LACAN' S "THE REAL"

TECHNICAL AUTHORITY


"because it has to be right"

— and this is where things get interesting.

The Century of Recovery is best understood as a technocratic consolidation era: a period in which a Technical Authority stabilizes a fragmented civilization, rebuilds infrastructure, re‑professionalizes scientific elites, and gradually transitions from emergency centralization to the pluralistic civilization begun by the New Deal.

What Ferkiss's Technological Humanism would give us. Call it an International Geophysical Century. (I enjoyed the sci-fi movies inspired by IGY.)

A Technical Authority that “calls the shots” during a transitional period. A society emerging from disorder, scarcity, and institutional breakdown. A need for coordinated scientific and engineering expertise to rebuild. A political atmosphere where competence temporarily overrides ideology. A sense that this Authority is not permanent, but a bridge.

I don't know if Earth will be saved from Climate Change, so I'd set it on another planet colonized by refugees from this one who make the same mistakes, but history won't repeat itself completely. Imagine a different response to the energy crisis based on a memo by Michael Boretsky, who worked for the Nixon Administration. I bet he had a tiny basement office crowded with filing cabinets. This incarnation will go berserk and abduct the equivalent of the 3M CEO who rejected the public-private recommendation. Instead of neoliberalism, we'll get:

1. The Emergency Technocracy (Years 0–20):
a. Collapse of international coordination after the broken Epstein-controlled supply chains leaves countries isolated.
b. The Technical Authority emerges as a crisis institution, not a government.
c. Its mandate: restore communications, stabilize food and energy systems, prevent cascading failures.
d. Engineers, physicists, logisticians, and navigators become the de facto elite class.
e. Political legitimacy comes from competence, not ideology, “calling the shots” because no one else can.

2. Reprofessionalization and Reconnection (Years 20–60):
a. Rebuilding of universities, research institutes, and training academies.
b. Standardization of freight maintenance, navigation protocols, and safety systems.
c. Reopening of trade routes between nation-states and civilization-states; slow re‑knitting of economic networks.
d. Emergence of resource-assessment orgs.
e. Cultural stabilization: archives restored, languages standardized, scientific norms re‑established.

3. The Technic Transition (Years 60–100):
a. The Technical Authority begins devolving power as stability returns. (I hope! Mack Reynolds once ended a novel about Technocracy with coups and counter-coups, the sort of thing that afflicts all social organizations when not watched for signs of inevitable entropy.)
b. The Authority shifts from command to coordination, becoming more like a standards body.
c. The first recognizable systems-holistic institutions appear:
d.- Cultural mood shifts from austerity to takeoff.

By the end of this century, a new civilization is fully underway.

1. Collapse → liminality → technocratic consolidation → re‑expansion.
2. A temporary elite ecology dominated by engineers and logisticians.
3. A transition from emergency centralization to pluralistic civilization.
4. A mythic sense of “recovery before greatness”.

This is similar to Toynbee’s “interregna” and Veblen’s “reprofessionalization of the technical class”.

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