Technocracy In Canada

The Beaver, the Canadian History magazine has a great article on Technocracy Inc. in Western Canada. Here is a short excerpt.

Walter Fryers lives in Edmonton and leads the Technocracy chapter here. Which meets at the Stanley Milner Library Tuesdays and Sundays at 1:30 Pm

THE LAST UTOPIANS
by Ray Argyle

Technocracy promised Depression-weary Canadians an end to their hardship. But the offer came with a catch.

The abandoned farms and empty streets of Depression-ridden rural Manitoba filled the view through the windows of the railway coach as Walter Fryers, a twenty-three-year-old university student, journeyed back to Winnipeg.

It was the fall of 1936 and Fryers had spent the summer trapping muskrats in the delta of the Saskatchewan River, working for little more than “board and a bunk.” Now he was anxious to return to his science studies at the University of Manitoba.

During the long train trip from The Pas, the young student took to heart the dark reality of the dust bowl. It had been the hottest North American summer on record. Across the Prairies, dark clouds of dust rose off the drought-stricken land, burying livestock that lay dead and dying in the fields, and caking the faces of the hungry and haggard families who grimly trekked to the cities, leaving their devastated farms behind. Against this backdrop, Fryers pondered the failure of society to provide a better life for the millions impoverished by the Great Depression.

This continued to weigh on Fryers’ mind after he arrived in Winnipeg, with its bread lines and its boarded-up businesses. Here, a chance encounter — spotting a poster for a lecture on something called “Technocracy” — was to rapidly change the direction of his life.

The lecture introduced the young man to a radical new doctrine that seemed to satisfy his yearning for a scientific solution to the world’s problems. Technocracy’s adherents claimed it would eliminate want by putting power in the hands of a capable few — not politicians, but an elite group of engineers and technicians, known as the Technocrats.

Within months, Fryers was himself preaching Technocracy’s merits to the media. The Winnipeg Free Press gave front-page space to his declaration that the existing economic system was the root of the problem, because, in order for it to work, “a scarcity must be created and maintained. That is why, in a world of plenty, we have widespread poverty.”

Technocracy flared like a comet in the darkness of the dirty thirties, promising to replace a collapsing capitalist system with a non-political government of scientists and technicians. It attracted thousands of members in Canada, survived a wartime banning, and enjoyed renewed, but brief, popularity after World War II amid short-lived fears that Canada might return to Depression-like conditions.

Of all the protest movements that flowered in the Depression, Technocracy was a unique creation. Largely overlooked by historians and neglected by most political scientists, the movement never elected an MP or fomented a riot. But to workers without jobs and farmers without crops suffering through the hungry thirties, Technocracy’s proffered world of plenty seemed a utopian paradise: Unemployment would be a thing of the past and all would share equally in the abundance of the machine age. Sir Thomas More’s sixteenth-century conception of a “happy island” stricken of all poverty and crime might at last become a reality, thanks to modern technology.

Founder Howard Scott’s design for what he called the “Technate of America” did away with borders and merged the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America into a single nation under a regime of engineers and technicians. Political parties, along with money and all the trappings of the present price-based economic system — which Scott saw as incompatible with the distribution of industry’s output — would be things of the past. The economy would be based on energy (the capacity to perform work) and the new currency would be “energy certificates,” qualifying every citizen to an equal share of the continent’s wealth. People would work four hours per day, four days per week, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five.

Technocracy spread quickly in Canada — although its strength here, as in the United States, was concentrated in the West. Eight chapters were soon organized in Vancouver, and the magazine Technocracy Digest was launched. Branches were set up throughout British Columbia, as well as in Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Hamilton, and Toronto. For many, Technocracy served as a fraternal organization. The Winnipeg Free Press reported on a 1940 technocratic wedding, noting the groom and his attendants wore Technocracy grey suits and “twelve men in Technocracy grey formed a guard of honour.” In Vancouver, a Technocracy orchestra was formed.

