2020 VISION: SIGHTING GLOBAL "SOLUTIONS"

 

 

 

Dr. Eugene Narrett, Ph.D
October 6, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

 

If one climbs high enough, one can see for miles and miles. If one is a global cartel with 480,000 employees in Automation and Control, Power plants and fuel cell technologies, Transportation, Medical services like Bayer Diagnostics, Lighting, and the field of Information and Communication that instructs and diverts the masses, one can direct not only activities in space but can shape, even enforce the future.

Hence a group at Siemens AG (Allgemeine Geselleschaft) has produced a 304-page tome that conditions us to the world they say we will inhabit twelve years hence. They call it, “Horizons 2020” and it is part of the conglomerate’s vision of “Solutions for Sustainable Development” (home page), a “thought-provoking look at the future” covering Home Life, Eating Habits, Relationships, Old Age, Media, Work, Travel and Security.

“Sustainable Development” means ‘we will regulate and manage you,’ and more.

“We develop solutions for the world of tomorrow” they write and “Horizon 2020” is part of the solution. File the report under “information and communication” services as part of their stated commitment to “ethical, ecological, economic and social concerns.” The ethical approach to “growth and profitability” means “focusing on fields where we can capture and strengthen leading positions” from the HQ in Berlin and Munich.

Call it siege warfare by technical innovation, economic leverage and info-conditioning. When a position has been “captured” and a fortress “strengthened” it can be maintained against other barons; the surviving serfs, whose wealth and labor built the castle will cluster in fearful and giddy gratitude around its walls and lower courtyards.

Before examining extracts from “2020” consider a bit of the conglomerate’s history and current holdings.

Siemens and Halske was formed in October 1847 based on a telegraph Werner von Siemens developed that used a needle rather than Morse Code to form letters. In 1848, Siemens built a Berlin-Frankfurt telegraph line; in the 1850s they built one in Russia and already intercontinental and trans-national in orientation, in 1867 completed a line from Calcutta to London for the British. In 1881, AC Alternators developed by Siemens provided the first city electric lighting in Godalming, England. After S & H incorporated in the 1890s they began to dominate lighting and light bulbs in Germany now internationalized in part through their ownership of Sylvania which markets for Siemens in North America.

While Siemens, unlike I.G. Farben, General Electric, Ford or Royal Dutch Shell did not assist the rise and dominance of the Nazis they eventually joined the “Aryanization and Nazification” of German industry. They made extensive use of slave labor from concentration and death camps and the crematoria at Buchenwald were their work [1]. Shifting to wacky consumerism, Siemens has a twelve-year deal to sponsor attractions at Disney Land and Disney World. It developed GSM cellular tech in 1997 and in 1998 acquired Nixdorf computerized banking systems, underpinning modern social change and application of power. Nokia, Chrysler Electronics, Photo-Lab, CTI Molecular Imaging and Power Tech International are other companies in their stable.

Their medical division “will be the first health care supplier to provide a full range of diagnostics featuring all key in-vitro and in-vivo technologies” they write. If that recalls Brave New World and the eugenics movement (pooh-poohed – “it remains a dream” -- in “2020”), so does the following clause: “by 2050, it will be necessary to optimize efficiencies all along the healthcare continuum.” This techno-babble leads to an assertion that in 2020 “the jury is still out on the issue of whether people have the right to determine the time of their own death.” That’s for public consumption: in closing the section they add “both the ethical and economic aspects of the right to die” are “still being hotly debated” (2.2.2, emphasis added). Perhaps they still will be debated. In any case, Siemens AG will “capture and strengthen its leading position” in these debates and determinations of optimized efficiencies for lifespan.

In Massachusetts this year it became mandatory to have medical insurance. Commercials have begun emphasizing that one must be sure to purchase “enough” insurance. There are “economic aspects of the right to die” as Malthus, Sanger and others have been writing and saying for centuries. Read Sanger’s remarks on “the cruelty of charity” (1922; 1950). What has changed is the definition of the “unfit” or “disconnected.”

