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Technocracy - William Henry Smyth · Twenty Years After

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  Speaker 1: Section one of Technocracy by William Henry Smith. This is
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  Speaker 1: a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recorded by the Progressing America project. Technocracy. Part one Human
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  Speaker 1: Instincts in Reconstruction, An analysis of verges and the suggestion
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  Speaker 1: for their direction. Editor's Note. The author shows that the
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  Speaker 1: forces of the four great human instincts to live, to make,
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  Speaker 1: to take, to control are as essential in modern social
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  Speaker 1: life as at any time in the past. But all
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  Speaker 1: of these urges in a living democracy should be controlled
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  Speaker 1: without being controlled. To achieve this seeming paradox, we must
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  Speaker 1: have a great national purpose and unselfish leadership, such as
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  Speaker 1: could come through a national Council of scientists. Mister William
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  Speaker 1: Henry Smith has been in general practice as a consulting
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  Speaker 1: engine since eighteen seventy nine. He is the inventor of
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  Speaker 1: many machines and mechanical devices, including a system of raising
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  Speaker 1: water by direct explosion on its surface, the device being
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  Speaker 1: known as the direct explosion pump. He has been an
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  Speaker 1: engineering expert in many patent cases and is a frequent
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  Speaker 1: contributor to technical journals. As well as a pioneer in mechanics,
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  Speaker 1: mister Smith is a pioneer in economics. He is a
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  Speaker 1: member of the leading scholarly associations in that field, including
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  Speaker 1: the American Economic Association and the Royal Economic Society of
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  Speaker 1: Great Britain. Parts one, two, and three appeared originally in
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  Speaker 1: Industrial Management of New York. The concluding part four has
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  Speaker 1: not heretofore been published and will appear exclusively in the
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  Speaker 1: Gazette the editor. Instincts control instincts are the most persistent
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  Speaker 1: human urge factors. Seemingly, they are less subject to change
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  Speaker 1: than even the most unchanging aspects of our physical environment.
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  Speaker 1: The instant to live self preservation is as dominating today
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  Speaker 1: as in the days of our caveman ancestors. The instinct
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  Speaker 1: to construct is as persistent in man as in the beaver.
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  Speaker 1: The mastery instinct desire to control others is as vital
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  Speaker 1: as Ever, the thievish instinct desire to acquire and hoarde
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  Speaker 1: shows no change and is the same old urge as
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  Speaker 1: that disclosed by the pre man's stores of insects, birds,
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  Speaker 1: and various animals. Indeed, without these primordial urges, man could
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  Speaker 1: not have developed, and the loss or atrophy of any
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  Speaker 1: one of them would probably mean the rapid extinction of
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  Speaker 1: the race. Thus, it would seem that our fundamental instincts
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  Speaker 1: are essentially necessary to human continuance, at least to our
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  Speaker 1: social existence. So let us look once more at these
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  Speaker 1: vital factors in the light of recent events, in order
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  Speaker 1: to see what part they now take and are likely
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  Speaker 1: to play in our future social economy. Brute force, no
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  Speaker 1: lesson of the war, probably is more obvious or more
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  Speaker 1: clearly defined than the rapid trend towards skill as a
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  Speaker 1: predominating and controlling factor in our immediate social development. Recorded
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  Speaker 1: history and archaeological investigation confirm the suggestion that, in the
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  Speaker 1: matter of economic control of human activities in their products,
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  Speaker 1: the possession of this control has oscillated to and fro
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  Speaker 1: under the influence of one or other of the instinct
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  Speaker 1: of verges, so that characteristic types of men secured alternate mastery.
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  Speaker 1: Starting in the pre human period before the dawn of
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  Speaker 1: definite self consciousness and continuing during the eons in the
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  Speaker 1: twilight of human intelligence, rob root force must have been
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  Speaker 1: the dominating economic factor. The influence of skill during this
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  Speaker 1: period was practically negligible, except in so far as it
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  Speaker 1: affected individuals. Of this the huge prolongation of the unchanging
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  Speaker 1: Stone age is sufficient demonstration contest with cunning. The gradual
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  Speaker 1: growth and rapid culmination of the skill factor is an
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  Speaker 1: important consideration in our present inquiry and likewise in our
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  Speaker 1: social reconstruction problems. For while purposeful skill is of slow development,
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  Speaker 1: purposive cunning, on the contrary, is inherently otherwise. Indeed, cunning
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  Speaker 1: and purposiveness both imply mental alertness and hence are in
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  Speaker 1: some wise synonymous. For these reasons, in the early stages
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  Speaker 1: of human development, raw strength and animal cunning must alone
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  Speaker 1: have contended to satisfy the other instinctive urges to live
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  Speaker 1: to control, practically uninfluenced by the relatively modern urge of
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  Speaker 1: purposeful skill. Doubtless, this simple conflict of raw strength and
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  Speaker 1: brute cunning waged with varying results, slowly oscillating age by
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  Speaker 1: age and race by race in favor of one or
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  Speaker 1: other human type, as environmental conditions or racial admixtures gave
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  Speaker 1: one or other the advantage of circumstance, and as economic
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  Speaker 1: implies the usages, laws, and institutions, whereby a community endeavors
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  Speaker 1: to organize its methods and means of living. Those whose
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  Speaker 1: activities characterize the times, initiate and administer its economics. Age
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  Speaker 1: long seesaw. So with these age long oscillations of control
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  Speaker 1: types economic institutions necessarily underwent like changes conforming to the
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  Speaker 1: dominating human characteristics of each age and nation that they
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  Speaker 1: did so oscillate and economically conform in the vaguest dawn
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  Speaker 1: of human beginnings is the teaching of archaeology. During the
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  Speaker 1: past few thousand years, the contest of strength and cunning
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  Speaker 1: is shown by reliable historical records to have oscillated with
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  Speaker 1: comparative rapidity between one and the other extreme, including considerable
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  Speaker 1: periods during which strength and cunning unified. Control by union
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  Speaker 1: of church and state. Prior to the immediate present was
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  Speaker 1: a transition stage caused by the gradual weakening of the
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  Speaker 1: bond between turch and state, with a coincidental shifting of
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  Speaker 1: control in favor of cunning under a changed and relatively
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  Speaker 1: modern guise, representing the instinct diverge to take expressing itself
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  Speaker 1: as commercialism. With this change came a consequent modification of usages, laws,
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  Speaker 1: and institutions appropriate to its highest expression capitalism capitalistic economies.
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  Speaker 1: The result of this last oscillation of control in favor
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  Speaker 1: of acquisitive cunning was that Germany became a nation of slaves,
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  Speaker 1: England a nation of paupers, France quit breeding, and the
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  Speaker 1: United States went wealth crazy. Challenged by purposive skill, the
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  Speaker 1: war represents the conclusive termination in this period of the
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  Speaker 1: age long contest of force and cunning for the control
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  Speaker 1: of men and the products of their activity. But this
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  Speaker 1: last and most spectacular conflict is complicated by the intrusion
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  Speaker 1: of the most modern and most rapidly developing factor, organized
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  Speaker 1: purposive skill. Here then, skill enters the arena with a
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  Speaker 1: challenge to both earlier contestants for the prize of human
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  Speaker 1: control and mastery of the social machinery. Enters that contest
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  Speaker 1: older than the race itself, the struggle to satisfy the
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  Speaker 1: primordial instincts to live, to control, to take strength versus
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  Speaker 1: cunning versus skill. Thus the contest has become a triangular
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  Speaker 1: fight between the strong, the cunning, and the skillful, a
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  Speaker 1: fight in which rob brute force is a participant of
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  Speaker 1: rapidly diminishing importance. A modified continuation of the old time
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  Speaker 1: bloody contest for a humanly undesirable outcome. Cunning control is
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  Speaker 1: today the victor and in possession of the spoils the
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  Speaker 1: financial wealth of the world. But all the evidence points
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  Speaker 1: to a short enjoyment and a losing fight against the
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  Speaker 1: organized forces of purposive skill. Creaking capitalism. Cracking capitalism under
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  Speaker 1: war stress shows convincing evidence of inadequacy. The non effectiveness
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  Speaker 1: of money and credit wealth has become so obvious as
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  Speaker 1: to procure the enactment of work or fight laws. Thus
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  Speaker 1: into the discard, when our pre war money evaluation of
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  Speaker 1: men to be substituted by a standard which measures millionaire
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  Speaker 1: and hobo alike in accordance with their relative skill. Our
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  Speaker 1: pre war faith in the mysterious magic of money, too,
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  Speaker 1: received a staggering shock when all the private fortunes enmassed
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  Speaker 1: and all the billions of national credit combined utterly failed
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  Speaker 1: to add a single pound of much needed sugar to
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  Speaker 1: our limited supply, necessitating the two pounds of sugar per
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  Speaker 1: person apportionment, a commonplace vulgar fraction measure applicable to financial
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  Speaker 1: potentate and wary willy alike producer versus parasite on broader lines. Also,
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  Speaker 1: the evidence points the same way. Purposive skill is inherently productive,
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  Speaker 1: while purposeful cunning is naturally parasitic. Then the capability of
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  Speaker 1: cunning to rule and the continuance of its success in
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  Speaker 1: controlling others resides in and depends upon the stupidity and
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  Speaker 1: illiteracy of the governed. Mystery and magic are its weapons,
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  Speaker 1: equally in the realm of modern finance, as in the
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  Speaker 1: ancient theocracies, skill implies the reverse of all this. For
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  Speaker 1: skill is intelligence physically manifested. It is knowledge of nature's
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  Speaker 1: laws utilized dexterously, and the spread of scientific information characterizes
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  Speaker 1: our age. Thus, as the bulwarks of cunning control crumble,
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  Speaker 1: the weapons of skill are multiplied and perfected, so the
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  Speaker 1: outcome seems a foregone conclusion. With this outcome, our methods
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  Speaker 1: of life will necessarily change. Capitalistic customs, laws, and institutions
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  Speaker 1: will be substituted by others, differing as widely from those
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  Speaker 1: with which we are familiar as the motor ideas and
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  Speaker 1: ideals of purposeful cunning differ from those of purposeful skill,
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  Speaker 1: work or fight lesson peradventure, the work or fight and
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  Speaker 1: the two pounds of sugar per person measures are tonic
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  Speaker 1: forecasts of the coming skill economics. Obviously, we are in
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  Speaker 1: transition to a new social order. The signs of the
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  Speaker 1: times portend the dethroning of decadent aquisitive capitalism and the
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  Speaker 1: crowning of productive skill autocrat of the new age artisanism.
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  Speaker 1: This change has been in dubious process for years. The
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  Speaker 1: war has merely speeded its progress and made the outcome
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  Speaker 1: practically inevitable. But whether it be brought about by evolution
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  Speaker 1: or revolution, or whether it comes in clean cut aspect
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  Speaker 1: or be fogged by irrelevant social factors and forces, it
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  Speaker 1: is in no sense a rational or final solution of
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  Speaker 1: our social problem. In any event, should artisanism come, it
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  Speaker 1: will be merely another social spasm, probably shorter than but
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  Speaker 1: equally as futile as our present world wide finance madness.
