Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technocratic Age | Zbigniew Brzezinski

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The Dystopian Blueprint Pursued by Psychopaths

Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technocratic Age | Zbigniew Brzezinski

Between Two Ages examines the impact of the ongoing technological revolution on the social and political values, institutions and directions of the U.S. and other industrial nations.

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski – Between Two Ages – 1982

Today, the most industrially advanced countries (in the first instance, the United States) 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. – page 5

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 behaviour and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.” – page 12

Global telephone dialing that in the more advanced states will include instant visual contact and a global television satellite system that will enable some states to “invade” private homes in other countries will create unprecedented global intimacy. – page 13

Moreover, the United States has been most active in the promotion of a global communications system by means of satellites, and it is pioneering the development of a worldwide information grid. It is expected that such a grid will come into being by about 1975. For the first time in history the cumulative knowledge of mankind will be made accessible on a global scale—and it will be almost instantaneously available in response to demand. – page 18

In addition, it may be possible—and tempting—to exploit for strategic political purposes the fruits of research on the brain and on human behavior. Gordon J. F. MacDonald, a geophysicist specializing in problems of warfare, has written that accurately timed, artificially excited electronic strokes “could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the earth. … In this way, one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period. . . . No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.” – page 28

Not only have new weapons been developed but some of the basic concepts of geography and strategy have been fundamentally altered; space and weather control have replaced Suez or Gibraltar as key elements of strategy. In addition to improved rocketry, multi missiles, and more powerful and more accurate bombs, future developments may well include automated or manned space warships, deep sea installations, chemical and biological weapons, death rays, and still other forms of warfare—even the weather may be tampered with -> As one specialist noted, “By the year 2018, technology will make available to the leaders of the major nations a variety of techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised. One nation may attack a competitor covertly by bacteriological means, thoroughly weakening the population (though with a minimum of fatalities) before taking over with its own overt armed forces. Alternatively, techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm, thereby weakening a nation's capacity and forcing it to accept the demands of the competitor” (Gordon J. F. MacDonald, Space,” in Toward the Year 2018, p. 34). – page 28

On Anthony C. Sutton: For impressive evidence of Western participation in the early phase of Soviet economic growth, see Antony C. Sutton's Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917-1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1968), which argues that “Soviet economic development for 1917-1930 was essentially dependent on Western technological aid” (p. 283), and that “at least 95 per cent of the industrial structure received this assistance” (p. 348). – page 56