I disagree with the authors claim later in the article that the idea of the Technate, technocracy's model of governance over production and distribution systems, is authoritarian and anti-democratic. He mistakes representative parliamentary democracy as being the only form of democracy.

It is a technical model for production and distribution.Indeed the idea of the technate is the administration of things not people. Technocracy did not offer up a political system to replace capitalism per se.

And in fact in a paper I presented on Technocracy, Socialist Industrial Democracy and Syndicalism, available upon request until I post it, I showed that it coincides with North American models of workers control. That is the Technate can be adapted to be used by worker controlled industries as an alternative to the wage system. Especially in light of the Norbert Weiners applications of cybernetics to industrial production that was attempted in Allende's Chile.

The fact that it was popular in Western Canada shows again that radical alternatives to capitalism were sown here for most of the early years of the twentieth century. And that radicalism was NOT conservative individualism as the right wing pundits and other neo-cons of today assert.

Today many of the predictions of Technocracy about the crisis of energy demand in an advanced industrial society are being accepted as common knowledge; namely their assertion of the crisis of Peak Oil.

SEE:

Technocracy Inc. Predicted Oil Crisis Over 50 years ago

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
utopians, Howard Scott, Western Canada, Peak-Oil, Hubbert,
Veblen Technocracy, Energy

1930s Post-Scarcity Dreams: Remembering the Technocracy Movement

Benjamin Abbott Mar 1, 2013 Ethical Technology


https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/abbott20130301

For a brief moment in the 1933, a radical solution to the Great Depression seized public attention across the United States. Claiming the mantle of scientific authority and well-equipped with facts and figures, Technocracy condemned the economic status quo – the price system – as hopelessly antiquated in an age of abundant energy. Technocrats argued the era of meaningful scarcity had ended.

The movement proposed a technician-run economy of equally distributed prosperity as the only way to prevent ecological and social collapse in the North American continent. In the context of financial meltdown and widespread destitution coupled with overproduction, the country's population proved receptive to the possibility of switching to economic system firmly grounded in material reality and organized by engineers' logic of instrumental rationality.

That transition never happened, of course; the price system weathered that crisis and others that followed. Technocracy fell back into obscurity as suddenly as it rose to prominence. Many historians treat the movement as a curiosity worthy only of ridicule – and not without reason. I've scant interest in promoting Technocracy as such and less still in apologizing for movement figurehead and would-be supreme leader Howard Scott.

However, I consider Technocracy's critique of capitalism and future vision valuable in that comes from an engineering perspective. Through insistent focus on the physical and technical, Technocracy turns on its head economists' claims about the efficiency of capitalism and effectively characterizes the price system overwhelmingly wasteful. Despite their myopia and enthusiastic embrace of numerous forms of oppression, Scott and company's analysis provides insight into the profound contradictions of the industrial world system and the project of cultivating better future.

Here in the twenty-first century, eighty years past the zenith of the Technocracy movement's notoriety, the contrast between actually existing production and human wants stands out as even more absurd. There's so much manufactured stuff around that many affluent folks don't know what to do with it. Few things last; designs routinely assume or ensure rapid obsolescence.

Dumpsters swell and spill over; landfills sprawl across acres and acres. In the Pacific Ocean, trash coalesces into patch of arguably continental proportions. Waste, as miserably processed as vast majority of it is, constitutes as resource for scavengers. Bottle, can, and scrap metal collection forms an important income for impoverished urban residents. I personally survive primarily from food deemed unsellable and thus donated. I know comrades who live off the food people leave on their plates at restaurants when traveling. Between gift markets and friends, I can hardly remember the last time I paid for clothing.

