steer while calling such intentions–governing.

“The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in behavioural science by policymakers at local, national and international levels. The first wave of interest asked: how can we use behavioural science to nudge our citizens to follow the rules?…The second wave considered the relationship between a people and their government.” All of these visions of public policy envision a regulation of the ‘market’ economy at all levels in the name of “many of the most central moral concerns we face as a society: concerns about distribution, welfare, opportunity, and the good life. It is therefore also a central concern for us as citizens in a democratic polity.” That was Noveck and we saw precisely the same concerns in those Habitat III documents and the conferences HUD has quietly hosted. In the comments to the previous post are links to what a Right to the City will factually mean.

When the Roadmap from the last post stated that the purpose of government is now to “improve people’s lives” it means precisely the kind of public policy steering we are covering in this post. A steered citizen cannot be a genuinely well-informed, rational person because it negates the ability to construct the necessary internalized keel to control how ‘facts’ are perceived, which emotions are utilized, and what values motivate actions. After the last post I listened to this interview with Angela Glover Blackwell since I had heard her speak last January so I knew she was touting the same people as I read in the recent book The Way Back tied to the Atlas Network. http://ssir.org/videos/entry/three_questions_with_angela_glover_blackwell

The question was “what role can public policy play in advancing social inclusion?” Her answer was that it “is essential for a fully inclusive society. The society won’t just be inclusive on its own. And public policy has always been the thing that translates the values of the nation into what actually happens in that nation.” So education controls prevailing values and you cannot have a “fully inclusive society” if some people know more or have better skills than others. Remember Ms Noveck called that an epistocracy? So this public policy-centric vision assumes actually that governments at all levels are in fact the bosses of us. To quote Ms Blackwell again “So public policy allows us to be able to spend our resources and make decisions that are fair and work for the broader society as well as work for the individual.”

Honestly when I first created this blog’s metaphor of an invisible serfs collar, I only knew a part of the story. I am not sure I had ever even heard the term cybernetics before. Yikes! In order for all these plans for a fully inclusive, governments at all levels are in charge, steerable economy and society vision to work, governments have to control prevailing consciousness. To avoid opposition, that control cannot be widely perceived in time. Makes the timing of turning over the Internet to an international authority as of October 1 rather timely and propitious, doesn’t it? Unappreciated radically different conception of K-12 education and the loss of control over the Internet certainly seems like an excellent means to have “complete command over the interpretation of political concepts, which is necessary for complete steering of men from the outside” said the cyberneticians I found as I contemplated that Roadmap.

If anyone is still not convinced on the ties among what has been openly proclaimed once we know where to look and an attendant need for Mind Arson, let me close with the opening epigraph from “The Revolutionary Toolbox” link. Citing Ithiel de Sola Pool:

“People who think about social change in traditional political terms cannot begin to imagine the changes that lie ahead. Conventional reformers cast their programs in terms of national policies, or in terms of laws and central planning. But in the end, what will shape the future is a creative potential that inheres in the new technologies of electronic communication and machine intelligence.”

That vision is what governments at all levels want and they blithely use the term public policy to obscure the manipulative intentions they talk about elsewhere at conferences we are not invited to and in books and reports we are not really supposed to read. That Roadmap for the Next Administration is not for us and it’s really not for a President Clinton or Trump either. It is for the people either would appoint to a federal agency or the judiciary and the professors of the elite universities that credential them.

This aim to steer is well and frequently expressed. It is Bicameral and Bipartisan, at all levels of government, and think tanks of every purported ideology. The way out is to remember that cybernetics is all about the need to “organize the flow of information and control in a system.”

Radically reconceptualizing the nature of education with a desire for Mind Arson, putting Public Policy as the supposed driver of society, and giving up control of the Internet each goes to that necessity. Ms Noveck never used the term cybernetics or socio-cybernetics, but she did describe the essence. She also wrote about the various means “for organizing distributed information flows in biological as well as sociological systems.”

That sounds so much better that its essence of organizing what people in a society are to know, believe, perceive, and value so that they can be collectively steered. Sociological systems is just a fancy word for workplaces, schools, cities, economies, and all the other groups of humans who are to no longer be free to not submit to a “fully inclusive”, steered society.