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Novus Ordo Seclorum ~ New World Order
Blueprint for a Prison Planet
                                                                                                  by Nick Sandberg

(The Plan to Microchip Humanity... and why you won't believe it)

This piece is available in booklet form from Amazon.co.uk, price £2, or free,
(temporarily), from Relax UK Ltd, the publishers. To order a free copy, e-mail info@relax-uk.com
stating booklet name and your mailing address.

Contents:

Introduction

Part One - The World Outside

Part Two - The World Inside

Part Three - The Prison Planet

Part Four - Escape

[Author's note: One intention of this piece is to help facilitate the expression of deep emotions in those who wish it - consciously or subconsciously. Should you find yourself experiencing powerful emotions whilst reading, therefore, please don't be overly concerned, it is part of a natural process. To assist in this, it is recommended this article not be viewed on computer screen, but instead be printed out and read at leisure.]

Introduction

This work is split up into four sections. Firstly it contains an overview of an increasingly popular 'conspiracy theory' relating to a proposed plot to turn the Earth into a 'prison planet', thus chaining us forever to material desires, a life of simply working and consuming! Secondly, a look at how this hidden agenda may be being kept from us and how we are unwittingly being led into assisting in its unfoldment. Thirdly, an overall view of how the Prison Planet is being created. And, finally, and a look at what we can do to stop it.

People from a wide variety of social and cultural backgrounds are increasingly willing to take seriously the notion that much of what we are taught of our history is some distance from the truth. In accordance with classic conspiracy theory beliefs, they believe that the degree of randomness ascribed to much of what has happened in the last few centuries is excessive. And that, behind the scenes, a coherent negative force is manipulating the events of our lives for its own ends.

It is believed that there exists an 'elite cabal' at the apex of banking and industry, operating through government, and controlling our political, social and personal lives to ever-increasing degrees. An elite group that has been pursuing its ambitions for some centuries, and is operating to an agenda entirely not in our interest. A group that has ruthlessly manipulated the political landscape with the goal of rendering all humanity under its centralised control. This being done via a multiplicity of strategies - the stirring up of unrest within countries, thus fuelling revolution; the creating of international situations that lead to wars; and the promotion of globalisation via the technological revolution. A few examples of their work being - the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the conflict in Kosovo. The overall objective of the group being to take the incredibly diverse range of human cultures existing on Earth and slowly render them into a single, homogenised trading block under centralised control.

This cabal has further developed its own prototype of world culture - America. And is now seeking to expand this prototype across the globe, slowly eliminating a wealth of ancient peoples and beliefs and replacing them with a standardised, consumerist stereotype. The ultimate goal being to bring about a single globalised marketplace, controlled by a world government, policed by a world army, financially regulated by a world bank via a single global currency, and populated by a microchipped population connected to a global computer. A computer that both monitors and updates our personal transactions, and regulates our emotional state via transmitted electrical signals - technology that already exists.

This ambition of rendering the Earth into a 'prison planet' - a self-contained interactive structure under total centralised control - is chiefly being pursued via the elite's activities in two areas - culture and commerce.

In 'commerce' the elite have created the corporations, the 'vehicles' for the planet's enslavement. And in 'culture' the elite have created both the drivers and passengers of those vehicles - us. By formulating a specific set of childrearing practices designed to render innately beautiful and loving human beings into emotionally dependent creatures who will either work for the corporations and need to purchase their products or otherwise find themselves sidelined in structures where they cannot rebel effectively, the elite have created a powerful and ever expanding control vehicle that progressively draws the entire planet under their control.

The historical roots of this 'elite cabal' stretch back into the mists of time. But the development of the modern banking system in Middle Ages Europe provides a useful starting point for a look at their activities.

Part One - The World Outside

A Brief History of Banking

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws" - Amshall Rothschild

In the recent era, the story commences with the development of the modern banking system in Middle Ages Europe. At this time, individuals with personal assets usually kept them in the form of precious metals - invariably gold or silver. For safety, these were kept in the vaults of the local goldsmith, receipts for deposits being issued. Financial transactions would require the buyer to withdraw his gold and give it to the seller, who would them deposit it again, frequently with the same goldsmith. This was obviously a time-consuming process, and so it became common practice for people to simply exchange receipts when conducting financial transactions. And smiths began to issue receipts for specific values of gold, thus making buying and selling easier still. The smiths receipts became the first banknotes.