The scavenger economy marginals like me participate in – constrained as it is by gates, locks, and zealous garbage defenders – only hints at the staggering excesses of capitalism. Let's begin with a big-picture view of basic necessities and comforts. First, nutrition. A recent report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers concludes that a third to half of all food produced simply spoils. Next, shelter. In in the United States, approximately twenty-four houses go completely empty for each houseless person. So much more residential space goes unused at the micro level; the other bedroom in the apartment where I stay has been unoccupied for the better part of a month while I search for someone to fill it.

What about transportation? As Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler convincingly show, U.S. car culture approaches optimization's antithesis. You’ve got to work at it to devise a system that squandered more resources than multiton hunks of metal that commonly carry only a single person and spend 95% of time idly taking up space.
Members of the Technocracy movement examined similar dynamics from their time and concluded that it could and had to be done better. Along with Thorstein Veblen's 1921 The Engineers and the Price System, the Technical Alliance's studies of industrial waste appear in any account of the Technocracy movement's origins. The Technical Alliance – a group that included both Scott and Veblen during its 1920-1921 existence – prepared reports from clients such as the Railroad Brotherhood and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Stuart Chase used his research with Technical Alliance as the foundation for his 1925 book The Tragedy of Waste. From a system-design standpoint, capitalist production and distribution looks like an awful, ugly mess.

I find this approach of comparison with the physically possible ideal an illuminating and provocative heuristic device. I heartily recommend contemplating what you want whether it’s possible or not as technique of both social critique and personal understanding, but the materialist-empiricist epistemology employed by the Technocracy movement adds a grounding element to this utopian exercise. If wielded prudently, Technocracy’s extreme reduction of human beings to machines with energy inputs and outputs constitutes a fruitful thought experiment. As sketched above, the ideal here obliterates assertions of capitalism’s efficiency. At best proponents can retreat to the stance that capitalism least bad among a lineup of stinkers.

While Scott insisted on distinguishing Technocracy and the technical mindset he idolized from Leftist revolutionary ideology, Veblen took a less rigid view and happily channeled Marxism in his notorious call for “a soviet of engineers and technicians.” Technocracy promised an old socialist, communist, and anarchist objective: universal comfort with minimal toil. Following Henry Elsner, Jr., I interpret the Technocracy – especially Technocracy, Inc. under Scott’s domination – as an authoritarian Left movement not as far removed from the Marxist spectrum as Scott repeatedly proclaimed. Dreams of egalitarian automation animated Leftists of Elsner’s era; I’m especially fond of socialist-feminist Shulamith Firestone’s cybernetic communism and Valerie Solanas’s plan for complete automation. Today, apart from Technocracy Inc. itself and explicit descendants such as Network of European Technocrats, Technocracy’s influence seems strongest in the Zeitgeist Movement and associated Venus Project.

In relation to the post-scarcity discourse prevalent within transhumanist and Singularitarian circles, remembering the Technocracy movement indicates that we need not wait for nanofactories and artificial general intelligence to terminate human want. The technical ability to create abundance of the basics has been around since the dawn of the twentieth century if not much earlier. Building a post-scarcity society requires political struggle and isn’t likely to happen on its own. There’s no guarantee that increasingly potent productive technology will lead to distributed plenty. As the current intellectual property rights regime demonstrates, governments can manufacture scarcity through coercion.

I conclude with a passage from the soul-searching debate within the Continental Committee on Technocracy that resulted from the split with Scott. The sentiment expressed applies as well to transhumanism and the Singularity movement in my estimation:
Some of us contended that behind the fad, the fantastic figures, and the pseudo-scientific jargon, was a sound idea. And that civilization itself might very well depend on getting this fundamental idea accepted, on proving to the people that the days of material scarcity would be over as soon as they willed it (Continental Committee on Technocracy, Bulletin No. 13, August 1, 1934).

Further Reading:

Akin, William E. Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Elsner, Jr., Henry. The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 1967.

Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 2005.

Stabile, Don R. “Veblen and the Political Economy of Technocracy: The Herald of Technological Revolution Developed an Ideology of 'Scientific' Collectivism.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 46:1 (1987), 35-48.

