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The Anti-Social Society
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- The Northwest Technocrat, 3rd quarter 1988, No. 312, Vol. 50 This article was given to me some time ago by the author, and differs somewhat from the printed version. In the magazine, the title was changed to ``Society at a Crossroad''.
This article was adapted from a lecture.
The system of social control developed in the United States is held up to the rest of the world as the ultimate. Let us look a little more closely at this utopia the world is urged to emulate.
Only 1% of the population controls 34% of the wealth.1 The Wall St. Journal estimates that there are over 500,000 homeless people. The U.S. navy spends an extra $365 million above normal operating costs per year to protect oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. This is about three times that spent on energy conservation.2
Not so long ago, all out nuclear war was the only thing that threatened our total destruction. Now our price system has invented many new ways. Destruction of the Earths ozone layer and the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere now threaten us.
The ozone layer, high in the earth's stratosphere, protects all life from the sun's ultraviolet rays. It has been discovered that chlorofluorocarbon chemicals, mostly used in refrigerants, are destroying this vital sheild. Carbon dioxide is probably the most important greenhouse gas. A greenhouse gas, of which there are several, is involved in the trapping of the infrared rays leaving the earth's surface radiating heat back into space. Precise control of the balance of these gases is important to maintaining the earth at the proper temperature. Burning large amounts of hydrocarbons (oil, coal, etc.) is upsetting the balance of these gases in our atmosphere. We are now conducting the largest experiment in all of human history and if it turns out wrong life on earth as we know it could be extinguished. In this deadly game, the only thing of concern to our price system is the beloved financial bottom line!
In many of our popular magazines and on the book shelves across the country, stress management is one of the most popular topics. It seems that we are having a difficult time living in such a grand place.
Quoting: ``We express our longing for the ineffable in the wolfishness of our appetite. Maybe the weight of our acquisitions will prevent us from drifting off into the void, or relieve us of our anxiety, or buoy us up against our fear of losing definition in the world. The feasts of consumption thus become rituals of communion.
Perceived as sacraments, the acts of consumption acquire a spititual meaning not always apparent to a European, a moralist or a bookkeeper. Taken in appropriate quantity and with a decent regard for ruinous expense, products bestow health, long life, status, sexual prowess, intelligence, national security, happiness and peace of mind - all the bessings that devout Christians expect from the hand of God.
If the state of perpetual dissatisfaction becomes imbued with the significance of both patriotic duty and religious quest, then the satisfied man stands condemned as a heretic and a traitor. To admit being satisfied is to confess a crime against the state and to risk alliance with the Evil One - that is, with anybody who knows, or has, what he wants.'' 3
Where would could such a quote be found? Might it have come from the pages of Pravda or some left wing publication? No indeed, it came from the pages of the Wall St. Journal and who should know better!
The U.S. is probably one of the most narcissistic societies in the world. `` Narcissism is a mental state where a persons' only concern is with themselves. It is a state of experience in which only his body, his feelings, his thoughts, his property, and everything pertaining to him are sensed as being fully real. Things not sensed as part of him are not interesting to him...... A narcissistic person finds objective judgement of any situation very difficult.'' 4
This trait shows itself in the strong interest shown by our society in gambling. People are hoping to gain security for themselves and let the rest of society go its merry way. It's an understandable desire.
This trait shows itself again with our preoccupation with religion, the quest for personal salvation. Technocracy can have no quarrel with anyone who wishes to lift his own spirit and that of others by religious means. But, much of what we see today is a grasping for personal advantage over others, much the same as with money.
We still have some survivalists and those of a similar bent around. Such can be referred to as the ``crawl into a hole and pull it in after you crowd.''
Ten percent of the U.S. population takes drugs on a regular basis.5 Evidently a large number of people want to be here without being here. This is probably the ultimate in escapism, short of suicide.
To the narcissistic patriot, the smallest imagined slur becomes an instant call to arms. Patriotism, the decent response to the needs of ones' country, in the hand of the narcissistic person becomes a vengeful witch hunt.