“Horizon 2020” has an approach distinctive of modern hi-tech and info-warfare: it is a preemptive strike, an infomercial conditioning the public to get used to what corporate barons want them to accept and become; and such preemptive strikes provide “thought-leaders” in academia and media with tomorrow’s talking points, story-lines and editorial views using “the techniques of persuasion and information and true propaganda that we have learned in war” (J. Huxley); thus they provide sociologists and psychologists who “coordinate the personality” of the masses with ideas for new syndromes that lawyers can argue into law with the help of promoted lawyers (judges). The politicians, made or unmade by the media will promote and fund the desired initiatives and new statutes in the classic, outcome-based model. After all, “this is a nation of laws,” the more evolutionary the better, for some.

So we learn that “the greatest advantage of the future’s young-at-heart old people is that they are geographically mobile (get moving; did you think getting along in years meant you could settle down?). 2020 talks less of options than future facts: “the aged therefore visit schools for life-long learning and learn in the same way youngsters will do.” They will? They do? Siemens says they do. Will they or others pay the tuition? It must be contingent on “the economic aspects of the right to die” and “whether people have the right to determine the time of their own death.” The lords of the new world re-define mercy, too.

Then 2020 introduces the topic, “parents” and informs us that “people today practice more different forms of cohabitation than ever”; more even than now, they write in the cheery future present. “The family used to be the nest” but will be replaced by “club families.” It is not blood relationships or customs like marriage or values like loyalty that build or maintain families, -- that’s not part of “sustainable development.” Rather, “planned events” bring “club-families” together after which “each member goes their own way.” Sounds a bit lonely and solipsistic, no, a bit animalistic? It is a fact that there are more “patchwork and single parent families” thanks to generations of foundation-driven social policies and social science ideologies that make fathers disposable.

As for children and child care, “child benefit allowances” (dropping as if from the sky), “day nurseries that stay open until late in the evenings” (to serve “patchwork families”) “and the chance to recruit household help or elderly people for an affordable fee” makes Horizon 2020 swim into view. The theme of readily available, low-wage workers unifies the treatise.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World foresaw many of these attitudes and practices. One recalls Lenina’s and Fanny’s dating habits when 2020 states that “people frequently change partners and want to have more children with their latest partner,” perhaps by some of those in-vitro techniques that already facilitate varied lifestyle and partner options. “Frequent changes of partner” will produce more siblings whose “social and generic parentage is not identical” (2.2.3.1).

But it’s a good world for kids: “great expectations are placed on their development;” like Alice Bailey’s psychologists, the writers continue coordinating the future personality, “a pronounced performance orientation will afford children happy and successful lives” [sic] but also may reflect “excessive care” by parents. Like many modern text books, 2020 tells parents what they are (“excessive”) before they can be it (guilty of goodness twelve years before the fact) implying that they should be replaced by State “caregivers” or “ankle bracelets that let parents know the exact location of their child at any time.” It’s amazing that any child ever felt loved before such profitable communication and control technologies.

The Siemens group anticipates our angst. They know that children will “have to cope with the variegated assortment of ‘important others’ they encounter” in the new “club-family” environments that the professions and government have been helping us create for decades. Children may surmount this by no longer fixing “their attention on one or two adults” since there will be many “important others.” This “will help offset the parents’ excessive caution” (note the motif). Also mitigating the involvement of parents are caregivers “as in former centuries who often are paid a very low wage. Recruiting such assistance has become easier since governments agreed to subsidize household help” (who “subsidizes”?). Here again, the “voluntary” involvement of any elders that survive will help and be for them “a welcome boost to low pensions.”

The age at which an American can regain their SSI without penalty has been raised to 66.

Any elders left will be eager to work for “in the final phase of life…at-home care is barely affordable” although mandatory health insurance will cost who knows how much, and “all forms of hospitalization and hospices have been severely restricted” (2.2.2.3). Here again elders provide valuable “voluntary” or “low pay” service: “they look after sick people” gladly because “those without work permits earn very little.” But big sister is always watching with love: “technology-assisted home surveillance allows even those who need constant care a measure of independence” (see section 2.2.10, “Health care” in which Siemens will, you know the phrase, “optimize efficiencies all along the healthcare continuum”). Surveillance will be the only “choice” because “hospitalization has been severely restricted” (supra).