TECHNOCRACY THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order 


by Patrick Wood (Author) 
Format: Kindle Edition

https://tinyurl.com/yazkxzdh

In 1974, Trilateral Commission member and academic Richard Gardner wrote an article "The Hard Road to World Order" for Foreign Affairs magazine, predicting the future of the Commission's self-proclaimed New International Economic Order. Gardner spoke of an "end-run around national sovereignty", a "booming, buzzing confusion" and building it from the "bottom up" rather than attempting an "old-fashioned frontal assault."After almost 45 years, it is time to examine the record. In Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, Wood traces the steps and developments that led to the United Nations' establishment of Sustainable Development as an outgrowth of historic Technocracy from the 1930s. UN programs such as 2030 Agenda, New Urban Agenda and the Paris Climate Agreement are all working together to displace Capitalism and Free Enterprise as the world's principal economic system. As a resource-based economic system, Sustainable Development intends to take control of all resources, all production and all consumption on planet earth, leaving all of its inhabitants to be micro-managed by a Scientific Dictatorship. Topics covered include the devolution of federal governments combined with the rise of global Smart Cities. Tools are examined, like ubiquitous surveillance, collaborative governance, Public-Private Partnerships, Reflexive Law, Fintech, including crypto currencies and the drive toward a cashless society. The spiritual aspect of Sustainable Development is also explored as an important component of manipulation. Looking underneath the cover of globalization, Wood shatters the false narrative of a promised Utopia and exposes the true nature of the deception used to promote this new economic order. Those elite who hate the bedrock of American liberty and its time-tested Constitution have pulled out all the stops to destroy both, and it's time for citizens to stand up to reject them. As always, Wood closes with the nature of effective resistance and the tools that can help to achieve success.

The dark horse of the New World Order is not Communism, Socialism or Fascism. It is Technocracy.

With meticulous detail and an abundance of original research, Patrick M. Wood uses Technocracy Rising to connect the dots of modern globalization in a way that has never been seen before so that the reader can clearly understand the globalization plan, its perpetrators and its intended endgame.

In the heat of the Great Depression during the 1930s, prominent scientists and engineers proposed a utopian energy-based economic system called Technocracy that would be run by those same scientists and engineers instead of elected politicians. Although this radical movement lost momentum by 1940, it regained status when it was conceptually adopted by the elitist Trilateral Commission (co-founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller) in 1973 to be become its so-called "New International Economic Order."]

https://tinyurl.com/yaq3b7u9

In the ensuing 41 years, the modern expression of Technocracy and the New International Economic Order is clearly seen in global programs such as Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Councils of Governments, Smart Growth, Smart Grid, Total Awareness surveillance initiatives and more.

Wood contends that the only logical outcome of Technocracy is Scientific Dictatorship, as already seen in dystopian literature such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948), both of whom looked straight into the face of Technocracy when it was still in its infancy.

With over 250 footnotes, an extensive bibliography and clarity of writing style, Wood challenges the reader to new levels of insight and understanding into the clear and present danger of Technocracy, and how Americans might be able to reject it once again.

OMG HERE ARE THE SECRET PLANS OF THE NWO

     

Policy Innovations Transformative Change - Local 2030 ...

https://www.local2030.org › library › Policy-Innovations-for-Transformativ...

Oct 4, 2016 - Societies across the world are facing many complex ... Pathways to transformative change for sustainable development ... Chapter 2: New Trends and Innovations in Social Policy ... Government policies are key for upscaling, capacity building and facilitating ... the creation of carbon markets or incentives for.

HURRAH AN ORGANIZATION; TECHNOCRACY THAT BARELY EXISTS THIS GUY SAYS THEY ARE THE NEW CONSPIRACY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD

I LOVE THIS SCIENCE FICTION STUFF AS A HERESIOLOGIST, A HERESY HAS A HERESY OPPOSING IT.

