Tianxia is a phrase translated from Chinese aspirations that caught my eye because it fits so well not only with what I see being mandated via K-12 learning standards all over the world, but also with False Narratives and Accurate, but Irrelevant, Narratives that seem to be used to distract parents from the true focus of changes they might rebel against. Personally, I think parents would be really outraged by a politician or principal openly admitting that they seek to control each student’s ‘cognitive system’ so they can control “what they can do or be” in the future. That’s far worse than simply hyping White Privilege or Gender as a Social Construct. Both those examples that now rightfully have many parents in an uproar are simply components of larger, more invasive aims that we need to talk about.
The Chinese idea of Tianxia, like other aspirational terms we have illustrated here at ISC like Upravleniye or Dirigisme, become useful shorthands that allow us to know it when we see it because we now have a concept that illustrates an effect or plan that would otherwise make no sense. Tianxia struck me as akin to an invisible and unconscious Mental Habit of Mind being fostered that guides, and even controls, future decision-making, perception, motivation, and likely behaviors since it is defined as “a common choice made by all peoples in the world, or a universal agreement in the ‘hearts’ of all people.” In fact, after I first outlined this post, I came across this https://www.aspeninstitute.org/publications/commission-on-information-disorder-final-report/ released this week. Those recommendations simply reinforced my sense from reading materials and reports being pushed all over the globe that there was a common effort to control what must be thought, believed, and valued.
That Aspen Commission insisted such common beliefs must be held, mentally and emotionally, “at all levels of American society, paving the way for sincere collective progress.” That emphasis on collectivism fits with the Chinese emphasis, as would Aspen’s insistence that We the People now begin to build “trust across division, which is a precondition for societal cohesion.” Collective Progress and Cohesion in some kind of alliterative motto then rely on Control over each Individual’s Cognitive System. There’s a pattern here! I know there are skeptics reading this that think I am only inferring that aim because of my analysis in my book Credentialed to Destroy that this is how Competency-Based Education grounded in Learning Standards like the Common Core actually work, but like a seasonal Holiday Ronco commercial from my childhood: “Wait! There’s more!”
Back in early October the National Science Foundation in the US, which has done so much to finance the now no longer mysterious ‘constructivism’ in reading, math, and science because it turns out teaching the actual subject matter is passe, released its “Next Generation Earth Systems Science” vision urging a shift in emphasis from the physical sciences primarily to including the social sciences. Things begin to make far more sense when we remember that Pedagogy and Psychology are Social Sciences. When they are then rounded in Neuroscience we suddenly have an excellent tool for the classroom to combine the physical sciences, with social sciences’ normative aims as to what society can become. All it supposedly takes is for the typical student, and then citizen, to have the desired values, attitudes, and beliefs instilled in them via prescribed learning experiences.
The always useful Bibliography to that Initiative’s paper linked a 2013 article from Systems Research and Behavioral Science called “Understanding Systems Science: A Visual and Integrative Approach” that included just such an explicit aim. It also helpfully provided a graphic illustrating “The Function of Systems Science in the Field of Sciences.” Cognitive Systems were one of 5 listed Areas of the Phenomenological Sciences–Physical, Living, Social, and Technological Systems are the others–that will need to be controlled in the 21st Century. This will allow for all 5 systems to then feed into a desired “Systems Design” vision where collective decision-making, problem solving, and design can all be guided from afar to yield the needed Values and Aesthetics. See how the aims of Tianxia fit?
It fits in even better once we become aware of a paper by a Chinese professor from Lanzhou University published in the International Journal of Education, Learning and Development in mid-September called “The Construction of a Learning Field Based on Lewin’s Equation for Behavior”. It calls for thinking of each person as a platform with the targeted human elements listed as the “physical, psychological, and social.” Redefined as competencies in education, those aims would correspond to the Cognitive, Intrapersonal, and Interpersonal that were the topic of a 2014 White House conference and now are tied to mandated Whole Child learning standards. Without outlining that paper fully at this point, it also aims to hack the cognitive system to rearrange its synapses in order to create ‘fitness’ “for the modern, interconnected world.” Now we have a vision of learning that seeks to “redesign and reconstruct [each student’s] inner psychological structure.”
