Knowledge Without Wisdom: Phaethon and Technocracy

Gustave Moreau’s Phaethon.

By: Jay
In our emergent technocracy we are submerged in a sea of knowledge.  Modern wonders reach their apex in the readily-available stores of knowledge at anyone’s fingertips.  Given this seemingly magical commodity was heretofore unknown to vast swaths of now dead humanity, one would think man would jump at the opportunity to educate himself on any and every topic.  Yet the reality is quite the contrary, as such a notion of aspiring, latent human potential had its origin in the universalized doctrine of “human reason” bequeathed to us from the Enlightenment.   The vast online Alexandrian databases are only perused by a few, with the majority of humanity preferring to opt for a wasted life of the meaningless and mundane.  In a strange twist that must baffle the modern progressive, humanity has devolved with the advent of their imagined tech utopia, not risen to the heights of transcendence.  The question arises – what is the purpose of never ending streams of knowledge, without wisdom?
Before considering that question, we have to ask how we arrived at this point.  For several hundred years, Western man in particular has been firmly convinced of the dogma that humans are blank slates awaiting only the right imprinting, the perfected external educational stimulant, and when the hallowed secular social order finally gets it just right, man would achieve his Promethean triumph.  When the coming technocracy appears, universal education and global democratic republics full of enlightened, informed citizenry will lead the way into the great ascent to godhood.   With a rising erection, the Enlightenment evangelists even hoped a fully global government would be conjured up, like some benevolent republican idealistic version of the Incarnation out of the Kantian noumena.  Instead, it becomes more apparent each day that these ideologues were either duped or consciously evil.   The presuppositions of existing modernity and its structures of power are still operating as if the Enlightenment “truths” are axiomatic givens – enshrined discoveries of the heroes of science that are no longer in question, as the verdict of reason and history are fully and ever vindicated.  The hard truth is that the Enlightenment ideologues were not only fundamentally wrong, but they were funded by the banking cartel for the purpose of social disorder and reorganization.  The dark lords of cash and subversive secret societies atop the idiot demagogues and salesmen were quite cognizant of the stupidity of such notions of Enlightenment tabula rasa anthropology, nevertheless, the endless stream of Dantons won out and even still never go away.  All the while, the money power laughs a hearty satanic cackle as the centuries pass by.
And so here we a couple hundred years after 1789 and 1776 and what do we see?  We see the intelligenstia operating as if physics and empiricism are actually explanatory “grand narratives.”  In total hypocrisy, labeling religion a fictitious “grand narrative” that only existed because it had explanatory power and satiated human fears, these intellectually dishonest liars erected their own alternative narrative that daily assaults me, and which I gleefully dissect on a daily basis: The new Gospel of human ascent through “science.”  One thinks here of August Comte’s patterned view of history where man passes from gradual stages of enlightenment, from primitive superstition and paganism, to rational monotheism, to philosophy and metaphysics, to physics and “social science.”  Although nothing could be further from the truth as regards the actual working of science and the actual structures of human social order and history, this mythology is still modernity’s Heilsgeschichte. 
For Jurgen Habermas, in his Theory and Practice, the Frankfurt School one can see another exemplary strategist for the dark side grappling with the course of the never ending “revolution,” from 1776/1789 onwards, looking into the future for the social engineers to fix man through his destruction.  I cite Habermas because he is a major Marxist Frankfurt School thinker who links the destruction of the old world to the French and American revolutionaries.  Habermas and the rest of his ilk like Horkheimer and Adorno, who worked with Western oligarchs and British establishment to destroy Western social order, export their weaponized disintegration to the rest of the globe.  They are significant for demonstrating that evil is not merely an organic, chaotic force that just occurs.  On the contrary, evil is very much concentrated, organzied and cunning in its tactics.  The key point here is that this technocratic rewriting is a strategic plan for total destruction that had to first be preceded by centuries of revolution and disintegration, prior to what Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley called “the final revolution,” intending by this the great revolution against man himself.  It is organized, structured, full spectrum subversion, inversion and dominance.

Writer Jeffrey Steinberg comments on this technocratic revolution as follows:
“Lord Bertrand Russell, who joined with the Frankfurt School in this effort at mass social engineering, spilled the beans, in his 1951 book, The Impact of Science on Society. He wrote:

‘Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.” Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.’

Russell’s book proves what I refer to as the “science conspiracy.”

Russell continued, “The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship....The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.’
Russell concluded with a warning: “Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
And,
“Russell’s blunt description of a “scientific dictatorship” was matched by the account of Aldous Huxley, author of the utopian tract Brave New World, in a speech on the U.S. State Department’s Voice of America, in 1961, of a world of pharmacologically manipulated slaves, living in a “concentration camp of the mind,” enhanced by propaganda and psychotropic drugs, learning to “love their servitude,” and abandoning all will to resist. ‘This,’ Huxley concluded, ‘is the final revolution.’
Speaking at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley announced: “There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

With this context in mind, we can begin to see the reason the modern West is unable to combat this strategic infiltration and destruction is due to its adoption of all the same presuppositions of the Enlightenment revolutionaries and Jacobins.  As long as you have conflicting presuppositions and double-think at work in your worldview, it is only a matter of time before one begins to live more consistently with one of the two combating principles.  In philosophy we call this coming to epistemological self-consciousness.  America especially, as a propositional presuppositional abstraction nation, is founded on this double-think of deistic rationalism and puritanical pietism.  It is the Enlightenment par excellance, and only “works” so far as the assumptions of the Enlightenment are correct.  But as a philosopher, it is my job to tell you the truth, and the ugly, red pill truth is that the presuppositions of the Enlightenment anthropology and statecraft are incorrect.  Man is not a blank slate and the state is not an entity that the social contract speaks into existence.  The entire history of statecraft and humanity attests to the opposite of the Enlightenment claims, yet this never dissuaded Locke, Rousseau or Jefferson from their deep commitment to faith in their dogmas.