BUT OF COURSE IT ALL BEGINS WITH THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0986373923/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2
This is the documented story of the organization and members of the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, with the specific purpose of creating a "New International Economic Order". With an small but powerful international membership hand-picked by an executive committee, Commissioners asserted undue influence over America, Japan and Europe. In 1976, Trilateral members James Earl Carter and Walter Mondale were elected to head the Executive Branch in the U.S., thus starting a 40 year hegemony over the greatest economic nation on earth. American influence and position was used to reform international trade, promote globalization and interdependence among nations. European Trilateral members were then instrumental in using the United Nations to create a doctrine of Sustainable Development and Green Economy: See Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (Wood, 2015) for details. Originally written in 1979-1980, Trilaterals Over Washington quickly became a best-seller and over the course of about two years, sold over 75,000 copies internationally. The books were very well received for excellent scholarship and original research, and even became a frequently-used textbook in political science classes at many colleges in U.S. universities. The co-author, Professor Antony C. Sutton, passed in 2002 having authored 24 books during a distinguished academic career that included UCLA and the Hoover Institution at 
Stanford University.

Since at least 1973, the engine of globalization has been the troika of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements. Acting in concert with each other, national barriers were broken down and national assets were often raided with impunity. Biography
Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy.

He is the author of Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton.

Wood remains a leading expert on the elitist Trilateral Commission, their policies and achievements in creating their self-proclaimed “New International Economic Order” which is the essence of Sustainable Development on a global scale.

An economist by education, a financial analyst and writer by profession and an American Constitutionalist by choice, Wood maintains a Biblical world view and has deep historical insights into the modern attacks on sovereignty, property rights and personal freedom. Such attacks are epitomized by the implementation of U.N. policies such as Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, Smart Growth and in education, the widespread adoption of Common Core State Standards.


Wood is a frequent speaker and guest on radio shows around the nation. His current research builds on Trilateral Commission hegemony, focusing on Technocracy, Transhumanism and Scientism, and how these are transforming global economics, politics and religion.

THANK FNORD 

Technocracy Inc. Predicted Oil Crisis Over 50 years ago

I thought I would re-post this article here, as it is buried deep in my RedBetweenTheLines blog at Modblog. And given how often Modblog fails, which is why I no longer post there, I thought I would republish it here. Just in case it disappeared into the cyberabyss. And it is still relevant since it was published in January 2005. Wow way back then.

Recently a discussion on M.K.Hubbert arose on the marxism discussion list. This in itself was rather surprizing since Hubbert is a technocrat, and Technocracy Inc. is usually dismissed by the left as being some utopian scheme, or some kind of strange sect or cult. They were the original scientists and engineers for social responsibility, and being ahead of their time their theories appear to read like science fiction.

Hubbert is a favorite reference for my uncle, John Gregory, a professional engineer and geologist who worked for the National Research Council of Canada and is a long time member of Technocracy Inc here in Edmonton. As a social democratic technocrat living in the energy capital of Canada, his promotion of Hubberts therom was downright heresy. I grew up with a political understanding of technocracy as a progressive movement thanks to my uncle. Technocrats in Edmonton have always been activists appearing at all the progressive rallies and forums promoting their form of planned industrial/energy economy.

M. K. Hubbert predicated the Oil Crisis of 1972, waaaay back in the Fifties. He predicts that we will face a further oil crisis in the early part of this Century as reserve stocks decline along with increased demand.
Hubbert was dismissed at the time as a technocrat and his work is still villified in some circles today.Hubbert's work however has gained further legitimacy as oil prices have rocketed, and the Imperialist oil wars have drawn attention to this ongoing crisis.

Hubberts solution to this crisis was his theory of steady state economics. What was once thought of as crackpot theories of Technocracy, Hubbert has gained with new respect for his predictive analysis. Especially now that the impact of oil culture on the biosphere has been documented. Hubbert had already predicted that increasing reliance on oil would lead to an evironmental crisis in 1974.

