A Brave New World, Today's Clerisy and Mind Control

The ultimate goal of mind control experiments is not to create
mind-controlled assets or Manchurian Candidates, as some may
think (https://bit.ly/3uyzBh2). The goal (https://bit.ly/3wIEoiE)
of these experiments is mass mind control and technological
psychosocialisation on a societal scale, like with Soma in
Huxley’s Brave New World.
With populist parties and movements gaining influence not only
in North America but in Europe and Latin America as well, many
have been predicting a new era of authoritarianism, such as
portrayed by George Orwell in 1984 or by Margaret Atwood in
The Handmaid’s Tale. But the more likely model for future tyranny
is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the masters are not
hoary Stalinoids or fanatical fundamentalists, but gentle, rational
executives known as “World Controllers.”
The Controllers preside over a World State composed of five
biologically engineered social castes, from Alphas at the top to
Epsilons at the bottom. Alphas take for granted their pre-eminence
and their right to the labour of lower castes. People no longer have
children, since humans are developed in vats. Families have been
abolished, except in a few distant “savage reservations.” Citizens
of the World State live in amenity-rich dormitories and enjoy
pleasurable pharmaceuticals and unconstrained sex without
commitment or consequences. This family-free life is similar to
how Mark Zuckerberg described his ideal Facebook employees:
“We may not own a car. We may not have a family. Simplicity
in life is what allows you to focus on what’s important.”
Huxley’s scenario eerily resembles what today’s oligarchs favour:
a society conditioned by technology and ruled by an elite with
superior intelligence. The power of the Controllers in Brave New
World resides mostly in their ability to mould cultural values: like
those at the top of today’s clerisy they suppress unacceptable ideas
not by brute force but by characterising them as deplorable, risible,
absurd, or even pornographic. Because their pronouncements are
accepted as authoritative, they can run a thought-dictatorship far
more subtle, and efficient, than that of Mussolini, Hitler, or
Stalin.
Today’s clerisy includes university professors, scientists, public
intellectuals, and heads of charitable foundations. They tend to
believe themselves more enlightened than the average person —
on attitudes about the family, for example — and seek to impose
their own standards through the media, the education system, and
various arenas of cultural production.
In the past, religion and the priesthood occupied the position of
ministering to the masses and imbuing in them the values of the
State. Today, that position has been secularised and is now occupied
by legions of so-called scientists, experts, and fact-checkers.
Scientism is the new religion. Science denial, the new heresy.
Twitter de-platforming and de-banking, the new witch-burning. The
enemy of the establishment is the “wild man”; rural and suburban
denizens who bear a stronger allegiance to their own community
and its unique values than to the wider establishment and its
homogenising and stultifying agendas.
Many working-class people in developed countries correctly sense
that their living standards are declining. In the US, home ownership
is becoming more difficult to attain. This is not an accident. Our
financial system uses overvalued homes as a reservoir of value. The
Elites of society would prefer it if we all lived in high-density
housing and are pricing us out of the low-density housing market
on purpose.
However, they also realise that – just as it stresses out chickens or
cows when one stuffs them in cages situated atop one another,
stewing in each other’s excrement – city living is also immensely
stressful for human beings, hence the need for countless
technological, medical, and psychosocial interventions to make
free men more comfortable with being reshaped into a disenfranchised
slave caste, stripped of property rights and stuffed in a rented pod
apartment, valued only for their ability to produce labour and
consume frivolous trinkets and keep the giant pyramid scheme going
for just a few years more, so the looter class can run off with even
more money and consolidate their already immeasurable power.
In coming decades, today’s clerisy could employ “new intellectual
technology” as a means of “‘ordering’ the mass society,” as Daniel
Bell predicted – a sociologist who’s the unacknowledged prophet
of Tony Blair’s third way. Bell’s work stands out as astonishingly
prescient in its anticipation of the concerns and concepts which
dominate political debate in both Britain and the US, Prospect
Magazine noted.
Technology might be employed to reprogram attitudes on everything
from the environment to the notion of “unconscious bias” against
racial and sexual minorities. Companies like Google as well as
college campuses already use technology to monitor and “correct”
the thinking of employees. The Chinese government’s efforts to
monitor thoughts and regulate opinion, sometimes assisted by US
tech firms, could prove a harbinger of things to come in Europe,
Australia, and North America.
But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not
own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.  And there are
clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable
elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher
education.