Barack - That's My Baby
Look at what I found in September of 2008. Some would call this a 'synchronicity'.
Item 1. The following is a quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski found on the first few pages of "Operation Mind Control" written by Walter Bowart, 1978 Fontana Publishing. Operation Mind Control
"In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason."
Zbigniew Brzezinski,
National Security Advisor to Jimi Carter
Zbigniew Brzezinski is the man (handler) behind the presidential candidate "Barack Obama." Brzezinski is the author of "The Grand Chessboard," & "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era."
Item 2. Furthermore, I found this item. Open: An Examination of Obama’s Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches
Here's the original quote in its original context. Look for it in item (8).
"Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era"
THE VIKING PRESS / NEW YORK
Copyright © 1970 by Zbigniew Brzezinski All rights reserved
First published in 1970 by The Viking Press, Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022
Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited
ISBN 670160415
Library of Congress catalog card number: 76104162
Printed in U.S.Aby H. Wolff Book Mfg. Co.
Prepared under the auspices of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University
Portions of this book appeared in "Encounter" in different form
Page 10, "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era." - Zbigniew Brzezinski
1. The Onset of the Technetronic Age
The impact of science and technology on man and his society, especially in the more advanced countries of the world, is becoming the major source of contemporary change. Recent years have seen a proliferation of exciting and challenging literature on the future. In the United States, in Western Europe, and, to a lesser degree, in Japan and in the Soviet Union, a number of systematic, scholarly efforts have been made to project, predict, and grasp what the future holds for us.
The transformation that is now taking place, especially in America, is already creating a society increasingly unlike its industrial predecessor. 1 The post-industrial society is becoming a "technetronic" society: * a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications. The industrial process is no longer the principal determinant of social change, altering the mores, the social structure, and the values of society. In the industrial society technical knowledge was applied primarily to one specific end: the acceleration and improvement of production techniques. Social consequences were a later by-product of this paramount concern. In the technetronic society scientific and technical knowledge, in addition to enhancing production capabilities, quickly spills over to affect almost all aspects of life directly. Accordingly, both the growing capacity for the instant calculation of the most complex interactions and the increasing availability of biochemical means of human control augment the potential scope of consciously chosen direction, and thereby also the pressures to direct, to choose, and to change.
Reliance on these new techniques of calculation and communication enhances the social importance of human intelligence and the immediate relevance of learning. The need to integrate social change is heightened by the increased ability to decipher the patterns of change; this in turn increases the significance of basic assumptions concerning the nature of man and the desirability of one or another form of social organization. Science thereby intensifies rather than diminishes the relevance of values, but it demands that they be cast in terms that go beyond the more crude ideologies of the industrial age. (This theme is developed further in Part II.)
New Social Patterns
For Norbert Wiener, "the locus of an earlier industrial revolution before the main industrial revolution" is to be found in the fifteenth-century research pertaining to navigation (the nautical compass), as well as in the development of gunpowder and printing. 2 Today the functional equivalent of navigation is the thrust into space, which requires a rapid computing capacity beyond the means of the human brain; the equivalent of gunpowder is modern nuclear physics, and that of printing is television and long-range instant communications. The consequence of this new tech-netronic revolution is the progressive emergence of a society that increasingly differs from the industrial one in a variety of economic, political, and social aspects. The following examples may be briefly cited to summarize some of the contrasts:
(1) In an industrial society the mode of production shifts from agriculture to industry, with the use of human and animal muscle supplanted by machine operation. In the technetronic society industrial employment yields to services, with automation and cybernetics replacing the operation of machines by individuals.
(2) Problems of employment and unemployment—to say nothing of the prior urbanization of the post-rural labor force—dominate the relationship between employers, labor, and the market in the industrial society, and the assurance of minimum welfare to the new industrial masses is a source of major concern. In the emerging new society questions relating to the obsolescence of skills, security, vacations, leisure, and profit sharing dominate the relationship, and the psychic well-being of millions of relatively secure but potentially aimless lower-middle-class blue-collar workers becomes a growing problem.
(3) Breaking down traditional barriers to education, and thus creating the basic point of departure for social advancement, is a major goal of social reformers in the industrial society. Education, available for limited and specific periods of time, is initially concerned with overcoming illiteracy and subsequently with technical training, based largely on written, sequential reasoning. In the technetronic society not only is education universal but advanced training is available to almost all who have the basic talents, and there is far greater emphasis on quality selection. The essential problem is to discover the most effective techniques for the rational exploitation of social talent. The latest communication and calculating techniques are employed in this task. The educational process becomes a lengthier one and is increasingly reliant on audio-visual aids. In addition, the flow of new knowledge necessitates more and more frequent refresher studies.
