This experience helped me decide between multiple paths I could have taken in transitioning from high school to university. I sought out a double major in Biology and Psychology, focusing heavily on physiological psychology, animal behavior and genetics. Like a true reductionist, I wanted to understand human behavior by studying the nuts and bolts of the human brain, neurotransmitters, pathways and the genes that underpinned neurodevelopment. Interestingly, my US friend Lesley became a medical psychiatrist.
In my early twenties, I discovered BF Skinner’s book “Beyond Freedom and Dignity”. As I was trying to teach myself to type on my new typewriter (yes, they had them in those days), I decided to type out excerpts from Skinner’s book for practice. I still have them somewhere in my memorabilia after forty five years. Skinner’s behaviourism and his Skinner boxes (used to demonstrate operant conditioning in rats) had featured in Messel’s Science School, so this book furthered my interest in becoming a brain scientist. For my Honours degree, I studied neurons in cell culture and their membrane glycoproteins. My PhD journeyed even deeper into the reductionistic tunnels, studying the epigenetic regulatory proteins which turn genes on and off.
However, something was happening in parallel to subtly subvert all of that: while working in the biology lab, I met a lab technician called John who meditated. My curiosity was aroused to study the brain correlates of this practice, but the wise meditation teacher told me “if you want to study meditation, you will have to DO it”. So I did, it blew my little mind, and one thing led to another and I found myself doing “self transformation” workshops and courses, and then trainings in neo-Reichian body-oriented psychotherapy.
A double life indeed. I began to realize that the reductionistic tunnels from behavior to brain to neurons to neurotransmitters to genes, were leading me further and further from the questions about human behaviour that I started with. I was also starting to feel a bit like a lab rat myself, anticipating the academic bar-pressing aka publishing, applying for grants and endless boring committees; I also could no longer bear killing or otherwise torturing animals to get my answers, or breathing in toxic lab fumes and using radioactive chemical tracers. Down the microscope I intuited a vague warning: Go Back, You Are Going The Wrong Way.
The tension between my two lives finally led me, at the end of my PhD rite of passage, to abort my lab scientist trajectory altogether; I won a Fellowship and flew off to the USA on an adventure into somatics and expressive arts therapy, then ecopsychology, deep ecology and music therapy. I found in these “holistic” disciplines, the artistic and academic freedom to explore my embodied human mind, creatively and even spiritually. While in the US, I visited my childhood friend Lesley, but sadly by that time my “fringe” fields were not compatible with her still pharmaceutically-based model of psychiatry.
I subsequently found, in my collection of left and right-brain resources, plenty to keep me and my students amused and self-actualising during my various forms of teaching over the next twenty years. Eventually, when I found myself “retired” from my academic position, I became a climate activist, as you do, when you realize that there’s a big problem.
At first, I was frightened and obedient. I became a footsoldier for the government Narrative, my biological reductionistic finger pointing to the “Science” if I happened across friends on Facebook who were questioning the wisdom of lockdowns and masks.
And then, in 2021, with the deaths of women my age after the injections, the censorship, the lies about “horse pills” and the coercion to get “the jabs”, I found myself defined by a new DSM-like-diagnosis: “vaccine hesitancy”. I stopped trusting the mainstream media. I went looking for explanations of what on earth was going on…
My world inverted.
I had stepped through the looking glass into an Orwellian dystopia. Some of my climate change friends tried to “rescue” me from “disinformation” or “PTSD”. But I saw that they were simply backing the BigPharma Science Dogma, not the actual data or observations of coal-face doctors whom I found to be congruent and trustworthy.
I wrote to the media, to my trusted politicians in the Greens, to other NGOs that I thought would defend bodily autonomy and reject mandated injections. Silence. I began to find that the only politicians speaking out against medical aggression and injustice were from the “wrong” side of the culture war I had religiously observed. I implored my Greens to transcend the culture war and stand by these politicians to save lives that were being lost to lack of early treatment. Silence. Betrayal.
I began to observe that my friends also became silent. Some were firmly entrenched in the Narrative, some smelled a rat but just didn’t want to know, or couldn’t cope; others seemed able to listen to my alternative viewpoint but were not really that interested, or agnostic; yet others sometimes would “like” my FB posts, but never comment (were they humoring me or were they genuinely afraid of Big Brother-Tech?); thankfully, a few friends were “on the same page”, searching and sense-making, and we would comment and discuss theories about what was going down. I began to make new likeminded FB friends, and gradually found a complex rabbit warren filled with the interviews, discussions, writings, and debates of people around the world who were searching for the big picture behind this new dystopia.
