People do weird things in the name of science. For example, have you ever heard of the technocratic movement of the 1920’s and 30’s in the United States? As near as I can tell, sci-fi author H.G. Wells popularized the term “Technocracy” in his book The Shape of Things to Come. It is essentially a “government by experts,” or more broadly “a government or organizational system where decision makers are usually highly-skilled in fields of management or any other field.” Wikipedia summarizes Wells’ strange book:
The Shape of Things to Come is a work of science fiction by H. G. Wells, published in 1933, which speculates on future events from 1933 until the year 2105. It is not a novel, but rather a fictional history book. Wells creates a framing device by claiming that the book is his edited version of notes written by an eminent politician, Dr Philip Raven, who had been having dream visions of a history textbook published in 2105, and wrote down what he could remember of it.
The book is dominated by Wells’s belief in a world state as the solution to mankind’s problems. Wells successfully predicted the Second World War, although he envisaged it dragging on into the 1960s, being finally ended only by a devastating plague that almost destroys civilisation. Wells then envisages a benevolent dictatorship - ‘The Air Dictatorship’ - arising from the controllers of the world’s surviving transportation systems (the only people with global power). This dictatorship promotes science, enforces Basic English as a global lingua franca, and eradicates all religion, setting the world on the route to a peaceful utopia.
The term “technocracy” is also referenced in James Burnham’s 1940 book, The Managerial Revolution. I found an essay by none other George Orwell which seems to summarize Burnham’s book:
Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers”. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be
abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small,
independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.
Orwell in that essay seems to be saying the Burnham believes Nazi Germany and the USSR to be examples of this new “managerial” model of society. That description Orwell gives above though of course sounds like a plot outline for his novel 1984. I am assuming that Orwell penned this essay around the time when Burnham’s book came out, because he is analyzing predictions for the course of the war that Burnham makes, and 1984 (originally titled The Last Man In Europe) wasn’t published until 1948. Burnham’s book is also listed under Orwell’s influences for that novel.
The term “technocracy” is also often connected to turn of phrased coined by Aldous Huxley, “scientific dictatorship” - in which science is enthroned as the ultimate ruling power. In Brave New World Revisited, it seems that Huxley wrote:
Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
I’ve also seen people try to make the argument that this trio of Wells, Orwell and Huxley were not, in fact, warning us against such a system coming into existence in our world. They were actually telling us that it was so already. Some even argue that they celebrated it. Interesting questions which maybe we’ll explore another time.
Back to the matter at hand though. The technocratic movement in the United States was originally begun by Howard Scott, who created the Technical Alliance after World War I, which was one of the nation’s first think tanks. They did some kind of “energy survey” of North America, which I frankly don’t understand and then were disbanded. According to Wikipedia, “In 1933, the group became incorporated in the state of New York as a non-profit, non-political, non-sectarian organization known as Technocracy Incorporated.” And they still exist under that name, Technocracy, Inc. today. They even have a website, where I found some swell pictures from the 1930’s:
Fun, right? That ying-yang looking thing is what they refer to as their “monad” whose meaning is said to be something like “a balance between a nation’s production and consumption” - presumably through perfect technical-scientific control.
I highly recommend reading through some of the group’s documents and multimedia productions, as I’m sure I won’t do justice to just what they are all about. What I can do for you though is pull together some interesting tidbits from their Wikipedia page and allow you to draw your own conclusions.
One of the most interesting things I have found is that apparently Peak Oil theory (aka Hubbert Peak Theory) - which has been on everyone’s lips a lot the past couple years - was created by a member of Technocracy, Inc, M. King Hubbert. If that doesn’t interest you, then perhaps mention of their hopes and aspirations will. Seems they want to create something called the North American Technate to replace the current nationalist system in place today:
The North American Technate is a design and plan to transform North America into a technocratic society after the collapse of capitalism. The plan includes using Canada’s rich deposits of minerals and hydro-electric power as a complement to the United States’s industrial and agricultural capacity.
[See also some of the research I did regarding a suspiciously similar plan in place today to create something called Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America - nevermind talk of the North American Union.]
The technate will be further sub-divided into self-enclosed urbanates (see also: burbclaves):
Once a technate has been established, the Technocratic movement believes that it should proceed to construct an entirely new form of living environments called Urbanates. An Urbanate is essentially an assembly of buildings where people live and work. These places would have all the facilities needed for a community, including schools, hospitals, shopping malls, waste management and recycling facilities, sports centres, and public areas.