We have comparable aims in the US, but they tend to get obscured as Civic Education initiatives or Personalized, student-centered learning. Such nice euphemisms for aims that function just like Tianxia and the Human Being as a Redesignable Platform to fit new political and normative aims. Rather than summarize any of these papers with a common aim in this post as I wade back into writing, let me call attention to one more influential recent paper with global aspirations. https://ncee.org/quick-read/rethinking-education-systems-for-tomorrow-a-conversation-with-marc-tucker/ is from the group that originated the first set of Learning Standards back in the 90s . Tucker also wants to make sure that students all “develop the social and emotional attributes to function effectively in relation to others” which rather fits with all this emphasis now on working together as a collective, as does the “need to understand and develop empathy for others near and far who may be very different from them.”
Beyond that emphasis on the psychological and social attributes, we get another Cognitive hack of students being trained to use prescribed abstract concepts as they “draw on that deep understanding of multiple disciplines to analyze the enormous challenges society now faces” and draw also on the cognitive “ability to interweave the study of theory and concepts with the constant application of theory to real-world problems great and small.” Those aims are what makes a school, district, or country Top Performing in the 21st Century, even though even a cursory knowledge of history would be a tip-off that applying theories of what might be is a poor model for redesigning what already exists. That, of course, would be what Tucker’s paper decries as “the accumulation of facts and rehearsed procedures” instead of the sought, far more flexible to upending the social status quo: “deep understanding of core concepts and the structure of knowledge.”
Nobody then has the pesky facts to notice an Inapt Metaphor being used to hack the Cognitive System. In the next post we will cover all these papers with a common, global, and internalized aim for students as “adaptive agents” who will practice experiences to “take the [conceptual} frameworks they had learned to understand in one part of the world and use them to gain a new and more creative perspective on another part of the world.” There’s a reason such Higher Order Thinking Skills are considered a prerequisite to envisioning a new society, economy, culture, and even a new ethos for humanity itself.
It all goes back to hacking the Cognitive System and grounding its perceptions and interpretations in emotion and useful transformative images. All these game plans and more plan to take us to a common destination. Shouldn’t we all know the Itinerary before inadvertently climbing aboard? Especially since it is so detailed if we know where to look?
Here we go again here at ISC.
I wish I could share here all the collectivist hive minded behavioral steering emails that I have received from my daughters institution of higher learning in the last 19 months. I have saved them all for a book I will distribute via an underground method at some point in the future . Each new missive is more darkly Orwellian than the last. Since the admin letters to parents are just the tip of the ice berg of the indoctrination students are receiving I despair . And talk about humorless. Lord. Good statist robots all.
You know precisely why I bolded theory, don’t you? https://www.uclg.org/sites/default/files/izmir2021_statement_en.pdf from one of the global meetings of a local government TOGAs all levels remember?) is short and makes the crucial role of reimagining culture crystal clear. https://agenda21culture.net/sites/default/files/izmir2021_statement_en.pdf is another link to that same statement.
Remember when I covered the noosphere in CtD? The 4th Izmir Summit on Culture held in early September says “we are evolving together. Development also means a shared conscience. Not sharing is not an option and may constitute an Information Disorder prompting the need for a Truth Racial Healing and Transformation TRHT) Commission as Aspen calls for in that report. Good to have Prince Harry calling for the US to have a TRHT to deal with its Information Disorder. He needs to go back to juggling.
Apparently there is a global summit in 2022 called Mondiacult so that Culture can be “the culture as the fourth dimension of sustainable development, on an equal basis to the economic, social and environmental pillars.” It supposedly, as in hacking the cognitive system, enable “humanity, as world citizens of our spaceship, mother Earth, to forge new forms of cooperation and solidarity”.
“Our spaceship”? Who needs turkey and stuffing to feel warm and fuzzy with lovely sentiments like that?
And then there is this:
https://www.lucistrust.org/the_electric_bridge/building_the_carbon_temple
Methinks they all meet for sustainability cocktails toasting their solidarity.
