War and Culture

If one climbs high enough, one can see for miles and miles. If one is a global cartel with 480,000 employees in Automation and Control, Power plants and fuel cell technologies, Transportation, Medical services like Bayer Diagnostics, Lighting, and the field of Information and Communication to instruct and divert the masses, one can direct not only activities in space but can shape a profitable future. Whether it is a humane future can be discerned from the text.

Hence a group at Siemens AG has produced a 304-page tome that conditions us to the world they say we will inhabit twelve years hence. They call it, “Horizons 2020” and it is part of the conglomerate’s vision of “Solutions for Sustainable Development” (home page), a “thought-provoking look at the future” covering Home Life, Eating Habits, Relationships, Old Age, Media, Work, Travel and Security. 

“Sustainable Development” means ‘we will regulate, program and manage you.’   

“We develop solutions for the world of tomorrow” they write and “Horizon 2020” is part of the solution. File the report under “information and communication” services as part of their stated commitment to “ethical, ecological, economic and social concerns.” The ethical approach to “growth and profitability” means “focusing on fields where we can capture and strengthen leading positions” from the HQ in Berlin and Munich.

Call it siege warfare by technical innovation, economic leverage and info-conditioning. When a position has been “captured” and a fortress “strengthened” it can be maintained against other barons; the surviving serfs, whose wealth and labor built the castle will cluster in fearful gratitude around its walls and lower courtyards. Surplus elders will provide volunteer or “low-cost” labor…

Before examining extracts from “2020” consider a bit of the conglomerate’s history and current holdings.    

Siemens and Halske was formed in October 1847 based on a telegraph Werner von Siemens developed that used a needle rather than Morse Code to form letters. In 1848, Siemens built a Berlin-Frankfurt telegraph line; in the 1850s they built one in Russia and already intercontinental and trans-national in orientation, in 1867 completed a line from Calcutta to London for the British. In 1881, AC Alternators developed by Siemens provided the first city electric lighting in Godalming, England. After S & H incorporated in the 1890s they began to dominate lighting, a place now internationalized through their ownership of Sylvania which markets for Siemens in North America.

While Siemens, unlike I.G. Farben, General Electric, Ford, GM or Royal Dutch Shell did not assist the rise and dominance of the Nazis they eventually joined the “Aryanization and Nazification” of German industry. They made extensive use of slave labor from concentration and death camps and the crematoria at Buchenwald were their work [1]. Their holdings now include GSM cellular tech, Nixdorf computerized banking systems, underpinning modern social change and application of power. Nokia, Chrysler Electronics, Photo-Lab, CTI Molecular Imaging and Power Tech International are other companies in their stable.  

Their medical division “will be the first health care supplier to provide a full range of diagnostics featuring all key in-vitro and in-vivo technologies” they write. If that recalls Brave New World and the eugenics movement, so does the following clause: “by 2050, it will be necessary to optimize efficiencies all along the healthcare continuum.” This techno-talk leads to an assertion that in 2020 “the jury is still out on the issue of whether people have the right to determine the time of their own death.” They say the jury is still out; via “health care” companies may decide. In closing the section they add “both the ethical and economic aspects of the right to die” are “still being hotly debated” (2.2.2 emphasis added).  In any case, Siemens AG will “capture and strengthen its leading position” in these debates and determinations of optimized efficiencies for lifespan-related issues. 

In Massachusetts this year it became mandatory to have medical insurance. Commercials have begun emphasizing that one must be sure to purchase “enough” insurance. There are “economic aspects of the right to die” as Malthus, Sanger and others have been writing and saying for centuries. Read Sanger’s remarks on “the cruelty of charity” (1922 in the Pivot of Civilization; 1950 speech to IPP); what has changed is the definition of the “unfit” or “disconnected” toward an inclusive morbidity and control.   

“Horizon 2020” takes an approach distinctive of modern info-warfare: it is a preemptive strike, an infomercial conditioning the public to get used to what corporate barons want them to accept and become; such preemptive strikes provide “thought-leaders” in academia and media with tomorrow’s talking points, story-lines and editorial views using “the techniques of persuasion and information and true propaganda that we have learned in war” (Julian Huxley); thus they provide sociologists and psychologists who “coordinate the personality” of the masses with ideas for new syndromes that lawyers can argue into law with the help of promoted lawyers (judges). The politicians, made or unmade by the media will promote and legislate funding of the desired position via new statutes in the classic, outcome-based model. 

