Our guest is once again Patrick M. Wood, Editor-in-Chief of Technocracy News and Trends, who joins us to discuss his important new book, Technocracy Rising : The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation, which impressively "joins the dots" of many a question about the nascent New World Order.

In some ways a follow-up from our previous conversation with him, which concentrated on the Trilateral Commission and its technocratic quest for a "New International Economic Order", this interview centres in Technocracy itself and explores some of the key ways in which its utopian goals are being pursued in the world today.

Patrick Wood is an author and lecturer who has stud­ied elite globalisation policies since the late 1970s, when he partnered with the late Antony C. Sutton to co-author Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II, and he remains a leading expert on the elitist Tri­lateral Commission. An economist by education, a financial analyst and writer by profession, and an Amer­ican Constitutionalist by choice, Wood maintains a biblical worldview and has deep historical insights into modern attacks on sovereignty, property rights and personal freedom. A frequent speaker on radio shows around the U.S., Wood's cur­rent work centres in Technocracy, Transhumanism and Scientism, and how these are transforming global economics, politics and religion. As he says, the endgame is scientific dictatorship; we ignore it our peril.

Original Audio      Notes                                                                                                  Transcribed by Sarah Brand—Proofread by Anon.

Julian Charles:  Hello everybody! Julian Charles here of TheMindRenewed.com podcasting to you as usual from the depths of the Lancashire countryside here in the UK. Today is the 23^rd April 2015, and I am delighted to welcome back to the programme Patrick Wood, who joined us last year to talk about the Trilateral Commission and its vision for a "New Economic World Order."

Patrick Wood is an author and lecturer who has studied elite globalisation policies since the late 1970s, when he partnered with the late Antony C. Sutton to co-author Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes l & ll. He is a leading expert on the elitist Trilateral Commission, their policies and achievements in creating their self-proclaimed "New International Economic Order."

An economist by education, a financial analyst and writer by profession, and an American Constitutionalist by choice, Patrick maintains a biblical world view and has deep historical insights into the modern attacks on sovereignty, property rights, and personal freedom. Such attacks are epitomised by the implementation of UN policies such as Agenda 21, sustainable development, smart growth, and, in education, the widespread adoption of Common Core. He is a frequent speaker and guest on radio shows around the US and, indeed, internationally. His current research builds on Trilateral Commission hegemony, focusing on transhumanism, Technocracy, and scientism and how these are co-opting economics, politics and religion around the world.

Pat, thank you very much indeed for joining us again on The Mind Renewed.

Patrick Wood:  It’s great to be back, Julian. Thanks for having me back.

JC:  Now the subject of the conversation today—which will be very much related to the conversation we had last time, on the Trilateral Commission—is going to be your new book, which you published this year, called Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation, which, I have to say, is a fascinating read. I think it’s a really important book, and I’m going to say I think everybody has to take time to get this book and read it. It's a cliché to say that a book "joins up the dots," but this one really does. So, my first question, Pat: How’s the book doing in terms of sales?

PW:  Well, I wish it was doing better, obviously, but then I would probably say that no matter how many books we were selling. I would have expected some more sales than what we’ve had, but the response has been fantastic. For people that are reading the book, I mean it’s just over the top. You know, you look on Amazon.com and I think there are thirty-four or thirty-five reviews on there now. There’s one four-star review, and all the rest of them are five-stars all the way down the line, and statements like: "If you only read one book this year, this has to be it."

Some people are saying this is the book for the fate of the future. I don’t write those kind of reviews. I’m just saying what other people are saying about the book. You would think, with that kind of enthusiasm, that more people would want to get a hold of it and read it. You know, I think there are some reasons maybe why—not just politics crowding out mind share, but there might be a measure of fear as well. You know, people hear me on the radio, they hear me on TV, and they listen, they nod their head, they understand, and say, "That’s fantastic." And then they say: "Man, I don’t want to know any more." (Chuckles)

JC:  I guess one of the things must be that there are so many books about which a lot of hype is created. I mean, [virtually] every book that’s out there: "You’ve got to read this; it’s going to change your way of looking at the world." When it comes to a book that actually is going to do something along those lines, people perhaps don’t believe it.

PW:  Well, we’ll see how it turns out. Sales have been picking up as people talk one-on-one to other people, and it's clearly impacting the people that do read it. People get moved to action; that's one thing that’s very pleasing to me. They're actually moved to get off the couch, put down the TV remote and go and do something useful with themselves, like either tell other people or start attending their town meetings, where all this sustainable development and Agenda 21 stuff is being implemented, and they're getting down to the root of it.

JC:  Yes, as I said to you before the interview, you seem to be perfectly placed to have understood this, because of your experience with Antony Sutton back in the 1970s. You therefore have an interpretive framework to make sense of so many of the things that are going on in the world today. And you said to me before the interview that you believe God has led you in that direction.

PW:  I really do. You go through life making decisions, some of which are deliberate, but by and large your life just happens. Things go along, and you do things today that you might never have thought you were going to do thirty years ago. So, I look back at all the instances in my life and say, "Wow! The way it’s put together, if any one of those things were taken out of my life at all, I would not be where I am today. I would not have had the capacity to understand technocracy, much less research it, and I would not have had the knowledge of the Trilateral Commission to relate that to this big picture as well."

Besides that, my time with Antony Sutton gave me skills. He taught me skills that you can’t learn in the university. He was a very unusual researcher, and very meticulous and methodical. He had a mind that didn’t work like everybody’s else’s, I have to say. But what I learned from him, the skills I learned from him, were absolutely essential for the rest of my life, and especially for studying all this Technocracy stuff.

JC:  The last time we spoke, we concentrated on the Trilateral Commission, and we brought the philosophy of Technocracy into that conversation. But in this book, you very much concentrate on the philosophy and the history of Technocracy itself (although you bring the Trilateral Commission very much into that story), and you examine how that philosophy is being used. You call it a "Trojan horse" to bring about global transformation. So, could you give us a brief sketch of what technocracy is essentially about? And what kind of transformation you’re talking about?

PW:  Yes. Back in the 1930s in America there was an organisation actually called Technocracy Incorporated. It was preceded by a movement, still called Technocracy, but a movement that was for a short period of time embedded at Columbia University. The two founders of the movement at that time were Howard Scott and M. King Hubbert. They were both the co-founders, as well, of Technocracy Incorporated in 1934. At that time, the world was in deep depression, especially in America. There were soup lines and food lines, and unemployment was just unbelievable, and there was very little hope. People thought that capitalism had died and wondered what was going to become of the world. Was it just going to fall apart? It looked that way.

So the scientists and engineers—not all, but some scientists and engineers of the day, especially the ones at Columbia University—decided that the only way to save society was to create a new economic model that would replace capitalism. That’s what Technocracy is all about; it’s an economic system. It defines a completely new paradigm for the control of economic affairs in society. They proposed that it would be based on energy rather than on money, supply and demand, capitalism and free enterprise—things we know and understand today. Instead, it would be based on energy. The idea would be that everybody in society would be issued a certain amount of energy credits or energy currency for a period of time, and that they would buy goods and services at prices that were set according to the energy that it took to make those goods and services. There was no provision for property rights, because why would you need to own anything if everything was basically provided for you? It would end up being a completely managed and controlled society by the scientists and engineers that hated politicians. They saw no need for politicians whatsoever.

JC:  On the face of it, one might be forgiven for thinking: "Ah, well, this sounds a little bit like communism, or pethaps national socialism (fascism), or something like that. But you say it’s neither of those.

PW:  Well, it isn’t, and the reason is because it’s an economic system, not a political system. Fascism obviously has economic aspects to it, but it’s still a political system, a political model. All of those "isms" are still based on a price-based economy, even though they’re managed economies in different ways. With fascism you have corporate management, and with socialism and communism you have government management of that economic system. You see, it’s a top-down management. But technocracy is not capitalism at all; it’s completely other-worldly to capitalism. It doesn’t show any of those characteristics whatsoever, and it requires a type of management of society that controls goods and services being consumed, being made, things being taken out of the earth to make those things, and so on. Aldous Huxley, one of yours, I believe . . . . (Chuckles)

JC:  Indeed.  