Before dismissing Technocracy, one should review their work on economics needing to be energy based, actual credits based on the total value of physical energy available in an industrialized society. Not wage based, in other words they call for abolishing the wage system! Technocracy opposes capitalisms m-c-m formula (money-capital-money, or as we would call it today the Casino Capitalism of the Stockmarket) they oppose this money economy or price economy as they call it and propose replacing it with an energy economy.

Technocracy is a left wing industrial/social planning model , once banned at the same time as other left wing groups in the US and Canada. They promoted the theories ofthe Icelandic/American socialist Thorstein Veblen, author of the Leisure Class which gave us the term 'conspicious consumption'. Spefically Technocracy was influenced by his work: The Engineers And The Price System, regarding the social responsibilities of Science and Engineering which were direclty linked to the radical workers movement of the 1920's. The opening chapter is about Sabotage in the work place, the workers dissastisfaction with work and their alienation in industrial societies.

Technocracy Inc. from its beginings had friendly relations with the IWW, and was influenced by its unique form of North American syndicalism. Howard Scott was a friend of IWW General Secretary Vincent St. John, who got him to write articles for the union. Like other brain workers Technocrats viewed themsleves as workers, not a professional managment class as scientists and engineers have become today.

Unfortunately like left wing ideas of workers control, or self management which have been recuperated by capitalism and its managment theorists, technocracy and the term technocrat have been used as a prejorative for years. The reality is that technocrats are not just social engineers but socialist engineers, and an open organization to everyone, except politicians. Why thats downright anarchist of them.

Which may explain why politicians use technocrat as prejorative, they don't like being left out of anything.

Modblog stories on Peak Oil

Le Revue Gauch stories:

Thorstein Veblen

Technocracy

Peak Oil



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Hubbert, Technocracy, Peak-Oil, Socialism, Veblen, Engineers, IWW, Howard, Scott

Technocracy, Then and Now

The Question Concerning Technology

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Technocracy, Then and Now

A number of prominent news organizations reported recently that "technocrats" have taken over the governments of Greece and Italy. Oddly, those reports failed to define what a technocrat might be. Slate magazine's Forrest Wickman stepped in with an "Explainer" column last Friday that nicely cleared up the issue.  A technocrat, he said, is:

 An expert, not a politician. Technocrats make decisions based on specialized information rather than public opinion. For this reason, they are sometimes called upon when there’s no popular or easy solution to a problem (like, for example, the European debt crisis). The word technocrat derives from the Greek tekhne, meaning skill or craft, and an expert in a field like economics can be as much a technocrat as one in a field more commonly thought to be technological (like robotics).

Technocracy is something I spend some time on in my book, and I'd like to make a few comments about it here. It's a way of thinking that inevitably gains influence as we increase our commitment to technology, especially in turbulent times. And given that an increasing commitment to technology and turbulent times tend to go together, it's a way of thinking that we'll surely be hearing more about in years to come.

To elaborate on Forrest Wickman's definition, technocracy can be described as the conviction that we will all be better off if we operate according to the rational standards of the machine. A given problem can be solved by the systematic application of a set of principles and procedures. Usually those are principles and procedures only experts can fully understand. It's a philosophy of methodology.

Lucas Papademos of Greece and Mario Monti of Italy both have advanced degrees in economics. Papademos has advanced degrees from MIT in physics and electrical engineering as well. As Wickman says, these qualifications implicitly suggest that they can be counted on to apply the necessary remedial measures without being swayed by anything so irrational as politics or popular opinion.  

