Musk & Epstein: The Third Culture Dossier
How Elon Musk Was Trained in Psychological Manipulation via a Jeffrey Epstein-Funded Program.
by @johnnyvedmore for NEWSPASTE
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In 2011, a small group of extremely influential people met to discuss the future of humanity. Among their ranks were Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Nathan Myhrvold, Sergey Brin, and the infamous pedophile child trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. But this was not the first time these powerful and affluent technophiles had met to determine how best to control society.
For many years, I have been unwittingly preparing to write this piece and a bulk of my previous investigations will intersect with this article. For those who aren’t aware, I have written extensively about Jeffrey Epstein’s influence on leading politicians and scientists; I have revealed previously unknown details behind the rise of Jeff Bezos; I have mapped out the history of modern Globalism; and I have written about the political influences behind such infamous leaders as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
In my NEWSHOUND series, I have covered the history of Elon Musk; his family life; his early businesses; as well as his more hidden ties to Microsoft. I’ve also examined the psychological “Nudge Units” adopted by Obama and Cameron respectively which were designed by the father of behavioural economics Richard Thaler and his colleague and co-author Cass Sunstein. And recently I revealed Eric Weinstein’s work for the UN, designing the current unfettered immigration we have seen happen all around the globe, along with his participation in Edge when it was almost fully funded by Jeffrey Epstein. However, I wasn’t expecting all these investigations to merge into one investigation eventually.
Since I began reporting on Epstein and his accomplices in 2019, I have been searching for something rather specific. I have been trying to find people with previously unknown or unrevealed connections to the sex-offending intelligence operative. In doing so, I’ve been hopping around the internet archives on the hunt for concrete evidence that powerful people such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk met in person with Jeffrey Epstein. Although there were many rumours which suggest as much, finding definitive proof of these powerful people all in the same room, at the same time, has been challenging. However, what I wasn’t expecting to find was Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk being trained to manipulate the masses via a Jeffrey Epstein-funded program. But, alas, here we are.
Prepare to look behind the curtain of power, as we investigate more than just Musk and Bezos’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein. We’re going to discover how an elite psychological operations unit trained the future technocratic elite on how to manipulate our lives, our societies, and, most of all, our minds.
The Four Factors for Control
Those who want to take over and control society require four main components: A paradigm-shifting technology; a coherent political social science; a loyal leadership group; and, most importantly, political consent.
Historically, many great thinkers have tried and failed to find some form of political panacea for all our ills and it is often a novel technological paradigm shift which has been the most effective way to drive real change. Any emerging technology capable of revolutionising certain aspects of our society can be implemented in several ways. Future technologies are almost always imagined and predicted decades before they arise, and those who understand the implications of a paradigm shifting technology can also seek to control its evolution, implementation and its accessibility.
Technological Paradigm Shift: The past is littered with technological paradigm shifts. The wheel; the road; bronze, iron and steel; steam trains; gunpowder, dynamite, and the atomic bomb have all had a massive impact on how human society has developed. Every time such a technology has emerged in the past, our society’s infrastructure has been irreversibly redrawn and this has led to people’s lives being shaken up like it’s a game. The vast majority of humans, as the pieces in this game, get redistributed around the board in preparation for the proverbial next level. And we again find ourselves on the precipice of such a predictable change.
The world of tomorrow has already been extensively mapped out. For more than half a century, those in power have been designing the Globalist megacity utopia where humanity becomes inextricably entangled with Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology and various implantables.
A very small group of very wealthy actors have been in control of the design, implementation and direction of the major technologies of the future. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk are four clear examples of the billionaire elite who have the ability to irrevocably change the course of humanity in many ways.
Political Social Science: When faced with a technological shift into a new epoch, the prevailing Establishment usually jumps at the opportunity to redesign society. They often adopt an experimental branch of political social science which they think will best fit the developing paradigm. Adopting a social science which will hold firm in an ever-changing world is vital if those in power want to retain control over an emerging system. Within modern Western democracies, the preferred system of social governance has already been adopted.
Whether you wanted it or not, the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair have forced Third Way politics, as imagined by Anthony Giddens, on America and Britain, with many other Western nation-states joining suit. Third Way ideology is essentially an ideological stepping stone which they intend to utilise to take us from democratic nation-states and onto a form of undemocratic multipolar Globalism. In the case of Third Way politics, we can see how this process unfolded. By the time Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, he hadn’t only adopted the Third Way political science created by Giddens, but he was also preaching it from his political pulpit. At the same time, the future New Labour elite were in America and hanging on every word spoken by the likes of Anthony Giddens, Robert Reich, and Larry Summers.
For instance, Yvette Cooper worked on the Clinton campaign in 1992, Blair and Brown came back from trips to America during this period and they attempted to push Third Way politics onto the then Labour leader John Smith, while Ed Balls was studying under Robert Reich and Larry Summers at Harvard. Eventually, the Labour upstarts designed the so-called “New Labour” party and modelled it on the reformed New Democrats of Bill Clinton.