PW:  ...Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, and Columbia University was just receiving Technocracy in 1932. So you have to ask the question: Where did Huxley get his inspiration for Brave New World? He wrote about scientific dictatorship and how the system would control everybody, down to even how embryos are controlled and how people are given their marching orders, how they are going to work, what they would be allowed to do in their life, maybe who they would be able to marry, and so on.

He was looking at Technocracy; that was the only thing going on at the time that had any resemblance to what he was writing about. But fortunately for us, in a way, technocracy had no institutional support in those early days. There was no Rockefeller money, no Carnegie money, no foundation money, no big person took any interest in them. And when Columbia University found out that Howard Scott wasn’t even an engineer and didn’t even have a degree, they punted him and the whole movement right out of Columbia. It was a huge disgrace to Columbia at the time. So Technocracy went out of favour with Columbia very quickly. But that only encouraged the two co-founders, Scott and Hubbert, to go out on their own and create an actual organisation and incorporate it. Then they began to solicit membership around the country, and it was wildly successful, Julian. It was amazing. There were over 500,000 card-carrying members of Technocracy during those early days of 1934-1935.

JC:  And you say in the book that Howard Scott was considered to be something of a messiah figure.  

PW:  Well, people looked at him that way. Sometimes we use that word loosely, but people looked at him as the saviour of the world. Not in the sense of a spiritual saviour to compete with Christ necessarily, but: "Man! This guy has ideas that are going to put the world back on track again." He did nothing to squash that idea, either. (Chuckles) People said it, and he liked the sound of it. Scott was really just a blowhard, not an engineer. He knew the language and used some of the terms, but was basically just a promoter.

His partner, however, was altogether different. M. King Hubbert was a young geophysicist at the time—well-educated, a very sharp guy. This was also the same M. King Hubbert, by the way, who twenty years later, in 1954, invented the so-called Peak Oil Theory. And he became ultimately one of the fathers of the whole eco movement globally, predicting, of course, that oil was going to run out, that resources and reserves and so on would be in decline, and that we’d all run out of energy, and, therefore, had better do something about it. The United Nations all the way down to the smallest group count M. King Hubbert as one of the fathers of the faith, so to speak.

JC:  And the concept of limitation of resources was one of the features of Technocracy itself, was it not?

PW:  That’s exactly right. It was a resource-based economy, and they were very concerned about the efficiency of extracting things from the earth and balancing that against the population. I should say limiting the extraction of things from the earth and balancing it with the population. Scientists and engineers have a different perspective. And, by the way, I’m not bashing scientists and engineers in general. When I use that term, there’s really only a relatively small percentage of scientists and engineers who are really involved with technocracy, even today. The rest of them—and I know many scientists and engineers personally who are great people—don’t go into this wild philosophical thing. They don’t want to control the world; they don’t want to control society, and so on.

JC:  Yes, you qualify this in your book by saying that people who are wrapped up in this way of thinking have really swallowed the ideas of scientism, positivism and humanism that came from the Enlightenment. In his interviews with us Dr. Martin Erdmann spoke about Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon and how their ideas had been picked up [Part One - Part Two]. So, this is not just about being a scientist or engineer; it's about embracing a certain philosophy. Do you want to explain what scientism and positivism are?

PW:  The father of Technocracy was basically Henri de Saint-Simon. He was a French philosopher who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He was the guy who is credited with being the philosophical touchstone for everything relating to Technocracy today. One of things he wrote was really stunning. He wrote: "A scientist, my dear friends, is a man who foresees. It is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful, and scientists are superior to all other men." (Both chuckle)

JC:  Okay!

PW:  Yeah, there are a couple of problems with this statement, obviously—one being that scientists are not superior to all other men; they are just men. But this is an easy ego trip. You see, when someone like an ancient philosopher says: "Hey! Oh, you’re a scientist now? Wow, you’re superior to everyone else"—now that's an attitude that’s pretty easy for mankind to accept if you happen to be a scientist. You now say, "Wow! I didn’t know that, but I like the sound of that!"

JC:  Sure.

PW:  And the other thing that’s really dangerous about this is that Saint-Simon postulated that the scientist is able to predict the future. He says it pointedly: "A scientist... is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict [the future] that it is useful." Well, it’s not given to man to know the future. The Bible says that very clearly, and I’ve never seen anybody yet, including Nostradamus or anybody else, who will ever be able to predict the future with any kind of certainty whatsoever. It’s just wild guesses, and some of them may end up being right. Men do not have the ability to predict the future, and yet this is one of the basic assumptions that started out with scientism way back when: "Hey! these people are into science; they somehow have a crystal ball to see what’s coming down the road."

So you see, [this is related to] all of this stuff today about things like, for instance, climate change. Al Gore, by the way, is a member of the Trilateral Commission. (We need to relate things properly where we can.) Al Gore is the poster child for climate change—global warming issues. Basically, he said that all the ice in the world is going to melt and the seas are going to rise and we’re all going to die. You know we haven’t yet, but he keeps crowing that mantra. Well, you see, Al Gore believes that he can predict the future using science. Well, I’m sorry, but he’s not going to predict the future in the way he thinks that it’s going to turn out. Whatever he’s saying, it won’t happen that way; I can just virtually guarantee him. But Al Gore has a religious belief that he is superior to all other men and that he has this ability to predict the future. So, you see, very little has changed since Saint-Simon—and he died back in 1825.

JC:  It’s very interesting that you should call that a religious belief—this idea that you can predict the future, or know everything through science—because, as Martin Erdmann said, Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte (the latter in particular) had a view of religion that if you could somehow combine the scientific worldview with religion, then that would be a useful and profitable thing to do, presumably, in order to harness that religious aspect of human psychology. So, the idea that somebody like Al Gore has made a religion of this makes quite a lot of sense within that tradition.

PW:  It’s very much a religion. It has a priesthood and an oracle. The oracle is science; the priesthood is the scientists and engineers who alone are able to determine what the oracle speaks. I use the example of the mythical volcano. You know, the priest runs up to the top of the volcano and listens carefully to see what the volcano is saying to the people down below. And he comes down from the mountain and tells the people: "Well, the volcano says that you need to sacrifice two virgins by the 15^th of the next month, or else the volcano’s going to spew fire and ash over you and kill you all." And the poor people down below have no knowledge really what the volcano said. Of course, the volcano said nothing, right? But it’s basically just the priest who said, "Hey, this is what you need to do." The priest is controlling the people, and the people just blithely go along with it and follow the instructions they are given by this priest, who alone has the supposed ability to understand what the oracle has said. And this is basically what this priesthood of scientism, in a sense, is doing today. They and they alone are able to interpret the scientific reports and determine what science really says to mankind. It's nonsense—absolutely nonsense. It’s the biggest scam that’s ever been pulled on the face of the planet, ever.

JC:  There’s another aspect to this. Looking at this from a slightly religious point of view, you mention holism in the book and its importance to technocratic thinking, which is not what you’d expect considering you’ve just talked about science and engineering. You mention Jan Christian Smuts and his book Holism and Evolution. Do you want to say how that fits into the picture of Technocracy?

PW:  Smuts was a very brilliant man, I do believe. He was involved in the founding of the League of Nations; he was prominent in South Africa; he was prominent in Great Britain. The guy was a statesman, supposedly. But he came up with this idea of holism and evolution. Of course, back in those days, in the early 1900s, everybody was searching for some new philosophy: communism was on the scene, Marxism was on the scene, fascism was growing, and everybody was always talking about the "new thing". So, Smuts was part of that whole thing.

The idea of holism is what he called "the theory of the whole", in which the sum of the parts is of greater importance than any of its component parts. So, take a little thing, such as you and I as individuals: Well, we’re each a member of a family, so our family is greater than us; then your family is part of a community in your neighbourhood, so you have the neighbourhood as greater than your family; and then you maybe have the city that you live in, so the city is greater than the community; and so on up the line until you get to the whole universe.

Smuts believed that the whole of society, and earth as well, was basically one big living organism, and that everything down the line from the top should be subservient to the higher thing. This is where you get the whole concept of the greater good—you know, that we should do things "for the greater good." Well, that’s never really defined, but it really has its roots in this philosophy of holism. It's kind of esoteric, in a way, because you say, "Well, okay, I’m still a person, I still live where I live, I am what I am." But philosophically, when people who want to control society start to use this concept of holism, your individual sovereignty must be submitted to the greater good, to all of the other little holons that are above you. You need to be a good little team player, and if you’re not you’re going to get busted somehow—you know, you’re going to get put in the line.