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  Speaker 1: Instincts not a rational basis. While it is conceivable that
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  Speaker 1: human societies could be organized upon and with any one
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  Speaker 1: of the stated basic instincts as dominant factor and raison detra,
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  Speaker 1: it is practically certain that any such national society would
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  Speaker 1: be quite ineffective and transient. For obviously it would not
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  Speaker 1: and could not satisfy even our present limited intelligence, our
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  Speaker 1: rational imagination, or our modern spiritual ideals. No very extended
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  Speaker 1: analysis would be required to show the validity of this proposition.
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  Speaker 1: The past has already demonstrated the insufficiency of societies based
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  Speaker 1: upon the mastery instinct autocracy. The present amply proves the
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  Speaker 1: failure of the acquisitive instinct as a social basis plutocracy.
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  Speaker 1: A moment's thought will show that a society based upon
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  Speaker 1: the making instinct would simply crumble in its formative process
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  Speaker 1: under the demands of our complicated modern mental make up.
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  Speaker 1: For clearly this instinct provides inadequate human scope and hence
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  Speaker 1: presupposed as parasitism in even more extended form than that
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  Speaker 1: of acquisitive capitalism. And worse than all, a society based
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  Speaker 1: upon the instinct to live and propagate would return us
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  Speaker 1: at once to the brute state from which we have
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  Speaker 1: arisen through ages of struggle, strife and bloodshed. Control without control. Still,
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  Speaker 1: it is apparent that the basic instincts which urge to live,
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  Speaker 1: to make, to take, to control, are as useful, yes,
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  Speaker 1: are as essential in and too modern social life as
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  Speaker 1: they have been in all the past. But while all
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  Speaker 1: are necessary, no one of them constitutes a proper basis
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  Speaker 1: law of operation for a rational human society organization. They
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  Speaker 1: are factors, necessary and desirable contributory parts, no one of
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  Speaker 1: which is inherently adapted to function as the machine's unifier,
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  Speaker 1: its strain and speed equalizer, its control element. Thus, the
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  Speaker 1: determination of a suitable character of control element is seemingly
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  Speaker 1: the crux of our social problem, the problem of controlling
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  Speaker 1: without control, that old old paradox freedom made effective by restraint.
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  Speaker 1: A paradox, however, which the war may have resolved for
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  Speaker 1: us by demonstrating its non existence. It has in some
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  Speaker 1: ways answered our troublous question by clear definition in the
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  Speaker 1: statement of the nation's object in going to war. The
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  Speaker 1: war has answered the question in another aspect by the
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  Speaker 1: nation's adoption of the method forced upon it by logical compulsion,
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  Speaker 1: whereby success was achieved to make the world safe for democracy.
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  Speaker 1: Is the clearest and most universally accepted statement of our
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  Speaker 1: purpose in going to war. Self government for nations, self
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  Speaker 1: government for individuals. Concept of control control by others, then,
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  Speaker 1: is antithetical to the ideals for which we have waged.
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  Speaker 1: This last the greatest, and it is hoped, the final
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  Speaker 1: bloody contest for self government. Control is equally antithetical to
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  Speaker 1: our ideals of self government. Whether the control is exercised
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  Speaker 1: by others characterized by the instinct to live and breed
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  Speaker 1: the masses, or whether the control is exercised by others
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  Speaker 1: characterized by the instinct to make the skilled artisan, or
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  Speaker 1: whether the control is exercised by others urged by the
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  Speaker 1: instinct of mastery, the employers, or whether the control is
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  Speaker 1: exercised by others under their dominating, acquisitive instinct, the financiers. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: the concept control by others is an idea inherent in
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  Speaker 1: and appropriate only to now discredited autocracy, a concept which
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  Speaker 1: the war has rendered an obsolete ideal. If we are
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  Speaker 1: intelligent enough to profit by its costly teaching discard Caveman control.
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  Speaker 1: To be rationally consistent, this control concept should be as
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  Speaker 1: absent as it is obsolete in fact and effect. In
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  Speaker 1: our inevitable reconstruction, this autocracy control concept must be thrown
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  Speaker 1: in the discard where we have dumped the European autocrats
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  Speaker 1: whose ideal it was. If our reconstruction efforts are intended
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  Speaker 1: to produce a rationally organized modern human society, a society
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  Speaker 1: founded upon the ideals consecrated by the lifeblood of our
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  Speaker 1: bravest and best. But our age long familiarity with control
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  Speaker 1: by others in our halting progress from brute beast to
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  Speaker 1: modern man, has so deeply ingrained in our mental fiber
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  Speaker 1: this Stone Age concept as to make it almost impossible
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  Speaker 1: for us to even conceive the idea of a society
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  Speaker 1: lacking this cave man spiked club element. Yet no fact
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  Speaker 1: in lesson of our participation in the war is more
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  Speaker 1: clear and free from doubt than the spontaneous acquiescence by
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  Speaker 1: the people of the United States, rich and poor, artisan
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  Speaker 1: and laborer alike in self control, self repression, self dedication
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  Speaker 1: to the United will, and unified purpose of the nation purpose.
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  Speaker 1: No lesson of the war is more significant then. Given
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  Speaker 1: a national purpose intelligently comprehended and acquiesced in, only unselfish
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  Speaker 1: leadership is needed, and neither control by force nor control
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  Speaker 1: by cunning is necessary to bring about the unification of
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  Speaker 1: effort needed to accomplish the nation's objective. The significance of
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  Speaker 1: this lesson is the utter irrationality of national control in
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  Speaker 1: the hands of any class characterized by self centered instincts
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  Speaker 1: or that strength or skill or cunning should be dominating
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  Speaker 1: factors in the social structure, though none of these factors
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  Speaker 1: should dominate each in all of these vital and necessary
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  Speaker 1: elements should have free scope for the socially effective outflow
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  Speaker 1: of its particular expression of life energy. Second only in
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  Speaker 1: significance to the acquiescence and cooperation of the United People
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: is the method irresistibly forced upon the nation by the
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  Speaker 1: logic and necessities of its stupendous war problem. First real nation,
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  Speaker 1: this first modern economic institution, and the united co operation
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  Speaker 1: of the United People are the two outstanding lessons of
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  Speaker 1: the war for us. Taken together, they point significantly to
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  Speaker 1: the solution of our social problem. The lacking element, which
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  Speaker 1: should and could consciously, deliberately and rationally unify the basic
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  Speaker 1: instinct of verges into an harmonious direction of national effort
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  Speaker 1: and so produce a humanly efficient national organization, the first
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  Speaker 1: real nation on Earth. The lacking element, the element which
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  Speaker 1: is adapted to assume the function and position to be
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  Speaker 1: vacated by the obsolescent autocratic concept arbitrary control. The element
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  Speaker 1: capable of controlling without control, of making freedom effective democracy
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  Speaker 1: a living fact as well as a noble ideal. In this,
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  Speaker 1: as in many other seemingly difficult problems of long standing,
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  Speaker 1: the solution has evaded us by reason of its very obviousness.
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  Speaker 1: Such a unifying factor has always existed in plain view,
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  Speaker 1: unutilized in its proper function as social sal strain equalizer. Indeed,
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  Speaker 1: this urge factor, more even than the instincts to live,
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  Speaker 1: to make, to take, to control, is the most universal
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: and most humanly characterizing trait of that most marvelous complex man,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: desire to know. I refer to curiosity, curiosity rationalized into
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: desire to know. Desire to know, while equally urgent for gratification,
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  Speaker 1: inherently lacks the undesirable and inappropriate qualities which render the
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: other human instincts unsuitable as organizing and strain equalizing factors
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  Speaker 1: in the social structure. Also, it possesses qualities and attributes
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  Speaker 1: which make it peculiarly adapted to perform the rationally harmonizing
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  Speaker 1: function so irrationally assumed in all earlier social organizations under
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: the guise of forceful and cunning control. Desire to know
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  Speaker 1: is as imperative in its demands as any of the
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: self centered motor instincts to live, to make, to take,
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  Speaker 1: to control, but it is impersonal. While it is as
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: aggressive as other instinctive urges, Characteristically, its natures and activities
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: are directed at nature, not in aggression on human opponents.
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  Speaker 1: Hence it engenders no human strife. And while it drives furiously,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: it drives none but its possessor in the pursuit of
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: knowledge desire to know, while profoundly interested in all that
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: pertains to human life and living, to eugenics and racial development. Characteristically,
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: its possessor would risk his own life in the pursuit
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: of knowledge. Desire to know, though urgently interested in nature's
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: laws and in all that concerns the correct making and
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: constructing of things, characteristically lacks desire to make or construct things,
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: but seeks only systematized concepts of knowledge. Desire to know,
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  Speaker 1: while deeply interested in all that pertains to the desirable
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: things of the world and to economic affairs, characteristically lacks
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: the thievish impulse the INSTINCTI take to acquire physical possession.
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  Speaker 1: Supremely acquisitive, it craves only to acquire knowledge, desire to know.
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  Speaker 1: While surpassingly masterful, desires no mastery of men. It craves
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  Speaker 1: instead godlike insight, prevision, prophecy power in the boundless realms
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  Speaker 1: of knowledge. Leadership here, then, is an indomitable urge, lacking
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  Speaker 1: all the inappropriate qualities of the strife producing autocratic force
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  Speaker 1: and fear control motor concept of social organization, and possessed
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  Speaker 1: of all the unifying qualities of social leadership. A human
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  Speaker 1: society or nation is sanely designed or rationally organized on
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: correct principles only when it has a purpose, and as
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: in the case of a well considered machine, only when
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: full cognizance is taken of all its contributory elements, together
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: with their essential functions and their proper coordination a national objective.
