Our global leaders have resorted to most resolute revolutionary measures to oppress the past and exploit future time

By Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker Blog

The contemplative class during their lifetime of higher education and through consuming high literature often receive ‘conspicuous winks’ from men of letters to the tune that we, as an evolving technological species, have long unraveled the so-called fourth dimension, time, in that we do not only sense it in the moment and deduce it from causality but also, to indisputable extent, reign over it.

What are examples of such ‘conspicuous winks’? First, the obvious ones from the forefront of physics and astronomy which frequently remind us that time really is a dimension that experimentally exists just like space exists, yet is more flexible and conditional. Time not just happens, it is extrapolated from movement. Therefore, it is relative.

Humans busily fill out temporality. That sounds fictitious, and it is: Among classicists there is a consensus that the world as it appears to us is just a theatre, a farce, a spirit or will and imagination. It doesn’t matter where you venture in this world, our greatest thinkers from east and west concluded that appearances are one or many or all of these things: a dream, fake or insane, a conspiracy or just an illusion. So, let us begin our investigation here in that whatever we entertained ourselves with during all these centuries – and I am not even going into gods and fairy tales – was utter make-belief. That make-belief however works – and to our advantage, as we shall explore.

Since human activities were put on record, we have multiplied our brains billions of times; our “stories” however remained relatively bottled. A few kings and charlatans ran their narrative and, to greater extent, powerful groups still do it today. For the most part of mankind’s existence, however, we were not yet masters over earth’s surface, let alone reached the heights of stars. How much more ignorant have we been of exploring the fourth dimension.

Next, the ’conspicuous wink’ from the queen of all knowledge – philosophy (the king is science). Philosophy by literal translation means love for knowledge, not to be mistaken for knowledge itself, which is quite unattainable, with the exception of practical knowledge, which then ceases to be philosophy and becomes applied science or life science. The search for knowledge, or shall we call it the quest for truth, ideally is an ongoing, never-ending process. Why is that? Because all our best theories so far point to non-permanence. In the common parlor: change.

In philosophy, not a single theory is permanent, as in “impossible to refute.” This astonishing insight has come down to us in various forms such as classical dialectics, language games or the law of difference. Everything can and will change the moment we put our mind to it. Take ‘free will’, perhaps the most invigorating theory of human existence: it is equally plausible and implausible on every other turn: Even if life was a gigantic controlled experiment with all parameters and data known to the observer; we would still have the problem of the observer being outside of the experiment, thus free.

So, what about chance? This ‘conspicuous wink’ we as parents and educated readers properly attached to a higher profession are perhaps most familiar with. It is the magic force behind the so-called theory of evolution as well as all economic activity. The roll of a dice, we dread to think, should sufficiently eliminate all hopes of planning security and intelligent design. Everything, or at least the otherwise inexplicable, happens by chance, freak accident or random mutation, and that all exists somehow as if by invisible force: the good or the fit.

That reasoning is of course tautologous. And from primordial tautology, circular thinking, the Christian idea of ‘truth’ was born: Truth is whatever is, or what we think it is, or what we are told is. How convenient to sustain a closed belief system; but for our enquiry into the future of time quite useless. That is because we parents and educational professionals can very well control evolution. We ably domesticate animals and plants, choose spouses, migrate and manipulate the markets easily. No self-respecting government believes in non-governance. We win arguments but cunning or force or persuasion. In short, even if there was truth, we would manipulate it unrecognizable because we can.

Chance, so mathematicians inform us, can be calculated by knowing something about probability. But probability is not real, it is an estimation – the likelihood of a certain outcome. A construct. Now, what is a construct? A construct cannot be grasped easily with the mind. It is something above and beyond the real. Like capital or love. Constructs are what the Germans call Mehrwert or “added value” to the world.

Now we are entering the humanities in our quest for mastery of time. The humanities deal with those artificial realities of added values, which we express in elaborated concepts such as culture, religion, language, laws and many more. Let us sum all of these up in one word: creativity. The human mind is capable of creating and rearranging new knowledge.

This new knowledge did not previously exist, as sure as you and I did not previously exist before we were created, not just in a biological sense with a big bang, but in a social context of differentiating us from all that come before and after. Now, we observe that only the tiniest selection of all knowledge created guide us in what we refer to as history, the history of the human race, usually in the stories of important events attached to great personalities and their ground-breaking ideas or horrible deeds, such as Saint Augustine of Hippo or Emperor Caligula.