JC:  It does strike me as being somehow related to the philosophy of "the One," which Carl Teichrib was talking about—where everything gets its value from being understood as part of just One big reality, so that things on the individual level—well, they’re almost illusory, really. You get to understand the value of the parts by relating it to the ultimate reality, which is the Oneness of all things, which is why I thought of this in religious terms. It does seem to be very close to that way of thinking.

PW:  It does, and it is. And we can see it expressed in all kinds of different ways in modern society. The only reason I put it in the book is that it interested me. You could say that that is exactly what is happening today, and here’s where it came from. There’s nothing new under the sun. You know, these people who come up with these ideas today say, "Oh, this is all brand new stuff, we just figured it out." No, you didn’t. I’m sorry, I hate to burst your little bubble, but you didn’t think anything up. You’re basically just rewarming what somebody has said before you a thousand times!

JC:  Sure. So, we have these two prongs of the fork, as it were: the scientific trajectory and this mystical Oneness trajectory. And they’ve got to somehow work their way into the consciousness of ordinary people. One strategy that you point to is the Fabian socialist strategy. Do you want to say something about that?

PW:  You know, the one thing that Fabian socialism had going for itself was that it took the slow end-run route of changing society, rather than being revolutionary—like, for instance, the Bolshevik Revolution, which was a bloody revolution that resulted in the instant imposition of communism on a whole nation. Fabian socialism took the slow route, saying, "We’ll get there like 'the tortoise and the hare' race. We’re going to get there in a slow way. We’re going to gradually change things—change society until it bends our way." This is exactly the principal we see being used by the Trilateral Commission, starting in 1973. They knew back then that they had to take an end run around everything, whatever national sovereignty, personal sovereignty, and so on. They couldn’t just go in and conquer people; it would be too costly and too bloody. But they could do it if they took their time with it and planned it out in advance. By taking the slow approach to it, they could basically do anything they wanted to do—and they have. They’ve used [that approach] tremendously effectively today.

JC:  Yes, I want to examine with you some of these end runs, because there are a number of ways in which they’ve not just attempted to achieve that, but have to some extent succeeded in achieving that. But, in a sense, we’ve missed out on the big story about the Trilateral Commission. We covered that in the previous interview, so I do encourage people to go back and listen to that one to get the fuller picture on this.

But could I move to the end run of the international trade deal, because this is very important in your book. You say this is the Trilateral Commission’s vision of the "New Economic World Order," so that the whole globe is in view here. Originally the vision of the Technocracy movement was limited to the American continent. You say they wanted to unify the US, Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America. They had no idea how they were going to achieve that, but that was the goal at the time. But since those days, of course, we’ve seen the creation of the UN, the European Union, the attempts at a North American Union, and we have these international trade deals. A key quote in your book is from the trilateralist Richard N. Gardner in his famous article, "The Hard Road to World Order," where he specifically talks about the need for an "end run" around national sovereignty. The international trade deal is one way in which this is being achieved. So could you explain how those deals have served to affect that end run?

PW:  David Rockefeller himself, in 1998, attributed the success of the European Union back then to early members of the Trilateral Commission working to bring it about. If you were to go back and study the history of the EU, I believe you’d find the fingerprints of the Trilateral Commission all over it—that is, the European members of the Trilateral Commission. They’ve become very adept at bringing areas together. I would say that in Europe you have the perfect example of how an end run around national sovereignty took place. Nobody really saw it coming. It started out as an economic union. It sounded good at the time: "Yeah, there are benefits to it, so let’s go ahead and do that.” And what it has ended up being now is altogether different from what the people saw in the first place.

JC:  Yes, when I grew up it was the EEC, the European Economic Community.      

PW:  Yes, that’s right. The emphasis on economics there ties into the New International Economic Order. This is what it’s all about. Regionalism is a very core concept in global order—in the globalisation process. And so you have the region in Europe where individual European nations have been stripped of their sovereignty, and you have regionalism going on in North America with the proposed North American Union—to include Canada, Mexico and parts of South America as well—into one big union. You have the signs of a Eurasian Union forming up now.

All these are part of the march to globalisation—to the globalisation process—to bring about this New International Economic Order. How they’ve done it is through the mechanism of the executive branch of the United States government. Our executive branch has been instrumental in driving or directing the global economy for decades. Going well back into the early 1900s, we’ve been instrumental in driving the world stage. The Trilaterals knew that if they got their hands on the machinery of the executive branch, they could control the course of economic history in the world. And so when Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale took office in 1976—both of them were members of the Trilateral Commission—they swept in a third of the US membership [of the Trilateral Commision] to top government positions in Carter’s Cabinet, including Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser. All but one Cabinet member was a member of the Trilateral Commission. They stacked the deck. You [might] say, "Well, that’s just a coincidence", or "Maybe it just happens to have the best people." Well, that’s not the case at all. 

Flash forward in history now, look back and see what they’ve done. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is the person who has negotiated all these trade treaties over the years, like NAFTA (that’s the North American Free Trade Agreement) and CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) and others. Since 1977, when the USTR position was created under Jimmy Carter, there have been twelve appointees by the US President to this position. It’s now a cabinet-level position. Out of twelve people over that period of time, nine of them have been members of the Trilateral Commission.

JC:  Yeah.

PW:  See, this is the end run; this is how they did it. And nobody ever cares what the USTR does in public. They never have any press, and nobody even has a clue as to who they are. But these are the guys negotiating this stuff. Carla Hills, who was USTR from 1989 to '93, was the undisputed architect of NAFTA. She was credited back then when she working for George W. Bush, who is also a member of the Commission by the way. Everybody credits Carla Hills with being the primary architect of NAFTA. It’s a Trilateral document.

Today, Michael Froman is the USTR, and he’s negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership and also the Transatlantic Partnership. He’s a member of the Trilateral Commission. Okay, I ask the question: "Do I trust them to represent my interest as a citizen of America? Or are they representing the corporate interest? Or the collective interest of members of the Trilateral Commission?" (Scoffs) I mean, you can’t even ask. It’s a rhetorical question. 

JC:  And you also say that the fast-track authority that was given to the President was a trilateralist project in itself.

PW:  I believe it was. The fast-track authority was first granted as an act in 1974. That was a time of turmoil here, because Richard Nixon had just resigned, and his Vice-President, Gerald Ford, had assumed the presidency. He wasn’t elected; he bumped up. And when that happens, the Constitution provides for him, the new President, to appoint or select a Vice-President for himself. It has to be confirmed by the Senate, but it doesn’t matter who it is: that person is not elected. Well, who he appointed to be his Vice-President was none other than Nelson Rockefeller, the brother of David Rockefeller.

JC:  It’s amazing how many times that name appears, isn’t it? 

PW:  I know, it keeps popping up. And here’s the thing about Rockefeller as Vice-President: One of the key positions that the Vice President holds that gives significance to his job is that he is President of the Senate. In other words, he presides over the Senate and has tremendous influence over what the Senate does. And so when the trade act of 1974 was ushered through, it had the fingerprints of those early Trilateral people all over it. And basically it gave the President the authority to negotiate trade treaties and present them to the Senate for ratification, disallowing any amendments. In other words, it can’t be changed. The whole trade treaty has to have an up-or-down vote—Yes or No. No bills can be attached to it in any way—no amendments, no modifications whatsoever—and the time for debate was limited to something like three days (I think). It was a ridiculously small amount of time, not even enough time for people to read the whole treaty, especially considering that it only required a 51% vote to pass the Senate.

Normally, the Constitution grants the Senate 100% power to negotiate all foreign treaties and requires a two-thirds vote to pass. Two-thirds requires non-partisan sponsorship; you know, some people have to cross over the line from Democrat to Republican or whatever and vote for this thing. It’s very difficult to get anything through our Congress with a 66% vote. But at 50%, you can get anything through. (Chuckles) It’s the bottom line. And so fast track [trade authority] was implemented back in 1974. Even though it had a sunset provision where it automatically expired, it’s been renewed periodically over time to pass these important treaties like NAFTA. They were able to get fast track reinstated to pass NAFTA on a 51% vote. And right now the Trans-Pacific Partnership is being presented. The President says it’s ready now, and he’s pushing for this fast-track legislation again. If Congress approves it, he’ll be able to slam-dunk this thing through the Senate with a 51% vote. Everybody knows the votes are already there. So the real issue right now is whether it’s going to get fast track authority. But this has been one of the main velvet sledge hammers that the Trilateral Commission has used against America. These trade treaties don’t just change us, they change you [in the UK] as well. They change the whole world.

