New World Order Rising?
Thoughts on the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development

by Steven Yates

Having begun on August 26 and continuing on through September 4, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa is what may be the largest confab the United Nations has ever sponsored. WSSD commemorates the ten-year anniversary of the adoption of Agenda 21 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil back in 1992. Over 100 world leaders, thousands of delegates, CEOs, representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other dignitaries and elites – over 20,000 people in all – have descended on the Sandton Convention Center in South Africa’s largest city. Moreover, as WSSD has approached the American public has been treated to a stready stream of new articles and so-called studies on how, if we do not change our ways and adopt "sustainable" behaviors and patterns of economic growth, environmental disaster (global warming, deforestation, extinction of species, etc.) is right around the corner. So the time has come to stop talking about Agenda 21 and take action.

What, exactly, is Agenda 21?

During the early 1990s a new set of terms began creeping into our lexicon; in addition to sustainable development or sustainable communities they included our global village, biodiversity, smart growth, habitats, urban boundaries, wildlife conservation zones, open space areas and many others. Many of the new terms seemed to involve local issues involving urban and suburban planning in one way or another; others (such as lifelong learning) were turning up in edu-speak; others (e.g., public-private partnerships) spilled over into business and still others (e.g., workforce development) seemed to cut across more than one area. Few Americans realized that the source of the new vocabulary words was the UN. Most have never heard of Agenda 21. They certainly aren’t going to learn of it from Dan Rather. This is a shame, because after the Bible and the Koran, Agenda 21 may be the most influential document in the world right now. It is definitely in the top five.

Agenda 21 is the bible of the sustainable development movement. A horribly written, longwinded tract consisting of 40 chapters of various lengths covering everything from land, water and waste management to urban planning to biotechnology, it purports to offer a comprehensive new paradigm for life on planet Earth. The basic idea behind sustainable development was spelled out back in 1987 by the little-known Brundtland Commission. The Bruntland Commission definition: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This innocent sounding phrase came to carry with it the implication that there are too many people living and working in an environment of finite resources to permit "unsustainable" economic freedoms. Behind the idea of sustainable development is the idea that we have a choice: adopt "voluntary" central planning (with the UN at the helm) to integrate economics and ecology within a globalist perspective or face ecological disaster a few decades down the pike. The United States has been a thorn in the UN’s side all along. Although President Bush has committed billions to every area the UN wants and committed the U.S. to involvement in 14 "partnerships," Uncle Sam still doesn’t give the UN as much money as the globalist bureaucrats want, and opposes such things as global taxation and the erosion of national sovereignty.

If the purpose of the Rio Summit was to introduce sustainable development to the world, WSSD’s purpose is to call for action. According to Nitin Desai, Secretary-General of WSSD, writing in the UN’s Global Challenge, Global Opportunity: Trends in Sustainable Development, "[s]ustainable development, as a complex process with many interacting factors, requires the participation of all members of society, as public policy makers, producers, consumers, scientists, engineers, educators, communicators, community activists and voters." Accordingly, WSSD has convened with five items on its agenda: water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity. These five have generated a new acronym: WEHAB (we inhabit the Earth – get it?). The WEHAB Working Group released five Framework for Action papers, one for each problem area. I had a look at just one: the Framework for Action on Health and the Environment. It offers some interesting insights into how globalist bureaucrats think.

Their first premise is Principle 1 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: "Human beings … are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature." The authors then draw on the idea that understanding "the close relationship between health, the environment and development" is the key to improving health, for "the environment can also be a profound source of ill health for many of the world’s people. At least a quarter of the global burden of disease may be attributable to poor environmental conditions." By poor environmental conditions is meant a lack of clean water, indoor air pollution, contaminated food, unhealthy working conditions and chemical contaminations. Much of what follows is an account of the various diseases and conditions to which populations in the "developing world" are prone: HIV / AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition, pregnancy-related complications and so on. A lot of connections are drawn here, including to lack of basic education, lack of sanitation and lack of access to health services.

So what are the authors proposing? I got a sense of reading the work of minds chronically out of focus. There are repeated references to "stronger partnerships," "new technologies," "better environmental management," and "human resource development" – more telltale buzzwords to add to those above. There are criticisms of the "insufficient political commitment, inadequate human resources, difficulty in achieving intersectoral action for health and insufficient funding." There are calls for "a major intensification of effort" and a "sustainable and integrated approach to poverty reduction and environmental improvement that reaches the poorest, most marginalized and most displaced individuals." There are, finally, all the obligatory references to "promoting gender equality" and "incorporat[ing] the education and empowerment of women."

