Why is it that what appears to most people to be innocent phrases of general intent like school choice, social emotional learning standards, the rule of law, or competence (just to cite a few examples I have dealt with) provoke such a strong, specific reaction from me? Because I read the books and articles where people lay out intentions that were never meant to be openly and accurately discussed. For example, back on October 27- November 2, 1968, just before the close and contentious US Presidential election, the Rockefeller Foundation turned over its lovely Bellagio, Italy retreat to the OECD Long-Range Forecasting and Planning Symposium. Once again our invites were lost, but this retreat focused on a “new kind of planning” and the redesign of social systems and the need to “dynamically change human values” to fit with this desire to plan “the creation of a future society.”
The ‘old’ concept of planning had been “essentially short-range in scope” with a concentration “on changing variables within a given system.” Out with the Old and In with the New was big in that epochal year of student riots around the world. The ‘new’ planning would be “essentially long-range in scope” with its concentration “on changing the system itself, i.e. its structure as well as its variables”. All those things I am so concerned about discussing on this blog or in my book Credentialed to Destroy go to invisibly implementing that second conception of planning. The word ‘system’ itself, unfortunately, includes people, hopefully captured during their neurobiologically most malleable years at school. Let me quote from just how extensive the desired planning was and where our title comes from as it is my belief that this is still where the Right and Left Pincer action of the think tanks, politicians, and governments at all levels in every country are taking us.
“The dominant concern over systems design, which expressed itself in the discussions, clearly arises from the recognition that planning ought to be integrative, i.e, cutting across a multitude of dimensions, in particular, social, economic, political, psychological, anthropological, and technological dimensions…the discussions of the Symposium dealt exclusively with two type of joint systems only–the society/technology and the man/society systems.
This restriction was also borne out by the statement that mankind, in its evolutionary process, is now moving from the era of environmental control (achieved through technology) into the era of social systems, whereas the era of individual systems is still far away–indeed a frightening prospect.”
A frightening prospect indeed and precisely where student-centered personalized learning is unquestionably taking us, but that’s not what we are talking about today. I want to explain what happens when the desire for such planning and redesign of what people are at an internalized level, and the human institutions and places they interact with daily, decides to use the law to obtain the necessary coercion. When someone begins to tout the Rule of Law from now on, I want everyone’s anti-manipulation radar to begin to spin at Full Alert Status. Let’s start with a book communitarian prof Amitai Etzioni, who is also the Active Society architect, touted as “If you are going to read only one book in preparation for the 90s–make it this one”–Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk.
Now I had already encountered Professor Glendon insisting that the Rule of Law must be used to get the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into daily operation as a binding obligation. She had already moved well beyond any historic sense of the term–Rule of Law. In her 1991 book she complained that the law has for too long ignored its potential for a “right ordering of our lives together” where there would no longer be “silence with respect to personal, civic, and collective responsibilities.” If someone sees “legal discourse…as the most important tributary to political discourse” where is it they want to start? Why that would be at the now familiar levels of education and media coverage that “help to shape the interior world of beliefs, attitudes, dreams and yearnings that are the hidden springs of individual and social action.”
A bit more recent Call to Arms for the Global Planning Set is “The Global Values Discourse” from 2012 from Garry Jacobs and Winston Nagan. It lets us know that commencing in 2010 the influential Club of Rome (also started at Bellagio about the same time as that planning conference) and the WAAS–World Academy of Arts & Sciences–laying out an affirmative, normative use of the law for “charting a better collective future for humanity based on universal values for sustaining a world order in the common interest.” If that sounds glorious, be careful as Brazil and Venezuela got touted as early implementers of this Human Development vision and both now have platitudes, dysfunction, and a shortage of toilet paper.
Nevertheless, the point of this post is to alert us all that the Rule of Law now is often obscuring a reality that seeks to “alter our fundamental conception of the source of rights throughout the world and weave a new narrative that embraces and assigns a rightful place to the individual, the community, the nation-state and humanity.” How many of us are aware that the same Institute for the Future which wants to redesign education and use gaming to recreate desired mindsets has also created “An Inventors Toolkit” called “Governance for the Future.” If that’s not concerning enough as a means “to reimagine society for an age of planetary challenges and human responsibility,” how about their involvement in the April 2013 Reconstitutional Convention, “convening a community of social inventors and innovators passionate in designing and creating new governance systems.”