JC:  There’s something fascinating that you point out on page 63 of the book. You quote Article 6 of the US Constitution. Let me just read this: "[A]ll treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." So, treaties trump the laws of the state. They trump the Constitution, and if the President is given this fast-track authority, then presumably he is effectively in control of the whole lot, and can just do an end run around the constitutional laws of any state if he so chooses.

PW:  That’s exactly right, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

JC:  Okay, so another end run is the green economy, which you bring out in the book as well. Of course, this sounds, on the surface, like a really good thing. We’ve looked at this on the programme quite a bit, actually—the notion of sustainable development. And we’ve obviously noted that it can contain some very good ideas, such as looking after the environment, not being wasteful, not being irresponsible, that kind of thing. But it’s a phrase that is so vague that it can mean pretty much anything you want it to—well, what anybody in power wants it to mean! Which makes it quite scary in some ways. One of the core things that it usually means is communitarian thinking, in which, going back to this holism idea, the good of the whole is said to trump the rights of individuals who have got to look after—in inverted commas—"the planet." What I found interesting is that this phrase "sustainable development" was never used in the early days of Technocracy, you say, but the idea of it is central to the thinking of the Technocratic movement.

PW:  It is. We need to go back and look at a little bit of history on where the word "sustainable development" came from and how it was really popularised. The 1992 Rio Conference, held in Rio de Janeiro, was the conference that produced the book Agenda 21. There were other books that came out of it as well, but Agenda 21 was the primary one. That was the agenda for the 21^st Century, and this has been the touchstone book for everything that the United Nations has done since implementing this policy of sustainable development around the world.  

The United Nations itself gives credit to the Rio Conference, intellectually, to a committee that had been started by the UN earlier in 1987 called the Brundtland Commission. The Brundtland Commission was headed by the ex-Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland. She was also the minister of ecological stuff in Norway before she became Prime Minister. But she was appointed by the United Nations to head up this organisation to produce the policies that would go down the road. I don’t really know if they had the 1992 conference in mind at the time, but the Brundtland Commission produced a book called Our Common Future. It’s still in print today; people can go to Amazon and buy it. This was the book that provided the intellectual fodder for the Rio Conference and for all the policies that wound up in the book Agenda 21. That’s where "sustainable development" started.

JC:  And she was a member of the Trilateral Commission. Is that right?   

PW:  She was a member of the Trilateral Commission. That’s exactly right.

JC:  It’s absolutely incredible. One of the things you do in the book, of course, is to type in bold everybody who is involved with the Trilateral Commission. On every page they keep on popping up. It’s quite incredible.

PW:  They deserve the attention, don’t they? In my opinion, they deserve the attention. So you have to ask, "Was sustainable development just something that happened because society was ready for it? Or did it happen because it was a policy that was purposely pushed by members of the Trilateral Commission?" I will vote for the latter in every case. This is exactly where it came from, and they’ve had their fingerprints all over it ever since. 

JC:  So from this intellectual foundation come Agenda 21, Councils of Government, the Earth Charter, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), amongst other things?

PW:  That’s right. That’s exactly where they came from. More than just intellectual, I guess; they had been the drivers of this since then as well. For instance, Bill Clinton was totally instrumental in impressing sustainable development on America. Clinton did a number of things in the 1990s, after the 1992 Convention, to impress sustainable development on every corner of our nation, and it is today. You know, people still will scratch their heads over this and wonder, "How does this end up? Where is this going?" You know, it's vague; all the facts aren't on the table. Well, let me tell you what the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said recently. Her name is Christiana Figueras; she's a Costa Rican diplomat. She’s the number one climate change person at the United Nations. Remember, Agenda 21 is where all this stuff started, and Christiana Figueras now is the head person. She’s not a member of the Commission, but she’s the head person on climate change at the United Nations.

This is what she said on February 3^rd of this year in a press conference in Europe. Some sharp journalist picked it up and reported it for us. This is a direct quote. She said: "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least a hundred and fifty years since the industrial revolution."

You see, she’s pulled all the blinders off here, giving us a glimpse of the end game. The end game is to destroy capitalism and to implement what the United Nations calls a "green economy". What that means is well-defined by the United Nations. She doesn’t talk about the green economy here; she only talks about getting rid of the economic development model that’s been reigning for the last 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution. Now you can’t mistake that for any economic model other than capitalism, because that’s all we’ve had.

JC:  But when people hear that term "green", they think it’s only to do with looking after the environment. I think a lot of people don’t think further than that, and don’t analyse the other words that are coming out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?

PW:  It really is. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), on its website, has a short snippet that defines a green economy. This is a direct quote. "A green economy implies the decoupling of resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth. These investments, both public and private, provide the mechanism for the reconfiguration of businesses, infrastructure and institutions, and for the adoption of sustainable consumption and production processes."

Now, that’s their definition of a green economy. It’s full of oxymorons, for one thing. How do you decouple resource use from economic growth? You can’t. If you have a business and you want your business to grow, you have to use resources. You have inputs that you have to have to make whatever it is you’re making—the materials or energy or something going into making it. But they say we’re going to decouple resource use and environmental impact from economic growth, and then the investments that are being made to do this, they say, provide the mechanism for the reconfiguration of businesses. I say, who cares how you reconfigure your business if it’s your business to do with what you want?

But then, it goes on to say, "...for the reconfiguration of businesses, infrastructure and institutions." Now at this I say, "Hold up!" What are they talking about: "reconfiguring... infrastructure and institutions"? You see, this is governments. This refers to the national structure of our nations and how the governance process works and how government works. So the green economy doesn’t just stop with some kind of fairy-tale-kumbaya-let’s-all-do-good-to-Mother-Earth sort of thing. No, the green economy drills down in and says, "We’re going to restructure the entire planet. We’re going to reconfigure the infrastructure. We’re going to reconfigure the institutions that you people rely on for your social existence. We’re going to reconfigure those institutions. And then, in other places, they go on to tell you how they’re going to reconfigure our institutions. If you get that far down into it, the hair will be standing up on the back of your neck. (Chuckles) It really will.

JC:  If all of this is decoupling from economic growth, then it seems to me that what’s needed is to have a redefinition of what economic growth actually means. Presumably it doesn’t mean anything like what we’ve understood it to mean in the past.

PW:  Honestly, I don’t know what they mean by economic growth. I think they’re using that term just to appeal to everybody else that it has something to do with economic growth. In America, I can give you a good example of the lunacy of this policy. There are currently 25,000 water dams in America that are slated to be destroyed. Now, one of our primary sources of energy, especially in the Northwest, is from hydroelectric power. People have figured out very efficiently how to get free energy from the rivers by using turbines. As the water runs downhill, it can create electricity. This is a wonderful thing (if you live in the Northwest, that is). And of course dams provide water conservation for us as well. When droughts happen, if you have a big lake somewhere, you draw water for a long time, and you get through the drought. Then the snows come and they fill the thing back up again.

So dams have been a very good sign of progress over the years. They’ve had a lot of benefit for mankind. A lot of economic development has been done around dams in America, such as recreational facilities, marinas, boating and parks. Yet today there are 25,000 dams that are slated for destruction. They want to blow them up and return the rivers to their "natural state." There’s no particular reason given as to why they want to do that, because the rivers are still perfectly fine on the other side of the dam. As the water comes out, there are some great rivers going down.

You look back in history a little bit and you say: "Who came up with the idea to blow up all the dams in the stupid country in the first place?" You can trace the answer back to the Clinton Administration during the '90s—to the policies of the man who was head of the Department of the Interior at the time. The guy who came up with the policies to blow up the dams—who was singularly responsible for this well-documented policy today—was a man by the name of Bruce Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona (where I live, by the way). He came from a ranching family in northern Arizona. Bruce Babbitt was a member of the Trilateral Commission—lo and behold!

JC:  And what’s his rationale for doing this?  

PW: There is no rationale. Honestly, there is no rationale whatsoever that makes any sense from a practical point of view, other than somebody who’s thinking in terms of a green economy. Because you see, in a green economy, this implies a decoupling of resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth. They have nothing to do with each other.