Once one cuts through the bureaucratese, it is clear that we are looking at something that is only possible (1) if implemented by large-scale interventions in every areas of the local economy and in people’s lives, involving a great deal of coordination and centralization, and (2) if funded by vast amounts of money from outside, since the economies of the nations we are talking about – mostly in Africa – are dysfunctional. This particular document does not openly call for a global tax. The closest it comes is to state that "Political commitment at all levels of government is clearly a prerequisite for action," meaning "unprecedented resources and global alliances to address health threats in a broader development framework." This "massive effort … will require substantially increased funding …" This means "Intensified efforts are needed to mobilize resources through higher allocations from national budgetary resources, increases in bilateral and multilateral assistance …" A figure of $66 billion a year in U.S. dollars is mentioned, "about half of which comes from donors." Draw your own conclusions.

One gets something more definite from the NGO Statement at the European and North American Prepcom, held almost a year ago as one of the preliminaries for WSSD. At this meeting NGOs called for a "Global Deal" involving the following: equity ("eradicating poverty through equitable and sustainable access to resources"), rights ("securing environmental and social rights"), limits ("reduction of resource use to within sustainable limits"), justice ("recognition of ecological debts and cancellation of financial debts"), democracy ("ensuring access to information and public participation") and ethics ("rethinking the values and principles that guide human behavior"). Here it comes:

How to finance this?

• Initiate negotiations toward development of mechanisms to ensure financial markets contribute to sustainable development, such as the Tobin tax;
• Recognize controls on the movement of capital as a legitimate instrument to ensure sustainable development; and
• Agree [to?] Global rules governing publicly financed investment, eg, international financial institutions and export credit agencies to ensure it is tested against sustainable development criteria.

If this is not a call for an edifice of global law to be enforced by global government and financed by eventual global taxation, I cannot imagine what would count as such. The globalist bureaucrats prefer the term governance, of course. Governance involves partnerships. Partnerships are how the encirclement of controls envelops businesses and business organizations, hundreds of which have sent representatives to WSSD.

Much sustainable-development writing has a flavor of localism about it, in the sense that its authors appear to want to involve local groups and average citizens, and encourage "voluntary" action. "Decisions should be made closest to those affected, wherever appropriate" – which sounds okay until we ask who determines what is or is not "appropriate." "It is our view that law and policy frameworks at higher levels of government should be better focused to enable local action. This requires a strengthening of local authorities and decision making structures." Does this mean local sovereignty or micromanagement? The problem with the former is that the local people might not do what the globalists want, including ensuring "that human rights include the right to a favourable and healthy environment including social rights and equitable access to resources;…" There is no means of accomplishing this without control from the center, especially given the authors’ firm conviction that "the idea that access to markets will on its own bring poor communities out of poverty is wrong" [emphasis theirs].

There are two things that greatly sadden me about all this. (1) Not all of the issues being discussed at WSSD are unfounded or illegitimate. It is true enough that we cannot foul our own nest, as it were, without eventually paying the consequences. Moreover, no reasonable person can look at the situation in many impoverished and dysfunctional societies without a sense that something can be done to improve the lives of the people living there. (2) Agenda 21 isn’t the answer, however. Not in either case. One gets a sense of "calls for action" that will have no rational basis and do more harm than good. One of the oft-repeated premises of WSSD is that the "developed" countries (read: the U.S., primarily, but also Western Europe) represent 20 percent of the world’s population but consume 80 percent of the world’s resources, and that this is "unsustainable." Sustainability-activists, UN bureaucrats and "developing world" politicians propose huge transfers of funds ranging from out-and-out government grants to private investments of resources and technology, under the assumption that this will reduce and eventually eliminate poverty. They demonstrate no grasp of where wealth comes from or why a program of massive redistribution of wealth will not work. As it undermines incentives to create wealth in the "developed" world, the kinds of proposals being floated at WSSD – and being endorsed by our own leftist politicians – would result in lower standards of living here and guarantee eventual worldwide poverty as there is less and less wealth to redistribute. Nor is there the slightest evidence that global centralization of power in a body such as the UN will do anything to protect the environment. The evidence points in the other direction: the less centralization, the better. When the Soviet Union collapsed and U.S. observers saw Russian rivers and streams for the first time they were dismayed at the pollution. They found tracts of land the size of Massachusetts that were uninhabitable. Americans have not been polluters at all by comparison; but the U.S. has nurtured a powerful and very radical environmentalism that has been incorporated wholesale into the sustainable development movement.