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  Speaker 1: A truly efficient national organisation would facilitate, not suppress or prohibit,
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  Speaker 1: the expression of all inherent instinctive urges, rationalizing their outflowing
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: life energy by sane institutional conventions into unification in a
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: fully predetermined national purpose. In a crude but clearly perceptible manner,
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: the United States during the war gave suggestion of such
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  Speaker 1: an ideal social arrangement. It had a defined and universally
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: accepted purpose, its scientific desire to know men, and its
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: scientific societies were more or less organized into a unifying
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: and advisory board to formulate and suggest methods and means
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  Speaker 1: for sane living and to accomplish the predetermined purpose of
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  Speaker 1: the nation. We have accomplished the object of the war.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: We have made the world safe for democracy. Now let
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  Speaker 1: us inaugurate a democracy, a democracy with an object for
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  Speaker 1: its existence, a democracy with a purpose. By the peril
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: to its life, the nation has been shocked into momentary sanity.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Let us, while still rational, rationally take to heart the
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: lessons which the war has taught at so staggering a cost. First,
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  Speaker 1: the need of a national purpose, a purpose based upon
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  Speaker 1: peace and rational human development, a purpose as inspiring and
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: as unifying as war for democracy, and as high as
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: our highest ideals of life. Second, the need of a
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: supreme national Council of scientists, supreme over all other national institutions,
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: to advise and instruct us how best to live and
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: how most efficiently to realize our individual and our national
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: purpose and ideals. But first and last, a unifying national objective. Fernwald, Berkeley,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: December nineteen eighteen. Is it rational to base human society
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: on animal instincts? End of Technocracy? Section one Section two
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: of Technocracy by William Henry Smith. This LibriVox recording is
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: in the public domain, recorded by the Progressing America Project Technocracy.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: Part two National Industrial Management Practical Suggestions for National Reconstruction.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: Editor's Note. After outlining and characterizing the great economic drifts
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: in the national developments of the past, the author declares
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: that during the period of the war, the United States
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: has developed the new form in government for which there
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: is no precedent in human experience. He calls this technocracy
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: the organizing, coordinating, and directing through industrial management on a
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: nationwide scale of the scientific knowledge and practical skill of
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: all the people who could contribute to the accomplishment of
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: a great national purpose. Carry this new form of government
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: into the ways of peace, and we will have industrial democracy,
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: a new commonwealth. The editor economic drifts the United States
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: is obviously in social flux, in unstable economic equilibrium. In transition,
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: customs and usages which a few years ago received universal
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: approval and legal sanction are now punished as crimes. Economic
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: expedients which but yesterday were deemed irrational imaginations of utopian
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: visionaries are today accomplished facts. And in every direction, immemorial
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: methods and time honored social processes have lost their sacrosanctity,
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: like ocean streams enfolding in mass flow. All this whirling
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: confusion of economic cross currents, legal revolutions, and social agitations,
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: there are to be observed certain super controlling drifts. Centralization
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: of government, concentration of wealth, unification of mechanical industries, force
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: wealth in day. These great economic drifts indicate the mass
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: resultant of myriad individual activities expressing that peculiarly human quality
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: which has made man the dominating animal factor on earth,
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: unquenchable desire to control, the mastery instinct, and what is
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: more important, in the present connection, these supercontrolling social drifts
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: also indicate the only directions possible for the social expression
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: of the indomitable human urge. Direct control of men by
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: force and fear exemplified in centralization of government, Indirect control
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: of men by controlling their products shown in concentration of wealth,
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: mutualized control i e. Utilization of nature expressed, and unification
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: of mechanistic industries. Conflicting ideals. In these various forms of
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: social aggregations, there are broadly speaking, but three human types involved.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: The type characterized by aggressive physical strength, the type characterized
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: by alert mental cunning, the type characterized by purposive skill.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Of these, the last, the purposive skill type, is significantly modern,
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: brought into social prominence by that most stupendous social factor,
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: experimental science, science which is the effective cause and basis
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: of this era of invention our Industrial age. A triangular
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: conflict of ideals of life and of social purpose has
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: thus been inaugurated, a conflict which accounts for and is
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: expressed in our social unrest, conflict of capital and labor,
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: our social problem and reconstruction. The strife for supremacy of
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: social ideal and community purpose, thus indicated, is co extensive
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: with the human race. Its most spectacular climax is the
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: World War. And notwithstanding the many confusing forms and many
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: cided aspects which this world wide human struggle presents, it is,
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: of course, at bottom the age old contest of slavery
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: and liberty, bondage and freedom, the Golden Age. Our answer
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: to this old but ever new problem will determine whether
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: our Industrial age will progress to a social condition of
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: industrial freedom to which nothing in the past is comparable,
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: or whether our time shall be to future generations. The
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: Golden Age the high water mark of human liberty, The
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: age of a noble but a feudal fight for a
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: great ideal democracy club economics. In simple caveman times, the
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: boss parent quite naturally made and administered suitable primitive economics
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: with his persuasive club as a very practical emblem of authority.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: Under this raw force regime, the weaker fagged for the stronger,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: and the doings and havings of the fags made life
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: more likable for the forceful, As the procreator of his
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: subjects and superior in strength during most of their lives,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: the ownership of them and theirs by the boss parent
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: was as natural as any other obvious fact, and chattel
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: slavery as necessary as parent ownership is self evident. Mystery economics.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: Then miracle fire maker and animal breeder came along and
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: disturbed many of the time honored and well established customs,
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: playing havoc generally with club economics. By his wonder working magics,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: cunning miracle Worker put the fear of gods more potent
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: than physical strength into the heart of simple old skull
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: cracker parent god. So miracle Worker waxed fat and in
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: his turn initiated and administered suitable economics, fire worship, and
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: mystery economics, otherwise theocracy. With theocracy came the greatest of
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: all social revolutions, the dethroning of brute strength and the
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: crowning of mental alertness cunning. This marked an epoch in
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: human history in man's upward progress as a social animal. Also,
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: it marked the beginning of control of men and their
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: product through man's instinctive fear of the unknown, the rule
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: of the cunning Force mystery economics, with varying fortunes. Force
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: economics and cunning economics contended for supremacy till in comparatively
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: modern times, autocracy was found an effective compromise in this
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: most practical arrangement, though by that time conventionalized parent god
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: received his authority from the all powerful God of magic,
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: so was initiated modernized force. Mystery economics and the human
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: race has yet found no more efficient means for the
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: control of organized society than force mystery economics. Methods, means
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: and institutions, which, but superficially modified since Old miracle Worker's day,
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: still function in our twentieth century. Customs, autocratic and democratic usages, conventions,
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: and legalised economic systems working by proxy economics in Caveman
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: economic the real function of the club, or the purpose
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: of clubber, was not to incapacitate club B, but to
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: induce the latter to do and supply the matters in things,
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: which otherwise would require greater and more constant expenditure of
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: effort on the part of the economist than the semi
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: occasional swing of his skull cracker. Old skull crackers motives,
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: though more crudely expressed, were the same as minar in
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: the employment of my cook and my gardener, that is,
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: economy of effort on my part otherwise working by proxy.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: But the club economic system was essentially wasteful and inefficient.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: Its operating expenses were outrageously high, notwithstanding the low cost
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: of raw human material. Indeed, this system was apt to
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: defeat its own ends, especially in those strenuous days when
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: zeal commonly outran discretion doers and suppliers. Thus, mystery coercion
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: represents an enormous economic advance over all law physical force.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: Fear of unknown but awesome consequences for failure to do
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: and supply matters in things is fully as effective as
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: the club, and beyond measure less wasteful of doers and suppliers.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: So it is quite natural and inevitable that crude force
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: methods and processes of economic control should lose favor in
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: competition with mystery economic systems, and long race experience has
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: proved that a judicious combination of club and mystery, otherwise
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: force and cunning, makes for the highest degree of efficiency
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: in a working by proxy economic system. Proxy beneficiaries. Such
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: economic systems, however, obviously imply direct or indirect slavery ownership
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: of the body or control of the mind of the proxy,
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: and for the latter, the mystery method is peculiarly adapted
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: and most satisfactory. For self evident reasons, control over another's
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: mind is more effective and economically then property ownership of
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: his body, taking into consideration the practical responsibility which the
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: latter entails, so quite naturally direct ownership of proxy by
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: the economical worker by proxy gives place to customs, usages,
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: and conventions economics, facilitating control over the results of proxy's activities. Then, too,
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: complex division of labor and specialization render chattel slavery impractical
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: indeed unworkable in a society highly organized for productive industry.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: So an ideal working by proxy economic system would permit
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: complete physical liberty to do and to make, while arranging
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: appropriate usages, customs, and laws which automatically transfer ownership of
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: the matters and things done and made from the doers
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: and makers to the proxy beneficiaries economic science. The difference
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: between modern and primordial economics, is not an idea or purpose,
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: but only in added obscurity of method and in greater
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: complexity of detail. Incidentally, also it has become evident that
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: economics is not a science in any proper sense, but
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: a variable system of community usages intended to facilitate the
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: predominating social activities, and hence, to be workable, an economic
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: system must be in keeping with the activities which characterize
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: the times. In caveman times, the boss parent and his
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: clubmen had to make cave economics. A system initiated by
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: the fags would have been obviously unworkable. The priesthood had
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: to initiate and administer theocratic economies, and so on. Through
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: the various changes in social organization, those whose activities characterize
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: the times must initiate and administer its economics economic experiments.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: Raw force has been relegated to the economic backwoods, to
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: the racially infantile tribes of darkest Africa, and to the
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: social usages of our anachronistic cree criminal elements, the yegg,
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: the thug, the gunfighter, the strong armed gangs of the
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: underworld of modern organized society. Theocracy, with its crude cunning,
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: its childish terrors, and its dazzling promises of future super
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: mundane rewards, has practically vanished as a recognized dominant social factor,
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: a fading shadow of ancient greatness. Autocracy, that cunning combination
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: of force and fear economics has just now been dumped
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: into the scrap heap of outworn social expedients at the
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: cost of the most atrocious and bloodiest of all wars,
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: and the flower of the world's manhood. Plutocracy, with its
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: autocratic capitalistic economics, while weakened and shaken by the shocks
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: and stresses of the World War, is still a virile
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: contestant for the throne of world domination. Strength, skill, cunning.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: Economic sufficient for autocracy must necessarily differ from economics appropriate
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: for theocracy, and these would differ from economics suitable for plutocracy,
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: and these again would differ still more from economics appropriate
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: to and efficient four industrial democracy. In brief, force economics
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: cunning economics and skill economics must necessarily differ as widely
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: as the essential differences between the basic qualities strength, cunning, skill. Hence,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: any attempt to organize or reconstruct a social aggregation with
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: these three basic human traits as contemporary economic bases means
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: simply continual social warfare, a war which sooner or later
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: must be decided by victory for the strong, the cunning,
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: or the skilled, unless human ingenuity can devise a form
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: of society which will permit and facilitate the full, unified
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: and social useful expression of these three irrepressible forms of life, energy,
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: mechanized industry. Thus we return to the three great social
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: drifts centralization of government, concentration of wealth, unification of mechanistic industries.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: Of the first two little need be said, for they
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: are familiar racial experiences. But the last, the mechanizing of life,
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: is quite otherwise. Hence, it is, if for no other reason,
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: the most significant factor to be taken into account in
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: the social problems with which we are now confronted, our
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: problem of economic reconstruction, and truly our modern mechanization of
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: human life, is a most dubious social experiment, a danger
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: fraught development a dynamitic racial adventure. Modern science, back of
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: the mechanizing of human functioning, is that greatest of all
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: modern marvels, experimental science. Science has brought about a profound
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: revolution in our mental attitude toward life and in our
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: methods of dealing with nature. It has swept into the
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: discard practically all our previous notions regarding ourselves and our
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: relations to the laws of nature, to universal reality. It
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: has at the same time debased man's pride in the
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: dust of humility and glorified intelligence, and human worth to
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: godlike heights. Science is, of course the effective cause of
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: our present mechanistic development, with all its physical benefits and
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: all its spiritual horrors. For science knows neither morals nor ethics,
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: and is equally potent for social bad as for social good.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: Science works just as effectively in criminal hands as in
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: those of a saint. It is an impersonal, ethically neutral
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: force and factor, so potent that, even in the chaotic
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: condition in which it now exists, it has brought about
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: a world revolution in man's mental outlook and his physical activities,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: both individually and collectively. Indeed, it has shown to man
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: a new heaven, a new Earth and a new hell,
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: our social heaven we have yet to construct. But the
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: World War is sufficiently impressive proof of what social hell
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: can be wrought by science. In the hands of self interest,
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: there is no serenity a long view on the part
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: of science, which seems to be of no age, but
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: to carry human thought along from generation to generation, freed
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: from the elements of passion. Every just mind must condemn
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: those who so debase the studies of men in science
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: as to use them against humanity. And therefore it is
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: part of your task and of ours, to reclaim science
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: from this disgrace, to show that she is devoted to
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: the advancement and interest in humanity, and not to its
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: embarrassment and destruction. The spirit of science is a spirit
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: of seeking after truth, so far as the truth is
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: ready to be applied to human circumstances. From President Wilson's
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: address before the Academy of Lynxy in Rome, past and
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: present as the result of modern science, the present time
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: is without precedent. Hence no valid analogy exists or can
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: be imagined, between an economic system appropriate to our science
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: taught mechanistic age, and earlier economic systems suitable to conditions
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: of life, the warp, wolf and pattern of which were
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: mystery magic. Chance that no helpful comparison can be made
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: between the past and the present would be completely true
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: were it not that our science teachings affect but the thinnest,
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: superficial layer of our conscious thinking. While the fabric of
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: our thought processes, our familiar customs, our current usages, our
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: economic institutions, remain practically unchanged, our racial heritage. But even so,
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: the unceasing conflict of past and present, of slavery and
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: freedom of bondage and liberty of error and truth goes
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: ever on and on, a blood soaked path, a path
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: of misery, strife, and disappointment, though hopefully ever upward toward
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: our ideal industrial democracy with personal freedom for self realization
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: mental inertia. Without a concurrent change of economic institutions appropriate
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: to the amazingly rapid psychical development and refinement of our
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: modern ideals brought about by the advent of science, the
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: realization of these ideals will be impossible. And sorrowfully, we
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: recognize that man's instinctive resistance to change of old established
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: modes of thought, howsoever irrational, makes progress in this direction
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: seem almost hopeless. Familiar fallacies most reluctantly are familiar fallacies relinquished. Indeed,
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: we hang on to them with irrational tenacity, ages after
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: their unworkable character has time and again been tragically demonstrated.
