"One estimate shows how by simply reworking the continental transportation system, we could operate our entire society on as little as 5% of the energy we consume today..."

This should read 50%, not 5%. I'm not sure why this typo hasn't been fixed yet.

BigGav,
Thanks for this interesting background. Seems that technocracy is talking about reduced energy intensity(GDP/boe), and that their predictions have come true( except for the increased holidays and early retirements). Would have been hard to predict peoples appetites for consumer products and world travel in 1930's.

I always learn something from your posts Gav. Today I learnt that I am a technocrat :-)

I edited the first sentence under the heading "Technocracy" to remove a surplus 'administer'.

Nice posting! There are a few other technocrats in Australia and New Zealand. For now, we focus on research and work most closely with the European Technocrats. You can find our pages at:

Members: http://en.technocracynet.eu/index.php?option=com_groupjive&task=showgrou...

Forum: http://en.technocracynet.eu/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=63&fun...

European Technocrat website: http://en.technocracynet.eu

NET (the Network of Eurpoean Technocrats) includes participants from numerous coutnries in Europe and North America as well as Asutralia and New Zealand. NET strives to be extremely science-based and includes faculty and scientists from several universities. An examination of NET's website will indicate the diversity and caliber of the people involved.

The major ideological differences between the NET movement and the traditional North Armerican movement is that NET's approach is more research-oriented, incremental and global-oriented. The North American organization Technocracy, Inc. focuses on public education and advocacy in North America. Technocracy, Inc. also serves as a repository of original North American technocracy movement documents and literature.

The statement that NET is not affiliated with Technocracy Inc. in the USA/Canada is correct. Some participants with NET, such as myself, are also members of Technocracy, Inc., but we don't officially speak for that organization.

By the way, I should point out that Mungo has recently circulated email telling people not to listen to me because I'm Australian.

Apparently only Americans have a right to say anything in Mungo's eyes. Mongo has advocated censorship of both Australians and Swedes, as well as other nationalities.

(P.S.: For the record, I live in Australia part of the year, but I'm a not an Australian citizen).

Mungo in this very thread discounts the viewpoints of NET because there are Swedes involved in NET. That is bigotry.

Mungo either is a person name Skip Sievert or is a follower of Mr. Sievert.

I refer to an excerpt from one of Mr. Sievert's bigoted emails, that discounts the views of Australians and other non-USA nationals.

"Mark Ciotola... an Australian... who is connected by friends to TechInc... is a regular member and contributor of the NET site. The NET site is a dumbed down spam and vanity site in Europe... Sweden,,, that promotes an idiotic version of Technocracy based on misguided research of Bill Desjardines of Canada and a couple of other people. "

Regarding Buckminster Fuller, there certainly are similarities, and the technocratic movement can benefit from his approaches. Several technocrats are already trying to integrate some of his ideas, such as experimenting with domes as a building structure for a technocratic society.

Mongo, since you aren't using your real name (unless you are M. Ongo), what exactly is your relationship to Techocracy, Inc.? Are you a dues-paying member, and do you have authorization to speak for Technocracy, Inc.?

Such an interesting idea, this fits in well with Jay Hanson's idea of a society of sloth.
Most OECD nations have only 3% of the population feed the rest 97%.

If scientists and technocrats were in charge we could quite possibly transition our society away from the peak oil cliff. (Maybe that is utopian)

12% of American energy use goes towards feeding the population, so conceivably America could survive on 25% of its current energy usage. Just that people wouldn't work as much, save on gas, better insulation of homes would all make a real impact.

But to sell such an idea to the public would be nearly impossible in this day and age.

About 5 years ago as was becoming ever more emersed in my post 9/11 research, and the REAL world was opening up to me, I had a dream in which I had a long philosophical discussion with my grandfather (who died in 1965 when I was 9) and one element of the dream I remembered vividly after waking was that he had a small faded yin yang, without the dots in the bodies, tattoo on his hand between his thumb and pointer.

Later I was talking with my father and I asked him if grandpa had a tattoo and he said “yes, he was a technocrat and many of them at the time had this tattoo.

So I did quite a bit of research and found much of the philosophy to be very compelling. I even contacted the local representative and had a bit of a chat.

Not being much of a joiner I didn’t.

I eventually discovered that there is huge opposition to this concept. Many see it as elitist, world domination conspiracy stuff and vow to oppose it as strongly as communism. I could get no traction with discussions about Tecnocracy.

