Epistemically Secure Society–Phraseology to Explain this Coming Decade of Plans for Us

Since Epistemically Secure Society is rather a mouthful, let’s shorthand this useful phrase as ESS. It’s an important semantic tool to grasp though as it builds on the Shared Reality aspiration we covered in the last post, as well as the rather remarkable set of events set in motion around the US Presidential election. The type of demonstrably provable factual events media platforms will no longer allow to be mentioned or disseminated. The type of assertions, that despite sets of affidavits, may get a lawyer sanctioned now if they push the stories in Michigan. They may be true, but they deviate from the desired narrative of events and thus threaten the ESS. It fits too with how learning standards work and their component conceptual frameworks that now constitute Knowledge with a capital ‘K’. These approved concepts or theories that the standards both disseminate and mandate act as a common core of perception and motivation for future decision-making. The officially approved set of filters installed at a neural level is another way to put it.

The ESS phrase was laid out in a document called “Tackling Misinformation During Crisis” which stated this in October

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying ‘infodemic’ clearly illustrate that access to reliable information is crucial to coordinating a timely crisis response in democratic societies. Inaccurate information and the muzzling of important information sources have degraded trust in health authorities and slowed public response to the crisis. Misinformation about ineffective cures, the origins and malicious spread of COVID-19, unverified treatment discoveries, and the efficacy of face coverings have increased the difficulty of coordinating a unified public response during the crisis.

In a  recent report researchers at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) in collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) workshopped an array of hypothetical crisis scenarios to investigate social and technological factors that interfere with well-informed decision-making and timely collective action in democratic societies.

The UK’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence put that out October 21, and a newsletter in the US tied to global change aspirations linked to it in mid-November, after the election. I was struck when I read it how well the expressed aspiration fit with everything I was hearing in the name of Equity in the US and the Science of Learning and Development being led by Biden Education Advisor Linda Darling-Hammond. It fits with an interview I watched before Christmas with the same NCEE that created the New Standards Project where the name David Albury came up. I tracked that new name to a 2016 Australian document called “Innovating for Global Excellence,” which matter-of-factly informed readers that China too had embarked on an ideas-oriented transformation of its educational system. A little research confirmed that shift.

When a well-known dictatorship wanting to be the world’s dominant power thinks an ‘ideas’ curriculum reform is also compatible with its plans, the potential embodied in ESS certainly comes into perspective. It fits with how the media in the US seemed to coordinate to keep out any bad news about one candidate prior to the election, while refusing to cover even documented election fraud. As the Leverhulme paper put it: “If there is no shared belief among the actors in  a community about the nature of a crisis or the efficacy of a proposed response, collective action is less likely to come.”

And it turns out collective action and its need for a common core of a widespread shared belief among the actors is what ESS is all about. Since we are all living in the midst of this, I thought the phrase would be a helpful arrow in our quiver of recognizing what we are dealing with and all these plans for transformation over this next decade. Many of us with 20-something graduates will recognize that the expressed “need for robust and reliable systems of information production and dissemination” is already being met by elite higher ed institutions and the media and tech platforms are merely following suit. The Leverhulme paper may have premised the need for an ESS “in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the upcoming 2020 elections,” but it also recognized it as the “solution to managing infodemics” which require a coordinated effort to control what information is produced, disseminated, and how it is UNDERSTOOD by individual minds:

the promotion of epistemically secure democracies will help us be more resilient to similar events in the future.

Methinks in an ESS, there will be no inconvenient assertions about fentanyl overdoses when a horrible video emerges that can become a totem for allegations of systemic racism meriting the wholesale transformation of society, its component minds, institutions, and prevailing normative values. Another paper I located in a footnote to that Science of Development and Learning openly called for a New Sociology of Education that would enable a TPS–a Totally Pedagogized Society. No wonder the Chinese are on board and digital learning experiences are now becoming ubiquitous. The TPS and the ESS go together nicely like interlocking gears turning something much bigger. No need to point out that the TPS analogy for what is needed now compared it to “the medieval period during which Religion played a totally pedagogising role and function.”

Awareness of TPS and ESS as openly expressed global aspirations help us understand what is going on around us and what is ahead of us in a way that clearly deviates from the hoped-for widespread shared belief system. Let’s stick though to the facts as long as we can. I joke about my bookshelf, but I did go looking there yesterday for insights after I decided these unequivocal concepts actually helped me grasp what otherwise seems to live more like bad science fiction than the reality that 2020 has been. I landed first on Richard Falk’s 1975 book A Study of Future Worlds from the World Order Models Project that the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations funded that I have covered previously here at ISC [see tag]. Its Prospectus for Transition seemed to be precisely what Donald Trump’s surprise Presidential election in the US in 2016 or the earlier Brexit referendum shock from that same year seem to have interrupted. See if this sounds familiar if a bit off schedule:

In terms of political action we anticipate t1, the 1970s, to be the decade in which value changes occur mainly on the level of political consciousness, i.e., orientations toward action. In t2, the 1980s, the main value changes will involve mobilization for action to achieve the new value priorities, while in t3, the 1990s, the focus will be on action to achieve transformation of institutions and organizations, both to alter value and goal priorities and to adapt organizational forms to the emerging value consensus.

Just because the timing is off, doesn’t mean the plans changed. Unlike the bolding in this post, those italics were in the original Proposal for Transition. I think Professor Falk and WOMP’s funders were a bit optimistic in how much it would take to change minds. That is probably why both sources of funds began to push educational reforms around conceptual frameworks beginning in 1980. Now we also get Competencies and Performance learning standards that fit right in with Mobilization for Action. Beyond Falk’s plans though, I also pulled Kenneth Minogue’s always excellent book The Servile Mind. His insight of what had changed in our conception of society really hits its mark in 2020, ten years after its publication.

…our very conception of society has changed. It is no longer an association of independent self-moving individuals, but rather an association of vulnerable people whose needs and sufferings must be remedied by the power of the state.

A few pages later in the book’s Introduction Minogue pointed out that

At the heart of Western life as we inherited it within living memory are self-conscious individuals guiding their destinies according to whatever moral sentiments they entertain…this moral idiom is being challenged by another, in which individuals find their identifying essence in supporting public policies that are both morally obligatory and politically imperative.

That’s the essence of learning standards properly understood all over the globe and the ESS and TPS they are to lead to in the 21st century. It is also the reason, I believe, that the False Narrative around education reforms, especially the Common Core, that commenced in earnest in 2011 in a most coordinated manner, keeps tying back to certain public policy think tanks. We will cover that more in 2021 so we can ‘be alert to the semantics’ as Minogue put it in this quote. Seems like an excellent way to finish this post and this troublesome year designed to resurrect the desired Transition and Transformation from unexpected electoral interferences.

I for one am not dismayed that attitudes have a life of their own, and that the demos in the twenty-first century is not entirely plastic material suitable to be sculpted by rulers. Rulers may get excited about ‘changing the culture,’ but modern peoples are usually brutish enough to resist being improved. Being alert to the semantics by which the moral has been transposed into the manipulable is one protection against a gullible acquiescence to the projects of government.

ESS and TPS, election fraud with no legal remedy, allegations of systemic racism with no regard to the facts, mask mandates regardless of whether they work, and lockdowns whatever the economic destruction and lack of efficacy–just a few of 2020’s Projects of Government.

See you in 2021 so we can stay alert to the semantics and try to avoid the mental and socio-emotional sculpting.

 

96 thoughts on “Epistemically Secure Society–Phraseology to Explain this Coming Decade of Plans for Us

  1. Derived from the post:

    Epistemically Secure Society (ESS) is a semantic tool to build a contrived Shared Reality that controllers could manipulate in the era of panics where demonstrably provable factual events will no longer be allowed to be mentioned or disseminated in Social Media and on Corporate News.

    They may be true, but not allowed if they deviate from the desired narrative. Nor can they be allowed if they deviate from Capital ‘K’ Knowledge that Standards disseminate and require in schools. This Common Core of perception and motivation fosters the approved set of filters at a neural level to guide future decision-making for the Totally Pedagogized Society (TPS).

    ESS and TPS explain Government Projects like:
    • election fraud with no legal remedy,
    • identity politics at the expense of the individual,
    • unfalsifiable allegations of systemic racism,
    • selective application of laws by officials,
    • arbitrary suspension of the Constitution,
    • mask mandates absent proof of efficacy,
    • allocation of scarce medicines by unscientific social views, and
    • lockdowns that cause greater economic and personal destruction than justified.

    ESS and TPS purport to favor shared value and community while, to the contrary, the few who grasp for control manipulate social pressure to herd citizens to do their bidding.

    Their activities are not “misguided” but directed to eliminate individual intellect, creativity, and courage that—as opposed to their centralized manipulation that postures false appeals to community—leads to effective community that individuals validate and support on their own.

    • Bravo!! Notice this story from about an hour ago corroborates that China will now imprison for reporting demonstrable, inconvenient truths. https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/china-slaps-citizen-journalist-jail-over-virus-reporting-wuhan

      She was convicted on Monday at the Shanghai Pudong New Area People’s Court for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” according to Reuters.

      The verdict is a warning to all journalists in the country that the communist government is coming after those who exposed their shortcomings during the initial months of the virus outbreak. More importantly, Zhan’s case shows the government has a zero-tolerance policy for critics.

      “I don’t understand. All she did was say a few true words, and for that she got four years,” said Shao Wenxia, Zhan’s mother, who attended the trial.

      Also notice the rest of the concerning roles laid out in the report’s conclusion. http://lcfi.ac.uk/news/2020/oct/21/safeguarding-information-trust-during-crisis/

      Report recommendations

      The report aims to advise government actors (or other guardians of reliable information production and exchange) in preserving a society’s ability to organise timely and well-informed collective action in light of the threats and vulnerabilities described above. The following recommendations are presented to highlight areas where additional research and resources will likely have a significant impact on epistemic security in democratic societies. We define an epistemically secure society as one that reliably averts threats to the processes by which reliable information is produced, distributed, acquired and assessed within the society.

      1. Develop technological or institutional methods to increase the cost for adversaries in spreading unsupported, fabricated, or false information.

      For example, penalties could be introduced for the knowing dissemination of false or misleading information or fines given to information organisations that do not undertake minimum fact-checking procedures.

      2. Develop methods to help information consumers more easily identify trustworthy information sources.

      For example, information organisations and platforms could be certified as an epistemically responsible information source. An epistemically responsible information source would be one that has done all that it practicably can to distribute true and well-founded information…

      4. Develop technological or institutional methods to monitor changes in social information systems to rapidly detect adversarial action during times of tension or crises.

      Intervening in information systems is fraught with unintended consequences. Strategies should be developed for monitoring emerging information technologies and platforms, forecasting their impact on informed collective action, and monitoring emerging claims and narratives that could undermine collective action in times of crises…

      6. Establish working relationships with a diverse array of experts experienced in identifying and analysing threats and who could serve as advisors before and during crises.

      In a crisis it is important that a democratic society can deploy people skilled in the kinds of techniques for appraising epistemic threats and vulnerabilities described in this report. These experts are currently distributed throughout various disciplines and professions (government and non-government) and employ different strategies for identifying and dealing with epistemic threats. For example, responsible journalists and journalism agencies undertake internal fact checking procedures to counter the spread of misinformation, and psychologists investigate vulnerabilities in the processes by which individuals choose to consume information and form beliefs. To address the wide variety of epistemic threats and vulnerabilities that face a heterogeneous society it is important to draw on a diversity of viewpoints when assembling a community of epistemic security experts.

      is just some of what is above the passage I quoted from. Chilling, but on the way without better recognition of what is sought. It’s also hard not to see SCOTUS as an example of a thoroughly corrupted institution transformed as planned by Falk. The Process Theory of Law was invented at Yale in the late 40s for just such a purpose.

      Thanks for your succinct follow-up.

      • SCOTUS is thoroughly corrupted indeed. I’d like to say I never thought I’d see the day but learning what I have from you and others I’d be more surprised if it was not thoroughly corrupted .