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: As in our bodily functioned and skeletal frame, there still
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: persists the characteristics of our soy and primordial ancestry. So
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: ancient modes of thought live unnoted in our present day
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: thinking processes, and our social institutions represent the seemingly outgrown
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: superstitions constituting man's mental heredity during every past day since
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: the infancy of the human race. Got mit Uns medievalism
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: characterizes our sacred and secular institutions and energizes our customary actions.
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: Demonology is practically as prevalent as in the past, unnoted
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: in ourselves, but easily perceived in the got mit UN's
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: attitude of the Kaiser. We pray for health, heedless of
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: nature's laws. We pray for long life while disregarding the
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: simple rules of right living. We beseech forgiveness of sin,
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: while making sin profitable by deliberate legal enactment. In a
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: world filled to overflowing with all good and humanly desirable
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: things to be had for the striving we economically steal
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: from our industrious neighbours. Like paupers, we beg God for
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: vicariously earned joys, for unearned prosperity, and for all other
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: forms of undeserved good fortune. And like pert children, we
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: urge silly advice on our man made providence for the
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: conduct of common human affairs which we are too lazy,
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: too stupid, too self indulgent to bring to desired outcome
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: by our own effort. The God of chance. Important departments
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: of life and the distribution of the products of industry, trade, speculation, opportunity,
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: recreation involve large elements of luck, for by the grotesquely
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: solemn laws, the issues are left to the God of Chance,
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: just precisely as in the old days, when momentous matters
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: were settled by the entrails of sacrificial animals. The killing
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: of President McKinley by a madman caused the depreciation in
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: the value of stocks to the extent of thousands of
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: millions of dollars. The San Francisco calamity, which rendered half
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: a million human beings homeless, made fortunes for the owners
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: of and speculators in suburban property, the Titanic disaster through
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: one hundred millions of wealth others products into the hands
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: of a schoolboy and with it control over the lives
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: of thousands of human beings. And even the supreme tragedy
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: of a world at war is the prolific cause of
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: transforming hundreds of mediocre men into multimillionaires and hence into
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: powerful social factors. Diabolism. All this represents kindergarten thinking, primitive
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: and childish, as nursery, prattle of prixies and fairies, Aladdin's lamp,
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: and all the other forms of old world superstition and
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: diabolism worthy only of the infancy of the race. Were
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: it not that these grotesqueries characterize our economic and finance system,
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: and our solemn professors soberly teach them, they would be
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: utterly incredible in this age of science and mechanics. But
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: as already indicated, our economics in finance are merely survivals
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: from pre science times, an inheritance from the days of
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: wizardry and witchcraft, mystery and magic. Our quaint economics and
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: clear finance are as anachronistic, as inconsistent, and as ineffective
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: in this mechanical age of industrialism, as astrology would be
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: in an astronomical lilae observatory, alchemy in a chemical laboratory,
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: or perpetual motion in a machine shop. Scientific foresight, imagination
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: based on science, enables us to foresee the oak in
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: the acorn, coming events latent in present happenings. But so
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: strong is custom, so firm is the grip of the past,
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: so compelling is the obsession with ancient superstitions, that, with
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: all our lately acquired capability for rational scientific thinking, only
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: the tragedy of the accomplished fact has sufficient power to
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: jolt our sluggard wits into momentary activity. Ten fifteen, yes,
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: twenty five years ago, it required no more intelligence to
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: foresee the present war than to anticipate a crop in
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: the fall from seed sown in the spring. Even less
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: scientific information is now needed to foretell a condition of
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: social disintegration, one more widespread and disastrous than the war,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: as the logical and inevitable outcome of our irrational and
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: antiquated social conventions. Our economic financial system taking instinct, if
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: taking by force or diverting by cunning, in whole or
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: in part, the product of another's effort without adequate equitable
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: return be accepted as a valid social principle of action
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: between individuals. It must be equally good and proper as
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: between social groups, as between nations, but however disguised in
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: smooth sounding phrases, the chances of business, the profits of trade,
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: the opportunity of other's misfortune, the prize of the victor,
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: the fortunes of war, the right of might. Taking expresses
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: the parasitic and predatory instincts, and called by whatsoever name,
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: or howsoever disguised, Taking others makings by force, or diverting
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: other's products by stealthy cunning inevitably involves unending strife, strife
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: within the group, and recurring wars of nations, strife to
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: settle the relative strength or cunning as between individuals, and
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: wars to determine the relative might of nations. Predatory economics.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: Our economic system is essentially autocratic in means, in method, inobjective,
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: being left over from an age of predatory autocracy. Necessarily,
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: its ideals are materialistic, its motor instinct and urge impulse,
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: being self centered, greed and grab Naturally, its means are
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: force and cunning, and its methods are ruthless, for its
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: object is power. Power, irresponsible and absolute our modern ideals.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: If we are to remain true to our ideals, ideals
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: which the flame of war has illuminated to our normally
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: purblinde spiritual insight, our course is determined. We have no
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: choice but to choose freedom, pioneer, a virgin trail slash,
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: a course unblazed by history, uncharted in race experience, a
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: courage testing national adventure. The race has never before been
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: confronted with the situation in any way analogous to the
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: one in which we now find ourselves, nor a problem
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: the like of that which we are now compelled to solve, yes,
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: and solve correctly, if we would avoid disintegration into social
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: chaos overwhelmed by a science made Frankenstein. Science is dynamitic.
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: Science has, however, put into our hands an instrumentality of
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: such a measurable potency that, used with intelligent courage, we
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: may conquer all our difficulties, surmount all our social obstructions.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: But science left a chance or in the hands of
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: unintelligent self interest, the chances are it will work untold
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: social calamity. There are so many roads to go wrong,
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: and only one way to go right, to leave a
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: force and factor of such supreme social significance and potentiality
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: as science in its present condition, socially uncontrolled and unorganized,
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: for the common wheel, is more crassly unintelligent than to
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: permit fused and capped dynamite to be scattered around promiscuously
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: to the chances of any carelessly or maliciously applied spark.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: A striking and significant parallelism to the thought here expressed
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: was subsequently voiced by President Wilson in one of his
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: speeches at the Versailles Piece Conference. Is it not a
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: startling circumstance, for one thing, that the quiet studies of
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: men in laboratories, that the thoughtful developments which have taken
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: place in quiet lecture rooms, have now been turned to
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: the destruction of civilization. The enemy whom we have just overcome,
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: had at his seats of learning some of the principal
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: centers of scientific study and discovery, and he used them
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: in order to make destructions sudden and complete. And only
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: the watchful, continuous cooperation of men can see to it
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: that science, as well as armed men, are kept within
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: the harness of civilization democracy In the rough democracy is
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: the rule of the mob, the rule of the masses,
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: the rule of the majority, the rule of unintelligence. But
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: even so, it is better than any form of governmental
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: control based upon self interest, not accepting beneficent autocracy, humanly
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: bad and socially inefficient, as it may be and has been,
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: Democracy alone and closes and fosters the living germ of
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: freedom self government. But during the scant two years that
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: we were at war, no ordinary or accepted definition of
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: democracy could make that term descriptive of the United States. Indeed,
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: under the life threatening stress of a world war, our
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: great but chaotic nation, in self preservation ceased to be
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: a democracy transformation. In that remarkable war transformation, we certainly
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: did not become an autocracy, even less so of a plutocracy,
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: and least of all a theocracy. In fact, during this
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: thrillingly interesting time, the United States developed into a form
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: of government for which there is no precedent in human experience,
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: national industrial management technocracy. The characterizing peculiarity which rendered our
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: great country unique during this period of national stress, and
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: not only unique, but uniquely irresistible, was the fact that
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: we rationally organized our national industrial management. We became, for
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: the time being a real industrial nation. This we did
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: by organizing and coordinating the scientific knowledge, the technical talent,
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: the practical skill, and the man power of the entire community,
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: focusing them in the national government, and applying this unified
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: national force to the accomplishment of a unified national purpose.
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: For this unique experiment in rationalized industrial democracy, I have
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: coined the term technocracy. It was but an experiment, a
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: forced one to meet an exceptionally serious emergency, and like
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: most other experimental devices, it doubtless was far from perfec
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: in many ways and details. Still, as it seems to me,
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: it presented an important suggestion, the germ of a novel
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: and significant idea, a pioneer idea in the ancient art
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: of government, dog eat dog. Until appropriate economic institutions and
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: instrumentalities are available, humanly effective industrial democracy must remain an
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: unrealizable ideal, a theory unattainable as a workaday principle of
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: social life and for the efficient distribution of the products
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: of toil upon which human life rests. The practical working
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: out of our present efforts in this direction has so
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: far only resulted in a frenzied scramble for wealth, place power,
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: a brutish instinct scramble in which greed, cunning, and lust
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: for human mastery are the urges dog eat dog. The
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: practical ideal and mystery medievalism, law, loaded dice, and chucklock
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: instrumentalities the controlling factors the greedless scientists in this weird
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: social conglomeration, how incongruous seems, and indeed is the greedless
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: scientist who seeks but to learn, to comprehend, and to
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: coordinate the laws of nature, and who cares not for
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: human mastery in this frenzied scramble for science created wealth.
