Running the risk of sounding like a broken record, the genesis of our collectivist and tyrannical society can be traced back to the Progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What were once free, thriving and dynamic capitalist economies, as soon the Great War broke out, the Western countries instantly forewent their (classical) liberal tenets, quickly adopting a despotic stance instead. Regrettably, the shackles of progressivism have never been broken since, having at most been loosen for some periods. Even though I have already touched on this subject, I think I should delve deeper into it and give a more detail account of the degeneration from laissez-faire capitalism (a.k.a. classical liberalism) to the increasingly top-down administration of society. This is of paramount importance to understand how we got here and where we are heading. Albeit an American-born movement, the seeds of progressivism came from the German states, in essence. Having studied German state theory of such philosophers as Georg WF Hegel – the boche who came up with the Hegelian dialectic alluded to in the previous instalment – and Johann Bluntschli, as well as being taught by Richard T. Ely who was educated at German universities, Woodrow Wilson, of all people, was the initiator of likely the most fundamental element of progressivism: the administrative state. Despite playing a vital role in the pursuit and attainment of progressive goals, the rationale for the formation of an expert class to administer the governance of the State was much more unpretentious. Wanting to get rid of the “spoils system” that had been prevailing since the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the urge for civil service reform materialised at first during the Civil War, though it culminated only in 1883 with the enactment of the Pendleton Act. In April of 1864, when Senator Charles Sumner (R., Mass), a Boston Brahmin and a leader of the Radical Republicans, introduced a bill for tenure and open examinations, to be administered by a federal civil service commission, the civil service reform movement started. Interestingly, this batch of Reformers was almost consanguineous. Akin to Senator Sumner, the overwhelming majority constituted the older and highly educated Northeastern elite. Moreover, this group of sanctimonious elitists spent most of their life concentrated solely on this endeavour of implementing a more efficient form of administration. Take the example of Representative Thomas Allen Jenckes (R., RI.). In December 1865, as a result of being in correspondence with British civil service Reformers, he introduced a bill in the House modelled after their programme. Fortunately, it failed to gain much traction. Notwithstanding, a year later, he resubmitted a reform bill. However, this time he extolled the example of Prussian bureaucratic efficiency recently displayed in the Austro-Prussian War. At any rate, the civil service Reformers got their way in the end, dismantling the spoils system. Now that the terrain had just been manured and primed to sustain the administrative state and, more saliently, the Progressive era, all was needed was for someone to lay the seeds. As I have already mentioned, future US President Woodrow Wilson took the lead, and was followed by another ideologue named Frank Goodnow. Basically, Wilson wanted to import the Prussian model of administration into the US, just like his ideological fellow, Representative Jenckes. Be that as it may, Wilson did not just want to do away with the spoils system because it was inefficient or haphazard. Astutely, the Progressives began building upon this inclination against the influence of politics in administration and make it part of a thoughtful, comprehensive critique of American constitutionalism and part of a broader argument for political reform. In 1887, Wilson published his seminal essay, The Study of Administration, where the case for separating politics and administration and for freeing administration from the confines of constitutional law is made explicitly for the first time in the US. Like Wilson, Goodnow also believed that history had made obsolete the Founders' dedication to protecting individual natural rights and their consequent design of a carefully limited form of federal government. Hence, both of them argued that government needed to adjust its very purpose and organisation to accommodate modern necessities. Clearly, this is where the absurd axiom ‘living document’ comes from. For Wilson and his ilk, the Constitution is a living, organic entity that evolves to adapt to its ever-changing surroundings. The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live." For Progressives, there was something special about civil servants that somehow raised them above the ordinary self-interestedness of human nature. Such confidence came from the faith that the progressive power of history, a core tenet for all collectivist doctrines, had generated an honest and credible cadre of public servants to the highest standards of objectivity and expertise. Simply put, the advocates of progressivism had to either destroy or ignore the US Constitution. Indeed, the administrative state is not simply unconstitutional, it is anti-constitutional. In its structure and operation, it represents a system of government that cannot be reconciled with constitutional government. In effect, the modern administrative state destroys the separation of powers by uniting all the powers of the State in its hands. As Article I of the Constitution declares: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” The people, in establishing the Constitution, delegated the power to make laws to Congress alone. The non-delegation