Aaron Kheriaty was at the forefront of developments during Covid-19 as a professor of psychiatry at the University of California Irvine and long-time chairman of the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals. He had a stellar reputation as a teacher and found himself in a situation where he had natural immunity following Covid infection with many robust scientific studies showing that ‘natural immunity following infection was superior to vaccine mediated immunity in terms of efficacy and duration of immunity.’ (p. 100) Moreover, ‘the largest population-based study [published in Clinical Infectious Diseases] comparing natural immunity to vaccine immunity found that fully vaccinated individuals were 6 to 13 times more likely to get infected than previously infected unvaccinated individuals.’ (p. 101) This was the logical scientific basis for Kheriaty to challenge the university vaccine mandate, and many physicians were reluctant to sign exemptions for fear of losing their license. Moreover, he asked himself how he could continue to call himself a medical ethicist if he failed to do what he was convinced was morally right under pressure. He was immediately banned from working on campus or from home and was later placed on unpaid suspension that forbad to see his patients or even engage in other professional activities. This showed him that ‘the university leadership was not interested in scientific debate or ethical deliberation.’ (p. 109)
This is the personal background to this wide-ranging, brilliant and hugely important book on the rise of the biomedical security state and its implications for social organisation. The four chapters look at the origins of the current situation, a new societal paradigm, the coming technocratic dystopia, and ways of reclaiming freedom for human flourishing in a more rooted future. The prologue takes us to Nuremberg 1947 and the history of Nazi medical experimentation—23 physicians were indicted for crimes against humanity and justified their experiments in the name of scientific progress and the greater good (!). Fast forward to 2020, and we find ourselves in a situation where informed consent is jettisoned in the name of population health. Among the important and relatively unknown thinkers cited are Giorgio Agamben, Augusto del Noce and Stefano Zamagni, who gave an extraordinary lecture to the Simone Weil Center (her essay on the need for roots is an important source).
The starting point is that ‘Covid provided a useful opportunity for global elites with economic and political interests, in collaboration with the intelligence community and the police powers of the state, to accelerate the acceptance of a powerful and invasive digital infrastructure of biomedical surveillance and control….: this normalised subtle but powerful new methods of social control.’ (p. 6) The ‘New Normal’ is in fact, as the title suggests, The New Abnormal invoked by a state of emergency that still continues in the US. The danger is that continuous crises mean that the state of exception becomes the norm embedded within a vocabulary of war and security driven by fear. Health is imposed as a legal obligation for biosecurity purposes. Kheriaty gives telling examples from his own university micromanaging ZotPass system and the Amazon Associate Development and Performance Tracker, both run by bureaucracies with enormous power but—crucially—no locus of responsibility. As Lewis Mumford anticipated in his two-volume The Myth of the Machine over 60 years ago, what he called the megamachine is driven by ‘order, power, predictability and above all, control’ where humans are regarded as machine-conditioned animals with no inner life – this is what CS Lewis called the abolition of man.
Many wargame scenarios arising from the merging of public health and the military-intelligence-industrial complex have taken place over the last 20 years, effectively as training exercises and where consistent themes envisage empowering centralised authoritarian governance and coerced mass vaccination: ‘humanity, as part of biological nature, must be managed and controlled through strict biomedical security measures.’ (p. 47) The ideology behind this is one of scientism as intrinsically totalitarian, as explained in Kheriaty’s article in this issue and where misinformation is defined as contradicting the mainstream narrative. This enthrones consensus science as the only valid authority underpinned by ‘a myth of progress via radical rupture with the past.’ (p. 59) In both fascism and transhumanism, ‘nature is nothing more than a raw material to be reshaped by technology’ and any transcendent source of moral authority is rejected.
The next chapter analyses many elements of the Covid narrative, including shifting definitions of what the vaccine can achieve and the burying of data to combat ‘vaccine hesitancy’, and in spite rising evidence of adverse effects and now excess mortality (pp. 74 ff.). Then there is the collateral damage from government responses, such as lockdown policies, especially in terms of mental health. After taking on his university, Kheriaty joined efforts to battle with the CDC and FDA with their one size fits all approach to public health and their predetermined behavioural outcomes. His lawyer Aaron Siri sent the CDC a submission with 56 studies on natural immunity, in which they showed no interest whatsoever. He also discusses the Pfizer data in terms of what they knew but failed to disclose – all of this took place within a context of regulatory capture, and it was shocking to learn that ‘in 2020, more than two-thirds of Congress – 72 senators and 302 House of Representatives members – cashed a campaign check from a Pharma company.’ (p. 121). It is evident that root and branch reform of these corrupt systems is required, and Kheriaty makes a number of constructive suggestions in this respect.
