Epic Health and Omega Point – Huxley’s Eugenics Manifests In Madison, Wisconsin

I spent a few days this week doing a close read of Julian Huxley’s 1946 “UNESCO Its Purpose and Philosophy.” It leans heavily on scientific eugenics, social efficiency, and charting individual characteristics as potential contributions to convergent consciousness, Teilhard De Chardin’s Noetic Christogenesis. I’m not sure about you, but I’m pretty skeptical of an “ascension” program that seemed to emerge from a Fabian / DARPA mash-up. I was trying to figure out how to talk about this without it being super dry. I read those sixty pages, so you don’t have to but the compiled highlights were still daunting.

Then, serendipitously, I received an email from Australia about the Capital Territory Health Directorate signing onto a deal with Epic Systems for a new patient record system. Epic, privately held since 1979 with a huge footprint in the digital health space, is headquartered in Verona, a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin. Upon seeing Madison, I had flashback to the days when I was researching widespread adoption of K12 educational technology and realized the timeline stretched back to Department of Defense distance learning in the mid 1990s. Advanced Distributed Learning, the project lead, has four outposts including a K12 education gaming office in Madison formerly led by social game mechanics specialists Constance Steinkuehler and her husband Kurt Squire. I ended up stopping at the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab on a trek I made out to South Dakota in the summer of 2020. In fact, it was one of my very first site visits; the first of many boring office park parking lots.

So, I decided to create a map that showcased how digital health records, prescribed wellness, and pay for success finance in “value-based” medicine would intersect with “sustainable” behavior management, eugenics, radio-isotopes, psychiatry, and gamified badging systems for AI-mediated gig work. Next to each section of the map I organized excerpts from the Huxley paper. I hope it illustrates the outrageous origins of current policies that are chipping away at our creativity and our humanity bit by soul-sucking bit.

Below is a link to the featured map for exploring. Click on any dot to open the source links. The three small dots on the left side (middle) of the page should open the slide-out panel if it’s not visible already. Have fun poking around. I also pulled out links to the Littlesis maps, old blog posts I referenced, and the video clips if you decide you want to revisit or share them.

Reference Links

Epic Systems / Huxley / Madison map link here.

Links to other featured maps: Australia/Singapore here; ADL IoT education here: impact investing In CA health here; and Produce RX here.

Featured videos: Selfish Ledger here; slime mold here; XAPI data analytics here; Yet Analytics for workplace efficiency here; Hoskinson Cardano Atala Prism Ethiopia here; and Soros on New Economic Thinking here.

Plus, two clips I forgot to show are Suzanne Gildert and Synthiam on remote robotic pilot tasks as the future of “work.”

Contextual INET / Soros blog post here.

Contextual education / Department of Defense blog post here.

Two presentations on pay for success finance and health management, including alternative systems, with Sayer Ji from 2021 here and here.

Presentation link here, 3 hours.

 

Pictures from around Madison, WI from May 2020. The first of many site visits looking around the labyrinth.

 

 

5 thoughts on “Epic Health and Omega Point – Huxley’s Eugenics Manifests In Madison, Wisconsin

  1. Roderick says:

    On the topic of guided self-organization:

    “A covert leader in a swarm is notable because it receives less information than followers on average.” (Prokopenko et al.)

    it occurred to me that if covert leaders could be identified it would be possible to recruit them to seed a new collective consciousness in the swarm and then steer it according to the goals of guided self-organization engineers.

  2. Mike Chappelle says:

    I tried to bring this book to your attention while you were visiting Denver, looks like you might be more open to it now. “The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of the New Biology” by Lily E. Kay.

    • wrenchinthegears says:

      Hey Mike, you might want to revisit your wording here. I’m actually quite familiar with Cal-Tech and the role of the Rockefeller’s in the molecular approach to medicine. How about something like…”A book I’ve found interesting that sheds more light on these topics is XYZ.” Try that approach next time.

  3. Mike Chappelle says:

    A book I found interesting sheds light on your comment above regarding your familiarity with Caltech and the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the molecular approach to medicine; in fact, molecular biology at Caltech was not part of a molecular approach to medicine, but rather molecular biology as a technique of social control.

    (p. 48)
    Weaver’s program was modified… . It increased its conceptual and structural autonomy by establishing a greater distances from the medical sciences… The program’s name changed from “Psychobiology,” to “Vital Processes,” to Experimental Biology.” Finally, in 1938 Weaver unveiled the name “Molecular Biology,” defining the term as “subcellular biology” and the “biology of molecules… (p. 49) control over nature was to be derived from manipulating miniaturized bits of matter…
    “The direction of our activity results from the fact that we are attempting to sponsor ‘the application of experimental procedures to the study of the organization and reactions to living matter… We have chosen this activity because of a conviction that such studies will in time lay the (only?) sure foundations for the understanding and rationalization of human behavior.”

    (p. 50)
    The molecularization of life was to be applied to the study of genetic and epigenetic aspects of human behavior. Based on the faith in the power of upward causation to explain life, Weaver and his colleagues saw the program as the surest foundation for a fundamental understanding of human soma and psyche — and ultimately as the path to rational social control…
    Freed from the omnipotence of established biological traditions — medical education, agricultural interests, evolutionary biology, the residues of natural history –molecular biology had a clear mandate. Wedded to engineering and the physical sciences, the new biology was implanted in a cognitive-institutional matrix that could foster an understanding of life inspired by visions of human engineering.

    (p.17) Why then did the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Science of Man” agenda privilege a molecular vision of life? The answer to this question is embedded in the matrix that linked the particular forms of social control sought by that agenda with the specific kinds of control supplied by the new biology… the Rockefeller Foundation officers and their scientific advisers sought to develop a mechanistic biology as the central element of a new science of man whose goal was social engineering… to map the pathways of the human soma and psyche in order to control biological destiny.

    You’ll probably see some light on these pages as well.
    (p. 276)
    There should be tattooed on the forehead of every young person a symbol showing possession of the sickle-cell gene or whatever other similar gene … It is my opinion that legislation along the line, compulsory testing for detective gene before marriage, and some form of semi-public display of the possession should, be adopted.
    Linus Pauling, (whom everyone in my generation recognizes as a kindly old grandpa wearing a beret pushing vitamin C as cure for everything).

    (p. 176)
    Picture of Pauling in a white lab coat clutching a black rabbit. Will give you the chills.

    (p. 45) The challenge of this situation is obvious. Can man gain an intelligent control of his own power? Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men? Can we obtain enough knowledge of the physiology and psychobiology of sex so that man can bring this pervasive, highly important, and dangerous aspic of life under rational control? Can we unravel the tangled problem of the endocrine glands, and develop, before it is too late, a therapy for the hideous range of mental and physical disorders which result from glandular disturbances? Can we solve the mysteries of the various vitamins so that we can nurture a race sufficiently healthy and resistant?

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