Going through the actual Performance Assessments in the last post reminded me of what a useful mind altering and emotion manipulation tool they will be for someone like Climate and Population Alarmist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich has long wanted http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/learning-to-learn-or-how-to-replace-old-minds-with-sustainable-new-ones/ to use education to “change the way we perceive the world, the way humanity sees the world in order to survive.” But I did not know when I wrote that post that both he and the US Climate Change Aspiring Professional Bureaucracy and Collection of Rent Seekers would publish reports that came out late last week. Just full of plans on how to use education to physically change minds and arouse emotions to support their lucrative “research” agenda.
Now Research Agenda has clearly become a euphemism for telling us what we must or cannot do and to gain unprecedented levels of political, social, and economic control. At least in the US and any other country of free citizens. I will start with Ehrlich since we have been tracking his aspirations for New Human Minds Incapable of Ingenuity and Inventiveness for a while. His essay entitled “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?” is clearly designed to elicit an “I certainly hope so. What must we do right now?” response. It starts with a mention of previous collapses and then cites to Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. Very dramatic. We instinctively visualize those statues on Easter Island with no trees around and wonder will that be us? Except Ehrlich’s 1989 book on the conscious evolution of new human minds has a Jared M. Diamond listed as one of the helpful commenters on his manuscript to be thanked. I am starting to think that civilizational collapse books unless we change as outlined are a booming business. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full.pdf+html
Not to be mean but it is a hyperbolic essay clearly designed to try to create hysteria and the Ehrlichs’ mania for control over us shows through repeatedly. He also envisions some sort of rule by academics which appears to be all the rage at Stanford. I wonder if he and Linda Darling-Hammond do lunch in the sunshine to talk about those SBAC Performance Assessments or how Effective Teaching just happens to coincide with creating New Minds? Anyway, to avoid collapse:
“there is a need for natural scientists to collaborate with social scientists, especially those who study the dynamics of social movements. Such collaborations could develop ways to stimulate a significant increase in popular support for decisive and immediate action on the predicament.”
So we taxpayers get to pick up the bill for all those social and natural scientists whose payday is contingent on finding such potential catastrophes and planning for them. And lobbying us and persuading us we are the misguided ones. No conflicts there. And then hitting us up for more money to fund continuous planning. Now Ehrlich wants “fundamental institutional change” in educational systems and he happens to mention a new project at Stanford–the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere.” MAHB wants to create a new kind of intelligence, foresight intelligence, that sounds ever so much better than Newmindedness or Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking even if it works much the same. FI as I shall call it is the 21st century aspiration to “implement behavioral, institutional and cultural changes necessary for humans to ensure a sustainable and equitable future for all.”
Which sounds to me like the kind of aspiration likely to produce civilization collapse as all sorts of unappreciated reasons that things work at all get punted in the name of wholesale Transformation to “reduce humanity’s ecological footprint and social inequities before it is too late.” Collapse triggered by computer modelling by rent seeking parasites determined to ignore reality in their lust for power and money or just naivete. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261577/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-Met-Office-report-reveals-MoS-got-right-warming–deniers-now.html?ito=feeds-newsxml came out over this weekend directly on point.
I am not picking on the Ehrlichs but this entire operation of gutting it all using the plans of people whose only skin in the game is that they get paid well for such advocacy is ludicrous. The unintended consequences are likely to be horrific and the intended ones seem quite grim as well unless you are in the planning class. That becomes quite apparent when we don’t accept Ehrlich’s description of MAHB as “nascent” like a newborn just opening its eyes. Instead MAHB had a 2011 name change from its previous more apt description of the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. And just in case you are worried that MAHB might have all-encompassing aspirations. They do include the “values, attitudes, and actions of individual and collective actors.” Which will certainly make those performance assessments timely since that is what they target and measure. MAHB also wants to change towards sustainablity to take place “across all domains of human life”–mentioning “institutional arrangements, social structures, norms, and cultural practices.”
Only someone without a knowledge of history or economics could advocate deliberately redesigning and changing all those things and proclaim it is to avoid civilizational collapse. It’s much more likely to bring it on as all the factors that create human progress and prosperity get targeted for gutting to enable widespread submission to such schemes. Ehrlich even calls these changes via education a “soft means” to advance public policy but the landing is likely to be quite hard. Laying out the fellow international players does not help. It just adds to the toxicity of the brew being hatched to use “social science and humanities” to sway minds by metaphorically lobotomizing them.