Leadership Group: To drive people in a new direction, social scientists must first successfully gain the king’s ear. They must convince those who crave power, but are yet to gain power, that their brand-new branch of political science is what must be adopted. Whether it’s Klaus Schwab’s brand of Stakeholder Capitalism or Anthony Giddens’s Third Way politics, a young and aspiring leadership group must be recruited and trained to make it work.
There are many examples of industrial leadership training programs, the most famous being the Forum for Young Global Leaders—originally the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program—run by the World Economic Forum. The first year of the latter program saw Tony Blair and Gordon Brown attend alongside Angela Merkel, Bill Gates, Nicolas Sarkozy and many other potential young leaders who were later installed into power. Also in attendance, alongside Blair and Brown, was Larry Summers, who was another proponent of Third Way politics and an Epstein associate, who was appointed Under Secretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton’s administration.
The leadership training mill was not limited to the WEF’s Young Global Leaders program. Blair and Brown had already been put through the US-run International Visitors Leadership Program which originated out of a wartime operation set up by Nelson Rockefeller.
The German Marshall Fund also runs multiple leadership courses from their Harvard base which specifically target leadership candidates focused on European/Russian affairs. These sorts of leadership programs are a way for state apparatus to instil future leaders with the socio-economic philosophy which best suits the chosen political paradigm of the ruling elite.
Consent: The fundamental issue with creating radical political change isn’t in the difficulty of persuading a small, tight-knit, leadership cabal to adopt a chosen brand of social science, the real issue is how to convince the majority of voters to cast their ballots for a newly developed and relatively untested social order. This is an especially pertinent problem when the chosen branch of social science doesn’t initially benefit the wider population. To convince the electorate to vote for their suppression, the consequences must be obscured.
Johnny Vedmore explore the Population Control training given to the WEF’s Young Global LeadersTo enact real change, those in power don’t only require newly emerging technologies, a freshly created social science, and a group of leaders hungry for power who are willing to adopt a new paradigm, they also require a way to enact behavioural change on the masses.
The people who want to control society must be able to harness behavioural economics and the social psychology of the population they seek to enforce control over. Most importantly, they must have control over the means for propagating information. In this regard, we currently see Mainstream Media being supplanted by social media platforms such as Facebook and X. The fact that the control of information is currently in the same hands as those who control technology should worry us all. This should increase exponentially once they head towards government.
In this article, I will map out how the future technocrats were trained by the most prominent social and economic psychologists of the past 20 years, to manipulate society via courses directly funded by Jeffrey Epstein.
The Intellectual Divide
In the early seventeenth century, a German Rosicrucian pamphlet mentioned “The Invisible College”. This was a small meeting of noted scholars, which in the early years included the Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle, and the infamous English architect, mathematician, astronomer and physicist, Christopher Wren. This sort of meeting of great minds continued later in the same century with the Republic of Letters which encouraged long-distance letter writing between the intellectual community. This was the intellectual community revolutionising how they communicated, spurred on by simple technological advances in writing tools and increased access to materials. This systematically encouraged and focused boost in intellectual networking gave rise to powerful organisations such as the Royal Society.
While some of these organisations are created as a simple networking tool for certain sectors of the scientific or political elite, others have been made manifest to push an agenda of control over the vast majority of the global population. One man who was inspired by the invisible college of yesteryear was John Brockman. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Brockman set up a comprehensive and distinct modern iteration of these intellectual endeavours which he eventually named “Edge.org”. Brockman was an extremely influential intellectual, who had been the author/editor of 19 books by 1995, which was the same year he published, “The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution”. The latter work is extremely pertinent to this investigation in particular.
Brockman was born in 1941, seven months before America entered World War II. He began his career in 1965, working at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. His mother was a registered nurse, while his father was a well-known flower broker known throughout Boston as the “carnation king”. He grew up as a Jew in an Irish Catholic neighbourhood, where he and his brother Philip regularly got into fights. Philip was a scientist by trade, being of the initial group employed by NASA to work on their space program and later retraining as a laser scientist in the 1970s.
Throughout the 1960s, John Brockman was directly influenced by the composer John Cage, who handed Brockman a copy of a Norbert Wiener book entitled “Cybernetics” during a 1965 New York dinner. According to Brockman, this began his obsession with what he called “the cybernetic idea” while also influencing his desire to create more opportunities for intellectual encounters.
In 1981, John Brockman founded “The Reality Club”, which saw a small group of mostly New York-based intellectuals meet for seminars on scientific topics trending amongst the intellectual Establishment. The Reality Club’s members included some of the greatest minds of the era, some of those who were attempting to push scientific frontiers to the max, such as Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker. Originally, Brockman created the Edge Foundation in 1988 but it was only once the World Wide Web had been properly developed that Edge found its home online. Edge soon became the focus of Brockman’s attention and the Reality Club was eventually reorganised into the Edge Foundation in January 1997.
