How do we get out of this?

Editor

1997

Published in:

Technocracy Digest 3rd quarter 1997, No. 325

Many people must feel that they are caught in a barbed wire enclosure -- like the one we have shown on our cover. Whenever or wherever they move, to try to better their environment, they are torn by the barbs of poverty, worry, and distress. Many of them blame themselves for straying into the barbed wire net; many of THEM ARE blamed for getting themselves entangled in the hooks of unemployment and debt, finally ending up torn and bleeding, where they may be grudgingly rescued by the uncompassionate welfare net.

This is a simplistic comparison, we know, but there are many people who are distressed by their own poor circumstances, or distressed by watching the environment disintegrate, or seeing other people in poverty, or the escalation of crime -- well, we can go on and on as to what distresses people. All these symptoms have been evident to some thinking people for over 60 years, among them, the Technocrats. We put out warning signs, but these have been ignored. But, as time went on, during which there were some wars, then a couple of false prosperity eras, and then -- out of the fog of complacency -- people suddenly find themselves in the 1930s' time warp -- the same one in which their grandparents had been trapped.

In the 1930s, when people heard what a Technocracy would do for them, they joined this Organization in droves. Huge Technocracy Sections and Units sprang up in every city, town and hamlet. Technocracy offered a workable technological design to re-organize the social system. Fourteen years of research by seventeen very well-known and respected scientists, the likes of Thorstein Veblen, and others: engineers, educators, architects, bio-chemists, mathematical technologists, forester-naturalists, had gone into planning a safe, peaceful, and bountiful environment in which people could be healthy, well-educated, able to enjoy their lives -- working at jobs they loved, and participating in whatever sport or hobby or artistic expression they wished. There would have been no debt, no environmental destruction; and, probably, no wars. Certainly, no poverty.

But, before many of these people understood the true liberation a Technocracy would provide for them, World War II, a saviour for the industrialists of this Continent, was invented. Munitions factories beckoned the millions of unemployed. Propaganda lured young men into the armed forces with the promise of travel, exciting careers, and cash. Cash they hadn't had for years was the dangled carrot. Death was never mentioned.

After the war, there was a brief prosperity, interspersed from time to time with some downward spirals as machines started making great inroads into taking over their jobs. The Organization of Technocracy was unknown to most of them as, by this time, there was a conspiracy of ``hush hush'' over it. Where it had made big news before, the media have never mentioned Technocracy again, even to this day.

But the media have always been a voice for their rich and powerful owners, and have been dishing out the propaganda coming out of those political and financial houses of this Continent -- telling us that democracy is the system under which we are living, and that we must keep voting for it.

People who have been thus brain-washed actually believe all this garbage. There may be a few exceptions, some voices in the wilderness (like the Technocrats) who can see through these machinations, calling out warnings to their fellow citizens, but, by and large, most people trot dutifully, like flocks of sheep, to put their Xs into the ballot boxes. They seem to be oblivious to the fact that is exactly what they will get out of that procedure: a big X.

We are even being taught that poor people are to blame for their own poverty; and that it must be they, the working people, who are responsible for the debt, and who now must tighten their belts in order to get the debt down?

Fergus Heywood, the editor of Technocracy's Victoria Section's 123448-B Newsletter, explains DEBT in this comprehensive manner:

``The Ambiguity of Debt: Debt, where does it come from? Debt is a ``serious'' game -- a method of trying to acquire wealth, usually in terms of money. The practice is played, or pursued, where people try to build up debt against others faster than they build up debt against them. If one of us has $1,000 in the bank, the bank is in debt to us in the amount of $1,000, on which we can demand, by cheque, etc., any amount up to the $1,000.

``But, the bank can make loans to other customers on the depositor's $1,000, to the amount of ten times that of the original deposit. All this is done on paper accounting for up to $100,000 -- the amount of debt owed to the bank by those borrowers. Therefore, the $100,000, minus our deposit of $1,000, equals $90,000, created out of nothing but just bookkeeping. All debt exists and grows in this manner.

``So, what are we going to do about the debt? First of all, working people can stop taking the blame for creating debt. We suggest that we let it go back to nothing from whence it came, along with the Price System which supports debt. We are 70 years late in attending to the problem of debt.''

Now, what about the other problems facing everyone on this Continent -- the breakdown of our environment which threatens our health, our water supplies, our air, our soil?

And Technocracy has a special message for environmental groups who are trying to snip that barbed wire, strand by strand, only to become more entangled as the wire snaps back around them.

First of all, Technocracy applauds the efforts of all those brave souls who are on the front lines, fighting against the short-sighted stupidity of a financial system destroying our Continent. Your well-intentioned groups and organizations have sprung up to try to save the environment, save the poor, save the children, save the animals, save the birds, save the bears, save the green space, and the water, and the air, et al. However, concerted efforts by the monoliths of industry, the captains of investment portfolios, the power of the G-7; have conspired against you. They don't care what happens to any of us, or the environment.

Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Leeds University in England, concluded that the wealthy people -- who happen also to be the politically powerful -- all over the world, will soon not even need the poor. They will have it all, and the rest of us can just starve to death for all they care. They do this now, in the Third World countries, and if you can read the signs, that is the level to which they are driving most of us. (Mind you, the way these G-7 people are treating the earth, there may not even be an atmosphere in which they can live; they may not be as smart as they thought they were.)

SO, WHAT TO DO? Remember that old saw: United we stand; divided we fall. Technocrats were `environmentalists' years ahead of everyone else. The scientists who founded this Organization foresaw that the misuse of technology would cause chaos in our environment and in our lives. However, they knew that technology could be used to bring people up from poverty; that by harvesting our natural resources, it could save the wealth of this Continent for generations to come. We can still turn things around.

Back to the article by Fergus Heywood, he further explains that this is what must be done to save all of us from possible extinction: ``We can establish a measurable accounting system, known as `Energy Accounting'. All energy comes from the sun, directly or indirectly. Everything we are, and everything we do, is somehow related to energy, calories, watts, megawatts, horse power, solar power, etc. `Extraneous Energy' is energy other than human or animal muscle, which can, and does, produce an abundance of goods and services through the use of technology. It is the height of stupidity to build a machine to do our job, then cry Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, when this same technology is there to free us from toil and give us the leisure to enjoy the many things our earth provides.''

But, we can solve our problems when we realize we have to Know the Problem First. A problem that causes crime, poverty, disease, and tremendous waste of resources (like the planet's forests) is nothing more than -- you guessed it -- MONEY. Since we have the resources; since we have the intelligence to create technology that will use those resources wisely; then we don't need money for anything. Since money, or the lack of it, is the problem for millions of people, we say, let's get rid of the problem. Discard the money.

Therefore, we must all unite, where, with one voice, we can demand the only change that is ever going to work. Discard the money.