        • I went back and pulled Jean-Francois Revel’s great Last Exit to Utopia that I used for epigraphs and insights into what I found in CtD that remains enduringly relevant 8 years after it was written, I found this that is directly relevant to ESS:

          Socialist societies are oligarcgic. The ruling minority assigns to each individual his or her place in the production system, including place of residence. Above all, the official doctrine must be made to penetrate into everyone’s mind as the exclusive intellectual fare. As for art, the only justification for its continued existence is to promote the edifying ends of the revolution, and artists are required to restrict themselves to the comically vacuous project of portraying a society that swims in egalitarian bliss and reflecting the ecstatic, admiring gratitude felt by the people toward the Supreme Tyrant.

          I wanted to make that Tyrant plural to take in all the levels of government. I must also admit to thinking of a meal at The French Laundry restaurant when I read the first sentence. This is also a relevant quote as we have the Jubilee Centre and the Templeton Foundation funding curricula in the name of the US Constitution Centre that turns the familiar concepts of liberty and freedom into communitarian manifestoes of the kind Professor Danielle Allen asserts as the real purpose of her reimagined Declaration of Independence. Well, it turns out she was Rpbert George’s student at Princeton per his interview of her for AEI that I watched this fall. https://www.aei.org/events/how-our-history-can-unify-us-a-conversation-with-danielle-allen-and-wilfred-mcclay/ Sources of Our Unity indeed. Assert the tyranny as an internal compulsion and Habit of Mind trained under the mantra of Good, True, and Beautiful.

          The long tradition, going back two and a half millennia, of utopian ideas–of writings that area astoundingly similar, down to the smallest detail, in their prescriptions for the Ideal City–confirms this truth: the totalitarian temptation, lurking beneath the demon mask of the Good, is a constant of the human mind. It has always been in conflict with our aspirations for liberty, and it always will be.

          I suppose instead of the Good there we could insert ‘Well-Being’ or ‘Eudaimonia’, as both are current flags we keep encountering over and over. Something else we are going to discuss in 2021, which ties to that 2011 coordinated False Narrative before anyone knew someone was burrowing into the documentable truth surrounding these issues.

      • Additionally, and speaking of SCOTUS and Falk and longterm transformations, I have been listening to Diana West’s book American Betrayal. It’s chock full of excellent facts and research. I imagined, AHHH… she understands… but perhaps I am too quick to assume. Her father after all, by her own admission, was a very progressive, leaning towards commie type in the 50’s until suddenly in the 70’s he wasn’t. Or wasn’t he?

        So what you may ask? Well, perusing Twitter the other day I came upon West’s posts and she was tweeting advocacy of Trump pardoning….. wait for it… ASSANGE AND SNOWDEN.

        HUH?

        West is no dummy. Not by a long a long shot. So why is she of brilliant mind hustling the controlled opposition, state run persona/psy-ops of ( ‘The Family’ Cult )Assange and ( Mr. snuck my stuff out of the NSA with a thumb drive to my stripper girlfriend ) Snowden??

        It’s a head scratcher. But not if she is one more Aktor in the dialectical game.

        • I do not know the answer to that. When I read her books it reminds me of the MH vision, but I have never seen her refer to that. She seems to be unaware of the Human Development Society, even though many of the people she writes about are clearly trying to impose that vision. I always wondered if Horowitz and Ron Radosh went after her so because they recognized how close she was to laying out the MH template.

          How’s this for a quote as I backtrack through issues of The Blue Dot, Issue 10, from a Richard Davidson column. Love the analogy to teethbrushing as if a new kind of consciousness hardwired in is analogous to avoiding tooth decay and its attendant bacterial infections traumatizing the human body.

          In parallel with the development and promotion of SEL is the neuroscience evidence that establishes some of the key circuits that underlie the core competencies in popular models of SEL. For example there is a large body of neuroscientific evidence on self-management that includes the growing understanding of the circuits critical for emotion regulation and delay of gratification. In the domain of social awareness, neuroscientific evidence has provided an understanding of both cognitive and affective circuits that underlie different aspects of empathy. Responsible decision making, another core competency of SEL, requires the integration of both affective and cognitive features that depend upon the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and structures with which it is interconnected. Of particular importance is the recognition that these circuits all exhibit plasticity. They are often shaped by forces around the individual of which they have little awareness and often no control. These external influences that shape the brain over the lifetime can be the cause of much suffering. However, these same neural circuits can be transformed to promote flourishing and well-being by the systematic practice of the skills of social and emotional learning.

          This is the great promise and opportunity.I believe that today we have a moral obligation to incorporate SEL into our educational systems at all levels. We can view this as a form of mental hygiene or mental exercise, akin to taking care of our bodies. When humans first evolved on this planet, we were not brushing our teeth at the beginning, yet virtually every human being on the planet today has learned this skill and incorporates it into their daily routine. If we nurtured positive qualities of our mind—the sort of competencies featured in typical SEL programs—even for the short amount of time each day that we spend brushing our teeth, I have the strong conviction that this world would be a very different place. The UNESCO MGIEP is poised to widely disseminate programs for SEL that will have the potential to influence the development of the next generation of global citizens. The MGIEP is exploring different modes of dissemination including digital platforms that show great promise for massive scaling. This work is critical to the future of our species and our planet and is based upon fundamentally sound scientific insights about the emotional brain and neuroplasticity. The work of the MGIEP provides some glimmer of optimism in the troubled world we inhabit in this first half of the 21st century.

          • WOW. Moral Obligation. Mental Hygiene. Washy and Scrubby of the brainz. No words.

            “This is the great promise and opportunity.I believe that today we have a moral obligation to incorporate SEL into our educational systems at all levels. We can view this as a form of mental hygiene “

      • Ironically, there is no “epistemic security” in an open, free, liberal-democratic heterodox society, and the 1st Amendment was created specifically to ensure that no totalitarian notion of mass societal “epistemic security” overseen by guardians of epistemic rectitude and entities such as state-sponsored Ministries of Truth and “fact-checkers” for gigantic social media corporations and ideologically homogenous and politically perfervid media conglomerates would ever become dominant and able to vampirically drain society of the intellectual creativity, independence and dynamism of its individual members and sub-communities let alone its core classical liberal/Judeo Christian foundations.

        It appears we are now well past that point.

        • Yes, we are, which is why I went for a nice long walk after framing the next post and, once again, went back to Revel, this time its his book on Deceit.

          It helped me frame what we are looking at better. I still feel like raising the point I made in CtD, about eating our seed corn while expressing ideological aims. Once gone, some things prove irreplaceable, which is where we find ourselves now. I did love his phrase about ‘hearsay culture’. Those of us who refuse to rely only on hearsay are the once being accused of promoting Truth Decay and Disinformation.

          • He was quite prescient. “Hearsay culture” is the culture of what we now call the “Twitter trolls” and others of this ilk, including most major figures within the mainstream media who appear to believe that they need only assert a claim to make it true.

            Tragically, I’ve met all too many people in social media over the years who also seem to believe this without question (unless it is “right-wing” media).

            The Totalitarian Temptation and How Democracies Perish are also well worth the read.

    • • lockdowns that cause greater economic and personal destruction than justified.

      Japan suicide watch: Suicides in the last ‘month’ exceeded the Japan Covid-19 death toll, in total.

      • I am flipping through Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia and it seems to me that in 2020 we have had both ‘health’ and ‘Racial Equity’ get substituted in the place of Liberty in this relevant quote on the essence of utopian totalitarianism. Suicides then are just a symptom that mental health needs must be met under ever tighter regulation by political mandates. As Revel said:

        But it should be obvious by now that the hallmark of utopian totalitarianism (and what chiefly distinguishes it from direct totalitarianism) is to effect the opposite of its vaunted program: namely to impose tyranny in the name of liberty.

      • From The Blue Dot, Issue 11, on the Need for Kindness to achieve the SDGs

        According to a study by the World Health Organization (WHO), Indians are among the worst hit by depression, with nearly 36 percent of the population having suffered a major depressive episode. While one person in India commits suicide every four minutes, younger Indians are among the worst hit. That is why Richa Singh, an IIT Guwahati alumnus, started http://www.yourdost.com, an emotional support system for people to discuss problems with qualified and experienced individuals, in anonymity. Available as a free service through its web portal and mobile app, YourDOST has close to 70,000 users, a number that is growing by nearly 40% every month. A majority of the reported depression stems from issues such as bad performance in competitive exams, relationship problems, anxiety during exam preparation, and the feeling of rejection arising from working in a field that people do not enjoy.

        Thus the answer is a new kind of education and remaking the nature of work. Maybe that’s where Caring Economics comes in.

  2. Wow! Guardians of the Galaxy!

    …“ guardians of reliable information production and exchange”…

    Entertainment geared to the youth has removed normal reflections of human life completely and replaced it with reflections of what they are selling us through “ reliable info production”, hollywood gladly complies. Disfigured Dysmorphic dark parentless blobs in cartoons for the kiddos, and ratcheted up to Guardians of the Galaxy who each posess a physical challenge and power where they battle in perpetutity for control. Hmmmm.
    “The world as it should be” said the ghoulish string puller.
    Todays young adults mind archives have litttle reality in them so they are easy pickins for transi baloney spin.
    Sucker born every day….. , but now with a special new demented sticky hotsauce where the kids feet are firmly stuck. The iphone.

    • Well now, having LDH as an advisor about sums up what we need to know on the motivation, doesn’t it. I literally spat out a four letter word while reading. I have been trying to tune it out for awhile and missed that disturbing info. My, my, my, warp speed in more ways than one.

      • From the SoLD Alliance–Science of Learning and Development Alliance Year End Statement out today.

        2020 is a year that reminded us that learning and development happen everywhere and our best work is to nurture it so that all young people can thrive. In the face of monumental challenges, young people and communities across the country have brought a wealth of strengths to this year, including resilience and a resolve to be the agents of their own learning. Similarly, educators and all other youth-serving adults were asked to do the seemingly impossible — and yet we see examples everywhere of adults who created meaningful and supportive contexts and learning experiences when young people needed them most.

        The lessons from this year allow us to rethink what is possible and necessary from our education and youth-serving systems moving forward. At the SoLD Alliance, we often talk about how education systems are at a crossroads: we can either revert to inequitable, pre-pandemic education systems, or we can transform systems to be truly aligned with the science of learning and development and designed for equity.

        If you haven’t already, we encourage you to take a look at what the SoLD Alliance – a network of leaders like you who are individually and collectively working to transform education so that every young person can thrive – accomplished this year:

        • I’m sure you saw the Time Magazine dedicated to The Great Reset, with plans from the World Economic Forum melding the SDGs, and all that new styled caplitalism
          We have discussed? Really in plain sight now isn’t it?

          • Yes and Angel Gurria of the OECD who I quoted in the last chapter of CtD as he put the ed agenda into the broader context now called the Great Reset is deeply involved.

            https://europeansting.com/2020/09/01/a-top-economist-shares-3-ways-leaders-can-help-economies-recover/ is just one of the relevant statements from Gurria. The truth is it fits with where DeSeCo was going and what PISA is really measuring and the OECD 2030 ed agenda I have written about briefly and its transversal competencies.

            https://www.weforum.org/great-reset is the link to wef forum complete with 3D platform to aid the imagination and the list of partners.

            Happy New Year. I systematically went through those Blue Dot publications until I just got too tired of how it all melded with what I have been warning about. Started yet another confirming book today that I am at least trying to read while getting my anti-viral dose of Vitamin D from the now severely south facing sun.

          • Did you see the Kellogg F has launched a racialequity 2030 website? Here’s the announced agenda.

            Dear friends,

            Do you have a game-changing idea to advance racial equity?

            Explore the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s (WKKF’s) $90 million Racial Equity 2030 challenge — a global call for bold and actionable solutions to drive an equitable future for all children, families and communities.

            WKKF is inviting teams of visionaries, change agents and community leaders from around the world to join.

            Racial equity requires a politically organized and controlling society at every level of government. Lots of incentive there for electoral fraud, especially with the electoral dominant candidate outpolling virtually any Rep candidate ever among Blacks and Hispanics. Instead we get plagiarizing Kamala parroting MLK Jr this time.

    • This edifies the two sides of same coin motif in CommunAmerika. The ed secretaries no matter what party have been on the same march.

      • Bill Bennett used to hang out on the DeVos yacht according to things he has written in the past.

        I am working on the transformational agenda and have come to realize reeducation camps in China or the USSR HAD to be a different physical location, like Siberia or the archipelago of prison labor. Now the training will be via LMS and Project-Based Learning. Also apps per the various issues of The Blue Dot. Chillingly, this is another MGIEP quote from 2019

        …just as individuals can be trained in the cognitive aspects, the emotional parts can be trained. In short, human beings can be trained to be empathetic, compassionate and kind.