With the Edge Foundation online, John Brockman began to gather intellectuals. The first Edge meeting took place on 21 December 1996, and included a talk by Richard Dawkins entitled: “Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder“. The scientists involved in the Reality Club, and then Edge, were some of the most sought-after thinkers of the day. The offer of networking with big names was already attracting further scientific celebrities and Edge soon became central to the plans of a certain New York money-man named Jeffrey Epstein.
Such networking wasn’t only successful because the regular Edge attendees were so illustrious and well-known, much of Edge’s popularity was down to John Brockman himself. Howard Rheingold, an American writer and teacher, who specialises in the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media, once said of Brockman:
“John Brockman has an uncanny way of knowing people who know something important and a talent for putting those people together.”
And Rheingold’s assertion was correct, Brockman had embedded himself within the deep state Establishment from the 1960s onwards and, alongside his knack for predicting the future, he was always a successful top-flight interlocutor. As a rule of thumb, Brockman surrounded himself with movers and shakers and this took more of a scientific bent the closer he got to old age. For Brockman to understand which intellectuals he should entice, first he needed to decipher which scientific advancements were most pertinent to our unfolding reality. He wasn’t the only one who craved such knowledge. A vast array of power players could see the obvious benefits of knowing the future that the reigning intellectual elite had already predicted to emerge, and Edge was created to be a vehicle towards such ends.
However, Brockman’s gatherings were designed to be pointedly different from most of the scientific societies of the past. Brockman was looking to create what he termed a “Third Culture” to make scientific endeavour accessible to the wider intellectual community. To understand this, we must first examine Brockman’s reason for using the term “Third Culture”. In a 1959 book by C. P. Snow entitled “The Two Cultures”, the author explained how academics were split into two diverse intellectual groups. The academics within the humanities appeared to have little to no understanding or knowledge of those intellectuals from the traditional natural sciences, and vice versa. Snow’s point was best summarised in this well-quoted part of his thesis:
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
To both Snow and Brockman, the general knowledge gap between social and natural scientists was a clear issue. Where both men saw the two groups as separate and distinct cultural entities, Brockman was intent on creating an alternative culture, where they could synthesise and learn from each other. Although he claimed to have been the first to attempt to bridge this intellectual divide, many organisations had wrestled with the same issue.
Brockman’s intentions were clear, he knew that real power did not reside in one place and that physics, biology and chemistry could only have a significant impact on wider society if their importance were truly understood at the level where they could be implemented into policy. However hard he tried to overcome the divide between intellectuals of these distinctly separate disciplines, Brockman’s Third Culture became more of a mishmash of the elite scientific Establishment. Regardless, his organisation would have more than simple networking benefits for those involved.
When Jeffrey Met Elon
Those who attended Edge from the late 1990s were more than just scientists, essentially they were elite, rock star status, celebrity intellectuals, who had already obtained vast wealth, power and influence. Membership of Edge became inextricably linked with the ability to generate vast wealth. Those directing Edge weren’t looking to fill up stadiums with scientists of every ilk, instead, they wanted to fill up small meeting rooms with the ruling class of the elite scientific circles, and that’s exactly what they did. This gave rise to Edge’s so-called “Billionaires Dinner”.
Most people who have looked into the Epstein case have seen images of Epstein attending a Billionaires Dinner or two, alongside members of his operation such as Sarah Kellen and even some of his known sex-trafficked victims like Cindy Lopez. Many of the attendees at Edge spoke highly of Epstein’s intellect, even after he had been convicted, jailed, and publicly vilified. Steven Pinker was one of those regular attendees of Brockman’s scientific gatherings who was roundly criticised in the media for his lack of regret for associating with Jeffrey Epstein, something of which Bill Gates was also guilty.
However, once Epstein was arrested the second time and the case blew up in the Mainstream Media, many other regular Edge members either dissociated themselves publicly from the infamous money-man or simply refused to comment to the press. Finding direct links between Epstein and the high-profile elites who were proactively distancing themselves from him, was always going to be difficult. Especially as many of those involved can systematically censor the information. Those who were most keen to hide their connections to Jeffrey Epstein are in total control of the major social media and video platforms such as Google, YouTube, Twitter/X, Facebook and Amazon.
Edge was a perfect platform to allow Epstein to network with some of the most important people in science. This includes some of the most influential people responsible for designing the technocratic panopticon taking shape around us. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, could have met Epstein on several occasions. Bezos was based in New York during the early 1990s, where he had been working his way up to becoming the vice president of D. E. Shaw’s hedge fund before he started setting up Amazon. D. E. Shaw’s founder, David Shaw himself, had become an economic policy advisor for the Clinton administration when Mark Middleton and Jeffrey Epstein visited Bill Clinton’s White House 17 times over two years.
