Technocracy And Humanism
John A. Waring
1985
Published in:
Section 3 Newsletter, Feb. 1985, No. 18 and Mar. 1985, No. 19
Every politico-economic ideology, like every religious belief, proclaims that it has the one true doctrine and that all others are either entirely different or at "opposite poles."
They are largely successful in this kind of indoctrination and propaganda--with students and the public at large, as well as with philosophers, textbook authors, newspaper publishers, et al--because they incessantly emphasize, exaggerate, and reiterate the minor differences while ignoring what they have in common. This making-a-mountain-out-of-a-molehill game is similar to not seeing the forest for the trees and is just what the leaders of these vast divisions want the public to base their attitudes on; thus, the extremist's desperation where he cries to his followers: "It's either we or they, black or white, good or bad, etc." In the U.S., as a result of the Cold War for instance, the game is so rigged that critical thinking and constructive action have been muted by repetitions of the official propaganda line: "If you don't like what we have here...with all its imperfections...the only other alternative is some form of Marxian socialism or a fascistic dictatorship-- and you don't want them!"
So the socially concerned man and woman, the idealistic youth, are circumvented and their efforts are swerved into one or another ostentatious but petty reform movement, or some outright escapism.
How many, or rather how few, have exclaimed something like--"To Hell with those foreign isms! And with the imported monopolism of high finance misruling and despoiling this Continent...Lets start building a nation fit for everyone to live in--not just exist!"
In effect that is what fifteen men and one woman did in 1918-19 in New York City, led by Howard Scott, a young engineering scientist in his 20s who organized them into what was known as the Technical Alliance. These engineers, mathematicians, architects, foresters, statisticians, educators, chemists, physicists, physicians, et al, had been working in their professional capacities directly or indirectly for the Federal Government during World War I. Among them were Dr. Charles P. Steinmetz, the "Wizard of General Electric"; Professor Richard Tolman, physicist and during World War II vice chairman of the National Research Board that Vannevar Bush headed; Leland Olds, whom President Roosevelt made Chairman of the Federal Power Commission in the 1930s and 40s; the president of the American Institute of Architects; the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Dr. Alice Barrows Fernandez, who had studied under John Dewey and who later became the Chief of the Division of the Design of School Buildings for the U.S. Office of Education; Professor Thorstein Veblen, the "Stormy Petrel" of American economics; et al...not a group of wishful- thinking philosophers but a nucleus of trained professionals.
These trained professionals recognized what could be accomplished in coordinating the nation's resources for war. Under Howard Scott's leadership they set out to investigate the possibility and feasibility of coordinating the nation's resources in peacetime in order to eliminate waste, increase technical efficiency, mechanize industry to reduce manhours, and multiply production so that a higher standard of living could be provided to everyone, not just a favored few. That was how the idea of Technocracy got its start.
In order to understand the social design that Technocracy proposes as uniquely relevant to our North American Continent, it is first necessary to make clear what it is not. This is because all ideologies of the past and present are variations and branches of one system: the Price/Political System. Thus, whether feudalism or liberal republics, capitalism or socialism, monarchy or democracy, fascism or cooperatives, the most benign commonwealth or the most repressive dictatorial tyranny...all without exception are based on, and take for granted, as being fundamental for any society, a) political rule, and b) economic- monetary-price values.
The socialist-communist countries are no less tied to the ancient anachronisms of money, price, interest, taxes, debt, wages, etc., as are the so-called capitalistic nations, which is only natural since they too are still laboring under scarcity. Only the superficial labels of "ownership" are different. The fiduciary "mechanics" of mankind are essentially the same, however, whether within the Chase Manhattan Bank, Barclays of London, or the Kremlin's Gosbank. The main difference is that the Gosbank is larger--the largest bank in the world in terms of monetary holdings. In fact, "Bolshevik" Russia today has five times as many banks as does the U.S.A., and Red China has three times as many.
Economics in any and all forms rests on the assumption of conditions of natural or artificially enforced scarcity, far less than enough to supply everyone. The study of economics and its everyday business control and transactions tells you how each variation of the Price System makes an ideology of how to divide up that scarcity. You will find economics defined in terms of scarcity in every textbook on the subject, usually in the opening chapter. Without scarcity, some of them candidly admit, there would be no need for economics.
Politics, regardless of what label it goes under, is fundamentally concerned with the manipulation and coercion- control of millions of human beings as well as each individual one. The skill and ability to stay in office, whether a senator, commissar, king, or president, depends on how well he manipulates the people in his domain...usually in terms of how well he has them fooled, as Machiavelli postulated the game.
There are no exceptions to these generalizations; all societies, whether primitive or the most sophisticated and "advanced" today, are run entirely within the framework of the rules of the game of Political government and Economics. The inherent anti- social features of these rules have been obvious to all thinking people throughout recorded history--especially to those humanistically concerned. All they have been able to do is hope for a more benign ruler to be born, or to vote for more "honest" politicians...the wishful thinking futility of these purported choices and alternatives is dreary reading.
Enter Technology: As long as scarcity, the natural scarcity that still prevails throughout the Third World, only partially diminished in East Europe and West Europe, and toil and labor--both concomitants of little or no technological energy--was the lot of humankind, then there was nothing that could be done to ameliorate the poverty and oppression of the majority of the populations. Then a group of scientists, technologists, engineers, and other professionals--the Technical Alliance, 1918-21--pointed out that the development of technological power in the U.S. and Canada had rendered the ancient Price/Political System not only unnecessary and obsolete on this continent but increasingly dangerous for us to tolerate.