JC:  So the heart of this seems to be a kind of utopian "return to nature" mentality . . . .

PW:  That’s exactly right.

JC:  . . . where human beings have "interfered" with the world as it should be in its pristine state, so let's get rid of that and return to how it "should be".

PW:  That’s right, with no regard to any economic growth that’s resulted from these dams being there in the first place. It is a mental disconnect, I grant. But this is the way these people think, and this is why it’s so dangerous. When you look back at books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four— also written with Technocracy in mind—some of it you can take with a grain of salt. But some of it you just have to take to heart and say, "You know what? These thoughtful men wrote about this" [even though] they spun tales and made up stories around it. But we should be looking at this stuff today and saying, "Wait a minute! There’s absolutely no evidence or research that says this utopian system, which has never been tried in the history of the world, is going to work, and yet they’re driving this green economy business onto us at full speed."

And this is an economic issue, not just a political issue. It is driven by the economic side of things, and that’s what Technocracy’s all about—economics. Democracy, a republic, a parliamentary system of government—those things are about government, not economy. Technocracy has to do with economy without the need to have government in place to do anything, because they’re going to govern everything, they’re going to regulate everything.

JC:  So is this partly why we see the decline in the power of government, because everything of any real value is taking place on this economic level?

PW:  That’s exactly right. Our Congress has been absolutely neutered. They have no influence over what the executive branch does today. It’s pathetic. But then, look what happened in the European Union—to all the nations of the EU. They find that they have no say anymore either. They’ve been completely muted and neutered. They may get one or two hours of discussion time to say something at the main EU meetings. It’s like somebody else is making the decision for them. They’re appointed; they’re not elected, and you just have to like it or else you’ll pay fines. They’ve got you by the throat.

JC:  And, as you said in the previous interview, we’ve got to the situation now where we actually have people overtly called "technocrats" put into positions of power within Europe.

PW:  Oh my, yes! In 2011, when Italy and Greece were about ready to go up in flames, the EU appointed two people to be Prime Ministers over those countries. That’s inconceivable to me—that the EU could actually appoint a Prime Minister and say, "Here, you take this guy or else." (Chuckles) This guy’s supposed to be elected, right? Well, they were appointed. In Italy, the guy they appointed was Mario Monti, and he was Prime Minister for a period of time before he left again. Monti was not only a member of the Trilateral Commission; he was in charge of the European division of the Trilateral Commission. And they called them "technocrat" when they sent them there. They used that word in the European press: Mario Monti was a technocrat sent to be Prime Minister in Italy to solve their economic problems. And they did the same thing in Greece by sending in Lucas Papademos. He was also a member of the Trilateral Commission. And they called him a technocrat when they sent him in.

Okay, now how, out of all the people in Europe—[out of] all the potential people who could run a country as Prime Minister or whatever—is it conceivable that the only two qualified people are members of the Trilateral Commission, when you only have probably less than a hundred people from Europe that are even members of that organisation? Is it conceivable that the only people they could find to fill those slots were members of the Trilateral Commission? I don’t think so.

JC:  No. This brings me to one of the things that could be said with a very careless reading of your book—that, well, you know, you’re finding all these links with the Trilateral Commission, and of course you’re putting them in bold so that everybody can see these names, and oh yes! that person was a member, and therefore you’re seeing links—well, they’re perhaps tenuous links—and you have this thesis that you’re developing and finding these pinpoints on the board and saying, ah yes, that’s the big picture. But when you read it carefully, these names do seem to be very much embedded in the Trilateral Commission. You’re not just picking out vague associations. They’re members, aren’t they? And they’re very crucial individuals in these developments.

PW:  Absolutely so. And in the case of Europe, this just shows you who really had the power in Europe in 2011—who was really running things, in other words. Was it just the EU in general, or was there some kind of another core part of that organisation that was really running things? The fact that they appointed two Trilateral Commission members to be the Prime Minister in those countries tells me that there is an inner core, in fact, that is calling the shots, and somebody else is saying, "Hey! This is the person we want in, go put him in." "Okay, yes sir!"

You bring up a good point, though. I want to defend that thought about making spurious connections. One of the main research techniques I learned from Antony Sutton was to look for patterns. He introduced me to the concept of patterns—not just trying to find events or whatever, but look at patterns of things to discover what’s really going on. This is not a theory out of the blue, either. Police, for instance, when they investigate a crime, look for patterns to determine what what really happened. Sutton taught me: "You’ve got to look for the pattern of the thing, not just at the surface of it. You’ve got to look a little deeper and look for patterns that recur over a period of time. Because patterns don’t just happen; they’re created." So when we did all our original work on the Trilateral Commission in the '70s, we got all our leads and clues from the patterns of things that we determined were true, where we could identify them clearly. And I carry that philosophy into this book as well, because that’s kind of all I know at this point. It was just imprinted on me that the pattern that you see throughout the sustainable development, Agenda 21, green economy, smart growth—you know all this stuff—this pattern is unmistakable.

JC:  I suppose to a large extent that’s the way a historian actually has to work. Is it called abductive reasoning? I think it might be, and it seems to be something that’s definite for historians, because of course you can’t do it deductively. You can’t just have some sort of principal and deduce all the facts of history, neither can you do it inductively and say that you’ve got so much data so that you can therefore prove that this is the case. But you have to, as you say, accumulate data points and see a pattern and then hypothesise based upon that. This is something that I picked up from what historians have said to me.

PW:  Yes, that’s exactly right. All the people in my book that are in bold type—just so readers can get the point here—where they see somebody in bold type, they can look a little more carefully at whatever is being said about that person and why they show up again.

JC:  Could I skip back to the Earth Charter? I did mention it in connection with those things that were the fallout of the Rio Conference back in 1992. The Earth Charter, of course, brings us back to the role of religion—the instrumentalist use of religion to achieve these ends. As indeed does the organisation called The Elders, actually. I was astonished when I came across that. I understand that Gro Harlem Brundlandt and Jimmy Carter are members of The Elders. It sounds very religious. Can you tell us anything about that group before I ask you about the Earth Charter?

PW:  Oh my! I ran across The Elders some years ago. Interesting group of people. They’re the appointed elders of the world to solve difficult problems. (Chuckles) Think of Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village, and you think, "Oh, wow! A village, yeah, villages have elders don’t they?" If you look down the list of members on their website theelders.org, you see people like Nelson Mandela. He’s of course passed now, [but] you saw Kofi Annan and Gro Harlem Brundtland—she’s the Deputy Chair of the Elders right now. Then you see Jimmy Carter. Isn’t that interesting—Jimmy Carter! Yeah, he’s a member. And then you see Mary Robinson from Ireland. She’s a member of the Trilateral Commission. Then you see Ernesto Zedillo from Mexico, and he was a member of the Trilateral Commission as well. They have about five out of ten people on the list who are members of the Trilateral Commission. I don’t know what The Elders do or whether they’re impactful on anything, but I tell you what bothers me about it is this condescending attitude—that "We’re the Elders of the World." That really bothers me.

JC:  Yes, and it does have a connotation of spirituality—and priesthood—about it, doesn’t it?

PW:  Yes, it definitely does. 

JC:  Sorry, I shouldn’t really have butted in. I was talking about the Earth Charter, but I had to ask you about The Elders. But with the Earth Charter itself, there’s overtly religious language in there, isn’t there? You have this printed in one of the appendices at the end of your book, where you say that it’s clearly exploiting human beings’ religious sensibilities for the purposes of Technocracy. Could you talk through that? I mean, we have figures like Steven Rockefeller (that name coming up again!) Isn’t he a theologian?

PW:  He is. He’s tightly related to the Rockefeller family, obviously. I believe he was the director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among other things. He’s been instrumental in Rockefeller affairs for a long time, but he’s never been part of the bank; he’s never been part of industry. He’s a theologian and, in particular, his claim to significance and fame, I guess, is his work on the interfaith movement throughout the world—bringing different religions together into a common framework.

JC:  An "all is one" kind of thing, perhaps?

PW:  That’s right. You know, you can maintain your own tradition, but there’s unity in diversity—that sort of thing. He’s been very effective in doing that over the last thirty years, moving around in the background. Who is going to pay attention to a guy like Steven Rockefeller, anyway? The press doesn’t follow him around. But he’s been out there working, and his work in the interfaith movement has tied many different segments of society together that you wouldn’t think would normally be tied together.