The goldsmiths, now fledgling bankers, noticed that at any one time only a small proportion of the gold held with them was being withdrawn. And so they hit upon the idea of issuing more of the receipt notes themselves, notes that did not refer to any actual deposited wealth. By giving these receipts to people seeking capital; in the form of loans, the goldsmiths could thus use the money deposited with them by others to make money for themselves. It was found that for every unit of gold held by the smith, ten times the sum could be issued as notes without anyone usually becoming the wiser. So, if a goldsmith held, say, 100 units of other peoples gold in his vaults, he could issue banknotes to the value of 1000 units! And as long as no more than 10 per cent of the holders of those notes wanted their gold at any one time, no-one would be realise the fraud being perpetrated. This practice, known as fractional reserve lending, continues to this day and, believe it or not, is the backbone of the modern banking industry! Banks typically loan ten times their actual financial holdings, meaning 90% of the money they lend does not now, never has, and never will exist!

These loans had to be paid back to the goldsmiths with interest, meaning non-existent money slowly became converted to tangible assets in the form of goods and labour. And should the loan be defaulted upon, the banker had the right to seize the defaulter's property. As time passed, therefore, the banks became wealthier and wealthier, for they were allowed to create money out of thin air and then convert this money to real goods, labour, or property. A loan of money at 12% interest recouped not merely 12% for the banker, but 112%! As it does to this day.

As the industrial era began, so the potential for exploitation increased exponentially. The bankers' ability to loan money created out of thin air and then recoup the loans as tangible assets with interest enabled them to begin to control whole industries to the point where the worlds of banking and industry became, to all intents and purposes, a seamless entity; headed usually by an extended family, and exerting such influence that the various monarchies and fledgling governments of the time began to seem quite powerless by comparison. The creation of the banking and industrial elite had begun.

To still further increase their power and influence, the elite would employ agent provocateurs to stir up unrest between countries by buying influence with politicians or advisors to monarchies. And then lend vast sums of money to the same governments or monarchies so that the resulting wars could be waged. Any armaments purchased being manufactured by the industrial wing of the banking-industrial cartel. By regulating the loan of money and the delivery of weapons to individual nations, so the outcome of any conflict could be effectively controlled. Monarchies could also be destabilised by causing poverty within nations and again using agent provocateurs to fuel the desire for revolution. With such power it was now easy to control the fledgling governments of Europe and ensure that only those politicians who would do the will of the elite would come to power.

By periodically restricting the money supply, crashes within the emergent stock exchanges of the world could easily be engineered. One notable example being the Wall Street Crash of 1929. What the history books don't tell you is that, in a crash, wealth is not actually destroyed, merely transferred. The Crash of '29 allowed the most powerful of the banking and industrial families to absorb the weaker elements, providing even greater levels of centralised control. Furthermore, by buying up TV stations and newspapers, so the mass media was created and controlled, ensuring that only a portrayal of events that suited the elite's interests would get to public attention.

Government

The vision we're usually given of how political power is manifest in our society typically runs something like this: Government at the apex; banking, industry, media and military, as separate entities, beneath; and the people beneath this. However, a basic independent examination of the history of this power structure's development is more likely to reveal the following arrangement: extended family elite groups controlling seemingly separate fields of banking and industry at the apex; government beneath facilitating the wishes of this hierarchy; the military or police enforcing those wishes where necessary; the media beneath portraying the work of the government to the people as "democracy in action"; and the people beneath this.

From this it can be seen that the truthful role of government is simply to facilitate the wishes of the elite group. This notion is reinforced when one considers that we don't get to actually pick who becomes our political representative. This task is undertaken by the party hierarchy. Neither do we get to pick the policies our representative will pursue, this also being under the control of the party. We just get to vote for representatives of the various political parties. Furthermore, who gets where in any political party is entirely controllable by the party. To say this system is open to abuse is something of an understatement.