doctrine, which holds that the legislature cannot delegate its legislative powers to any other hands, is a logical conclusion of the Founders’ understanding of government by consent of the governed. Since, the people delegated legislative authority specifically to Congress, it cannot turn around and pass that authority to any other set of hands. As the political philosopher John Locke wrote in 1690, the legislature holds authority “only to make laws, and not to make legislators.” Thus, the administrative state has no constitutional authority. At most, all administrative agencies would fall within the purview of the executive branch and be answerable to the President in his constitutional role of enforcing the nation’s laws. How, then, did this vast bureaucracy come to wield such sweeping powers to make the rules that govern us? Over the course of the past century, Congress abandoned its legislative function and delegated its legislative powers to the unelected bureaucracy. In spite of still passing resolutions that were officially called laws, these have generally taken the form of sweeping grants of authority empowering agencies to craft rules and fill in the details of unfinished legislation. Thanks to congressional delegation of legislative power and the judiciary’s acquiescence in the growth of the administrative state, agencies craft rules and regulations in what amounts to an alternative legislative process. While they enforce these rules as they see fit, the judiciary defers to the agency’s interpretation of its own rules in adjudication. For all intents and purposes, the administrative state has become the central institution of national authority, not just in the US but in the rest of the so-called liberal democracies, wrecking the very essence of the original definition of liberalism. Eventually, liberalism became to be defined in modern parlance as a variety of collectivism, with Merriam-Webster dictionary claiming the former to being a very relevant synonym of the latter. In lieu of an understanding of rights grounded in nature, where the individual possesses them prior to the formation of government, Progressives like Goodnow postulated that rights are granted by government itself. This is the crux of the issue. Unsurprisingly, the ideals and thinkers that influenced Progressives did inspire other collectivist camps to boot. The rot that contaminated the philosophical space spawning progressivism thereby had already occasioned socialism, in all its various strains. Furthermore, this domain never ceased to be tainted, with these different doctrines soiling one another on account of their overlap. At last, this relentless ideological decay brought about the loathsome concept of technocracy. To begin with, there appears to be some confusion to what technocracy actually is. In reality, much like the concepts of liberalism, capitalism or socialism, this moniker has had several definitions, though very similar. All in all, technocracy can be interpreted as the management of society by a class of experts, applying scientific principles to yield the most efficient results. Still, this concept mutates in accordance with each groups’ particular worldview. Although this term had already been used in 1895 for the first time, according to Merriam-Webster, William Henry Smyth, a California engineer, is usually credited with employing the word technocracy in 1919 to describe “the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers.” This definition was devised in the article ‘Technocracy’ – Ways and Means to Gain Industrial Democracy, in May 1919, in the Journal of Industrial Management. All the same, he had already published two previous articles in the same venue, in the same year, referring the word technocracy. Owing to being a disciple of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who began developing his theory of scientific management in the 1880’s, culminating in 1911 with the publishing of The Principles of Scientific Management, Smyth was associated with the Scientific Management Efficiency Engineers and the Taylor Society that came out of the Great War. However, as the title of his paper referenced above indicates, he was a proponent of industrial democracy. In short, this term became popularised by the 1897 book Industrial Democracy, in which the authors, the highly influential British social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, used it to refer to 1) “the combination of administrative efficiency and popular control” by trade unions, and 2) “the method of collective bargaining”. In time, its meaning assimilated the German expression Wirtschaftsdemokratie which, although was the German equivalent of the Webb’s definition, it predominantly alludes to co-determination. In turn, co-determination, according to its originators, is primarily the practice where workers of an industry or sector, and their unions, enter the negotiations and debates for the making of policies that affect them. Nowadays, this term brings up the micro level, dealing with the practice where workers of an enterprise have the right to vote for representatives on the board of directors in a company. This is important to point out because it becomes obvious that all this new-fangled and revolutionary movements that cropped up during, and even before, the Progressive era are all offspring of the same collectivist notions and theorists. Despite breeding the most brilliant thinkers ever, the Age of Enlightenment produced an equal, if not greater, number of utopians and crusaders whose teachings continue to torment us till this day. Having said this, philosophers such as utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon and the secular humanist