A Kettle Of People

John Berge

1990

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat, 3rd quarter 1990, No. 320

Our present understanding has it that water molecules when heated begin to move, their movement becoming more erratic with increased heat. Perhaps our society is like that, if we consider the pressure of events to correspond to heat. At least it seems so. Society was pretty tranquil following World War II; people had their lives laid out for the most part, and those who didn't were not complaining too loudly. The dissidents of the 60s had only a far-away attempt at genocide to become excited about, and the hungry and dispossessed were fairly quiet. If we stay with our metaphor; the water was only warm.

But, perhaps, events could warm us to an uncomfortable degree; it begins to appear that that is probable -- and in the not too distant future. People may have an unsettled feeling about warnings of changes in the offing, but they can still tell themselves that those bad things will surely pass if we just hang in there.

But, farmers without farms, steelworkers with no steel mill, loggers without trees, miners without a mine and people generally, are finding that they must compete with their children for jobs making hamburgers; they are beginning to talk -- and loudly. There is something wrong; the heat is increasing.

There is a tendency in people to persevere, to stubbornly persist in doing what once was a rewarding effort and then to get angry and destructive -- not good! This situation is a situation of a different kind, one requiring intelligence and concerted action on a different level than that of a mob.

One of our difficulties here is that, from birth, we have had to live in a melange of adversarial relationships. To live we have had to take from someone else before that person got around to taking from us. This taking can be disguised very cleverly -- all of us living in this Price System should have come to realize that by now. Anyway, the potential for social disturbance is growing. Rage can replace compliant submission with just a little additional insult or oppression. And, with conditions worsening, when the heat really comes on, the potential for a loss of our civilization because of irrational behavior on the part of a people with no positive direction, is real.

Think of it! If everyone voted one way or another, would that give the public a positive goal? No! What if everyone joined some particular church? Would the problems causing our difficulty ease? Again no! Just suppose any group you can think of had their way. Would things change for the better? You should know better than that.

What is needed is for us all to have a social goal that we want to work for; we need a social context where we don't have to keep our backs to the wall for protection; we need to be able to plan eagerly for the future. What we really need is to replace this system that is causing all the trouble with one that can give us a future with security. We need to be able to control the heat that is warming our backsides. That heat is coming from an obsolete social system. There is no evil personality doing his thing that is giving us trouble; it is our social system that is "out of sync" with technology that will increasingly become dangerous and otherwise unsatisfactory.

We can control the heat that is bothering us by learning how to properly control technology, and we can only do that in a proper social system -- Technocracy.