Why that particular history and no other? Because historians wrote down that particular version and no other. That is how all institutions of knowledge in principal work: they are constantly describing the world, thereby creating it. Next, they try, predictably, to preserve that knowledge for future generations and trick them into believing that that was “the past.” Previously, the fabrication of the past happened decentralized, therefore we had several histories. That is, until the Europeans colonized the world and the Americans occupied Europe. Now they all spurn out the same history: the West’s.

Overwhelmingly today, with so much more sophistication than just a few centuries ago, we know – and largely control – what the past is: it seems already written. Or is it? Or do we?

And herein lies the great misunderstanding of time: We naively surrender to a tradition that coerces us into believing the past has already happened and that the future lies before us, therefore is unbeknownst. What is our evidence again? All those descriptions of the past. We have lots of descriptions of the past, but few about the future. Neither exists without us describing them.

It follows that if a large enough group, say half of humanity, were to describe the future equally prominently, that future, just like the past we fabricated before, would stay in our mind and dictate our actions and would soon come into existence. Like capitalism, socialism or the great reset.

Let us acknowledge that history produced and maintained by our historians and writers before the 20th Century was aimed backwards. If in the first half of the 21st Century we turned half of them around, combined with the technological assistance of artificial intelligence, we would create an equally compelling history forwards.

Fiction writers do that, artists, visionaries, pundits and the journalists at the Economist magazine. And they succeed, don’t they? Listen to them how few ‘alternatives’ are left for us: Democracy, globalism, diversity, rainbows in South Africa and Adolf Trump. Are those curators less successful in predicting the future than those scribblers who were setting up the past? Only in numbers and on scale.

Which brings us to the next ‘conspicuous wink’, the wink from high literature. All of the world’s greatest writers, who undoubtedly must have been among the greatest readers as well, have not only felt as ‘makers’ themselves but have referred to their works as having been created. Lesser politicians, religious leaders and all ruling cliques heard the same call and acted upon their narcissistic urge: Those who control the past, control the future. You may consider that a misanthropic platitude circulated by machiavellians, zionists or paranoid schizophrenics, but really it is common policy of all governments. Our regimes and tyrants and elites, with the help of media and education, really do fabricate reality; and we all could do it, even on such massive scale, if only we had the means.

Most scholars, journalists and editors are cognizant of their contributions to fabricating the past: Without our relentless gate-keeping, propaganda and moderation, particular bits and chunks of history we preside over would probably not continue: India was British, the USA are democratic, Africans are our ancestors, China has philosophers, Japan is a sovereign state.

We have to invent the past for the benefits of whoever wants us, and feeds us, to do so.

When our favorite economic theorist Karl Marx yelled: “Time is everything, man is nothing,” he had in mind the hours squeezed out of mechanized factory workers, not woke pen-and-paper armies. Astonishingly, the communists understood that ‘conspicuous wink’ at once, rushed and began to construct a new timeline, a new history of man. In no time, they were attacked, persecuted and put down all over the West.

This creative process, endless description, is now accelerating; and not just by billions of new Youtube content creators: it will accelerate a billion-fold once we utilize supercomputers and self-learning algorithms. We must prepare for endless psychological warfare, fake polls, rigged games, bullshit data, paid research, drama, rumor, marketing and mad agitation. As a movement, the descriptive process will one day create what had not yet been possible to create for lack of man-hours, woman-hours, child-hours, server-hours and technology’s untapped time resources: the so-called ”post-reality,” for lack of better term for it.

Past and future are neutral to any form of description; description does not distinguish between them. History can be written and will be written, once we, or whatever aids us in the form of apps, angels and differences, put our mind to it.

If you don’t believe it immediately, imagine a superior alien force, let’s call them North Koreans, visiting earth and starting to describe what we call our past. That would be creating a future history from their point of view. Did it happen? No. Could they create it without ever having visited us? Yes. In fact, they didn’t even need to come to us at all.

That seems provocative at first. Surely they, the aliens, can’t just simulate us. But ask the physicists: No one needs to travel to the end of the universe to know the end of the universe. We can know it all from behind our desks. History was “done” from behind our desks.