        Students can be trained to be good Comrades in other words, except now we get euphemisms to obscure these declared outcomes. Just incorporate it into a Learner Profile or Portrait of a Graduate. The experiences provided by the LMS can aid in the desired Becoming that is hardwired neurally by the stated aims.

        • Regarding archipelagos, I am rethinking the “Galapagos Japan” metaphor, because that is not what has happened, here. Could be more like re-education camp experiment conducted on an entire nation…and, quite cynically. When I think about it…at the exception of this experiment there existed a highly-intelligent, reasonably well-educated, curious and sometimes expansively-thinking population. Cut to the present — I would say we have the “new man” in the Soviet sense, and which Robin has detailed, pretty tirelessly. Why not do ‘it’ to a whole nation that is somewhat isolated by language constraints, and cannot access resources the rest of us take for granted.

          • Look where following up on the False Narrative popped me out to this morning. http://en.celap.cn/col/col2084/index.html

            Adding this because it makes the link explicitly and Shanghai is where China pilots all its curriculum changes.

            Being a public institution funded by the central government, CELAP is directly administered by the Organization Department of CPC Central Committee and under the guidance of CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee. Zhao Leji, member of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee and Minister of the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee, is the president of CELAP. Li Xi, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee, serves as the First Vice President of the institution. CELAP consists of eight departments: General Office, Department of Teaching Affairs, Department of Participant Affairs, Department of International Exchanges and Program Development, Department of Academics, Department of Research Administration, Department of Information and Technology and Department of Human Resources.

            How do we get the “individual to sing with the voice of the collective” and “make them effective vehicles for thought” are both sentiments sure to get my attention. Author is a regular lecturer here and greatly admires the Chilean CyberSyn Project. I wrote Fernando Flores’ name in the margin. Funny thing is that I even guessed he was a Balliol grad given what I know about the nature of Oxford colleges and the various allusions made to topics I already know a great deal about. It reminded me of something Claire Berlinski wrote about Balliol grads.

      • A friend of mine has done extensive research on Fernando Flores and Cyberspin. I’ll see if I can get her to chime in here or to you Robin.

        • A belated Christmas present for you and your friend. https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/systems-and-common-sense/

          I guess this is new year’s as I followed up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGTEoJI5-Y4

          I knew something was up with mit press doing that book on cybersyn in about 2013. I adding this astute comment in case that video is taken down. Written about two years ago.

          It is important to note two things: This project is after the first works in creating the Internet through ARPANET in 1960s, so it is not so avant-garde. What is avant-garde is that while the Internet was thought of as a decentralized information system, the Cybersyn project sought to centralize information and make decisions in a few hands of politicians. Consequently, from the perspective of a socialist person, who values the total control of the State and prefers to submit to the designs of an elite group, this project would be his ideal. But, for a liberal person who was against the Chilean Socialist Party (UP) and who values their freedom to choose and develop their own projects, this project would be macabre, the plan was to create a semi-human Big Brother, centralized and controlled by a few that would determine the work, life and production of each person.

          Amen. And apparently now if we are in the US House-a-woman showing our govt representatives to be illiterates about language.

  3. James Lindsay relates the false narrative to a type of psychopathy. https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/

    “Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in sociopolitical calamities—up to and including war, genocide, and even civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant.”

    Pseudo-realities and ESS have a lot in common: they use the chosen narrative to twist perception and manipulate thinking. Yesterday I watched a documentary called One-Child Nation about China’s One-Child Policy and noted all the propaganda and coercion needed to make that policy stick. It was sickening and everyone from the medical personnel down to the village chief complained that it was the policy and there was nothing to be done about it at the time. China’s Communist Party was at war with its own population with the dire message of “one child or starvation.” Was it the reality? Mass deception requires a somewhat believable threat. In 2015, after realizing the numbers of youth couldn’t support the numbers of elderly Chinese, the Party changed the One-Child Policy to the Two-Child Policy, with much of the same propaganda adjusted accordingly. Worth a (difficult) watch to see how the concept of family planning dominated China, destroyed lives literally, and allowed participants to avoid responsibility due to the enforced narrative and the policies promoted from the Party. Sadly, it is no surprise that a Covid-questioning journalist was jailed for four years as an example of Party power.

    Today’s media narratives aim to “stick” even if they only tell half the story or twist the reality. Meanwhile, who are teaching children about Digital Literacy and reliable information they can trust? The credentialed are using online media to teach Digital Literacy and Digital Citizenship. FCPS uses Common Sense Media: https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship/lesson/finding-credible-news
    “Families and teachers everywhere trust Common Sense for expert reviews, objective advice, helpful tools, and so much more.
    Your trusted guide for a fast-changing world.”

    These days, when someone tells me repeatedly to trust them, I usually take it with a grain of salt.

    Happy New Year, Robin! Here’s to truth-seeking and truth-telling in 2021!

    • Common Sense Media is Jim Steyer, Tom Steyer’s brother. Remember Tom running for President in the Primaries? Tom is also supposedly connected to China and coal despite being an environmentalist when it comes to US policies.

      Am adding this link on him. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/05/jim-steyer-the-man-who-took-on-mark-zuckerberg and this https://www.africanleadershipacademy.org/staffulty/speakers/jim-steyer/

      I wrote about the 2018 issue of The Blue Dotfrom UNESCO’s MGIEP based in India but global in its aims. https://d1c337161ud3pr.cloudfront.net/files%2Fd0682ab5-7f94-492d-ab68-b7110a3b6764_The%20Blue%20DOT-Issue%2012.pdf is the 2020 issue with Big Plans for Digital Learning. “Reimagining Learning Spaces for Uncertain Times”. After I wrote this post one of my newsletters pointed out that about a week ago PNAS published the most alarming paper “The plasticity of well-being: A training-based framework for the cultivation of human flourishing.” Adding this quote to that link because it ties to the new well-being framework”.

      This Blue Dot issue aims to propose transformative alternatives to today’s education systems in terms of purpose, delivery, and content – alternatives that are more fully human and allow us not only to survive but to thrive, leading a life that makes sense and a difference in our interconnected, interdependent world, into an inherently unknowable future.

      There really is a plan to rewire for global utopia and it is what I started working on as soon as I saw that framework and its supporting Appendix. Davidson also turns out to be on the Scientific Advisory Board Member of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science. I cross-referenced the footnotes with what I already knew and found not only connections again to Planck, but also to a new textbook published in 2014 and now translated into multiple languages including Chinese on “Caring Economics”. As I said, I prefer bad science fiction to these real-life aspirations for rewiring our way to utopia and a mandated collective orientation.

        • I’ll say:

          [The SDGs] are a summation of the collective aspirations for a future worthy of our planet.Since the adoption of the SDGs, governments, businesses and wider civil society organisations the world over have taken up the arduous challenge of mobilising societies to act to realise a peaceful and sustainable future. This urgency for action has also been induced by the fact that some of the challenges that the SDGs set out to address are materialising by the day, especially the looming climate catastrophe.

          As much as the SDGs have inspired individual and collective action, they are yet to internalise a mindset that is peaceful and sustainable among individuals. Something is needed to internalise and make automatic the mindset to co-exist (with the planet) peacefully and sustainably. This is where kindness could play a significant role in creating and internalising such a mindset. Imagine a world where it is intuitive and easy to be kind to each other, to all beings and the planet; where individual and collective action is informed by this simple and natural secular ethic…

          To realise a world that is peaceful and sustainable, there is need to replace violent and unsustainable systems, which requires a massive behavioural change on an individual and then on the collective level. As established above, research from the cognitive neurosciences indicates that behavioural change stems from functional and structural biological changes in the brain that occur as a consequence of neuroplasticity.

          Given the massive benefits of kindness and prosocial behaviour, it is time we consciously promote and augment this naturally occurring prosocial circuit in human beings such that it is automatically activated. A spiral of numerous acts of kindness strengthens the circuit, and in return, the circuit induces individuals to perform more acts of kindness. As described earlier, adolescents and the youth are uniquely positioned because of the brain development that they undergo at that age. The explicit promotion of prosocial behaviour can arm them to tackle dissonance that exists because of beliefs, attitudes values and feelings about oneself, others or the environment. Not to forget, humans have a fundamental need to belong to something larger than themselves (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). One’s social responsibility is rooted in relationships with others—individuals must feel connected to others and see oneself as part of a larger entity. When supported by others, growing autonomy during adolescence can also foster social responsibility, as autonomy entails having the agency to act on one’s values—values that involve helping others and contributing to society (Wray-Lake & Syvertsen, 2011). The ability of adolescents to identify and define social responsibility, in turn, is important in defining who they are, where they fit in the social world and building confidence in their sense of agency (Youniss & Yates, 1997). A confident, self-aware and values-conscious youth can lead the world towards peace and sustainability, and kindness presents itself as the ideal trait to drive this movement.

          My bolding. From the Cover Story in The Blue Dot from last year on “Kindness – The Force that will Help us Achieve Sustainable Development Goals” By Bhavya Arya, Kuany & Nandini Chatterjee Singh.

          Have fun skiing. I just got fresh crabmeat to make crabcakes for New Years Eve with chard and bacon and oven roasted garlic potatoes. Making black-eyed pea Good Luck Soup New Years Day. Greens and black eyed peas. Have fresh cornbread from making Split Pea Soup yesterday afternoon.

          • We need that good luck soup!

            That bit above is just such ROM, eh! Now here we are. Bonkers on top of bonkers.
            Happy New year to you and yours and all folks in this ISC clan.
            To 2021!

          • Hopefully you will be back on the slopes today. Woke up early to take some sudafed for some new year sniffles and then sat down to look at The Blue Dot Issue 10.

            You and I have discuused Mark Greenberg’s psych template in the past and its role in schools globally and I noticed he is cited repeatedly in the CASEL story https://mgiep.unesco.org/the-blue-dot-issue-10 on their plans to push systemic SEL globally over the next decade. Then the next article, starting on page 25 of the pdf, is by a PennState prof–Robert W. Roeser. It has the title “Educating the Head, the Heart and the Hand in the 21st Century: Notes from India and the United States”.

            dding this:

            Robert W. Roeser is the Bennett Pierce Professor of Care and Compassion at Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. from the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan (1996) and holds master’s degrees in religion and psychology, developmental psychology and clinical social work. His research focuses on schooling and its impact on students’ academic, social-emotional and ethical development; as well as on the implementation and evaluation of mindfulness and compassion programs for parents, teachers and students.

            Care and Compassion Prof. Wonder if he uses grades or just hugs?

          • Also adding this quote from the first issue of The Blue Dot:

            This 21st century world is a place which has become more interconnected and interdependent than ever. It has also become a place where there is reduced premium placed on peace, human rights, tolerance, and justice both at the local and global levels. Thus the need arises for an education system that leads to transformative learning by placing increasing emphasis on the importance of values, attitudes and convictions as critical complements to the existing core foundations of knowledge and skills. The pilot survey shows that youth are relatively well informed and willing to be actively involved in creating a more just and peaceful world. Transformative education at its core necessitates a youth-driven agenda where it aims to empower this generation to learn about its rights and obligations and to lead the way towards a more peaceful and sustainable co-existence. It will allow young people to become proactive contributors to a more just, peaceful, inclusive, secure and sustainable world. The consolidation of the international human rights regime, the greater interconnectedness and interdependence of individuals and groups across the world, and the emergence of new forms of transnational or post-national civic engagement are all expressions of this transformation. However, an area worth more detailed exploration is the level of satisfaction of the youth with the current educational systems and suggestions for creating a system that could impart global citizenship education so that the youth can be empowered to assume active roles in resolving global challenges and ultimately become agents for change.

            I bolded that bit on Values, attitudes, and conviction in part because it reminded me of a video created aping the insights of my book, without attribution as became the norm for the False Narrative crowd so they would appear authoritative before the misleading part began. Instead of admitting this is what Tranzi OBE was about. The False Narrative tried to make it about a database of PII. Hence my point these aims are centripetal to gain changes toward common aspirations instead of centrifigal like the old Six Flags ride where the bottom dropped out and we stuck to the wall. The only reason to get to know the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the students is to change them. It’s what continuous improvement really means and it’s cybernetic because it seeks ongoing change against declared goals that then become about the qualities of 21st century ‘citizenship’. It simply functions like what used to be comrade education in China, Cuba, or the USSR.

