"New Normal" (1) - Quareness Series 152nd "Lecture".
There's a growing suspicion (if not realisation) on the part of increasing numbers of people that a reconfiguration of power has been in process for some time and is now rapidly emerging as part of an economic/medical/political institutionalised complex. What appears to be unfolding, propelled by the covid-19 "trigger", is a radical alteration of legal and power narratives that categorise and control life and death whilst gaining dominion over the whole domain of personal sovereignty.
Within the context of a biological threat, the official measures taken to deal with the current "pandemic" across our world are birthing a changed social/political engineered construct for human society...a "new normal". And this is being enacted via a series of measures granting power authority over both the individual and collective bodies...in effect to exercise control over the administration of all life. The power and willingness of the State to place individuals under surveillance and even incarceration has been quite openly on display under the pandemic "state of emergency", and now increasingly looks to be concerning itself with mapping all of life.
For now this claimed "biopower" is being exercised through a range of strategies backed by specialist medical knowledge and adopted by the State along with a supporting network of institutions and agencies, and even non-State actors. And those citizens opposing the draconian measures are invariably being negatively labelled despite the long accepted understanding of the sovereign individual as one with a moral and natural right to bodily integrity.
Ongoing lockdowns, track-and-trace impositions, constant surveillance, loss of right to protest, etc. look like becoming established in this "new normal". Such unprecedented world wide forms of control and regulation can hardly avoid impacting upon our psychological well-being as we try to cope under more regulation of social life (mask-wearing, social distancing, reporting violations of rules, etc.) and self-policing of the mental landscape ("right thinking", self-censorship, etc.).
This new emerging field of "biopolitics" may envisage the individual and the collective being bound into a strengthening mix of the technological, the political, the legal and the financial. Seems like we might all soon be seduced into / lined up for a new totalitarianism encompassing biopower, biopolitics, biocapital and biosecurity...all combining to create a totalised and singular form of power. The underlying agenda could be the rendering of humanity as "docile bodies" that do not resist intervention in the control of societies. And to frame human life under such a regime of total biopolitical power, State authorities would likely have to take jurisdiction over both what we think and who we are in the physical sense. Total power of course requires total control...in this scenario external control over everyone's body and thought processes e.g. social (isolation, pressure groups, etc.), mental (conditioning, programming, etc.) and biological (health treatment, vaccination, etc.). What we'd have here is a dangerous mix of narratives based upon a monopoly of "scientific knowledge" harnessed for the purposes of totalitarian policy making.
What we're already seeing is a rapid merging of health and health economics with accelerating expansion of the data tracing and tracking applied in surveillance capitalism. And given the vigorous promotion of this approach by Governments, analysis of such digital data and its use for predictive analytics is likely set to profoundly change the way "patients" are managed. Some of our experts are already claiming that humanity has "entered a pandemic era" with the covid-19 being only the first of an accelerating rate of future outbreaks. Here we can see the claimed justification for the future of vaccine roll outs to be secured alongside a continuation of emergency powers.
It's not difficult to discern in all of this mindset, the rise of new biosecurity regimes where liberty is available only to those who succumb to the new rules of jurisdiction and closed off for those without verified biosecure immunity. Travel within and between countries might be permitted/
possible only through a highly regulated architecture of surveillance and tracking. Such ongoing draconian strategies would, however, inevitably serve to silence and stifle life for people...
including rights to free speech and protest. Of course the threat and fear of being "cut off" or punished for non-compliance would place us on course for an inherently unhealthy relationship with power where biosecurity measures become the instruments of a dictatorship operating through a facade of health and safety merging human biological life with the physical-digital structures of State biopower.
Underneath all of this is a profound question...what is an authentic human life? In our modern rapidly growing digital environment with the citizen subject to external authority in ways not heretofore possible, humans can be targeted as objects/units to be controlled both in body and mind...new colonies to be conquered. And this is a very real possibility as the notion that "humans are biohazards, machines are not" gains traction. We may soon all have to ask ourselves if it is possible to live authentically when subjected to external power regimes of authority that deny personal individual sovereignty.
Currently this biopolitics seems to be trying to turn us into more docile creatures so as to facilitate a technocratic future potentially driven by an agenda that's rather unlikely to embrace human compassion and fellowship...and thereby voiding the core qualities of being human in a living organic world. In this sense it's hardly an overstatement that the future of our very humanity is on the table here.
Our biology and fluid dynamics seemingly
Share in the naturally occurring ability
To spontaneously concentrate energy
And self-organise a fractal order.
But our AI may now be setting to rob us of
This ability to access higher consciousness,
Flattening us down and lowering our vibration
And depleting the energy of our own life force.
A newly emerging technological transhumanism
Is rapidly seducing us into that Luciferic trap
Of an ego driven desire to serve the machine
In exchange for participation in its power.
But if we can lose our fear of self-responsibility
We won't really need nor want to be controlled,
We could simply decide to turn off the machine
And it could leave us alone.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
October, 2021.