(4) In the industrial society social leadership shifts from the traditional rural aristocratic to an urban plutocratic elite. Newly acquired wealth is its foundation, and intense competition the outlet—as well as the stimulus—for its energy. In the technetronic society plutocratic pre-eminence is challenged by the political leadership, which is itself increasingly permeated by individuals
* The term "post-industrial" is used by Daniel Bell, who has done much of the pioneering thinking on the subject. However, I prefer to use the neologism "technetronic," because it conveys more directly the character of the principal impulses for change in our time. Similarly, the term "industrial" described what otherwise could have been called the "post-agricultural" age.
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Page 11, "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era." - Zbigniew Brzezinski
possessing special skills and intellectual talents. Knowledge becomes a tool of power and the effective mobilization of talent an important way to acquire power.
(5) The university in an industrial society—in contrast to the situation in medieval times—is an aloof ivory tower, the repository of irrelevant, even if respected, wisdom, and for a brief time the fountainhead for budding members of the established social elite. In the technetronic society the university becomes an intensely involved "think tank," the source of much sustained political planning and social innovation.
(6) The turmoil inherent in the shift from a rigidly traditional rural society to an urban one engenders an inclination to seek total answers to social dilemmas, thus causing ideologies to thrive in the industrializing society. (The American exception to this rule was due to the absence of a feudal tradition, a point well developed by Louis Hartz.) In the industrial age literacy makes for static interrelated conceptual thinking, congenial to ideological systems. In the technetronic society audiovisual communications prompt more changeable, disparate views of reality, not compressible into formal systems, even as the requirements of science and the new computative techniques place a premium on mathematical logic and systematic reasoning. The resulting tension is felt most acutely by scientists, with the consequence that some seek to confine reason to science while expressing their emotions through politics. Moreover, the increasing ability to reduce social conflicts to quantifiable and measurable dimensions reinforces the trend toward a more pragmatic approach to social problems, while it simultaneously stimulates new concerns with preserving "humane" values.
(7) In the industrial society, as the hitherto passive masses become active there are intense political conflicts over such matters as disenfranchisement and the right to vote. The issue of political participation is a crucial one. In the technetronic age the question is increasingly one of ensuring real participation in decisions that seem too complex and too far removed from the average citizen. Political alienation becomes a problem. Similarly, the issue of political equality of the sexes gives way to a struggle for the sexual equality of women. In the industrial society woman __the operator of machines—ceases to be physically inferior to the male, a consideration of some importance in rural life, and begins to demand her political rights. In the emerging technetronic society automation threatens both males and females, intellectual talent is computable, the "pill" encourages sexual equality, and women begin to claim complete equality.
(8) The newly enfranchised masses are organized in the industrial society by trade unions and political parties and unified by relatively simple and somewhat ideological programs. Moreover, political attitudes are influenced by appeals to nationalist sentiments, communicated through the massive increase of newspapers employing, naturally, the readers' national language. In the technetronic society the trend seems to be toward aggregating the individual support of millions of unorganized citizens, who are easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, and effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason. Reliance on television—and hence the tendency to replace language with imagery, which is international rather than national, and to include war coverage or scenes of hunger in places as distant as, for example, India— creates a somewhat more cosmopolitan, though highly impressionistic, involvement in global affairs.
(9) Economic power in the early phase of industrialization tends to be personalized, by either great entrepreneurs like Henry Ford or bureaucratic industrial officials like Kaganovich, or Mine (in Stalinist Poland). The tendency toward depersonalization economic power is stimulated in the next stage by the appearance of a highly complex interdependence between governmental institutions (including the military), scientific establishments, and industrial organizations. As economic power becomes inseparably linked with political power, it becomes more invisible and the sense of individual futility increases.
(10) In an industrial society the acquisition of goods and the accumulation of personal wealth become forms of social attainment for an unprecedentedly large number of people. In the technetronic society the adaptation of science to humane ends and a growing concern with the quality of life become both possible and increasingly a moral imperative for a large number of citizens, especially the young.
Eventually, these changes and many others, including some that more directly affect the personality and quality of the human being himself, will make the technetronic society as different from the industrial as the industrial was from the agrarian. * And just as the shift from an agrarian economy and feudal politics toward an industrial society and political systems based on the individual's emotional identification with the nation-state gave rise to contemporary international politics, so the appearance of the technetronic society reflects the onset of a new relationship between man and his expanded global reality.
Social Explosion/Implosion
This new relationship is a tense one: man has still to define it conceptually and thereby render it comprehensible to himself. Our expanded global reality is simultaneously fragmenting and thrusting itself in upon us. The result of the coincident explosion and implosion is not only insecurity and tension but also an entirely novel perception of what many still call international affairs.
* Bell defines the "five dimensions of the postindustrial society" as involving the following: (l) The creation of a service economy. (2) The preeminence of the professional and technical class. (3) The centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and policy formulation in the society. (4) The possibility of self-sustaining technological growth. (5) The creation of a new "intellectual technology." (Daniel Bell, "The Measurement of Knowledge and Technology," in Indicators of Social Change, Eleanor Sheldon and Wilbert Moore, eds., New York, 1968, pp. 15253.)
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