Which brings me to the http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-chap29-researchagenda.pdf National Climate Assessment draft released by more aspiring Planners and Permanent Rent Seekers last week. The US Global Change Research Program was already on my radar screen for its “You will Believe This No matter What the Actual Facts” Attitudes in previous reports. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/ I wish taxpayer funded agencies in supposedly free countries did not behave in ways that provoke descriptions previously used for the Soviet Union. But the Soviets too were quite consumed in using education to limit the likelihood that citizens had the mental capacity or store of accurate information to challenge the plans of the nomenklatura. So the analogy is unfortunately apt.
Research Goal 6 on page 1041 of that NCA draft lays out the plan for education and workforce development. I know you will be Shocked, Shocked to learn it just happens to mirror what Spady called Life Role Complex Performances and others are describing as Deep Learning (Hewlett), Higher Order Thinking (Webb’s DOK), Second Order Change (MCREL), Global Competence, and 21st Century Skills. You’d almost think there was active coordination going on. Here goes [my snark in brackets]:
“Building human capacity to respond to the emerging challenges described in this Assessment [are you as tired of that word as I am? It should be listed in Terms of Duplicity for Aspiring Statists] requires expansion of skills within the existing public and private sectors [lucrative retraining for academia. Like an annuity] and developing a new workforce that excels at critical and interdisciplinary thinking. [They don’t know much and much of what they believe is false but they are passionately devoted to these beliefs and committed to acting on them.] Useful capacities include facilitation and communications skills [a 2 inch leap], integration of new technologies and data sources into existing programs and practices [vocational with lucrative ICT contracts available for Cronies], management of collaborative processes to allow for imaginative solutions [unimpeded by knowledge to prompt a logical “this won’t work” response], development and use of sustainable technologies to reduce climate risks [more ICT contracts and Solyndras and Fisker exploding batteries], and building frameworks for decision-making in an internationally interdependent world.”
Education, K-12 and higher ed, used to be about empowering each of us as much as possible with the knowledge of what worked, or didn’t, in the past so we could make good decisions as adults about our own lives and what we valued. No more. Now it is apparently about hobbling our ability to be independent so we will surrender “decision-making” to others.
And we won’t mind or even notice.
Now once again. Where is the likelihood of collapse really coming from?
I discovered your blog by following a link included in a comment on an article which was published at PJ Media.
I respect your insight and determination. You have the ability to elevate the common dialog, which is desperately needed.
I am witnessing events and changes that I can only interpret as the blatant thrust of tyranny into American life. No one seems to be aware or concerned.
Does that seem accurate or is it just me?
I would say that is accurate which is why I am so determined to get this story out there. If anything I underplay the extent of what is being pushed from the articles and books I am quoting from. At this point I am literally following the footnotes on what people say they are doing and why if you know where to look.
I think no one is fully thinking through the consequences of literally trying to shut down the rational mind while simultaneously manipulating emotions.
Plus we are not getting anything for all these federal expenditures on education and climate change except individual expectations about the future that cannot be met as adults. Or a diminished economy. Ehrlich mentions in that rspb essay about getting economists to avoid collapse environmentally “by designing steady-state economic systems.” But the facts show the Earth is simply not in the danger being hyped and that’s not how economies work either.
We are pursuing expensive fantasies in the name of power or equity or social justice that in the end will not bring any of those things. Unless equity in poverty is the point. I spent part of this morning following Ehrlich’s cites to the Nordic systems but they are not really viable models. In fact our historic failure to follow their social welfare model that they now call a Human Resource State is making it harder for them to stick with it.
I have gone back to the 20s and read Max Eastman who knew Dewey, Lenin, and Stalin. I read Chamberlin’s book on Collectivism from 1935 when he was a Christian Science Monitor reporter. People who saw these events and tyrants up close. I am always numbed by the actual parallels.
Putting all these pieces together has been a full time job for me over the last several years. I don’t blame others for not getting to the bottom of these stories or recognizing the clear overlaps.
But there is unfortunately no ambiguity on how tyrannical this all is. In fact much of the cited authority behind the Positive School Mandate denies the legitimacy of the historic concept of the individual at all. john a powell’s antipathy in this post http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/distributive-justice-is-not-enough-we-must-break-the-illusion-of-the-unitary-self/ is par for the course.
Thanks for reading. Let me know if there is a particular area. I keep notebooks of all the posts for easy reference.
“I think no one is fully thinking through the consequences of literally trying to shut down the rational mind while simultaneously manipulating emotions”
Robin – My fear is that the consequences are in fact well thought through, intentional, and effective.