Remember when I used Keith Windschuttle’s book The End of History to get a handle on Constructivism for CtD? We discovered Tranzi OBE all over the English-speaking world, but especially Down Under? Now look at this https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-punish-a-scientist-for-defending-science- as Maori ‘ways of knowing’ are elevated as on par with biology, physics, and chemistry. Makes sense to us here at ISC because we know what is being targeted to create “common tools of sensemaking” across the population.
Here’s more– https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/03/ways-of-knowing-new-zealand-pushes-to-have-indigenous-knowledge-mythology-taught-on-parity-with-modern-science-in-science-class/
The CRT hype can get in the way of parents recognizing that it is the concept of the transmission of knowledge as the purpose of education that is being hijacked. Instead, we get an emphasis on manipulating the so-called Intrapersonal or internalized realm used to guide perception and interpretation. That’s the real purpose of CRT and what you have seen with your own kids’ higher ed experiences as you have related. The focus becomes theorizing the current reality in order to create motivation and justification for transforming it.
And the beat goes on…..
Yes indeed. https://www.learningforjustice.org/the-moment/november-18-2021-teach-the-truth-this-thanksgiving
“Teaching Slavery Through Children’s Literature” is one example
Did anyone expect anything good or pure to come out of the Aspen Institute? Why?
Especially when we intersperse this Information Disorder report’s rec’s to their RETOC–Racial Equity Theory of Change–and NCSEAD work–both covered here at ISC. Plus, the supposed ‘common choice made by all peoples’ from Tianxia ties to something that the Soviets called ‘reflexive control’ that they lacked the technology to implement in the 70s. As Marc Tucker covers in that paper, we have the technology now to hack into what governs decision-making. One of the papers we will cover next time asserts that this is what the Chinese social credit system is all about. That it is global in its aspirations and is best seen as a hack of the ‘citizen’s’ cognitive system.
Welcome back by the way.
Connected to the Civil Discourse guide I linked to this morning below is this https://www.facinghistory.org/sites/default/files/publications/Teaching_Current_Events_Educator_Guide.pdf publication also being pushed to cover the Rittenhouse verdict. Notice the push for what resources can be used and to “teach Media Literacy”. If you go to the Aspen report on Information Disorder, you will see it features Jim Steyer, whose Common Sense Media developed the concept of Media Literacy and the K-12 curriculum materials used to ‘teach it’. They too are pushing a hack of the Cognitive System that coordinates well with SHEG–Stanford’s History Education Group as I covered a few years ago. Remember Sam Wineburg?
Remember this post? http://invisibleserfscollar.com/intertwining-architects-advocates-makes-planned-mind-manipulation-both-tight-and-nearly-invisible/
Also, never forget Jim Steyer is a Stanford graduate and faculty member whose brother, billionaire Tom Steyer, was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic primaries for President? All those profits from coal plants in China? No connections there between profiting from doing business in China and donating to the creation of K-12 hacking of Cognitive Systems in Western education. Nothing to see here, move along.
The Chinese idea of Tianxia, like other aspirational terms we have illustrated here at ISC like Upravleniye or Dirigisme, become useful shorthands that allow us to know it when we see it because we now have a concept that illustrates an effect or plan that would otherwise make no sense. Tianxia struck me as akin to an invisible and unconscious Mental Habit of Mind being fostered that guides, and even controls, future decision-making, perception, motivation, and likely behaviors since it is defined as “a common choice made by all peoples in the world, or a universal agreement in the ‘hearts’ of all people.”
Robin, you might want to mine “neo-Confuscianist” constructs to learn more about this. This programming is fully in place in Japan, although the Japanese will adamantly deny it. The talk is always about harmony within the group, but it goes a LOT further than that. If you are not part of the BORG, you can feel your transgressions of it, multiple times a day.
Thanks. Looking at what is being recommended to help schoolchildren process their dismay from believing all the lies fed to them by the media about what happened in Kenosha. As a lawyer, I truly hate the cases like Rittenhouse’s that never should have been prosecuted under the provable facts. I think Andrew Branca has done yeoman’s work, as he did in the Zimmerman case, of reporting from the court room on both the actual testimony and relevant law. It’s the narrative because of the useful effects of Tianxia for transformational change. This is from the SEL program Facing History this weekend. Notice the insistence on a common understanding.