Some commentators have argued that the future remains uncertain, as opposed to the static past which, at bare minimum, offers relics, documents and bones. To which we reply: Not at all, the past is equally uncertain, only that we have invested a disproportionate amount of energy and volume of our descriptive powers into creating a past over meaningless objects. And oh boy are they meaningless. There will come a revolutionary insight to man that fossils, even our bodies, are infinitesimally irrelevant. Soon we will be able to create worlds forwards, backwards and side-wards any way we want them: We will print and place objects for later to discover them.

The past is not at all as fixed as we once were made to believe. Saint Augustine could tomorrow become a plagiarist, an invention or not exist at all. Emperor Caligula could become a benign hero, an inspirational coach or just this: a nobody. You think: Impossible? The general population knows little yet about our possibilities or, what is even more likely, we were not supposed to know because those who entered the city first would never in a million years think of handing us the keys.

Most readers will have encountered this last ‘conspicuous wink’ from their accumulated wisdom and from life experience: If they, our masters and benevolent educators, hid away all those written histories (the “New World” – it wasn’t new; the “Exceptional nation” – it was exceptionally unexceptional), or replaced our curriculum with a brand-new History, would we not never knew it existed in first place, would we not be as uncertain about the past as we are now, understandably without descriptions, about the future? In short: were we not duped?

You wouldn’t know which was the greater con job: that IQ existed or that it doesn’t. That the Ancient Greeks were so fantastic or that the Modern Greeks are bottom people. They could teach you that nations, gender, societies, economies, climate, identities and the universe do not exist but are all socially constructed, stories really, that you must now disavow. In the same Nordic classroom they could totally teach you about new nations, new genders, new societies, new economies, Greta Thunberg, new identities and a new universe that you, quite rightly, have no reason to believe were any less socially constructed. We think that because we have memories of the past and no such memory of the future, therefore the past is more trustworthy? That little problem is solved by having people pledge to ban backwardness from their lives and by teaching children the correct future, hopefully on a planetary scale.

All those ‘conspicuous winks’ mentioned above are signals we were meant to decipher eventually. Something is coming through, something is reaching out to us. A new plane of cognizance. Our planners know with near absolute certainty what our future is, and know better than our historians knew about our past. The Communist Part of China has 5-year, 20-year and 50-year plans. The totalitarian European Union has 7-year, 30-year and, wait for it: eternal plans. Says Vice-President of the European Commission Franz Timmermanns, quote: “Diversity is human destiny. There is not going to be, even in the remotest places on this planet, a nation that will not see diversity in its future.”

This is no longer Harvard’s ‘Fake it till you make it’. This is no longer Peking University’s ‘Advanced Humanistic Studies’. This is no longer Silicon ‘Do the right thing’ Valley. Our rulers have time machines. If so many of our forward-thinkers knew it, today’s greatest corporations, governments and think tanks with all their networks, news organs and resources are already decades ahead of us. We will no longer be able to distinguish between past and future, because both are one and the same coding, and what can be done to one of them, can be done to the other.

Let us discuss a few concrete examples. We actually have fabricated more years than should be on the calendar. The last two millennia were probably 600 years shorter. The history of humanity is supposedly 300,000 years long. It says so on your computer screen. Do you trust it? Why? Tremendous efforts were placed into indoctrinating us about empiricism, judiciary, laws and ethics – yet none of these concepts are natural or evolutionary. They have nothing to do with the universe, and it could be argued that, while nature evolves backwards and into certain death, we humans develop in the opposite direction and into birth. Since something can exist without being existent (interest rates, gross domestic product, French cuisine, the billion-year commitment and unicorns), soon our planners will introduce the realm of non-existence – and harvest it accordingly. It is a bit like discovering the concept of negative numbers. The notion of humans who are actual burdensome “minus-people” will capture imaginations. We will compute trillions of them.

Machines, just like animals and plants, aren’t gonna replace humans, but ‘differences’ will. It is a new being and constant, to be used in mathematics, which is akin to distance in geometry. We are going to harvest descriptions from non-existent entities, and measure time not in minutes or seconds but in differences – bits and bites if you will. Think about Jesus the Christ and Joey the psychology major for a moment. The former probably didn’t exist. But then, who has heard about Joey and his plans to control the world, nor could anyone possibly vouch for his existence. Yet the former accumulated all those descriptions about himself. Another one: Rodion Raskolnikov. Sure you met him: he is the most famous murderer in history and fictional character in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Evidently, it does not matter whether a person physically exists for it to colonize time. Same with events, organizations and governments.