and father of positivism Auguste Comte anticipated a predictive science of society that would allow for the perfection of government as a rational system of administration. In addition, even though the idea of snubbing politics and replacing it with technical-scientific rationality such that the “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things” is often associated with St. Simon, the originator of the phrase, in fact, was the infamous Karl Marx’ partner in crime Friedrich Engels, who believed that the communist state would be an overseer of production rather than a referee of political conflicts. If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority.” While there was much agreement among the various factions of the progressive movement, a point of heightened contention was whether the administration of society should be more technocratic or democratic, as evidenced by the famous debate between Walter Lippmann, the socialist and co-editor of the New Republic magazine, and the former postmillennial pietist John Dewey. Unmistakably, this putative debate was extremely constrained in terms of the philosophical range; purposefully so. On the one hand, Lippman did not trust in the abilities of the common men to handle their own affairs nor to decide what is best for the common interest of society. Consequently, he reasoned that, to get the best results, an expert class had to take over the helm and destroy individual self-government. After all, the legislators and their appointed agents “are made of a finer clay”. On the other hand, for being a humanist that supposedly believed in the potential of autonomous individuals to make rational decisions for the betterment of mankind, Dewey posited that the governance of society should be more democratic. Regardless of that, he absolutely agreed with Lippman that an expert class ought to direct policy on the basis of social scientific knowledge. Due to being all the rage, a myriad of groups were formed that adhered to the general concept of technocracy. One of such organisations was the still-active Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose members were nicknamed Wobblies because of their lifestyle of hopping freight trains to get to the “sites of struggle.” Considering their ideology, one might assert that the IWW belongs to technocracy’s – or is it socialist? – branch of industrial democracy; specifically, the Wobblies defended co-determination through the role of whole-industry trade unions. Evidently, they followed the same line as William Smyth, who viewed industrial democracy as a paradigm where engineers, scientists and technologists are incorporated in the decision-making process through existing firms. Yet, on account of being a radical socialist syndicate, the IWW put special emphasis on the workers’ interests. Moreover, the influential humanist John Dewey founded, with some other progressive luminaries, the New School for Social Research (NSSR), later renamed The New School. Insofar this institution’s prominent figures were reformist educators of the likes of Dewey, their aim was to introduce into the minds of the next generations of intellectuals and professors their revolutionary concepts and methodologies. Closer to the mark is the concern among these “democratic” theorists that a technological society, by virtue of its complexity, makes specialised knowledge a necessity in a way that justifies the exclusion of the average citizen. Undeniably, this school has been financed, at least in part, by the usual coterie of globalist entities, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, which goes on until today. Another cofounder of the NSSR was economist Thorstein Veblen, to many considered the father of technocracy. Seeing that Veblen had the misfortune of being raised in the progressive environment of that epoch, coincidentally being a graduate student at John Hopkins with fellow traveller Woodrow Wilson, he obviously developed the same kind of brainless beliefs and fallacious theories as the rest of the progressive savants. Drawing inspiration from the same old idealogues and applying it to his field, Veblen originated the school of institutional economics; and his assumptions heralded the inception of evolutionary economics, which is essentially a case of old wine in a new bottle. In his initial two hits, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), Veblen expressed his perspective on the ills of contemporary society. Because of people’s desire to impress others and emulate the lifestyle of the wealthy, they, Veblen argued, engage in “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure” so as to gain or signal status. As a result, “conspicuous waste” often ensues. Although, Veblen was strongly opposed to this inefficient use of resources, blaming it on the “business classes” and financiers, he valued their contribution to the progress made in the industrial age. Nevertheless, he felt, hitting at the alleged progressive power of history, they were no longer capable of managing the modern industrial society. Inasmuch as some institutions are to some extent more “ceremonial” than others, they would have to be more “instrumental” by making use of technology to reduce inefficiencies. At first, Veblen argued that the workers must be the architects of the necessary social change that would create economic and industrial reform. However, as luck would have it, after a momentous encounter, he gradually shifted his focus away from workers towards technocratic engineers and technologists as the drivers of change. In spite of Howard Scott, the charismatic leader of the most prominent technocratic group to be erected, affirming to having never come into contact