This is the resource being pushed for Monday’s discussion https://www.facinghistory.org/sites/default/files/publications/Fostering_Civil_Discourse_2020_3.pdf which concludes with this.
Notice the focus once again on the attributes that control Decision-Making and the desire to control future behavior. Again, this intentional misreporting and refusal to cover inconvenient, provable facts is part of the effort to hack the Cognitive System that we see being touted as a tool if the social sciences are to be used as a vehicle for Reflexive Social Control. Since the authors say that is what they are doing, there is no speculation involved with reporting those aims. It’s why I spent the summer listening and watching the professional development webinars for educators getting ready for this school year. No need to allege when damning quotes are so readily available.
For some reason this reminds me of what YouTuber Joshua Slocum (Disaffected) has been saying about NPR. He says that most broadcasts are done in a “mommy voice” that tells us how we should process the content if we want to be good children. I tuned into a few segments, and, my god, he is exactly right but I might call it a “Nurse Ratched” voice.
Good old ( not ) Nurse Ratched from ” One flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” . I remember reading the book and seeing the movie. At the time it was amusing ( except for the ending when Jack Nicholson gets smothered after his lobotomy. As kids we were eager followers of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this book is actually a blueprint for the entire, nationwide psychiatric “health” care system. Robert Whittaker and Dr. Peter Breggin were the ones that really opened my eyes to the massive scope of this problem which is really an epidemic. Of course , I’m not sure if this has anything to do with the invisible serf’s collar, but then again…?
I would say this system has a LOT to do with the ISC, is critical to it. Something that has come to my awareness recently relates to WHO is empowered to ‘section’ people to psychiatric facilities. I always thought one needed a medical degree to do this, or that police could do this with authorization. HELL NO! The guy who blew the whistle on the Tony Robbins organization told me that he, a security guy, routinely ‘sectioned’ persons who had flipped out in Robbins’s ‘programs’.
When speaking to my niece, a social worker, she referred to her having ‘sectioned’ people.
I just saw a Swiss epidemiologist who had posted what he meant to be a helpful report on the Covid-19 virus report that persons of undisclosed affiliation appeared at his door the next day and ‘sectioned’ him.
The film we saw as kids gave the impression that these barbaric practices were a thing of the past….I don’t think so.
Talk about controlling the narrative. https://brownstone.org/articles/is-youtube-now-presuming-to-be-in-charge-of-science/
Fits right in with the neural net being instilled by learning standards tied to competency-based education.
Well, what we are looking at is systemic rot…
CPS- understanding the fraud
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eajTCqAJ9E8&list=PLKy_dVDou3PBgWXpaOeDOWfseZU_CrLWe&index=4
Read Bats in the Belfry by Ellen McClay if you can get your hands on a copy. (Its hard ). She outlined many moons ago the progression to where we are now with “mental health” being used as cudgel
YES!!!!! About NPR and “tone”.
Its a SHAME based Mommy Tone. II was listening the other day to a discussion regarding how narcissists “hear” and process spoken words. They have incredibly limited ( if any) self awareness and they operate from a punishing, fearful -avoidant, shame based internal working model at all times and so what they HEAR in tone and process unconsciously determines their behavior more than the words spoken.
And what I believe is being created culturally through many avenues , technology and education, being the primary routes, are pathologically narcissistic human beings who are ripe for all the brainwashing and cognitive controls being heaped upon them.
Like an insistence that we all have “a common purpose” to go along with our common meaning-making? Very lucrative–that Kluge Prize. Makes the MacArthur Genius award seem penurious.
I worked on EAD all summer and still need to finish what I have documented before life got in the way this fall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOqDqYkOePU&t=863s is the link.
Allen was one of Robert george’s star students at princeton. Do you remember Kenneth Boulding’s definition of a ‘system’? It requires having a common purpose. Now this new-fangled vision of history and civics intends to create just that. As I have mentioned before the Hewlett Foundation says it has long funded Allen’s work and sees it as part of its Marxian Law and Political Economy transformation tied to this legal vision. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/feature/building-a-law-and-political-economy-framework from 2020.
