Chronocide: How technocracy is erasing the past, present and future

The past is another country, according to LP Hartley’s opening line of The Go-Between. Nowadays, we may say the same of the present, as the pace of technological and demographic change quickens.

As for the future, what confidence and certainties can we have for our children and grandchildren?

Countries might not exist in any recognisable form as a new world order is cemented. But it is not only borders that are being undrawn. When Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’ on the fall of communism, perhaps he was inadvertently priming for the globalists’ most dramatic impact on humanity: the erasure of time. As warned by David Fleming, whose philosophy of continuism offers a unifying rationale for preserving humanity against the technocratic onslaught, ‘chronocide’ is a strategy.

As social animals, human beings create society. Over generations, each community establishes and maintains its customs, beliefs, roles and relationships. While ideologically progressive humanists emphasise that we have more in common than our differences in race, religion or region, a person from one culture cannot simply move to a place of different culture and expect life to go on as normal.

The crucial component of society is time, measured in lifetimes of immersion. Indeed, human beings + time = culture. In this equation, important factors may be understood as nature or nurture in the human-temporal complex, such as terrain, resources, climate, commerce, conflict and technology. Each society writes and curates its history.

In the classic dystopian novels of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, the past was deleted by design. Winston’s job is to revise records of events to comply with the current narrative, as it evolves. In Aldous Huxley’s futurism, babies are born by machine, and the idea of a woman giving birth is disturbing.

As the Marxists of the Frankfurt School realised in the 1920s, and as every management consultant knows, nothing really changes unless the culture changes. Social bonds and traditions are bulwarks against radical plans imposed from above. Piecemeal, incremental policies are prone to regression to norms, but major restructuring or other shocks to the system break social connections and shatter stability. The more dramatic and sudden the change, the more readily resistance is overcome.

Year Zero wipes the slate of our human story clean. For uncompromising totalitarians such as Pol Pot in Cambodia, this was a necessary means of shifting the people from a traditional agrarian existence to a communist order. Anyone harbouring relics or attitudes of the past was exterminated. While schoolchildren are taught (uncritically) about the Holocaust, generally they are uninformed on the trauma of extreme collectivisation.

Chronocide is the deliberate slashing and burning of everything in our culture – both the visible stem and branches above ground, and the underlying roots. We are being deprived of our continuity as families and fraternities, because such human connections are an obstacle to the technocratic mission. An atomised society is literally taking time out, in the following ways.

1. An Orwellian information war is being waged against the ordinary people. Facts derived from experience, common sense or critical thinking become ‘misinformation’ or ‘hate’. Knowledge handed down through generations is denigrated as unscientific old wives’ tales or prejudice from an intolerant past. The young, most heavily targeted by propaganda, are encouraged to reject time-honoured truths.

2. State-led behavioural psychology operations (‘psy-ops’) bewilder and frighten people, detaching them from settled knowledge and understanding. Placing the populace in uncharted territory, as in the Covid-19 pseudo-pandemic, puts them at the mercy of the powers-that-be. A worldwide deadly contagion could not be remembered by any living person, as the Spanish influenza outbreak was over a hundred years ago. In emergencies the authorities take control, and life is never the same again afterwards.

3. Safetyism suffocates culture, by replacing festivities steeped in heritage with managed events. Bonfire nights are cancelled if there’s any wind blowing, village fetes are stopped if there’s a risk of someone having an allergic reaction to homemade jam, and vigorous children’s games such as ‘British Bulldog’ are banished from the school playground. The insurance industry, through high cost of cover, helps to curtail activities that displease the authorities.

4. Dehumanising architecture proliferates on the skyline. On a scale much greater than in the social engineering of the 1960s, when swaths of terraced housing were replaced by concrete blocks and communities were moved en masse to new towns, construction is ever-upward. The physical landscape may retain remnants of the past, but churches, banks and pubs have closed, and the high street is in creeping desolation. Lessons from the recent past about the problems of high-rise living have been discarded. Smart Cities are being developed, with forests of steel-and-glass apartment blocks.

5. Expropriation of people’s property and assets is transferring all wealth to the elite. The World Economic Forum tells us that ‘you will own nothing and be happy’, but someone must own the capital. Generational inheritance will end, as shown by the extortionate tax on farms that have stayed in family ownership for centuries, forcing landowners to sell.

6. Mass migration has led to many people of the host country feeling marginalised and alienated. Despite the platitudes about multiculturalism, social cohesion has declined as the identity and loyalty of recent incomers is tied to their kith and kin, with little sense of shared belonging. That’s what our rulers want. Rootless cosmopolitans (the ‘Anywheres’ described by David Goodhart) always prefer things foreign or exotic to the predictable and homely, but now shire folk and the indigenous working class (‘Somewheres’) are finding themselves in a timeless Nowhere.

7. Rapid technological development is displacing people from physical to virtual reality. While the present is most visibly changing in demographic transformation, the near future poses an existential threat to humanity, making inter cultural tensions seem like a picnic in the park. The future, if the technocrats get their way, is transhumanism.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) defines genocide as the killing of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. But there is also the concept of cultural genocide, as devised by Raphael Lemkin, entailing ‘systematic and organized destruction of the cultural heritage’.

A culture can be wiped out without a shot being fired. The technocrats have been playing a long game, preparing for a post-cultural, post-temporal future. Chronocide is a crime against humanity.

Niall McCrae is a social commentator and an officer iof the Workers of England trade union. He was previously a senior lecturer in mental health at King’s College London. His books include The Moon and Madness (2012), Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016), Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (with Robert Oulds, 2020) and Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm (2024).  He writes regularly for The Light newspaper.

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