America

The creation of the United States of America represents the pinnacle of the elite's ambitions for world domination. In many ways, the creation of the United Kingdom, a simple, self-replicating, class-based society, can be regarded as the elite's first experiment in social control. But it was soon clear that this excessively repressive regime could never be expanded to form the basis of a prototype for world culture. And a new front was needed. What better for this purpose than to set up an entirely new country and allow it to evolve under your direct guidance and control?

America is therefore, in essence, a prototype for world consumer culture. By encouraging a broad base of racial groups to settle and develop under their constant control, the elite have been able to slowly direct the natural evolution of a form of social order that humans from any background can adapt to, without a significant number of them becoming sufficiently dissociated to actually take up arms and overthrow the system. Aided of course by a highly repressive justice system, backed with the largest prison population on the planet.

And, now that the technological revolution has facilitated the expression of American cultural values across the world, America is, in effect, expanding until the 50 states actually encompass the whole globe, in all but name. Our planet is slowly becoming America.

America is the ultimate control fantasy - consensual incarceration. Whole groups of people slowly drawn to believe there's no other way of existing securely together than to give up their liberty bit by bit, to believe that true freedom is actually the giving up of freedom.

World War II

The Second World War is probably the most stunning recent example of just how suspect taught history really is. This conflict, which cost the lives of tens of millions of people, was entirely manipulated into being by the elite banking and industrial cartels described above. The question our history teachers at school were unwilling to answer was: "How was it that a country as utterly bankrupt as Germany in the 20's and 30's could afford to wage full out European war on so many fronts?"

Hitler rose to power in a country so economically crippled by reparations from the previous war that going into another should have been absolutely inconceivable. But the banking elite agreed the loan of billions of dollars, and furthermore set up a vast industrial complex, (much of it I.G.Farben - a Standard Oil subsidiary), within Germany to manufacture the vast amounts of tanks, planes, arms and munitions necessary to wage European war. Oil supplies were agreed, lines of credit extended and the war machine spent nearly the whole of the decade churning out weaponry whilst the rest of the country remained in abject poverty thus fuelling the desire for war. The whole thing was a set-up from start to finish, as even a cursory examination of history will confirm. And the millions of deaths that resulted were seen by the elite as a sacrifice necessary to achieve greater levels of European homogeny and centralised control.

This war, and the version of it we're taught in school, is merely one of numerous examples of the way the elite have come to increasingly control our lives.

The Third World

"Conquered states.....can be held by the conqueror in three different ways. The first is to ruin them, the second for the conqueror to go and reside there in person and the third is to allow them to continue to live under their own laws, subject to a regular tribute, and to create in them a government of the few who will keep the country friendly to the conqueror."
                                              - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince.

Here we look at the elite's ambitions in the Southern Hemisphere, or so-called 'third world'. All across Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America the elite have again pursued unrelentingly the ambition of destabilising a multitude of individual cultures and creating a series of homogenised trading blocks. In recent years this task has been undertaken by the International Monetary Fund, (the IMF), but the story commences many years before. Colonisation by the European empire builders from the sixteenth century onwards and the later granting of 'independence' to conquered territories led slowly to the forging of individual nation states with central governments. To ensure that the government be a puppet of the elite, agent provocateurs and dubious Western government agencies worked to displace any leaders who showed democratic tendencies and replaced them with elite puppets from local communities and their extended families. To maintain these hated and corrupt regimes in power, the elite-controlled Western banks lent vast sums of money to these "governments" to enable them to form armies, frequently with foreign troops, and thus prevent the people of the country from wresting power. In addition, loans were granted to purchase weapons, (for waging various regional wars stirred up by elite agent provocateurs using techniques like "shuttle diplomacy"), and to build immense palaces for the elite puppets to reside in.

