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February 28, 2021: updated commentary: Notes on Between Two Ages by Zbigniew Brzezinski: PDF, EPUB/PDF/HTML

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Comments on Between Two Ages by Zbigniew Brzezinski
By Alan Mercer

(From Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, 1971, Viking Press, New York)

Series Contents
Continued from Part 1

Brzezinski (p. xiv), writing in the late 60’s, writes about the emerging “post-industrial” society, but he uses his own term “technetronic” instead:

“the most industrially advanced countries … are beginning to emerge from the industrial stage of their development.  They are entering an age in which technology and especially electronics – hence my neologism “technetronic” – are increasingly becoming the principal determinants of social change, altering the mores, the social structure, the values, and the global outlook of society.” (p. xiv)

By the way, when we come across terms like “post-industrial”, or  “stage of development”, I think it’s normal to assume that it is some kind of natural evolution for humanity.    But why assume that?   Here is an academic who works in institutions that actively plan policies for the future.    Since there is so much planning, why wouldn’t the idea of “post-industrial” be planned also?

Brzezinski calls the United States a “social pioneer” and “guinea pig for mankind” (p. xv), as though the United States has a type of revolutionary function assigned to it.   Whether or not he has that in mind, I believe this idea is referred to in The Secret Destiny of America, by Manley P. Hall.  Regardless, American technology and culture has changed the world.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf, is quoted at the beginning:

“Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap… There are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.” (p. 1)

And so basically, as everyone knows, we are living in a time of constant change, constant growth in knowledge and technology, where many of us feel the ground slipping underneath our feet.  The church I used to attend was  heavy on prophecy, so I tend to think of Daniel 12:4, which refers to the “time of the end”, where “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”  The “end” refers to the end of an age, before the beginning of a supposedly perfect utopian age.   However, nowadays I don’t look at the passages in Daniel or Revelation as God’s will.  I look at these as an ancient formula for control.   (You can find out more about these ideas I’m referring to from Alan Watt and Bill Cooper).

The technology itself, through radio, television programming and the Internet, and other media, has altered our perception of the world, of ourselves, and our fundamental beliefs.  And technology is used to alter our environment and life itself.  And this seems to be intentionally planned and directed by a managerial class.   Human beings are the bread in the toaster.   We’re the stew in the pot, slowly altered by the heat.  We’re the fruit in the blender.

We are ruled over by those who plan the future.   The borrower is servant to the lender.  Our governments borrow from private lenders. Therefore governments don’t serve us.  We serve them.  Governments funnel our wealth into the science, technology, wars and propaganda that serve the interests of the globalist agenda.

Right off the bat, Brzezinski tells you something fundamental about wars:

“While the formal rules of the game maintain the illusion that it is played only by those players called “states” …  Some states possess overwhelming power; others, the “mini-states,” are overshadowed by multimillion-dollar international corporations, major banks and financial interests, transnational organizations of religious or ideological character, and the emerging international institutions that in some cases “represent” the interests of the minor players (for example, the UN) or in other cases mask the power of the major ones (for example, the Warsaw Pact or SEATO).”   (p. 5)

Brzezinski is very interesting to read most of the time, because despite being at the center of power, it seems to me that he is driven to get otherwise unspoken truths, from the elite’s point of view, across:

“Organized mechanisms, in the form of uniformed, salaried personnel, are established to confine violence to socially tolerable limits.  A certain measure of crime is accepted as unavoidable; for the sake of order, therefore, organized crime is generally preferable to anarchic violence, thus indirectly and informally becoming an extension of order.”  (p. 6)

His focus is on the globalist agenda, which he promotes:

“global politics are similarly characterized by the confusing pattern of involvement, congestion, and interaction, which cumulatively, though gradually, undermines the exclusiveness and the primacy of those hitherto relatively watertight compartments, the nation-states.” (p.8)

The post-industrial society

“is becoming a “technetronic” society:  a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics – particularly in the area of computers and communications.”  (p. 9)

Just like Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley, Brzezinski writes about the capacity for CONTROL through technology:

“…both the growing capacity for the instant calculation of the most complex interactions and the increasing availability of biochemical means of human control augment the potential scope of consciously chosen direction, and thereby also the pressures to direct, to choose, and to change.” (p. 10)

The university

“becomes an intensely involved “think tank,” the source of much sustained political planning and social innovation.” (p. 12)

Audio-visual communications

“prompt more changeable, disparate views of reality…” (p. 12)

Other topics discussed:  Pragmatism, sexual equality, automation.

In the technetronic society,

“the trend seems to be toward aggregating the individual support of millions of unorganized citizens, who are easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, and effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.  Reliance on television – and hence the tendency to replace language with imagery, which is international rather than national, and to include war coverage or scenes of hunger in places as distant as, for example, India – creates a somewhat more cosmopolitan, though highly impressionistic, involvement in global affairs.”  (p. 13)

This is a major part of our indoctrination.   Tragedies and disasters are milked just for this purpose.   Big Daddy U.S. or UN,  or Canada, etc. reaches down out of the clouds to supposedly help some particular country like Haiti we are made to believe is completely helpless.   It’s all lies.   We are supposed to believe we are advanced and superior while this other country is undeveloped because of some fault of theirs rather than suffering because of constant military invasion and imperialism.   The media leave that part out.  It’s easier to believe the lies.

Television globalizes us by making us feel part of “one world”.   It’s more feeling than reality.  Just because we can see and hear,  it doesn’t make it real that we are connected to some event on the other side of the world.  We are better off reading a book, and thinking things through, and taking our time, rather than falling for “we are the world“.   We are limited individually in time and space.  We have images that delude us into going along with huge agendas that we do not direct.  We are urged to supposedly help people far away that we don’t actually help directly, via machine-like institutions that are not accountable to us.  Living in reality means facing up to the fact that we are not involved enough in the things that will make us more independent, where we are, more able to support each other locally in tough times, without government direction.   We are being dragged into a system of total helpless dependency.

Economic power:

“The tendency towards depersonalization of economic power is stimulated in the next stage by the appearance of a highly complex interdependence between governmental institutions (including the military), scientific establishments, and industrial organizations.  As economic power becomes inseparably linked with political power, it becomes more invisible and the sense of individual futility increases.” (p. 13)

Eventually,

“these changes and many others, including some that more directly affect the personality and quality of the human being himself, will make the technetronic society as different from the industrial as the industrial was from the agrarian.”  (p. 14)

Life

“seems to lack cohesion as environment rapidly alters and human beings become increasingly manipulable and malleable.  Everything seems more transitory and temporary: external reality more fluid than solid, the human being more synthetic than authentic.  Even our senses perceive an entirely novel “reality” – one of our own making but nevertheless, in terms of our sensations, quite “real”.” (p. 15)

In the footnote, he presents an idea of holography being used to create a sensation of a living presence as well as actual conversation. (p. 15)  So he seems to be describing the idea of virtual reality before it existed, being used for communication.

Without using the actual word, eugenics is part of the picture.  There is

“already widespread concern about the possibility of biological and chemical tampering with what has until now been considered the immutable essence of man.  Human conduct, some argue, can be predetermined and subjected to deliberate control.  Man is increasingly acquiring the capacity to determine the sex of his children, to affect through drugs the extent of their intelligence, and to modify and control their personalities.   Speaking of a future at most only decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, “I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.”  (p. 15)

He expresses the doubt that technology will give us more choices and freedom, implying that it may do the opposite:

“Thus it is an open question whether technology and science will in fact increase the options open to the individual…” (p. 15)

Continued: Part 3
Series Contents

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