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.
Perhaps the most remarkable – and frightening – feature of the war by the Technocrats on humanity, is their attack on the individual. They outrageously claim, in essence, that you have no right to be you.
Your mind? No. You will think what we tell you to think.
Your body? No. You will inject and ingest what we want you to put into it.
Your morality? No. We deem that hateful, and outlaw your beliefs and practices.
Your children? No. They belong to the State.
Your vote? No. You can pull a lever in a voting booth, but we will change it to our hand-picked candidate.
Your gun? No. You are too dangerous to be able to protect yourself.
Your property? No. You will own nothing, and be happy.
If they had their way, the Technocrats would reduce each one of us to a mere part in a global transhumanist machine – which they operate. When we break down, we could be repaired. When we are no longer of any use, we will be replaced.
Reduceable. Repairable. Replaceable. That’s the Technocrat conception of the individual person. It’s offensive and demeaning. And it’s a threat to everything we hold dear.
At first glance, it looks like a recipe for our own destruction; yet ironically, it could actually be a recipe for theirs. By trying to force us into the collective, these psychotic dictator-wannabes are causing us to value our individuality like never before. They are making each one of us realize that God created us in His image as a unique and special person, and that no other person has the right to diminish that.
This is a lesson the Jewish people learned when we were rebuilding ourselves from a nation of slaves into a nation of free people, after the Exodus from Egypt. It’s a lesson the free people of the world today must recall as we resist the Technocrat efforts to impose tyranny.
Every person counts. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explains how the Torah teaches this in his commentary on Parashat Bamidbar called “Leading a Nation of Individuals.”
https://www.rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/bamidbar/leading-a-nation-of-individuals/
He points to the unique wording in the description of the census that takes place in the Parsha:
“The answer lies in the phrase the Torah uses to describe the act of counting: se’u et rosh, literally, ‘lift the head.'(Num. 1:2) This is a strange, circumlocutory expression. Biblical Hebrew contains many verbs meaning ‘to count’: limnot, lifkod, lispor, lachshov. Why does the Torah not use these simple words for the census, choosing instead the roundabout expression, ‘lift the heads’ of the people?”
That method is not a mere “counting:”
“The short answer is this: In any census, count or roll-call there is a tendency to focus on the total – the crowd, the multitude, the mass. Here is a nation of sixty million people, or a company with one hundred thousand employees, or a sports crowd of sixty thousand. Any total tends to value the group or nation as a whole. The larger the total, the stronger the army, the more popular the team, and the more successful the company.
“Counting devalues the individual and tends to make him or her replaceable. If one soldier dies in battle, another will take their place. If one person leaves the organisation, someone else can be hired to do their job.”
It is intended to prevent “herd behavior” and “group mind:”
“Notoriously, too, crowds have the effect of tending to make the individual lose their independent judgment and follow what others are doing. We call this ‘herd behaviour,’ and it sometimes leads to collective madness. In 1841 Charles Mackay published his classic study, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which tells of the South Sea Bubble that cost thousands of people their money in the 1720s, and the tulip mania in Holland when entire fortunes were spent on single tulip bulbs. The Great Crashes of 1929 and 2008 had the same crowd psychology.
“Another great work, Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) showed how crowds exercise a ‘magnetic influence’ that transmutes the behaviour of individuals into a collective ‘group mind.’ As he put it, ‘An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’ People in a crowd become anonymous. Their conscience is silenced. They lose a sense of personal responsibility.”
This method of counting reflects the emphasis in our religion on the dignity of each individual as a creation of God:
“Hence the significance of one remarkable feature of Judaism: its principled insistence – like no other civilisation before – on the dignity and integrity of the individual. We believe that every human being was created in the image and likeness of God. The Sages said that every life is like an entire universe.[3] Maimonides wrote that each of us should see ourselves as if our next act could change the fate of the world.[4] Every dissenting view is carefully recorded in the Mishnah, even if the law is otherwise. Every verse of the Torah is capable, said the Sages, of seventy interpretations. No voice, no view, is silenced. Judaism never allows us to lose our individuality in the mass.
“There is a wonderful blessing mentioned in the Talmud to be said on seeing six hundred thousand Israelites together in one place. It is: ‘Blessed are You, Lord… who discerns secrets.'[5] The Talmud explains that every person is different. We each have different attributes. We all think our own thoughts. Only God can enter the minds of each of us and know what we are thinking, and this is what the blessing refers to. In other words, even in a massive crowd where, to human eyes, faces blur into a mass, God still relates to us as individuals, not as members of a crowd.”
And so Moses, when he conducts the census – and by extension, leads the people in other national functions – must make sure that each person under his tutelage understands that he or she counts:
“That is the meaning of the phrase, ‘lift the head,’ used in the context of a census. God tells Moses that there is a danger, when counting a nation, that each individual will feel insignificant. ‘What am I? What difference can I make? I am only one of millions, a mere wave in the ocean, a grain of sand on the sea-shore, dust on the surface of infinity.’
“Against that, God tells Moses to lift people’s heads by showing that they each count; they matter as individuals.”
I would add this: I do not know exactly how Moses showed each person that he or she counts, when he was taking the census; that could be a fascinating topic for further study. But we can easily see a multitude of ways to make sure we count in today’s world, despite the powers-that-be attempting to push us into lives of insignificance. We start by asserting our God-given rights to operate as free individuals, and by retaining our claim to what is ours by His blessing: our minds, our bodies, our morality, our children, our votes, our guns, and our property.