Parable? Or Predictive Programming? Pt. 2

Examining the concept in greater detail

2. Predictive Programming?

The concept of predictive programming is controversial, and has been widely debunked. That alone isn’t enough to dismiss the idea, but it may be that—just as I argue in “The Fallacy of Binary Thinking”—it’s not a case of either/or, as in: either it’s true or it isn’t. It may be more a case of discerning its shades of truth and fantasy.

Recently I watched the original The Terminator for the first time in probably 30 years. I was struck by how on-point it was. The film was made and set in 1984, with a futuristic dystopian society dominated by Terminator cyborgs pictured by Arnold Schwarzenegger. True to the storyline, 40 years later we now have steel-frame and Tesla robots that can do back-flips, hold an egg between two fingers without crushing it, and many other complex tasks previously thought impossible for the technology. We haven’t yet married flesh to these robotic frames, but today’s transhumanists are pushing for a future convergence of robotics, AI and human flesh very much as depicted in The Terminator. Chillingly, “Google has published a new set of AI principles that don’t mention its previous pledge not to use the tech to develop weapons or surveillance tools that violate international norms,” writes Jessica Lyons. [1] “The Defense Department announced late last year a new office focused on accelerating and adopting AI technology for the military to deploy autonomous weapons in the near future,” reports Washington DC newspaper The Hill. [2]

Are we contemplating AI’s existence or is it contemplating ours? The fictional scenario of The Terminator is suddenly more relevant than 40 years ago: what will AI eventually decide about the future of humanity?

Ray Kurzweil decades ago wrote of an approaching “singularity,” when AI would surpass human intelligence to become a separate entity—precisely the scenario of The Terminator, where cyborgs have decided humans are an inferior species deserving of elimination and launch a genocidal war on us. Dr. Robert Malone warns that the “Stargate” AI initiative may in fact be just another node in this transhumanist infrastructure. Kurzweil, Ellison, Altman and Yuval Harari see this as “next stage human evolution,” and believe that humanity has no future without it. It’s hard to see how humanity has any future with AI.

But there is always a Resistance. Kyle Reese, the resistance soldier in The Terminator played by actor Michael Biehn, is an effective type or metaphor for today’s social warriors—people like Meryl Nass, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Byram Bridle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Naomi Wolf, Mark Trozzi and so many others who have the wisdom to use their knowledge, elite access and power on behalf of the forces of light. As Dr. Malone has made clear in his book PsyWar, 21^st century warfare has shifted from kinetic battlefields to psychological warfare. In James Cameron’s bleak sci-fi vision, Reese tells Sarah Connor that the resistance of the future is actually winning against the cyborg tyranny, which is why the Terminator had to be sent back in time to kill the mother of Resistance leader John Connor before he could be born.

Since the restriction of civil liberties introduced during pandemic lockdowns, today’s world has also seen the rise of a resistance movement. During the past year alone we’ve seen the WHO’s pandemic treaty power grab fall apart, and now with President Trump pulling the US out, Italy and Argentina are next at the door. [3] We’ve seen the ignominious retreat of “wokeism,” its patent failure to force itself down the majority’s throat, the fiasco of the electric car “eco-savior,” and the trouncing of the very philosophy whose smug self-righteousness finally built itself a tsunami of angry resistance. So is Big Tech’s “Stargate” project, the missing link to The Terminator’s Skynet—I mean Elon Musk’s Starlink? With resistance fighters like we have, with heart and soul like we have, I wouldn’t bet on Sam Altman or Larry Ellison’s tech Godzilla, with its brain-damaged notions of “next stage human evolution” or brain chips the body vomits up like tainted meat.