We have developed a highly competitive society. Almost no one today questions whether a society organized on this basis makes any real sense. The human race owes its existence to the fact that it is capable of cooperation between individuals. The human race owes its existence to the fact that it is capable of cooperation between individuals. The question is: Do we perform better when we compete with each other or when we work together or alone? This is a fair question. The answer is that cooperation is far superior whether it is examined in controlled experiments or by looking at competitive versus cooperative societies.
The Japanese have a far less competitive, much more cooperative society than do we. The current balance of trade between the U.S. and Japan is so lopsided that it is a source of embarrassment to the Japanese. W. Edwards Deming, ostracized in the U.S., took his management techniques to Japan where they were accepted.6 His management system involves cooperation between management and labor and is one of the ``secrets'' of Japans high productivity.
Our entire educational system is based on competition between students. Yet it has been found that rearranging the process so that there are no winners or losers produces far better results.
Our society is in love with whatever is number one. This is one of the major defects of our system. The skills required to be number one and the skills required for competence are different. Does competition build character as is so often claimed? A pep talk (not uncommon) from the book That Championship Season: ``That trophy is the truth, the only truth. I told him to get mean, punish some people, put some fear into them, you have to hate to win, it takes hate to win. I didn't tell him to break anybody's ribs ....I just told him there's no such thing as second place.''7 What kind of character does competition build?
Technocracy's argument is not that the current system is evil (although it may very well be) but that if we continue to apply science, technology, and energy to the productive processes we will force a social change no matter what anyone wants. It is the direction and form of that social change that Technocracy addresses. The application of technology will force the collapse of the Price System and all the social and cultural forms that surround it. Society will have to operate on a non - price basis.
The two major motivations for human behavior are incentive and initiative. Incentive is that motivation that is external to the individual, in other words, you do something because someone else wants you to. (If you don't work, you don't eat.) Initiative is that motivation that comes from within yourself. You do it because it's important to you. Our society currently operates almost exclusively on incentive - so much so that it is hard to imagine any other way. It will be necessary to develop a society based on initiative on a non - price basis that is without any money in the society. Such a society can only operate cooperatively.
Most of the activity in our society today stems from the need to maintain a scarcity artificially where none really exists. Quoting from the book No Contest: ``When economists talk about scarcity they generally are not using the word to mean that goods are in short supply. Their technical use of the term refers instead to (1) the fact that choosing one commodity involves giving up the chance to have another, or (2) the presumed failure of people to be satisfied regardless of how much they have. Let us take these in turn.
The first usage defines a scarce good as one for which a consumer would give up something else. Scarcity, then, concerns the mutually exclusive relationship between commodities. This may be a useful way of looking at the world in some respects, but it tells us nothing about the absolute status of a given commodity. The model is set up so all finite goods will always be considered ``scarce''; the availability of each is being evaluated vis-a-vis the others. By definition, no economic system can remedy this state of affairs, so competition is no more sensible a way to deal with scarcity than any other arrangement.
The second definition rests economic theory on a very questionable (but very rarely questioned) assumption about ``human nature'' - namely, the belief that we will always want more of something than we had before or more than the next person has. Far more reasonable is the proposition that insatiability and competitiveness reflect cultural mores. As Wachtel saw, ``Our obsession with growth is the expression of neither inexorable laws of human nature nor inexorable laws of economics......It is a cultural and psychological phenomenon, reflecting our present way of organizing and giving meaning to our lives...that is now maladaptive.''