with Veblen nor ever reading his work before they met in September 1918, due to being unmasked a few years later as a charlatan, we can hardly believe his word. In his 1977 book, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941, historian William E. Akin claims that Scott arrived in Greenwich Village, New York City, just before the close of World War I, where he spent much of his time rubbing shoulders with progressives, including Veblen and Charles P. Steinmetz. Apparently, “Scott absorbed many of Veblen’s fundamental themes. Veblen’s scientific positivism and technological determinism was basic to Scott’s subsequent thought.” Besides that, owing to Scott’s short stint as research director for the IWW in 1920, it is safe to assume that he was not a stranger to the teachings of scientific management or socialism, nor their spin-offs like industrial democracy. According to Scott, his cadre “never had any use for Taylor or any of the efficiency or scientific management crowd.” Ostensibly, this rift was barely due to some quibble. Whereas the Taylorists merely wanted to achieve the highest degree of efficiency in production, Scott and his followers and colleagues at the Technical Alliance sought to completely revolutionise how society was structured and functioned, as well as believing that “the only way to be really efficient is to eliminate [human toil] entirely”. We have always contended that Marxian communism, so far as this Continent is concerned, is so far to the right that it is bourgeois.” Casting an illustrious collective of progressive comrades, Howard Scott established the Technical Alliance study group in July 1918, in New York City. In its ranks, as part of the temporary organising committee, were distinguished figures such as Thorstein Veblen, Charles P. Steinmetz, who was head of the research section at the General Electric Company of America, and writer Stuart Chase, whose 1932 book The New Deal served as inspiration for Franklin Roosevelt’s political programme. The bulk of this committee was made up of engineers, educators and other technicians from the fields of physics, mathematics and biology. Through combining their professional background and clout too, the Technical Alliance began to gain prominence and popularity. By setting up a truly unique and consolidated movement, setting itself apart from the other progressive camps, but especially from socialism, Scott and his fellows ended up, rather incredibly, pushing the concept of technocracy to the forefront of collectivist ideas. In that eventful year of 1918, Veblen joined The Dial magazine as an editor, where he would stay till the following year. According to Scott, he met Veblen for the first time in September 1918, at the Faculty Club of Columbia University. At this meeting, among others, two co-founders of the NSSR, economist Alvin Johnson and historian James Harvey Robinson, were present. In the end, it was agreed “that a series of seminar dinners be held in which Veblen would undertake to bring the economists and sociologists, if [Scott] would make a similar undertaking to bring a number of scientists, technologists and engineers.” Patently, all of these collectivist organisations, at least the major ones, were all intertwined. Indeed, the membership overlap present in these groups, whether they regarded themselves as socialist, progressive, democratic, technocratic or even liberal, or a combination of them like democratic socialist or the oxymoron social liberal, is only made more explicit by the fact that they have the same patrons, either directly or indirectly. A case in point, per Scott, Veblen’s salary at the NSSR was made possible thanks to the donations from heiress Dorothy Whitney; the same Dorothy Whitney who funded the creation of the leading New Republic magazine, which had been helping to spread progressive propaganda. In any event, of all the articles produced by Veblen during his tenure in The Dial, the ones noteworthy to make reference to, considering the matters being discussed in this post, were those which wound up being compiled into the 1921 book titled The Engineers and the Price System. Here, Veblen surmised the gist of his reasoning, presenting the climaxing notions and beliefs of his career. As if it was written by Marx or Engels, Veblen contended in his outlandish magnum opus that there would eventually be an American “Soviet of technicians”, which would only be accepted after revolutionary action. Firstly, engineers would plan a general strike to “incapacitate the country’s productive industry sufficiently.” Then, the business owners, financiers and the managerial class would see the need for this “new order of production”, and a “self-selected, but inclusive, Soviet of technicians” could effectively “take over the economic affairs of the country… [and] take care of the material welfare of the underlying population.” In short, so far as regards the technical requirements of the case, the situation is ready for a self-selected, but inclusive, Soviet of technicians to take over the economic affairs of the country and to allow and disallow what they may agree on; provided always that they live within the requirements of that state of the industrial arts whose keepers they are, and provided that their pretensions continue to have the support of the industrial rank and file; which comes near saying that their Soviet must consistently and effectually take care of the material welfare of the underlying population.” Regurgitating the typical progressive cacophony, Veblen asserted that technicians, who are part of and master the industrial side of the economy, would realise that to optimise the productive structure and reduce waste to its minimum they