The World Needs a Renaissance, Not a Reset Part II: Will the Prometheans of the West Rise Up?

In the beginning, seeing they saw amiss,
And hearing heard not, but, like phantoms huddled
In dreams, the perplexed story of their days
confounded;

By David B. Gosselin 

Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus

As we explored in the first part of our series, writing a new chapter in one’s life begins by first understanding what has transpired up until that moment. For, what we believe our story to have been in many ways defines how we choose to write the next chapters. Today, this is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the United States, which has become the flashpoint of a broader ideological war in which a re-definition of the past lies at the heart of the battle to shape the future. These developments serve as a great reminder that history is not something in the past—our understanding of history bears directly on our sense of self and the actions we take in the present. In a word: our understanding of history not only informs our sense of where we came from, but where we think we should be going.

Therefore, in order to cut through the many false frames, illusions of choice, and memory holes embedded within the Western narrative matrix, this installment will focus on “zooming out” of our current moment and rewinding to various critical points in humanity’s story. In this way, we shall revisit its most recent chapters in a more nuanced and precise light.

In the briefest terms, humanity has gone from using primitive forms of “fire” for light, warmth, and cooking its food—with otherwise very limited control over its fate and the natural elements—to developing the ability to increasingly change the default conditions of early human life and the unbridled wilderness of nature. However, in recent times this more primitive and early stage in human history has been romanticized, treated as an Eden, a more “sustainable” age where humanity lived in harmony with “Mother Nature.” This was the time before man’s fall into the modern age of dirty technology, industrial pollution, and “over-population.”

As a leading spokesman for the World Economic Forum and its “Great Reset” agenda, HRH Prince Charles and heir to the British throne recently spoke of how the wisdom of Canadian First Nations people might offer some useful insights into how we might best “reset” civilization, and bring it back into balance with nature. Speaking on the BBC 4 in 2020, Charles said:

I’ve been talking to quite a lot of the First Nations leaders in Canada over the last year, and it’s high time we paid more attention to their wisdom, and the wisdom of indigenous communities and First Nations people all around the world.

We can learn so much from them as to how we can re-right the balance and start to rediscover a sense of the sacred, because nature – Mother Nature – is our sustainer, we are part of nature. We are nature.

Today, saving “Mother Nature” takes the form of humanity’s collective decision to either adopt the supranational and legally-binding governance structures of the UN COP26 and World Economic Forum “Great Reset” agendas, or prepare for the imminent biblical floods and fires, which we are told, will be the punishment exacted upon humankind for its hubris, our sins against “Mother Nature,” and the foolish belief that mankind could freely wield the Promethean “fire.”

So goes the story.

Returning to “Mother Earth”

Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her.

Pope Francis’ Opening Prayer – Laudato Si (2015)

Recently, Pope Francis has spearheaded the call for a redefinition of humanity’s relationship to nature. Going back to his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, Francis wrote:

An inadequate presentation of Christian anthropology gave rise to a wrong understanding of the relationship between human beings and the world. Often, what was handed on was a Promethean vision of mastery over the world.

For Francis, as for the World Economic Forum and Europe’s hereditary “blue bloods,” this Promethean vision has become “old and obsolete.” Alas, civilization must now return to a more “sustainable” age.

Fortunately, the generous and beneficent means of Lynn Forester de Rothschild and other City of London bankers has created the Council for Inclusive Capitalism in order to assist in these efforts.

At this point, we should ask: who was Prometheus? From whence arises this very vocal and overt disdain for Promethean fire? To answer this question, let us consider the story of Prometheus as told by one of the greatest classical Greek tragedians, Aeschylus. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the Titan Prometheus describes the state of humanity before he gave it the gift of “fire”:

But listen to the tale
Of human sufferings, and how at first
Senseless as beasts I gave men sense, possessed them
Of mind. I speak not in contempt of man;
I do but tell of good gifts I conferred.
In the beginning, seeing they saw amiss,
And hearing heard not, but, like phantoms huddled
In dreams, the perplexed story of their days
Confounded; knowing neither timber-work
Nor brick-built dwellings basking in the light,
But dug for themselves holes, wherein like ants,
That hardly may contend against a breath,
They dwelt in burrows of their unsunned caves.
Neither of winter’s cold had they fixed sign,
Nor of the spring when she comes decked with flowers,
Nor yet of summer’s heat with melting fruits
Sure token: but utterly without knowledge
Moiled, until I the rising of the stars
Showed them, and when they set, though much obscure.
Moreover, number, the most excellent
Of all inventions, I for them devised,
And gave them writing that retaineth all,
The serviceable mother of the Muse.
I was the first that yoked unmanaged beasts,
To serve as slaves with collar and with pack,
And take upon themselves, to man’s relief,
The heaviest labour of his hands: and
Tamed to the rein and drove in wheeled cars
The horse, of sumptuous pride the ornament.
And those sea-wanderers with the wings of cloth,
The shipman’s waggons, none but I contrived.
These manifold inventions for mankind
I perfected.

Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus

This theme has been echoed throughout history, with many of the greatest poets and philosophers revisiting this old but ever youthful tale. These include Germany’s Goethe, America’s Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and England’s Percy Bysshe Shelley, to name a few.

Notably, even a leading Fabian intellectual, H.G. Wells, echoed a Promethean view as humanity began to see the rise of the twentieth-century modern industrial age:

The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement of stone.

H.G. Wells – “Prelude” to A World Set Free (1914)

However, with a burgeoning middle class and new generations of individuals who felt they could now have a genuine say in their own fate, that of their families, and their nation generally, as a stark British imperialist and leading Fabian intellectual within the upper echelons of the British Empire’s intelligentsia, Wells saw the necessity of “re-tooling” this Promethean vision. So Wells’ “fiction” became the story of how man’s creation of atomic weapons necessitated the creation of a world government and scientific dictatorship whose purpose would be to regulate the flow of scientific knowledge and information, lest humanity destroy itself as a consequence of the foolish belief that it could wield modern Promethean “fire” i.e. atomic power.

Anticipating the coming qualitative transformations that would be engendered by the widespread use of modern technology, Wells was very candid in his non-fiction works about how he viewed the situation and its needed remedies:

It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)

Wells described what would therefore be necessary:

“The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility, not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.”

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)

Interestingly, Wells’ prose sounds as though it were written by Zeus himself. However, this thinking also echoes the words of another collaborator of Wells, Lord Bertrand Russell. Lord Russell, a descendent of one of England’s oldest hereditary “blue blood” families, was especially interested in the importance of “mass psychology” as a means of reshaping and reframing humanity’s sense of identity, and consequently, its behaviour:

“The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”

Bertrand Russell – The Impact of Science on Society (1951)

Russell warned:

“Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

Bertrand Russell – The Impact of Science on Society (1951)

In his earlier work, Russell was even more candid about the stakes and goals of a “scientific dictatorship,” and the means necessary to sustain it:

“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviorism and biochemistry will be brought into play… all the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “cooperative” i.e.: to do exactly what every body else is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished will be scientifically trained out of them.”

Bertrand Russell – The Scientific Outlook (1931)

While these statements by leading twentieth-century “liberal” intellectuals may seem shocking to some, the reality is these were commonly held views among the British liberal intelligentsia, its Fabian intellectuals, and top echelons of the British financial aristocracy. Indeed, it continues to be so with only minor re-branding efforts using the latest “behavioral insights” in social psychology and behavioural science, just as prescribed by Russell. These include re-framing eugenics as “human engineering” and “transhumanism,” or the re-framing of a world scientific dictatorship and governance structure for the sake controlling nuclear weapons to one of protecting civilization under the guise of “sustainable development” and “environmental protection.” While the narrative may change, the goals and intentions have not. In fact, one could argue that the main difference between earlier attempts at the totalitarian control and dictatorship needed to enforce global population control and eugenics was that twentieth-century Fascist varieties (at the time supported by the top echelons of the British and American aristocracy, including the British Crown itself) were deemed much too messy and inefficient for there to be any kind of long-term viability.

Enter the aggressive and sweeping interest in advanced forms of mass psychology and behavior modification described by Russell. Their latest embodiment is embodied by advanced forms of behavioural nudging, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), and hypnosis. As we will see, despite the re-branding efforts, the British Crown and hereditary nobles of Europe continue to be at the helm of the efforts to once again bring the Promethean fire under lock-and-key, this time under the guise of “protecting the planet” and creating a more “sustainable world.”

In reality, these are the outgrowths of precisely the kind of “behavioural science” and “mass psychology” which early twentieth century liberal imperialists and Fabians of the City of London believed would be necessary to achieve the ultimate goals of empire and global population control. But to do so effectively involved new and precise means of coloring and reshaping the stories and imaginations of generations with a new “humanistic” and “democratic” ethos, lest somebody suspect something were awry. However, these are not and never were new ideas; they are very old ideas that have simply been re-branded and “reframed” for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Of course, modern self-identifying “Humanists” and intellectuals may protest against the use of the above-cited passages by one or another of the mentioned liberal thinkers. They might suggest that our description of these intellectuals constitute a mischaracterization. In reality, the passages embody the modern liberal imperialist world outlook. For, these same thoughts can be found echoed by many of the British literary intelligentsia’s own leading figures, from George Bernhard Shaw to D.H. Lawrence. In Lawrence’s words:

“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.”