One of the evidences of that is if you go to the website of, for instance, the World Council of Churches, or, in our country, the National Council of Churches, or if you just go to the main denomination websites, like the Catholic church, the Episcopal church, and so on, you’ll find that they have all turned green. And when I say "green," I mean they’re all talking about climate change; they're all talking about sustainable development. You have to ask the question, "How did this happen? Who did this? How did all the churches of the world get impregnated, if you will, with green philosophy from the United Nations?" Well, you look at people like Steven Rockefeller, and you understand.

But all the religions of the world are sold out. Even the Pope has declared that there’s a major encyclical coming by June on climate change policy. Now that’s not church law. An encyclical goes out to all the bishops, but it's not official doctrine like it would be if he wrote a Papal Bull. But an encyclical is extremely important in that it goes out to all the bishops around the world, and they’re expected to do something about it. The idea is that the Pope is driving this from the top down, as well as all the other religions in the world now, too. It’s stunning.

JC:  What strikes me about this is that the alarm bells should have rung with regard to the Earth Charter, certainly in Christian circles. Because you’ve got these people like Mikhail Gorbachev saying things like—he was always involved with this, of course—saying, "Cosmos is my god. Nature is my god," and Maurice Strong saying, "The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will become, in fact, like the Ten Commandments." And you say in the book that it was carried around in a kind of new Ark of the Covenant at one point. This really should have been a "red rag to a bull", shouldn’t it, for Christians?

PW:  It should have been, I know. I don’t remember anybody really paying attention when that actually took place. But, yes, there are religious overtones found anywhere [there's] a group of people talking about sustainable development [that's] orchestrated from the United Nations’ point of view. You find a little conference—wherever it might be, big or small—and you'll find that religious component there, talking about spiritual things. It doesn’t mean everybody’s following them around listening to them, either. But you’ll find that in virtually every meeting that we can see. (Go look at the websites of some of these organisations and see the meetings they’ve had.) Pretty much in every case you’re going to see a footnote that there was some spiritual implication to it—that somebody was there doing something of a spiritual nature.

JC:  And would you agree, from the point of view of the Technocrats, that they are actually exploiting religion—that this isn’t (in many cases, anyway) a deeply-held view? Are they, rather, saying: "Well, religion is one of the three pillars of society that are necessary for society to function. Therefore we must have to have a religious component in order for this to work. So let’s use it to bring about our purposes" ?

PW:  That’s true, and religion probably is more loosely-defined today by these people than [ever before] in history. But, if you go back to the early '70s, in particular, you’ll find that the Trilateral Commission was very heavily involved with the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies in America. They later changed the name just to the Aspen Institute so it doesn’t sound so religious. But the Aspen Institute has spread to the corporate world around the world. They have spread the philosophy of humanism and things embedded in the Earth Charter to executives and to government people all around the world. They’ve been incredibly successful.

Make no mistake about it, humanism is a religion. It has been declared as a religion by the US Supreme Court. And it has all the trappings of religion, especially in its early days at the Aspen Institute. I am certain, looking backwards, that they understood that they need to cover the bases on that—that’s part of society you cannot get away from. The religious side has to be there, because people want to believe in something. It doesn’t matter what they believe in, they want to believe in something. They want to have a cause. They want to have a god that they can go to, whether they’re Hindu, Buddhist or whatever. And they recognise that that other kind of faith that people have allows them to twist reality in front of their eyes so they can do other things to them. (Chuckles) And so, yeah, we see it going all the way back from day one—with members of the Trilateral Commission being involved, for instance, with the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.

JC:  Other related issues are the Internet of Things and the Smart Grid. In the past, this technocratic vision for an energy-based system of global control wasn't feasible, but now the infrastructure is possible, and it’s growing. You indicate in the book that this is being instantiated through the Smart Grid and through the Internet of Things. Could you tell us how those two things fit into the overall picture?

PW:The reason [the Internet of Things and the Smart Grid] are important is because the scientific dictatorship that's being crafted is to be a system; it's not to be a person. We talk about a person becoming a dictator—maybe it's Mario Draghi, or maybe it's Barack Obama, or whoever—Putin. Those are individuals. But in the global context, one individual cannot possibly run the whole world. So the system of things that is growing up, which was originally proposed by Technocracy—the system itself, using the scientific method and technology—is to be the dictator. It's going to be the thing that limits everybody either to not do certain things or to do other things. And the system is closing in around our necks everywhere we look.

Now, having said that, let’s talk about Smart Grid. Smart Grid is a specification from the early 1930s, at least in principle, that consumption and production of energy need to be controlled and monitored. The Smart Grid we have today, with these digital meters put on everything, got started in 2009. It all got started with stimulus money all around the world. When I first saw the stimulus money in our country being [applied to the Smart Grid], I was surprised. Then I started looking at other countries, including Great Britain and other countries in Europe, and even at China and Mexico. They used stimulus money at the same time for the same purpose: to kick-start Smart Grid. Then I found that there’s a global Smart Grid being created all around the world today. It will aggregate data from every nation that’s tied into it, literally creating what is called the Internet of Energy.

This is just an incredible concept. Why would anyone want to have an Internet of Energy? Well, the idea is to be able to control the use and consumption of energy from the top down, to be able to limit the energy that you use in your household. The new appliances that are being made today, like air conditioners, refrigerators, and other things inside your home, are being made with chips—circuits that will talk to the smart meters on the side of the house or business, so that the utility can control those appliances in your house without your intervention. So, if they need to balance the load of power a little bit, they can dial it back on a whole neighbourhood or a whole city, limiting the amount of power consumption and basically controlling your life.

If they want you to wash your clothes at 3 o’clock in the morning, they can turn off your washer for all the other periods of time and have you get up at 3 a.m. to wash your clothes.

This is actually happening in certain parts of the world right now. Smart Grid is a master plan to control energy. People don’t relate this to Technocracy unless they listen to me just a little bit (chuckles), because I can relate it to Technocracy very well. I’m going to give you the first two of the first five requirements of the Technocracy Study Course that was written in 1934 by M. King Hubbert—who we’ve already talked about. They both deal with Smart Grid: (1) "Register, on a continuous twenty-four-hour-per-day basis, the total net conversion of energy," and (2) "By means of the Registration of Energy converted and consumed, make possible a balanced load."

Now, this is all you hear from the utility companies today. Go read the website of a company like Siemens in Germany and you’ll see this concept of "balanced load" everywhere you look. They regulate energy to make a balanced load. It used to be that if a community needed more energy, the utility was supposed to just go out and build more power plants and supply it, but not today. A balanced load today is going to be balanced on the back of consumers, not on the back of the utility to have to make more investment. But in any case, we see the Smart Grid being put in as a very specific requirement of Technocracy. This was written back in 1934, but it could have been written today.

JC:  And how does that relate to the Internet of Things?

PW:  Well, the Internet of Things is expressed, for instance, in the interaction of the smart meter on the side of your home and your washing machine or your air conditioner inside your home. They’re communicating with each other. One has the ability to control the other. That’s part of the paradigm of the Internet of Things. Things talk to each other rather than people—rather than you sitting at your computer and me sitting at my computer typing messages back and forth communicating with each other. When things communicate with each other, there are no humans involved. Let’s say there’s a neighbourhood computer that watches electrical use in the neighbourhood, and if all of a sudden there is something going on in the neighbourhood that requires the computer programme to intervene—maybe to cut back energy on certain things, or maybe to cut back at a certain time of day—the computer just automatically intercedes and does it. It communicates the instructions blindly to all the other things that are communicating with it. It’s just done; there’s no human intervention. Now, they’re talking about connecting essentially everything on the planet with everything else.

JC:  Yes, this is rather confusing, because people do talk about chips being put, say, into a pair of shoes or into a shirt or a coat—into virtually everything—so that all of this would be surveilled. But I have communication with a listener who is involved with fitting smart meters, and he says that currently that technology’s not in place. The meters are not actually able to read everything like that, although he says he doesn’t discount that that might come along in the future.

PW:  Right. In America, Congress actually passed a law that requires appliance makers to embed the circuitry in all the appliances they make. And I believe, if you look at some of the other major appliance makers over there in Europe, you’ll probably find them doing the same thing at this point. It may be spotty on a global basis right now, but this is clearly the concept, and it’s clearly being enforced here in America since the start of 2009.