To this day I still believe there are many sound proposals in the movement but it would be difficult to near impossable organize and empower it due to peoples fear of intellectuals.

Cheers!
(a closet technocrat and yes I have the one and only tattoo)

Well, this definitely falls in the category of "why people who are quite brilliant on one subject might actually be complete fools on another." It is, of course, completely normal to believe that some gruops that you belong to ought to rule, and would do it better than anyone else. Nearly everyone, from right wing Christians to people who believe that aliens are speaking to them believes this. Fortunately, democracy has some useful preventatives. Now some of the technocrat's specific proposals might be quite good - but the "elite ruling class of scientists bit" is bad.

Some difficulties. 1. If you had an actual technocracy, how would make sure that they scientists who do believe in serious limits are the ones in charge, rather then the scientists and engineers who don't grasp this concept - which is probably a larger number. That is, once you open the door to "government by scientific expert" you have no real way, short of a (benevolent, I'm sure) dictatorship of assuming that there will ever be a monolithic scientific consensus that would lead in the right direction.

2. As Jared Diamond observes, virtually all of our most intractable social problems stem from technological solutions to existing problems. There is no reason to believe that this state of affairs would suddenly alter one day, and only good and useful forms of technology, with no unforseen consequences would evolve.

3. Universal leisure is something of a fantasy, of course, but somehow it never actually happens. Plus, grandma might not like being taken to the potty by the robotic toileting machine, or having her orifices probed. We've been told over and over again that people and their labor are unneeded - and yet somehow, technological innovations always seem to find new menial jobs for people. It turns out that human labor never quite seems to go out of style. Hmmmm...

I'll pass, thanks, but if you try it in Australia, let me know how it goes.

Sharon

Ah, didn't realize it could have the T Capitalized. Also not surprised to find that Hugo Gernsback, pioneer publisher/editor who coined the term "Scientifiction" (later parsed down to "science fiction" of course) and also, by the way, wasn't very handy with the English language (hence the devolution in craft from Wells etc. for the sake of pulp readership), had ties with Technocrats: World of Westfahl Eaton Volumes: Technocracy and Plutocracy, or, How Hugo Gernsback Would Follow the Money to the Two Cultures.

Still, Gernsback also had a palpable passion for science, and science fiction, that cannot be plausibly attributed purely to mercenary motives. That is why Gernsback's science fiction, and much of the science fiction after Gernsback, has been routinely characterized as "technocratic"—as, for example, in H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect; and it is for that reason that one would pick up copies of Gernsback's rare 1933 magazine, Technocracy Review, and expect to find an organ of vigorous advocacy. And certainly, that is what I expected when I first asked the long-suffering employees of UC Riverside's Interlibrary Loan to dig up copies of its two published issues.

Instead, however, the magazine announced and maintained a strictly neutral stance: "Technocracy Review voices no opinion of its own. It aims to publish all opinions whether for or against technocracy." In the original and reprinted articles that it presented, the magazine did follow this policy, and Gernsback's own writings on the subject display at best ambivalence, and at times genuine hostility, towards technocracy.

NB - article refers to "Gary Scott" when they mean Howard.

I first heard of Hubbert's technocracy affiliation by way of Richard Duncan, who identified Hubbert and Frederick Lee Ackerman (one of Technocracy Inc.'s founders), along with Henry Adams, as his main influences in formulating the Olduvai theory.

Technocracy was yet another utopian concept which sounds good on paper except for the little matter of not taking human nature into account. It's difficult to see how they would have expunged greed, which is the rock upon which every utopian dream shipwrecks.

It also says nothing to the hungers of the spirit. Even if these material claims could be achieved, you'd still have people clinging to their gods and guns, and that would wreck the whole thing.

These days whenever I read a utopian prescription which elides human nature it seems similar to how I now divide all energy, environmental, economic, and political writing into whether or not it's Peak Oil-aware.

(BTW, is there going to be any agreed-upon term of art for that? "Not Peak Oil aware", or "ante-Peak aware", or whatever. A Marxist might ask does one have "Peak consciousness"? Just a thought.)