Hopefully will get that Social Credit post up this week. It seems like this week is full of webinars.
Im not sure why, but this guy from Belgium, Prof. Matthias Desmet, is gaining some traction.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A8i6zv5zK3I
His focus is on the media creating a form of mass hypnosis.
Leslie ,
I saw this recently and thought you might have something to say about it. ;-).
https://youtu.be/odjuqbLJRMY
Upon reading your 2nd paragraph this scripture came to mind: “Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.” 2 Thessalonians 2:3 & 4.
Real time; right before our eyes. The knowledge of God within people being usurped by the control of education via the knowledge of mere men. God intended for us to be one in Him; not in the collective of one another.
This quote is from the Lewin paper I mentioned in this post. It is quite relevant to think tank pieces like this one just out https://www.city-journal.org/education-hooked-on-bad-pedagogics that are basically beside the point as CtD covered. Dewey was a philosopher with an interest in pedagogy and education because of the new type of person he wanted it to bring about. Lewin wanted the same. Tucker’s vision for digital learning controls the life space or learning field just as described below.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/we-cannot-rest-mary-grabar/ recently on Replacing History with a ‘Narrative’ is properly irate at the shift away from facts, but seemingly oblivious to the role of Conceptual Frameworks in controlling just such a Psycho-Physical Dialogue because it allows for the same Transformative Mindset Dewey sought. One reason for the persistent omission to properly explain Conceptual Frameworks and framing generally (I first noticed it during the APUSH controversy in pieces Rick Hess, Stanley Kurtz, and Jane Robbins were writing) may be that supposedly alternative curricula and schools like Barney Charter or Classical Education are using normative concepts like Good True and Beautiful to get at that same psychological space to supposedly sculpt ‘Virtuous Citizens’ who will also exercise the desired decision-making internalized Habits of Mind and engage in desired future behaviors in that physical world. They too are targeting “the dynamic relationship among person’s needs, the goals and the obstacles to overcome to achieve goals, which serves as the basis for studying human behavior and his [Lewin] field theory emphasizes the interaction between person and environment, meaning human behavior is the result of their cognition of the life space.”
Quite frankly, all over the world, it appears that everyone from public education to all the supposed remedies that School Choice holds out as alternatives for those alarmed by the think tank pieces like that above or much of the CRT stories is still planning to manipulate the students’ “cognition of the life space’. They all are pushing classroom visions that recognize that “the environment directly interacts with the perceptual region of a person” so that the curricula, standards, and prescribed learning experiences can manipulate “what the perceptual system perceives in the environment would trigger such corresponding responses as evoking a desire or eliciting certain needs in the person’s inner region.”
Precisely the same aim as Tianxia and quite invisible unless we discuss what is being aimed at and quit pretending curricula is still about the transmission of factual knowledge with the dispute being what set of facts to transmit and how to best do that. It is also important to note that the Lewin vision in the Life Space paper is also referred to as Lifelong Learning. Lifelong Learning is about getting at that inner psychological space and remolding it as desired by people and the philanthropies that quietly fund so many of the think tanks, websites, and supposedly ‘conservative’ blogs that are all pushing the same remedies and visions with different rationales and sales pitches. They all function the same. I had a similar reaction to the sameness of function to the Independence Institute’s pushing the 490 BC Project as the alternative to the 1619 Project. Neither remedy is about facts. Both want to get at that inner psychological arena.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1hz5Lke0_4
“OMG, its like they are all sharing the same brain”…
Oh. Joy.
https://www.gettingsmart.com/2021/11/15/how-sustainable-is-your-district-use-the-greenprint-from-green-schools-national-network/
And sure enough, having learned to let emotions be dominant and having been trained to use provided concepts, lenses, frames, and narratives, it is effectively like sharing a brain–deliberately infused common meaning-making.
More from the linked Greenprint.
https://greenschoolsnationalnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/GreenPrint%E2%84%A2-Final.pdf
More–
Understand the interdependence of natural, human, and global systems may not be factually true, but it is a useful belief for fostering agents of transformative change if only the students had empathy for the right things and the right cultivated understandings. Right Emotions and Understandings=Tianxia vision for 21st Century Citizenry. Suitable for the Collective.