Jeff Bezos was also already turning in the same circles of the New York elite as Jeffrey Epstein. Bezos even entered into an online partnership with Sotheby’s during the late 1990s while Mega Group member and Epstein’s main funder Les Wexner was on the board of the auction house. He also shared a love of Formula One racing with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and there were plenty of other opportunities where Bezos could have interacted with Epstein, but it was at Edge where a direct connection would most likely be found. Bezos attended Brockman’s Billionaire Dinners almost religiously and was a regular participant in the courses Edge ran for their elite members.
From the late 90s onwards, almost every top member of the future ruling technocratic Establishment was involved with Edge. Bill Gates of Microsoft was a regular, Sergey Brin of Google was also a stalwart attendee and the presence of Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures should not be understated either. Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, who were also representing Google, were noted at Edge events, alongside Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe and Elon Musk, who was representing Space X and Tesla during the period he was attending Edge.
Elon Musk has managed to remain distant and detached from the Epstein case. There is one photo in particular of Musk alongside Ghislaine Maxwell which has been heavily shared online and is often used as proof of some form of the connection between Musk and Epstein. However, evidentially speaking, a single photo of Musk and Maxwell is pretty inconclusive. This is especially so seeing as Ghislaine Maxwell regularly photo-bombed elites at high-brow events as part of her repertoire. It was also reported by Business Insider that Maxwell asked Musk on that occasion to “destroy the internet”.
We know that Elon Musk had a profile page on Edge.org and we also know that he had attended a few well-documented meetings. It may have been difficult to find concrete evidence that Elon Musk was in the same room as Jeffrey Epstein, but it was not impossible. Epstein and Musk were both at one exclusive Edge event in particular.
Only about 25 people attended the Edge Billionaires Dinner of 2011, an event which took place just after Jeffrey Epstein had been released from prison for his initial conviction. It was revealed in a BuzzFeed News article that Epstein was at the Billionaires Dinner that year. He was even caught in a blurry photo at the event which was also published by Buzz Feed News. However, what the reporters failed to notice in that article is that Elon Musk was actually in the same photo, too. You can see Jeffrey Epstein sitting at the same table as Zack Bogue of Montara Capital Partners, and just 3 metres away from Epstein is Elon Musk. Musk was attending the event alongside his then-wife Talulah Musk. Elon and Talulah had married a year before the event in question and they had divorced a year after.
John Brockman was in attendance alongside his son Max Brockman who was managing Brockman Inc. Nathan Myhrvold, Jeff Bezos and Sergey Brin were also in attendance. Salar Kamangar represented YouTube, reporter David Brooks was there for the New York Times and even musician Peter Gabriel was noted amongst the attendees at the dinner.
Jeffrey Epstein had become significantly more low profile after his prison term, so he’s not officially listed as an attendee at the event, but he was there, as we can see from one blurry photo taken at the dinner by Nathan Myhrvold and published on Edge.org. Although this photo shows Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein at the same Edge event, there was more to find. Tracing Elon Musk’s involvement with Edge while it was almost fully funded by Jeffrey Epstein leads us to a much more significant and worrying course: the standardisation of government-sponsored psychological operations to systematically manipulate an unwitting public.
Elon Musk’s Training in Psychological Manipulation Funded by Epstein
The psychological manipulation of the masses via various intelligence-linked programs is well-documented. The officially sanctioned, government-led programming of the general population is not a conspiracy theory, it has become accepted by many as a mainstream method to enact control. Such abhorrent and underhand manipulation used to be resigned to the realm of secretive and subversive intelligence programs or campaigns run by major PR companies, but that changed abruptly once Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein took their brand of behavioural economics on the road.
It was the Democratic Party under Barack Obama that first welcomed the creators of what were eventually termed “nudge units” into the White House. This led to government-attached units set up to subtly “nudge” people into changing their behaviour on behalf of those who wish to control the future direction of society. In the United Kingdom, Richard Thaler also found a friend in David Cameron and his Conservative Party administration, and they soon created what was termed the behavioural insight unit in the United Kingdom.
The British Governments during this period were already ahead of Thaler in many regards. In 2004, Tony Blair’s New Labour produced a paper entitled: “Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: the state of knowledge and its implications for public policy”. Within this fascinating example of the Government overstepping what may be considered appropriate to the electorate, part of the paper “reviews the growing body of knowledge about alternative, and perhaps more subtle, ways in which government might affect personal behaviour.” The paper concludes that the use of behavioural change would be positive for government policy, stating:
“Looking to the future there is an evident need to strengthen our theoretical and empirical understanding of what drives behaviour and behavioural change. Just as important will be the wider testing out of policy tools to develop a more sophisticated toolkit for policy-makers. Policy should not simply proclaim personal responsibility or blame, but needs to be shaped around the ways in which people actually think and feel, and the social and psychological forces that influence behaviour.”