Letter to Blanche Jennings (9 October 1908) – D.H. Lawrence

Fast-forward to World Economic Forum (WEF) high priest Yuval Hariri’s not-so-subtle preaching about the rise of a new “global useless class.” Hariri gives no word on how exactly the self-styled “elites” of Davos plan to deal with this new “global useless class,” other than vague suggestions of “bio-digital convergence” and the “genetic engineering” of more efficient super humans by the wizards at Google and Facebook.

As in the past, The Fabian Society continues to be a leading think-tank for the liberal world imperialist outlook, quietly tucked away within the upper echelons of the British political and financial establishment, along with the City of London’s academic brain trusts in “elite” universities like Cambridge, Oxford, York and their American offshoots. Most recently, these very circles played a catalytic role in the promotion of precisely the kind of cutting edge behavioral science techniques articulated by Lord Russell.

Making use of a wide panoply of carefully curated linguistic models born out of the “behavioural sciences” and social psychology, the modern Olympians and their architects of a new Tower of Babel have been busy crafting a new “Great Narrative” as a means of engineering this subtle shift towards a more Gaia-centric post-industrial, pre-Renaissance utopia.

At this point, we should ask: from whence comes this hostility towards Prometheus and the infatuation with “Mother Nature” i.e. Gaia? Does Prince Charles, Klaus Schwab, or any of the WEF billionaires and old European nobility plan to adopt the new bug-rich sustainable lifestyle they so ardently advocate for?

To fully appreciate the subtle nature of these modern imperial machinations unleashed by the City of London and Wall Street slime mold, its “Five Eyes” intelligence octopus, and the WEF Borg Cube, consider a curious exchange between another famed novelist and H.G. Wells disciple, Aldous Huxley, and Huxley’s famous collaborator, Dr. Timothy Leary (of MK-Ultra and CIA “mind-control” infamy).

Saving Gaia: Scientific Paganism

Occurring in the 1960s at a pivotal moment in the West’s shift towards a new post-industrial utopia—today heralded as a “Great Reset,” we find Huxley and Leary musing about the “coming revolution.” Not only did Huxley explore the possibilities of such a Brave New World in his now famous dystopian novel, but also in his later works, including his final novel, The Island.

In his autobiographical account, Flashback, Dr. Leary recounted some of the exchanges he had with Aldous and the problems they identified as obstacles to any kind of “new age” enlightenment. Huxley first told Leary:

These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.

Leary reflected on the obstacles they encountered as they sought to develop and flesh out their vision of a new enlightened society:

We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.

A Judeo-Christian view of man and the universe, centered on the sacredness of the individual, has and always was understood to be incompatible with the kind of neo-pagan Malthusian or Gaia-centric order—now with a technocratic caveat— which the old imperial houses of Europe yearned to regain since the genie of Promethean fire was let out of the proverbial bottle during the Golden Renaissance, and then later, with the American Revolution. The Gaia-centric pagan view emphasizes the sacredness and “equality” of all life forms, with the sacredness of an abstracted “Mother Nature” held above and in opposition to Promethean man, despite humanity itself being the only creature endowed with a unique spark of creative reason not found in any other life form. This to the materialist, determinist, and eugenicist is only a matter of “chemicals” and “complexity.” The latter Promethean view treated mankind as the culmination of an ongoing self-developing creative process, with life taking on a self-conscious and self-directing role, which inherently strove towards what Plato called “the Good.” Through humanity’s conscious self-perfecting as imago viva dei and capax dei, humanity was understood to uniquely possess an ability to consciously bring itself into ever greater conformity with the “Logos.” This recognition of man’s conscious and willful ability to discover the lawful ordering of the universe and its natural law necessarily posed the ultimate threat to the reigning system of oligarchical control and its feudal order defined by a hereditary system of masters and slaves. For, it recognized the existence of an intrinsic divine spark within each individual, one that allow even the common peasant—with the right education—to exceed and outperform his hereditary “blue-blooded” masters.

Thus, the purpose of society and government was understood as the duty to see to it that every individual was afforded their God-given right to develop that sacred spark of reason which dwelt within each sovereign individual made in the living image of God i.e. imago viva dei, and that this sacred spark should be allowed to develop to its fullest potential in each person.