Engineering behavior through programming neurons…
Alison McDowell
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7jZaEzA885M
Robin, have you researched/written on ESG metrics and Asset Management? I believe this is how various agendas are being driven in the corporate sector.
Yes, although it has been awhile. Have been on programs in last year where Blackrock was pretty upfront in what it requires of companies it invests in. Also get a weekly newsletter every Friday out of WEF. Had something yesterday on its links to the behavioral sciences. Nice wheel on getting at the sources that guide decision-making, including motivation.
There is also this global summit next Monday and Tuesday https://events.unesco.org/event?id=The_Athens_Roundtable_on_Artificial_Intelligence_and_the_Rule_of_Law3259999850&lang=1033
This link is a bit better as it includes a registration link https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-rule-of-law/-/council-of-europe-to-participate-in-the-athens-roundtable-on-artificial-intelligence-and-the-rule-of-law
I attended last year and can tell you the Rule of Law phrase encompasses the ESG agenda. Standards, like learning standards or those involving digital learning platforms, are considered ‘soft law’–binding but mostly out of sight.
Have you seen this? https://dailytelegraph.co.nz/news/pfizer-document-concedes-that-there-is-a-large-increase-in-types-of-adverse-event-reaction-to-its-vaccine/
I have come up with some good metaphors in the past, but this passage is outstanding from that piece.
Yes, seen…and this was the data they were trying to have sealed for 50 years!
“Trust the science.”
Anthony Fauci: “I AM science.”
Here is resource from the now-captured fields of Organization Development/Organization Behavior that you might find useful.
Images of Organization is a bestseller book by Gareth Morgan, professor of organizational behavior and industrial relations at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, which attempts to unveil organization via a number of metaphors. It was first published in 1986.
The book particularly describes the organization as (1) machines, (2) organisms, (3) brains, (4) cultures, (5) political systems, (6) psychic prisons, (7) flux and transformation, and (8) instruments of domination.
THE AUTHOR KNEW WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT WITH (8).
You will like this–
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/12/a-half-truth-is-whole-lie-omicron.html
Essay is linked to by Mark Hauck’s Meaning in History in an essay today on “The Uses of Fear”, but it’s that quote I like for here because it gets at the same realm involved with Constructivism–be it math, science, or Whole Language in reading. We are to accept our assigned Categories of Thought.
I have been watching a Youtube series by a British physician of Indian descent. This guy has followed the distorted logic of pharma, government and social engineers to many humorous conclusions. He posted, yesterday, on a herd of hippos, of which one had tested ‘positive’ and then showed frantic efforts of game wardens to track these creatures down in their obscure bush and VACCINATE them. Do hippos have the same ace receptors as humans, or is Pfizer whipping up a special brew?
And, on that note, Robin, you will recall that we met when I contacted you about a research project that was making no sense at all. I also described a related project, a bio-science startup involving Dr. Michael Cusamano of MIT. The technology in question related to accelerated drug discovery using big data that could only be crunched by the super computer located at Tokyo Institute of Technology, meaning it could be used for the rapid design of vaccines. Cusamano knows Bill Gates very well and wrote a book about him. Money for this project came from a mystery investor.
I think the smoking gun is going to be found in the hands of the Jesuits… to wit the unholy trinity, Fauci, Biden and G8s … is it that they do Biden’s bidding? Or the other way around? Doth the tail waggeth the do?
But while we ponder that, here is some more entertainment from Alison McDowell- ” Credentialed to …” ( hmmmmm…where have we heard that before?)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pgedOVccCmE
Rwanda genocide 5G
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GD-D4tv1tZI
” students being trained to use prescribed abstract concepts as they “draw on that deep understanding of multiple disciplines to analyze the enormous challenges society now faces” ”
This would be hilarious, if they didn’t have the ability to act on such an idea. These are K-12 kids. Deep understanding of multiple disciplines? They are lucky if they have a shallow understanding of one or two. That’s why we’ll put them in charge of telling all the old crusty adults how their society is to be reordered.
They’ll be like the Red Guards, too young to know better.