In the early 70's the elite-manipulated Yom Kippur war resulted in a massive rise in oil prices. The whole world found itself paying vastly increased rates for petrol, and the resulting massive profits made by the oil-producing nations were invested back with the elite-controlled Western banks. Relying on the ever-popular tactic of loaning at least ten times their reserves, the banks now had insane sums of money to lend. And with the 'third world' countries compelled to pay vastly increased sums for their oil, as well as service the debts already incurred by their puppet leaders, further massive loans were advanced to them in a banking strategy that came to be known as "petrodollar recycling". The Western banks would send youthful reps across the world offering gigantic loans to anyone in power who wanted them. Loans of money created out of thin air and tied by agreement to the recipient buying weapons, machinery or goods from industrial or military clients of the banking cartel offering the money. In the 1980's the bubbles began to burst. The Mexican debt crisis being the first of many 'days of reckoning'. The World Bank and IMF, elite-manufactured organisations created in the 1940s to 'stimulate the conditions of world trade', now stepped in. They offered 'adjustments' - strategies for repayment that involved the countries concerned adopting economic 'austerity' programmes and commencing industrial production of Western goods and consumer products.

To commence industrial production the countries had to take out further loans and buy plant from - the industrial clients of the banking cartels. And to generate sufficient power for the new industries they had to hire companies to build hydroelectric power plants, (usually with dams that required the expulsion of many local people); or nuclear reactors, (which frequently were too unsafe to use, notably the Philippines' US$2 billion reactor which never produced a single watt) - companies that were again the heavy industry clients of the banking cartels.

The IMF debt rescheduling practices enforced on the countries experiencing major problems paying back their loans, (problems entirely generated by the elite via their control of world interest rates and oil prices), compelled the 'third world' nations, one after another, to commence manufacturing goods, not for themselves, but for sale on the world markets. Here, in the emergent global marketplace, they had to compete with each other in a highly competitive market over which they had no control. Indeed, the only factor in the IMF equation that the Southern hemisphere countries could control was the cost of abour. The result being cheaper goods for Western consumers, and greater poverty for workers in the 'third world'.

All across the Southern hemisphere small farmers were forced away from planting crops for themselves, and driven to plant crops for export, hoping they'd get paid enough to survive. In the 80's, runaway inflation stimulated by Reaganomics in America, (the arrangement of vast loans for US spending on military and space projects that sent world interest rates skyrocketing), began to force many local people out of the countryside altogether, and drove them into the newly created cities where they vied with each other for work in the newly built factories. Thus leading to the destruction of traditional ways of life for millions upon millions. Emergent drug cartels, invariably under the direction of government agencies like the CIA, began to flood the cities and industrial areas with cheap drugs, hooking those with jobs deeper into a life of wage slavery. And those without into lifelong street-level delinquency, fuelling social problems. In addition, grain crops, previously used for bread, would be diverted to the production of alcohol for the relocated populations. Social problems unheard of a generation before became epidemic in proportion all across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, unemployment, violence against women, poverty and malnutrition, to name but a few. In Brazil, one of biggest food exporters in the world, approaching half a million children die annually from malnutrition or hunger-related diseases.

(Journalists and economists investigating the debt problems of "third world" countries invariably start by believing that the chaotic and destructive situation that confronts them has been arrived at simply through the naïvety and greed of the Western banking institutions. And that the IMF, the World Bank and the elite financial and industrial conglomerates are just being unrealistic in trying to get their original loans and interest payments back. Invariably however, at some stage in their research, the truth begins to dawn on them. They realise that the banks never had any intention of recovering the money loaned or the interest owed. And that the whole exercise has simply been undertaken to compel thousands of self-sufficient agricultural communities to be drawn into industrial wage slavery in the global export markets).

Meanwhile, in early 90's Europe and the US, the spectre of such Western capitalist greed proved increasingly disturbing for the people buying the goods thus created. And so the elite came up with 'green-washing' - the media driven means by which images of change within the Southern hemisphere are bombarded upon the Western viewer, convincing them 'the system' is adapting to moral pressure from Western citizens. News broadcasts accepted that previous practices had been exploitative but that, post Live Aid and  similar, things were changing and any residual problems were entirely the fault of the poorer nations themselves or the weather. Something that anyone who has made even the most primitive study of modern 'third world' politics will know is quite untrue. The previous 'evil capitalists', the Reagans and Thatchers, were removed from power and replaced by consumer-friendly mouthpieces of the elite - the Clintons and the Blairs. On UK TV at the time of writing, one BBC programme features former Spice Girl, Geri Halliwell, entering the worlds shanty towns and meeting crowds of poor but happy looking children jumping up and down. Thus generally promoting the image of gradual change and improvement. What the programme neglects to reveal is that in many of the 'third world's shanty towns children now have a less than 50% chance of making it to their first birthday. Infant mortality rates are rising steadily throughout the Southern hemisphere, despite the efforts of the UN and WHO to massage the figures. And for those lucky enough to reach the grand old age of 5, the only prospects they have to look forward to is a life of begging, street crime or child prostitution. There is literally nothing else.