In a word: under the Western Judeo-Christian ethic, each individual was placed closer to his Creator, leveling the playing field with a hereditary oligarchy which had up until that time largely ruled Europe not as a continent composed of sovereign nation states, but as a “Europe of regions,” of what might today be understood as a collection of “autonomous communities,” and the many petty fiefdoms and properties belonging to the various local hereditary oligarchies. But a fundamental shift occurred with the advent of the Renaissance. This shift was perhaps most finely expressed by one of the towering minds of the fifteenth-century Golden Renaissance, the philosopher, mathematician, and diplomat, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa:

“All legislation is based on natural law, and any law which contradicts it cannot be valid. Hence, since natural law is naturally based on reason, all law is rooted by nature in the reason of man. All legitimate authority arises from elective concordance and free submission. There is in the people a divine seed by virtue of their common equal birth and the equal natural rights of all men so that all authority which comes from God, as does man himself, is recognized as divine when it arises from the common consent of the subjects. It is the common opinion of all experts on the subject that the roman people can take power to make laws away from the emperor because he derives his power from the people. When they order something contrary to a divine commandment, it is evident that the commandment does not share in the divine rulership, and no one should obey it. No one is obliged to observe an unjust law, and no living person is exempt from a just one.”

(On Catholic Concordance – Nicholas of Cusa, 1434)

As a microcosm, the human individual was uniquely gifted with the ability to reflect and understand the ordering of the macrocosm in an increasingly less imperfect manner, and to increasingly master new forms of “fire.” Though the absolute Truth would always remain unattainable in absolute terms, for just that reason humanity’s relationship to Truth was necessarily unbounded and understood as one of constant development and change, such that humanity could always improve its understanding of the universe in ever less imperfect ways. This also meant that progress was not defined by the movement away from some fixed perfect center or the establishment of a point of perfect equilibrium, but rather that the natural state of humankind was a creative change and an evolution moving ever closer towards “the Good.” Humanity’s ability to make fundamental leaps in scientific knowledge and artistic composition therefore demonstrated that human creative thought and the natural laws of the universe were necessarily congruent, making man uniquely imago viva dei i.e. in the image of his Creator.

Despite the countless struggles and bloodshed, Western oligarchical systems have consistently run up against this Promethean current of Western Judeo-Christian culture, which asserted the sacredness of each individual and man’s inalienable rights as “self-evident,” rather than granted by any sovereign or arbitrary temporal authority. These ideas always seemed to make the realization of any perfect utopian future or eternal empire impossible.

And this is where our story takes a turn.

Alas, the reigning Western oligarchy and its intellectual “brain trust” lodged deep within the bowels of the City of London did what empires have always done going back to ancient Rome, Greece, and Babylon: create and spread new pagan death cults and gnostic ideologies which by their very nature would bound the thoughts and belief structures of “the masses” within acceptable axiomatic frameworks.

Notably, Aldous Huxley’s brother was none other than the world-famous eugenicist Sir Julian Huxley. Julian, who also coined the word “transhumanism,” which now serves as a guiding philosophy for the WEF, would go on to found the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 1963, alongside Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (House of Orange-Nassau) and Prince Philip (House of Glucksberg). The funding for the WWF would be created using the “1001 Club: A Nature Trust,” organized by Philip and Bernhard personally. Notably, Prince Bernhard was a lifelong racist (an actual racist), and a card-carrying Nazi who would only give up the latter for political reasons. Meanwhile, Prince Philip would regularly voice the typical oligarchical sentiments of needing to “cull” the herd and muse about returning as “a deadly virus” in order to contribute something to the problem of “over-population.”

In the words of Prince Charles’ late father, the Duke of Mountbatten, HRH Prince Philip:

“You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than you are capable of feeding. In other words, conservation may involve culling in order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any particular habitat. I realize this is a very touchy subject, but the fact remains that mankind is part of the living world. Every new acre brought into cultivation means another acre denied to wild species.”

Not surprisingly, Julian Huxley worked with H.G. Wells to create a new world religion with their The Science of Life. Julian would also go on to run the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the World Wild Life Fund’s predecessor.

Underlying this tradition of “conservation” was the assumption that there exists a universal equilibrium in nature, and that humanity must submit to this predetermined “balance.” This is today framed as a question of Earth’s “carrying capacity,” determined by computer models run by a special class of “experts” who run programs with pre-determined assumptions built into them, supported by a scientific “consensus,” of course.