Technocrats wish Urbanates to be something akin to resorts, designed to give each citizen the highest standard of living possible. Getting around in an Urbanate would be inherently easy and efficient. Every kind of major facility would be placed within walking distance of a housing complex, eliminating the need for cars.
[...] The reason given by the Technocratic movement for all this ambitious restructuring of urban life is that modern cities are often extremely poorly planned and built in a haphazard way leading to major inefficiencies, waste, and large numbers of social and environmental problems. Technocrats believe that rather than trying to solve all these problems within the framework of existing cities, it is best to start with a clean slate and construct Urbanates. Technocrats propose that all of the old cities in the technate should be gradually abandoned and mined for their resources.
They are apparently so serious about this post-collapse re-organization of the North American continent into a Technate that they have even had their graphic designers hard at work on a Universal Technate ID Card, which I pulled from their website’s Energy Accounting page:
Wikipedia summarizes their system of energy accounting, which is intended to replace the need for money:
An energy credit is a hypothetical unit of currency used in a technate. Unlike traditional money, energy credits cannot be saved or earned, only distributed evenly among a populace. The amount of credit given to each citizen would be calculated by determining the total productive capacity of the technate and dividing it equally. The reason for the use of energy credits is to ensure equality among the Technate’s citizenry as well as prohibit spending that is beyond the productive capacity of the technocracy. This system is usually referred to as energy accounting.
For a more detailed analysis, check out the energy credits wiki page.
Anyway, I’m pretty damned astounded that I have never heard anyone mention this group before. Part of me thinks that it’s simply because they are obscure and not influential. But another part of me wonders: are these technocratic concepts simply already operational, but under other names and ideologies? The more I look down that road, the more I find on it. And I will share the rest as I continue looking.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- A Technocrat’s Response
- Technocracy In-Fighting
- Notes: Personal Universal
- Behaviorism & Individual Expendability
- Wild & Free
30 Comments
This is a good article linking technocratic ideals to the Neocon movement:
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Commentary/Technocrats.htm
Good base definition of technocracy too:
What we see, in other words, is philosopher kings, or rule by the wise.
They also quote Carroll Quigley, who was one of Clinton’s teachers as saying… wait, I found the full quote elsewhere:
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/quig13.htm
In the intro to his book, Propaganda, Edward Bernays echoes a similar sentiment:
That was published in 1928. The Technate very much already exists!
Also from that same page of Bernays:
Wow… they’re crazy.
But they may yet be the future.
On the other hand, I’ve long thought that an “energy credit” based economy would be a good idea, though not in the way they’re thinking. What I’d have in mind is directly pegging the value of the dollar to 20 KWH of electricity, and keeping a national energy reserve (based on the most efficient and directly accessible energy technologies- natural gas, hydrogen, and nuclear); money could be directly exchanged for energy in the same manner as the old gold reserve. It would make a lot more sense than backing a currency with precious metals (which are little better than the current fiat system), as an economy is essentially a breakdown of energy states. And it would provide a market-based solution to energy resource depletion, as it would provide a direct compensation for conservation and the creation of energy-reserves; energy would no longer be an economic “free lunch”.
But it’s interesting to note how similiar the “technocratic” vision is to the political positions that I argued for with my father as a child- he’d try to tell me why democracy mattered, while I always thought the world would be better off if it were run by scientists and engineers, and if people were genetically engineered into castes (mind you, this was a decade before I’d get around to reading Brave New World). Part of me still thinks the younger me may have had a point… another part thinks he’s batshit crazy…
Noam Chomsky said “Intellectuals come in two varieties, according to the trilateral analysis. The “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals” are to be admired for their unquestioning obedience to power and their services in social management, while the “value-oriented intellectuals” must be despised and feared for the serious challenge they pose to democratic government, by “unmasking and delegitimatization of established institutions.”
Bernays would be in agreement with Walter Lippman who coined the term ‘manufacturing consent’. He basically argued that in a properly-functioning democracy there are classes of citizens. There is the class of citizens who have to take some active role in running general affairs. That’s the specialized class. They are the people who analyze, execute, make decisions, and run things in the political, economic, and ideological systems. That’s a small percentage of the population… ‘Those others, who are out of the small group, the big majority of the population, they are what Lippman called “the bewildered herd.” We have to protect ourselves from the trampling and rage of the bewildered herd’
George Orwell and Huxley were probably liberal/libertarians they did not trust the state. One of my favorite Orwell quotes is “if you want a vision of the future- imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever”. One of the things I find funny though is Orwell absolutely hated surrealism.