            It is what Jean-Francois Revel wrote had come to France via sociologists putting their theories into mandated pedagogy.

            One of my kids just asked why there was a canister of frozen chicken broth on the stairs. I said it is for the black eyed peas. If I start now they can cool and will have better flavor when I warm up later while (probably) sipping champagne. Tis a New Years tradition. My son was really impressed the year I pulled out the pasta pot, added water and ice, and used it to quickly chill two bottles. He probably realized he could use the same technique for less high-brow beverages.

    • James Lindsay: “This is the real alchemy of the pseudo-realist ideological project: turning normal, mostly healthy people into psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually broken water-carriers who can no longer cope adequately with the features of reality and thus must prefer the pseudo-reality that was built to receive them—and, more importantly, to make strategic use of them.“

      This clearly mirrors SEL and so many other ED tropes breaaking the kids as early as possible.

      An aside, yesterday ( we are at a ski mt) my son was exiting the premises after skiiing, and a guy, an arbitrary stranger yelled at him, “ hey put your mask on so the rest of us can ski for the season!”
      Ok he was outdoors, exiting. So then we meet in cosy restaurant where as soon as we sit we remove masks, as everybody here, all behind the invisible barrier of the pseudo-reallity which is that outdoors in the cold, while you ski its safe, but if you take your skis off you are toxic. You are toxic when you enter a restaurant, but you are safe upon being seated.

    • Thank you for that. I deleted the first link to same video.

      Hope everyone is happy and safe. We still have a great deal to talk about here at ISC. It turns out there is voluminous documentation of what is desired.

      What I figured out in CtD is the foundation still but there is now so much being laid there.

      Happy remainder of 2020 to all. Have finished frying the bacon for my chard while my vegetarian child was running errands.

      • Wishing that we all thrive, flourish, and enjoy TREMENDOUS and ‘equitable’ well-being in this New Year!

        For a couple of years, I have been researching (among other things) the behaviors, traits, aptitudes, and attitudes necessary to effective ‘anything’ (I was going to say leadership) in complex international environments. Agree or disagree, these entail a compliment of cognitive skills (cognitive complexity), and aptitudes and behaviors that cluster around that dubious handle, “emotional intelligence”. I would add a high tolerance for novelty, and the ability to fluidly adapt to variables that may not be fully-understood. Call it 3-dimensional chess, with a heart thrown in.

        So, how has the education system of my host culture addressed the development of these, now, survival skills? Standardized test-focused K-12 education; no accountability for learning tertiary education — with few students pursuing advanced degrees…and, oh yes, state-sponsored training in the ‘civic virtues’ (CCP-style).

        This system produces a creature who, for all intents and purposes has a H.S. education, and who stopped maturing emotionally and intellectually at Grade 12. Quite amoral, too, because ‘civic virtue’ translates into affecting ‘right’ behavior and speech (its a lot like PC) in public, whilst doing what you damn please anytime you think no one is watching. I think this person could thrive, flourish and experience well-being in a not too complex role in a TECH firm, and as a SHOPPER for useless stuff. Are they capable of procreation, the jury is out…

        • One other thought for the year, the last one. I struggled in my own research regarding certain LGAT organizations and their coaching ‘club’ iterations — as others have because we were led down a path by the anti-cult crowd, who spin their wheels and waste a lot of time trying to decide whether a given organization meets THEIR framework for what is a c.u.l.t., and then, so what?

          Read a marvelous though not very recently published work on cults by a French author, and entitled in English, “Soul Snatchers”. This researcher just cuts to the chase saying that ALL these organizations, the analysis thereof, falls under the purview of “forensic psychiatry”…meaning he understood the criminal dimension of these activities. THANK YOU!

          And, I think this also speaks to the psychopathy recently described in the James Lindsay piece referenced above and much of what we discuss in the forum. Important to never forget the criminal dimension of what these people are doing.

  4. Final, final rant for the year, last year, on the Covid-19 nonsense. Notice MANY msm sources are asserting that the mortality rate for Covid-19 is 3.0% is that, that or the other location. This was the original forecast but is NOT borne out by the CDC’s own statistics…so what gives with that? Then lies the task of explaining why Singapore, for instance, has only suffered 27 fatalities — so they work backwards to rationalize certain factors and future remedies, mask wearing, contact tracing, the efficacy of which has yet to be demonstrated.

    I think it might be useful to go back to a certain lab in Wuhan, and ask a few more questions about that facility, which was internationally-staffed and funded.

    This thing is beginning to remind me of 3/11, and the Fukushima/TEPCO international media scam’o’rama. The Tepco-operated, Fukushima nuclear facility was a G.E. plant, and G.E. engineers (AMERICANS) provided regular maintenance to the facility. It was stated in the Japanese news early on that there were ’40’ American engineers performing maintenance on that facility at the time of the incident. I saw one of these gentlemen interviewed on NHK! Then this narrative simply disappeared, and we heard stories of the incredible bumbling incompetence of TEPCO personnel, and criminally sloppy procedures, dirty stretchers/no medical aid equipment, etc. I want to hear about the 40 engineers, and I would like to know WHO was attached to that Wuhan facility, as in a list of personnel.

    Additionally, it seems to me that developing a vaccine for a coronavirus is like trying to jump onto a moving train — these things mutate quite rapidly, don’t they? Isn’t this why each flu season requires a gerry-rigging of new vaccines. But, somehow, for this one, we have the magic bullet!

  5. I have said privately to a number of friends who can be bothered to ‘get it’ ( H/T to Werner E. lol ) that communism, communitarianism, or really, totalitarianism of any kind, turns the average Joe or Jane into a petty criminal as they simply try to go about the act of living their lives w/o undue interference.

    SEL education , Habits of mind, Competentcies, etc, take that survival impulse which necessitates breaking idiotic rules to be “normal” and ensures that the survival impulse is completely amoral and devoid of actual empathy despite all the happy talk showing a person how to demonstrate approved compassion in public for any admiring audience.

    The other night we went out to dinner in Glorious Soviet of PA which has had all inside dining closed for 3 weeks. ( To Flatten The Curve ) We did this by dining outside /inside under a massive tented patio space replete with fire pit and heat lamps.

    One side of the “tented” space was open to the elements to prevent certain death from the RO. Of course we had to leave by 9:59 when everyone knows the RO will kill you by 10:01. I exited wearing my new sparkly mesh and blessedly oxygen allowing mask.

    Note; the purveyors of the restaurant and I were both performing. Kowtowing but fully aware of the game being played. When people do that long enough they become calloused and inured to insanity. It becomes practiced and learned dissociation unless you are playing constant attention .

    Should work out well for all.

    • Yes, the ‘virus’ has mysterious properties, which require the cancellation of church services that only permit attendence by a dozen masked and sanitized people — YET, the virus in Japan, at least, is not active in Starbucks shops after about 7:00 PM. As for my own neighborhood, it looses all potency at about 9:00 PM when the bars and restaurants are full to capacity.

      On the criminality, Werner E., etc. — intellectuallizing any of this, de-criminalizes it, in a sense. I think this is part of the language manipulation thing, as in, “Father of the Self-Help Movement”, even if remotely ‘true’, has a much different ring than, “Ex-used car salesman, con artist, and child abuser…” right?

      Loved the “Glorious Soviet” comment.

    • https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2020/how-change-behavior-during-pandemic-personal-habits-public-health is on January 15.

      Co-sponsored by The Behavioral Scientist. Notice all the links in the participants to Angela Duckworth as well as brain research.

      Katherine Milkman, James G. Dinan Professor, University of Pennsylvania

      Katherine Milkman’s research explores how insights from economics and psychology can be harnessed for good, such as vaccine uptake, saving for retirement and building lasting exercise habits. She is the cofounder and codirector of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative and the host of Charles Schwab’s Choiceology podcast, which explores stories of irrational decision-making large and small. Recently, Milkman led a nationwide study on how to boost flu vaccine uptake in the United States.

      Jay Van Bavel, Associate Professor of Psychology, New York University

      Jay Van Bavel’s research examines how collective concerns — group identities, moral values and political beliefs — shape the mind, brain and behavior. He is the Director of the Social Identity & Morality Lab, which takes a social neuroscience approach to understanding the human brain. Recently, he has been investigating the roots of political polarization and has coauthored a study on how the social and behavioral sciences can support our response to the pandemic.

      Evan Nesterak, Editor in Chief, Behavioral Scientist

      Evan Nesterak is the cofounder and editor in chief of the Behavioral Scientist, a nonprofit digital and print magazine dedicated to exploring the world through the science of human behavior. Previously, he worked with Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania on character development research and, while in Philadelphia, helped kickstart the city of Philadelphia’s behavioral science team. He also led the Mindset Assessment Project, an initiative designed to bring rigorous psychological research into the world of sport. There he worked with the US Soccer Federation, among other organizations. Originally from Colorado, he currently lives in Prague, Czech Republic.

      Then we have this, but without the adjective ‘Great’ but still the Rest idea.

      This event is cosponsored by the Behavioral Scientist. It is part of Reset: The Science of Crisis & Recovery, an ongoing series of live events and science journalism exploring how the world is navigating the coronavirus pandemic, its consequences and the way forward.

      Reset is supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Knowable Magazine is a product of Annual Reviews, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. Major funding for Knowable comes from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

    • Ma came to my attention when he and Melinda Gates released this report. https://www.alizila.com/ma-gates-led-un-panel-releases-digital-cooperation-report/

      Note that many of the media companies spreading false information surrounding the US Presidential election or suppressing potentially damaging info, depending on the candidate, have related businesses that would greatly benefit from this idea that broadband and digital technology are a human right to be provided, if needed, at taxpayer expense.

      • Are you aware that MA started a ‘university’? I beieve the focus of this institution was to foster entrepreneurship in the PRC.

        • I was not, but thought you would appreciate this quote from the 2018 book Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World that rather combines our complementary areas of expertise. It’s in the last Chapter of the book (my bolding):

          The other reason they’re rare is the absence of either a discipline of collective intelligence, or a professional well skilled in how to design and run them. But my hope is that the next few years and decades will bring the emergence of a new cadre of specialists in ‘intelligence design,’ adept at pulling together the hardware and software, data and human processes, that make thought on a large scale effective. This profession will sit on the boundaries of computer science and psychology, organizational design and politics, business strategy and leadership. It will need a repertoire of skills and tools. It also will need, like all the best professions, a strong sense of vocation and ethos in order to link up the elements of the world’s intelligence the better to make choices we would in retrospect be proud of.

          Not sure who that ‘we’ is in that last sentence, but it doesn’t include us I’m afraid. Like Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich in their book New World, New Mind when I first came across Arationality and the push for a new way of thinking that bypassed the Axemaker Mind, Geoff Mulgan also wants new categories of thought and new ways of thinking. He uses the word ‘dialectical’ a lot. Fits with socialism, like it or not.

    • This should resonate. From Australia.

      We all long for a return to simpler times, when a “superspreader” was merely a successful prostitute and corona was a (barely drinkable) beer. This is sinister, though. As Kel Richards has recently pointed out, “linguistic engineering” has become a tool of social control and a vehicle for radical social change. (It also started in China. Mao’s China).

      The phrase “climate crisis” is but one example of the genre. Toxic masculinity, white privilege and unconscious bias are others. Ideology embedded in words and phrases and if you say them enough by rote, they get believed. They become part of the narrative. Another strategy straight from the Orwellian playbook. The strategy has been front and centre in the Branch Covidian cult. Control the language, control thought.

      2020 was a year in which several key institutions of our democracies simply gave up doing their jobs. One is the legacy (corporate) media.

      http://asenseofplacemagazine.com/2020-the-year-that-was/

      • And, from the same article:

        “A new disease has emerged in 2020, and I do not here mean Covid. It is “hypochondria by proxy”, that is, taking on needless worry for the health of others. Most governments around the world caught the disease, and passed it on to many of their citizens. It has become a weird obsession. But again, the hypochondria by proxy is selective. We only wish to protect the Covid-exposed. It is part of a strange, modern, still emerging secular obsession with extending this, our only life, as long as we can. And then ending it at a time of our choosing. All very post-Christian. If man can control everything – including the climate – he should be able to control death. It is our right, nay, our duty. God might well be thinking – “not on My watch”.”