It wasn’t only the Tory government which was cooing at Richard Thaler. In a Guardian article from 12 July 2008, entitled: “From Obama to Cameron, why do so many politicians want a piece of Richard Thaler?”, New Labour’s Richard Reeves is also noted as desperate to get Thaler aboard, with Aditya Chakrabortty writing:
“”There was a time when Labour would have been all over Thaler and Downing Street would have pulled him in for a chat. Now, it’s the other side that are showing they are open to new ideas,” says former government adviser Richard Reeves. “Sadly, that tells you where the intellectual energy is in British politics.” Reeves has taken it upon himself to organise a dinner next Tuesday with Thaler and some government advisers and thinktankers from the centre left.”
After Richard Thaler, described as “the father of behavioural economics”, published his book in 2008, entitled: “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”, those who wanted to manipulate people’s behaviour began to flock to him. It wasn’t only Cameron and Obama who understood how the study of behavioural economics could be applied generally to change the behaviour of the general population. This was the perfect tool to systematically manufacture consent amongst the voting population and, if applied industrially, had the potential to change the entire world.
Brockman and Epstein saw many benefits in Thaler’s teachings. They had certain aspects of total technological control covered; they had the ear of many world leaders, they had introduced the Third Way politics of the future into the public arena, with its creator Anthony Giddens also being involved in Edge; but they were yet to figure out how to manufacture the consent of the voting population efficiently. This was where Thaler’s newly created strain of behavioural economics came into play. Behavioural economics was the Establishment’s best hope for achieving change amongst regular people, most importantly, without those targeted realising how or why they were being manipulated.
In 2008, Thaler was an attendee at the San Francisco dinner held by Edge, but this wouldn’t be his only involvement with Brockman and Epstein’s organisation. Thaler also went to Edge specifically to train an extremely select group of Edge members in his newly developed branch of psychological operations. In October 2008, Edge hosted a course, funded by Jeffrey Epstein, which focused on this new form of behavioural science. Richard Thaler and Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed the six-part course themselves.
This course was designed to be a “master class” something which the Edge website claimed was “the most recent iteration of Edge’s development,” and had begun the previous year. The first Edge master class of 2008 was called: “Libertarian Paternalism: Why it is Impossible Not to Nudge”, while the second in the master class series was entitled: “Improving Choices with Machine Readable Disclosure”.
The second part of the Edge Master Class saw only eight Edge members in attendance: Jeff Bezos, Nathan Myhrvold, Salar Kamangar, Daniel Kahneman, Danny Hilis, Paul Romer, Elon Musk and Sean Parker, while the third part also saw George Dyson and France LeClerc join the group. This wasn’t a random group of thinkers, these were some of the most powerful movers and shakers in the digital world. This Edge event saw the leading experts of behavioural economics training the very top echelons of Google, Amazon, YouTube, Space X, Intellectual Ventures, Facebook and Peter Thiel’s Founder Fund.
Alongside Thaler and Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman is one of the leading experts in not only behavioural economics but also cognitive psychology and the processes behind judgement and decision-making. Thaler and Kahneman started working together in the 1970s when Thaler arrived at Stanford. Kahneman also had a close business relationship with Richard Thaler by sitting on the board of Fuller and Thaler Asset Management, Inc.
The attendees of this Edge Master Class would soon become the most powerful people in the world, more powerful than any president, prime minister or king. Paul Romer is an American economist and policy entrepreneur, who later became Chief Economist for the World Bank in 2016 and eventually shared a Nobel Prize in Economics alongside William Nordhaus. The year before the Edge event in question, Salar Kamangar replaced the founder of YouTube, Chad Hurley, as CEO of YouTube and, in February 2014, he left the company. Kamangar was replaced as CEO at YouTube by another staunch Edge regular, Susan Wojcicki.
Danny Hillis had previously worked at Disney and had co-founded Applied Minds, but by this time he had founded Metaweb Technologies which was later acquired by Google. The infamous creator of Napster, Sean Parker, was already invested in Facebook by this point. However, maybe more notably, Parker had become a managing partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund. The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, was already a powerful mover and shaker by 2008, while Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures controlled almost 70,000 patents and patents pending at its peak.
The third Jeffrey Epstein-funded Master Class in the series which Elon Musk attended was entitled: “The Psychology of Scarcity”, and it begins with a Sendhil Mullainathan quote that suggested they were imagining how to benefit from an impoverished population, stating:
“Let’s put aside poverty alleviation for a second, and let’s ask, “Is there something intrinsic to poverty that has value and that is worth studying in and of itself?” One of the reasons that is the case is that, purely aside from magic bullets, we need to understand are there unifying principles under conditions of scarcity that can help us understand behavior and to craft intervention. If we feel that conditions of scarcity evoke certain psychology, then that, not to mention pure scientific interest, will affect a vast majority of interventions. It’s an important and old question.”