would have to take over the ownership of the businesses from the absentee owners. Obviously, since there are vested interests and accepted notions and precepts on how to conduct business which adhere to the “price-system”, the transition might take a while, not likely to happen in the calculable future. On account of his disdain to “the business logic of the price-system”, one can discernibly see the overlap and perhaps influence that the technocrats, in turn, exerted on Veblen. After ironically succumbing to some financial pressure in 1921, Scott carried on, nonetheless, his endeavour so that one day his dream of a North American Technate, where the price-system would be replaced by an economic unit designed around energy measurements, would come to fruition. During this torpid period, while Scott was rooming with M. King Hubbert, later known as the father of “Peak Oil”, Scott and former Alliance member Walter Rautenstrauch, chairman of Columbia’s prestigious Department of Industrial Engineering (the first of its kind in the United States) instituted the Committee on Technocracy. Then, Rautenstrauch introduced Scott to Nicholas Murray Butler, who was the President of Columbia in 1932. In view of being totally smitten by their ground-breaking ideas, and considering that Butler shared the same goal of remaking the world, he invited the Committee to establish itself in Columbia so as to conduct research into the history of American industrial development, as seen through a complex series of energy measurements. Sadly, for them, when muckrakers and snoopy busybodies began to dig deeper into the roots of this movement and its members, particularly Scott’s, there appeared to be some trickery going on. Ultimately, seeing that he was possibly being played, his ego needed protection from these salient attacks. Thus, Butler kicked the Committee out from his campus after a year. All the same, Scott and his gang had already drawn up the papers to form Technocracy Incorporated, in the fall of 1932. Therefore, when they were expelled from Columbia, they picked themselves up and continued to advance their cause. That being so, technocracy for them was defined, for instance in the Technocrat Magazine Vol. 3 No. 4, as “[t]he science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population of this continent.” Furthermore, they believed the “Price System” had to be abandoned since “price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance the smaller the price.” Thereby, they reached the conclusion that “[i]n a real abundance there can be no price at all.” In their 1934 Technocracy Study Course, they declared that “Technocracy finds that the production and distribution of an abundance of physical wealth on a Continental scale for the use of all Continental citizens can only be accomplished by a Continental technological control, a governance of function, a Technate.” Hence, there would be a “central headquarter” in each continent, staffed with “technically trained personnel” to administrate the “entire social operation, and all records of production and distribution” for the Technate. All social, industrial and technological “functions” were said to be interdependent and, consequently, the entire functional system could be centrally planned and managed. Ergo, the Technate would supposedly operate through careful control of the various “Functional Sequences”, as depicted in the next chart. As you may guess, there is a lot to take in and digest to understand this movement completely. Even though it is important to know, a thorough analysis would have to be done. However, that is not the point of this piece. Still, Iain Davis’ Substack article gives a rather marvellous account. According to him, their desire to restructure society in accordance with individuals’ “peck-rights” would engender the perfect form of crony capitalism, which is just another, more modern form of feudalism. As defined by them, peck-rights are the spectrum of technical skills and ability to lead, whether they are innate or a product of their environment. In other words, an elite deemed capable and specialised in all scientific and technical fields would command all the various “Functional Sequences” that compose the Technate. In their apparent naiveté, the technocrats ignored the “elite theory” of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Roberto Michels and others, which demonstrated that political power is wielded by those who control resources. Like the technocrats, the elite theorists posited that aristocracies (a.k.a., oligarchies) were merely the result of some kind of meritocracy. At any rate, because the elite theorists acknowledged power could be corrupted and abused, the chief belief of progressivism in the civil servants’/administrators’/soviets’ lack of self-interestedness and commitment to the common good and efficiency maximisation was absolutely demolished. Unlike elite theory, the technocrats were seemingly unaware, or chose to ignore, the likelihood of this corruption remaining in their preposterous technocratic system. Similar to Veblen’s reasoning, Technocracy Inc. maintained that under the present “Price System” the business side of the economy, i.e., the captains of industry and their banking cronies, unfairly acquired the lion’s share of the wealth, while the actual workers, who produced the “Physical Wealth”, i.e., the goods and services, got the minute remainder. To resolve this injustice, the focus would shift to “converting available energy into use-forms and services.” This question brings us to a subject exceedingly difficult to discuss: for habits of thought and connotations differ fundamentally in the world of business, banking, and politics from those