When General Gage and his Redcoat army landed to take over Boston in the aftermath of the Tea Party, John Adams did not greet him with a platter of macaroons and corn dodgers to declare:
"I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords."
Nor did the nation's Founders convene in 1787 to proclaim:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form diverse Efforts to change social Norms and establish Opportunities and Strategies to promote Behavior Change ...
Yet that's what Obama's Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren articulated in 2016 in an oration worthy of Brave New World or Coneheads , delivered to an auditorium full of young Federal bureaucrats looking for new turf to conquer, and citizens to rule:"As President Obama noted in his Executive Order 13707, behavioral science insights can support a wide range of national priorities including ... accelerating the transition to a low carbon economy.
That Executive Order, 13707, directs Federal agencies to apply behavioral science insights to their policies and programs, and it institutionalizes the Social and Behavioral Science Team...The adminstration is releasing new guidance to agencies that supports continued implementation of
The Behavioral Science Insights Executive Order.
The "new guidance" of Executive Order 13707 still applies to every department of government, and requires the Department of Defense to report back to the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team at regular intervals, as to how the armed forces are being remodeled in accord with the executive guidance of an order that remains one signed by the Commander In Chief.
No advocates of The Precautionary Principle at the National Academies -- and there are many , have so far stepped forward to ask if it applies to the warning given the 1787 Constitutional Convention by Yale Professor Roger Sherman ,of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence:
A fear General Washington astutely echoed in his 1796 farewell address, when he warned the nation to:“If the Executive can model the army, he may set up an absolute government.”
avoid the necessity of those overgrown... establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty.