The United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insight’s team have since been used to coerce the population during the coronavirus pandemic with the Nudge Unit coordinating closely with the Department of Health and Social Care in “crafting the government response”. The Institute for Government noted the Nudge Unit’s “use of “disgust” as an incentive to wash hands and the suggestion of singing Happy Birthday to ensure hands are washed for the requisite 20 seconds.”
Regardless of how powerful the majority of the attendees of Richard Thaler’s Master Class in behavioural psychology were, Elon Musk was the real rising star in this room. Officially, Musk represented Space X and Tesla, but his growing business portfolio, alongside his wealth, power and influence, has increased exponentially ever since.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he made his intentions for the future direction of the app clear. Musk intends to turn X.com into the Western equivalent of WeChat, an everything app which will not only be the biggest social media platform in the world, but will also be a payment platform from where you’ll be able to manage your money, bills, shopping, and much more. The development of X is fundamentally a prescient step towards what Musk perceives as an inevitable new paradigm. The psychological manipulation of the public via powerful social media platforms won’t only be used to reap potential economic benefits for those in control of sites like X, Facebook, or Google, they will be used by the government to sway popular opinion, too. So, as Elon Musk crosses the proverbial Rubicon from being someone who is in direct control of a platform which has the potential to create mass social change, onto Government, big questions must be asked.
Exacting Behavioural Change
In this article, I will attempt to briefly describe the breadth of what is termed “behavioural economics”, but once you begin researching this subject one thing becomes extremely clear—everything we do, every action we take, and every decision we make is encompassed by behavioural economics.
It’s not simply a case of nudging people’s behaviour concerning purchases or credit cards, you can use these techniques to create a range of behavioural changes in people outside of economics, too. To a behavioural economist, people’s actions are mappable. Everyone is driven by a mental model, and altering their mental models will, in turn, change their behaviour by giving their targets specific stimuli designed to nudge them into choosing an alternative option.
During the third class of the 2008 Edge course, Mullainathan describes it like this:
“It’s about how there’s a large set of programs where we’re trying to encourage behavioral change in some form, and one of the underlying themes that emerges that unifies them is can we effectively elicit the mental model people operate with and then use that to then create behavioral change. It’s a structured way to think about the behavioral change literature.”
One of the aforementioned attendees Daniel Kahneman, a leading expert in cognitive psychology and the processes behind judgement and decision-making, recognised the psychological potential of this technology, stating on Edge:
“What we’re saying is that there is a technology emerging from behavioral economics. It’s not only an abstract thing. You can do things with it. We are just at the beginning. I thought that the input of psychology into behavioral economics was done. But hearing Sendhil was very encouraging because there was a lot of new psychology there. That conversation is continuing and it looks to me as if that conversation is going to go forward. It’s pretty intuitive, based on research, good theory, and important.”
Although we believe ourselves to be somewhat discerning when making tough decisions, human behaviour is very predictable and, ergo, easy to manipulate. A lot of behavioural economics is data-driven, it’s as simple as: if we are confronted with our data output in a certain way, we will often choose to make different decisions. The more information they have about you, the more they can design their “nudges” to best sway your behaviour, whether you want them to or not. And that is the crux of behavioural economics, the more information they have about you, the easier it is to manipulate you into making certain decisions.
When Thaler and Sunstein officially went on the road in 2008 to convince people of Nudge theory, they weren’t shy about it’s potential to overstep previously unspoken red lines. In a Boston Globe article on 2 March 2008, written by Drake Bennett, entitled: “When Shove Comes to Push”, Bennett states:
“Thaler, Sunstein, and other similar-minded thinkers argue that this approach has a panoply of applications: Besides improving people’s financial and energy habits, it could restructure health insurance and medical care. In the social realm, some economists are experimenting with contracts to get people to lose weight; in their book, Thaler and Sunstein even suggest changes to the marriage contract.”
After they had released Nudge, Thaler and Sunstein wrote articles in several papers setting out their stall. In the Chicago Tribune on 6 April 2008, Thaler and Sunstein wrote an article entitled: “A Gentle Prod to Go Green”, the behavioural tinkerers wrote:
“Behavioral economics is an exciting new field that combines standard economics with an understanding of human psychology. From the standpoint of behavioral economics, it is important to focus on both the economic and the psychological aspects of the climate change problem. The economic aspect has to do with people’s incentives. Neither big companies nor individual consumers are required to pay their full share of the environmental costs they impose on everyone else.”
In reality, within behavioural economics as practiced by Thaler and Sunstein, the general public is unwittingly convinced to accept the final bill for whatever policies those in power wish to enact. Whenever the politicians in power think that they know better than everyone else, they are free to systematically manipulate the general public via subversive psychological methods. In fact, much of Thaler and Sunstein’s teachings interfere unduly with personal choice, the very definition of the “nanny state”.