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: What earthly chance has its real creator? The scientist practically none, None,
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: unless he sells himself into virtual slavery, unless he debauches
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: his truth seeking to the interests of those who more
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: practical devote their energy and cunning to the practical enterprise
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: of gaining power by securing control of wealth. And yet
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: the United States is characteristically a nation of technologists, scientists, inventors,
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: workers in and utilizers of the raw materials and the
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: forces of nature. Not only are we instinctively mechanistic, but
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: we are by heritage, by force of circumstance, and n
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: by tradition born lovers of personal freedom. Freedom is our
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: ideal self government. Prior to the war, our dehumanizing ideal
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: was mechanistic efficiency. Under its soul searching stress was borne
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: a humanly effective nation. Our costly lesson, with all these
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: considerations before us, and our fleeting glance at the possibilities
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: of socially unified skill, technology, and science, how worse than
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: foolish to revert to our pre war dog eat dog
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: practices and practical ideals. Instead of so doing. Would it
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: not be well to take to heart the lessons forced
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: upon us at so stupendous a cost of life and
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: human misery? Would it not be wise statesmanship to experiment
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: further on the lines of direction into which we were
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: forced by the compulsions and stresses of war reconstruction with
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: a national objective. The war is over one. We are
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: now facing thee in reality more stupendous problems of social reconstruction.
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: For the war, we enlisted, conscripted, commandeered all our men who,
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: by natural aptitude and by personal inclination were adapted to
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: the requirements of war. We organized and co ordinated them
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: for the intended purpose. We trained and exercised their bodies
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: and their minds to meet known and unknown trials. We
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: energized their loyalty to the flag, the commonweal. We stirred
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: their personal devotion to the nation's ideals. We infused their
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: wills to the accomplishment of the unified will of the nation,
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: the national objective, rationalized industrial democracy. No need is there
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: to speak of the result of this unification of national
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: spirit and national purpose. The war is over, one gloriously one.
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: As we enlisted all those peculiarly adapted to the destructive
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: functions of war. Let us now systematically unify those peculiarly
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: adapted to the constructive functions of peace. Our scientists, our technologists,
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: our inventors, indeed, all who, by natural aptitude and personal
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: inclination are specially fitted to deal with the social and
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: constructive problems of peaceful industry. Nationally unify them and their
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: accomplishments for the commonweal. Let us organize our scientists, our technologists,
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: our exceptionally skilled. Let us commandeer, conscript and list their loyalty,
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: their devotion, their enthusiasm, their intelligence, their interest, their talents,
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: their accomplishments for the purposes of peace and the realization
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: of a noble national purpose. Let us rationalize our industrial
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: democracy public service. First, we are up against the problem
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: of national reconstruction. Let us not tinker with feudal details.
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: Let us nationally reconstruct. Such a national coordination of science
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: and technology, as is here said jested, would produce and
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: constitute a living and social life giving national reservoir of science,
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: practical and theoretical, a technical army devoted to peace and construction.
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: It would constitute a national army from which alone private
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: interests could draw their needed scientific and technical personnel, personnel
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: whose loyalty is primarily to the commonweal, the nation, the
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: nation of which they are honoured public servants. This is
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: the exact reverse of our present unpatriotic, undemocratic order and organization.
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: Yet such an intimate but subsidiary relation to public service,
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: as is suggested, would liberate, not hamper individual energy and
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: freedom of private enterprise, for it would permit the free
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: expression of self interest unified in the commonweal. Industrial apex
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: from this coordinated army of science, technology and skill should
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: be selected by a process of realized capability and recognized
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: social worth. A representative and comprehensive national council of scientists
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: as managing directors our supreme social institution. This national Council
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: should be the apex of the nation's industrial management. It
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: should constitute the leadership of our thus rationalized industrial democracy purpose.
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: But this reconstruction, revolutionary as it doubtless will appear to many,
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: is only preparation for our national task. It would indeed
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: make of us an organized human aggregation, a unified social
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: machine capable of intelligent, self conscious national life. And then
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: comes the question for what worthy purpose have we constructed
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: this huge, highly organized human instrumentality, This problem a nation
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: no less than an individual unescapably faces the instant it
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: has become really self determining. It is the nation's first,
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: its final, its only problem, the final problem of human existence.
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: And this all important matter every nation, like every individual,
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: must settle for itself. Settle between itself and universal rationality,
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: the object of the nation's being, its conscious rational purpose,
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: its national objective. Fernwald Berkeley, January nineteen nineteen. Should the
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: destiny of the nation be left to chance? End of Technocracy,
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: Section two, Section three of Technocracy by William Henry Smith.
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recorded by
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: the Progressing America Project Technocracy, Part three. Ways and Means
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: to gain Industrial Democracy Editor's Note. In the two preceding essays,
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: mister Smith forecasts a new form of government that which
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: he calls technocracy national industrial management. This article discusses ways
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: and means to develop, guide and direct purposive industrial democracy
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: and so usher in a new Commonwealth. The author suggests
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: three practical thoughts for economic reconstruction. That permitting chance to
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: influence our lives and conditions means ignorance. That the flow
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: of time is not reversible. The future cannot help the present.
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: That cause an effect, not whim is the law in
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: nature's processes. The editor Social structures, democracy and autocracy are
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: the antitheses of social organization and express opposite underlying principles
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: of human interaction. The structural details of any human contrivance,
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: whether mechanical or so sociological, must be in keeping with
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: its underlying IDEA. Change in principle necessarily entails functional reorganization reconstruction. Hence,
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: ways and means that have proved effective for autocracy, or
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: that long usage has shaped to facilitate its aims and outcomes,
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: must needs be not only workable in but subversive of democracy.
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: So it will be helpful in our quest to keep
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: constantly and clearly in mind the differences between these mutually
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: exclusive notions of government autocracy. Probably the most radical difference
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: between these two forms of social structures is the assumed
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: sources from which each gets its authority. Autocracy derives its
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: powers from God. This assumption presupposes inherent social distinctions between individuals.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: Occult privileges conferred upon some to control the acts of others,
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: but effectively to control acts, makes requisite control of thoughts,
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: for consecutive thought taught necessarily precedes purposive action. Thus, autocracy
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: implies a god given right of censorship over other men's
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: physical and mental functioning. Hence, it also presupposes the non
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: neutrality of nature cosmic favoritism, for clearly Nature's God could
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: not look with favor upon disobedience or lack of submission
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: to the mandates of his authorized agents. A social organization
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: framed upon this general idea implies constructive details i e. Customs, laws, institutions, economics,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: comprising first a supreme control element deriving its authority from
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: and responsible only to, a super mundane source. Second, social
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: instrumentalities to enforce obedience physically coerce human actions and supernaturally
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: control men's thoughts. Third, a descending series of conferred authority,
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: starting with the god appointed ruler and ending with the
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: popular masses void of rights. Thus, the measure of efficiency
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: in this social system is the absoluteness of control, completeness
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: of enforced obedience in act, and subservience in thought to
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: the god inspired will of the autocrat and his agents
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: democracy Democracy derives its authority from man. This presupposes general
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: intelligence sufficient at least for self conscious individual wants and
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: mass purposes, with freedom for their pursuit. Thus, it assumes
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: super mundane non interference with human wants and purposes, and
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: a rational cosmic order corresponding or coordinated to human intelligence
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: in such wise as to be knowable and responsive thereto.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: A social system based upon this general idea implies constructive
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: details in consonance with first the neutrality of nature, second
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: the inherent individual rights flowing from the facts of rational
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: human existence. Third equality of individual rights. Thus, the measure
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: of efficiency in a democracy is to be gauged by
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: the completeness of individual freedom of thought and liberty of
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: action in relation to each other, and of access to
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: nature's stores, resources and forces. Freedom and liberty being based
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: upon rationality as determined by workability in the production of
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: general human happiness, prosperity, and opportunity for self development. Autocracy
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: is based upon the idea of the essential manship i e.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: Man likeness of God and the inherent unrighteousness irrationality of man.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: Democracy is based upon the idea of the essential godship
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: i e. Godlikeness of man and the inherent righteousness rationality
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: of the universe. Thus we get a clear concept of
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: our chosen social ideal and from it indications as to
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: the character of means appropriate to or discordant therewith. In
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: other words, we have on broad lines basis for rational
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: economic conventions adapted to men make effect of a social
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: system on the basic principles of democracy limitations neither by
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: mutual agreement, nor by legal enactment, nor constitutional provision, nor
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: even as a concession to ancient custom and universal consent.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: May we make two units and two units constitute five units,
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: being contrary to the facts of nature. For precisely the
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: same reasons, we cannot, by any or all of these
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: social expedients successfully adopt or retain economic devices at variance
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: with the essential principles of democracy industrial democracy. Purpose. Autocracy
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: and democracy are both merely forms of human organization, group contrivances,
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: social machines built on different basic ideas or principles, machines
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: to accomplish something. A nation no less than an individual
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: that would build or reconstruct without first clearly determining the
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: purpose of the proposed structure would be indulging in a
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: foolish and feudal waste of energy. But what our national
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: purpose is is quite apart from the present inquiry, and indeed,
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: it is not the province of an individual, but of
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: consensus to determine the ultimate national objective industrial democracy. The
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: people of the United States have, however, agreed and decided
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: upon the idea of the national organization and its proximate
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: character industrial democracy. Or perhaps this outcome represents the resultant
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: of choice and circumstance. Be that as it may. We
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: are now consciously launched on a career of mechanistic industrial democracy,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: and the aim of the present inquiry is to investigate
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: the functional consistency appropriateness of the working parts of the
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: accepted principle of the national social machine. Neural nature. The
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: greatest and most consequence breeding thought that has ever found
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: lodgment in the human mind is the idea that nature
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: is neutral towards man and in regard to all human concerns.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: The greatest and most consequential human discovery is the orderliness
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: rationality of nature. These two concepts are the marvelously fruitful
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: germs from which all modern science has developed, and as
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: exact science based upon experimental proof, owes its continued development
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: to machines of precision, It may, with ultimate significance be
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: said that our idea and ideal of human liberty self government,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: as we today conceive it, is one of the many
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: wonderful products of the machine shop, our mechanistic industrialism. Motor
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: impulse of autocracy. Man's soul is free, hence rational liberty
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: is his social motor impulse. Clearly, with an anthropomorphic god
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: interested in human wants, wishes, purposes, and projects, and with
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: unlimited power and inclination to metal in human concerns to
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: help or hinder to make or mar them, human freedom
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: of thought would be futile, and human liberty of action
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: a farce. We have seen that the motor impulse of
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: autocracy is super mundane in origin. Its initiative is superhuman,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: Its means are mysterious occult powers derived from above. That
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: privilege maintained by ruthless force and cunning is an essential element,
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: and power absolute and humanly irresponsible is its objective. These
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: factors therefore present some criteria wherewith to gauge the validity
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: of present economic conventions, also to test their appropriateness in
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: a democracy, the basis of which is human experience energized
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: by individual human initiative, likewise, to measure their probable worth
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: in a society in which the powers to do and
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: the opportunity to be are derived from the consensus of
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: free and equal human wills, wills subject to none but
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: cooperating to facilitate individual and mutual purposes, purposes socially unified
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: in the purpose of national will. Nature non ethical in
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: the light of modern science. Human experience shows that nature's
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: dealings with man carry no moral or ethical significance than
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: in the problems of practical mechanics. Scientifically enlightened experience teaches
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: that humanity alone is ethical or takes account of motives impartially.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: The sun warms and scorches, blesses or blasts, brings famine,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: and plenty, life and death, the sea, the wind, earthquake
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: and torrent, and all the forces of nature build and
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: destroy with utter disregard to man or his handiworks, his hopes,
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: or his faiths, his motives, or his morals. The wondrous
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: mechanism of creative evolution performs its myriad functions no less
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: oblivious to man's existence than are the ponderous machines of
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: man's own devising Nature like them, fosters or overwhelms with
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: heedless indifference, ruthless, pitiless, appalling to ignorance, error, and fear,
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: but helpful, indulgent, obedient to knowledge, intelligence, and courage, neither
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: kind nor cruel, nor good nor bad impersonal failure. In
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: the past, with childlike faith, we have relied for supporting
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: guidance in human affairs upon the assumed beneficence of occult powers.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: Upon this basis, autocracy is the only conceivable form of
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: social organization. Yet the autocratic idea and ideal has proven,
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: in the opinion of many, to be a disastrous failure
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: under modern conditions, and we in the United States have
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: decided to try its antithesis, democracy, But while discarding the
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: old for the new ideal, we have most illogically retained
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: substantially unchanged the effect of conventions, the ways and means
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: of the old order, and now, with modern science and
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: mechanics hindered in he hampered at all points by our
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: feudal and inappropriate economic system. We are fighting for national
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: life and democracy against efficiently organized autocracy, not alone the
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: autocracy of organized military force, but also the autocracy of
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: systematized and unified financial cunning. Thus, the urgent need for
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: scientific reconstruction of our whole social system is multiplied many
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: fold if we are to rectify our past sins against
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: reason and retrieve our pitiful social failure. Modern dependence on machinery.