The world's population is currently estimated at around 6 billion people, 3 billion of whom are living in poverty. And 1 billion of this group existing at near starvation level. For the majority of the world's citizens life now is demonstrably worse than at any time in recorded history.

The Future - Chips with Everything?

So, if there really was a coherent body organising all of this, what would their motivation be? And, where might all this be leading? The primary motivation behind all elite activities is the desire for control. It's the base desire to control everything. To take a vast, dynamic planet-full of people; different races, different beliefs, different lives; and render them into a single homogenised unit, under your central control. This is what truly motivates the elite.

To bring about this highly negative state of affairs, the elite must be active on two fronts simultaneously - the world outside and the world inside, the planet and the mind.

In the 'world outside', the objective the elite are working toward is globalisation, the creation of three vast interlocked markets centred on America, Europe and Asia, followed by their full integration into a single trading block. A global marketplace peopled with consumer-workers and serviced at the lower end via third world debt.

In the 'world inside', the plan is to get all humanity microchipped. For despite a multiplicity of control tactics currently being imposed on us; things like mortgages, credit cards, street surveillance systems and pharmaceutical antidepressants; people still have a basic level of personal freedom. Though it's getting harder to do so, we can still walk out of consumerism and embark on a new life. But if we're chipped, this won't happen. For scientists' knowledge of neuroscience is now such that, by having a microchip the size of a grain of rice implanted inside our body, we can be regulated at an emotional level. By gaining control over our body's receptor-ligand network, our emotional state can be manipulated by electrical signals, either as a part of a chip's program or via remote signalling. Thus creating a perfect consumer workforce. Work, buy, procreate, sleep - a life stripped down to materialism and survival, without any unpleasant emotions to get in the way.

So, the question for the elite is, how do they get people to get the chips fitted? And make sure that they aren't removed? For, even though our planet has advanced considerably along the road to becoming a world consumerist superstate, most people are still highly resistant to the idea of having a chip put under their skin. There is therefore a progressive strategy that will be gradually implemented to lead us, step by step, into permitting this nightmare future to come about.

It will unfold in three stages. First - the removal of cash. Second - the placing of all personal and financial data on individual 'smartcards'. Thirdly, the gradual elimination of smartcards to be replaced by personal microchips.

The only way of getting people to accept being chipped is for them to believe it is necessary. Bank details, credit ratings, employment status and similar information can all easily be programmed into a chip and updated via remote signal or by passing it across a reader. Therefore, it is first necessary to render all money electronic, and to get people to carry around their personal details on some form of 'smart card' - a credit-card sized device bearing all the details that they need for daily transactions. Once this is achieved, any number of problems can be manufactured within the smartcard system such that people will need to get the chip actually put inside their body if they are to be able to conduct transactions safely.

Removing cash from our society. For the past twenty years we have been slowly led towards giving up cash in favour of electronic money. And in the last ten the heat has been turned up. The increased promotion of credit cards, phone banking, mail order and internet shopping have all, in part, helped to bring about a society where the need for cash transactions is greatly reduced. Yet most people still like carrying cash. More will have to be done if cash is to be eliminated completely.

One strategy may be the introduction of new, multinational currencies not available as cash. The Euro, the currency for the European Union, may be such a thing.

Another very likely possibility is that cash will be removed from our society on the pretext of eliminating the illicit drug trade. Many cities now have around 1% of their population injecting heroin daily. (In some UK cities it is approaching 2%). This, along with crack cocaine usage, is proving a near intolerable social burden for people who live in the areas affected. Drug-related crime is at an all-time high and the public increasingly crying out for something to be done. If cash were eliminated, anonymous illicit transactions for small sums would not be possible. With electronic money, the identities of the buyer and seller of any article are recorded on computer, and should a transaction be for an illicit substance it could be instantly traced. Although illicit drugs come into our countries in vast shipments, they are nearly all ultimately sold in small amounts at or near street level. Remove cash and drug dealers could be instantly
traced.

