The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

I agree it's not perfect, but I think you are over-dramatizing.

My gut says that planetary healthy would be wildly improved if we worked to build a more efficient society. Having meaning & caring about being a well running world would hopefully give us some grounds to flourish on, pride and effort and will to drive us towards something meaningful, beyond the grab-as-much-money-as-you-can state of things today. A collective future worth caring about.

The article talks about building a social world for people deliberately. It seems like they had some care, wanted to try to improve the social lives of people too. If anything I think the Technocracy people understood somewhat better that these decisions about how we treat people are not instanteous questions: maybe we get more social productivity out of some by treating them like crap & working them to collapse, but then we have decades of them being a social and perhaps economic drain on all society. That short term exploitation is what capital does to people today already! But no scientist worth a salt is going to create such imbalanced wasteful systems!

Efficiency can mean a lot of different things. It depends on what you are trying to make efficient, doesn't it? An efficient society, in my view, would be focused on happiness indexes, on gini coefficients. It would be trying to make our footprint more modest, try to make goods repairiable & sustainable long term. Modern eco-concern today has a lot of overlap with many of the basics here.

I'm speculating a lot. But if you don't want to nibble at this food for thought what other morsels are worth trying? This very much is a case where, again, I find the anti-willpower striking and concerning, the leaping into the negative. Over something strange and weird and a bit fanciful and naive. But at least they were working for something to believe in. At least they had a will to better, one that seems fundamentally resoundingly kind of true, kind of needed: a view that is long term, that focuses on building a maintainable long term running order, that doesn't consume until exhaustion.

Paine also said that society is good. That government is but the necessary to maintain it as it grows.

And I worry that what government we have now is not very effective. Health care in the US is a mess. Building anything has grown vastly more expensive, be it buildings, rail, or ships. We have countless laws protecting corporate IP, lobbyists a gazillion, and corporations regularly court shop to get whatever judicial treatment they desire.

The idea of a government focused on efficiency, that is trying to share and spread intelligence & knowledge & know how, that tried to help make us efficient at housing and food and health care: that feels, well, sort of essential at this point to maintaining what Paine loved & cherished: society.

And giving a nation back some purpose, some meaning: that can help bring us together too, perhaps. A purpose make a world that won't over consume, that has a chance to house & feed & care for itself, for hundreds, thousands, or vastly more years: that feels like such a potential antidote to the poison of reckless abandon & foolery that so many brutal nasty little value-less children have beset upon the world, have dissoluted our empathy & perpetrated mercenary anti-social campaigns against the world with. We need value systems that look forward, that care broadly, and that place a reasoned, scientific view as a pole star, and that seek actions not grandiose for grandiosity sake, but to serve us all, to bring an efficient, livable, social societal world out.

Our scale is perhaps a bit bigger than what Paine could have imagined, our numbers vastly more. I fear the Bowling Alone future only intensifies. I would not throw out Paine, but I do think we ought be open to asking what values our society shows for itself, asking if the values have kept up & are adequate, and we ought be open to assessing how governments might better enable societal values we think we need or perhaps just want to see. Technocracy's suggestion that those who care deeply about how the world works, and already have a life of servant leadership, seems atuned, to me, of being ideal for maintaining a society of fewer ills, and being willing to reduce their own role as we do get more efficient, as our ills and evils receed. While inspiring better.

Not just that but the 30s was the tail end of a period of reduction and unification in science. If physics and biology (large portions of it) could be reduced to a handful of principles, why not economics and politics. Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Hilbert, the Vienna Circle. It must have seemed like science was on track to explain more or less everything.

I found this comment very insightful - and it's interesting to see that it is downvoted even if there are zero replies trying to make some counter arguments..

It’s interesting that the theory of Quantum Mechanics emerged just after this point and threw a wrench in the idea that the universe could be neatly explained through a universal single theory, suddenly there were more questions than answers. And Einstein famously hated quantum physics.

There’s something to be said about the cultural impact of quantum mechanics and how it shifted people’s perceptions from a universe that could eventually be explained by a set of fairly simple, understandable laws of physics to one that is much more complex, mysterious and contradictory. Suddenly the laws of the universe were defined by randomness and uncertainty, rather than determinism and easily understood logic.