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A reconfiguration of power has been in process for some time and is now rapidly emerging as part of a medical-political-economic institutionalized complex that I will refer to as 'biopower'.
Now that modern societies across the globe are transitioning from industrial to digital life, power is no longer solely over the 'docile body' but intra-body - the genetic, programmable cellular life - as well as the conscious life of a person.
Disciplinary power was all about training the body, subjecting it to drills and rules.
However, now control over the 'docile body' is expanded to include
control over the 'docile psyche' - to reach into, influence, and
steer the psyches of the population.
In the words of Jose Delgado, a professor of neurophysiology at Yale University and a famed mind control researcher:
In psycho-power, the
human being is the target site, including their conscious and
unconscious thought patterns.
The contents of an individual's mind is another aspect of our existence and, as such, also is to come under State jurisdiction. For all human life born into this world, the State automatically assumes the power to dictate the conscious thought of that new life.
This means not only external control over an individual's body but also techniques to interiorize this control, both,
As the reign of biopower continues to unfold, the situation may be increasingly managed so that each person is limited in how they make health decisions.
I refer to this as a form of psycho-power that, aligned with the biopower agenda, seeks dominion over external and internal realms through the rhetoric (or double-talk) of claiming to represent the power of well-being.
The result will be less 'well-being' and more control of the human being...
The very process of how we determine human well-being is at the core of what is transpiring.
The current biological 'state of emergency' is forcing people, on a global scale, to accept previously unimagined ideas to the point where the human psyche is tested to its limits.
A new narrative is being established and seeded into mass human consciousness.
This new 'consensus reality' imposed on the world attempts to colonize our private senses. It propagates a new shared affinity of conditioned thought. And yet, this is more likely to cause dissonance than cohesion.
The question of freedom, especially freedom of thought, is now bringing forth its own forms of constraint and generating new forms of coercion.
German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han has stated this new form of power, emerging from post-industrial capitalism,
The individual's apparent
freedom is exploited as they are carefully guided - nudged - to make
the right choices through precise control of
the psyche.
As Han notes, people are less liable to revolt when they are depressed:
Current forms of biopower
do not overtly interfere with the human psyche in a systemic
fashion, but it has prepared the groundwork for the newly emerging
biology of control to gain influence over the intra-space of the
human psyche.
What we are witnessing, and Han agrees, is,
Governance imposed not only by traditional nation-state bodies but also through the harnessing of technology to influence the human mind and how people think.
The new consensus reality is already erasing pre-'pandemic' history.
We can sense this already occurring...
The world, pre-2020, now
seems like a bygone age. It is surprising how many people readily
accustomed themselves to the 'new normal' with its biosecurity
regulations.
This is in contradistinction to earlier disciplinary societies where emotions were considered distractions from orderly and mechanical functioning.
The "Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)," as the World Economic Forum labels it, is about a new functionality:
As part of this increased emotional engagement, certain 'technologies of the self' are promoted.
Within such a system,
weak points are targeted and 'worked on' to gain increased
'efficiency and performance'.
It is more likely that under the new system of psycho-power, the 'good self' will be exploited in the increasingly corporate-aligned 'Consciousness Industry'.
Being fed on a carefully formulated diet of 'Positive Thinking' teachings can actually distract a person from deeper self-directed interior examination.
As Han notes, constantly 'working' on oneself, as per the self-improvement industry, can become a new form of work ethic:
Italian philosopher Franco Berardi takes an even stronger position.
Berardi sees a psychopharmacological addiction and disorientation as the new despondency - a form of confused passiveness amidst mental mayhem, within which dwells an impotent desire for revenge.
It is a sign of painful irony that in an age of impotence, as Berardi calls it, human fertility is rapidly declining and looks set to diminish even further.
As the grip of psycho-power continues to imprint new patterns on human thinking, this 'impotent rage' feeds into a rising social architecture of human 'unfreedoms'.
With the lockdowns of 2020 continuing into 2021, many people are finding it very difficult to endure enforced confinement in their homes, cut-off from social engagements and networks.
It has caused great personal unrest and psychological discomfort as people were previously accustomed to what they considered a life of 'freedom' and leisure.
What is now surfacing is
that many people harbor unconscious fears about the risks of
freedom...
Erich Fromm
(1900–1980)
Fromm posited that a struggle for freedom is,
Under the prevailing 'pandemic' of personal fears of social isolation and uncertainty, people have willingly given up freedoms and empowered outside agencies.
Eventually, this leads to people becoming instruments in the hands of powers external to them.
Fromm says that when individuals attempt to become more independent and self-reliant, they also become more isolated from social systems, which creates fear of isolation.
Similarly, the new consensus reality is attempting to strengthen a dependency upon external systems - through the fear of the virus - biosecurity.
This dependency is either
compelled by triggering people's fears (through heightened
narratives of risk) or enforced through regimes of biopower and
psycho-power strategies.
These individual and social conditions make
for the suppression of human life and its tendency for control and
management.
People are more liable to turn to authoritarian systems to provide a 'safe freedom', especially within the heightened environment of biosecurity risks.
In his Fear of Freedom, Fromm proposes that our inherent, often unrecognized, fear of personal freedom and self-independence results in the following escape mechanisms:
Fromm saw that people turned to external dependencies as a way to save themselves from being crushed by their unprocessed fears. He wrote:
This "new kind of authority," to operate under psycho-power, is an insidious form of power that literally gets into peoples' heads and gives them the "illusion of being self-willing individuals."
This is what Fromm called automaton conformity, which eventually leads to the condition of authoritarianism.
The only other
alternative is Destructiveness - a rage to eliminate others or the
world.
Today, power is no longer solely exercised through the façade of political institutions:
Under the new regime of psycho-power, the only form of security is inclusion.
By excluding yourself
from the over-arching systems of social management, you bring
increased risk upon yourself and your loved ones.
Psychological programming by mainstream media generates the required fear of exclusion from state-sponsored health security (biosecurity).
The ingenuity of psycho-power will likely be its production of 'security anxiety' (playing on people's fears) in which the collective public mindset is further conditioned with feelings of insecurity, strengthened by relentless repetition by politicians and the media.
Erich Fromm was prescient in recognizing that a hugely influential, almost secret, power is exercised over the whole of society that conditions our ways of thinking and how we perceive reality.
The peril of the moment is that many people continue to live under the illusion of thinking they are self-willing individuals.
Despite this state of affairs, every individual really does have personal agency and the power of sovereignty.
But we can only perceive the truth of our power if we extricate ourselves from the emerging new consensus reality that incorporates biopower, biosecurity, and increasing narratives of unfreedom...
Footnotes
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