Free humorists often note the banality of reality. When financiers abandoned the gold standard and our banks henceforth created money out of nothing, many thought this pig couldn’t fly. Or when clever lawyers fabricated legal persons. Who is Google? Has it a soul? Or when the idealists decoupled empiricism and self-declared post-modernists henceforth created problems out of thin air just to solve them. Disbelievers called it a conspiracy theory. The list is long. Remember when, during the rise of the Internet, the public came to realize that News disseminated by mainstream organs amounted more or less to fake news, lies and disinformation? The abandoning of archaic dependencies on all information will completely shatter our sense of reality.

To give evidence to our ‘new stories’, pioneers are going to produce new fossils, new people and new anthropology. The past we grew so fond of will gradually be exposed as junk, even criminalized if people cling too much to it. Safety, property, security and legitimacy are usually derivatives of the past; they could easily be outsourced to the future. What if you were salaried by a non-existent, made-up organization prior to its appearance in a hundred years? That is exactly the position of Chinese socialism, to be realized in 2047, the European Union, scheduled in a few centuries, and the Galactic Federation with the acquisition of Mars.

That thought, that they make up the future for us, may be bizarre at first, but it is no less congenial than taking out loans or paying carbon tax for polluting air. Already, woke states are totally leaning toward the liberal and abolishing the bygone, including out-dated notions of nationhood, people, borders, symbols, statues, names, races and classes in order to create post-factual and more progressive reality: don’t make babies, kill all pets, be gay, wear a mask, liberate the people of Hong Kong, eat insects.

That is not to debunk this shift. In fact, it is more sustainable to make up future schemes and invent authorities that regulate us backward in time, so that we won’t ever meet or question them.

All historical events and political systems are just this: complex narratives. Once we know how the French Revolution was spun forth – proclaiming a republic, anti-right campaign, great leap forward, cultural revolution, reform and opening up -, we know exactly what is needed to re-enact France without needing her, be that in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1945, Egypt in 1952, China in 1958 or Iran in 1979.

Which brings us to the concept of censorship. True censorship is not banning books or silencing people. That´s repression. While we know that somebody or something is pro-actively repressed, we have no way of knowing that somebody or something was censored, because for all we know they never existed.

If a team of moderators censored information about the past, we wouldn’t know that piece of information existed. So maybe the censors already have done so, or, more intriguing, maybe what we are experiencing now will be erased for those who follow or preceded us. Under a proper regime that is solely interested in its self-preservation, say the New York Times, it would need to consist of 1% propaganda and 99% censorship. Far more voices and news are actively made to disappear than created. Even in a modern state such as the 1949-installed Federal Republic of Germany, extended to include East Germany in 1989, barely 0.1% of its population of 80 million had access to public discourse, while the rest of the world, 7 billion foreigners, had close to zero access.

Evolution, the theory, will surely be revoked. There is no connection between parents and offspring. A new bodily system that translates differences into chemical actions will be discovered. Thinking is basically just saying ‘No’ to the next thousand years of science. How pathetic. Speech will be outlawed simply because it perpetuates non-desirable histories and, besides, it is far too primitive and slow as a form of communication. As to local political parties, all redundant, they’ll be replaced by the more adaptable Better World commissioners, councils and advisory boards: a menace of uber-bureaucracy that regulates social credits, quotas, taxes, distributions and penalties. It can calculate existence and non-existence, so political groups can win seats without campaigning. Outcomes are preemptive. Do you conceive World Wars Three, Four and Five? They happen, we just prevented them. It will be fond that war is unnatural to humans. They won‘t, ever. Only the past made them do it. Age is wrong and discriminatory. Away with it. People referendums are already abandoned in the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Germany and France; since rulers have enough data to “know” how the people would vote in advance, no voting is actually necessary. There are countless tyrannies and pandemics. We just prevent them. There is no alternative. Ultimately, time itself will be governed just like space.

We finish this talk by repeating its core message irrevocably and clearly: Can we predict the future? Yes, absolutely we can, in strangely similar ways we concocted the past. We only assumed, through massive exposure through descriptions, that the past was more real and less dependable than the future which was taught too little. How mislead we were. We are able in our descriptive existence to hold strong the moment and cover all temporal bases. And we haven’t even begun, in our world-building endeavors, to fully unleash our creative powers and limitless potential to arrange the future with the same dedication we delivered the past.

The author is German writer and cultural critic.