It is a tragic fact that humanity has been living amidst a regime of perpetual warfare since known history. From the last 100 years alone, we have seen (amongst many others), two major European world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the War on Terror, and now the Virus Wars. In line with the unfolding trend of technology, the ‘wars’ are shifting from inter-bodies (between bodies) to intra-body (within bodies). In this current state of ‘perpetual warfare’, there are now attempts to colonise the terrain within our most sacred space – the human biological body.
In my previous essay on biopower (see New Dawn 183), I noted there had been a shift from the disciplinary societies as described by French philosopher Michel Foucault toward more fluid networks of biopower control. As Foucault noted, the biopower model functions to tax rather than organise production, and to rule on death rather than to administer life. The older biopower models focused on the exterior modes of enclosure – school, factory, hospital, prison, etc. – whereas what I put forth in this essay is that the new reign of biopower is about gaining access to our interior spaces. Older exterior institutions (school, factory, etc.) have an expiration date – the human being, in contrast, is an ongoing and continuous ‘body’ available for generational control. The new regime seeks an ongoing vested interest in the exterior and interior spaces. These are the reconfigured social-body politics of control – or, the politics of control-biology. The new reign of biopower is concerned with continual modulation, adapting to ongoing events more like a wavelength than a fixed broadcast.
Psychological warfare in the new biopower reality.
The new enclosures are no longer disciplinary institutions (as identified by Foucault) but the fluid flows and networks of inter and intra-body spaces and the new regimes that are arising to govern these social-biological terrains. The individual human body is being fully incorporated into the global body politique. There are no ‘fixed markets’ for biopower; instead, there are flexible networks of exchange. Yet the question remains – who sets the parameters of legal authority on these exchanges?
We have truly entered the age of the erosion of biological boundaries. We are all being targeted as possible mobile hosts for our own crippling disease – regardless of the true potency of the viruses – just as a person could be a suspect in the War on Terror. In both cases, the human being has been re-cast as a site of suspicion and risk. The body is now re-classified as a ‘site of weakness’ – which may itself play into a later transhumanism agenda.
Becoming ever clearer is that the new reign of biopower will deny us our rights to keep the frontiers of the human body closed. The fundamental right to health (health safety) is being reconstituted as a legal obligation to health (biosecurity).17 This process, overtly and covertly, attempts to reorganise human citizenry in a way to create maximum obedience to institutions of governance and security. This is also a process that will eventually lead to denying each person their individual sovereignty.
The rise of biosecurity amid the converging health intelligence (HI), along with tech-based “integrated protocols,” and increased reliance on Artificial Intelligence both within healthcare systems as well as state-sponsored surveillance, all point towards a worryingly cohesive ‘full spectrum dominance’ over human life. It is a biopower-enforced control system not only between bodies and within bodies but also within the human mind.
Biopower is also, I propose, a control system for human consciousness. This is confirmed by rapid moves on the internet to censor any information that criticises or is contrary to consensus narratives and programming. A case in point: the UK Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth (Labour) is demanding a law be put into effect, with financial and criminal penalties, to “stamp out dangerous” anti-vaccine content online. It is time for all political parties, says Ashworth, “to work with the government on a cross-party basis to build trust and help promote take-up of the vaccine.”18
According to a report in the Sunday Times, UK ministers are preparing to launch a massive public information campaign to convince people to get vaccinated. The Times reported that the British Army mobilised the 77th Brigade’s Defence Cultural Specialist Unit to monitor and “counter online propaganda against vaccines.”19 The news report admits the 77th Brigade specialises in creating “behavioural change.”
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. The usual response to anomalous data is to try to fit it into pre-existing parameters of thought – our existing ‘reality boxes’ – to maintain a sense of stability. When the irrational encroaches upon consensus reality, a person is forced to accept the abnormalities as the ‘new normal’ or to undergo critical, often radical, change at a personal level. Which do you think is the easiest, most popular option?
Polarising events have the result of affecting both the conscious and the unconscious mind. A person can be both consciously and unconsciously torn between what they are told to believe and what actually is. This can easily create a schism in the human psyche and result in further social divisions and polarisations within familial and cultural groupings. This is not the time to be fostering mental, emotional, and socio-cultural dissociations. On the contrary, we should be asking ourselves: what does human sovereignty and empowerment mean to me? The question of human sovereignty applies to each and every one of us. It is not a privilege or a luxury – it is a basic right and necessity.
As the reign of biopower continues to unfold, we are going to be seeing – and receiving – many more instances where control-biology situates itself into our daily lives. It is a calculating narrative because, after all, does not everyone wish for good health and well-being? The situation, though, is being managed and coerced into a state where each person will have no choice over how they make their own health decisions. Biopower forces dominion over our external and internal realms through the rhetoric (or double-talk) of representing the power of well-being. The end result is more on the side of controlling the human being, and few people, it seems, have an adequate response to this. Too many people continue to respond as if caught off-guard in the coming headlights.
The very nature of how we recognise human well-being is at the core of what is transpiring now. This is the fundamental issue we need to address. It is no longer simply a matter of whether we need to wear masks or not – it is a question of our humanity being masked.
One thought on “The New Reign of Biopower: The Rise of Control-Biology”
The hidden powers seem to consider that man cannot evolve any further after his many millennia’s of struggling with natural selection; he needs their help to take the next step; to where?
The consensus is that his incredibly complex evolved brain just cannot compete with a computer that is now being designed to replaces it.
I do not consider that nature or a God put us here to compete with a computer. Natural selection is about survival and we, being gifted with an energy that is cosmological and not supplied by batteries.
What happens to AI when the grid goes down or the batteries need replacing. I’m sure they have considered that but the immense pleasure man experiences with life will be relegated to a Computer Application.
I guess it can be recorded if any of us survive to view it. https://www.stopworldcontrol.com/madej
The hidden powers seem to consider that man cannot evolve any further after his many millennia’s of struggling with natural selection; he needs their help to take the next step; to where?
The consensus is that his incredibly complex evolved brain just cannot compete with a computer that is now being designed to replaces it.
I do not consider that nature or a God put us here to compete with a computer. Natural selection is about survival and we, being gifted with an energy that is cosmological and not supplied by batteries.
What happens to AI when the grid goes down or the batteries need replacing. I’m sure they have considered that but the immense pleasure man experiences with life will be relegated to a Computer Application.
I guess it can be recorded if any of us survive to view it.
https://www.stopworldcontrol.com/madej