Few Americans have any inkling of the degree to which this movement has insinuated its way into our lives – including at the local level. The changing vocabulary of city and community planning considered at the outset ought to provide a few clues; city newspapers endorse the plans and throw around such terms as if their meaning were straightforward. They generally do not mention the UN. There are thousands of documents on the Web that promote sustainable development or discuss its role in one community plan or another; one has to do a very focused Internet search to find the relative handful of sites that criticize the idea.

The emphasis on nurturing change-agents at the local level should be no more surprising than the omission of reference to the UN, if we think about it. Globalists want to encourage as many people as possible to "think globally and act locally," as the late-60s slogan went. They want to alter a community’s infrastructure to bring it into line with the global-government agenda without drawing attention to themselves or their involvement. Thus in their instruction manuals (but not their press releases) we find local versions of Agenda 21 – called in Europe Local Agenda 21 (LA21) and a version aimed squarely at Americans called Communities 21. Let us pass the reins of the discussion into the hands of an organization called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), a UN partner. ICLEI bills itself as "the international environmental agency for local governments. Its mission is to build and serve a worldwide movement of local governments to achieve tangible improvements in global environmental and sustainable development conditions through cumulative local actions." The organization claims to promote "decentralized cooperation" between its members. But it is entirely beholden to Agenda 21, drawing its impetus from Agenda 21’s Chapter 28 which focuses on local initiatives. Here is the crucial statement, reproduced on the ICLEI website almost like a Biblical quotation:

You read that right. Versions of Communities 21 now reach from the change-agents all the way down into private households in many American cities and towns as the sustainability movement spreads. The change-agents’ aim is to bring entire communities into alignment with globalist goals, using whatever techniques of manipulation and behavior modification are necessary. ICLEI’s U.S. branch, based in Berkeley, Calif. (where else?), published a very detailed Local Government Handbook: essentially a guide for sustainability change-agents along the lines of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals on how to infiltrate towns and communities, win the support of local politicians, local media, business leaders, organizations such as the local Chamber of Commerce, other community leaders including ministers, and win as much support as possible from ordinary citizens by virtue of the bandwagon effect.

Reading this document is an experience in itself. The sustainable development movement has generated its own brand of change-agent psychobabble, full of phraseology that sounds wonderful if you don’t read between the lines. There are linguistic products such as the following:

Note the requires and the must be developed in there. Such soft-law imperatives ("We must…" "Communities have to…" "Local authorities are called upon to…" "Citizens will be required to," etc.) permeate sustainability-speak, and you might miss them if you are not looking for them. There is no indication that sustainability development as a whole is the sort of thing that ought to be voted on. Indeed, the Communities 21 model would transfer authority from elected officials and autonomy from businesses as sustainability bureaucrats slowly assumed the reins of power and began implementing an agenda established thousands of miles away. Communities 21 calls for such things as listing all the community resources in a "sustainability inventory," articulating a "vision statement," developing goals, outlining actions and establishing timetables. These might include such events as an "annual sustainability day" to promote the activities to the general public in a way calculated to entertain and generate enthusiasm – but there are very few specifics on what citizens are being asked to do. What they eventually will have to do goes beyond recycling cans and using bicycle trails. It would be easy for the unwary reader to forget that he is reading a Gramscian campaign of infiltration, a "march through institutions" of all sorts with the purpose being to bring a population regarded as little more than sheep under control – using focus groups, methods of generating consensus and eliminating opposition such as the Delphi Technique, and enough persuasion through the media, workshops, etc., so that as many citizens as possible will cooperate willingly in the transformation of their cities and communities to a socialist feudal order. That claims on behalf of "citizen participation" might be bogus is strongly suggested by reports such as that "1,800 people" were involved in the planning that has gone into Region 2020, the globalist master plan for central Alabama being developed out of Birmingham. Can anyone in his right mind believe that 1,800 people in such a group are going to participate directly in anything, much less reach a consensus?