There was some discussion of Technocracy on the USENET dating back to the 90's. It is probably significant that the movement started during the worst of the great depression. Just for amusement here is John McCarthy the computer guru and world class cornucopian reminiscing
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Discussion subject changed to "The Limits To Growth" by John McCarthy

John McCarthy
View profile
More options Nov 15 1996, 12:00 am
David Lloyd-Jones includes:
On the other hand I am always amused to read Technocrat
types (capitalised in honour of the Technocracy movement, of
which they are often unwitting reinventors) who want to
measure this against that, and that against the other thing,
to get useable indices of what's the smart thing to do.
When I was a boy in Los Angeles, Technocracy Inc. was active.
1. Their doctrine was that engineers could and should seize power.
2. They had cars with yin-yang symbols on the sides and loud speakers
on the roofs. This was so that in some unspecified emergency, they
could drive their cars around the city and tell the citizens what to
do.
3. They had a maximal leader, and the movement collapsed when he died.
4. They wanted to measure value in terms of energy,
i.e. kilowatt-hours. I remember one of them who came frequently to
Caltech peddling magazines being pointed to the electric power socket
and being invited to put in his finger and extract as many
kilowatt-hours as he thought is magazine was worth.
In their fixation with energy as the measure of value, they were
precursors of the energy religion of today. I don't think they
imagined that there was a shortage, however, so they weren't quite as
dumb.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and, according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest. This disparity between a monetary system which continues to grow exponentially and a physical system which is unable to do so leads to an increase with time in the ratio of money to the output of the physical system. This manifests itself as price inflation. A monetary alternative corresponding to a zero physical growth rate would be a zero interest rate. The result in either case would be large-scale financial instability. - M King Hubbert

Malthusian finance!

With much the same result -- a ghastly collapse.

Informative and thought-provoking essay, Big Gav. Thank you!

This last quote really gets at the crux of the problem:

"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. We are not starting from zero, we have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time." - M King Hubbert

This seems presumptuous to me at one level. How can we possibly know how vast our ignorance is or is not? We do not know what we do not know. I will refrain from trailing off into a Rumsfeldian "know...don't know" monologue.

Frenchman Jacques Ellul had a different take on technology and Technocracy as a cultural paradigm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul

Ellul wrote an extensive critique of the technological society in 1964, and wrote plenty about propaganda, media, and technology as a de facto religion.

Hubbert's sense of urgency was correct, and reminds me of the sense of urgency that everyone be converted to the particular form of American Christian Fundamentalism that I grew up in. True Believers have some comfort in the idea that they know the Nature of our Cosmic Predicament, and also what to do about it.

I no longer know the nature of our Cosmic Predicament except that -- as Kurt Vonnegut has said: "we are here to help each other get through whatever this is."

Our species has evolved to dominate and devour while telling ourselves stories that rationalize this behaviour which will eventually destroy us, unless we have some strange chance to evolve to coexist, which seems unlikley right now.

Even if we evolve to cooperate and coexist into a kind of Aquarian version of ourselves, none of us will live forever, nor will our species live forever.

Hubbert sure had it right also when he noted that our "maneuverability" would diminish over time with relation to our resource base.

We have hit the planet upon which we depend for life like the hammer of god. We have killed the Mother who still feeds us as she dies, and we have little or no awareness of what we've done.

My favorite word -- for years now -- is "apocatastasis." This is a mystical idea with many manifestations from ancient Greece onward. The notion is related to Apocalypse and Revelation.

Hubbert had a religious faith in Technology. We all have faith in something.

As has been noted by others, I think that \many of the Technocrats ideas have merit. We should admit that it is a kind of faith.

Harvard biologist E. O Wilson has called for religion and science to be wed together in some way.

Could Technocracy contain the seeds of a new cultural paradigm which is even now being interwoven with ancient religious themes and stories?

It seems unlikely to me that our funny little species will survive the next 30 years. If we do, even that will be a kind of miracle.

Humans will survive because there are many who have stopped working for the MAN and devote their lives to healing GAIA our earth mother - however our technological lifestyle will not survive as Hubbert pointed out "We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time."

In other word if we don't change prior to or shortly after peak energy then we will not be able to make a change and keep technology going.... ALL CURRENT ENERGY IS COMMITTED TO SET UP A NEW SYSTEM WILL TAKE ENERGY THAT WE DON'T HAVE....