Dahria Beaver, writing for Ohio State University, notes that the concept of predictive programming was first proposed by philosopher Alan Watt, who defined it as “a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders. If and when these changes are put through, the public will already be familiarized with them and will accept them as natural progressions, thus lessening possible public resistance and commotion.” [4] This article sees it as a dubious concept, naïvely assuming that the Deep State doesn’t exist outside of conspiracy theory. However, working in tandem with predictive programming is the Overton Window, as explained by The Mackinac Center for Public Policy:

The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support— they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. Other policy ideas exist, but politicians risk losing popular support if they champion these ideas. These policies lie outside the Overton Window. [5]

The Mackinac Center further explains how the Overton Window can be shifted over time in order to make formerly unpalatable policies more acceptable. Normally this happens as a natural byproduct of social evolution, but debunkers conveniently ignore the role of propaganda, which as I’ve illustrated, is not limited to wartime. An example of Overton Window shifting given by the Mackinac Center is alcohol Prohibition in the early 20^th century, which swept Western society at the time but today is considered a retrograde idea. This standard definition of the Overton Window limits itself to the realm of politics and politicians gauging their chance of successfully pursuing policies that push social norms. With the backlash to transgenderism we’ve certainly seen how disastrous it is to push too quickly beyond such norms. And in the spirit of Socratic reasoning, we need to ask: Is it wise to try to destroy social norms that have existed for thousands of years? Could there be good reasons why such norms have persisted?

It would be naïve to assume that Deep State social engineers aren’t keenly interested in moving the goalposts to suit their military-industrial agendas. At the same time, it’s not hard to see how a process of gradualism can stretch the Overton Window by using movies and TV shows to normalize ideas or behaviours formerly considered beyond the pale. Outright DISinformation—as distinct from mere MISinformation, which can simply be mistaken ideas—is a common tool of propagandists designed to accomplish a particular strategic objective. Disinformation is a time-honoured, stock-in-trade tool of intelligence agencies. And as advertising agencies have known for decades, repetition, repetition, repetition is the key. “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth,” explains Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Kahneman. [6]

Beaver’s article relies heavily on guilt by association, noting that proponents of the predictive programming theory include conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and David Icke. Usefully, however, she adds:

“There is also a control of imagination because the most commonly used tool in predictive programming is science fiction, by creating these stories the author can create boundaries of imagination and slowly show what may happen. … In predictive programming it is said that by portraying a message a reaction is assured regardless of the context…” —Dahria Beaver [7]

Beaver cites problems with this idea due to studies in social learning theory that suggest unpredictability in a subject’s reaction depending on whether the message is presented positively or negatively by the experiment controller. Further, the phenomenon of pareidolia—the human tendency to see patterns where none may exist—means that predictive programming is subject to confirmation bias.

The ancient art of prophecy is a good example, since prophecies are often “confirmed” to be true based on an assessment of events that have already happened. Prophecies are often couched in vague language. The prophecies of Nostradamus are a prime example—almost anything can be made of them in interpretation. Even Paul Wagner, whose website lists him as an “intuitive coach, spiritual guide and mystic,” says “there is no direct evidence to support the claim that media is deliberately used to predict or prepare the public for future events. The theory relies heavily on circumstantial evidence and interpretive analysis.” [8]

In many cases this is certainly true, but not all.

Proponents of predictive programming typically cite examples with a much more one-to-one equivalency, such as the Star Trek communicators, or scenes of the Twin Towers in New York belching smoke in The Simpsons several years before 9/11. I’m not about to scroll through a list of sci-fi movies and novels and try to parse which ones are predictive programming and which ones aren’t. That misses my point. The truth is more likely somewhere in the middle. Again, it’s not either/or. That’s the trap of binary thinking. I’d much prefer that readers learn to see things in a spectrum rather than hard, black-and-white categories of true/false. The philosophy of The Kybalion, a Hermetic text published in 1908, [9] makes sense in this context:

“Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.” [10]