In the United States we tend to associate technocracy with the Technocracy movement, which enjoyed a brief moment of national prominence in the early 1930s. In that case the connection to technology was slightly (only slightly) more direct. Americans feared that businessmen and politicians had shown themselves incapable of managing the explosive forces of industrial production, forces that were rapidly and radically reshaping the life and economy of the nation. The general feeling, says historian Henry Elsner, Jr., was that "somehow man had unleashed a monster in his midst – The Machine – which had gotten out of control and was threatening to wreck his civilization."[1]

One avenue of reform proposed was populism, which aimed to restore more control to the people. Another was technocracy, which aimed to focus control in the hands of the experts. This is an instance where we find history repeating itself today, with technocrats being asked to take charge by the established power structure in Europe even as the populists of the Occupy Wall Street movement agitate from street level for greater democratic control.

The Technocracy movement of the 1930s proposed that engineers take over as a sort of priesthood of the new industrial state. It wasn't the machine that was destroying society, they said, it was mismanagement of the machine by amateurs. Properly handled by qualified experts, technology would introduce an era of unprecedented plenty and leisure.

Here's how the Technocrats themselves described their qualifications for the job, in one of their pamphlets:

Technocracy's scientific approach to the social problem is unique, and its method is completely new…It speaks the language of science, and recognizes no authority but the facts. In Technocracy we see science banishing waste, unemployment, hunger, and insecurity of income forever…we see science replacing an economy of scarcity with an era of abundance….[And] we see functional competence displacing grotesque and wasteful incompetence, facts displacing guesswork, order displacing disorder, industrial planning displacing industrial chaos."[2]

The Technocracy movement faded quickly for lots of reasons, among them internal dissension, doubts about the credibility of its leaders, and absorption of its reforms by the New Deal. Technocracy was also hindered by a fundamental contradiction: It hoped to gain popular support for an ideology that was inherently elitist. 

Nonetheless, the temptation to rely on the expertise of the technocrat has remained, especially, as mentioned, in turbulent times. One of the more tragic examples to date was Robert S. McNamara's prosecution of the war in Vietnam.   

McNamara was a technocratic visionary whose evangelism on behalf of rationalism and efficiency took him from leadership positions in the Army Air Force's Statistical Control Office and the Ford Motor Company to the U.S. Department of Defense, which he headed under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. A passage from McNamara's 1968 book, The Essence of Security, described his philosophy:

Some critics today worry that our democratic, free societies are being overmanaged. I would argue that the opposite is true. As paradoxical as it may sound, the real threat to democracy comes, not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement. To undermanage reality is not to keep free. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. That force may be unbridled emotion; it may be greed; it may be aggressiveness; it may be hatred; it may be inertia; it may be anything other than reason. But whatever it is, if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential.[3]

Vietnam showed that, contrary to that philosophy, management by reason does not automatically eliminate the influence of emotion, greed, aggressiveness, hatred, or inertia. McNamara himself learned that lesson well. As he acknowledges in Errol Morris's documentary, The Fog of War, "Rationality will not save us."

Among the foremost advocates of technocratic principles today – in the business of technology, not in politics or in war, as far as I know – are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. The company's vice president of global communications and public affairs has called them "ideological technologists."

(Given that Google provides the blog space on which these words are written, my comments here may be seen as lacking the graciousness due one's host.)

Here's how Page, now Google's chief operating officer, explained his management philosophy to the journalist Ken Auletta:

There is a pattern in companies, even in technological companies, that the people who do the work – the engineers, the programmers, the foot soldiers, if you will – typically get rolled over by the management. Typically, the management isn't very technical. I think that's a very bad thing. If you're a programmer or an engineer or a computer scientist, you have someone tell you what to do who is really not very good at what you do, they tell you the wrong things. And you sort of end up building the wrong things; you end up kind of demoralized. You want a culture where the people who are doing the work, the scientists and engineers, are empowered. And that they are managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing. That's not typically the case.[4]

This, of course, reflects the classic technocratic conviction that the only person who can properly run the machine is the person who built it, or who knows how to build it. In today's technological society, that leaves a lot of us out.




Notes:

[1] Henry Elsner Jr., The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation (Syracuse University Press, 1967), p. 8-9.
[2] Quoted by Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (U. of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 122.
[3] McNamara's book quoted by Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, originally published 1968) p. 11-12.
[4] Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (Penguin, New York, 2010), p. 227. 