This position defines scarcity as a matter of psychological state (perception or desire) rather than objective fact. Some social critics have gone along with this approach but have shown that this state, which is often used to justify competition, actually is a product of competition. Specifically, it is argued, our system manufactures scarcity. Our price system's driving force is the quest for profits; its alleged success at satisfying human needs is merely a fortuitous by-product. This goal requires the continuous - indeed, constantly expanding - consumption of goods, and these goods will be purchased only if they are desired. The advertising industry exists to create this desire, to produce a continual dissatisfaction with what we currently have and to tell us of the fulfillment that purchasing yet another product will bring. We must be ``educated'' as to the desirability of low-calorie TV dinners, cordless telephones, and this year's model of video recorder.''8
One wonders that if all advertising of food products were removed from our mass media of communication would we all starve? Why is it necessary to advertise food!
``Sociologist Philip Slater is worth quoting at length: Scarcity is spurious....It now exists only for the purpose of maintaining the system that depends on it, and its artificiality becomes more palpable each day....Inequality, originally a consequence of scarcity is now a means of creating artificial scarcities. For in the old culture (the dominant disposition of American life), as we have seen, the manufacture of scarcity is the principal activity. Hostile comments of old-culture adherents toward new-culture forms (``people won't want to work if they can get things for nothing,'' ``people won't want to get married if they can get it for free'') often reveal this preoccupation. Scarcity, the presumably undesired but unavoidable foundation of for the whole old-culture edifice, has now become its most treasured and sacred value, and to maintain this value in the midst of plenty it has been necessary to establish invidiousness as the foremost criterion of worth. Old-culture Americans ....find it difficult to enjoy anything they themselves have unless they can be sure that there are people to whom this pleasure is denied .....Since the society rests on scarcity assumptions, involvement in it has always meant competitive involvement.''9
The argument is frequently made that ``you can't change human nature, that greed will always be with us.'' Technocracy has never advocated any change in human nature. But much evidence indicates that such behavior is only a cultural affectation and definitely not part of human nature. The tremendous power of a change in social environment to shape the behavior and thought of the human being was powerfully demonstrated by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University.
His experiment was on the effects of imprisonment. Twenty one male college students were chosen to take the roles of guards and inmates in a very realistic prison that had been constructed in the basement of the psychology building. ``The 21 subjects were selected from a group of 75 volunteers precisely on the basis of their normality: they were stable and scored in the middle range of a personality profile. Equally important, they were randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard. Almost immediately, the subjects began to take on the pathological characteristics of their respective roles. The guards delighted in devising arbitrary tasks and absurd rules for the inmates, demanding absolute obedience and forcing them to humiliate each other. The prisoners became passive and obedient, taking their frustration out on each other and otherwise assuming the role of victim. As the guards became more abusive, the prisoners became more helpless and dependent. The patterns became so pronounced that Zimbardo grew alarmed and ended what was to have been a two-week experiment after only six days.
Given the design of this experiment, what happened can not be explained in terms of the individuals involved. The researchers, like the subjects, had been inclined to ``focus on personality traits as internal dispositions for individuals to respond in particular ways,'' thus ``underestimating the subtle power of situational forces to control and reshape their behavior.'' Most of us make the same error, Zimbardo contends, leading us to try to solve problems by ``changing the people, by motivating them, isolating them.....and so on.'' In fact, he concludes, ``to change human behavior we must discover the institutional supports which maintain the existing undesirable behavior and then design programs to alter these environments.''10
The contention that people won't work for nothing is correct but that something need not be money. The desire to be a part of society is powerful part of the human make-up. In 1985 the Gallup poll found that 89 million Americans work voluntarily in various organizations - 44.5% of our workforce.11 The only possible reason for this is that they understand the need, and importance, of what they are doing.
The selection of leadership for the society was the next focus of Technocracy's examination. It is obvious that if all of our current economic institutions are to disappear, the culture and rationale for our whole current civilization will disappear with it.
The current society selects its leaders in the same dreary cycle no matter where one looks. We elect them, then realize they don't have any better answers than the last one. We then develop all kinds of enthusiasm for the next person only to repeat the same story.
Technocracy's proposal was really quite simple. Virtually all the functions of the current political governments become unnecessary once a price system no longer exists. This means that the only real portion of the social system left that requires organization is the physical means by which we live - the plants and equipment that produce and maintain our standard of living and without which we would all die.