(Reading this, you might well think that removing cash would actually be quite a good idea if it got rid of the illicit drug trade! But, think a little deeper. Regardless of the possibility of later being microchipped, do you really believe our governments are doing all they can about drugs? To create heroin or cocaine, vast areas of land must be given over to the cultivation of their plant sources. Thousands of farmers in the more remote parts of SE Asia and Latin America have to spend their lives cultivating these crops. Vast tanker loads of precursor chemicals must be shipped into remote areas to convert the raw coca or opium into cocaine or heroin. And whole financial networks established to launder the billions of dollars revenue the trade generates annually. We live in a world where our governments can mobilise hundreds of thousands of troops to fight a war to allegedly protect our oil supply, (the Gulf War), yet are apparently powerless to prevent groups of peasant farmers and third world gangsters from poisoning our children to death. Sit down and think about it for a moment. Does it really seem likely? We have satellite tracking systems capable of locating a single opium poppy growing in a field, and capable of detecting an illicit lab manufacturing heroin or cocaine from the plant sources. There are in fact UN departments fully able to eliminate drugs like heroin and cocaine at source, via crop-replacement schemes and similar, as was recently revealed at a major conference in New York attended by some 160 world leaders and their representatives. The United States refused to finance the plan, and not a word of it was reported in the European media.)

If the 'drug war' is going to be used to assist in the outlawing of cash, one of the first signs will likely be moves to legalise soft drugs like marijuana. For the smoking of cannabis is the primary cash-based illicit activity that people indulge in, and so the prospect of having this pleasure withdrawn from them would inevitably create considerable opposition to any plan to outlaw cash. In addition, marijuana legalisation would create the appearance of policy-softening on behalf of government, when the opposite is really going on; and the stress-relieving effects of cannabis-smoking are useful to further anaesthetise people to what is really going on around them.

Whatever strategies are eventually employed, whilst cash is being eliminated and the creation of a global society being pursued, there will be an assortment of 'distraction' tactics used to keep the Western public unaware of what is really going on. And, simultaneously, 'softening-up' strategies employed via the media.

The economic system will likely be deliberately manipulated to create a society in which hard work is seen to go hand in hand with hard play. A high daily workload backed up with a myriad distractions, soft drugs and diverse recreational activities creates the feeling of living life to the full and ensures that there is little time for contemplation of what is really going on behind it all. And for those who aren't working - crime, hard drugs and constant media bombardment with images of opulence intended to increase feelings of lack of self-worth, and to stimulate the desire to succeed.

Another distraction tactic will likely be the promotion of hedonism, via the constant bombardment of sexually stimulating material through the media, and the legalisation of soft drugs like cannabis and ecstasy.

The 'softening-up' process will likely proceed via a steady trickle of media stories relating to microchipping and globalisation. Stories relating how some scientist says that in the future we won't have to carry wallets around, it will all be on a chip installed in the wrist. Or tales of how much better life will be for everyone once we're all one global community. Such stories will usually make it seem that microchipping and globalisation are inevitabilities, that they have already been decided.

Once cash has been eliminated from a country or region, by whatever means, and all money has become electronic, the next step on the road to microchipping will be taken. People will be increasingly drawn into giving up the multiplicity of cards they are carrying around; credit cards, bank cards, ID cards and similar; and have them replaced with a single 'smartcard'. The 'smartcard' will perform all the functions of the other cards, and thus act as an interface between the holder and the increasingly global superstate.

With the smartcards increasingly in use, and cash gone, what will likely happen is that problems will suddenly begin to mysteriously occur within the electronic money system. People will occasionally find their money disappearing into thin air. Computer errors and fraud within the system will appear rife.

