Daniel Broudy, “Controlling Concepts, Controlling the Future: The Role of the Academy in the Directed Demolition of Civilization”

Abstract

In 2015, during his tenure as Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab described the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a transformation that changes not what we do but who we are. His description of some mysterious inexorable process, which few members of the public appeared to notice at the time, offer profound insights about actors in places of power and influence and how their mental processes work to conceptualize the masses.

Since concepts precede words, language serves as the common denominator for our intellectual transactions, both in the academy and in broader society, and therefore must also be the first site where the modification of meaning is made to alter basic conceptual categories. The reconstruction of society toward the “New Normal” is typified by how we think and speak about the ongoing sacrifice of the center of societal and cultural reproduction: the family unit. As envisaged by the major investors in global governance by technological means, elite institutions of higher learning such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford have lead the global campaign in dismantling key concepts that, for millennia, delineated males from females.

The capture and control of academic discourse point to the successful capture of the Western academy now responsible primarily for remolding young minds to fit a future of total unquestioning servitude. This presentation considers the disintegration of the Western academy in the Covid-19 world as another causal link in the long chain of events organized to disrupt, disintegrate, and deploy anti-scientific thinking about the natural world, about creatures and creation. Enlisted in the effort to critique the reengineering of our perceptions of the human body are theories in Gestalt psychology and cognitive linguistics.

Downloadable Materials

The slides for the presentation can be downloaded below.

Support Our Work

If you would like to support the work of the Study Group on Technology and Power, please consider making a donation at https://opencollective.com/omniwar.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dhughes.substack.com