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: The life of the ordinary modern man differs from that
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: of all previous times in his peculiar dependence upon complicated machinery,
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: machinery over which he exercises no personal control. The manifold activities,
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: which in past times depended upon individual muscular effort, are
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: now performed by prime movers and power driven machines, so
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: that the individual man's work and effort is unmeaning and
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: useless upon art from these instrumentalities of life and production, Thus,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: the United States is one huge mechanistic industrial workshop. The
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: organization of these complex specialized power driven mechanisms, and the
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: sources of power and of the raw materials with and
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: upon which they operate, together with the distribution of the output,
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: are the functions of scientific and technical industrial management. There
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: should be. It would seem no room or occasion in
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: such an arrangement for chance, mystery, or magic. Old customs.
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: That the average individual prefers old customs to new helps
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: to account for much that is strange in present conditions,
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: But it fails to explain completely how it happens that
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: occultism has been wholly banished from the machine shop, the
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: social producing element, and remains so conspicuously interwoven in our economics,
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: the social distributive element. It would seem that we are
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: compelled to assume that our deep seated human inns instinct
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: of self interest is the controlling factor in maintaining this
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: incongruous combination of science and occultism. It would seem that
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: the cunning acquisitive instinct of certain exceptionally alert minded men
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: in the community, taking advantage of the normal preference of
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: the average man for old ways and customs, and his
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: preoccupation in his favorite workings and doings is employing these
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: ancient and familiar usages to befog and obscure the stealthy
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: diversion of an undue proportion of the community product. If
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: this be so, it should be interesting to glance at
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: the ways and means the press the digitatorial bag of
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: tricks by which it is accomplished. Later we will scrutinize
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: them more closely and in greater detail. Money and credit,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: the basis of mechanics, in all its symbol and complex expressions,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: are two commonplace elements, the wedge and the lever. The
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: basis of our economic and financial system, in all its
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: curious manifestations, are also two commonplace elements, money and credit.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: Here the similarity ends. There is not one ordinary fourteen
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: year old boy in the United States but who knows
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: and intelligently uses the wedge and lever, And there does
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: not exist a mechanical expert who could reasonably question the
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: practical accuracy of the boy's knowledge regarding these elements of mechanics.
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: Under our present economic usages, customs, and laws, each one
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: of us, man, woman, and child is compelled willy nilly
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: to use daily and hourly some form of money and credit,
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: and there is not in the world a man who
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: understands either of these economic elements as the boy knows
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: the wedge and lever. Nor is there an economic specialist
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: or financial expert whose attempted explanation of either money or credit,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: or the functions of either, who supposed elucidation, would not
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: be ridiculed and controverted by a multitude of economic and
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: monetary experts of equal or greater authority. The average man
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: of affairs, lawyer, doctors, editor, tradesman, merchant, or mechanic freely
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: admits his incapacity to understand the mysteries of finance, and
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: frankly says, I don't know a damn thing about it.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: Even bankers and brokers, financiers and economists whose business it
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: is to deal in and manipulate those most remarkable commodities,
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: will quite frequently make the same honest confession of ignorance. Indeed,
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: the subject is common stock in the jokesmith's workshop mystery
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: magic failure. In no other department of human interest is
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: so much mystery, confusion, and controversy regarding the basic facts
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: and assumptions accept possibly institutional religion, which avowedly rests upon
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: the miraculous and supernatural. Indeed, the parallelism between these two
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: ancient activities is curiously complete. Both transcend human experience and
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: neither submits to the tests of science weighing, measuring cause
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: and effect, experimental proof. Credit. Like our religious customs, our
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: economic system is hoary with age, a survival from ancient
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: Babylonian customs. It rests on assumptions unsanctioned by science. Its
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: effects are causeless. The miraculous supersedes natural causation, mystery takes
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: the place of human reason, and endless futurity is its
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: heavenly storehouse of all humanly desirable things. A thievish process.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: From this miraculous store, the Wizard of Finance, with his
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: wonder working wand credit, filches back for a slight present,
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: tangible consideration, and without the owner's consent, the imagined products
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: of imagined future toil of unborn generations of workers, a
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: doubly thievish process. As black in morals as in magic. Money.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: While supposedly representing lifeless things that wear out by use,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: money is conventionally endowed by financial magic with everlasting life
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: and also with life's unique function reproduction. So money makes
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: money forever endeavor for the magician, peace, superabundance, and endless idleness.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: Retirement from business is the promised land flowing with milk
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: and honey of economic sainthood, the early heaven of finance.
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: But never was work more urgent, nor idleness less common.
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: Never was peace more scarce, nor strife so universal. The
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: labor of future generations has been crazily mortgaged by thievish
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: economic conventions, beyond all possibility of redemption. In spite of
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: the fact that science and mechanics have multiplied manifold the
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: effectiveness and productiveness of present labor, and man's present vocation
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: as social suicide, the destruction of wealth and the slaughter
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: of his fellow men a stupendous and tragic record of
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: economic folly and failure. The mechanics philosophy success, the god
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: of our nursery tradition, has been banished from the machine
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: shop and the world of mechanics. The result of this
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: courageous spiritual declaration of independence has been our conquest of nature,
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: our age of productive industry, seemingly alike rending of thought shackles.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: A similar breaking of mental prison bars is needed in
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: the realm of economics. When scientific imagination and knowledge of
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: nature's laws are substituted in our economics for chance, mystery,
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: and magic. When the regulation of our nationwide industry is
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: taken out of the hands of quibbling lawyers, and nature's forces,
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: resources and the mechanical instrumentalities for their transformation into human
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: necessaries and desirables are no longer the playthings of money
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: juggling gamblers, and the products of nature and mechanic arts
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: no longer glut the instinctive craving of acquisitive cunning. When
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: this economic childish irrationality is sanely substituted by organized science, technology,
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: and specialized skill coordinated in national industrial management, then will
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: begin real civilization. The age of social sanity, technocracy, chance, catastrophes,
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: the god of chance or God's mysterious providence which permits
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: the killing of a president by a madman, the obliteration
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: of a great city by fire, the sinking of a
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: huge passenger ship in mid ocean, and a world war
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: are merely misleading euphemisms for human ignorance, human improvidence, and
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: childish shirking of responsibility. Social conventions, our economic and financial system,
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: which by money, magic, make these chance catastrophes into controlling
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: factors in the distribution of the product of human effort,
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: are simply tragic monuments to ignorant superstition, mental laziness, and
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: criminal folly. Indeed, our whole economic system is so incredibly unscientific,
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: so irrational, so utterly puerile, that, were it not for
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: custom induced mental myopia, its glaring absurdities would long ago
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: have sufficed without a world war to shock our mental
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: sense and intelligence into effectivity. Chance. In economics, a machine
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: is certain in action and uniform and output because scientific
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: imagination has foreseen and constructive intelligence has provided for the
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: elimination of the chance element. The forces which will devastate
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: the results of man's industry through the natural action of
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: an uncontrolled torrential stream with equal unconcern, if scientifically directed,
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: will make the same countryside team with human happiness, but
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: not by chance. In like manner, the same natural social
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: forces which make poverty, wretchedness, and vice will, with equal unconcern,
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: produce the opposite results, but never by chance. Human institutions
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: founded upon chance merely express man's brute unintelligence that our
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: economic system makes chance a controlling factor for the distribution
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: of wealth merely shows the persistence of ignorance, and that
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: old habits of thought are more compelling than modern intelligence.
