It's a Fair Cop, and Social Engineering Is to Blame

 About that Technocracy map...

I submit that we already live in one.

When doing "my own research" (oy jeez) I found this very small compact book by a woman whose name I can't remember. Printed during the Depression, it listed and described alternative economic systems much in the news. Fascism's advertised theory was in it. So was Communism. These were fresh back then. Technocracy was in there. I think Social Credit was too. Not the Chicom arm-twisting but something dreamed up by an engineer named Douglas.

When I started becoming interested in the Progressive political movements of the North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin arc, there was a sense these folks had created their politics from their interaction between a harsh environment and the plundering robber barons who made their existence infinitely worse than it had to be.  These political movements owed their philosophical ideas to a lot of things but their curiosity was directed by their real economic dilemmas.  They were trying to solve the problems of survival at the center of a large continent-sized empire.  These were truly home-grown political philosophies.

It's a classic anthropological situation. Earning existence from unforgiving nature is what cultures do. I suspect that many of the embittered but cognitively-constricted Trump supporters hail from the outermost edge of our unacknowledged buffer zone with raw nature.

As I got my arms around the history of economic development in north-central Usia, I started noticing that similar geographical, economic, and climatic conditions spawned similar political movements in other parts of the world.  In Russia, it was the Social Revolutionary (SR) Party—which was a peasant party somewhat like the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota.  The SRs were one of the first parties purged by Lenin after the Bolsheviks took power.  In Canada, it was the Social Credit Party.

The theory of Social Credit was developed by a British engineer named C.H. Douglas.  In Canada, it took root in Alberta and spread throughout the western provinces.  In British Columbia, the Social Credit Party actually ran the government between 1952 and 1991 though by the end, the theories of Douglas had long since lapsed into obscurity.  I first learned about Social Credit listening to Saskatchewan radio stations while living in NW North Dakota—on one show, Douglas was referenced often.

I don't want to get deep into the issue of money creation this merciless morn. There's a storm comin'. But if I'm going to run around telling folks that their only hope for survival lies in spending $100T for infrastructure upgrades, I owe it to them to explain where all that money will come from.

Actually, the source of that money is blindingly obvious—we will get those funds the same way modern society always gets those funds.  We will create them out of thin air.  But, scream the monetary Puritans, if you just create money willy-nilly out of thin air, what will stop us from becoming Zimbabwe with runaway inflation?  Again the answer is obvious—don't create money will-he-nill-he—only create money to pay for things that make the society richer.

What the monetary Puritans forget is that while money can be made valuable by specifying convertibility to rare metals like gold, the really important value of money is the ability to convert it into necessary items of survival—food, shelter, energy, water, etc.  Fiat money derives its value from funding the clever use of resources.  Producers make money valuable!  And so long a money is created to fund Producer projects—and converting the world into a giant solar-powered fire-free zone would most definitely qualify as a producer project—new money brings actual prosperity and not inflation.

Besides, creating money out of thin air is what bankers do!  It is the rest of us who make that money valuable.  They create a new mortgage with a few keystrokes and folks like us work like slaves for 30 years to pay it off.  It is our hard work that makes that money valuable.  Starving the society of funds necessary for the creation and maintenance of our infrastructure is easily sin #1 of the bankster classes.  Because of this madness, we are not only destroying the only inhabitable biosphere for light-years in any direction, we are going broke doing it.

What Tech Inc proposed - back when it got the respectful attention of the Brains Trust - was to issue coupons to the public to build up its purchasing power. At the same time, factories would crank out products that would soak up this scrip. "Clearing the market of both" is the cant phrase from orthodox economics.

One of Tech Inc's big projects was a statistical compilation of all the real resources in CONUS. "Just the facts, ma'am." What's really out there for us to deal with. Before the Leisure Class moved in to ruin things by overextraction.

The rest looked too much like social engineering. I submit that we're living in a socially-engineered culture right now.

I put my protagonist on a train with Ruth Benedict and Alfred Korzybski. These two worthies had not met before. My character got an earfu.l This was during the Depression but before WW2 so there have been developments since. Here goes.

To their dubious credit, the Technocrats (with the big red capital T sewn on their gray blazers) were facing a real problem: how to prevent the hallowed market from finding equilibrium at the level of absolute want. How does one increase consumption? Both they and Douglas were seeking to justify the increase of purchasing power on a new rationale.

In 1959 David Riesman published a book whose title, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘊𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘥, contained a hint Usia had gone through a major social change,. As I said, Riesman has since gone through one himself, becoming a more or less ordained defender of Things As They Are and wrote from within the Establishment. Prior to this, however, he had discovered how this Establishment had overcome the unpopularity of Tech Inc and SoCred. (To some degree, Ralph Nader exhibits the fault of all earnest moral leadership - humorlessness.  Like failed or thwarted bohemians in Western history, the impatient Technocrats fell back on the application of positive pressure backed by the threat of deliberate punishment to achieve their goals.)

Riesman was the first to make clear to the general reading public that, by the end of WW2, the United States was no longer a good Protestant producing society but had morphed into something quite different: a consuming society. Thanks to the demands of war, the problem of production had been solved. When hostilities had ceased, and the armed forces were no longer gobbling up the output of the tooled-up factories, America was faced with the new peacetime problem of how to consume the torrential output of its machines. Unlike some of its allies, Usia didn't have a ravaged land to rebuild or a decimated population. (Pohl and Kornbluth made their early careers out of SF depicting a society based on coerced consumption.*)

The problem of consuming all the goods had to be met within a framework in which "gummint interference" with biz (except for a few bagatelles like oil subsidies) had long been anathema, and where the public had been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that any kind of controlled economy was Antichrist. Americans as a nation have a hysterical blindness on the subject of social planning. Thus when Riesman wrote in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘊𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘥 that consuming was the new frontier, he was describing a situation in which (1) there was a glut of products and (2) there was a "free enterprise" economy that could not be messed with.

The only thing left to mess with was the people themselves. Was there a way to trick, trap, or back them into the narrowness of consumerism, with its tiny dramas of shopping and acquisitiveness, its self-absorption and fingernail-dimensioned horizons?

After years of WASP self-discipline augmented by four years of wartime rationing, the carrot had much more appeal than the stick.

Those game-show scandals make a lot more sense, now. It was one way of moving product.

I always feel tempted at this point to leave the rest of it up to the reader. By "it" I mean the homework problem of working out what effects this split-level psychology has had on the public. The hippies were one outbreak. Madison Avenue had to double down on them. The "peace dividend"- what happened to it? My go-to answer remains: profit psychosis, like the kind that afflicted the industrialists who supported Hitler.

I better go find me a good picture and a snappy title for this rant.

*It was solved by building a race of androids to wear out the shoes, etc. If you must automate production, then automate consumption, too!