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.
The evil of the global elites is a topic of daily conversation. We speak constantly of their lust for power; of their mania for control; of their utter disdain for “the masses;” and of their contempt for life itself. We see that they would sacrifice their own grandmother once she “outlived her usefulness.”
But is there a deeper psychology at work? Do these people have a mindset that explains their destructive actions? it seems to me that many do. Yes, a lot of them are simply driven by this unquenchable thirst for “more more more for me me me.” But I also think that many have a world view that justifies their embrace of death and destruction.
I think many of them actually drink their own kool-aid — their narrative about “climate change.” They really do believe that the earth cannot sustain its current population. They think that “depopulation” is a rational response to a world of “finite resources.” Their only hope for the continuation of humanity, is in a select minority who leave no “footprint” – carbon or otherwise.
And these elites would themselves be governed by “smart” machines that are programmed to make sure people live in compliance with “scientific” rules for living.
Talk about painting yourself into a corner! I cannot think of a more dismal way for a civilization to function — and cease to function. Yet it has happened before.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reports on the death of civilizations in his commentary on Parashat Tzav called “Why Civilizations Die.” He also gives us the key to survival.
https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/tzav/why-civilisations-die/
Rabbi Sacks begins by referencing the research of Rebecca Costa on the demise of the Mayans:
“In The Watchman’s Rattle, subtitled Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction, Rebecca Costa delivers a fascinating account of how civilisations die. When their problems become too complex, societies reach what she calls a cognitive threshold. They simply can’t chart a path from the present to the future.
“The example she gives is the Mayans. For a period of three and a half thousand years, between 2,600 BCE and 900 CE, they developed an extraordinary civilisation, spreading over what is today Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Belize, with an estimated population of 15 million people.
“Not only were they expert potters, weavers, architects, and farmers, they also developed an intricate cylindrical calendar system, with celestial charts to track the movements of the stars and predict weather patterns. They had their own unique form of writing as well as an advanced mathematical system. Most impressively they developed a water-supply infrastructure involving a complex network of reservoirs, canals, dams, and levees.
“Then suddenly, for reasons we still don’t fully understand, the entire system collapsed. Sometime between the middle of the eighth and ninth century the majority of the Mayan people simply disappeared. There have been many theories as to why it happened. It may have been a prolonged drought, overpopulation, internecine wars, a devastating epidemic, food shortages, or a combination of these and other factors. One way or another, having survived for 35 centuries, Mayan civilisation failed and became extinct.”
What led to the downfall of this once-great civilization? Rebecca says that like once-great civilizations before them, the Mayans could not think their way out of their problems:
“Rebecca Costa’s argument is that whatever the causes, the Mayan collapse, like the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Khmer Empire of thirteenth century Cambodia, occurred because problems became too many and complicated for the people of that time and place to solve. There was cognitive overload, and systems broke down.
“It can happen to any civilisation. It may, she says, be happening to ours. The first sign of breakdown is gridlock. Instead of dealing with what everyone can see are major problems, people continue as usual and simply pass their problems on to the next generation. The second sign is a retreat into irrationality. Since people can no longer cope with the facts, they take refuge in religious consolations. The Mayans took to offering sacrifices. Archaeologists have uncovered gruesome evidence of human sacrifice on a vast scale. It seems that, unable to solve their problems rationally, the Mayans focused on placating the gods by manically making offerings to them. So apparently did the Khmer.”
The Jewish civilization is the notable exception to this pattern of self-destruction:
“Which makes the case of Jews and Judaism fascinating. They faced two centuries of crisis under Roman rule between Pompey’s conquest in 63 BCE and the collapse of the Bar Kochba rebellion in 135 CE. They were hopelessly factionalised. Long before the Great Rebellion against Rome and the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews were expecting some major cataclysm.
“What is remarkable is that they did not focus obsessively on sacrifices, like the Mayans and the Khmer. With their Temple destroyed, they instead focused on finding substitutes for sacrifice…”
Since we could no longer offer physical sacrifices with our Temple destroyed, our leaders created spiritual alternatives to preserve our religious life:
“… One was gemillat chassadim, acts of kindness. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakai comforted Rabbi Joshua, who wondered how Israel would atone for its sins without sacrifices, with the words:
“’My son, we have another atonement as effective as this: acts of kindness, as it is written (Hosea 6:6), ‘I desire kindness and not sacrifice.’ Avot deRabbi Natan 8
“Another was Torah study. The Sages interpreted Malachi’s words, ‘In every place offerings are presented to My name,’ (Malachi 1:11) to refer to scholars who study the laws of sacrifice (Menachot 110a). Also:
‘One who recites the order of sacrifices is as if he had brought them.’
Taanit 27b
“Another was prayer. Hosea said, ‘Take words with you and return to the Lord . . . We will offer our lips as sacrifices of bulls’ (Hos. 14:2-3), implying that words could take the place of sacrifice.’
“‘He who prays in the house of prayer is as if he brought a pure oblation.’ Yerushlami, Perek 5 Halachah 1
“Yet another was teshuvah. The Psalm (51:19) says ‘the sacrifices of God are a contrite spirit.’ From this the Sages inferred that ‘if a person repents it is accounted to him as if he had gone up to Jerusalem and built the Temple and the altar and offered on it all the sacrifices ordained in the Torah’ (Vayikra Rabbah 7:2).
“A fifth approach was fasting. Since going without food diminished a person’s fat and blood, it counted as a substitute for the fat and blood of a sacrifice (Brachot 17a).
“A sixth was hospitality. ‘As long as the Temple stood, the altar atoned for Israel, but now a person’s table atones for him’ (Brachot 55a). And so on.”
By creating new institutions to nurture the heart and soul of the people, our sages secured our future:
“What is striking in hindsight is how, rather than clinging obsessively to the past, leaders like Rabban Yochanan ben Zakai thought forward to a worst-case-scenario future. The great question raised by parshat Tzav, which is all about different kinds of sacrifice, is not ‘Why were sacrifices commanded in the first place?’ but rather, ‘Given how central they were to the religious life of Israel in Temple times, how did Judaism survive without them?’
“The short answer is that overwhelmingly the Prophets, the Sages, and the Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages realised that sacrifices were symbolic enactments of processes of mind, heart, and deed, that could be expressed in other ways as well. We can encounter the will of God by Torah study, engaging in the service of God by prayer, making financial sacrifice by charity, creating sacred fellowship by hospitality, and so on.
“Jews did not abandon the past. We still refer constantly to the sacrifices in our prayers. But they did not cling to the past. Nor did they take refuge in irrationality. They thought through the future and created institutions like the synagogue, house of study, and school. These could be built anywhere, and would sustain Jewish identity even in the most adverse conditions.”
I would add this:
Clearly, many of our contemporary social institutions have become corrupted beyond repair. They have become simply too big to sustain. Big Government. Big Corporation. Big Military. Big Pharma. Big Media. The bigger they get, the farther away they get from any rational or sensible foundation for functioning — so the closer they get to their own self-destruction.
Just one example: can a “New World Order,” featuring a global uni-government, really last long, if all its members really do is traffick kids, traffick women, traffick slaves, traffick drugs, traffick cash, and traffick resources? These people will literally eat each other alive.
And they know this – hence their panic and desperation in trying to stave off the inevitable. We can literally smell the fear that fuels their futile attempts to maintain the status quo. They see they have nowhere to go. They are weak in mind and spirit.
So their fall is indeed inevitable — as it was for the Mayans, the Romans, and the Khmer. In the meantime. the freedom lovers of today are creating alternative institutions to replace the old – in education, in healthcare, in business, in so many sectors of society.
The future belongs to the strong-minded.
