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All or Nothing

Rupert N. Urquhart

1956

Published in:

• Technocracy Digest, 1956
• Technocracy Digest, Feb. 1962, No. 183
• Section 3 Newsletter, Oct. 1986, No. 38 and Nov. 1986, No. 39

This is an election year. Before it is over North Americans in their millions will have turned out to elect new local, provincial or state, and national legislators. While it has not yet been officially declared, there are strong hints that Canada will have a federal election. South of the border, United States citizens will be participating in their biennial political circus under congressional and senatorial election banners. All balloteers will be exercising the wholesale expression of that democratic privilege-- their right to mark millions of little pieces of paper with penciled crosses symbolic of their social illiteracy.

For whom do voters vote when they enter the polling booths? Most of them seldom know. Some simply follow ancestral tradition, staunchly voting straight through on a certain political party's ticket irrespective of anything said for or against its candidates. Others may consider themselves somewhat more discriminating. They frequently cross party lines in their choices if they feel, from what the assorted platformers have told them, that their personal positions will be improved by so doing. They are not concerned about probably having had no voice in nominating the various candidates. It does not seem to bother them that they likely never even heard of the candidates until they were ballyhooed long and loudly by campaign speakers. When it finally comes to voting, they find that their decision is determined not by how much they know of the candidates but by how effectively the various hopeful incumbents were praised or denounced. These voters are ballot drifters, switching their support from party to party according to their mood of the moment. It is toward these people that politicians direct their special attention at election time for upon them hangs success or failure.

Politicians are nominated on the strength of their potential ability to get their respective parties into office and keep them there. Since this demands a fair degree of oratorical ability, it is not surprising that many politicians are chosen from the ranks of lawyers whose good command of language is part of their stock in trade for a successful practice.

Facile language, spoken or written, may be sufficient credentials for electing lawyers or other non-functionals to public office where they can enact new legislation, but it does not render them capable of operating and coordinating the intricate physical equipment upon which society depends for its existence. This vital work must be left to trained personnel--scientists, engineers and technologists. Yet elected politicians wield authority over and interfere with the efficiency of these key appointed men while claiming credit for their accomplishments in the name of the political party which happens to hold the majority of seats in the respective government house.

It is the paradox of our times. The politicians have the authority but not the ability to administer the phenomena involved in the operation of our social mechanism. Those who have the ability lack the authority.

While you have been reading this, you may already recognize the validity of the foregoing. If this is so and if you agree with what you have thus far read of Technocracy, you may be asking: ``Why doesn't Technocracy run candidates for political office? I would like to help the program along, but how can I if I don't get a chance to express my support of it at the polls?''

It should be apparent from what has already been said that Technocracy Inc. has no respect for the political method or for those who engage in it. Quite apart from the inability of politics and finance to cope with the problem of distributing North America's abundance, their combined stench is becoming increasingly nauseating to the citizens of this continental area. So discredited have politics become that even its strongest proponents are aware of its unsavouriness, albeit they do not hesitate to exploit its unsavory aspects for their own ends. Meanwhile, many citizens, disgusted by the proceedings, are staying away from the polls--not through apathy, but because of their complete loss of faith in politics of all shades.

Technocracy's purpose and objective are much too important to all North Americans for the Organization to take the chance of being placed in the same vilified category as politics. This would be the inevitable result of its entering the political arena, not because of its programs which would not yet have been scrutinized by most of the electorate, but simply because of its association with politics. The stakes involved cannot be risked to such hazards.

Technocracy's design provides for the distribution of this continent's abundance to all residents. Since even the largest numerical election on the continent (U.S. presidential) involves less than half the land area, it can be seen that any political involvement would necessitate a compromise of the design with still-existing Price System scarcity controls. Such an attempted compromise of abundance with scarcity would soon prove completely unworkable. While politicians may make promises that they have no power or intention of keeping, no self-respecting Technocrat would do so. Even were a member to decide for some nebulous reason to run for elective office, he could do so only after resigning from Technocracy Inc., for the Organization's overall strategy would not permit such individual action.

Technocracy Inc. has no assumption of power theory. It is an educational, research organization with no aspirations other than to see its blueprint of social operation applied to the North American problem for which it was designed. When this is accomplished, the Organization's work will have been completed, thus permitting its disbanding--probably the first organization in history to welcome its own demise. Its members will gain no advantage in the new priceless society simply because they were Technocrats. They will take their places beside their fellow citizens and compete with them for promotion up the ladder of functional responsibility purely on the basis of demonstrated ability. It cannot be otherwise if the social blueprint is to be effectively instituted. What is this blueprint that Technocrats are always talking about?