Photo credit: Artist unknown, illustration from Common Ground-Common Sense. 

©Doug Hill, 2012

Technocratic Abundance Technocracy and the ...

static.stevereads.com › papers_to_read › review_technocratic_abundance

by D Nelson - ‎1978 - ‎

Henry Elsner, Jr.'s, The Technocrats,. Prophets of Automation (1967) is the most comprehensive treatment; it traces the movement from its origins to the 1960s.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=TECHNOCRACY

The technocrats 1919-1967 : a case study of conflict ... - Core

https://core.ac.uk › download › pdf

by D Adair - ‎1970 - ‎

CANADIAN STUDY MASTERS DEGREE SFU
COVERS CANADIAN TECHNOCRACY AS WELL AS US
VANCOUVER HAD A BUILDING AND LARGE TECHONCRACY
FOLLOWING IN THE CITY PRE WAR AND POST WAR.

Technocracy and Democracy - African Journals Online

https://www.ajol.info › index.php › article › view

by FEA Owakah - ‎2009 - ‎Cited by 8 - ‎Related articles

Technocracy and Democracy: The Challenges to Development in Africa 87. Technocracy and ... In this definition, Wallace likens technocracy to a platonic meritocracy of the skilled. This analysis to some, ... Wallace , Andrew. 2007. Technocracy: Building a New Sustainable Society for a. Post-Carbon World. New York: NET ...

Technocracy: Building a new sustainable society for a post carbon world

Andrew Wallace

https://tinyurl.com/y7nly4rd

TECHNOCRACY: building a new sustainable society for a post carbon world
by Andrew Wallace
Topics moneyless, sustianbility, post carbon, technocracy
Collection opensource
Language English
How can we build a moneyless, sustainable, post carbon world?
Dr. Wallace presents a proposal for an alternative socio-economic system that has sustainability built in right from the start for a world without oil, a world without money. Taking science as the foundation the applying that to design a society that gives people more time to be human yet results in a high standard of living for everyone.  

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Contents

Designing the future	3
The technocracy car	17
Foundations	19
Science knowledge and the truth	21
Society its organisation and the distribution of goods	33
A short history of money	37
What does the term price system mean?	41
Growth and its limits	43

What do we mean with the term expert?	55
How do we balance the needs of the Earth with the needs of society?	57
What do we mean with the term energy credits?	61
Why would people work for free?	63
How do we ensure that the system does not become corrupted?	65
How would people live in a technate?	69
How would people get around?	75
What forms the technocratic plan for society?	77

What do we mean distributed and selforganising systems?	45
Technocracy	49
How do we build a new society?	51

How would this become real?	85
What about down side?	103
Technocracy For A Sustanalbe Soc Nov 2008 SLIDE SHOW https://www.slideshare.net/isenhand/technocracy-for-a-sustanalbe-soc-nov-2008-presentation Why Dont We Have Peace? Discussion with Dr Andrew Wallace Speak Easy Talk A discussion at Four Bridges SpeakEasy with Dr Andrew Wallace Research Engineer from HUMLab, Sweden Author: Technocracy: Building a new sustainable society for a post carbon world. New book due out soon Points raised during discussion Our evolutionary baggage of hunter gatherers competing for scarce resources influences our idea of “scarcity” in a time of real abundance. The money to be made from war and post war rebuilding is fuels conflict. The Internet is a distributive system. Millions of local groups are networking together cooperatively to learn and share ideas and inspiration. This is becoming more and more urgent. We will need to have so many interconnections that there is plenty of “redundancy” in the system. We could face a sudden “phase change” in our social and economic system. We need to have alternatives tested and trialled. There is not one organisation or leader – it is important to keep this a distributive, invisible leadership “The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‘We did it ourselves” — Lao Tzu