        This really sums it up for me — CONTROL on every front of existence.

        • https://www.edweek.org/leadership/teaching-in-the-wake-of-a-traumatic-news-event-like-the-storming-of-the-u-s-capitol/2021/01

          All ready to go, just like C’ville curriculum for K-12 and using that Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s RULER. I watched a webinar this summer when it was held out as the answer to the BLM protests. Notice too the article ends with the historically illiterate statement that “The legacy that our forefathers left us was a system that emphasized cooperation, Adams said [director of strategy at The Urban Assembly in NYC]. “The only way that system of government work is for people to have faith in each other.”

          Got a verb- subject tense problem there in that quote in addition to the mistaken belief that a system of checks and balances and autonomy to the people with spheres government was not allowed to intrude on was about “people to have faith in each other.” That’s just more nonsense to impose Fascism as required communitarianism brought to us by an all-encompassing government supposedly in charge of our ‘well-being’.

          Notice the heading before Adams’ statement, which was again somehow all ready to go as if someone was anticipating what happened because an incident was planned to take attention away from the massive fraud–“Seize Teachable Moments in the wake of difficult events.” What? To teach students that they need to be ruled?

          I am adding this because a 2nd article all ready to go in this Reichstag moment when nothing is actually as it seems except the long-planned trajectory of subjugation to the vision of a politically organized society is called “Insurgency at the US Capitol: A Dreaded, Real-Life Lesson Facing Teachers”. It then begins with the statement that is extraordinarily useful when you want a curriculum attacking and emotionalizing perception itself and how students will interpret future experiences already planned for them.

          Classroom teachers face the difficult task this week of helping their students make sense of what happened at the Capitol.

          Notice that reference to “make sense”. Use what happened to create an interpretive lens for how government and certain political leaders are seen.

          • Again all ready to go yesterday. https://beyondthestoplight.com/2021/01/06/resources-for-teachers-on-the-days-after-the-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/

            This is consistent with an ESS and Pedagogizing Society. A call for Engaging in a Pedagogy of Political Trauma? Certain beliefs are not allowed?

            PUSH BACK AGAINST NEUTRALITY: Remember that it will do more harm to teach “both sides.” This is not about both sides. This is about justice. This is a quotation from Tayari Jones that I like to use as a way to think about the “two sides” debate: “The middle is a point equidistant from two poles. That’s it. There is nothing inherently virtuous about being neither here nor there. Buried in this is a false equivalency of ideas, what you might call the “good people on both sides” phenomenon. When we revisit our shameful past, ask yourself, Where was the middle? Rather than chattel slavery, perhaps we could agree on a nice program of indentured servitude? Instead of subjecting Japanese-American citizens to indefinite detention during WWII, what if we had agreed to give them actual sentences and perhaps provided a receipt for them to reclaim their things when they were released? What is halfway between moral and immoral?” –Tayari Jones, from “There’s nothing virtuous about finding common ground”, Time Magazine, 2018

            This is ESS, which is a prerequisite to this Marxist vision the world is now embarking on in earnest while pretending it is Trump supporters who are the insurrectionists.

        • Yet more resources. https://www.weareteachers.com/resources-for-teaching-about-attack-capitol/

          and this http://kylenebeers.com/blog/2021/01/06/tomorrow-is-not-simply-another-day-at-school/?fbclid=IwAR3p8vHHtLwytMH3znadTOGGmd7wvOR0-CV138JiGbhjzPSa9m9gScw9N6o wanting to make Sedition the word of the day at school.

          If the OED definition of sedition is “the stirring up of discontent, resistance, or rebellion against the government in power” and the very issue in question is the legitimacy of the process used to determine the next government in power, how can that be sedition? Weren’t all the false assertions made surrounding Russia and that Ukraine phone call that turned out to be legitimate the actual seditious acts under the OED meaning?

          Is it now seditious not to regard all politicians, however they came to office, as rulers and we the ruled?

          Using words like Insurrection or Sedition do NOT make them the accurate descriptions of the events in question unless one is looking for a Reichstag moment and wanting to control how we “all make sense of the events yesterday at the Capitol.” That very aspiration for control is itself a fascist aspiration for the State to control. Was the woman shot yesterday primarily because a tragic death made the Charlottesville talking points more compelling?

          • Adding this today which is from the Aspen Institute’s Society and Education Program. It rather solidifies my take that this has all been C’ville 2.

            Aspen Education Statement on Georgia Elections, Events at U.S. Capitol, and Future of Democracy

            This week, we saw the best and worst of America. In these moments, we see implications for public education. The best America was on display in Georgia, where record turnout—inspired by years of community engagement and voter registration that brought hundreds of thousands of new voters into the democratic process—elected the first Black man and first Jewish man to represent Georgia in the United States Senate. That a Republican Secretary of State supervised this historic election, while rebutting baseless claims of fraud, serves to underscore Americans’ dedication to the rule of law, and the power of the people.

            Americans also saw the worst: horrific scenes of our own Capitol, a beacon of democracy, invaded and trashed by a mob of domestic terrorists who were recruited and incited by elected political leaders. The avowedly insurrectionist, almost all-White rioters were treated with undeserved deference. The contrast with the militarized, disdainful treatment of overwhelmingly non-violent Black Lives Matter protesters in summer 2020 plainly illustrates the operation of white privilege in America. Such scenes cause confusion and dissonance in young people who are trying to understand America and their place in it.

            Last summer, in June 2020, we said that “Covid-19 and protests against police brutality are the most important teachable moments of a generation. Students will feel the hypocrisy viscerally if education ignores these issues, and we will miss an opportunity to lay the foundation for truth and reconciliation.” This week is a teachable moment for every adult with responsibility for public education. On the how, we need to redouble efforts to develop healthy social-emotional skills in students: how to self-regulate, have civil disagreements, and accept democratic decisions even when they don’t go our way. As for the what, we need a new commitment to teaching civics and history more deeply, so that young Americans are equipped to critically examine the arguments of others and exercise their rights responsibly. Teaching such critical knowledge and skills goes hand in hand: you learn social-emotional skills by learning about, discussing, and debating important issues that matter to you and your community.

            This week underscores once again that protecting and perfecting democracy is the work of every generation. Public education is the most profound investment in our shared identity as Americans. We have work to do in our schools to prepare young people to take their place as leaders. History is happening, and young people will learn more from what we do in response than what we say. The Aspen Institute Education & Society Program will work with leaders across lines of race, political party, and every other divide we must reconcile to position public education as a bulwark of democracy and an engine of equity.

            I worked through this book today https://www.rethinkx.com/humanity and it is quite clear to me that Wednesday, george floyd, and the pandemic are all excuses to get to the desired new Organizing System grounded in mindsets, new forms of thinking, conceptual frameworks, beliefs, and values. Going to be a bumpy decade with these plans.

            Especially with this too–

            https://www.gettingsmart.com/2020/12/the-united-nations-sustainable-development-goals-could-be-our-standards/

          • I would say “yes” to your last question. She was executed to add ‘resonance’ to the narrative. Jim Stone has suggested that DNC insiders (blood relatives) were involved in the organization of the Capital Hill ‘event’.

            On a completely OTHER note, I was staggered by a thought this AM — literally stopped in my tracks by it. This has to do with the management and control of Japanese multinationals — the big verticals, and certain consumer goods producers. OK, I was approached recently to assist in an attempt to integrate a parent ship back into the global organization. Imagine, for instance, that General Foods (the U.S. HQ, was lead by individuals who had absolutely nothing in common with members of their entire global leadership structure — this would include language, and business culture.) I would imagine the HQ relies on international consultants, lawyers, etc. as the only thing that tethers them to the global firm.

            I am imagining the opposite of what occurred, here in the 90’s and early 2,000’s when U.S. U.K. French and German financial firms installed their operations in Asia. Shadow companies formed, were formed in each of these entities. They were hi-jacked and then disabled. The shoe seems to be on the other foot right now, but with much graver implications. Just a thought, ;-).

            See, I just could not GET why this nation cannot develop internationally-capable business ‘anything’s’…what gives.

          • https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/01/09/the-left-is-enjoying-its-reichstag-fire-moment-n1327058 is a very good summation of why the Reichstag analogy is crystal clear for so many of us. Especially with the same type of consistency in talking points and blatant disregard of actual history in what are clearly erroneous statements.

            As with the pandemic and charges of systemic racism, we have a sought transformation looking for justifying memes and images.

          • Am adding this important tidbit from a post today as it fits with what I have heard on webinars as Big Business forces its customers to comply with its vision or be frozen out of needed services.

            Hitler biographer Peter Longerich notes that “six months after the ‘seizure of power’ with its various upheavals, Hitler had reached a deal with German business, according to which their authority within their enterprises was increased in return for an agreement to submit to overall direction by the state.” The means of production were still privately owned, but they were wholly under the control of the National Socialist state.

            This deal between Hitler and the German business titans was one of the principal reasons why his regime is called “fascist” at all. The word “fascist” comes from the Latin fasces, “bundles,” usually bundles of wooden rods. It might seem at first glance to be an odd name for a political movement, but the idea was that the disparate forces in society were bundled together in a unity of purpose and allegiance. Thus for the ancient Romans the fasces were a symbol of governmental authority, and from that Mussolini took the name of his movement. In ensuring that private businesses could remain private but had to work for the good of the state as a whole and under direction of the National Socialist government, Hitler was bundling together the titans of business, unifying them in service to his agenda.

            So it is today. The social media giants and the Leftist government elites, the swamp that has reasserted its hegemony by installing Old Joe in the White House, are working in lockstep. The government doesn’t own the social media outlets, and it doesn’t have to: whether Big Tech is submitting to overall direction by the state or the state is submitting to overall direction by Big Tech, the outcome is the same: every major force in American society is marching in the same direction, while dissenters are stigmatized, demonized, framed for crimes they didn’t commit, silenced, and isolated.

            https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/fascism-comes-us-robert-spencer/

          • I was just looking through my old posts for the one on Lauren Resnick and HOTS and came across this one from September 2014 http://invisibleserfscollar.com/treasure-of-social-comity-requires-sacrifices-of-individual-sovereignty/ laying out from Edward Wenk’s 1999 book how Government is now to be “considered as a steering system and not simply a power broker” and it needs to cultivate an ‘engaged pilgrim devoted to the here and now of political action”. It hit me that this is precisely what the already created Charlottesville curriculum ready for the 2017 return to school and now the sedition rhetoric and constant refrains of Insurrection and mortal threat to our democracy and the preposterous refrain about the BLM protesters being treated so much worse.

            Good time to reread it. Boy is it prescient. I’ll quote a few paragraphs that in retrospect almost take the breath away given later events in this country.

            “Consensus must be generated” so that governments can steer with a “high degree of harmony” towards a vision of Equity and social and economic justice for all. Many K-12 and college students have been thoroughly embedded in this vision for years. The Common Core is merely a means to make sure it is in place everywhere. Public or private. Suburbs, cities, or rural areas. To align the US with what is going on in other countries towards the same ends.

            We adults are the ones who simply assumed that the education template had continued on much as it had previously been. Once social comity becomes the established goal of the future at all levels of governments, then “social functioning needs a consensus on goals and a mechanism for its generation and fulfillment.” We get that mechanism by K-12 and higher ed signing on, as well as the media, plus “whoever controls technology.” No wonder their related foundations are so involved.

            ICT generates the visual images that serve as a “kaleidoscope” of what the future might be and are not bound by whatever has successfully existed before. Wenk wanted everyone to recognize that “Government is not mainly or the only machinery of governance. In American democracy, everyone should consider themselves part of government rather than holding it at arm’s length and figuratively holding the nose. Only by engagement through enlightened civic literacy, civic discourse and commitment can the diverse needs and desires of all be negotiated.” Hence the C3 Social Studies Framework and CCSSO prescribing desired Citizen Dispositions. As someone deeply steeped in history, this is a prescription for disaster, which is why accurate knowledge of the past is no longer being encouraged or much tolerated.

            No wonder digital learning was the answer to the pandemic even if children are neither particularly at risk nor common vectors of infection.