Despite their preliminary Energy Survey of North America and their warnings, the prosperity of the 1920s temporarily sidetracked their message. A decade later the Price/Political System in the U.S.A. almost collapsed for the first time anywhere in world history.
To protect the scientific integrity of its brilliant concept, Howard Scott in 1933 incorporated Technocracy Inc. as a non- profit educational and research organization, open to North American citizens from all walks of life and not solely the scientifically trained. Since then many North Americans have become members to study the possibilities, advantages, and the necessity of applying science to social problems, and to write and speak about the idea.
The Design: What Technocracy proposes is the world's first functional society. The first step is for the people of the U.S. and Canada to abandon once and for all the archaic game of Politico-Economic rule over human life on this continent. There is only one sane and orderly way to do this: by national referendum. But remember, it is a matter of survival, not choice; the System's waste of irreplaceable natural and human resources, of air and water pollution with worse depredations to come offer us no alternative.
To succeed the ancient Price-Political System, Technocracy proposes that the functionally trained men and women of this Continent immediately form a coordinating staff for the governance of the entire North American Continent's
34 billion technological Hp in factories, refineries, farm tractors, mining machines, all transportation as well as the coordination of the geological and ecological resources with that technology--for one purpose only: to meet human needs, both material and cultural, of the men, women and children of the entire continent.
Instead of money juggling and politics, interdisciplinary science and engineering at all levels from the top down would make the decisions as to planning and operating all our technology on a balanced load basis. Maximum mechanization and automation would reduce work time, giving people more hours to pursue cultural and recreational interests. Maximum use of renewable resources (hydropower carrying the base electric load instead of coal, oil, or nuclear power). Maximum use of all mining, agricultural, construction and industrial equipment operating at full blast night and day throughout the year would turn out an abundance of only the highest quality of goods since sleazy products waste valuable resources.
Contrary to what the economics textbooks would have us believe, psychologists have found that most people are not working for money. The average man, if lucky enough to be doing the kind of work he enjoys, does it for the satisfaction of accomplishment and social esteem, knowing that the pay he gets will provide a decent standard of living for himself and family. The goal in life for creative minds is to have the facilities for working out their ideas and acceptance of their best works.
Everyone would receive sufficient purchasing power in the form of Energy Certificates since the technological energy input for the production of all consumer and other products is technically measurable and the basis for a continuous Continental accounting. These certificates, having none of the characteristics of money/price/debt, could not be used for anything but acquiring any unit--say a dress or a tie or a book or a dozen oranges, etc., and any order would be instantly tabulated by the technicians whose job it is to keep the supply lines filled with more of the same. The certificate would possess some of the features of a traveler's check, an IBM punch card or electronic imprinted data face and a factory requisition form, none of whose details the citizen-user would have to be bothered with.
Everyone would receive their own annual book of Energy Purchasing Cards free as a right of citizenship no matter what one's occupational status or age or sex or color or race. To science there is only one race: The human race! Nor would these Energy Cards be based on the work you do or whether you work at all. This is simply recognition of the fact that technology is doing 99.9% of all the work so it is only functional and rational to distribute the abundance freely to all on the basis of what the machines are producing. This is democracy on a daily basis with everybody having the same vote and getting exactly what they voted for.
Exchange value for measurement and 95% of crime that the FBI states are for money, either directly or indirectly, would be eliminated at once without passing a single law or without any moral reformation in the individual. (The remaining 5% of crime is pathological and will take time to diminish.) This historically unprecedented act of removing the incentive for crime is worth a functional social system for this reason alone. But Technocracy is concerned more with social crimes such as the waste of natural resources, poverty, accidents, pollution, the Cold War, and disease, all of which are engendered by the Price System.
What of the social and cultural consequences? For the first time in human history there would be no more fear of deprivation and poverty; no more fear of political persecution or injustice; no more wastage of human talent; no more financial or other limitations on education; no more sex discrimination; no more racial discrimination; no more crime in the streets or anywhere else. No more commercialization of the arts and sex; no more financialization of health care; no more welfare or charity or poor; no more child labor or child beating or wife beating (remember, she has her own Energy Certificate, so you'd better be good, brother!); no more rackets of any kind from Mafia to gambling to the munitions/war promoters and drug dealers. The list of social depredations is almost endless, the new freedoms unbounded. All goods and services would be free to everyone: no prices, debts, taxes, profits, wages, charity, graft, insurance, banking, swindling, advertising, or any other kind of chiseling, disadvantages, or exploitation either of people or our natural resources.
This means engineering with Nature, not against her as Economics and Politics do, because in a Technate the agricultural and ecological specialists, the hydrologists and technologists would constantly be meshing their knowledge in an interdisciplinary functional way to obtain the most finished products for the minimum expenditure of energy and the minimum use of nonrenewable raw materials.
Scientists and engineers aren't trained to tell people what to do. They concentrate on getting the job done, solving problems. Those who do prefer controlling people--politicians, businessmen, bankers, etc., will all be retired or off to Spain or some likely place with all the gold bars they can carry and where they can still practice business.
What will happen to religion? Take the mortgage from the outside of the church and the collection plate from the inside, and only those clergymen sincerely interested in the spiritual welfare of their parishioners will stay on the job, automatically weeding out a lot of sanctimonious Pharisees now pontificating. People will become attuned to the rationality and reality of human life and achievement.
http://www.technocracy.org/archives/236-waring
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