What are the requirements for leadership in our present society? As I said previously, the skills involved in being number one and the skills involved in being competent are different. Quoting Eric Fromm: ``Among political leaders a high degree of narcissism is very frequent; it may be considered an occupational illness - or asset - especially among those who owe their power to their influence over mass audiences. If the leader is convinced of his extraordinary gifts and of his mission, it will be easier to convince the large audiences who are attracted by men who appear to be so absolutely certain. But the narcissistic leader does not use his narcissistic charisma only as a means for political success; he needs success and applause for the sake of his own mental equilibrium. The idea of his greatness and infallibility is essentially based on his narcissistic grandiosity, not on his real achievements as a human being. And yet he cannot do without the narcissistic inflation because his human core - conviction, conscience, love and faith - is not very developed. Extremely narcissistic persons are often almost forced to become famous, since otherwise they might become depressed and insane. But it takes much talent - and appropriate opportunities - to influence others to such a degree that their applause validates these narcissistic dreams. Even when such people succeed, they are driven to seek further success, since for them failure carries the danger of collapse. Popular success is, as it were, their self-therapy against depression and madness. In fighting for their aims, they are really fighting for their sanity.''12 Please take a careful look at who you voted for last.
Technocracy's proposal was that to operate the physical plant that exists on North America what is required are only those technically competent for the positions they hold. All that is really required is to strip off the political and financial superstructure that now sits on top of our society like a huge cancer.
Who are the persons best qualified to choose the most technically competent persons in any field? It is those who work directly under them and those directly above them. We would no more want the power to elect those that operate in areas of technical competence than we would want to fly in an aircraft where the passengers elect the pilot from among their midst.
One complaint frequently leveled at Technocracy is that such a system would be a technical elite closed to any approach by citizens outside their field. This is also untrue. A sequence of social relations is attached to every local area control would have direct access to every governing segment at the appropriate level for answers or action far more so than today. Also the social control proposed by Technocracy is completely market driven in that the only things that would be produced would be those things that people want.
Technocracy is the window and the doorway into the future of the human race if we are somehow fortunate enough to survive the incredible dangers presented to us by our current price system. Technocracy Inc. offers a sane and genteel social system to replace our current nuthouse.
To those who wonder, if Technocracy is such a good idea, why aren't people rushing in to demand its installation. We offer the following five rules for preventing social change as given by one author. Quoting:
- LIMIT YOUR VISION: the long-standing american tradition of ignoring the structural causes of social and individual problems was mentioned previously. By pretending, for example, that psychological disturbance has nothing to do with the societal forces that shape personality development, you can help see to it that those forces continue unabated. It follows that all intervention should be done at the individual level. It is fine to help, say, homeless people on a case-by case basis, but inquiring into the policy decisions and economic arrangements that have brought about their predicament would only serve to invite drastic changes - and this is what we want to avoid at all costs. Similarly, if we continue to treat each example of corporate wrongdoing (from illegal dumping of toxic wastes to bribing of public officials) as if it has occurred in a vacuum, then we can mange to preserve the system responsible for these acts.
- ADAPT: The best way to keep the status quo intact is to make sure that individuals adjust themselves to serve its needs. Such adaptation once was enforced by crude, authoritarian methods of ``re-education.'' Today this is hardly necessary. A wealth of advice is available on how to become successful - what to wear, how to negotiate, and so forth - and virtually all of it proceeds from the premise that you should adjust yourself to conditions as you find them. Adaptation is a critical part of the self-help model: you must succeed within the institutions and according to the rules that already exist. To do well is to fit in, and to fit in is to fortify the structures into which you are being fit.