I know what you’re saying - it’s definitely a fence-riding issue in a lot of ways. It cuts to that argument people always bring up about surgeons: you wouldn’t just want anybody to operate on your brain would you? You would only want somebody with the proper training and expertise to do so.
Here’s my best guess at what is happening though: it is a blend of both. “Behind the scenes” I expect that things really are run in more or less a technocratic method, and may have been so for close to a century.
But we all have these nagging lingering beliefs about democracy, the value of the individual, etc - which is essentially the tradition of Liberalism which originally was birthed with the Enlightenment and the dawn of modern science.
Modern science, however, moves a lot faster than individual humans and human culture. They essentially know we aren’t ready to jettison our long-held beliefs in favor of a scientific utopia. And frankly, they probably think, why should we? They can use our belief in our own democratic control and freedom as a “Noble Lie” to maintain our happiness within the system they are running behind the scenes. That way, everybody gets what they feel that they want, except for us nasty annoying discontents.
Great Vernor Vinge quote on this subject I posted recently:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006...6/is-the-illusion-of-freedom-freedom/
A totally scientized and technocratic government makes complete and total sense when you look at the state of affairs today: land-grabs to ensure resource dominance, a push towards total mechanized control and surveillance over the population, via tracking, RFID, spying, predictive models of behavior, marketing companies running presidential election campaigns, genetics/eugenics - it’s all right there
It all sounds good on paper, and at one point in my life I believed in many of the elements of the technocratic ideology. The problem is that dictatorships rarely if ever end up benevolent, even if they start out that way.
Instead of a technocratic utopia, we (they?) are creating a technocratic dystopia.
I think they may be looking at this with two filters: (1) one of which is materialist-behavioralist - essentially that mankind doesn’t have a soul, and internal states (such as suffering or dissent) are meaningless, and (2) that they are working on the long game, molding society through a painful birthing process as we transition out of old cultural beliefs and behaviors into their perfect scientopia. In this vision, any bad done or felt now would be outweighed by the future good and the ultimate goal.
The other thing: they don’t think they are running a dictatorship. They believe they are championing democracy, as I think is evidenced in the Bernays quote above:
I think they are also relying on the fact that lack of competition is bad for scientific advancement. To kill all opposition would lead to memetic/ideological stagnation. So instead they have to manage and corral that opposition into proper socially-constructive forms…
The ironic part of all this, I think, is that this is how our country was quite possibly originally envisioned. In a lot of ways, it is completely inline with the original goals of this nation, not counter to it. It may in fact be the final intended fulfillment of it, as the layers of myth and noble lie necessary at the time to grease the wheels are gradually stripped away. “The masses are asses”. I think Hamilton said that.
Well, I’m not too impressed either with the “masses” these days, plugged into IPods and uninterested in anything critical to our long term survival. Nevertheless, I’d still like to see everybody, even the asses, able to make a living without killing themselves, to raise their kids in peace, and to feel a sense of belonging in a community. The current situation seems to promote the opposite. And if you believe the various doomsayers (e.g. Jeff Wells) the long term goal is more of the same kind of abject serfdom and horror. Hopefully they’re wrong.
I’m not saying they’re wrong, but I am saying that if you look at the source materials of the people who initiated all this: the Enlightenment philosophers, people like Adam Weishaupt, then it starts to appear as though the things that you want are the same things that they want (or at least wanted)….
Another aspect we have not touched on here, is that I see little effort to delineate how ancient needs, culturally and selfishly will be met — humans appear still little more than machine fodder and then mulch. This so called “technocracy” it seems to me, has this incredibly vast blindspot. In some ways I can imagine this blindspot as being its chief feature — both imposing on that which perceives itself as weaker than the whole it claims that it is but also being driven by that which it cannot perceive (i.e. science). It’s like a vortex that leads unto a single infinitesimal point, fueled by that which it does not know. Humans put it into motion and the motion, unbeknownst at the time, will likely wipe us out. Yet not for one instant do I mean this cynically. I mean that, this “cosmic energy” we each have tapped into by dint of being alive, is not at this point elevated to its level of “proper” veneration of the human mind.