So 2020 talks less of options than future facts: they tell us that “the greatest advantage of the future’s young-at-heart old people is that they are geographically mobile (get moving; did you think getting along in years meant you could settle down?). “The aged visit schools for life-long learning and learn in the same way youngsters will do.” They will? They do? Siemens says they will. Will they or others pay the tuition? It must be contingent on “the economic aspects of the right to die” and “whether people have the right to determine the time of their own death.” The lords of the new world re-define mercy, too just as their German forebears did.

When 2020 introduces the topic, “parents” it informs us that “people today practice more different forms of cohabitation than ever”; more even than now, they write in the cheery future present. “The family used to be the nest” but will be replaced by “club families.” It is not blood relationships or customs like marriage or values like loyalty that build or maintain families, — it seems that’s not part of ”sustainable development.” Rather, “planned events” bring “club-families” together after which “each member goes their own way.” Sounds a bit lonely and solipsistic; it is a fact that there are more “patchwork and single parent families” thanks to generations of foundation-driven social policies and social science ideologies that make fathers disposable.

As for children and child care, “child benefit allowances” (dropping as if from the sky), “day nurseries that stay open until late in the evenings” (to serve “patchwork families”) “and the chance to recruit household help or elderly people for an affordable fee” makes Horizon 2020 swim into view. The theme of readily available, low-wage workers unifies the treatise.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World foresaw many of these attitudes and practices. One recalls Lenina’s and Fanny’s dating habits when 2020 states that “people frequently change partners and want to have more children with their latest partner,” perhaps by some of those in-vitro techniques that already facilitate varied lifestyle and partner options. “Frequent changes of partner” will produce more siblings whose “social and generic parentage is not identical” (2.2.3.1). It takes a village…

But it’s a good world for kids: “great expectations are placed on their development;” like Alice Bailey’s psychologists, the writers continue coordinating the future personality of ourselves and our children: “a pronounced performance orientation will afford children happy and successful lives” [sic] but also may reflect “excessive care” by parents. Like many modern text books, 2020 tells parents what they are (“excessive”) before they can be it (guilty of goodness twelve years before the fact) implying that they should be replaced by State “caregivers” or “ankle bracelets that let parents know the exact location of their child at any time.” It’s amazing that any child ever felt loved before such profitable communication and control technologies.

The Siemens group anticipates our angst. They know that children will “have to cope with the variegated assortment of ‘important others’ they encounter” in the new “club-family” environments that the professions and government have been helping us create for decades. Children may surmount this by no longer fixing “their attention on one or two adults” since there will be many “important others.” This “will help offset the parents’ excessive caution” (note the motif of “excessive” parental interest). Also mitigating the involvement of parents are caregivers “as in former centuries who often are paid a very low wage. Recruiting such assistance has become easier since governments agreed to subsidize household help” (via taxes”). Here again, the “voluntary” involvement of any elders that survive will help and be for them “a welcome boost to low pensions.”

The age at which an American can regain their SSI without penalty has been raised to 66.

Any elders left will be eager to work for “in the final phase of life…at-home care is barely affordable” although mandatory health insurance will cost who knows how much, and “all forms of hospitalization and hospices have been severely restricted” (2.2.2.3). Here again elders provide valuable “voluntary” or “low pay” service: “they look after sick people” gladly because “those without work permits earn very little.” But big sister is always watching with love: “technology-assisted home surveillance allows even those who need constant care a measure of independence” (see section 2.2.10, “Health care” in which Siemens will, you know the phrase, “optimize efficiencies all along the healthcare continuum”). Surveillance will be the only “choice” because “hospitalization has been severely restricted” (supra).

So “”home surveillance” equals “independence” or the “measure” of it left in 2020’s perfect vision. Peace is a “process” of attrition and, as Alice Bailey wrote, “death is a cure.”