Science-based religions are as old as science, and I mean at least as old as the priest-astronomers of the early agrarian societies. The idea is that those who know how things work are somehow best placed to say how we OUGHT to act. But, as the philosophy books tell us, you can't get an OUGHT from an IS. By all means, let them advise us on the likely consequences of a given course of action, and let us thank them for it. As to what we will actually do, that OUGHT to be left to me, my fellow voters, and our elected representatives, based on OUR values.

Here's what my grandfather Francis J Pettijohn's had to say about Hubbert from his book "Memoirs of an Unrepentant Field Geologist, A candid profile of some geologists and their science 1921-1981", University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Technocracy

In New York City King met Howard Scott, who achieved considerable fame--or should I say notoriety--for his role in the technocracy movement. America was in the depths of the Great Depression, and Scott was the principal exponent of technocracy--in reality its founder. Scott contended that the price system under which we operate contained the seeds of its own destruction and that a new system--technocracy--would take its place. He published his views in a long article in the Atlantic Monthly. King became an ardent technocrat and wore a lapel pin bearing the emblem of technocracy.

------------------------------------------

Below is the rest of what he had to say about Hubbert:

King Hubbert told me that it was in Bastin's [professor of economic geology] course that he first became acquainted with curves of mineral production, and this acquaintance led to his analysis of growth curves in general. This interest in turn led to his forecasts of culmination and decline in both production and reserves of petroleum and natural gas, which turned out to be uncannily accurate.

Perhaps King's most dramatic achievement was his prediction of oil depletion, which appeared in 1956 in a publication of the American Petroleum Institute. This paper dealt with the trend and future production of oil and gas in the United States; apparently it was generally overlooked or ignored, but King's presentation at the 1956 meeting of the Production Division, Southern District, of the American Petroleum Institute was not.

King clearly saw that at the time the discovery rate had peaked and production would soon culminate, and that it and our reserves would begin an irreversible decline. He predicted a peak production in 1970. His paper created a great deal of consternation in the oil world, and provoked heated controversy; he was roundly denounced. It was heresy indeed in a profession that is constitutionally optimistic and incapable of conceiving of its demise. It turned out, as we all now know, that King was right.

------------------------------------------

For his original work King was awarded the Day Medal of the Geological Society of America and later its Penrose Medal, the highest award. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. More recently he received the William Smith Medal of the Geological Society of London--ironically, named for the father of field geology but here awarded to a geologist who had done no fieldwork.

------------------------------------------

One student had a profound effect on my thinking and on the course of events later in my life -- M. King Hubbert. When I arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1929 King was one of the first graduate students I met. I was struck immediately by his personality. He turned out to be something of the iconoclast, a sharp critic with an excellent analytical mind and skill in mathematical and physical analysis. Nothing seemed to delight him more than finding a fatal flaw in someone else's analysis. Although he was a graduate student working for his Ph.D. under Rollin Chamberlin, I never could discover whether he took any courses, and I soon observed that, although Chamberlin was his adviser and supervisor, King neither needed nor accepted advice and supervision. He was a very independent individual--a student of nobody. Basically he was interested in geophysics, and at the time I arrived he had focused on isostacy.

King was not married at the time, nor was I, so both of us took our meals at the Gamma Alpha house on Dorchester Avenue. Gamma Alpha was a fraternity whose members were graduate students in the sciences. Although nominally a fraternity, it did not fit the usual stereotype of this genre--generally characterized by undergraduates more interested in social activities than scholarship and given to a great deal of beer drinking and noisy parties. Gamma Alpha was exceptional in the caliber of its membership--an unusual assemblage of very bright minds. Discussion at dinner was often very stimulating, especially with King Hubbert present. He nearly always provoked a heated debate.

King left Chicago without his degree to accept an appointment as instructor in geophysics at Columbia University. Still unmarried, he rented a loft somewhere in Manhattan and continued his research. He completed his paper on the theory of scale models--a study provoked, I surmise, by the model experiments of Ted Link, Fran Shepard, and other students of Chamberlin. These "pressure box" experiments with plaster of paris, wax, and diverse other materials were patterned on the well-known experiments of similar nature carried out earlier by Bailey Willis. King showed conclusively that all these experiments, designed to show how folds and faults develop, were incorrectly scaled--so badly so as to make them virtually worthless. King was persuaded to submit his degree even though his study had by this time appeared in print.

After nearly ten years King became disenchanted with Columbia. He resigned his post and left an academic career to go with Shell Development Company, the research arm of Shell Oil in Texas. Shell had built a new research center in Bellaire, near Houston, and King was made a co-director of this laboratory. He was to remain there many years.