The chapter on the coming technocratic dystopia draws on Orwell’s Newspeak and describes the Great Reset agenda mediated through public-private partnerships and agreements with the UN and individual governments such as the UK (see my review of Iain Davis in PE 138). I agree that the endgame here is corporatism; ‘the merging of corporate interests and government, or more accurately, the control of governing institutions by corporate interests’ (p. 145) – all of this will be further advanced at the Davos meeting in January attended by leading business people and politicians. In parallel, the WHO is preparing a new pandemic treaty for 2024, which gives them unprecedented power over governments. Significantly, in Article 3 ‘the WHO wants to remove the terms “with full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons” from its International Health Regulations and replace them with the fuzzy buzzwords “based on the principles of equity, inclusivity, coherence…” Agamben forecasts that this new system will be ‘capitalism in its communist variation’, modelled on the Chinese social credit system and centrally enforced by digital means (see also ID2020 and its supporters). Kheriaty summarises by saying that ‘the WHO’s digital system of biomedical surveillance and control will be mandatory, transnational, and operated by unelected bureaucrats operating in a captured NGO that has already badly bungled the Covid pandemic response.’ (p. 152 and see also p. 161)
As a spokesman for the WEF, transhumanism and dataism, Yuval Noah Harari is a significant voice defining humans as hackable animals and dismissing soul, spirit and free will as illusions in the quest to engineer, ‘upgrade’ and ‘enhance’ bodies, brains and minds. In this respect, Kheriaty defines transhumanism as microwaved eugenics. One of his key insights articulates the differences between Hippocratic and technocratic medicine informed by the mechanistic metaphor, scientism and technological power. Here he draws on the brilliant talk by Stefano Zamagni arguing (pp. 177 ff.) that the mRNA vaccine is in fact a technological device enshrining a technocratic understanding of the human being using ‘a command and control mechanism, hijacking our cellular biology and redirecting our body’s “machinery” for novel purposes – in this case, the production of the virus’s spike protein, which is then expressed in our own cells.’ Crucially, he continues, ‘this process has nothing whatsoever to do with the natural workings of a healthy human body’, and its relationship to the body is one of power not assistance, with no consideration of its intrinsic and natural healing power. This is the logical destination of impersonally treating the human body as a machine requiring regular software updates.
The final chapter suggests a humane way forward into a more rooted future, while the epilogue depicts a fully-fledged technocratic digital system operating in Seattle by 2030. Kheriaty puts forward a number of proposals and steps, the first of which is to overcome our fear and to resist behavioural conditioning promoted by social psychologists in government ‘nudge’ units. Politically, we need to demonstrate and that there are limits to what citizens will accept under public health emergencies and with respect to invasive digital technologies. Then there is institutional reform, already mentioned, plus the development of an open peer-review system and decentralised health agencies. Beyond this, Kheriaty makes the case for universal rationality and pursuit of truth grounded in a transcendent logos beyond mere instrumental rationality. He points out that reason is also contemplative – it should persuade rather than force. Allied to that is restoring the moral authority of values and the dignity of work while also recognising our need for roots and living from enduring principles. As I indicated at the beginning, this is one of the most thoughtful, well-informed and penetrating books on our current social trajectory by a man of real integrity and that deserves the widest possible readership.
Review essay of Aaron Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal by David Lorimer, originally published in Paradigm Explorer, where Lorimer serves as editor. Also, you can check out Kheriaty’s April 6th interview with David here on the Imaginal Inspirations podcast.
David Lorimer is a visionary polymath who is Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network (https://scientificandmedical.net), Editor of Paradigm Explorer and Chair of the Galileo Commission (https://galileocommission.org). His most recent books are A Quest for Wisdom and his poems Better Light a Candle.