Throughout this time the 'softening-up' process will have been continuing. By now, there will likely be whole groups of people within society who have already been chipped. Criminals, the mentally ill and military personnel being three likely targets. Chipping will be portrayed as the socially positive thing to do via a multiplicity of media techniques. And, furthermore, having your ID and financial records placed on a chip inside your body will become renowned as the only safe way to keep your records safe from interference. There may well be encryption technology available on the personal chip that, for some reason, won't be available on the smartcard. By now the media will be pushing personal chips frenziedly. Small children will go missing in high profile cases on the daily news, then be found 'because they were chipped'. Young peoples TV will be especially targeted. Getting chipped will be seen as a 'cool' thing to do, with a vast array of different chip features available to order. Getting chipped will be seen as synonymous with 'getting ahead' and attracting members of the opposite sex. The media will spare no effort ensuring that the negative aspects of getting chipped, such as feeling like a robot, are expelled from our minds.

To still further intensify the drive to get the public chipped, large corporations will begin to make it a prerequisite for persons working for them. Likely under the guise of it being their contribution to a creating a positive society. By this time the multinational corporations of today, big as they already are, will have been transformed into transnational giants; astride the world like statues of Colossus; controlling vast sectors of the earth's resources and meting them out according to their masters schedule. (And with a vast and continuous PR job making it all appear completely consensual). Virtually everything purchased will be from a multinational corporation, and nearly all employment opportunities will involve working for one. With cash gone and no way of bringing it back, and the credit card, ID card and even smartcard systems increasingly falling into disrepair, life will begin to seem pretty bleak for those persons not chipped. Pretty soon, not being chipped will effectively mean you are not capable of working for a regular wage in any but the most menial job. There will of course initially still be a large black-market operating at varying degrees outside the law and trading in a wide variety of licit and illicit substances. But, as chipping proceeds all across Western society, and becomes seen as being as natural as paying tax, so the State will increasingly make moves to attack illicit activity. With the moral backing of the microchipped population, engineered by the media, so those persons not chipped will increasingly be marginalised in the same way the homeless are now - forced to the edges of society and left to fend for themselves in an environment of poverty, drug addiction, sexual exploitation and crime.

And, with chipping now finally accepted as being an integral part of life in the 21st century, the next stage will be implemented. The introduction of chips that can regulate aspects of our body's function.

Self regulation of our body and mind will be seen as a new and convenient means of treating any number of complaints ranging from depression to minor flesh wounds. No need to take tablets or call up the doctor, just programme your chip to do it for you. Scientists are now sufficiently knowledgeable about our body's electrical system and ligand-receptor networks that they can superficially alter many of our natural emotional functions. By changing the way our body metabolises serotonin, for example, the symptoms of depression can be relieved. The problem is that doctors frequently don't understand why our body is behaving differently. Many scientists believe that things like depression are themselves merely symptoms of deeper problems that need addressing.

With chips capable of altering a whole range of neurochemical functions, we will increasingly have the ability to emotionally self-regulate ourselves. And there will thus be an inevitable temptation to try and cut negativity entirely out of our lives, to program ourselves to never feel down. From a health perspective this could be disastrous for negative emotions are frequently just symptoms of deeper problems that require attention. Scientists know the health risks of ignoring what our emotions are trying to say to us. Trying to block out negativity by altering our body's neurochemical functioning could lead to the rapid onset of numerous complex degenerative conditions, the presence of which will likely not be recognised - until it is too late.

And quite apart from the health aspects, giving people the means to easily emotionally self-regulate themselves could lead to the 'prozac generation' becoming global. People will become obsessed with feeling good about themselves all the time. And anything that threatens to interfere with that feeling will be ignored. Wars, starvation, political upheavals and global tyranny will all become just 'other peoples problems'. Nothing to do with us - until it happens in our own backyard.

And, with nearly everyone in the West using microtechnology to block negativity, who's going to notice if one day the chips seem to start regulating themselves? No longer requiring us to actually programme changes into them, but seemingly doing it all without our help. Thus no longer even allowing us access to our true feelings if we wanted them.

This nightmare scenario seems like something out of science fiction. But think closely and you will see that it could actually be with us within a generation. And all achieved bit by bit. Step by step, we may be being led into a place where no-one, if they thought about it, would ever willingly go. And without means of escape.

PART 2