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: To legalize chance deliberately is to relinquish our godlike control
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: over the results of nature's processes, and thus voluntarily enslave
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: ourselves to ruthless nature, and to abandon even our own
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: authority over the outcomes of our own actions. Hence, it
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: would seem that the first step toward a new and
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: rational economics is a courageous declaration of our freedom from
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: tyranny of the insensate god of chance. Choice. When a
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: mechanic has decided upon an idea or principle as the
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: basis of a proposed machine, he has exercised his rational
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: freedom of choice, regardless of whether his choice is wise
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: or not. In this decision, he has placed definite limits
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: upon the range of subsequent selection in regard to detail instrumentalities. Indeed,
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: he has entered into an implied contract, assumed a rational
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: responsibility to employ only such means in the construction of
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: his machine, as in accord with universal order, are appropriate
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: to make effect of his proposed mechanical contrivance, with failure
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: as the penalty for wilful or ignorant error breach of
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: his implied contract. History demonstrates conclusively that races, nations, civilizations,
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: equally with individuals, are subject to the same rational limitations,
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: are bound by the same responsibility, and incur the same
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: penalty for wilful or ignorant error in exercising their human
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: freedom of choice. Our last warning, the practical difficulties of
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: forestalling the hazards of birth, of death, and of disaster
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: are doubtless great, and the problem of eliminating the chance
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: element from our economic system is a man sized job
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: with a slim probability of complete success. But it is
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: reasonably certain that if courage to make the needed change
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: is lacking, or if our intelligence is insufficient for the task,
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: our social adventure in democracy will prove a tragedy, and
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: the world war is I believe our last warning laissez faire,
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: nor may we drift lays a fare is lazy, fear,
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: cowardly re submission to the dog eat dog jungle law
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: right of might, principle of nature and of autocracy from
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: which our modern conscience has revolted the mechanic. While caution
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: bids us pause and realize that nature is ruthless in
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: its punishment of ignorance and error. Courage reminds us that
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: nature also is infinitely lavish in its rewards for knowledge
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: and intelligence, and Courage points to the practical mechanic as
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: an exemplar and an object lesson for the social constructor
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: mechanic versus Nature. The mechanic has courageously invaded Nature's guarded realm,
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: has accepted her no quarter terms, and has assumed complete
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: responsibility for his revolt against all the ancient occult powers.
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: He has tacitly assumed that God and Nature are supremely
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: and pre eminently self sufficing that these all inclusive profundities
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: utterly transcend the utmost limits of his acts or his art,
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: that the plans of God and the Mechanic's problems cannot
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: in any wise conflict. He predicates that God and Nature
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: are limitlessly competent to care for their own infinite concerns,
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: hence that his problems involve only what the mechanic wants,
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: and not the wants of God in so far as
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: concerns his art, and with reverence for universal order which
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: makes his art possible, the mechanic in effect says this
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: I will this I do. I am the Earth, God
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: of things, of matter and of motion. The mechanic's achievements,
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: And how gloriously has the man mechanic made good? Even
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: the most cursory survey of his accomplishments in manufacture, in transportation,
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: in communication, in reclamation, in power utilization generally staggers while
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: it exalts the mind. Has he not with wheat and
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: corn from eastern steppe and western prairie, and with fresh
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: and wholesome meat from the Antipodes, fed the hungry workers
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: of Europe, and brought from the four corners of the
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: Earth materials for their needs, their uses, and their industries. Yes,
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: and from the teeming estuaries of the North, he has
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: served the world's table with dainty fish, and with wine
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: in oil, and luscious fruit from the fertile valleys of
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: the Pacific Slope. By his use of nature's forces, he
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: has immeasurably outrivaled imagination's magic carpet transporting by his mechanisms
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: untold millions of workwary families from cramped and life worn
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: areas to the free spaciousness of many wide scattered edens
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: of plenty, there to found empires and more. He has
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: bound these broadcast settlements in bonds of mutual help with space,
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: negating bands of steel and steam, and on the one
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: time pathless ocean, he has marked out highways with light
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: and life of swift moving commerce, till in the uttermost
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: ends of the earth, friend greet's friend, as though but
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: a mile from home, seas no longer separate, nor continents divide.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: For man now walks with man, as face to face
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: across the soundless void, as with a broom. He has
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: swept sullen ocean back to its deeps and bared netherlands
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: fertile plains, And with dike and mill and pump, he
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: holds his prize secure from angry wave and wind and
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: shifting sand. A prize indeed, a rich and prosperous country
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: of towns and villages, of farms and homesteads, all interlaced
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: with road and rail and placid waterway, a hive of
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: human industry, a kingdom snatched from ocean's grasp. In Toward Egypt, too,
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: he has tamed the turgid nile to flood the desert sands,
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: and made thereof a nation's granary. He has moved mountains,
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: split continents, harnessed Niagaras to his machines, subdued the land,
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: triumphed over the sea, and now seeks dominion of the air,
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: and east and west and north and south. He has
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: sluiced and swept with giant streams the high piled gravels,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: and ripped and smashed and ground to powder finess from
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: the mills of the gods, mountains of crystalline quartz, and
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: dredged and plowed and sifted the frozen Arctic tundra, to
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: tear from the reluctant Earth its golden treasure for counters,
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: wherewith to play Man's worldwide commerce game. The economist's failure.
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: All this stupendous output of human experience, human reason, human
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: industry rival in creation itself is in startling contrast with
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: our worldwide tragedy, the outcome of our worldwide economics, a
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: contrast doubly significant, significant in the entire absence of chance,
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: of mystery, of magic from the work of the mechanic,
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: and again as expressing the practical extremes of glorious success
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: and of failure most tragic selective rejection. The human mind,
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: like the body, can advance only step by step from
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: the solid ground of the known and tested to the
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: doubtful footing of the unfamiliar. Human progress is like adventuring
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: through a morass of ignorance toward a far distant goal,
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: with disaster the penalty for every false step. In the
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: great adventure called human progress, the occult has proved a
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: will o wisp guide. Notwithstanding all the stupendous accomplishments which
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: characterize productive industry and the present era as the age
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: of mechanics, the process which has brought it all about
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: is the same, step by step, proof by experiment scientific method.
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: We can think of the new and unknown only in
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: terms of the old and familiar. Still, errors detected and
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: fallacies perceived are guides for inventive synthesis. Construction selection is
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: but a process of inverted rejection. So, having determined that
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: our ideal social structure is the antithesis of the autocratic ideal,
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: we may with confidence assume that the characteristic elements of
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: autocracy are inappropriate for our purpose. Thus, by a process
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: of selective rejection, we should arrive at economic expedients more
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: in harmony with our social ideal. Democracy versus anarchy. Universal
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: order is the keynote of modern science, and upon this
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: orderliness of nature, scientific thinking is based. Hence, the much
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: abused phrases human liberty and human freedom cannot imply anarchy
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: or chaos i e. Disorder. Liberty means absence of a
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: rational restraint. Freedom of thought can have but self imposed limitations.
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: Social freedoms simply means liberty for rational individual activity tending
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: to the accomplishment of community purpose national self determination. When
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: a nation exercising its freedom of choice discards autocracy and
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: selects democracy as its social principle, it cannot successfully retain
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: the working elements of the discarded social organization. If it
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: is to survive, it must adopt ways and means and
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: methods of life in consonance with its chosen principle. Our
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: feudal experiment, the United States, like a novice in mechanics,
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: has seemingly undertaken the feudal experiment of building an industrial
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: democracy out of the functional elements of predatory autocracy. The
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: natural result is noise, friction, and heat, and worse, a
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: dangerously large proportion of our energy is wastefully expended in
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: constant readjustment to keep the outfit running and to prevent
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: its pounding itself. Into discred Practically, the whole of our
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: economic and financial system is a leftover from the days
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: when absolutism and privilege were universally accepted ideas and ideals,
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: and when magic causation was an unquestioned fact. Quite naturally,
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: our economic customs, conventions, and laws are in keeping with
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: those antiquated assumptions. Substantially, our economics is a vestige, and
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: as with other vestiges, like our veriform appendix, it is
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: now functionally useless and frequently causes much unnecessary pain and trouble,
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: which sooner or later may end in tragedy. Not all bad.
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: While in the foregoing there is no real cause for pessimism,
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: there is even less reason for happy go lucky optimism. Mentally,
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: reviewing this matter, they repair several implications which stand out
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: clearly as definite practical suggestions for economic reconstruction. Suggestions for
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: reas construction. First, that chance means ignorance. The elimination of
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: even the crudely obvious chance factors from our laws, customs,
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: and economic conventions would do away with much rank and
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: justice in our social functioning. Second, that the onward flow
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: of time is not reversible. The future cannot help the present.
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: A clear appreciation and practical application of this seemingly axiomatic
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: proposition would go far to remedy the grosser evils of
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: capitalistic economics and strip money and credit of their conventionally
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: endowed time reversing magic. In every physical human accomplishment, there
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: are involved but three factors or elements raw material, Nature's
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: free gift, human time, human energy. Every product, food, clothing, housing, transportation, facilities,
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: or whatnot represents a definite amount of past human time
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: and past human energy gone beyond rerigs. Neither by ghostly
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: hands nor by flipper GiB financial conventions. Can future work
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: or future product be yanked back into the present to
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: be used for present purposes or to meet present emergencies.
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: Even if self respect and common honesty did not suffice
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: to prevent such inexcusable camouflaged robbery of the helpless. The
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: quintessence of taxation without representation. Third, that cause an effect,
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: not whim is the order of nature's processes. Science shows
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: us that, so far as man is concerned, nature is
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: infinite possibilities, possibilities realizable in terms of individual and collective purposes.
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: We can, if we will, providing our aims and objectives
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: are in accord with the rational order of nature. It
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: is only in purposive action that human freedom self determination
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: is expressed. An aimless man or a purposeless nation is
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: an equally insignificant fragment of raw material in nature's evie
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: polutionary and devolutionary processes. But knowledge of nature and of
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: nature's laws, coordinated by human intelligence in rationally purposive actions,
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: have all of nature's infinite potentialities and stupendous forces as
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: tools to facilitate accomplishment purposive coordination. Obviously, the control of
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: our great national workshop, the United States should not be
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: in the hands of selfish mister acquisitive cunning, who knows
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: the price of everything and the value of nothing, facile
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: only in getting something for nothing, and whose highest social
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: ideal is to buy cheap and sell deer. But in reason,
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: in common horse sense, our purposive industrial democracy should be
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: guided and directed by nationally organized and coordinated specialists in
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: all the branches of skill, technology, and science, which are
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: involved in its social life and requisite to the successful
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: accomplishment of its great national objective. Fernwald Berkeley, February nineteen
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: nineteen is the onward flow of time, reversible by human convention.
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: End of Technocracy. Section three. Section four of Technocracy by
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: William Henry Smith. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain,
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: recorded by the Progressing America Project Technocracy. Section four Skill
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: Economics for Industrial Democracy. Editor's Note. In the previous essays
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: of this series, the author shows that men's characterizing activities
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: express certain instincts or instinctive urges, and that human societies
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: nations today consist of uncoordinated groups, each bent upon gratifying
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: its predominating instinctive urge at the expense of other groups
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: and regardless of the commonweal. He proposes as a remedy
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: for this social strife, a plan of national coordination technocracy.