King remained at Shell for twenty-five years. He gave up his administrative duties early on and published a number of milestone papers. One of the best known was his "theory of Ground Water Motion," sparked by a late-night bull session after an afternoon scientific meeting at which a speaker had set forth his ideas on how the proposed trans-Florida ship canal would affect the groundwater system. The debate was unresolved, but it set King to work and led to his monumental paper. King sent it to the Journal of Geology, but it was far too long for a journal article. Rollin Chamberlin, then editor, arranged for it to appear as a supplement to a regular issue. It proved a popular item and went through a second printing. Among other papers King published were his work on hydrodynamic entrapment of petroleum and his study with Bill Rubey on the mechanism of overthrust faulting.

It is noteworthy that all King's papers were "pencil-and-paper" research. King did no fieldwork and virtually no experimental work. He developed his concepts from the first principles of physics, got his data from the literature, and used the information to test his general theories, of overthrusting, of entrapment, of groundwater motion. King's idol, if he had one, was J. Willard Gibbs, whose formulation of the laws of thermodynamics was a major achievement -- an achievement purely intellectual, since Gibbs, like Hubbert, was not an experimentalist.

------------------------------------------

Back blurb on book jacket: F. J. PETTIJOHN is professor emeritus of geology at the Johns Hopkins University (was, he died in 1999). A fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of the highest honors of geological associations--the Twenhofel Medal of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London, the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America, and the Sorby Medal of the International Association of Sedimentologists. Sedimentary Rocks, his best-known work, has been a classic for more than thirty years.

Energy Accounting? Technocrat?

Lets not forget Howard Odum's work in the field of eMergy. (Who has been accused of being a technocrat BTW)

And part of the Technocrat movement was to not have the technocrats be actual elected politicians.

"Hubbert's membership of the Technocracy movement was investigated in 1943 by his employers, the Board of Economic Warfare, who may have regarded it (not entirely unreasonably) as a form of communism - though engineers desiring political control didn't seem to do much better in the Soviet Union either."

No. They were not worried about communism. They were worried about influence of German Nazi Party and Italian Fascists. Look at the text under the picture of some Technocrats. The news on that day was that Communist were not welcome in the Technocrat movement. A proud claim of the Fascists was that they made the trains run on time. This was just the sort of accomplishment that Technocrats respected.

On the other hand, maybe they WERE worried about communism. Never underestimate the stupidity of US internal security police.

Big Gav,

Interesting article and the string of replies to it has been likewise fascinating. It brings back a lot of memories of my own intellectual childhood and development, and I am sure that it has something in common with many other baby boomers of my age group, since we were all influenced by many of the same books, articles and mass media from that period.
Anyway, I decided you folks were due to read an important, informative and thoughtful essay, so I went ahead and wrote one...:-)

THE COLLAPSE OF TWO UTOPIAS: What we want always matters more than what we know.

To set the time frame correctly, I was born in 1959, so I began kindergarten in 1964. As a child I did not realize how completely the Great Depression and Second World War still influenced the thinking of my elders, parents and teachers. To us kids, 30 years previous might as well have been the age of the Romans, so far removed from us as children beginning our education was it.

One of the influences stemming from WWII and the postwar period was the unbelievable regard and respect for technology extendeding into the 1960’s that existed in our culture at that time.

It was felt by many that the technicians had basically won WWII for the U.S. and the Allies. Yes the troops had given brave service, but it was the technicians who had stayed ahead of the Japanese and the Germans (still regarded to this day as some of the best technicians, even if their leadership were insane autocratic racists), and we had come out of the war with some of the most advanced aircraft, turbine engines and electronics in the world. So we stole from the Brits and Germans a bit, we made them perfect was the view of most Americans. The technicians including the “logistical” and management technicians had delivered, and would deliver to keep us in front of the Russians in the Cold War. I remember being told many times in elementary school math and science classes that “Russian kids can do this stuff, they have to if they want to go to school at all.” It was the motivating stick used to make us want to learn, that it would be the only way to avoid enslavement.