  6. I am sitting here watching the world flip out over certain social media bans. Shocked at the power grab. Now if they only understood the level of control and power grab of minds through the online schooling, gaming and testing has had. The masters are working those reaction responses like clockwork aren’t they?

    • Absolutely. Remember the Enschede conference described in CtD? This is what the ASCD released last night https://inservice.ascd.org/resources-for-talking-to-students-about-politics-civic-engagement-and-uncertainty/ and notice the call for us all to be moving in a common unified direction.

      ASCD strongly condemns the attack on the U.S. Capitol this week intended to disrupt the Congressional electoral vote confirmation. Like you, we watched in horror as political divisions in this country devolved into unjustifiable violence and chaos. Although we are dismayed and heartbroken by the current inability for this country and its citizens to dialogue and debate in ways that result in a common unified direction, we hold hope and confidence that our elected leaders and citizens alike can move forward together with a renewed purpose toward civility, decency, and common purpose.

      At the heart of any healthy democracy is a well-educated and informed citizenry. Indeed, education is the bedrock for democracy and civic discourse. Among the critically important services educators provide is your work instilling our children with knowledge, inspiration, hope, and compassion every day.

      One of the links involving Equity is to Zaretta Hammond who also writes and talks quite often for the SoLD–Science of Learning and Development Alliance. https://www.soldalliance.org/post/who-gets-to-thrive-the-science-of-learning-and-development-as-a-tool-for-anti-racism is about a forthcoming webinar.

      https://5bde8401-9b54-4c2c-8a0c-569fc1789664.filesusr.com/ugd/eb0b6a_b46614c8959e4d3f9380e4d6951fdb6b.pdf is a 2019 paper from her on their site called “Looking at SoLD through an equity lens: Will the science of learning and development be used to advance critical pedagogy or will it be used to maintain inequity by design?”

      Actually, given everything going on as, like Lysenko, we now must believe what political power seeks to have us believe, people may want to download other papers this weekend. https://www.soldalliance.org/sold-alliance-papers

      I have all these and have read them all and know how it all fits. Very glad now I went ahead and got the ESS phrase up during the holidays.

      • https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/08/the-totalitarian-hell-of-lockdown/ is very good on several of the related power grabs and false narratives around us, but Ms Hill does not understand how Tranzi OBE, virtual reality immersion learning, and the Science of Learning and Development work if she still believes her conclusion.

        The fact that the government’s New and Emerging Virus Threats Advisory Group committee includes a consultant sociologist and an academic psychologist suggests the government is still trying to shape our thoughts. But while at this point there seems no choice but to let them control everything we do, we cannot let them control what we think. As the Soviets knew, the most efficient totalitarian regimes on this earth have never been able to control what you get up to in the privacy of your own head.

        When I was finishing up Big Mind yesterday, one of my musings was that constructivism and the mindfulness initiatives (next post but plotted out already) want to control the private conversations in our head that pass for thought. Yep.

        • The duplicity is amazing. The willingness to declare one side unfit and in need of re-education is appalling. Especially after witnessing what was going on in pdx all summer and nearly every night since early summer. Even that night raging continued. Thankful there are still some of us who can think for themselves.
          It’s just the right time for all kids to head back to class … so many lessons to teach.
          https://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/daily-videos/classroom-resource-insurrection-at-the-u-s-capitol/

          • Facing History and Ourselves, which both of the Obamas were involved with back when he ran for the Senate from Illinois, was up with this Teaching Idea Wednesday night by 9. This was the accompanying statement:

            As we watch today’s events unfold, we are soberly reminded of a phrase we use at Facing History: “the fragility of democracy.” In a shocking rejection of the democratic process, the Capitol building was surrounded and infiltrated by insurrectionists hoping to stop an historically nonpartisan procedure. The counting of electoral votes is critical to one of our most sacred constitutional processes: the peaceful transition of presidential power. And once more, we must face our country’s history of racial injustice as we contrast the images from today with the force used against peaceful racial justice protesters this summer.

            Many of you have reached out asking for guidance about how to discuss today’s disturbing events in class tomorrow. Thank you for all you do to help students understand what is happening, especially as we ourselves are still struggling to make sense of it. We are grateful for your trust as we prepare resources for you to use in these crucial conversations with students.

            Students need opportunities to separate facts from misinformation, to explore and express their emotions, and to ask big questions about the significance of what took place today.

            We know, too, that addressing this crisis is not the work of one lesson plan or one class period. The fragility of American democracy so apparent today is rooted in fractures and systemic injustices that existed long before this election. In the coming weeks, we will share additional resources to help you explore historical echoes, questions of justice and accountability, and the possibility of democratic renewal as we all recommit to the critical work of civic education.

            As a global organization founded in the United States, Facing History and Ourselves stands with our history of honoring the results of free and fair elections. We fully support the inauguration of our duly elected government on January 20. And as we work together to support you and your students in trying to understand what happened today, we hope you join us in finding courage and inspiration in our mission. We must continue to instill using the lessons of history to support our democracy. This has been a long and complicated day; it began with an historic election outcome in Georgia, and it reminds us that, while fragile, our democracy and democratic processes endure. As Federal Judge William H. Hastie said, “Democracy is a process, not a static condition. It is becoming, rather than being. It can easily be lost, but never is fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle.” It is our privilege to continue that struggle with you.

            We are here for you as you navigate this moment with your students. We will stay in touch and share more resources and support over the coming days and weeks.

            Then it is signed by their head of Program and Thought Leadership. We have curricula on misinformation that is itself factually strained if not outright false, brought to us by the same people wanting to tech the Reconstruction and the Holocaust in late January to use it as a lens for seeing today’s events. Notice the constant references to Insurrection in a way that disregards the OED and the insistence that this summer’s BLM protesters were treated so much worse. Where, precisely?

            Then we have this troubling triangle and aspiration from the lesson that are apparently a big part of FHAO.

            The classroom is a place where students should learn with intellectual rigor, emotional engagement, and ethical reflection, and come to understand that their own views and choices matter. We represent those core educational values in Facing History’s “pedagogical triangle.”

            This integration of head, heart, and ethics is always important to learning, and it’s particularly crucial when students are considering contentious and troubling news. Tell students that you want them to use their head, heart, and conscience in today’s discussion. Invite them to open their journals, or a notebook, to reflect on questions related to the three points of the triangle. Tell students that these reflections will be private unless they choose to share them.

            Questions you might use to prompt reflection include:

            Head: What information do we currently know about the insurrection that happened on January 6, 2021? What additional facts or information would you like to have?
            Heart: How do you feel about the insurrection and what is happening in the aftermath? Are there particular moments or images that stand out to you?
            Conscience: What do you believe was at stake in the events on January 6, 2021? What questions about right and wrong, fairness or injustice, did insurrection raise for you? How should individuals or politicians act in order to protect our democratic institutions?

            If you remember the lessons of the Radio project covered in CtD that interested John Dewey, the OED definition of insurrection and the actual facts surrounding Wednesday’s events may cease to matter by next week to the typical student. It is like basing your beliefs of the Tet Offensive on listening to Walter Cronkite’s evening lies and then discovering as an adult we won. We has long since abandoned Vietnam by then based on falsehoods disseminated by the media with just such a goal.

          • This is from the Frameworks Institute’s response to Wednesday, released mid-day Thursday.

            We are deeply troubled by yesterday’s events at the United States Capitol. We affirm our commitment to nonviolent, democratic approaches to advancing social justice, and condemn any attempts to overturn or delegitimize the results of a free and fair election.

            The attack on the Capitol is an extension of events and trends that have been unfolding for years, but the severity of the moment calls for all of us to speak up. What we say now and how we say it can shape what happens next. People who participated in yesterday’s violence put resentment, entitlement, and intimidation on display. In response, we need to communicate and demonstrate our highest values.

            We offer our support to those who are communicating about yesterday’s events—and some considerations in framing these responses.

            Make this a moment about mission. What are the implications of these events for the causes you champion? Why does a peaceful transition of power matter for children and youth, for families, for climate action, for immigration, for racial justice and equity, for justice reform? How does political violence and extremist rhetoric undermine our shared progress as a society? Focus on aspects of the events that connect to your issue and make the connections clear and apparent.

            Make all your words count. Choose terms with care—thinking through their meaning and the effects that they will have. ‘Protestors’ suggests action that is essential to the health of democracy. The breach of the Capitol was not protest; we should not refer to it as such. ‘Trump supporters’ includes too broad a group. Use terms that make it clear that these actions are well outside the boundaries of civic participation: talk about riots, mob violence, extremists, white nationalists.

            Make a clear, well-explained point. These events are complex and there are a dizzying array of problems they illustrate and solutions they demand. But be judicious. Decide on a specific point to make and elaborate on it, rather than attempting to cover all of the facets of yesterday’s violence. One good explanation has more impact than a long list of problems.

            Make this a moment in a movement. What are your immediate objectives and your long-term goals? Will the language you use now serve only in the short term, or can it advance the narratives and ideas your work needs in the long term? A dramatic recounting of the events, for instance, could evoke emotional responses in the short term, but will age quickly. Thoughtful observations about the meaning of the day—such as the causes and consequences of political extremism, or the connections between racism and mob violence in America—advance ideas that always need to be in the public discourse.

            We believe in democracy—and think of you, the mission-driven sector, as an essential part of making it work. As you work to elevate the conversation about what this moment means, let us know how we can help.

            Notice the reason the term ‘protesters’ cannot be used here but it works with BLM ransackers or when Kenosha is burned down.

          • Another statement and links to materials to groups that are anything but unbiased. https://www.pblworks.org/blog/pbl-teachers-and-leaders-responding-attack-us-capitol

            Buck is behind the HQPBL Framework which is, of course, deemed more equitable. It stands for High Quality Project Based Learning. It goes after Head, Heart, and Hands in other words. We have covered Facing History and Teaching Tolerance before here at ISC. It is the Southern Poverty Law Center Initiative.

            anuary 6 was a dangerous day for our democracy, with an election in the balance and white supremacy on display. Here are a few resources for PBL teachers and leaders, especially for this week. We hope it helps as you navigate the days ahead.

            As we’ve said before: how we each act and what we say in defining moments will determine a vision for an anti-racist future. Here at PBLWorks, this moment just deepens our resolve to work in solidarity for racial justice in education and in our country.

            Have you noticed the only supposed remedy for ‘racial justice’ is a politically organized society where even our minds are now systems to be controlled?

            Adding this to the Orwellian redefinition of ‘misinformation’ needed by the ESS we are now living in. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/01/11/the-role-of-misinformation-in-trumps-insurrection/

          • This is a quote from a release Wednesday

            The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened longstanding inequities, highlighted the shortcomings of traditional approaches to academics and social-emotional learning and brought into stark relief schools’ broader social functions – including feeding children, keeping them relatively safe and providing custodial care.

            Concurrently, the public outcry caused by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black individuals has pushed long-brewing tensions to the fore, including the role of schools and education systems in perpetrating and reproducing systems of oppression. The pandemic and the racial justice uprising are increasing the level of uncertainty surrounding both current decisions and efforts to shape the future of learning.

            Leaders at all levels of education – from classrooms to buildings to districts to communities to states to the Federal government – need to grapple with key issues and the tensions that they raise as they strive to meet learners’ needs in virtual, hybrid and place-based settings. These issues include leadership focus, strained systems and contested power. Facing extreme uncertainties and grappling with challenges that have no easy solutions may seem overwhelming. However, if leaders co-create spaces to explore these issues and the tensions that they raise with inclusive groups of stakeholders, they can find focus and can clarify how to influence the future of learning.

            https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/education-balance-tensions-educations-futures/

            I was on a webinar yesterday where the Capitol “Insurrection” was deemed to be a threat to “Our Democracy” meriting a new vision for education that then tracked back to what I recognize we imported from the Soviets in the 80s and they translated from John Dewey in the 20s as I covered in CtD. I looked up one of the troubling speakers https://kathyhirshpasek.com/biography/ who kept mentioning “the kind of people we want to create” with a giddiness to her voice. That U-Pittsburgh BA in Psych would almost certainly put her in Lauren Resnick’s orbit there before Resnick imported the ideas from Luria that became her Curriculum for Thinking now known as HOTS and required by ESSA for annual assessment. None of this seems incidental, especially as I wrote in my margin that she said something to Ted Dintersmith about how students were applying the Taught Ideas in new circumstances and I recognized that as Resnick’s Transfer. Now I learn she was likely a Resnick student and then got a U-Penn PhD in psycholinguistics.

            Again the latter is a term associated with Luria and the Cultural Historical Activity Theory. New rationales for old ideas, huh.

      • At the heart of any healthy democracy is a well-educated and informed citizenry.

        On this topic, I do not believe Kamala Harris can serve as POTUS, in that she is not a “natural born citizen” as defined by the U.S. Constitution. Her parents were both in the U.S. on student visas at the time of her birth. You would think that attorney, Kamala, would know that.

        • Our judiciary apparently is no longer guided by the words of the Constitution, but by its supposed 21st century spirit.

          I have gone back to read New Lies for Old because of all the disinformation we are being fed in a most organized manner. I have to ask myself, if CtD chronicles the import of the ed template from the USSR and education is one of two legs of controlling communication to gain the desired internal and external transformations, why cannot it be worth pondering if we imported disinformation as a strategy as well?

          It certainly fits and would also explain why the allegation of ‘conspiracy theorist’ gets used to shut down scrutiny into documented facts that are inconvenient to the sought narrative. It also goes a quote from an SSRN paper from last week on defamation law and rejecting the current malice standard for public figures. First, it states in the abstract that “the First Amendment has been weaponized, frustrating a basic requirement of a healthy democracy: the development of a set of broadly agreed-upon facts.”

          Sounds like the ESS to me and redefining a totalitarian vision of adherence to the official line as “a healthy democracy’. Then later in the paper https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3761438 there is the related claim that

          A functioning democracy must have a basic consensus on what is real and what is fake and the way to reach such determinations.

          Again, this sounds a great deal like what learning standards are actually creating–common understandings that allow a group of individuals to function as a collective–a system–without mutiny or even contradiction of authority. Isn’t that precisely where these allegations of the pandemic’s risks, systemic racism, and Insurrections all lead?

          Doesn’t this all feel like a disinformation campaign to gain control over ALL human systems–economic, cultural, political, rules of social interaction?

        • https://www.nies.go.jp/i-forum/ is going on today and tomorrow and is tied to what is being pushed by Future Earth Alliance in 2021.

          Our society changes for strengthening the movement toward the realization of a sustainable society with adopting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement.
          This year’s Forum focus on three key issues that NIES has been continuously implemented in Asia – (1) Global Environmental Research Post COVID-19, (2)Environmental Factors are Major Health Concerns in Asian Countries, (3) Sustainable Consumption and Production in Asia. And we will also hold an open symposium in the form of panel discussion regarding the medium- to long-term direction of future environmental research in Asia with the post-COVID-19 world.
          Each participant including presenters from Asian countries and other foreign countries will participate online. Anyone can attend the open symposium after registration.
          We look forward to your participation.

          Next week’s Climate Adaptation Summit 2021 in the Netherlands, that country’s role in the behavioral sciences and unesco’s work, Bill Gates’ involvement in summit and his financing of the Achievement Standards Network globally, Common Core learning tasks as covered in CtD, and David Christian and his Big History work had me revisiting my IPCC Trilogy that turned into a Quartet in April 2014 to look once again at the meaning of the word Adaptation. I think it also ties to Richard Davidson’s work with the Dalai Lama and where the plasticity of Well-Being Framework released by Davidson’s Center for Healthy Minds just before Christmas all gets us to. It is the same vision. I wanted to make sure I could prove that before writing about it. I had also forgotten about Milton Rokeach’s targeting of the unconscious belief system in order to get desired action in the future–altering that internal image is precisely what the tiki torches visual in Charlottesville and the confederate flag with people now shown to tie to antifa and BLM takes us. No wonder the curricula was all ready to go. It gets to the Social Transformation touchstones I covered on April 6, 2014.

          I feel like humming “I can See Clearly Now” except the family cats would wake up and start distracting me.

          Talk about removing all doubt, look at what I bolded about changing how we live on Earth–

          With the adoption of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement in 2015, the world began to shift increasingly toward building a sustainable society. To accelerate efforts towards social transformation and fundamentally changing how we live on Earth, the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), the Institute for Future Initiatives at The University of Tokyo (IFI, UTokyo), and the Regional Resource Centre for Asia and the Pacific at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT RRC.AP) are undertaking a broad range of environmental research activities for a sustainable future in a transdisciplinary and comprehensive manner in conjunction with leading global research institutes and universities.

          The 2019 Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) caused the ongoing global public health and economic crisis. Although some countries have appeared to control the pandemic, many countries continue to experience a rising number of cases and continue to fight against COVID-19. Despite these conditions, the global economy has begun efforts to return to its pre-COVID levels. While COVID-19 continues to present social, economic and health challenges in Asian countries, climate change and related anthropogenic activities also continue to impact vulnerable environments in the region.

          Have I mentioned that sometimes I hate being prescient?

  7. Checking in from crazy land on another topic. I became aware through certain sources that a certain cult formed by an individual with the initials W.E., was targeting recalcitrant individuals with what they described as ‘sound weapons’. One of these sources described the subliminal tune that was piped into her home, as being like this:

    “It sounded like an inversion of a minor 7th chord, for the first 4 beats, resolving to a minor tonic chord, (or maybe a dominant), on the long note. The same chords, over and over again, with an ascending four-note minor scale playing over and over in the baseline, and continuing through the long chord.”

    For weeks, now, I have been just barely hearing a subliminal ‘loop’ being played in my district. This goes on day an night…I hear it all night long. It passes undetected, until you want to throw up. I would say the musical configuration is very similar to what is described above.

    Anyone else noticing any “happy shopping loops” being played in your neighborhoods?

  8. Guess who made an appearance in a book in my graduate HR courses. Who? You ask? Peter Corning. Gah! Because who doesn’t need some systems thinking and synergy in their HR departments? I made my way through with minimal nausea. These ideas have made their way into every inch of every area. I am glad, however, that I am able to decipher what they are really wanting and referring to.

    • I think

      This primer on human-centricity represents the first output of the Empowered Data Societies Project, which is due to be piloted in Helsinki in 2021. Together with a multistakeholder project community that includes business, academics, civil society organizations and government representatives, the project seeks to explore a new human-centric model (from public and private perspectives) for improving data availability to empower communities and societies. Importantly, human-centricity can serve as a useful route towards increased innovation and business-facing opportunities.

      ia relevant to what you are seeing. So Knowledge Works is pushing Human Centered Learning, Brookings is pushing Human-Centered Capatilism and the WEF was Human Centricity around Data. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_On_the_Importance_of_Human_Centricity_2021.pdf

      No patterns present here.

      • None at all. Several Ted talks were on the watch list this week. All centered on stakeholder capitalism. Sounds like what you wrote above. Profit is now a four letter word in some circles . Plus in addition to having a financial profit & loss you must have one for showing commitment to SDG’s and environmental impact. Can there be one for individualism and free speech?

        There’s only so much of the pie available in their eyes.

    • https://workofthefuture.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2021-Research-Brief-Polli-Kassir-Dolphin-Baker-Gabrieli.pdf is also relevant to the change in direction of what you are being subjected to in academia.

      The actual name of the paper is “Cognitive Science as a New People Science for the Future of Work”. Adding this–

      Practitioners of traditional approaches to employment selection have undertaken a variety of efforts to better account for the 21st century’s talent needs. The simple reality is that significant room for improvement remains, highlighting the need for a fundamental rethinking of people science strategies. Fortunately, entirely new areas of science dedicated to studying human brains, behaviors, and thought processes—fields such as cognitive science, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral neuroscience—have emerged since employment selection first became a research discipline. These advancements allow for the evaluation of job candidates in a manner that is individualized, nuanced, equitable, and dynamic. The result can be massive benefits to the efficiency of employers, the well-being of employees, and the cohesion of society.

      Regarding terminology, this brief will often make a distinction between traditional people science and new people science. Though not formal terms, the goal here is to differentiate between methods that rely on data inputs that are heavily correlated with demographic identity and social position and methods that incorporate modern technology for evaluating human potential. Traditional people science therefore encompasses tools such as résumés and CVs, standardized educational tests, IQ (or general mental ability) tests, and personality inventories based on self-report. The new people science refers to the evaluation of behavioral data collected with digital assessments, specifically to measure the underlying cognitive, social, and emotional traits of individuals without self-reports. Best practices for traditional people science are largely captured by the professional standards put forth by Division 14 of the American Psychological Association, also known as the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). Best practices for the new people science, on the other hand, are only beginning to coalesce as insights from behavioral and neuroscience labs are applied at scale in the context of employment selection.

      This Brief Proceeds in Five Sections:

      ● First, we review the limitations of traditional approaches to people science. In particular, we focus on four needs of the modern employer that are not satisfied by the status quo: job fit, soft skills, fairness, and flexibility.

      ● Second, we present the foundations of a new people science by explaining how advancements in fields like cognitive science and neuroscience can be used to understand the individual differences between humans.

      ● Third, we describe four best practices that should govern the application of the new people science theories to real-world employment contexts.

      ● Fourth, we present a case study of how one platform company has used the new people science to create hiring models for five high-growth roles.

      ● Finally, we explain how the type of insights presented in Section IV can be made actionable in the context of retraining employees for the future of work.

  9. Dang! “ The new people science refers to the evaluation of behavioral data collected with digital assessments, specifically to measure the underlying cognitive, social, and emotional traits of individuals without self-reports.”

    “ people science” Eugenics much?!
    Is this k-12 and college data accrued via such things as the Boss App, etc and of course teacher probing snitching reporting into data files, the “perrmanent record” now the blob that rules your life, gets you hired or doxxed. Video games and online learning. Oh dont forget your medical records. Tsk tak she didn’t give all 38 vaxxes to her baby…..
    Fired! Gulag!

    • Ten years ago, I was hearing about a modified form of MRI being adapted for employee assessments. There was a great buzz of excitement registered relevant to this.

      The ‘music’ is still playing.

    • Been a while since I wrote about World Savvy, but most, if not all, of the State Dept of Ed’s belong to it. This is their doozy of a statement released today. I could use a walk on this note.

      As an organization committed to engaged, responsible global citizenship, we and our community have been deeply impacted by this month’s violent attack on the Capitol, and the underlying and systemic issues that created the conditions for these events. And today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we are deeply reflective about the implications. What transpired was appalling, but not surprising.

      White supremacists have plagued this nation since its founding 245 years ago; their power has increased over the past four years with political leaders who share this ideology from state houses and Congress all the way to the White House. Marching through the People’s House to undermine the peaceful transition of power isn’t just an assault on our democracy, it is an assault on our humanity. Our team and our community of educators is committed to the continuous work of deepening our understanding of these issues, actively helping and supporting young people in finding their own agency to build a stronger and more equitable democratic society.

      We must think carefully about how to repair the damage that has been done to our nation and dedicate ourselves to measurable action. How do we ensure that people do not fall prey to conspiracy theories and misinformation? How do we create a society that values and celebrates the diversity within it? How do we center equity when our systems weren’t designed by or for so many of our fellow Americans? How do we encourage democratic process participation with empathy, compassion, and a critical mind? And, how do we collectively support educators, young people, and families to be the local and global leaders and changemakers we all need?

      It is these deep challenges that World Savvy was founded to overcome. We are working to educate and engage youth to learn, work, and thrive as responsible global citizens. Our community of educators integrates empathy, understanding, and inquiry-based competencies into classrooms to ensure the next generation can communicate across differences, think critically about facts and information, demonstrate empathy, and collaborate and problem-solve complex issues with diverse stakeholders. These events have made it clear there is much work to be done and we need to continue to learn, hone, practice, and improve in our efforts to advance our society beyond where it is today.

      We need to strengthen our democracy and build the foundation for a more equitable society where there is no safe place for racism and prejudice. We must press on to reimagine learning for the 21st century in order to equip our children to address complex, real-world challenges, including an American democratic system that has been undermined by white supremacists.