that obtain in the world of science, technology, and the field of materially productive work. Items of ownership, credit, debt, monetary units of value — dollars, shillings, etc. — or interest rates and relations, expressed as prices, constitute the realities in the former world; but they are unreal and fictitious items in the latter, where energy, resources, materials, rates of energy conversion, and use-forms constitute the real and basic things with which men deal.” Nevertheless, Howard Scott rejected Veblen’s “Soviet of Technicians” concept, simply on account of Scott not wanting his brainchild to be associated with any political movement. Seeing that they envisaged “an operating social mechanism of a technological socialization for the distribution of abundance”, Scott and his pals insisted that “social change on this Continent [(North America)] would take an entirely different pattern and would not be analogous to the development in any other part of the world.” Owing to being in vogue after the backing from Butler and the Columbia University, several copycats surfed this wave, forming their own technocratic organisations to rival Scott’s. Almost 30 groups, so the story goes, suddenly sprung up in the US. In addition, a myriad of publications, mostly magazines, started being published, though only one was edited by Technocracy Inc (displayed as the first image above). Denoting the mood at that time, Scott confessed that “18 or more of [Technocracy Inc.’] ex-members and associates” held a high position in FDR’s administration. Must we not forget that FDR’s presidency was the one that ushered in the full implementation of the modern administrative state, which was contemplated, as explained, by the progressive intellectuals of prior generations. Exemplifying one of the main points deduced from this examination, that the various branches of progressivism and socialism are just distinctions without a difference, several progressive and socialist highbrows visited the Soviet Union in the interwar period, having nothing but praises for that gruesome regime. Unsurprisingly, some of them influenced, worked for, or merely adulated the FDR administration and its final blow to classical liberalism. A case in point was Stuart Chase who, as I mentioned before, created the moniker “New Deal” from his book title. To finish that book, he had the brilliant idea to drop the line: “Why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?” These were the sort of degenerates who were permeating government halls, academic circles, editorial offices, labour unions and even Christian churches, not to mention civil rights organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union, of Western nations, and steadily more so. Still, this should have been expected since they had the same financial backers as their soviet comrades. Today the path to total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people… Therefore, hardly was the case that McCarthyism was a notorious witch hunt made up of unsubstantiated charges of communist infiltration on the various areas of the US society, from the government to non-profit organizations and from academia to Hollywood. As matter of fact, zeroing in on the administrative state, the policy making bodies and agencies were swamped with nincompoops who held collectivist views, which may fairly be regarded as ‘un-American’. As a matter of fact, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R., WI.) was not the trailblazer. He was just following the trail of breadcrumbs left by the House Un-American Activities Committee and then the Reece Committee. Regrettably, McCarthy and his followers, such as Senator William E. Jenner (R., IN.), simply did not know precisely what they were up against and how politics and public opinion had gone downhill for the previous 100 years or so. Incessantly keeping its path downwards, this collectivist and totalitarian snowball will not stop till it reaches the technocratic hell. Thankfully, Technocracy Inc.’s necessity for keeping continuously and instantaneously updated registries of every good in the economy was, in the 1930’s, not just audacious, but borderline insane. Be that as it may, in contrast to those days, the economic order envisioned by the technocrats, in which energy is budgeted, priced and traded by unelected panels of scientists and technologists is not an absurd pipe dream any longer. Poignantly, Harold Loeb, the eldest son of Albert Loeb, whose father Solomon cofounded the major investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Company, and of scion Rose Guggenheim from the renowned mining and philanthropic Guggenheim family, was unbelievably prescient. This technocratic crony, when he was not involved in some government enterprise or hanging out in the progressive haute monde, he busied himself expressing into writing how he visualised a technocratic future. Accordingly, he wrote the classic utopian novel Life in a Technocracy, where, among other things, drawing from Social Darwinism, he prophesied the emergence of the transhumanist movement. Technocracy envisages another form of domestication, a form in which man may become more than man… Technocracy is designed to develop the so-called higher faculties in every man and not to make each man resigned to the lot into which he may be born… Through breeding with specific individuals for specific purposes… A technocracy, then, should in time produce a race of men superior in quality to any now known on earth…” In conclusion, believe it or not, McCarthy was right (sort of)! See ya, folks, on the next episode.
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March 2024
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