The word “freedom” was prominent among those resisting the Narrative. I followed with joyful spirit the Canadian truckers, the New Zealand and Australian convoys, the US Freedom Convoy; and I was dismayed by the awful way these anti-mandate protestors were vilified and ignored by governments, media, and the compliant citizenry. The rabbit warren, at first medical-centred, branched out into abuse and trauma psychology, alternative media, writers, politicians, and lawyers.
At some point I stumbled across Yuval Noah Harare’s talk for the WEF, and the transhumanist plan to use biometric sensors to hack the human body and take over evolutionary biology.
And I realised I have come full circle. Back to Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Brain Mechanisms and the Control of Behaviour, A Clockwork Orange, in a new, transhumanist technocratic incarnation. The view of the human as nothing more than the nuts and bolts of biochemistry and scientific reductionism. Humans as Nudge-able animals to government-approved behaviours, digitally controlled and surveilled, and even genetically modifiable. But what sort of monsters would perpetrate a global medical coup?
It was then that I performed a little thought experiment…
I was born into upper class privileged elite in which lower classes were thought of as lesser beings, even referred to by my school friends as “cattle”. I found myself in a position of immense power and financial control and saw that the planetary ecosystem was headed for disaster. I attributed that problem to the growth in world population and the genetic disease burden that had been allowed to accumulate in the human gene pool. I had become a philanthropist and already put in place a vast network of global vaccination and birth control to reduce population growth. I was well aware that the financial system of the world had only years before complete collapse. There were also viruses being genetically engineered in bioweapons programs all over the world that could specifically target certain ethnic groups. My network of elites had long been attempting and refining plans involving eugenics to save the world from foreseen chaos and install a global government. New types of vaccine-gene therapies were being developed that could target the elderly, those with co-morbidities, and those with genetic defects, ostensibly for medical therapies, but these were the people who in my eyes were placing a huge burden on the human population. Such gene-based vaccines housed in lipid nanoparticles could also specifically target reproductive organs to reduce fertility in younger people. A global pandemic preparedness plan operating through WHO control of sovereign governments had been put into place in case of such emergencies.
What if…
One of the bioweapons laboratories “accidentally?” leaked a coronavirus containing a bioweapon peptide. My elite network “seized the opportunity” to roll out their plan for a “great reset” of the global healthcare and financial systems. A “diagnostic test”, never before used for such purposes, that could be ramped up to generate millions of false positives, was immediately rolled out globally to generate panic and lockdowns. Any nuisance doctors or scientists who spoke out or developed treatments for this bioweapon-virus would need to be silenced and discredited by the media, which was already easy to get onboard due to global ownership. The gene-based vaccines were rolled out globally amidst psy-op campaigns, well-practiced by governments, through the legacy media to ensure compliance in the name of “the greater good”. Doctors were targeted by their authorities to stay in line with WHO and health authority protocols. Any people who died or were injured by vaccines were quickly mopped up by changing safety monitoring definitions, statistics and gas-lighting the survivors as hypochondriacs or anti-vaxxers. Those who displayed reluctance to be injected were labeled as “vaccine hesitant” (a new diagnosable illness), “selfish” “narcissists”, and if they protested being coerced through mandated job loss, were vilified as “right-wing-anti-vaxxers”. The public was inoculated against those who were figuring out the eugenic plan by using the term “conspiracy theorist”, a historically proven technique to “other” any opposition to totalitarianism. I had some faint glimmers of guilt when the bioweapons “accidentally” killed children, but there is always collateral damage in any war. The ends justify the means…
Powerful forces are now vying for control of this new world of biomedical data; they believe the masses will give up their bodily autonomy in exchange for promises of health, and amazingly, with plenty of psychological terror campaigns and messages of “for the greater good” from nudge units and their media, they have succeeded in double or triple jabbing a majority of us, and are continuing for the fourth, then the flu shot and so on…and of course, the digital ID passports.
Strangely, I’m aware that the new order media have not only made “freedom” a dirty word, associated with “right-wing-anti-vaxxers”, but the authoritarian governments are now also hijacking the word “resilience”, which, rumour goes, will be associated with “good cop” assistance to those made homeless by weird weather (are they “nudging” along climate change, with geo-engineered local weather, as well as people? Given the last two years, it would not surprise me). And what of the resistance? “Come and stay in our resilience camps…” No, they wouldn’t, couldn’t, could they?
How ironic that I named my website “Resilience in Transition”! Little did I know what could unfold…
Time will tell whether this evolves into a benevolent dictatorship-cloaked-as-democracy or a nightmarish surveillance and culling of those inconvenient folks who still believe the “misinformation” that there is such a thing as human “freedom”.
I certainly hope my little thought experiment is a dystopian fiction. But if it’s not, don’t worry, the thought police will soon take it down.
May the Force be with you.