Social Diversions And Other Futilities

Jack Bergel

1990

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat, 4th quarter 1990, No. 321

Recently, on a national talk show that debated the role of women in the work-place and in the home, one gentleman on the panel of opinion-aters, stated his view in no uncertain terms. His stringent advocacy was that females should stay home and do the thing they do best, he said, which was to have babies. If not that, then they should only have jobs of clerical and other lessor positions in business and industry. Never should they be allowed to have corporate jobs of any considerable importance. He stated, further, that women have become too independent and that they should return to a former state, "enjoyed" by them previously -- that of being primarily a helper to men.

This gentleman represented a kind of stereotype common in such social debates that are typically futile and only about symptoms being kicked around in the developing "wars" between male and female, the old vs. the young, pro-lifers vs. pro-choice, blacks vs. whites, gays vs. straights, law & order enthusiasts, and other arguments of this nature that provide only social diversions, thus inhibiting focus on basic causes of these and other social problems. What this results in is a waste of the time and effort that goes into dealing only with symptoms. All this is done for the cause of "human rights", an abstraction that only can have real meaning in a social structure that provides its citizens with economic security, peace and with so few social problems that they become less interesting as subjects of dispute. Modern science and technology is now capable of producing social tranquility but is prevented from doing so by social ignorance and indifference.

When the majority of the audience on the show made fun of the man who was unable to recognize the changing role of women in this century, they were simply looking into a mirror at themselves. For, what was really represented by the gentleman, as well as by all the people engaged in the social debates mentioned, was people living with 18th century social concepts in the 1990s, anachronisms with an inability to bring their social thinking up- to-date and to recognize the role of science and technology in bringing about the vast changes in work: the basic reason for all the symptomatic conditions -- that are viewed as the basic problem.

We will find, as events relating to the economy and the environment proceed toward economic stagnation, that we can no longer hide behind an 1800s mentality while living in the year 1990. Hiding the real enemy, the archaic Price System we live in and cannot understand, is the basic cause of our social problems. Those debates are social diversions and are an evasive response to the real enemy, the Price System. Ignorance and fear create the resistance to social change, and this subject is what needs illumination. One writer summed up the situation as the power of monetary compulsion, when he said, "Damn the facts -- full greed ahead."

There is a scientific solution to the social problems that worry people -- Technocracy.