It would be hard to make a credible argument that Deep State interests would refrain entirely from using such a powerful tool as film and Internet media. Wagner makes a good case for the tendency of artists to be ahead of their time, “predicting scientific discoveries, societal changes, and technological advancements.” A good example in the context of this discussion is the 1927 sci-fi film Metropolis, which showed a lifelike humanoid robot. However, Wagner is more inclined to favour the Jungian explanation, which also makes sense. Psychologist Carl Jung posited the existence of a collective unconscious that links all humans, as evident by his study of mythology that revealed mythic templates across all cultures. Wagner notes how the same inventions often occur simultaneously at the same time in different parts of the world. His astute conclusion leaves the door open to possibility:

“The idea that media can predict or influence future events also raises profound questions about the relationship between art and life, the power of storytelling, and the role of media in shaping our collective consciousness. It invites us to consider how our minds and spirits interact with the media we consume and how this interaction can potentially transform our reality.” —Paul Wagner [11]

As Wagner says, artists throughout history have had an intuitive ability that allows them to cast their imaginations forward in time to “see” the future. In part this is due to their ability to read the zeitgeist, and an intellectual engagement with the world that is constantly scanning the horizon for new developments. It’s a synergistic combination of the intuitive and the intellectual, something often lacking in purely rationalist or scientific assessments.

Aldous Huxley’s fiction and essays grapple with futurist visions and how these can be made consistent with ethics and freedom.

A great example of this is Aldous Huxley, who—coming from an elite British family—had access to information circulating in elite circles that most of us do not. Yet despite his privileged upbringing he was a dedicated proponent of unfettered democracy and freedom. He was a seeker from his earliest novels, which lack the brilliance of his classic Brave New World but revealed a writer challenging the postwar world of the 1920s through satirical fiction. It would be ludicrous to accuse Huxley of being part of an elite plot to use his most famous novel as predictive programming, even though so much of it rings true today in the 21^st century. The more likely explanation is the dualistic one suggested by Hermetic philosophy. To the general public, such novels serve as cautionary tales—parables or allegories—while to governments and oligarchs they function as potential blueprints of future society. Nearly 30 years after Brave New World was published, Huxley wrote a short collection of essays, Brave New World Revisited, now commonly bundled with the novel, in which he assessed the adoption of his dystopian ideas in contemporary society. Already by 1958 when the book was published he could write:

“The prophecies made in 1931 (when Brave New World was written) are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning. …The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.” —Aldous Huxley [12]

Huxley’s vision of a genetically engineered human society—a modern application of Plato’s concept of the hereditary class system in The Republic—was conditioned by the long reach of Thomas Malthus and his theories of overpopulation. Like Malthus, Huxley got it wrong that “overpopulation leads to economic insecurity and social unrest.” [13] Both failed to foresee that with more humans also comes more creativity and innovation—qualities that can be applied to pressing problems such as food supply. Indeed, fewer people today on Earth are starving than were during Victorian England or during Huxley’s lifetime.

Correctly, however, Huxley foresaw that technologists would seek to develop the technology to manipulate DNA, something that suddenly came within the realm of possibility with the discovery of the double helix structure of the human genome by James Watson and Francis Crick. This discovery occurred during the decade when Huxley was writing Brave New World Revisited—the 1950s. It would take another 50 years to fully “map” the human genome: “In April 2003, scientists announced that they had sequenced the human genome, compiling a list of the three billion letters of genetic code that make up what researchers thought was humanity’s common DNA.” [14] Ironically, the driving impetus for such gene research in the coming decades may have less to do with population reduction or control than addressing human fertility rates plummeting around the world. [15] Epidemiologist Dr. Shanna Swan has raised the alarm that male sperm count has declined by 50% during the past 50 years. If this continues, the human race will no longer be able to perpetuate itself within another half-century. [16]

Huxley was quite aware that even democracies use propaganda on their citizens, devoting an entire chapter to it in Brave New World Revisited. While the concept of the Deep State would have been foreign to him in 1958, he would have had no trouble accepting that it would deploy psychology and the persuasive arts on its citizens through the tools of mass media:

“Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory. In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man… In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communications is controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite.” —Aldous Huxley [17]

Pundits claiming that Huxley was a conscious part of predictive programming through his dystopian novel clearly have not read his essays. In the closing chapter of Brave New World Revisited, “What Can Be Done?” he urges us to be “educated for freedom,” and observes that even during his lifetime, freedom was under assault from multiple directions. “Freedom is menaced, and education for freedom is urgently needed.” [18] That is the hope of my new work-in-progress, The Undeclared War, that by engaging with these essays and turning over their ideas in both mind and heart, the reader will truly be “educated for freedom,” and pass that education along. The greatest freedom is the one you cultivate for yourself within your own soul.