And you’re right about everything communicating with everything else—sometimes interactively, sometimes not. For instance, if there’s a chip in your shoe, and you walk by another chip, it's not going to cause you to stop walking. There’s no control involved—just a monitoring aspect, perhaps. But when you consider the possibility of different things interacting with each other, all passing data to some master programme that’s going to be making decisions for your life on what you can or cannot do, this is the danger in the Internet of Things. This is a very great danger.  

JC:  And the fascinating thing, as you said before, is that we’re not talking about human beings controlling this; we’re talking about something being set up as notionally a perfectly rational system . . .

PW:  That’s right.

JC:  . . . making decisions by way of artificial intelligence, presumably, on behalf of human beings.

PW:  That’s right, exactly, and they can be benevolent or they can be malevolent.

JC:  It is a frightening picture.

PW:  But this is the system that’s being created today to control everything in the world, including people. All the elements are in place now. And as the system gains cohesiveness, as it starts to tie together, as they start to hook these various elements up together, that’s when we are really going to feel the heat of this system asserting its dictatorship over our practical and real lives. It's coming. It’s already here to a great extent, but you can extrapolate some stories that could be very feasible in the very near future.

For instance, let’s imagine there's a Smart Grid in place and the authorities know how much energy you’re using in your home. They decide that you are an over-consumer because you’re consistently 20% higher than all your neighbours. Okay, they know that, right? And so you think, "I’d like to visit my cousin in New York City. I’m going to get online here and buy me a plane ticket, and I’m going to fly to New York City and spend a couple of weeks over there visiting my cousin." So you get online and you’re working on buying your ticket, and you get one selected, and you push the "buy" button, and a little message comes up on the screen that says you’ve exceeded your carbon allocation for the quarter and you’re not allowed to fly. (Chuckles)

JC:  So, looking back to those early days, the doctrine of holism is programmed into the system . . .

PW:  That’s right.

JC:  . . . not allowing you to do what you quite reasonably want to do.

PW:  That’s exactly right. The programme might say: "Do better to cut down on consumption in your home and maybe next month try again." (Chuckles)

JC:  Lovely! But a lot of people would say there’s no way human beings would accept this. And yet you point out that there is a way through this for the technocrat by changing the nature of human beings. You bring up the whole question of transhumanism. Is it possible that we will be changed in some way—perhaps persuaded to undergo changes to become post-human—so that we will accept this state of affairs?

PW:  I think this is a big carrot. I think the promise of escaping the laws of sin and death is a huge draw for many people—especially for non-Christians, I might add, who have no biblical basis for their thinking. Death is a very final thing for them, and if science could deliver on what used to be a metaphysical quest for immortality . . . . Now that science has come along and is promising some things to extend life and possibly to conquer death altogether, this is a huge carrot for people to buy into. In my personal opinion, I think this is the grandest deception that the world has ever seen. I do not believe there will be one person ever who will escape the laws of death, because that’s exactly what the Bible says. It's appointed for man once to die and then comes judgment. They're running after this like there’s no tomorrow, and they’re sure they can do it if they just get a little bit more science down. But on the other hand, they haven’t produced one shred of success since this whole movement started in earnest some thirty years ago.

JC:  Yes, the most stark manifestation of this—the idea of perhaps uploading yourself into the main frame—seems very extreme. But I think one could conceive of it—I think one must conceive of it—in terms of small increments. Maybe our brains could be enhanced, and maybe that would coax us into a sense of security with regard to some loss of freedom. And then a little more enhancement, and then we would accept a little more loss of freedom. And, in that way, you could step this up towards total loss of freedom.

PW:  Yes, it could. There are many risks and many dangers in the transhumanist movement. And not incidentally, one of the leading transhuman figures is a man by the name of Ray Kurzweil, who is a scientist/engineer originally from Silicon Valley in California. He’s a brilliant man—truly—but he believes that technology is going to supersede man’s ability to control it by somewhere around 2045. He calls it the "singularity", where machines, computers and artificial intelligence will advance at a rate faster than man’s ability to conceive of it, and that that will also coincide with the whole concept of immortality—the transhuman dream to escape the body by being uploaded into the 'brain' of a machine, or something like that—maybe travel in space, maybe have yourself an android body, or whatever. 

Ray Kurzweil is working for Google these days. He didn’t need a job, but Google offered him a job as senior scientist, and he took it, not because of money, but because of the resources that Google has to allow him to achieve his goals. He's had a documentary and he has a book out. People can read about Ray Kurzweil and find out what he believes. He’s really intent on conquering death. It just so happens—this is a weak link, by the way—that the chairman of Google (which, admittedly, is one of the most powerful companies in the world today), Eric Schmidt, was just inducted into the Trilateral Commission two years ago. (Both chuckle) So, yeah, the same people who are crafting the world have a very keen eye on this whole business of transhumanism. And, philosophically speaking, [Kurzweil and Schmidt] share the same belief in scientism. So they’re like Siamese twins: One focuses on society itself and the other focuses on individuals.

JC:  And when you take Google, you can see the incremental process going on, for example with those super glasses that give you access to the Internet at all times. That's a step away from a chip in your brain to give your consciousness access to the Internet at all times, which would be tantamount to a loss of freedom, it seems to me. So, at the same time as you might gain intellectual enhancement, you'd have a loss of liberty.

PW:  Yes, I know. And it was Google, by the way. They were the first to suggest a brain implant that would tie into Google search engines and stuff. They’re working on it. I think they’re going to come up with sawdust at the end of it, but they’re throwing all the resources they can muster at it right now. And the governments of the world are backing this 100%.

JC:  As you say, it’s a carrot. Whether it actually happens is another matter, but it’s persuading people to go along with all this.

PW:  It is, and this has always been a case with deceptions throughout history. People follow deceptions. The deceivers may or may not know that they’re actually deceiving, but the effects are the same: people follow them, and that's what the deceivers want. And there are a lot of followers right now in society. It's a philosophy. If somebody didn’t have any other hope, why on earth wouldn’t they be interested in transhumanism?

JC:  Exactly: if you haven’t got another hope. And really, that’s where I want to leave things. I didn’t want to leave the interview with a sense of doom and gloom and absolute hopelessness, because that’s not true. Looking at it from a biblical perspective, there is of course fantastic hope through Christ. And I know that you won’t have the opportunity to say things like this on every interview that you do, but on this podcast you have absolute freedom to say that. So do you want to say something about the real hope that stretches before us?

PW:  Well, certainly I do. I think there needs to be within the Christian community a resurgence of excitement about Bible prophecy. When I first became a Christian back in the 1970s, there was a lot of emphasis on studying Bible prophecy, and it was exciting. It’s really fallen out of favour in the last twenty to twenty-five years. As a result, many Christian churches have missed out on that "blessed hope" that Christ will return one day for his Church, his bride, and that he will deal with the world, and that we have a different future to look forward to after he returns. The things that we see in the world today are different from what we saw in the 1970s. In the 1970s, when IBM first introduced the scanner in a grocery store, oh my gosh! Christians freaked out: "Ah, it’s the Mark of the Beast. Oh, help! I’m not going to go through that food line. They’re not going to scan my head or my groceries." But there were all kinds of things people ran after back in those days that were really pretty ludicrous.

JC:  Do you think that’s contributed to the lack of interest in this kind of thing today?

PW:  There’s just lack of interest in anything . . .

JC:  Yeah, but is that because people did just run after all these things rather uncritically?

PW:  No. You know the emerging church today around the world is actually telling parishioners not to study Bible prophecy—saying it’s a waste of time. I think that’s why people don’t study today. But from my point of view—and I’ve always had an interest in Bible prophecy—what we see happening in the world today is creating the kind of system that ultimately the Antichrist will be able to assume control over. And you remember, we’ve always called the Antichrist a dictator, but he’s not called a dictator in the Bible; he’s called the Antichrist. And really, the word "anti" is not quite right; it really says "pseudo." He’s a fake Christ.