Thaler and Sunstein referred to their branch of psychology as “libertarian paternalism” and they saw the desire to nudge as a natural part of a capitalist system. In an article written by Thaler an Sunstein for the Los Angeles Times on 2 April 2008, entitled: “Designing Better Choices”, it states:
“We find ourselves these days mired in political battles that pit laissez-faire capitalism, with it’s reliance on unrestricted free markets, against heavily regulated capitalism, which favours government mandates and bans in an effort to ensure “good” outcomes. But this opposition is false and misleading. Any system of free markets will include some kind of choice architecture, and that means libertarian paternalism can offer a real “third way” around the battleground.”
However, to make this “third way” viable, Thaler and Sunstein have not only had to redefine “psyops” as “behavioural economics”, they have also redefined some “humans” as something they call “Econs”. These are predictable, rational actors whose behaviour is extremely influenced by sudden economic change. Thaler and Sunstein mention Econs a lot during Nudge, separating them from the humans who require nudging:
“Econs respond primarily to incentives. If the government taxes candy, they will buy less candy, but they are not influenced by such “irrelevant” factors as the order in which options are displayed. Humans respond to incentives too, but they are also influenced by nudges. By properly deploying both incentives and nudges we can improve people’s lives, and help solve many of society’s major problems. And we can do so while still insisting on everyone’s freedom to choose.”
It is clear that Thaler and Sunstein attempt to redefine what it means to be human. For them, humans need to be cajoled to make them act as the ruling class would like them to act. They clearly believe that humans would make worse decisions than Econs if they were left to their own devices but, in turn, that is based on the presupposition that the government always makes better decisions than the general population.
It’s true that some of the reasons why humans make poor decisions is due to a lack of specific information. However, like with the psychology of scarcity in relation to poverty, the unspoken issue here is actually concerning the psychology of scarcity concerning information. If everyone were given access to all the information from the start, then people would make better choices about who they were governed by and how society is constructed or, in this case, constricted. The digital panopticon is fuelled by the control of information. As with Bentham’s design of a hypothetical panopticon prison, in Thaler’s world, the state has access to all the information they require to nudge us while the general public is denied accurate information systematically. This manufactured information scarcity is not only a tool which the government uses to coerce our behaviour and decision-making, it has also become a commonly used tool of the biggest social media organisations and search engines.
Musk now owns one of the biggest social media platforms in the world and the amount of data his company can harvest about each user is excessive. They know what you watch, what you like, what you share, your private messages, and a growing selection of individual data sets which will allow them to build mental models of each individual. At the same time, Peter Thiel’s Palantir is also growing its datasets on individuals, while YouTube, Facebook, Amazon and Google are doing alike. These organisations are blatantly guilty of systematically controlling, hiding and censoring information from their users.
Look Who’s Nudging Now!
Behavioural nudge units are not anything new. But, conventionally, those who would use our psychology against us have tended to act from the shadowy realm of clandestine intelligence operations, with their actions regarded as underhand by most. However, since Richard Thaler came on the scene, this murky branch of behavioural psychology has been rebranded as an everyday tool ready to be utilised by those who seek to govern.
The act of nudging behaviour en masse is a form of psychological manipulation that is already being used by our military and police forces to influence people’s emotions, beliefs and behaviour. The term “psyops” is being rebranded as “nudging”, allowing it to be slowly but surely adopted by governments worldwide as a legitimate way to control the actions of the global population, and it isn’t only governments that will be enthusiastically adopting this tried and tested technique. The most effective way to use such psychological manipulation will be online, and it will be our personalised datasets that will be used to design how best to nudge us individually.
There is no doubt that various online companies will use this technology to control more than just what we purchase. For this reason, it shouldn’t be surprising that Bezos, Musk, Brin and their ilk have been trained in mass behavioural psychology. What should be much more of a surprise is that they were learning such techniques via a course funded by an elite child trafficking intelligence asset like Jeffrey Epstein. It’s hard to surprise most onlookers nowadays, partly because we have already entered the era of fifth-generation warfare and that may be why such a pernicious science is being so readily welcomed by governments and technocrats worldwide.
It is no coincidence that behavioural economics is emerging now, just as a centralised digital panopticon takes shape around us, brought to fruition by the likes of Thiel, Musk, Gates, Bezos and Brin. Elon Musk may be the wealthiest and most powerful person on Earth and, because of his investments, his wealth will likely increase at an exponential rate. Many of Musk’s supporters are fanatical, many of them idolise him, while some of that energy is synthetically driven by technology which uses focused behavioural nudging to improve Musk’s PR image. For the potential future technocratic leaders to create the world of tomorrow, a step towards governance is required, and Musk is now making his move.
We have seen a sudden lurch towards technocracy during the 2024 election, signalled by J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk becoming major political players and getting one step closer to being part of the government.