Possibly you are thinking of the conventional type of blueprints you have seen that guide construction men of all categories in building whatever happens to be their project for the time being--a house, a skyscraper, a power dam, a ship or what-have-you. It specifies every aspect of physical design and materials to be used to complete a given project. Technocracy's blueprint differs from the type with which you are familiar only quantitatively. Instead of being limited to individual aspects of the physical equipment that makes society run, it takes the entire continental operation into account and shows how it must be run to bring social mechanics into conformity with the rapidly developing nature of our mid-Twentieth Century technological processes. Even as the over-all design of an airplane intended to fly at supersonic speeds determines how each of its parts must be constructed, so the intention to establish in North America the highest standard of living that man has ever known must be determined by a continental design that will necessarily modify the character of the details. If this seems a mite arbitrary to you, imagine for a moment what that supersonic plane would be like if all of its parts were built separately by individuals who had no plans and no ideas about what the end product was to be. Bring all the parts together and assemble them--if you could. Would it fly? And if it would, do you think it would fly faster than sound? Just how far can your imagination carry you anyway?

Today's hodgepodge society is a replica of the fantasy in which you have just been asked to indulge. If the parts sometimes fit together, it is largely by accident for they have never been planned as integral units of a comprehensive social mechanism. This lack of planning--or, at best, piece-meal planning-- has resulted in much unnecessary sickness and suffering, and in a staggering toll of untimely deaths. Our highways alone have accounted for more people killed than our combined armed forces' casualties totalled in the two major wars occurring since the invention of the automobile. Increasing crime is another product of myopic Price System operation.

The Technocracy blueprint transcends any that has ever before been drawn up. It will make the most effective use of this continent's vast resources, energy potential and technical know-how to provide all citizens with those basic requirements of a physical organism in human form--food, clothing and shelter--for the provisions of which society exists and is primarily responsible.

In fulfilling this responsibility and supplying numerous amenities, the Technocracy blueprint in operation will permeate the entire functional administration. Where today we have individual plans for houses, the blueprint would provide for continental housing far superior to anything now known. Instead of a mass of family-operated farms, there would be huge 25-mile square tracts of fertile land administered by soil specialists and agrotechnologists. Locally built highways would give way to an integrated continental transportation system wherein vehicles and thoroughfares were specifically designed for each other. In addition, the blueprint specifies implementation of the nonmonetary Energy Certificate, construction of a Continental Hydrology, a functional calendar, a continental defense system, and many other phases of operation that are further explained in other literature of the organization.

You will have noted that the blueprint is always referred to as applying to the entire continent rather than to any one of the several national political divisions of which it is comprised. To the nationally inclined person this may seem an infringement of national sovereignties, but this is only because they are blinding themselves to the physical nature of the land area upon which they live. They refuse to recognize the functional impracticality of letting lines drawn in wholly arbitrary positions on maps determine how the land area shall be administered. The political divisions thus formed, both local and national, seldom coincide with the natural topographical divisions of mountains, plains, lakes and rivers, which are the primary determinants of our standard of living, providing as they do our resources, food supply and power.

The North American Continent is a land mass whose physical configuration cannot be chopped up like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Its parts are so interrelated and its many operations so interdependent that virtually nothing can be done anywhere that does not have its influence felt elsewhere, sometimes thousands of miles away. Even today it is becoming increasingly more recognized that where certain engineering measures must be taken that affect both Canada and United States, they must be taken completely without regard to the intervening boundary line. Such an instance was that of the Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission that was formed in 1913 to save the industry in the Fraser River after a rock slide seriously imperilled it, preventing the sockeye salmon from proceeding upstream to their spawning areas. More recently we find both countries finally cooperating in the construction of the long-talked-of St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project; while joint defense maneuvers by the armed forces suggest that there, too, boundaries are recognized only as hindrances in conditions of emergency.

It evolves, therefore, that any adequate design and operation of the productive and distributive processes that provide North Americans with their basic requirements must take in the whole continental area. That is exactly what the Technocracy blueprint does! Obviously, then, it cannot be cut up and applied regionally with any hope of success any more than a segment of the continent can be satisfactorily operated within its own territorial boundaries. ALL OR NOTHING must therefore be, and is, the objective for Technocracy's social blueprint! Can this be achieved with politics and finance so strongly entrenched?

In answering this question it must be realized that these institutions are powerful only within the framework of the Price System, which is the major entity since it comprises both of the others. The breakdown of the parent body would automatically result in the dissolution of its integral parts. Events both on and off the continent are shaping up in such a way as to suggest that this breakdown may not be far in the future. Investigate the trends for yourself.

Yet there can be no pat answer to the question. The job of impressing North Americans with the necessity of substituting their obsolete Price System with a functional administration has not been an easy one, but Technocrats realize that boom times (whether real or artificial) do not promote social consciousness. This realization prevents them from being dismayed even though some have been members for twenty years or more. (Today this figure may be extended to 50 years or more.) They remember that during the Depression 30s, Technocracy Inc. was the fastest growing organization on the continent. They remember too that only a global war was big enough to revitalize the ailing Price System with a transfusion capable of making most people forget their financial worries while entering into the orgy of war-induced prosperity at the expense of thousands of lives on overseas battlefields. Various devices such as ostensible post-war rehabilitation campaigns and the largest peace-time armament program in history sustained the economy in the ensuing decade, but only through a constant battle against the inexorable advances of technological abundance. Today the Price System is again in serious trouble. Its prosperity bubble is in imminent danger of bursting just as it did in 1929 under very similar conditions. Despite deficit financing, subsidies and all the other gimmicks employed to keep the economy going today, our growing abundance (automation-assisted), combined with declining markets will soon crush the Price System economy on this continent. WHEN (not if) this happens, the scarcity mechanisms of politics and business will be powerless to put the economy again on its feet. Once more with their backs to the wall, North Americans will turn to Technocracy Inc., the only organization with a program capable of handling the situation.