As a spiritual leader, if you will... (And perhaps a statesman. It doesn't really call him a dictator, yet he is. We know conceptually he is a dictator, because he’s going to run the world himself and tell everybody what to do. But he can’t be in all places at all times.) So how will this "end time" system actually be able to function and control the affairs of men with the specificity that we see in the Book of Revelation? I would contend today that if you look at Technocracy and how it’s set up to work, it is setting up the perfect system that only needs a policy maker at the top to determine what will and won’t happen in order to control people. You'll have control over energy, control over water, gas distribution as part of energy, location, and things like: Will you get on a train or not? Or on a plane or not? It’s all determined by the computer, not by you and not by men. It's something that can be completely automated from top to bottom, and nobody will have any recourse. There’ll be nobody to call if you don’t like the decisions made—and I could go on for that whole paradigm. But I think there’s biblical significance here to what’s going on today.

JC:  Yes, what you’ve just sketched does make a great deal of sense. However, it has to be said that looking at it like that, the easy reaction is to say, "Well, that is absolutely soul-destroying. If that is prophesied to happen—it’s going to happen, God has said it’s going to happen—then what’s the point in even opposing it in any way? It’s going to happen. God knows it will happen."

PW:  Well, He knows what’s going to happen; we don’t. We cannot predict the future, and I’m not predicting the future here. We can't presume that God will not turn the hands back on this whole process. He may. That’s His sovereign choice to do that. But I would point back to the Christians who lived during the time of Hitler in Germany. As things were really getting heated up in Germany, is it conceivable that any Christian in those days didn’t have thoughts that the end of the world was near, maybe even that Hitler was Antichrist himself? I’m sure they thought, "Man, the only way out of this is we hope that Christ comes soon!" He didn’t. But on the other hand, Hitler was finally conquered, and the end of the world didn’t happen.

So I can put myself in those shoes today, in a sense, and say, "Well, it looks pretty grim, but nobody knows what the hand of God is going to do, and as Christians we have no right to put Him in such a box and say He must act this way or that way." And so I think the mandate for Christians is to open your mouth, speak what you know, try and persuade. We have no right as Christians to retreat into the cave and just wait for the rocks to fall on our heads. We need to be out on the front line screaming this from the housetops, so to speak—and being salt and light, like the Bible tells us we’re supposed to be. In the meantime, this is a passionate thing that we do. It is always good to interact with people in the public forum. And for those who might see this as a downer, I’m sorry for them, but they could do some soul-searching and figure out what to do about it. And they have answers; God will show them answers, if they want them.

JC:  But ultimately, it isn’t a downer, because at the end of the day or at the end of the era, it’s Christ who has the victory.

PW:  That’s right; his victory is certain. It's guaranteed, absolutely certain. We just don’t know when. Today everybody’s talking about having a biblical worldview. Well, I say to Christians, in order to have a worldview you have to have a Bible. You have to start with the Bible, for sure. You can study the Bible all you want, but when you turn your glasses or your scope to the world, if you want to see the world through a biblical lens, you have to see the world for what it really is, not for what you think it is.

JC:  Well, I know exactly the kind of thing you mean, because in our church the Bible is prized, there’s no doubt about it, but there’s a certain way of looking at the Bible which doesn’t really take seriously the prophetic element. So people are not able to interpret the signs of the times. When I preach, I do actually try to do some of that, but it doesn’t go down very well. It’s not very popular, I’m afraid.

PW:I know. It’s a wakeup call for Christians to see the world as it really is, because they cannot have an accurate biblical worldview if they have some fantasy about what’s going on in the world. And people do have fantasies about what’s going on in the world. Most Americans think it’s all about the people we elect to Congress. They say, "It’s those congressmen or those pesky senators who are screwing us up." By and large, they don’t have clue as to what’s really going on in the world today. Therefore, they can know the Bible as well as they want to know it—and that doesn’t mean they’re not going to having blessing in their life, either—but if they want to have a biblical worldview, they’re just spitting in the wind thinking that they’re going to take a fantasy and make the Bible fit it. It’s not going to happen. You understand what I’m saying?

JC:  I do. Yes, we certainly have to use the framework of interpretation provided by the Bible.

PW:  That’s right. You have to see reality as it really is. The world today is so confusing to most people. I, too, am still confused to a great extent.

JC:  You don’t sound at all confused to me, actually.

PW:  But when you look at things like Technocracy, what the United Nations is doing, sustainable development, the Earth Charter—you look at all these things and the pattern of them, then you know darned well that these things didn’t happen just by accident. They have been orchestrated on purpose with an end game in mind. The Bible clearly says that there is one who is called "the god of this world." That’s the devil himself; he is "the god of this world." So who is orchestrating this world today? Who is the conductor of this orchestra? Well, according to the Bible, it’s the devil himself. Why is he doing all this orchestrating? What’s he orchestrating towards? Well, the Bible says that Christ is going to come one day, and that the Antichrist is going to assume control for that seven-year period known as the Tribulation period at the time of Jacob’s Trouble, and he will have full reign during that period to mount his last offensive against God. It’s going to be messy, yes,  but I think he knows his time is short. And I would conjecture that, of that seven-year period, he will not spend one minute worrying about creating infrastructure things to control his world. I would conjecture he’s going to do that in advance of that time period. Any good general, war strategist or whatever, knows that before you march to battle, you have all your ducks lined up in a row.

JC:  And in your book you lay that out. You provide evidence of the infrastructure being built that we see necessary to the fulfilment of that prophecy. That’s not to say that what is happening a the moment will lead necessarily to that prophecy being fulfilled; we don’t know when that’s going to be. But it’s consistent with it, and we need to take seriously that this could just be the time when such a thing is fulfilled. And, as you remind us, this is not something to be gloomy about, but something to speak about in the knowledge that Christ will return and that his is the victory. So, again, I do say to people: This book by Patrick Wood has to be read! It’s a very important book. I’ve said many times that it joins so many of the dots. Perhaps not all the dots; that would be too much to ask! But it makes a great deal of sense, so I do encourage people to get it and read it. Now, I understand that people can get it through Amazon, but they can also get it directly from you. If they do, can they get a signed copy?

PW: Yes, they can. They have to do that by going to www.Technocracyrising.com. However, if you live in Europe (or elsewhere outside the United States—although Canada’s okay) the shipping charges are going to be fairly steep to ship from Arizona in the US to your location. So you might want to check with Amazon, especially if you're in Europe, just to see if you can get it there. Amazon has printing facilities in Europe and usually can deliver the book within a day or two. You do get it a little bit cheaper [from Amazon], but if you want a signed copy, I’d be happy to do that. If you want to buy bulk copies, I have a pretty steep discount schedule. If people buy multiple copies—such as 20, 30, 40, 50 copies of it, for whatever purpose—the price goes down dramatically. For people who like to read the electronic version, there’s a Kindle version that they can get from Amazon anywhere in the world at any time, and have instant download. So you could do it thirty seconds after the show is over. (Both chuckle)

JC:  Absolutely. Well, why not? And it’s cheaper, presumably, than the physical version.

PW:  It is. However, people will want to sit down with a highlighter and pen, take notes and underline things and mark things. Another radio person told me that they ran their yellow highlighter out of ink by page one hundred and fifty.

JC:  Well, I can believe that. I don’t use highlighters myself, just a good old-fashioned pencil, but there’s hardly a page here—I’m just flicking through it now—without a mark on it. It’s just incredible, the number of connections that were there. Disturbing reading, in some ways, but nevertheless a very profitable read, and I think there’s no way I’m just going to read through that once. I'll probably read it several times.

Thanks ever so much, Pat, for coming on the programme. It’s been a delightful and very fascinating conversation, and I’m very grateful to you for joining us again.

PW:  My pleasure, Julian. Hope we can do it again some time.

JC:  Thank you ever so much for coming on.

PW:  Entirely welcome.

Disclaimer

• The views expressed by Patrick M. Wood in this interview are his responsibility alone; they do not necessarily reflect those of The Mind Renewed.

Images (other than Public Domain)

• "FUTURE_MY_LOVE_Technocracy_2" by Future My Love on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
• "Jan Smuts 1947"—See page for author [CC BY-SA 3.0 nl (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons
• "Gro Harlem Brundtland" by English: Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Flickr) [OGL (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/1/)], via Wikimedia Commons
• "Il Presidente del Consiglio incaricato Mario Monti (cropped)"—Presidenza della Repubblica [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons
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• "Earth Day ~ Mother Earth" by Alice Popkorn on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
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• "Raymond Kurzweil Fantastic Voyage" by Photo by Michael Lutch. [CC BY 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons