Does Life or Death Govern the Universe? Part 4: Bertrand Russell, Nihilist Priest of Entropy and the Roots of Transhumanism

Originally published on The Strategic Culture Foundation

In part three of this series, we were introduced to the growth of modern liberalism and Malthusianism as the outgrowth of the core fundamental axioms contained in Newton and Locke’s philosophical descriptive systems of mankind and the universe. We explored some of the leading voices who resisted this liberal Malthusian paradigm of social engineering with particular attention paid to the figure of Abraham Lincoln’s trusted advisor Henry C. Carey. We ended that section by discussing a new innovative adaptation which Malthusianism and Newtonian mechanics took in the late 19th century under the label of “Entropy”- also known as “the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics”. This system was popularized by a mathematician named Rudolph Clausius and based itself on a sleight of hand that took the obvious properties of heat powered machines made by humans which necessarily tended towards heat death over time, and extended these properties to the entire universe. The outgrowth of the social application of this dismal theory of a dying universe took the form of a neo-Malthusianism called eugenics.

A leading high priest of both eugenics and entropy who took these systems to new heights during he 20th century was a man named Bertrand Russell (1872-1970).

Lord Bertrand Russell had put himself to the task of becoming a grand strategist on behalf of the oligarchical system which he was born into and published Critical Expositions of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900) where he won acclaim among the upper echelons of the British intelligentsia by systematically skewering Leibniz’s entire life and philosophy. Throughout this hack job, Russell turns Leibniz inside out, portraying him as a dis-genuine flatterer crafting flowery arguments to win favor among princes while not even believing in his own theories.

Russell’s devotion to a closed system of entropic mathematics soon found its full expression in his 1910-1913 three volume opus Principia Mathematica (co-written by fellow Cambridge Apostle Alfred North Whitehead and named in honor of Sir Newton’s Principia). This work which proclaimed to reduce the entire universe to a limited set of logical axioms and postulates allowed no space for creative change, or a reasonable living Creator.

Lord Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead flanking their three volume Principia Mathematica which attempted to fit the entire universe into a cage of formal logic. Whitehead went on to plagiarize Leibniz’s monadology within his theory of Pan Psychism while Russell attempted to become the interpreter of Leibniz’s mind for all of academia.

Russell’s misanthropic view of an entropy-destined humanity which animated his perverse form of “creative” output throughout his hyper-productive life was clearly seen in his depressing 1903 statement:

“That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand… Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

The perverse evolution of entropy as the backbone of oligarchical grand strategic decision making throughout the following 120 years was treated in my recent study The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits first published on Unlimited Hangout.

In that location the emergence of Cybernetics as a new “science of control” was traced from the mind of Russell to his leading student Norbert Wiener (1894-1964). In his book ‘Cybernetics’ (1948) Wiener attempts to usurp Leibniz himself as the foundation of his new science saying: “If I were to choose a patron saint for cybernetics of the history of science, I should have to choose Leibniz.”

Norbert Wiener looking at something he believed would inevitably replace human thought

Cybernetics was the practical application of Russell’s theoretical edifice outlined in the Principia Mathematica which Wiener studied as a preacher would the Bible. Weiner wrote of his Cambridge experience saying “my chief teacher and mentor was Bertrand Russell, with whom I studied mathematical logic and a good many more general matters concerning the philosophy of science and mathematics”.

Utilizing theories of “information” as the energy fueling the command decisions of a central command within any system, Wiener and the new generation of cyberneticists like John von Neumann, Alan Turing and Shannon embraced notions like entropy, and artificial intelligence. Describing the importance of infusing Newtonianism and the new fad of “dice-rolling-science” that had emerged out of groups of young quantum mechanists in Denmark, Wiener zeros-in on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as the key to unite the worst of all possible worlds into his new science of control saying:

“Thermodynamics makes its appearance, a science in which time is eminently irreversible and although the earlier stages of this science seem to represent a region of thought almost without contact with the Newtonian Dynamics, the theory of conservation of energy and the later statistical explanation fo the Carnot principle or 2nd Law of Thermodynamics- all of these have fused thermodynamics and the Newtonian dynamics into the statistical and the non-statistical aspects of the same science.”

The key to understanding the attraction of cybernetics to a scientific dictatorship desirous of total omniscience and omnipotence is the following: In the context of a large boat, only the helmsman need have an idea of the whole. Everyone else need only understand their local, compartmentalized role.

With the application of cybernetics to the organization of economic systems, vast complex bureaucracies emerged with only small nodes of “helmsmen” embedded within the newly emerging “deep state” complex who had access to a vision of the whole. This idea was carried forth by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developments’ Sir Alexander King, who co-founded the Club of Rome and helped to apply these ideas across governments of the trans-Atlantic community during the 1960s and 1970s. This system was viewed by its proponents as the perfect operating system for a supranational technocracy to use to control the levers of the New World Order.

One of the most enthusiastic practitioners of this new system during this period of transformation was Pierre Elliot Trudeau (the then-newly imposed Prime Minister of Canada) who shaped a vast cybernetics revolution of the Canadian government between 1968-1972 through Canada’s Privy Council Office. During a November 1969 conference on Cybernetics in Government, Trudeau said:

“We are aware that the many techniques of cybernetics, by transforming the control function and the manipulation of information, will transform our whole society. With this knowledge, we are wide awake, alert, capable of action; no longer are we blind, inert powers of fate.”

Here, Trudeau’s adoration of Cybernetics had been shared by his Russian soul-mate Nikita Khrushchev who rehabilitated the banned “bourgeoisie pseudo science” after Stalin had died. In his October 1961 to the 22nd Party Congress, Khrushchev stated:

“It is imperative to organize wider application of cybernetics, electronic computing and control installations in production, research work, drafting and designing, planning, accounting, statistics and management.”

Trudeau worked closely with Sir Alexander King and Aurelio Peccei in the formation of their new organization the Club of Rome, which has had a profound impact on global governance from 1968 to the present. Trudeau was a devout supporter of this new organization, which soon became a center of neo-Malthusian revivalism during the early years of the 1970s. Trudeau even presided over the Canadian branch of the Club of Rome and allocated money to fund the MIT Club of Rome study “Limits to Growth”, which became a holy book of sorts for the modern environmental organization.

Alexander King and the computer model made famous in the 1972 Limits to Growth imposed a new schism between humanity’s desire to develop vs nature’s supposed desire to rest in mathematical equilibrium. This neo-Malthusian computer model was used to justify the culling of the unfit and overpopulated useless eaters and was subsequently incorporated into the third official World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting at Davos, where Aurelio Peccei was introduced by Klaus Schwab and showcased the Limits to Growth magic to thousands of supportive attendees.

This particular meeting was sponsored by Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, a man who had already distinguished himself among upper-level managers of the empire by founding the infamous Bilderberg meetings in 1954 and, later, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature in 1961 (alongside Julian Huxley and Prince Philip Mountbatten). In addition to incorporating Club of Rome population models into cybernetics-based planning, this summit also featured the official unveiling of “the Davos Manifesto”, a document which formalized the concept of “Stakeholder Capitalism” and the fourth industrial revolution into the governing manifesto of this “Junior Bilderberger” annual summit.

A prominent conference member and planner of this operation from its earliest days during World War II was named Sir Julian Huxley. Huxley was a leading eugenicist and imperial grand strategist who worked closely with fellow Fabian Society leader Bertrand Russell. Huxley shared Russell and Wiener’s devout belief in universal entropy saying in 1953:

“Nowhere in all its vast extant is there any trace of purpose, or even of prospective significance It is impelled from behind by blind physical forces, a gigantic jazz dance of particles and radiations in which the only over-all tendency we have so far been able to detect is that summarized in the second law of thermodynamics- the tendency to run down.”

As he was beginning to formulate his concept of “transhumanism” and while he was organizing the Macy Cybernetics Conferences, Julian also found the time to create the United Nations Education Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1946, drafting its founding manifesto. His entropic view of biology and physics was clearly expressed in his bone chilling political views wherein he writes:

“The moral for UNESCO is clear. The task laid upon it of promoting peace and security can never be wholly realised through the means assigned to it- education, science and culture. It must envisage some form of world political unity, whether through a single world government or otherwise, as the only certain means of avoiding war… in its educational programme it can stress the ultimate need for a world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.”

Cybernetics Conferences evolved throughout the 1960s-1970s, finding themselves increasingly integrated with international organizations like the United Nations, World Health Organization, NATO, and OECD. As this integration occurred, the new technocrats became ever more influential in setting the standards of the new world operating system. Meanwhile national governments found themselves increasingly cleansed of nationalist moral leaders like John F. Kennedy, Charles DeGaulle, Enrico Mattei, and John Diefenbaker. This resulted in the deeper integration of both systems analysis and cybernetics into the governing framework of a new transnational power structure.

After Julian Huxley coined the term “transhumanism” in 1957, the cult of Artificial Intelligence – guided by a belief in the inevitable merger of man and machine – grew increasingly with such major events as the man-computer symbiosis thesis of J.C.R Licklider in 1960 and the application of these systems into Department of Defense programs like wargames command systems, SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment), and unmanned jet plane defense networks. DARPA’s Augmented Cognition Computer-Soldier dyads were yet another expression of this perverse idea with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the creation of enhanced cyborg soldiers.

Over the years, followers of this new cult soon found themselves operating as helmsmen in the new global ship of earth, giving rise to a new global elite class of technocrats and oligarchs who are loyal only to their caste and ideology. They strive to shape their minds ever more closely to the model of idea computing machines capable of logic, but not love or creativity. The more that these cultish technocrats – like Yuval Harari, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab – could think like cold computers, while getting the masses of the earth to do the same, the more their thesis that “computers must obviously replace human thought” could be maintained

The Moral of this Story

Whether we review the growth of eugenics as a new pseudo-science of population control or in the growth of cybernetics, or even when we review the growth of modern ecologism and transhumanism out of cybernetics, the seeds of Aristotle’s oligarchical cosmology can be felt viscerally. The continuity of this dark cosmology through the centuries as it flowed into the works of John Locke, Isaac Newton, Thomas Malthus, Rudolph Clausius, Francis Galton, Bertrand Russell and Norbert Wiener are not coincidental, but direct, causal and substantive.

It is only when we finally learn to see the thing called “western philosophy and western science” as not one but two opposing paradigms that we will begin to properly think about which current we wish to situate our lives within and devote ourselves to defending.

In the next and final installment, we will review the most potent scientific thinkers who rose throughout the 20th century in opposition to the spread of this cult of death that had begun to poison the well of science and social organization. Particular attention will be given to Max Planck, Victor Schauberger, Kurt Gödel, Vladimir Vernadsky and Lyndon LaRouche.

Matthew Ehret the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas trilogy. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation . Subscribe to Matt’s substack here: matthewehret.substack.com