Technically interested children in those days knew the big names: IBM, Burroughs, General Electric, Westinghouse, and in the U.S. south, the TVA nuclear program at Oak Ridge, where nuclear fusion was on the way to being perfected, and of course, the queen of all technical organizations, NASA. If you could get in with any one of these outfits, you were set for a life of respect, money, interesting work, and recognition would come your way. By the age of 10 I was reading articles about Wernher Von Braun, Robert Oppenheimer and building scale models of the Apollo spacecraft and moon landing craft that would soon accomplish the greatest technical feat of all history, man on the moon and the human entry into the space age.

Science fiction was THE definition of fiction for us, from Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” to Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” to Frank Herbert’s “Dune”, this was the world of the future. Cities would be the domed dreams of R. Buckminster Fuller, and the fusion reactors would mean that the lights would never have to be turned off in the new 24 hour cities protected from the weather by the domes. A person only a few years from now would walk the sidewalks at 2:00AM in February in Minneapolis Minnesota in comfort. The spacecraft would deliver any rare earth materials needed from asteroids and the moons of the planets.

The key to all of this would be education, but a particular kind of education. C.P. Snow’s famous 1956 essay “The Two Cultures” had stated the chasm between the liberal arts/humanities and the technical/scientific spheres of education clearly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

Most parents in the 1950’s and ‘60’s dreamed of their baby boom children working in nice clothes at IBM or NASA, not smoking dope, listening to jazz and writing free verse poetry at coffee houses. But the young were already getting ideas of their own. The murder of JFK and then Robert Kennedy, the hopeless murderous quagmire of the technocrat war in Viet Nam, the birth of the environmental movement, and corruption of the Nixon regime were all taking their toll on the young generation’s belief in the technocrat dream. The recession and the energy crisis of the 1970’s, a crisis which the technocrat overlords were unable to confront and deal with, further decimated hope in a technocratic future.

It had been intended that the bulk of the 75 million baby boomers would enter the technical and scientific professions, providing the intellectual fuel that would drive the U.S. and other western nations into the technocratic utopia of the future, but by the late 1960’s it was seen that this was not going to be the case. Young adults with no memory of the depression and WWII often had little interest in science and math. They were after meaning, and began pouring into philosophy, art, literature, political science, anthropology, history, sociology and psychology classes. Many ended up dropping out of college altogether, pursuing careers and lifestyles in music, art, literature and communal living.

While science and industry would be deprived of its supply of cheap fossil fuel for only a short period in the 1970’s, the massive loss of the much more important talent, ideas and intelligence that would be needed to feed these areas of development would be lost for a generation (and more), and the repercussions are felt to this day.

It is hard now for people who did not live in the period to understand the difference between (to use as a period of example) 1964 and 1974. In my own junior high and high school a new generation of young teachers began to arrive after 1973. These were what the locals called the “beatnik” teachers, with long hair, colorful clothing, and even lesbian and gay teachers among them, shocking to the locals at the time. The older teachers were frankly frightened of them and aghast at what they were teaching. To the young teachers, the old “cold war” motivation for learning science and technology was a joke. They would openly discuss ideas, asking students, “don’t you care about THE CAUSE of these problems?…” referring to the war, the environmental and the energy situation. My interest in the space program, nuclear fusion, and fuel cells declined (cheap propaganda to beat the Russians, my young teachers said of the space program, and our energy problem was one caused by elitist control of resources). I began to listen to The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and developed loving crushes on what us thinking teenaged boys saw as the “earth mother” types, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, and to me the queen of them all, Joni Mitchell (why didn’t any of our high school girls THINK like that and write like that?) and I began to read poetry and literature, fascinated by language.

By the 1980’s, after I had graduated high school there was something of a return to the sciences as a national priority, but this time it would be science with a more down to earth purpose: Money. The idols would be Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates. The goal of studying science was to become rich. For those who could not get on the learning curve of computers, networks and software, the method of making money would have to be different, but the path other than high tech entrepreneurship would not be science and technology. It was much easier to go into finance, banking and management, and the rewards would be much greater.

Today, we find ourselves with a generation of parents who were cultured in the arts, and groomed to enter the management class, and of course, hope for the same for their children. Parents today are not at all troubled by a child who hopes to be a novelist, a graphic designer, a teacher of art or music. In fact, as C.P. Snow pointed out over a half century ago, it becomes a cultural thing. Parents who lean to a liberal arts background themselves often know little science, and their children are very likely to grow up the same way.

