Truth Over Tyranny: Biblical wisdom for defeating the Technocrats.These are my insights for defeating the Transhumanist Technocracy movement, based on the teachings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, on the weekly Bible portion.
Are the transhumanist technocrats people of faith?
We commonly consider people who adhere to the teachings of a traditional religion, as having faith. They follow the Bible, and have a relationship with God. They have faith that if they keep their end of the bargain, and seek to do good, God will do His share and make good things happen.
It’s a covenant.
In his commentary on Parashat Bechukotai called “We the People,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks talks about the covenant a nation can have with God. It engenders an attitude of shared responsibility — for each other, and for our relationship with God.
https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/bechukotai/we-the-people/
It gives us a basis for having faith. And we will see that the technocrats have no such basis at all.
Rabbi Sacks emphasizes that the notion of shared responsibility is common to all people, since we are all social animals:
“… there is nothing unique to Judaism in the idea that we are all implicated in one another’s fate. That is true of the citizens of any nation. If the economy is booming, most people benefit. If there is law and order, if people are polite to one another and come to one another’s aid, there is a general sense of well-being. Conversely, if there is a recession many people suffer. If a neighbourhood is scarred by crime, people are scared to walk the streets. We are social animals, and our horizons of possibility are shaped by the society and culture within which we live.”
The sense of responsibility we have for one another — as a unified people under God — sustains a nation, even through the hardest of times. The Jews found this out in our years of dispersion from our ancestral homeland:
“‘But despite all that, when they are in enemy territory, I will not reject them or despise them to the point of totally destroying them, breaking my covenant with them by doing so, because I am the Lord their God. But for their sake I will remember the covenant with the first generation, the ones I brought out of Egypt’s land in the sight of all the nations, in order to be their God; I am the Lord. ‘Lev. 26:44-45
“Even in their worst hours, according to Leviticus, the Jewish people will never be destroyed. Nor will God reject them. The covenant will still be in force and its terms still operative. This means that Jews will always be linked to one another by the same ties of mutual responsibility that they have in the land – for it was the covenant that formed them as a nation and bound them to one another even as it bound them to God. Therefore, even when falling over one another in flight from their enemies they will still be bound by mutual responsibility. They will still be a nation with a shared fate and destiny.”
Such a covenant unified people in other countries against tyranny — especially in America:
“This is a rare and special idea, and it is the distinctive feature of the politics of covenant. Covenant became a major element in the politics of the West following the Reformation. It shaped political discourse in Switzerland, Holland, Scotland and England in the seventeenth century as the invention of printing and the spread of literacy made people familiar for the first time with the Hebrew Bible (the ‘Old Testament’ as they called it). There they learned that tyrants are to be resisted, that immoral orders should not be obeyed, and that kings did not rule by divine right but only by the consent of the governed.
“The same convictions were held by the Pilgrim Fathers as they set sail for America, but with one difference, that they did not disappear over time as they did in Europe. The result is that the United States is the only country today whose political discourse is framed by the idea of covenant.
“In covenant societies it is the people as a whole who are responsible, under God, for the fate of the nation. As (President Lyndon) Johnson put it, ‘Our fate as a nation and our future as a people rest not upon one citizen but upon all citizens.’… That is the essence of covenant: we are all in this together. There is no division of the nation into rulers and ruled. We are conjointly responsible, under the sovereignty of God, for one another.”
Each one of us is responsible for our collective well-being — not any government. We are each a leader:
“In Judaism we are responsible only for what we could have prevented but did not. This is how the Talmud puts it:
“‘Whoever can forbid their household [to commit a sin] but does not, is seized for [the sins of] their household. [If they can forbid] their fellow citizens [but do not] they are seized for [the sins of] their fellow citizens. [If they can forbid] the whole world [but do not] they are seized for [the sins of] the whole world.’Shabbat 54b
“This remains a powerful idea and an unusual one. What made it unique to Judaism is that it applied to a people scattered throughout the world united only by the terms of the covenant our ancestors made with God at Mount Sinai. But it continues, as I have often argued, to drive American political discourse likewise even today. It tells us that we are all equal citizens in the republic of faith and that responsibility cannot be delegated away to governments or presidents but belongs inalienably to each of us. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers…
“Leadership is the acceptance of responsibility. Therefore if we are all responsible for one another, we are all called on to be leaders, each within our sphere of influence – be it within the family, the community, the organisation or a larger grouping still.”
I would add this:
Back to our initial question: do the technocrats have faith? Are they members of a covenant nation? Do they have a sense of shared responsibility that will sustain them when the going gets tough?
Clearly the answer is: no way.
They are a people bereft of any durable ties to others, and to God. There are numerous examples of this, all having to do with the various ways they exploit, enslave and prey on others.
As for the role of God in their lives — they have replaced Him with machines of their own making. They have placed their “faith” in electronic media… Digital ID and finance… and AI-fueled biotechnology.
Will these fake gods sustain them when we the people reject the sovereignty of machines?
Nope.