Despite the global climate and natural landscape having only consistently changed over its history, albeit remaining largely invisible on the simple micro-scale of individual mortal life, or even several generations of mortal life; despite Heraklitus having uttered his famous aphorism “nothing is constant but constant change” thousands of years earlier, the current dominant narrative of ecological science and conservation rebranded as “environmentalism” specifically defines eco systems as fundamentally closed systems with fixed inputs and outputs i.e. their “natural” states. Thus, by definition anything that fundamentally alters this “natural” state is framed as a deviation and form of violence or unnatural act against nature by humankind.

And so we arrive at our new world religion based on a “Gaia Theory.” As author and historian Mathew Ehret writes in his “COP26 & Pope Francis’ ‘Greening of Christianity’”:

The new Christian ethos unveiled by Pope Francis saw humankind not as a species which could transcend the limits of nature as Prometheus did when he stole fire from the Tyrant god Zeus and gave it to mankind. In Francis’ worldview, mankind is defined from the standpoint of Zeus: a creature to remain ignorant, underpopulated and bound inexorably to the ecosystem within which he evolved.

If the ecosystems of earth imposed limits on all species according to such variables as space, food and resource availability, then according to the secular priests of the new world order, humanity was expected to be no different. Nature was little more than a mother Gaia figure from ancient Babylonian times long past with the 2015 encyclical’s opening prayer:

Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her.

Pope Francis’ Opening Prayer – Laudato Si (2015)

So today, using dubious mathematical modelling and advanced behavioural science and “reframing” techniques, a new form of “scientific paganism” has not only been ushered into mainstream sciences, but also treated as a genuine new “Green” religion. In reality, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled Malthusian dogma framed using carefully curated linguistic models which suggest that any other conclusion is either pure anti-science “conspiracy theorizing” or the blind religious dogma of “science deniers.” Thus, by default, the only options are adopting new sweeping supranational world governance structures under the auspices of “saving the planet” from human-caused global warming, or biblical floods and fires.

Unfortunately, today’s scientific “consensus” marks the culmination of a long tradition of doomsday computer modelling going back to Stanford University’s Limits to Growth studies by Forest and Meadows, and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.

According to such experts, under a scientifically-managed society, the world would be able to calculate in the most precise terms possible what the Earth’s “carrying capacity” is, how many human beings should be allowed to live on any given surface area, and in this way determine acceptable living standards, family sizes, and ultimately the access to the scientific and technological progress and necessary for providing needed infrastructure, skilled labor, and resources (which change) necessary to power future projects.

In the language of “behavioural science,” we can identify that underlying what neuro linguistic programmers and social engineers might call the “surface structure” of official “sustainability” and “carrying capacity” narratives i.e. the out-loud parts, there lies the “deep structure” i.e. the quiet part. But a good deal of “the quiet part” spoken out loud can found by anyone who cares to be bothered. Take for instance a candid passage by the author of The Population Bomb (1968), Professor Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich was one of the leading researchers in the 1960s to herald the coming new Malthusian post-industrial paradigm, writing:

“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

Paul Ehrlich – The Population Bomb (1968)

Professor Ehrlich serves as a patron for Population Matters (formerly the UN Optimum Population Trust), where he serves alongside some of the world’s leading advocates for population control, including James Lovelock, the creator of the “Gaia Theory.”

Sir Alexander King, the director of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote:

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.

(The First Global Revolution – Sir Alexander King 1991)

Ehrlich’s protégé, John Holdren, who served as former president Barrack Obama`s science Czar, is another example of someone comfortable saying the quiet part out loud, writing on p.942 in his 1977 book Ecoscience:

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime- sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.

The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

Unchaining Prometheus

The choice of twenty-first-century narrative for humanity becomes clear when we’ve considered humanity’s broader story—one not captured and poisoned by twentieth-century Malthusian dogmas, ancient Babylonian myths, and Pagan Earth-goddess cults.

The question becomes: knowing humanity’s story, how should the next chapters be written?

Outside the West, other nations have long rejected the anti-Promethean and Malthusian dogmas and instead committed themselves to the survival, growth, and further development of their civilizations with economic transformations, which by any standard, constitute a genuine economic miracle, however imperfect, and with whatever other problems. They have rejected Gaia and have kindled Promethean fires of their own, as the West should and has many times before.

Therefore, the question for Westerner citizens is: are we really going to sacrifice our civilizations on the altar of Gaia, or are we willing to rediscover our own Promethean heritage?

This next chapter remains unwritten.

Bio. David B. Gosselin is a writer, researcher, and poet based in Montreal. He is the founding editor of The Chained Muse and New Lyre. His latest poetry collection is entitled Modern Dreams.