There is one mention in the Handbook, at the beginning, of the UN’s role. What it says is in plain English:

I ask again: is this or is this not a mandate of global control, something that could lead nowhere except to global government – otherwise known as the New World Order – in which the content of education, the availability of jobs, the use of natural resources, etc., would all be strictly monitored and controlled by sustainability bureaucrats. Moreover, the bureaucrats will have applied what is probably their most important learning experience of the past century, which is that really determined socialists can accomplish far more through infiltration, manipulation through distortion of language and behavior modification than they can through open displays of force. However, there can be no doubt that what cannot be accomplished through these methods leading to "voluntary" cooperation will be accomplished by legislative force. There is, again, plenty of fine print you might miss if you are not reading closely: "[A sustainable community] encourages environmental stewardship among businesses through regulatory incentives." The last time I checked, regulatory meant controlling economic action through force of law.

Dozens if not hundreds of cities and towns of various sizes have already allowed themselves to become guinea pigs for this agenda. The Local Government Handbook is replete with examples, and references still others with URLs. The reader is led to believe that the process of reshaping America’s smaller communities for the better is already underway. But let’s make no mistake about the aim of this agenda: it is to lead millions of ordinary people to submit willingly to globalist micromanagement in the name of saving the environment from destruction at the hands of unplanned and therefore "unsustainable" actions on the part of free persons. For all practical purposes, we could remove every usage of the word sustainable and replace it with micromanaged.

Is there direct evidence to support this negative interpretation of sustainable development? Consider the effects of the sustainable development movement on the town of Pattonsburg, Missouri. In 1993 – in the early years of the sustainable development movement – the town suffered from a devastating flood. Sustainability activists came to the rescue. A New Pattonsburg was built. Residents found themselves living under a few new legally binding mandates:

Also discussed were eight-pages of Architectural Standards related to external walls, building elements, windows and doors, roofs, gardens and landscape – covered under specific categories of materials, configuration and techniques. There were a couple of items classified as miscellaneous: "Railings of steel or wrought iron shall be painted black."

That was in 1993! Today the micromanagement is on a much larger scale. Consider the 98-page plan for a "Progressive Pell City," Pell City, Alabama:

• Homes on lots larger than 3 acres will comprise 20.5 percent of the town;
• Residences on lots of 0.3 to 3 acres, 41.7 percent;
• Garden homes, townhouses and apartments, 5.8 percent;
• Manufactured housing, 2 percent;
• Commercial and office building, 9.7 percent;
• Industrial complexes, 7.1 percent;
• Agriculture and open space, 8.5 percent;
• Parks and greenways, 3.4 percent;
• Civic buildings, 1.3 percent.

There is not a word in either case about private ownership of anything; the master planners have, instead, developed what begins to look more and more like a plan of population control.

These are just two examples. There are plenty of others – every state in the U.S. is being affected in one way or another by the sustainable development movement.

In the end, however, the kinds of global wealth redistribution, central planning and population control being promoted at huge globalist confabs like WSSD are what will prove unsustainable in the long run. The meager handful of critics of WSSD (such as Joan Veon, Chuck Morse and Ilana Mercer) have observed a distinct communist streak running through the UN agenda – with environmental issues having replaced exploitation of workers as the primary weapon against "capitalism." This, too, should really be no surprise; socialists founded the UN back in the 1940s, after all. Yesterday we had reds; today we have greens. The lack of understanding of basic economic law that has undermined every attempt to "build socialism" remains. Genuine understanding of economic law would reveal why the "developed" world has succeeded and why the "developing" world continues to struggle with poverty and misery. What would lead, e.g., the peoples of Africa out of poverty and misery?

One place to start would be to get rid of thugs like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and of the idea that "black majority rule" is in some sense progress. Whether anyone likes it or not, when these nations were under the yoke of European whites they were relatively prosperous with far lower crime rates; now, ruled by blacks, their standards of living have spiraled downwards as crime and barbarism have spiraled upwards; whites have fled in droves, sometimes in fear for their lives. Europeans developed an understanding of economic law and the role of private property rights; Africans did not. One of the reasons for the lack of genuine opportunities in Africa is that no one, black or white, will live and invest resources in a place where he has to wonder if he will make it home alive, if his family will be safe while he is at work, or if his business will still be standing the next morning.

A good second step would be to get rid of the resentment-driven Marxist division of the world into "victims" and "oppressors," which reappears in UN-speak as the contrast between "developed" and "developing" nations along with the idea that the "developed" world grew prosperous by exploiting the "developing" world. There is a distinct sense that the massive transfers of wealth and resources being called for by "developing" world politicians and activists are regarded as payback – a form of reparations for centuries of exploitation and apartheid. A third step would be something I cannot foresee the UN ever doing (since it would mean the end of its very raison d’etre): relinquishing the idea that central planning either has or ever can bring about anything except diminished living standards and eventual totalitarianism – regardless of whether we call it that or just go on using the word governance.

Of course, this is looking at things from an ends-means perspective. If your end really is to reduce poverty, then what are the most appropriate means? It can hardly be an accident that those countries that have enjoyed the most economic liberty have also been the most prosperous – and the least polluted. So if one wants to reduce poverty and help the environment, then the proper course of action is to promote economic liberty and private ownership of the land. Limit the power of government to interfere with private property rights and free interactions and transactions between individuals. Educate people in the "developing" world about the benefits of liberty and free enterprise. As free enterprise began to create jobs, both educational levels and living standards would begin to rise, the physical environment would begin to improve through incentives by free property owners to take care of what they own, and the means of dealing with many of the health problems would emerge. The resulting actions and arrangements may not be "sustainable" as the sustainability agitators define it. After all, building a free and prosperous economy cannot be done without making use of natural resources, changing raw materials into usable goods. But the alternative is to remain mired in poverty – or accept transfers of wealth from "developed" nations, gradually impoverishing them. So as one Johannesburg dissident from the party line recently put it, what we really need is more unsustainable exploitation.

It seems likely, however, that improving the human condition, whether in the "developed" or the "developing" worlds, is not what either the globalists or the greens have in mind. The globalists simply want power. As complete secularists (or secular humanists), they see themselves as having made God obsolete. They would replace God with an internationalist superstate. They are living out the realization that once our need for the transcendent is completely removed from our description of the human condition, there is no real reason why those in a position to do so should not attempt to seize the reins of power and rule as they see fit – on a global level, if they can pull it off. The UN overlords thus clearly see themselves as an emerging world government – the New World Order. Communism was one of the more conspicuous failures of the last century, however. But utopians never give up. The globalists turned to environmentalism and "deep ecology" as the most useful weapons against the despised capitalist system. Hence the rise to power of the greens.

The greens aren’t exactly secularists, though; and they certainly aren’t humanists in any sense of that word that makes sense. They worship "mother Earth" – Gaia – and in a fashion not unlike that of the pagan tribes that inhabited Europe prior to the rise of Christianity. I think the leaders of the green movement hate humanity, however. They resent the dickens out of a civilization that has largely succeeded without their contributions and which would ignore them completely if it were not for their political clout. Much "deep ecology" seems to be motivated by a deep-seated hatred not merely of free enterprise but of the human race itself, which it often portrays as akin to a virus that has infected the once-pristine planet Earth. This would explain their welcome embrace of avid pro-abortionists (e.g., International Planned Parenthood) and advocates of so-called "gay rights" (homosexuals cannot have children) – all represented in NGO’s at WSSD. The greens have been useful tools for the globalists.

Now it is important to add that these two categories do not apply to everyone in the sustainable development movement. I have no doubt that there are sincere, dedicated people at the grass roots level of these sustainable-communities movements who believe they are doing the right thing; they may have been pulled in by the change-agents’ skilled use of the Delphi Technique or just fallen, hook, line and sinker for "green" scare tactics about global warming or environmental degradation. The same is likely true of the businesses and corporations who sent representatives to WSSD. The latter may have been sold on bogus, pseudo-ethical arguments about the "rightness" or "social justice" involved in international wealth redistribution. Lenin would have called them all useful idiots.

WSSD hasn’t ended yet, and so its outcome and long-term effects are unclear. No doubt there are many who will gripe that "not enough was done" despite all the promises made and "partnerships" formed. Let’s hope not! It is unclear what can be done to stop the growing encirclement of controls on populations, often so subtle and gradual that the average person isn’t aware that anything has changed until it is too late. But there are ways. One is education – the real thing, which means debunking the "reforms" being staged in government schools, whether we call them school-to-work, no-child-left-behind, or whatever fashionable phrase comes along next. There is abundant evidence of a sustained, decades-long effort to dumb down the American public, with its focal point being government schools. If change-agents in classrooms can inculcate socialism and groupthink into children today, globalists will have little trouble ruling compliant, socialist adults tomorrow.

One solution is to support home schooling and private schools – kept private by abstaining from vouchers or other devices that will eventually be used to pull the institutions back in under the edifice of government and therefore globalist control. The growth of home schooling and home schooling networks all across the country has been one of the most interesting developments of the past decade, and should be encouraged.

Another strategy is to consider supporting or even joining the various secessionist and separations movements existing throughout the United States and, indeed, throughout the world – especially given that it is unlikely that any genuine purveyors of individual freedom will be nominated, much less elected, to any national office today (with Ron Paul being the only exception I know of). Groups such as the League of the South are scorned and labeled as racists in the dominant national media and by lackeys in the academic world. There is a very good reason for this: these are efforts to maintain control by controlling how information reaches the public. Such groups – which have formed and exist in plenty of places besides the Southeast – are a potential threat to the New World Order and therefore to the sustainable development movement. Their core ideas are sovereignty and independence – notions that have become taboo in major media circles today. Applying labels such as racist or sexist or homophobe or xenophobe or conspiracy-nut or isolationist or whatever has become the most convenient means of discrediting someone without having to listen to whatever he might have to say. Real education will teach children and teenagers to see through such garbage.

Finally, one should read and absorb everything Joan Veon and Henry Lamb have written on the UN, its threat to national sovereignty and the threat of the sustainable development movement to individuals’ rights to live where they want and do as they please with their own private property. One might even consider donating money to or even joining one of the organizations advocating that the U.S. get out of the UN while it is still possible to stop the global-government agenda. A fairly recent movement called Freedom 21 represents one possible alternative to Agenda 21 and WSSD.

The alternative is the world as the WSSD globalists envision it: an expanding encirclement of controls on individuals reflecting what is "sustainable," not what is Constitutional. Animals and even plants will have more legally recognized rights than human beings. Large tracts of land will be set aside as "wildlife preserves"; people will not be permitted to live there. Those in such places now will be relocated – forcibly, if necessary. Communities will be highly ordered habitats where the majority of the population lives in apartments and high rises (their service-sector jobs will not pay enough to afford houses). They will be more like beehives than neighborhoods and towns as we know them today. People will use mass transit or bicycles instead of automobiles to get to their jobs – automobiles pollute the air, after all. They will almost certainly not be allowed to own guns or other weapons. There will probably be plenty of entertainment – sports, nightclubs, and reality shows on TV. Such things function as distractions that encourage mental passivity. People in certain occupations might be encouraged to spy on their neighbors and report any "unsustainable" activities (spying on U.S. citizens is already being encouraged by the Bush Regime in the name of the "war on terrorism," thus establishing the precedent). Dissidents will be ostracized, find it increasingly difficult to earn a living, and might even find themselves harassed on their own property or in fear for their physical safety. This has already happened to at least one family simply for protesting outcome-based education in the local government school.

It is very probable that if Agenda 21 is fully implemented, citizens of the projected "sustainable communities" of the future will be told how many children they can have, so that control of population size can be maintained. Anyone who doubts that such ideas have been kicked around the smoke-free rooms of the globalist elites is invited to consult the work of sustainability-economists Herman Daly and John B. Cobb Jr. Abortion will not be a problem; abortions will be available, inexpensive and safe, just as Planned Parenthood and the NOW had ordered. Those children allowed to be born will be "educated" about their duties to the public good (always as defined by officially-designated authorities) and the evils of our nation’s past, about celebrating diversity, and using latex condoms when they have sex. It may no longer be necessary to divide them from their parents if their parents are also obedient socialists. As youth they will learn "job skills" in group settings and as adults they will work in teams in cubicles, having chosen an occupation from a list of government-provided options; they will return home at night to slightly larger cubicles, possibly shared with other families. They will believe – if they think about the matter at all – that truth is just consensus. In general they will have "learned" to be intellectually dependent on authority in the name of "interdependence," having grown up to be compliant "global citizens." With enough Ritalin, Prozac and "anger management" seminars and workshops, but with plenty of entertainment and no need to do any real independent thinking, they might even, in their own strange and passive way, come to enjoy living under the New World Order.

August 31, 2002

Steven Yates [send him mail] has a PhD in philosophy and is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and numerous articles and reviews. At any given time he is at work on any number of articles and book projects, including a science fiction novel.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com

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