Humanity looking into itself — even if being done merely by a handful of technocratic elite is the symiotic equivalent of an infinite regress between mirrors — you don’t see infinity but you deduce that it must go on (simple physics/phenomenology). The energy that fuels the “USS Humanity on Planet Earth” comes from none other than our vast stores of awe. The awe is quickly running out as the tank appears to be finite, like our human lives are finite yet we have elevated past the concept of God.
I don’t think anybody meant to do it. But it is quickly becoming apparent to me that this shit is what “the singularity” is. It will all come down on ‘one man” and he will decide to incinerate it all rather than possibly entertain the idea that he might be mistaken. No one is safe, not even the “elite” (whatever that means). Ergo: Jesus Christ.
Here’s the part I don’t get: why the sinister shtick if the technocrats are planning a utopia for us? To most observers it seems obvious that:
a.) we are spiralling downward toward totalitarian dytopia, complete with hollow “democracies” run by corporate interests, very heavily and yet subtly controlled media, rampant militarism, and a seemingly complete indifference to environmental degradation, and
b.) none of us want any of the above. I very much believe that it would require less effort to build heaven on earth, a workable, sustainable utopia. Capitalism, like its parent, mercantilism, depends in large part on economies of scarcity. Does anyone doubt that the “free market” is an artificial, even arbitrary construct? That collusion better describes the relationship between corporations than does competition? (A quick overview of the pharmaceutical industry, specifically the pricing agreements on brand and generic drugs, will dispel any romantic notions about any “free hand” doing anything but goosing the consumer/citizen.)
The fact is that we have the means at hand right now to turn this downward spiral around, without “selling our despair to any stronger man,” to quote Phil Manzanera, guitarist and philosopher (don’t laugh–Frank Zappa was far more enlightened than any politician of the modern era!) Why, if we could fix all that ails the world, and actually institute true political freedom and truly representative government, are these technocrat persons helping push us in the other direction? Why are the technologies which could literally save us being suppressed? Why continue to push the Big Lie, when the Plain Truth is so much easier and would be received by a grateful world with undying appreciation and fidelity?
Great question. My personal belief is that the Plain Truth would in fact NOT be met with appreciation and fidelity. Quite the opposite, I think. The reason why they don’t just reveal it to us I think also relates to on Star Trek what they call the Prime Directive: we must be able to rise up and join them on their level - hence this notion of Evolution, as explored a bit in the previous post.
Anyway I plan to write about exactly this tomorrow.
That is the fatal flaw in all “scientific” top-down control strategies. It is not possible to model every detail of a system without consuming an amount of energy equivalent to that in the system itself. But in the details are nonlinearities that may lead to huge unforeseen consequences. Technocratic systems are doomed to follow the wake of these blind spots. In fact, this is a clear example of the “Void” leading humanity. We are led by that which we cannot perceive.
http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com/
alan watt talks about the technocratic dystopia at length on his website above.
patricia pitcher talks at length about technocrats, lovers of power, in her book, artistts, craftsmen and technocrats.
could you imagine not being able to practice santeria and do readings unless you were an expert?
my view has always been that as bureacracies grow the tend to become self-serving, that is, dissociated from thier initial purpose and switch over to self preservation. government is clearly in that mode now. it`s agencies are cruising around taking money from the citizenry at the barrel of a gun. it is as if as more people group together in a specific purpose this over-agenda appears at some point. a tipping point where the management of our community needs become secondary to control.
welcome to 1984.
Veering wildly off the track of this conversation, I thought it was interesting that they call their ying-yang symbol a “monad”. I’ve recently encountered this in reading Neal Stephenson’s BAROQUE CYCLE, in which (both the fictional and the real) Leibniz wrote a book called MONADOLOGY–this was his discourse on the metaphysical nature of, essentially, atoms.
I quote the wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology#What_is_a_monad.3F
It’s not necessarily related, but I thought it was interesting, nonetheless. Neal Stephenson, through Leibniz, describes monads much more effectively in his book(s), which I do encourage reading in spite of its (their) length.
Wow, Tim, this is quite a post!
Just finished the Baroque Cycle last night, it was definitely worth reading.
Yes! There is a deeply related phenomenon from information theory and algorithmic information theory where it is proven that any possible theory can only contain a finite amount of predictive power. Essentially, even our best theories cannot predict any more information than what we put into their definition.
The positivists (basically scientific materialists) believe that our finite theories can encapsulate and control the inexhaustible world. Nevermind that the pencil on paper that wrote the theory and the mind that envisioned it is a part of the same physical process and cannot contain its container.