Regarding “technology-assisted home surveillance” (since no one but police may own guns home’s a bit more dangerous what with armed burglars and such), 2020 tells us about “Smart Homes, the networked, automated, remote-controlled home” that will create the new field of “domotics” for which savvy cadres already are clamoring in scholarly journals. “Door locks, alarm systems, lighting,” items in which Siemens excels via its “Automation and Control” and “Lighting” divisions will be there to cater to the phenomenon of “homing.” So many people will “need a refuge from a grueling life as a ‘multi-jobbers’ or double-income family” that life is increasingly “internalized” (in the late 20th century they used to call it “virtual reality”; in future that’s about all there will be: loneliness arising from state-caused father dearth and masses of “multi-jobbers” in “club-families” served by “domotics” and “voluntary or low wage” elders via “technology assisted home surveillance” assessed by the medical-insurance-banking team.

Like you, dear reader, in 2020 “the term ‘living room’ is showing its age and gradually being replaced by the notion of a ‘media-zone’ which allows a movie theatre-standard experiences… monitors are mounted in different rooms to let people continue watching TV” and to let the monitors keep watching them “while on the way to keep an eye on sleeping children” (2.2.4.1-2). It sounds so “homing…” so “technology-assisted home surveillance” savvy. It evokes the section titled, “the final phase of life.” We’re being pushed into culture death, profitable for those who serve the lords and ladies.

Modernism is all about regression; the realm reels back into the beast...

But wait, there is a respite: “constant exposure to the new media and obtrusive stimuli are giving rise to…the first time-out zones.” Fourteen years ago I began using the term, “the Nanny State” and now it’s gone global for those who have perfect 2020 vision. What’s a “time-out zone?” “Facilities where people can rent one-person quiet rooms with low key interiors and a complete absence of all means of communication”; sounds a bit like a jail cell or padded room. Renters or prisoners or patients: there’s one more sentence: “clients using these rooms are required to surrender their cell phones when they check their coats” (3.2.7.6, emphasis added).

As for humans who opt out of “the constant, 24-hour stream of incoming information” by “spending their time reading books,” they are “disconnected people…with an introverted disposition” (ibid). “The healthcare continuum” including its enforcement arm will enlist them, inter alia, “in massive, multiplayer online games,” and other therapies to be named, elaborated and managed by sociologists, psychologists and officers at court.

To “optimize efficiencies in the full range of diagnostics” also means “time-out zones” and “quiet rooms” and zoos made over for “nighttime safaris.” But it won’t be all fun: “depleted public coffers mean that…only people in upper income brackets can generally afford ticket prices” (“Culturetainment,” 3.2.7.7). One needn’t read between the lines to grasp the theme of impoverishment. And the suave derangement of language is part of corporate socialism’s preemptive warfare as Orwell so well explained, though he might have called it Fascism or Neo-Feudalism. As for the books, why not pulp or burn them?

And there’s a map of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. We see many new maps these days; Dennis Cuddy alerted us to those at the North American Forum for Integration. Visit to see a longitudinal quadra-sectioning of the continent, a grid to maximize profit (fina-nafi.org) and confound accountability. Horizon 2020’s map shows the “European Economic Heartland” which greatly resembles the Holy Roman Empire circa 1250, apt for a mighty Barony based in Berlin and Munich. The renewed Empire is larger, overlapping the eastern 80% of France, northeastern Spain (Catalonia), Northern Italy, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Czech land and the southeastern quarter of England up to Manchester (Foreword x). It’s not enough that the old rival England is being sectioned into nine EU regions; like the nascent NAU it will be further diced to better bury any lingering memories or traditions. Blended club-families will cover everything though not as knowledge of the Creator fills the seabed: that’s becoming the domain of the UN and the Kyoto treaty.

Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts! Enter Your E-Mail Address:

The major market of Siemens is America which also has 27% of its manufacturing capacity, second only to Germany. While America’s sovereign impulse will not easily go down, the EU and NAU already are thoroughly integrated and NATO keeps it snug against the harsh Russian antithesis. A hopeful note: it’s all too grandiose and morbid to last. The falcon will not hear the falconer; the centers will not hold. The flood may be terrible but it will cleanse bringing a better horizon near.

Footnotes:

1. Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (NY 1976), 52-3; 113; Wikipedia

© 2007 Eugene Narrett - All Rights Reserved