A Question of Humanity

Ron Miller

1992

Published in:

The Northwest Technocrat, 3rd quarter 1992, No. 328

Human beings can be viewed in many different ways. Technocracy views human beings as energy consumers primarily. The reasons for this are very important. Technocracy has stated that the operations of the social mechanism are measurable in terms of energy. The human being is the final consumer of energy and the object of all energy transformations within the social system.

A human being is an energy consuming device. So is an engine. This is a fact, not simply a way of viewing human activity. We put fuel into an engine and the engine converts it to work, heat, and waste products. When people eat, this is exactly what they do. A calorie (a kilogram calorie is the actual unit being referred to) is a metric measure of energy consumption. The energy in the food is converted by people's bodies to work, heat, and waste. The human body is an engine.

Technocracy does not say this is all there is to a human being. Anyone who has ever given any thought to this question knows better than that. But insofar as Technocracy is concerned, a human being is first an energy consuming device that must be provided for.

People that have had concern with the precise nature of human beings have been seeking to understand one of the major problems puzzling man throughout human history. Nazi Germany was concerned with the development of the "perfect Aryan man." They used this vision to classify many people they did not like as "subhuman." The slaughter of millions of human beings was the German fascists' attempt to rationalize an ideology.

The Communist Manifesto speaks of the development of the perfect selfless man: "from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs." It speaks of the dictatorship of the proletariat to accomplish these ends. In actual practice in the Soviet Union the dictatorship of the proletariat turned out to be one of the most Byzantine bureaucracies ever developed. Like any bureaucracy, its primary interest was in preserving and extending its own privileges, if necessary at the expense of the society as a whole. While it never could match the European fascists body for body, it was capable of very vicious behavior.

All of the great religious wars in history have mostly been involved with trying to save people from themselves. If unsuccessful, at least they could annihilate the heathens. There are plenty of outstanding examples of this in the world today.

One need only look at Afghanistan, El Salvador, Cambodia, and many others. In Cambodia, the Pol Pot regime was trying to create the perfect agrarian revolution. To do this they executed about two million of their own people. They forcibly marched all the city dwellers out into the countryside, causing the collapse of the economy. Anyone who was known to have an education or simply wore glasses was executed.

The duty of a functional governance as proposed by Technocracy is to supply people with what they want, where they want it, at the time they want it. As long as they are doing no harm to others, the "why" they want it is their own business. We can arrange things so that we can assure ourselves that what we want is good for us and for the rest of society. To accomplish this satisfactorily we must first assure ourselves that our governance is designed for the benefit of people and not profit.

Human beings are at the same time the most powerful, and as a result, the most dangerous form of life ever developed on this planet. The human brain consists of 75 billion cells. The whole body contains 75 trillion cells. Each cell has more chemical processes continuously in progress than all of the chemical factories on earth. (Fit For Life by H. & M. Diamond)

Due to his command of technology, man has now taken command of his own evolution (for good or ill) as well as that of the other inhabitants of the planet. (New World New Mind by R. Ornstein & P. Ehrlich). A human being is capable of adapting to a completely novel environment so rapidly and seamlessly that it appears to the individual involved that "it has always been this way." (No Contest by Alfie Kohn)

"Where does the instability of the homogeneous come from? Why does it differentiate spontaneously? Why do things exist at all? Are they the fragile and mortal result of an injustice, a disequilibrium in the static equilibrium of forces between conflicting natural powers? Or do the forces that create and drive things exist autonomously -- rival powers of love and hate leading to birth, growth, decline, and dispersion? Is change an illusion or is it, on the contrary, the unceasing struggle between opposites that constitutes things? Can qualitative change be reduced to a motion in a vacuum, of atoms differing only ion their forms, or do atoms themselves consist of a multitude of qualitatively different germs, each unlike the others? And last, is the harmony of the world mathematical? Are numbers the key to nature?" (Order Out of Chaos by Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers)

Only a human being is capable of posing or pondering such questions. Many of the things that make life worth living are not subject to measurement -- love, beauty, wonder, pleasure, sorrow, the thrill of discovery, of conquest, achievement. But for a social system to operate, it must be able to measure what it is doing. Technocracy proposed energy be used as the fundamental unit of the measurement of social activity because energy is the most fundamental measure of anything physical. It also stated that as far as the operations of the social system is concerned, a human being is nothing more than an energy consuming mechanism. This is not meant as a degradation, but to permit human development to proceed faster than ever before possible and with the greatest diversity of which we are capable.