But their irrational and unshakable belief in positivism means they have to fit everything they encounter into this framework, by force if need be.
The Christian/Muslim/(Jewish?) fundamentalism that moves so much on the world stage these days is an utterly modern reaction to the materialist worldview. There was no ‘fundamentalism’ prior to materialism.
John Gray’s “Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern” addresses this well.
The ‘burbclaves’ remind me of Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’, which is a lot of fun.
Crypto-anarchist Tim May used to always point out that licensing journalists, for instance, was effectively equivalent to denying free press rights to the rest of us. He applied this reasoning to every kind of licensing or authorizing.
Hey Tim,
I see you reference philosopher kings, so I imagine you realize the idea is at least as old as Plato’s Republic. And yet it still hasn’t really happened anywhere. I would guess this is because the people with political will end up with the power, and true technocrats tend not to have the necessary political will. Just a guess of course.
Just an interesting aside from the Wikipedia article on the Republic:
“A more positive view of an Platonic style government would be Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. His citizen can be compared to a Platonic Guardian, without the communal breeding and property, but still having a militaristic base. Although there are significant differences in the specifics of the system, Heinlein and Plato both endorse systems of limited franchise, with a political class that has earned their power and wisely governs the whole.”
prunes,
I very much like your syllogism:
The positivists (basically scientific materialists) believe that our finite theories can encapsulate and control the inexhaustible world. Nevermind that the pencil on paper that wrote the theory and the mind that envisioned it is a part of the same physical process and cannot contain its container.
But there are a few ways “around†the seeming paradox. Evolution, for example, allows for levels of complexity that are orders of magnitude higher that first conditions to develop, much as the seed of an oak tree allows for the “design†or structure of the mature oak tree to develop, even though the seed itself does not contain any specific blueprint for the later development. Another very interesting and, in many corners, highly scorned possibility is Amit Goswami’s version of John Wheeler’s “delayed choice,†which is based on a strange variation of the anthropic principle. Now I realize that Goswami came under heavy attack for his participation in the dreadful “What the Bleep Do We Know†movie, which set the “cause†back decades, I fear, but the idea here, this delayed choice, with its connections to the string and many worlds theories, is just too interesting to dismiss out of hand, as most of the dismissals have been. In “An Interview with Amit Goswami,†Craig Hamilton starts by asking the following question:
To be honest, when I first saw the subtitle of your book I assumed you were speaking metaphorically. But after reading the book, and speaking with you about it now, I am definitely getting the sense that you mean it much more literally than I had thought. One thing in your book that really stopped me in my tracks was your statement that, according to your interpretation, the entire physical universe only existed in a realm of countless evolving possibilities until at one point, the possibility of a conscious, sentient being arose and that, at that point, instantaneously, the entire known universe came into being, including the fifteen billion years of history leading up to that point. Do you really mean that?
AG: I mean that literally. This is what quantum physics demands. In fact, in quantum physics this is called “delayed choice.” And I have added to this concept the concept of “self-reference.” Actually the concept of delayed choice is very old. It is due to a very famous physicist named John Wheeler, but Wheeler did not see the entire thing correctly, in my opinion. He left out self-reference. The question always arises, “The universe is supposed to have existed for fifteen billion years, so if it takes consciousness to convert possibility into actuality, then how could the universe be around for so long?” Because there was no consciousness, no sentient being, biological being, carbonbased being, in that primordial fireball which is supposed to have created the universe, the big bang.But this other way of looking at things says that the universe remained in possibility until there was self-referential quantum measurement—so that is the new concept. An observer’s looking is essential in order to manifest possibility into actuality, and so only when the observer looks, only then does the entire thing become manifest—including time. So all of past time, in that respect, becomes manifest right at that moment when the first sentient being looks.
It turns out that this idea, in a very clever, very subtle way, has been around in cosmology and astronomy under the guise of a principle called the “anthropic principle.” That is, the idea has been growing among astronomers—cosmologists anyway—that the universe has a purpose. It is so fine-tuned, there are so many coincidences, that it seems very likely that the universe is doing something purposive, as if the universe is growing in such a way that a sentient being will arise at some point.
Before you laugh (too hard) read the rest of the interview, as the anthropic principle involved does not actually make man the center of the universe; rather it is consciousness, human (and conceivably otherwise) which sort of congeals into reality, in a quite understandable manner, at least once you’ve opened your mind to the possibility. http://twm.co.nz/goswam2.htm
Well, since you’re referencing Plato, didn’t Plato also say that a Noble Lie was necessary for this system to truly work? The Noble Lie, in this case, could very well be that the system is NOT set up this way and that we have a free republican system of government. Seems that there is no way to 100% prove such a speculation wrong.