      As we celebrate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, it is he who said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” Even as we further develop our intelligence by deepening, expanding, and adapting programming to answer these pressing questions and meet these challenges as an organization, we are also deeply introspective. We need to focus on our character, doing all we can to examine the ways we have participated in perpetuating systems of injustice, missed opportunities to be bolder and clearer about injustice, or failed to create transparent pathways for our community to hold us accountable. We invite you all to continue on this learning journey as well, and to call us out and in as we work to always uphold our values: to notice and disrupt exclusionary patterns, lean into complexity, believe big things are possible, and see the whole person – to name a few. This introspection and accountability will also help ensure we can achieve our urgent mission: to ensure the next generation of leaders have the skills and dispositions to thrive and lead in our diverse, interconnected global society.

      Look for resources and support in leading dialogue with young people in your community coming from us in the months to come, to aid in this journey. Thank you for being a part of this community.

      Have you noticed the term ‘white supremacists’ has joined the phrases insurrection, sedition, structural racism, etc. as the descriptions that merit total transformation towards a Fascist vision of the public and favored private entities managing us as if we were serfs?

      It reminds me of the enactment of the Service State vision laid out here http://invisibleserfscollar.com/circumscribing-knowledgepart-2-of-imposing-mindsets-to-fit-a-new-political-philosophy/ Even more important now because of the role of Digital Learning as the solution to the Pandemic. Good time to remember the aspiration from the past that

      The computer could become as important to the behavioral sciences as the microscope is to the biological.

  10. Spoke yesterday with an expat who was just transferred in from Thailand. He told me that, that country had not experienced a single fatality to Covid-19 — odd, because while the health-care infrastructure is well-developed, I don’t see Thai culture as embracing draconian anything…masking, social distancing, and the hygiene measures. Sounded simply like Covid-19 was simply a non-event in Thailand.

    • This quote pondering why the new approach to public health should really brush up on it as an excuse for the Human Development Society.

      So there exists a substantial body of evidence which suggests lockdowns are, at the very least, not as effective as their proponents say they are. Why hasn’t the Government told us this? Why is the broadcasting media not telling us this? Why is it that whenever the BBC runs its headline news programmes, the only argument that its audience hears is one that assumes ‘lockdowns’ are effective and needed?

      For whatever reason, the Government and much of the media are uninterested in questioning the new orthodoxy surrounding public health — even though the policy of ‘lockdown’ is completely new and, surely by this very reason alone, is worth being sceptical about.

      It is only when we directly tackle the assumption that ‘lockdowns’ work that we can begin to actually have a reasonable, measured approach to COVID-19. One that can exploit the benefits of non-pharmaceutical interventions, without going too far for no benefit and much cost.

      I am sure it will be argued that it doesn’t matter what all this evidence says; it just stands to reason that locking people up in their homes and closing down businesses will, of course, prevent transmission of the virus. But this is surely nothing more than superstition. And if public health policy is to be based on superstition, then we may as well do away with the scientific method altogether, and the consequences of doing so will surely be profound.

      https://www.bournbrookmag.com/home/covid-debate-wont-improve-until-lockdowns-themselves-are-questioned

      • Spoke recently to a Brit who had lost three family members in the last year, all quite elderly, all with serious health conditions. He reported that his own father, who was essentially consigned to hospice care, was at the end, was tested no less than three times for Covid-19 (ON HIS DEATH BED), and finally came up ‘positive’…so, Covid-19 went on the death certificate among other causes. Same drill with a mother-in-law.

      • YEP, it appears and reappears like a case of herpes. Strangely, I don’t recall many people of color involved with Esalen at any time in its history.

  11. Read the newly announced fed health official from Penna, Dr. Rachel Levine – taught … psychology.

    Sen Rand Paul released his 2020 fed overspending report, it noted the State Dept has been funding students to come here from … Russia, for years. Wasn’t the State Dept’s desired narrative that POTUS colluded with Russia? The student lives with a family and attends community college on US tax payer. Made me think of one of my fav Kevin Costner movies … “No Way Out”.
    God Bless, no need to worry 🙂

    • I just got off a webinar where the january 6 lessons came up and the teachers used Newsela to get the FACTS that all students were to acknowledge were the FACTS and then either discuss or journal about. I looked up the sources https://newsela.com/about/content/content-partners/ and beyond the WaPo, NYT, Al Jazeera, AP, USA Today and others who have been writing disinformation for years, we also have the Zinn Education project as a to be trusted sources as well as the Big History Project, that is the Gates-funded David Christian prject I have covered here at ISC. Also Facing History and Ourselves is to be treated as gospel.

      It’s also where the images used came from.

      • I work in a field, or did, the entire history of which was revised, circa 2006/7. I kept pinching myself wondering was I ‘there’ at such and such a time, and did I see/heare this, or not. It was like a major gaslighting program. You can tell when they are UP TO THIS because everyone repeats the same talking points until you want to scream.

        • Maybe the switch correlates with the 2004 release of this book with this aspiration

          The classification of strengths presented in this book is intended to reclaim the study of character and virtue as legitimate topics of psychological inquiry and informed societal discourse. By providing ways of talking about character strengths and measuring them across the life span, this classification will start to make possible a science of human strengths that goes beyond armchair philosophy and political rhetoric. We believe that good character can be cultivated, but to do so, we need conceptual and empirical tools to craft and evaluate interventions.

          In recent years, strides have been made in understanding, treating, and preventing psychological disorders. Reflecting this progress and critically helping to bring it about are widely accepted classification manuals—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association (1994) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) sponsored by the World Health Organization (1990)—which have generated a family of reliable assessment strategies and have led to demonstrably effective treatments for more than a dozen disorders that only a fewd ecades ago were intractable (Nathan & Gorman, 1998, 2002; Seligman, 1994). Lagging behind but still promising in their early success are ongoing efforts to devise interventions that prevent various disorders from occurring in the first place (e.g., M. T. Greenberg, Domitrovich, & Bumbarger, 1999).

          Consensual classifications and associated approaches to assessment provide a common vocabulary for basic researchers and clinicians, allowing communication within and across these groups of professionals as well as with the general public. Previous generations of psychiatrists and psychologists had no certainty, for example, that patients in London who were diagnosed with schizophrenia had much in common with patients in Topeka receiving the same diagnosis. They had no reason to believe that an effective psychological or pharmaceutical treatment of ostensible depressives in Johannesburg would be useful for supposed depressives in Kyoto.

          With recent incarnations of the DSM and ICD, matters have begun to change, but only for half of the landscape of the human condition. We can now describe and measure much of what is wrong with people, but what about those things that are right? Nothing comparable to the DSM or ICD exists for the good life. When psychiatrists and psychologists talk about mental health, wellness,or well-being, they mean little more than the absence of disease, distress, and disorder. It is as if falling short of diagnostic criteria should be the goal for which we all should strive. Insurance companies and health maintenance organizations (HMOs) reimburse the treatment of disorders but certainly not the promotion of happiness and fulfillment. The National Institute of Mental Health(NIMH) should really be called the National Institute of Mental Illness because it devotes but a fraction of its research budget to mental health.

          This handbook focuses on what is right about people and specifically about the strengths of character that make the good life possible. We follow the ex-ample of the DSM and ICD and their collateral creations by proposing a classification scheme and by devising assessment strategies for each of its entries. The crucial difference is that the domain of concern for us is not psychological illness but psychological health. In short, our goal is “a manual of the sanities”.

          We write from the perspective of positive psychology, which means that we are as focused on strength as on weakness, as interested in building the best things in life as in repairing the worst, and as concerned with fulfilling the lives of normal people as with healing the wounds of the distressed (Seligman, 2002). The past concern of psychology with human problems is of course understandable and will not be abandoned anytime in the foreseeable future. Problems always will exist that demand psychological solutions, but psychologists interested in promoting human potential need to pose different questions from their predecessors who assumed a disease model of human nature. We disavow the disease model as we approach character, and we are adamant that human strengths are not secondary, derivative, illusory, epiphenomenal, parasitic upon the negative, or otherwise suspect. Said in a positive way, we believe that character strengths are the bedrock of the human condition and that strength-congruent activity represents an important route to the psychological good life.

          What distinguishes positive psychology from the humanistic psychologyof the 1960s and 1970s and from the positive thinking movement is its reliance on empirical research to understand people and the lives they lead. Humanists were often skeptical about the scientific method and what it could yield yet were unable to offer an alternative other than the insight that people were good. In contrast, positive psychologists see both strength and weakness as authentic and as amenable to scientific understanding.

          Sounds like Marx’s prerequisite Moral Revolution to get to the little ‘c’ Human Development Society to me, but fits with all those papers I linked to over the weekend pushing the work of another former APA President Urie Bronfenbrenner.

          The book is Character Strengths and Virtues: A Classification and Handbook by Oxford University Press. Seligman co-wrote it with Christopher Peterson.

        • I didn’t watch the Inauguration, but https://www.facinghistory.org/educator-resources/current-events/reflecting-amanda-gormans-hill-we-climb in calling for a country acting as a “union with purpose” is calling on the US to function as a system going forward. No longer a composite of free individuals, but simply components of a human system whose purpose they no longer have any say in. I think ultimately that was the purpose of the electoral fraud. To force King’s Beloved Community or Marx’s Human Devt Society or what has also been called the cooperative commonwealth.

          It also fits with the Handbook above and Seligman’s work all over the world, including those conferences in Dubai I have covered where Csik joined him.

        • I’ve been studying and following American K-12 education, its intellectual fads and ideological fetishes, for some thirty years now, and the ideological homogeneity and incestuousness of modern public education and the perfervid leftist evangelism that descends from the teacher’s colleges is, while astounding, also a grey, dreary, masochistic subject to follow.

          The acronym fetish within American pedagogy has always been something I’ve noticed.

          I’ve its an acronym, it must be true.

    • Except for the aims admitted here. https://www.gettingsmart.com/2021/01/a-new-vision-for-a-new-administration-whole-child-development-learning-and-thriving/

      A New Purpose for Education

      Imagine a world where every child’s life is a succession of opportunities – opportunities where children come to know who they are and discover who they could become. Imagine learning settings of all kinds where those kinds of opportunities are not only possible, they are intentionally built and optimized, regardless of where a child lives or begins school. Imagine too that educators could identify each child’s abilities, interests, and aspirations and align them with the contexts that promote them. Finally, imagine a world that removes the constraints of racism, poverty, disparities, and injustices and provides each child with the specific relationships and supports to thrive.

      COVID-19, the related service economy recession, and ongoing racialized violence have laid bare the inequities of experience and opportunity for many young people in our country. It may be hard to find silver linings through so much suffering. But as recovery and reopening take shape, there will be a chance to design something different and better for children.

      Guiding Principles for Equitable Whole-Child Design

      Here is the opportunity we have today: developmental and learning science tell an optimistic story about what all young people are capable of. Children’s brains and bodies are malleable. The contexts and relationships they are exposed to are the primary driver of who they become, including the expression of their genes. Today, we can use the principles of Whole Child Design to build environments in all of our classrooms, schools and other settings for learning that enable children to cope with stress, build resilience, and develop the 21st century skills and mastery level competencies they need to live lives of fulfillment and choice.

      There is burgeoning scientific knowledge about the biologic systems that govern human life, including the systems of the human brain (Cantor et al., 2019; Cantor & Osher, in preparation; Darling-Hammond et al., 2020; Osher, Cantor, et al., 2020). Today, researchers can study the brain’s structure, wiring, metabolism, and connections to other systems of the body and to the external world. And they are documenting the deep extent to which brain growth and life experiences are interdependent (Immordino-Yang et al 2019). Researchers know much so more about the brain than they did when the 20th century U.S. educational system was designed. Now is the time to use this knowledge to design “a system in which all individuals are able to take advantage of high-quality opportunities for transformative learning and development” (Osher, et al., 2020b, p. 3).

  12. If we could concieve of a “bottom line” to ESS, it would simply be a society, including the entire public school milieu, completely scrubbed, cleansed, sterilized and free of all non-leftist, non-progressive, non-cultural Marxist/postmodern thought, alternative views, heterodox perspectives or even the possibility of the development of core mental sets outside the “woke” progressive intellectual and psychological cubicle the public schools now, overwhelmingly, exist to generate.

    The “we society” that these people want to create (i.e., a collectivist, “communitarian” socialist “daycare center state” as I’ve long termed it, and ideologically homogenous Eloi society, has no and cannot have the slightest tolerance for the individual and his/her “counterrevolutionary” or “reactionary” thinking.

    Even one person thinking and moving outside the hive becomes an existential threat to the fundamental assumptions and beliefs grounding the very existence of the hive.

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