Technocrats have worked steadily over the years to put that program before as many North Americans as possible. Avoidance of the emotional approach such as is familiar to politicians has limited membership enrollment, but it has built a growing nucleus of members who were intellectually attracted to the program and whose emotional stability was much better adapted to the long pull. Most members are average citizens whose first objective is to publicize the blueprint. Having only average educations for the most part they are not personally qualified to administer the physical equipment of the continent, nor would they presume to seek an elective office that would place them in so responsible a position. However, they can and do promote to their utmost the social blueprint that would put administrative authority into the hands of those scientists, technologists and engineers who are already responsible for the operation of the vital sequences but are today interfered with at every turn by obsolescent Price System controls.

To inform North Americans about the next most probable form of society to prevail on this continent, Technocrats distribute literature, give public lectures and conduct study classes. The objective of this is to develop a corps of informed citizens capable of giving competent leadership in a time of social crisis. It is NOT, as may be supposed, intended to place Technocracy Inc. or any of its members in positions of authoritarian control. We have already pointed out that the very nature of the blueprint precludes such purpose or intention. Whatever might develop from that ill-advised tactic would amount to treason for it would obstruct the full implementation of the government by skill demanded by North America's uniquely intricate technology.

A Technocrat entering the political field would necessarily have to make a lot of promises in order to be elected. Once elected he would be expected to introduce Technocracy's social program in full or in part within his particular constituency. He would be unable to do so--even if he had the full support of the electorate and was completely sincere in wanting to carry out his promises. Opposition from surrounding Price System controlled areas would combine with the resource deficiencies of the restricted area to result in the experiment's utter failure. The harm thus done would be immeasurable if not irreparable. It would largely cancel out all that Technocracy has achieved in making North Americans aware of and tolerant toward--if not yet enthusiastic for its functional blueprint. Herein lies the main reason for Technocracy Inc.'s refusal to enter the political arena.

The failure of a Technocratic form of society to work in a small area might be taken as evidence that it could not be effectively applied continentally. Such a conclusion is unwarranted, especially in reference to North America for the reverse happens to be the case. The blueprint cannot be expected to function in a small area any more than an ocean liner could be expected to maneuver in a ten-acre pond. It was designed for and is operable only in a Continentalism.

From what has been said it might be surmised that North American voters will never have the opportunity to endorse the Technocracy blueprint, but this is not necessarily so. While it cannot be known in advance what precise conditions will prevail when the Price System bows out, certain courses of action avail themselves according to then existing requirements. Among the several tactical choices is the already well-known plebiscite or referendum.

Frequently today you are asked to vote for a THING rather than a party or person. It may be a bylaw to grant authority for the spending of money on some proposed project, or it may be to determine whether or not you favor professional sports on Sunday. Whatever its purpose, the referendum's outcome is a direct expression of the electorate's wishes and the majority of ``Yes'' or ``No'' votes decides the issue. Actually, if the ideal of ``government by the people'' were practised, the referendum would decide all issues, but the obvious impracticality of this unwieldy procedure in an organized society paved the way for representative government. This, too, must soon go by the board.

The referendum may be used to put the Technocracy blueprint in operation. If so, at least two-thirds (in contrast to the presently required just over half) of all votes must approve the blueprint before it will be inaugurated. This last vote within the framework of the Price System will be the most important that North Americans have ever made, for they will be deciding whether they will move forward into an era of unstinted abundance or whether they will allow the inadequate, bungling controls of the Price System to exterminate many of them. The march of events will be the major determinant in the issue.

Time is drawing short and Technocracy Inc. still has much work to do. However, despite today's apparent prosperity, Price System champions are considerably disquieted by alarming symptoms of instability. They are afraid of what automation is doing to national purchasing power. This newest productive technique is building up unprecedented quantities of various products, but they are largely lying in warehouses unsold. If this trend continues, as every indication promises, these goods will constitute a growing ledger liability and will be just so much useless junk. When this occurs the captains of industries will lose all interest in their ``businesses.''

As they find it preferable to preserve their own lives to defunct business, they may be expected to realize at last the validity of Technocracy's analysis and that the institution of its social program will be their only hope of continued survival. Channels of communication now closed to the Organization will then be opened wide for an unlimited dissemination of the Technocracy blueprint to the North American public.

Will they respond to the picture painted by television, radio, screen and press? We may find the answer to that in the way they respond to current political campaigns that promise much and return nothing. They respond immediately and with great emotional zeal to anything that personally affects them. There is little doubt how they would cast their final Price System ballot were it laid on the line that their only hope for future survival lay in the direction indicated by Technocracy Inc.

The referendum, of course, is only one method that might be employed to institute the social blueprint mentioned herein. Which method is used is not particularly important. What is important is that it must eventually be instituted, and when it is it must be for the entire continent. Nothing less will suffice. It must be ALL OR NOTHING.