There is a fine line between epistocracy (rule by 'knowers') and Technocracy (rule by 'experts') and in the end, epistocracy would collapse into Technocracy anyway. This is a thoughtful article excerpted from a newly published book, How Democracy Ends.
Dr. Parag Khana, author of Technocracy in America, calls for Trump to scrap NAFTA and go directly to a North American Union. Under President George Bush, the NAU idea was driven into oblivion by American activists, including this writer. It was and still is a notion of Technocracy that Mexico and Canada should merge with the US to become a continental technate, ruled by Technocrats.
When Nye states, "Contrary to conspiracy theories, the Commission has little power", he is speaking of this writer's seminal works Trilaterals Over Washington, Vol. I and II, co-authored with the late Professor Antony Sutton. The Trilateral Commission and its members stand naked before the clear documentation of history, and no amount of self-effacing rhetoric will erase that.
The elitist Brookings Institution promotes Public-Private Partnership, aka 'Blended Finance', as the way to achieve Sustainable Development. Of course, this is 100% United Nations policy as well, and leads to Technocrat leadership using pseudo-science to change the behavior of citizens.
The heart of the real Scientific Method is to produce repeatable experiments that consistently give the same results. So what do you do with a study that cannot be reproduced? Most people would immediately discard it, but the Technocrat mind will 'believe' in their study whether it can be reproduced or not. Groupthink and politicization naturally follow.
Removing cash from the economy forces everyone to become digitalized whether they like it or not. It destroys the last semblance of anonymity and privacy, allowing the Technocrat banking machine to harvest every monetary transaction in the world. Blockchain will become the perfect medium of 'preserving' transactions except that the data will be held by centralized supercomputers.
The current battle for control of the people involves exploitation of the way normal large-scale change occurs in society. Thomas Kuhn defined these changes, called paradigm shifts, as “a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.”
The NSA is viewed as evil, but it must be remembered that it reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, who is a member of President Trump's cabinet. Coats is responsible for line-item budget control of all intel agencies, and authorizes every activity. Thus, it is inconceivable that the President does not understand these activities.
To a Technocrat, all conceivable problems can only be solved with technology, and if unsuccessful on the first few tries, then throw more technology at it. The UN pledges to eliminate poverty around the world; the answer is to embed sensors to cookstoves to collect blockchain information? People who are treated like livestock will never escape their corrals.
Where President Trump has shut down the national committee on climate change, New York is starting it back up anyway, with help from Columbia University. The new committee of 19 scientists will be working directly with cities, bypassing federal and state-level oversight.