- THINK ABOUT YOURSELF: Implicit in any exhortations to succeed by ``giving them what they want'' is the suggestion that you should be totally preoccupied with your own well-being. The more you limit your concerns to yourself, the more you help to sustain the larger system. But this does not apply merely to material success. Even therapeutic and spiritual enterprises are useful for preserving the status quo because in encouraging you to attend to your own needs, they effectively direct attention away from social structures. Groom yourself and let the rest of the world go on its way - what better strategy is there for perpetuating existing structures? A few people may argue, it is true, that personal growth can be a route to social change. But most of the human potential movement will not require you to wrestle with this question, since social change is irrelevant to its goals and techniques.
- BE ``REALISTIC'': Fortunately, it is not necessary for you to defend the larger system. You can even nod in sympathetic agreement with someone who indicts it. But it is crucial that this nodding be accompanied by a shrug. Phrases such as ``like it or not'' and ``that's just the way it is'' should be employed liberally in order to emphasize that nothing can be done about the larger picture. Such protestations of powerlessness are actually very powerful, of course, since they make sure that things are left exactly as they are. Every person who is encouraged to takes such a stance is another person rescued from social activism.
Occasionally a critic will refuse to resign himself to the way things are or to believe that we are helpless to make change. Such an individual should immediately be labeled ``idealistic.'' Do not be concerned about the vaguely complimentary connotations of having ideals. It will be understood that an idealist is someone who does not understand ``the world as it is'' (``world'' = ``our society''; ``as it is'' = ``as it will always be''). This label efficiently calls attention to the critic's faulty understanding of reality of ``human nature'' and insures that he is not taken seriously. Those who are ``pragmatic,'' by contrast, know that we must always work within the confines of what we are given. After all, if alternative models really were workable, we would already be using them.
Appeals to realism have the virtue of allowing you to avoid messy discussions about the value of a critic's position (and thus of the status quo). Why bother with such issues when you can dismiss his vision as ``well-meaning but unworkable''? Challenging the rightness of what he is proposing will only slow him down; it is the appeal to practicality that produces the knockout. Call someone wrongheaded or even evil and a lengthy discussion may follow. Call him utopian or naive and there is nothing more to be said. This method of dismissing models of change is uniquely effective since it sets up a self-fulfulling prophecy. If enough people insist that an alternative arrangement cannot work, they will be right. Its failure then can be cited as substantiation of one's original skepticism. No one uses this maneuver more skillfully than policymakers who are mistrustful of public institutions. Because of their conviction that governments can do nothing right, they divert funds from public schools and hospitals. When the inevitable crisis develops, they say, ``you see?''
Appeals to realism can insure that institutions which threaten to promote social change (e.g., legislative bodies, universities, the media) do nothing but reflect the status quo. In the name of democracy, descriptive accuracy, and objective journalism, respectively, these institutions can be tamed and made into powerful instruments for perpetuating whatever is in place.......
- RATIONALIZE: It is easier for critics to oppose existing institutions when those who defend and profit from them are obviously opposed to social change.You can make it more difficult for these critics - and salve your own conscience at the same time - by claiming that your real reason for acting as you do is to ``change the system from within.'' Like most people who talk this way, of course, you do not actually have to make change. On the contrary, even if this really were your goal, you would be permitted to work only for insignificant reforms that never come close to challenging the structures themselves. By becoming part of these structures, you can proceed to seek personal aggrandizement while at the same time contributing your talents to something you profess to find problematic. (A variation on this maneuver is to claim that you are going to do so for only a short time - as if it were a simple matter to leave the fast lane and get over to the exit ramp.) If you are audacious enough, you can even rationalize your participation as the most effective way to change the system. The more people who accept this reasoning and follow your example, the more secure is that system.''13
All the people of North America must come to realize that they all live in one society. If the society flounders, they will suffer. We cannot save ourselves, by ourselves.
Technocracy veiws the comming challenges as a wonderful opportunity to establish a new social system that would be the crowning achievement of the human race. People must recover from their feelings of helplessness and realize that a small determined group can have tremendous influence by sheer determination. The fact that Technocracy Inc. is here, after all these years, under these circumstances, is proof of that.