Another of Epstein’s associates who I’ve covered extensively has also become a colleague of Elon Musk recently, Nicole Junkermann. The German entrepreneur was invested in the Israeli Unit 8200 start-up company Carbyne911 alongside Jeffrey Epstein, Peter Thiel and former Israeli PM Ehud Barak. Junkermann became part of Space X after selling her Swarm satellite company to Musk’s Starlink. As well as her business links with Epstein, Nicole Junkermann had previously ridden on the Lolita Express on two separate occasions, which included a secretive meeting in the UK reportedly with two US senators at Wexner’s Foxcote House.
For almost a century, Technocracy Inc. has been on the rise. Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman, was a director of Technocracy Incorporated which, like the Edge Foundation, was originally founded in New York. Technocracy Incorporated was created in the 1930s and, either ironically or presciently, politicians and members of political parties were not permitted to become members. Even though they barred politicians, at the same time the organisation desired a radical restructuring of political, social and economic life in Canada, something which led to them becoming labelled as subversive to the war effort and banned during World War II. Regardless, as technological sophistication has increased, so has its ability to mould society.
What we’re currently seeing is an attempt to create a Third Culture of sorts. There may be no better example of an effort to synthesise social science and formal science than technocrats like Elon Musk and J.D. Vance taking control of the levers of political power. The Third Culture has been bubbling away for a long time. In the era of Musk’s grandfather, it had been inconceivable that political science and formal science could work together. Snow had recognised the dilemma and he was the first to properly define the communication issues between the humanities and the natural sciences. Brockman took that a step further and decided, as many others who are engrossed by a purely binary conundrum do, that there could be a potential third way to go about things.
The Third Culture is very much like Third Way politics. The practitioners of Third Way politics purge the extremities of their party to gain power. However, once in power, the claim that the solutions reside in the centre of politics is soon discovered to be illusory. In relation, the Third Culture can only be attempted by those who believe they can bridge the gap between a divide that can never be connected. If you design the social sciences based on practical science then you’ll soon discover that humaneness is inextricably lost. That’s what a world designed by rational scientists looks like, it’s authoritarian, it knows best, and, if it can’t control us with physics, then it’ll control us physically. The Third Culture is an attempt to deny humanity, or at least the humanities.
Third Way politics pushes perpetual warfare, austerity and poverty upon us, nudging us into the arms of an unforgiving and unethical form of governance. In the future, the technocrats will be in charge whether you like it or not. They will be the chosen few who will program the algorithms that drive every part of our society. In reality, a society where humans relinquish control over to technological science itself is the real Third Culture to come.
There are many questions that arise from studying these outrageously subversive technocrats, but one of the most important questions may be: What is Edge?
This is an organisation where the technocratic rulers of the here and now designed our future bit by bit. Edge is where the people in charge of almost all major parts of the online world are trained. Sergey Brin, trained in course after course at Edge. Jeff Bezos, trained in course after course at Edge. Nathan Myhrvold, Salar Kamangar, Elon Musk, all attended an elite organisation where everyone involved is now in complete control of our existence.
Should we not point at these events and exclaim that Edge could be a function of a grander conspiracy? What is to stop someone from positing that the people involved in Edge are designing not only our systems, our politics, our poverty, but even our very culture?
While we look at the people who took part in these Jeffrey Epstein-funded events as individuals, it states quite clearly that they were representing their companies at the highest levels. We shouldn’t lose sight of the implications of this fact. It is not only individuals conspiring together at Edge, it’s Google, YouTube, Amazon, Twitter/X, Thiel’s Founders Fund, Facebook, Tesla, and Space X. It was these giant corporations which were central to figuring out something very fundamental: How to control the population during the digital age. And all of those individuals, as well as the companies they represented, should have to answer for being part of a clear conspiracy.
As voters in a democracy, we should also be asking some pertinent questions in particular: Do we want a government which does what we say, or do we want a government which wants us to do what they say?
If you can be systematically manipulated by powerful social media platforms, should those who own such platforms be allowed to govern us politically, too?
And, most importantly: Are we really free?
Elon Musk is a manufactured persona, a hundred years in the making, and you should not view him through a memetic lens. He wields tangible levels of power, he has extremely questionable associations with the deep state apparatus, and he has the capability to sway people’s opinions by using subversive and unseen means.
I can understand why people follow him, I can see what they see. The only difference between a supporter of Elon Musk and I, is information and data. I am making my decision because I have extra information and data about Elon Musk, whereas Musk’s supporters are often making their decisions because Elon Musk’s platform has extra information and data about them, and it’s being used to nudge them into becoming true believers.
They are using our own information and data against us, as a psychological weapon. Whether you accept it or not, we are in a state of psychological warfare right now.
The Technocrats are not our friends, they have an agenda: To perpetually nudge us towards their preferred form of multipolar Globalism without us noticing, leading us to the doors of our prison cells within their carefully curated digital panopticon.
Source: Newspaste
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