Nothing is guaranteed however. No one at the time would have expected the youth of the 1960’s to so completely abandon the technocratic utopian dreams of their parents. The Vietnam War and other social ideas and technical challenges completely discredited the idea that all solutions would be found in technology. Now in the 2000’s, we are seeing an incredible discrediting of an idea and a class once again. Over the last quarter century what can only be described as the “financial class” had been raised to the level of priestly status, setting the very aesthetic, the morals, and the standard of the Western world. In so many ways, business became the new art.

It is difficult to describe the loss of status, the loss of credibility and the loss of influence that now faces the financial class, the class of entrepreneurs, CEO’s, investment gurus and hedge fund managers, “financial planners” and advisors and money market and funds managers that had over the last 25 years been elevated to the level of a superior almost godlike cult in many people’s minds.

This was a class that was almost without any form of check or balance given the wealth of the largest investing class in world history. Now, the children of that great investing class and even their grandchildren are seeing the money of their family destroyed, wasted as if it had been placed in the basement to be eaten by rats. The wealth saved diligently over a quarter century by millions of people dissipated without warning and with only the clumsiest of explanations will take decades to recover, doing the diligent humble investors of the brightest generation absolutely no good as they rot in their casket, never seeing the wealth they had saved and invested (so they thought) so carefully. We are seeing much more than the collapse of the funds themselves; we are seeing the collapse of an “idea”, the idea of financial utopia that had replaced the formerly held idea of a technocratic utopia.

We will almost certainly see a return to the study of ideas, of causes, and of aesthetics, the asking once again of the central question “What really matters?” always occurs at times of crisis. The beauty of language, art and music is not destroyed by lack of wealth, and technology can only provide so much entertainment and diversion before we begin considering a return to the study of our culture, our belief, our humanity, the beauty of the arts which is so much more important than just our money and our technical toys.

Technology is only valuable because it makes possible the time and resources to study and to improve what is really valuable.

Technocratic utopians and purist scientific ascetics make the error of worshipping the tools and being bored by the result of the tools, referring to the results as waste and greed. Technocracy is errant in that it is fascinated by what we know, not what we as human beings want.
“The goal of any great culture is variety achieved with unity retained.” W.H. Auden

Roger Conner Jr.

More information to various related technocratic concepts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/41892 What would Hubbert say today?

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/Bibliography.htm

http://exergy.se/goran/thesis/

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Industrial_ecology

PatrickMc is accurate in his appraisal here of how technocracy is not a general concept. Giving the link to Man Hours and Distribution above should make that clear. Here is a link to the actual file on the official site.
http://www.technocracy.org/man%20hours%20and%20distribution.htm

It can also be noted that the link he gave is from a site that is not connected to the Technocracy technate design, so that should be mentioned also. The TechCa. site contains a lot of disconnected opinions and constructs that are not related to the actual published ideas. They advocate for instance, referendum voting on ethics/morality questions and even aesthetic ideas, and that surely is not in the technate plan - That destroys the idea of scientific governance and includes special interest group or faction control.

The file above by Hubbert, is a slight expanding on what he wrote in the Technocracy Study Course a few years before. Technocracy Incorporated, as has been mentioned ''incorporated'' their ideas to protect the unique and cohesive ''scientific social design''.

This also, as has been noted, is a reason to not assume that all groups and their related ideas, claiming to be technocracy are Technocracy as developed by Scott and the Technical Alliance. That information was indeed based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Gibbs thermodynamics and Energy accounting http://www.eoearth.org/article/Biophysical_economics and is secular and humanitarian by default as proposed in the Technocracy Study Course.

There was general societal movement in the early 20th. century in regard to Technocratic ideas. Because of Hubbert and Scott and others such as http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz&diff... and a host of other physical and social scientists... the flowering of the best of American know how and creative problem solving ensued.
More on Hubbert http://mkinghubbert-technocracy.blogspot.com/

Investigate the actual ideas. That means downloading a copy of the Technocracy Study Course... and no, that is not the ''Study Guide'' from 1975... which is probably the only real piece of poorly done information ever put out by TechInc. That is called also the TTCD and is not suggested reading.
Technocracy Study Course... Unabridged edition is the actual program of the technate design.
This program now can be dusted off and used. The original basis being thermoeconomics and sustainability accounting using 'natural' capital (resources).
Link to the Technocracy Study Course file below.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dfx7rfr2_181grt6hhdb&hl=en#