My approach, such as it is, would seek to identify these agents of change and their ideological roots. This is beyond mindless adoption of fashionable concepts, it is the intentional dismantling of our culture. By whom? To what end? Who are the financiers?
You are right. At the level of professors at certain ed schools or at certain foundation or the accreditation agencies this is well planned.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/priming-delicate-minds-for-a-desired-disruptive-revolution-what-is-the-real-damage/ with quotes from Bill Ayers, Maxine Greene, Darling-Hammond and also Nel Noddings (also at Stanford) is a good example of that. These people mistakenly tend to believe that economies can be planned and kept on an even keel with zero growth. In fact they can go into a tailspin when we directly attack much of what makes them productive. We have a global population premised on the level of prosperity and economic freedom we currently have. If that contracts, it historically does set off a frenzy where everyone is trying to protect their turf. The irony is that free markets force cooperation and trust and politically connected markets have the opposite effect.
As I said in my earlier posts on Ehrlich, John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar basically directs all these agencies and what gets funded. He also has authority over an international program called the Future Earth Alliance and the Belmont Challenge that I wrote about back in June. Found those chilling documents back in late March following up on the March 2012 Planet under Pressure Conference in London.
So this is not a matter of odd ideas on education. These people control the purse strings and have access to curricula policy and are writing those performance assessment criteria. I left out the part about how Linda Darling-Hammond also heads assessment fpr ATC21S, the worldwide 21st century skills movement that is based in Australia off our direct radar screen. Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank are all partners. And it’s not skills in addition to knowledge. It’s just skills based on technology use. Which means it’s vocational and about the substitute of a tool that weakens the ability to think unlike books that rely on symbol systems.
“MAHB wants to create a new kind of intelligence, foresight intelligence, that sounds ever so much better than Newmindedness or Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking even if it works much the same. FI as I shall call it is the 21st century aspiration to “implement behavioral, institutional and cultural changes necessary for humans to ensure a sustainable and equitable future for all.”
Sounds very much like Otto Scharmer’s Presensing. Its all fundamentally of a piece. The totalitarian temptation, and the hubris that dives it, is strong – very strong – with these folks. Presensing has all the trappings of both religion and ideology, and the historical record of the creation of secular, utopian religous ideologies, or ideologies as religion, the goal of which is mass human “transformation” and the emergence of a new, better, more perfect world, if not sanctified world, should be of great interest to anyone taking a serious, sober look at all this.
My view is still that the public schools are not reformable or salvageable (some may be, but not enough to make a really relevant difference). This does not mean that conservatives should not enter the area of ideas and fight to expose and critique these movements, nor that some improvements are beyond reach. It does mean that conservatives need to finally begin to concentrate on forming and nurturing their own alternative institutions in the intellectual, educational, media, and arts/entertainment realm, and K-12 is the place to begin.
K-12 is, at this point, a wholly owned and operated satrapy of the cultural Left, but as the Left once did, conservative culture and values now form a very real if inchoate counter-culture that, with real commitment and economic support, can become a refuge for those who simply will not bow before the alter of the secular god of man himself.
Loran–I think the similarities to Scharmer’s and Senge’s work come from how much of this stems from various UN agencies wanting to impose a cultural evolution on Western societies. This post was originally going to be about Cyberlearning as well but what came out over weekend caused me to sever the cyberlearning even though it is all related. Imagine that. In a very graphic UN document describing its economic, social, and political plans for the 21st century, Scharmer and Senge’s work is actually cited.
Ehrlich’s MAHB has several partners in the Nordic countries and I have looked at those cites too. It all ties in as methods and rationales on redesigning, planning, and managing the economy with a dominant public sector. Instead of being called the welfare state, the new name is Human Resource States.
Most of the people who are coming up with all these plans and visions have spent their working lives in the public sector or working for non-profits and they have never had a need to learn what creates wealth. Or what the consumer decides means. Or why a Mercantile, dirigiste economy cannot work. Especially in large, diverse economies.
I am putting together what are related ideas that no one was ever to recognize as related. Using documents few were aware anyone would locate.
Most people think of totalitarian as something that happened in the 30s, not as a form of government that regards beliefs, feelings, and thought itself as their domain. That is precisely what the First Amendment and federalism and separate and enumerated powers were all designed to protect against. An all-intrusive government with the power to tax and also coerce.
It seems like a long time ago that I wrote this post. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-the-system-seeks-to-destroy-the-ability-to-think-can-james-madison-save-us/
That was back when I found all the social and emotional learning horrifically intrusive. Tip of the iceberg.