The strategic goal of social disintegration through constant revolution.

The “fire in the minds of men” was lit, and rather than produce the utopia expected, it resulted in the rise of brutal, tyrannical statist regimes controlled by the money power, like the world had never seen.  And to be the bearer of further bad news, this bogus religious system of Holy Enlightenment is so entrenched still that the only outcome for modernity seems to be the rise of the great world state beast.  For the hordes of bureaucrats, NGO workers, policy makers, “officials” and other compartmentalized know-nothings who daily labor to erect this Babel, the coming world state is their great humanistic version of the New Jerusalem.  For the dark lords and technocrats above them, it is a known trap – an ultimate con for humanity in general, lulling them into sweet submission to the pied piper’s tune of technocratic environmentalism and the solution to all ills through “science.”   This is not to say that religion and ancient man in general were not slaves to superstition, or that the rise of the scientific method is somehow false or dangerous in itself.  On the contrary, the scientific method is merely a tool, like human reason, that is able to be used for all manner of good.  However, when it is inverted and given an undue place, as it is post-Enlightenment, it becomes an instrument of doom, as we see from Russell and Huxley.

The Panopticon eye is ever watching.

The false faith in man’s reason and scientific methodology must also be accompanied by a false faith in man and his own progress.  This is not to say that man cannot use his reason to probe the atom or control the electromagnetic spectrum: He can and does. But why does he do this?  In a universe desacralized and emptied of any divine telos, the only logical conclusion is the destruction of what is, and thus man’s quest to dethrone God erupts into an orgiastic fanaticism to annihilate prima materia. The universe is mirrored in the atom, and so the atom must be divided, because the universe must be destroyed, and this is because man follows Satan, who is the adversary that divides.  Satan is the thief that comes to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10).  To divide is to conquer, and man’s quest to ritually sacrifice the atom like Abraham divided the carcasses (Gen. 15:10) is also much like Phaethon.  Phaethon is the mortal son of Apollo who tried to drive his chariot into the sun.  It is a myth modern man should consider.  In Plato’s esoteric masterpiece The Timaeus, he Solon speaks of Phaethon:
“There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story that even you [Greeks] have preserved, that once upon a time, Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father’s chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals.”
For seeking to drive his chariot into the sun, the earth was destroyed by fire and Phaethon by a thunderbolt.  Modern man is Phaethon in his mad quest to grab the destructive fire of the sun in the atom, that great electromagnetic engine, and instead, unable to control his horses, ends up destroyed by the very thing he sought to conquer.  Even Oppenheimer stated this when he spoke of splitting the atom, calling himself “Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds.”  The classics are full of such lessons of warning against the hubris of man, but like a toddler with a revolver, man’s ingestion of a near infinite data stream of knowledge coupled with his lack of wisdom can only end in desolation and destruction, and this is Satan’s great con in the Faustian bargain of technological obsession without wisdom.  For all man’s worship and enthronement of reason, why does he not reason thus – what is the point of existence, if there is no God?  Having closed yourself off from the infinite, confining your existence to purely temporal, finite meaninglessness, why should there be any purpose to doing science at all, other than destruction?

Atomic Age - J. Robert Oppenheimer Quote

Lacking this wisdom, thinking he can rewrite existence with an entirely fabricated overlay, modern man has destroyed all chance at wisdom because of his false governing presuppositions.  Meaning can only be if it is grounded in the eternal and infinite.  Without that objective unifying principle that can only be found in God, man’s actions are all sound and fury signifying nothing.  However, man refuses to look into that abyss from fear of its implications, and thus places fideistic faith in “science” to give his life meaning…one day. It is no accident that modernity is also simultaneously on a quest for an entirely synthetic, virtual existence, as a synthetic virtual existence is yet another attempt at time-bound fallen man to escape his own death and meaninglessness through the creation of alternate worlds.  But a synthetic virtual world of bits and bytes cannot solve his inner problems of the heart anymore than blasting off to Alpha Centauri, and in those “worlds” man can only destroy.  It is a lack of wisdom and a fetishizing of bare knowledge that characterizes modernity, and as foolish men pursue their own self-destruction in their devotion to “Goddess Reason,” it is only by confronting Eternal Truth and Meaning that they will abandon their own self-destructive hubris.

Get wisdom, get understanding;
    do not forget my words or turn away from them.
 Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you;
    love her, and she will watch over you.
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom.
    Though it cost all you have, get understanding.
 Cherish her, and she will exalt you;
    embrace her, and she will honor you.
 She will give you a garland to grace your head
    and present you with a glorious crown.

(Proverbs 4:5-9)