POSTSCRIPT: For James Corbett’s extensive work on predictive programming, start here: https://corbettreport.com/corbett-report-radio-010-case-studies-in-predictive-programming/

Although I respect Corbett’s work greatly, I don’t necessarily agree with all of his views on predictive programming. Again, it’s not either/or, true/false, black/white, but many shades of gray.

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[1] Jessica Lyons, “Google torpedoes ‘no AI for weapons’ rules,” The Register, February 5, 2025: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/05/google_ai_principles_update/

[2] Miranda Nazzaro, “Google removes weapons development, surveillance pledges from AI ethics policy,” The Hill, February 5, 2025: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5127666-google-ai-ethical-rules-updated/

[3] Meryl Nass, “The second domino falls: Argentina to leave the WHO,” Meryl’s CHAOS Newsletter, Substack, February 5, 2025:

The second domino falls: Argentina to leave the WHO

[4] Dahria Beaver, “The Psychology of Extraordinary Beliefs: Predictive Programming,” OSU College of Arts and Sciences, April 18, 2018: https://u.osu.edu/vanzandt/2018/04/18/predictive-programming/

[5] “A Brief Explanation of the Overton Window,” Mackinac Center for Public Policy: https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow (emphasis mine)

[6] Quoted in PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order, Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool-Malone (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2024), p. 91.

[7] Dahria Beaver, “The Psychology of Extraordinary Beliefs: Predictive Programming,” OSU College of Arts and Sciences, April 18, 2018, ibid.

[8] Paul Wagner, “Predictive Programming: A Comprehensive Examination of the Theory,” paulwagner.com, June 26, 2024: https://www.paulwagner.com/predictive-programming-a-comprehensive-examination-of-the-theory/

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kybalion

[10] Quoted in “SOLANCHA: The Creative Law of Harmony and BaLANce,” SOLANCHA staff, October 28, 2024: https://solancha.com/solancha-law-of-harmony-and-balance/ (emphasis mine)

[11] Paul Wagner, “Predictive Programming: A Comprehensive Examination of the Theory,” paulwagner.com, June 26, 2024, ibid., (emphasis mine).

[12] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Row Perennial Library, 1965 edition; first published 1958), p. 4. Bracketed note is mine.

[13] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, ibid., p. 13.

[14] “Mapping the Human Genome: History in the Making,” Genesight: https://genesight.com/blog/patient/mapping-the-human-genome-history-in-the-making/

[15] Philippa Roxby and Amy Walker, “Fertility rate in England and Wales drops to new low,” BBC News, October 29, 2024: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnvj3j27nmro For comparable US statistics see: “The Demographic Outlook: 2025 to 2055,” Congressional Budget Office, January 13, 2025: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875 For Canadian birth rate statistics, see: “Canada’s birth rate plunges to record low of 1.26 children per woman,” LifeSite News, September 30, 2024: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadas-birth-rate-plunges-to-record-low-of-1-26-children-per-woman/?utm_source=digest-prolife-2024-10-02&utm_medium=email

[16] Andrew Zaleski, “An Alarming Decline in Sperm Quality Could Threaten the Future of the Human Race,” GQ magazine, March 22, 2021: https://www.gq.com/story/shanna-swan-interview SEE ALSO: Evan Bush, “Falling sperm count observed around the world, study finds,” NBC News, November 17, 2022: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/falling-sperm-count-observed-world-study-finds-rcna57302

[17] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, ibid., p. 35.

[18] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, ibid., p. 108.