Thread by @petelincoln48

1/1981 Bilderberger Jacques Attali interview on his 1979 book-Cannibalism and Civilization: Life and Death in the History of Medicine. Its in French and excerpts translated.

straight2point.info/the-1981-miche…

2/In the first phase, the <health care> system tries to last by monitoring its financial costs. But this will leads to the need to monitor behaviours and thus to define standards of health, of activities, to which the individual must submit.

3/From then on, we move on to the second phase of self-denunciation of evil through the tools of self-control of behaviour. This allows the individual to conform to the standard of life profile and become independent of his illness.

4/The third phase is the appearance of prostheses that allow the name of evil in an industrial way. Thus, for example, electronique drugs such as the pill coupled with a microcomputer to release substances, elements of regulation, into the body at regular intervals.

5/The great dominant social science will be the science of codes, computer science and then genetics.

6/...all the medicines of the future that are linked to the control of behaviour can have a major political impact,

7/....It would indeed be possible to reconcile parliamentary democracy with totalitarianism since it would suffice to maintain all the formal rules of parliamentary democracy but at the same time to generalize the use of these products so that totalitarianism is daily ,

8/I don't believe in Orwellism, because it's a form of technical totalitarianism with a visible, centralized "Big Brother." Rather, I believe in implicit totalitarianism with an invisible and decentralized "Big Brother".

9/These machines to monitor our health, which we could have for our own good, will enslave us for our own good. In a way we will undergo a gentle and permanent conditioning...

10/.....with genetic engineering one could gradually ....create the conditions for a new commodity, genetic this time, which would be made of copies of men sold to men, chimeras or hybrids used as slaves, robots, means of work...

11/I believe that in the very logic of the industrial system in which we find ourselves, the lengthening of the lifespan is no longer a desired objective ....as soon as one exceeds 60/65 years, man lives longer than he produces and it costs society dearly.

12/Hence, I believe the objective will (be) to ensure that within a certain lifespan, man lives as well as possible, but in such a way that health expenditures will be as low as possible in terms of costs to the community.

13/Then a new criterion of life expectancy appears: that of the value of a health system, a function not of the lengthening of life expectancy but of the number of years without illness and especially without hospitalization.

14/Indeed, from the point of view of society, it is much better that the human machine stops abruptly rather than it gradually deteriorates.

15/However, I think that increasing lifespan remains a fantasy that corresponds to two objectives: the first is that of men of power. The increasingly totalitarian societies and directives in which we find ourselves tend to be led by "old" men, to come from gerontocracies.

16/The second reason lies in the possibility for capitalist society to make old age economically profitable simply by making old people solvent. ....

17/This is entirely in the view that man today is no longer important as a worker but as a consumer Therefore, we could accept the idea of extending life expectancy if we make the old solvents and thus create a market.

18/Euthanasia will be one of the essential instruments of future societies in all cases of figures.... In a capitalist society, killing machines, prosthetics that will eliminate life when it is too unbearable or economically too expensive, will emerge and will be common practice.

19/The problem with the evolution of mental illness medicine will be two-step. At first there will be even more drugs, psychotropic drugs, which correspond to a real progress, over the last 30 years, of mental medicine.

20/It seems to me that, secondly, and for economic reasons, a number of electronic means will be put in place, which will be either methods of pain control (bio-feed-back, etc.) or a computer system of psychoanalytic dialogues.

21/Medicine is indicative of the evolution of a society that is moving towards decentralized totalitarianism tomorrow. There is already a sense of conscious or unconscious desire to conform as much as possible to social norms

22/.....production of men is not yet a market like any other. Following the logic of my general reasoning, it is not clear why procreation would not become an economic production like any other

23/One can imagine, in a way, "rental matrixes" that are already technically possible. .....the woman or the couple will be part of the division of labour and in the general production.

24/This will allow you to buy children like you buy peanuts or a television set. A second important reason and related to the first could explain this new family order. If the child is an economic commodity like any other, society regards it also as well but for social reasons.

25/Democracy has a duty to adapt to technological change. Old constitutions confronted with new technologies can lead to totalitarian systems.

26/I believe we are emerging from an energy-controlled universe to enter the information universe. If matter is energy, life is information.

27/That is why the major producer of tomorrow's society will be living matter. Thanks in particular to genetic engineering, it will produce new therapeutic weapons, food and energy.

28/The emergence on the market of individualized self-monitoring and self-monitoring items will create the preventive spirit. Men will adapt to conform to the criteria of normality; prevention will no longer be coercive because it is intended by people.

29/I believe that this world in preparation will be so awful that it means the death of man.