Well, technically, from what I understand of Santeria, you really shouldn’t be doing readings until you’re an expert. There is a lengthy and often expensive initiation process of learning and dedication to the spirits of the religion required.
Why do conservatives constantly condemn human rights groups, civil liberty groups, environmental groups, the international court, the UN, labor unions, etc? It because they can’t stand any attack on the Nobel Lie, they can’t stand the Awful Truth.
Anyways, I say screw Plato he believed music corrupted people!
“For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions. ” Plato
Plato would have hated Punk rock
Plato’s political views are utterly inapplicable in the modern era. His ‘philosopher kings’ were not just highly trained individuals, but closer to saints or enlightened beings. The self-appointed (or university appointed) wise men of today would just be considered sklled craftsmen by him, unfit for ruling.
His philosophical writings, on the other hand, are perennially interesting.
Hey Prunes,
Of course Plato’s Republic may not even have been intended as anything other than a teaching aid even in his own time - philosophers still wonder whether he himself believed that his republic could or should ever be realized.
There is only one problem with technocracy: it does not work.
This has been very well explained by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, who said:
I think that about sums it up, and I know it’s true for me, and for most people I know. Technocracy is, ultimately, a recipe for disaster, because most technocrats are intellectuals who have little to no experience of the “real” world. Even people who may have both smarts and real world experience will make terrible mistakes if confronted with an unusual — or totally new — problem or set of issues.
A perfect example of this is the old USSR. To augment cotton production, technocrats decided to divert two rivers for irrigation. But these two rivers were the only ones who brought fresh water to the Aral Sea, one of the largest lake in the world. The result? A terrible ecological catastrophe, with thousands of people slolwly losing all means of subsistence. You can read more about this here and here.
Ultimately, there is such as a thing as the wisdom of the masses. Which is why Winston Churchill was able to say cheekily:
Well, no system of government “works”. You can’t simply point to one failure of a technocratic decision and say that this disproves that type of government. What about all the failures of other systems which are quite high and visible?
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[...] Lately I have been pretty gung-ho about exploring this notion of the technocracy (which I almost always accidentally spell technocrazy by accident - Freudian typing slip?). That crazy technocracy is basically a “rule by experts.” We could even call it an expertocracy if we wanted, but that doesn’t have as quite of a sweet ring to it. [...]
[...] Well, you throw around a word enough and people are going to notice. I recently received a rebuttal from a member fan of Technocracy, Inc which I wrote about in a recent post, Welcome to the Technate! I think this fellow makes some fine points and since I did specifically mention his group by name, and quite possibly took things that they said or stand for totally out of context, I would like to re-post what he said here. Hopefully he will be kind enough to field any questions people may have regarding what the Technocracy, Inc movement really stands for. Apologies for distorting it in my own efforts to understand just what the hell is REALLY going on in the world today! Hi, my name is Ross, I just read your article on the Technocracy Movement “Welcome to the Technate!” here… [...]
[...] I think we could also have an interesting conversation about the collapse of civilization vis-a-vis the little-known technocratic movement, who also just so happen to believe that a crash of our current system is not only necessary but desirable to allow them to implement their system of rule. Read more here. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the fact that M. King Hubbert, the man who coined the concept “Peak Oil” was also a public member of the technocractic movement. [...]
[...] Last night I received yet another email from somebody claiming to be involved in the Technocracy, Inc movement. According to this person, Skip Seivert, the other technocrats who contacted me (upset over my alleged misrepresentation of them) have been “discredited” and do not represent the official views of that organization. I will let Skip’s email stand for itself, as I’m a little confused over the whole thing myself still. Where he says “Technocracy.ca” he is referring to the original group of would-be technocrats who contacted me: Hi Tim. I don`t know you, but I am a very active member of Technocracy . I am a card carrying member of Technocracy inc. I am speaking for my self though ,when I would like to inform you of a couple things. The Technocracy.ca site that you were on recently has been discredited because of its leader there who has an interesting, shall we say ingenious interpretation of Technocracy. Bill DesJardines is the guy I am talking about. Known as Kolzene on the site. [...]
[...] Tim Boucher’s article on technocracy [...]