Technocracy and the New World Order: Part 3http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/5907-technocracy-and-the-new-world-order-part-3Written by Steven Yates
Saturday, 30 January 2010 06:00
carbon currency If we read between the lines, technocracy — both the old and the new — offers familiar utopian themes. Technocracy promises “complete economic security for every man, woman and child from birth to death; complete health care; modern, energy-efficient housing for all; education to the full extent of each individual’s ability; viable mass transit; employment for all who are able to work; careful stewardship of the Continent’s natural resources and environment.”
There is, of course, not a word about individual’s freedom here; nor a realization that real wealth must be produced and cannot simply be wished into existence by the creation of a new currency. There is not the slightest doubt about what F.A. Hayek called “scientism,” which expresses doubt that the methods applicable to the study and manipulation of natural phenomena can be imported into the study of human beings essentially unchanged. Thus there is no fear that the concentration of power would unleash a totalitarian nightmare akin to that of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, or Orwell’s 1984.
Neither the early technocrats nor their present-day disciples have any interest in national sovereignty. People will not live in sovereign nation states but in Technates. Readers will have noticed the references to North America as a single political unit, or Technate. Howard Scott and his group were the first advocates of a North American Union before the idea had that name.
Behind the technocratic agenda, though, is the idea, rooted as it is in the materialism of the nineteenth century philosophers, that human nature is exclusively a product of its material environment and is therefore as malleable as potter’s clay and can be changed wholesale by changing the economic arrangements — an idea whose best known exponent was Karl Marx (“from each according to his ability; to each according to his need”). All that is needed to change human nature is skilled technicians of human behavior who know what interventions to make. For example, technocrats believe that crime can be almost eliminated by ending the price system:
As practically all crime of the Price System results from the attempts of individual to acquire the property of others illegally to alleviate their own insecurity, crime would practically cease to exist in a Technocratic society. Technocracy defines a criminal to be a human being with predatory instincts, living under a Price System, without sufficient capital to start a corporation.
In a Technate, human beings would be treated for the first time in social history, not as willful entities, subject to legalistic prohibitions, restraints and penalizations, but as energy consuming people whose capacities as producers and consumers necessitate the development of the highest state of both capacities in order that human beings may be conditioned to living in a world of plenty where man's advantage over his fellowmen will no longer be socially profitable.
All worthy social projects are implied in the one big objective of Technocracy, which is to give to every human being adequate economic security.
But in a Technate will human beings still be allowed to ask, "What about basic freedoms, such as personal financial privacy or the freedom to travel?"
Today’s technocrats have an answer for those who presently ask, “What do you propose to do with those who do not choose to live under technocracy?”
They answer disarmingly, “Nothing. We are seeking people who are intelligent and open-minded enough to embrace a new idea. However, deteriorating economic and social conditions will force many people not presently interested to look in our direction.”
Read between the lines here. The elites who control the flow of resources through the economy now will be able to ensure that those not embracing the new status quo will pay dearly for what is therefore a Pickwickian choice at best.
“In the Technate,” the passage continues, “even the people who are not interested in Technocracy will enjoy the same high standard of living and increased leisure along with greater opportunity for cultural activities. Should they still prefer to live somewhere else, there will be no restriction on emigration.”
But under the world government that technocracy both imagines and requires, the obvious next question: where will would-be emigrants go?