Now if we visit that site http://reconcon.govfutures.org/ we will find Texas Law Professor Sanford Levinson as one of the listed speakers talking about “Is ‘Reflection and Choice’ Possible in the 21st Century?” If that name is familiar he was the first to call for a Constitutional Convention in his 2006 book Our Undemocratic Constitution. His work for a Recon Con should concern us in contemplating where such a Convention of the States would really end up. So should his prior work for the Soros-funded Constitution in 2020 that I have also written about. It does look like the Right and Left Pincers are all interested in disregarding our current Constitution as in the way of pursuing what Justice Breyer called Active Liberty in the August 15 Hic Sunt Dracones post.
Also be aware that in 2008 Columbia Human Rights Law Review published a special issue to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That issue insisted that this aggressive conception of Human Rights being asserted now in the legal training of lawyers “are rooted not in constitutions, treaties, or legislative acts, but in our very structures as human beings. According to [UDHR], these rights are universal because they are ‘indispensable for…[the] dignity and the free development of…[human] personality.'” Now I may recognize a direct quote from Uncle Karl when I read it, but the average law student does not when told this is the purpose now of the law.
Moreover there is no tip off in the law article on what the UDHR was in turn quoting from. Just one final opening sentence that “They are rights that every government, from the weakest to the most powerful, is legally and morally bound to respect, protect, and fulfill.” It should bother us that the US Human Rights Fund created a report called the Revolution of the Mind. Just like every other revolutionary, they recognize that to be successful in the long run it is the individual mind and personality that must be controlled and redesigned. Unfortunately, no one seems to regard this as a Frightening Prospect anymore. Just a necessary and exciting one that can now be successfully hidden in an online gaming assessment, unappreciated language in a charter, or in the terms outlining acceptable learning methods to be deemed a qualified provider able to accept money from an Education Savings Account.
Out of sight doesn’t mean the Rule of Law with its acute interest in planning at all levels and implementing the UDHR, like it or not, isn’t being bindingly put into place. Just because we do not consider ourselves to be governed doesn’t mean that others have not conceived plans to limit what we can be and control what we must do. Here’s a good example that’s probably completely off our radars. In October 2016 the Habitat III conference commences in Quito with all sorts of revolutionary binding plans for us. http://citiscope.org/sites/default/files/h3/Surabaya_Draft_New_Urban_Agenda-28_July_2016.pdf is the most recent draft of those plans. A few days before in Bogota (keeping it in same continent and he World Summit of Local and Regional Leaders laying out their plans for us. Here is the UCLG Definition of Local Governance:
“Governance is made up of the political and institutional processes through which decisions are taken and implemented. Governance is most effective when these processes are participatory, accountable, transparent, efficient, inclusive, and respect the rule of law. Good governance is particularly important at local level, where governments interact with citizens and communities on a daily basis.”
I could add that those governments are almost never forthcoming in those daily interactions about what they are really up to, but my point in this post is the dangers in failing to appreciate when planning and the rule of law are actually being used to impose the Human Development Society’s tenets with most of us being none the wiser. In other words, I want people to recognise what is being attempted before the toilet paper runs out and more minds are manipulated as if they were simply malleable play-doh that needs to be made amenable to these plans and new values. In late 2014, HUD commenced a National Preparatory process to implement the rights and obligations being laid out at Habitat III. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/HUD-Habitat-III-Overview.pdf shows that process in case we also missed that invite.
Anyone hear of the Affirmatively Furthering Inclusive Housing edict? That’s part of the Habitat III creation of new obligations and responsibilities. There were also HUD co-hosted Regional Convenings in Chicago on March 31 (Learning from the City), Philadelphia on May 17 (The City We Want & Need), Denver on May 20, Miami on June 13, and El Paso, Texas on June 22-23, 2016 in case we are neither employees of the Chamber of Commerce or community organizers and thus failed to get an invite.
With respect to the true nature of education reforms, the dramatic alteration in the purpose of the law and what the phrase Rule of Law actually now means, or what is really being imposed on us in the name of meeting human needs, none of us can dissent if we buy into all the false narratives floating around. These have been created by connected entities like think tanks or the Frameworks Institute or even formerly trusted institutions like the PTA , Girl Scouts, or even local churches precisely so laws can be used to bind and ultimately stifle dissent. Our job as still free parents, citizens, and taxpayers is to recognize all these coordinated plans for what they are and what they intend to do to us.
These are all frightening prospects and some are no longer far away at all.