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: This article discusses some of the important phases more in detail,
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: with constructive suggestions for the elimination of chance, mystery, and
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: magic from our present economic processes. The substitution of intelligent
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: purposive ways and means for haphazard methods and for self
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: interested autocratic control. The substitution of scientific leadership organized for
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: the accomplishment of consensus national objectives. The editor our nationwide
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: machine shop, attempting to make a robust man conformed to
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: nursery usages and swaddling clothes conventions would be no more
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: absurd than our present efforts to conduct twentieth century life
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: on the hunter and sheep herder customs of our racial infancy. Indeed,
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: it would be less preposterous than our continued efforts, despite
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: tragic experience, to have lawyers and gamblers run our new
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: nationwide machine shop by methods and under conventions not differing
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: essentially from ancient Babylonish laws of King Hammurabi and economic
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: customs in vogue two thousand years before Christ Childish economics,
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: human society started with brute force economics suitable to caveman,
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: hunter and fighter times. Then humanity passed through the pastoral
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: animal breeder stage, being therein confronted socially and economically with
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: the awe inspiring marvel of phallic phenomena, the fearful mystery
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: of death, and the joy inciting miracle of life. Life,
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: with its seemingly endless sequence of production and reproduction. The
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: animal breeder stage of development indeed seems to have left
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: an indelible impression, seems to have peculiarly influenced man's mental
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: outlook and modified his thinking processes so profoundly as to
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: have shaped even our modern business conventions and daily practices,
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: or at least to have provided favorable psychic habitat for
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: our conventional economic irrationalities. Mysticism and symbolism, the mind staggering
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: miracle of generation seems to have thrown primitive human thinking
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: back upon itself in dazed befogment, bewilderment, and misunderstanding of
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: nature's laws, out of which confusion of thought emerged mysticism
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: with its magic symbolism. This mental chaos of mystic symbolism,
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: the endowment of the symbol or representative with the qualities
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: and functions of the thing symbolized, is a primordial explanatory
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: perversion which still characterizes our commonplace thinking on monetary matters.
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: The power of money is proverbial among us, and that
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: money makes money is axiomatic to the average man. Also
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: that money makes the margo, and that it performs many
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: other strenuously animistic stunts money, mortgages, and neamyah down through
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: the ages. Occasionally we find, both in ecclesiastic and lay writings,
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: clearly reasoned reprobation of practices based upon this naive misinterpretation
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: of the facts of nature. The words of Nehemiah, the
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: son of Hashealayah and cup bearer to Arta Xerxes, king
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: of Persia, are as modern to day as on the
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: day they were uttered nearly five hundred years before Christ,
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: and they are as applicable to the civilized world to
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: day as they were to the kindergarten usages and anti
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: social practices of our civilization's nursery Mesopotamia. Some also there
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: were that said, we are mortgaging our fields and our
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: vineyards and our houses. Let us get corn because of
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: the dearth. There were also some that said, we have
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: borrowed money for the king's tribute upon our fields and
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: our vineyards. Yet now our flesh is as the flesh
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: of our brethren, our children as their children. And lo
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: be servants. And some of our daughters are brought into
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: bondage already. Neither is it in our power to help it,
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: for other men have our fields and our vineyards. And
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: I was very angry when I heard their cry and
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: these words. Then I consulted with myself and contended with
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: the nobles and the rulers or deputies, and said, unto them,
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: ye exact usury every one of his brother And I
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: held a great assembly against them, and I said, unto them, we,
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: after our ability, have redeemed our brethren, the Jews, which
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: were sold unto the heathen. And would ye even sell
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 1: your brethren, and should they be sold unto us? Then
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: held they their peace, and found never a word. Also
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: I said, the thing that ye do is not good.
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: And I, likewise, my brethren and my servants do lend
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: them money and corn on usury. I pray you let
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: us off this usury. Restore. I pray you to them
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: even this day, their fields, their vineyards, their all of
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: you are wards, and their houses also the hundredth part
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: the oil that ye exact from them. Then said they,
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: we will restore them, and require nothing of them. So
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: will we do even as thou sayest. Then I called
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: the priests and took an oath of them that they
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: should do according to this promise. Also I shook out
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: my lap and said, so God, shake out every man
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: from his house and from his labor, that performeth not
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: this promise. Even thus be he shaken out and emptied,
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: and all the congregation said Amen and praise the Lord,
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: and the people did according to this promise. Neemiah Chapter five.
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: Money reason and Rome, practical minded. Ancient Rome, from whom
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: we have learned so much of our workaday jurisprudence, while
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: retaining many other gross superstitions, seems to have rejected this
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: animistic pecuniary of ssasurdity, as is shown by the familiar
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: expression money does not procreate money numbus numbum, non parite money,
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: sheep and Shylock, the genius of Shakespeare, realized the fatuity
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: of this pastoral age founded pecuniary delusion that money breeds money,
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: which still obsesses our misbegotten finance conventions and holds it
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: up to deserved ridicule. The Merchant of Venice, Act one,
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: seem three, Shylock, when Jacob graized his uncle Laban's sheep, Antonio,
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: and what of him did he take interest? Shylock? No,
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: not take interest, not as you would say, direct interest.
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: Mark what Jacob did when Laban and himself were compromised,
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: that all the ealings which were streaked and pied should
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: fall on Jacob's higher The Ewes being rank in the
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: end of autumn, turned to the rams, and when the
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: work of generation was between these wars breeders in the act,
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: the skillful shepherd peeled me certain wands, and in the
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: doing of the deed of kind, he stuck them up
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: before the Fulsome ews, who then conceiving did an evening
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: time fall party colored lambs, and those were Jacobs. This
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: was a way to thrive, and he was blessed. And
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: thrift is blessing if men steal it. Not Antonio, this
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for a thing
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: not in his power to bring to pass, but swayed
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: and fashioned by the hand of Heaven. Was this inserted
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: to make interest good? Or is it your gold and silver?
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: Ewes and Rams, Shylock, I cannot tell. I make it
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: breed as fast adolescent economics, magic mystery, tinged breeder economics,
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: and vocational experience misinterpreted quite naturally resulted in theocracy and
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: theocratic economics. And from theocracy, the course is straight, the
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: step easy and obvious to working by proxy. Social systems
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: privilege economics as represented by autocracy, aristocracy, and modern plutocracy.
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: Thus the race has successively adopted strength economics, cunning economics,
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: and cunning strong economics, each system appropriate to the conditions
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: of life and stage of development in the past. Adult
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: economics today is the day of doer, worker, maker, practical
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: utilizer of nature by skill of hand and science taught
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: brain the mechanic. This is an age of applied science,
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: the utilization of nature's laws and forces. Consequently, the earlier mystic, predatory,
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: and parasitic economic usages and conventions are now antiquated and impracticable.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: Hence they are beginning to revolt our science developed, practical
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: common sense, our sense of propriety, and our modern sense
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: of justice. Furthermore, it is significantly in a cord with race, experience,
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: with common sense, and with reason, that those whose activities
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: characterize the times must initiate and administer its economics. So,
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: if our mechanistic age, our democratic dispensation, is not to
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: prove a feudal race experiment, a will of the wisp
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: by deal, we must initiate skill economics economics of our
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: twentieth century mechanistically characterized activities, economics of the scientists, of
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: the technologists of the mechanic on a nationwide scale. In
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: other words, national industrial management technocracy skill economics. The mechanics
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: philosophy assumes the neutral orderliness of nature, personal freedom, and
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: personal responsibility for the outcome of his acts. The mechanics
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: practice is based upon personal initiative, self reliance and the
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: validity of experience. The mechanics success results from knowledge of
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: nature's laws, experimental proof, and the elimination of chance. It
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: is reasonable therefore to assume that upon these fundamentals also
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: must be framed our new Workaday's skill economics in order
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: to be workable in our workaday mechanistic age. As applied
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: to our present obsolescent economics, these principles imply elimination of
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: magic as a tacitly assumed factor in the means and
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: methods of production, elimination of mystery from our means and
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: methods of exchanging human efforts and resulting products. Elimination of
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: chance from industrial organization and distribution TwixT devil and deep sea.
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: Stated as generalities, few will question the desirability of such changes,
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: for it will readily be conceded that chance, mystery, and
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: magic are merely expressions of ignorance clothed in old and
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: familiar superstitions. But when one comes truly to realize, not
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: just verbally admit how completely magic, mystery, and chance are
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: woven into the fabric of our modern life and thought processes,
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: than the true significance of the proposition strikes the mind
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: with a sense of shock. We are, indeed between the
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: devil and the deep sea. Radically change we must, or
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: our civilization will go the way of previous abortive social
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: experiments Assyria, Egypt, Phoonicia, Greece, Rome, Spain and Europe. But characteristically,
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: the huge majority of us would rather be socially damned
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: in the good old fashioned way than accept social salvation
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: through radical change. Yet, if human experience proves anything, it
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: demonstrates conclusively that a rationality cannot persist in the rational
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: order of nature chuckaluck economics. Thus, it will purchase be
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: helpful to indicate some implications of the suggested eliminations by
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: more specific applications to present social, economic and financial customs.
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: Usages and conventions. Birth, marriage, death are the time or
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: indice in our chuck luck economics. Birth, in the surroundings
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: of wealth or poverty on fifth Avenue or in the bowery,
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: decides whether a child shall be a master or a servant.
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: An owner or a slave, a nationally controlling factor, or
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: one of a million mere cogs, regardless of inherent fitness
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: to the chance ordained position or to further the aims
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: of the community. Marriage, under our quaint economic conventions, decides
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: into whose hands shall be entrusted power represented by vast
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: accumulations of wealth, regardless of the chances that the easily
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: acquired wealth may be frivolously squandered or used adversely to
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: national purposes. Death with sardonic, irrelevant play skittles with the
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: lives of the living, for our weirdly juckuned laws of
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: device empower dead hands from the grave to control thousands
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: of living men's activities, makers and takers under our economic
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: and finance system. To be born into our mechanistic age
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: with mechanical and constructive traits, dexterous hands, ingenious brain, and
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: irresistible instinctive urge to do to work, to make the
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: things which constitute our wealth is to be foredoomed by
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: chance to lifelong obscurity, social impotence, and relative poverty. While
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: to be born with instinctive, acquisitive, cunning, and insatiable greed
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: is to be elected by chance to social distinction, wealth,
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: and power. Indeed, it would seem that of all the facts, circumstances,
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: and incidents constituting present conditions of human life, blind chance
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: has irrationally been selected as the controlling factor in that
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: antiquated collection of queer customs, quaint canventions, and grotesque superstitions that,
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: with childish fatuity, we call our science of economics and
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: finance magic, ancient and modern. To gauge the folly of
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: earlier ages by our own advance is an easy and
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: vanity satisfying diversion. To correctly measure the ignorance and superstition
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: of our own times is a hopeless task. Thus we
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: look back with smiling contempt upon devil raising, soul selling
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: fountain of youth, which is broomstick and other wondrous paraphernalia
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: of black art. And yet no essential difference exists between
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: the old witchcraft, by which a magic potion added years
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: to human life, and modern financial black art, which gives
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: everlasting life to inanimate capital and endows lifeless money with
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: life's unique function reproduction, so that money makes money forever
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: and evor. Indeed, of the two, the modern magic causation
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: is the more crudely illogical and unscientific. For while the
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: ancient black art only purported to prolonged life already existing,
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: modern financial magic pretends to perform the still greater miracle
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: of infusing life into inanimate objects. Do I seem to exaggerate? Then?
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: Read what economic high priest boem be Work says in
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: his Capital and Interest, A Critical History of economic theory,
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: says seriously, supremely unconscious that he is describing a crazily
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: impossible miracle, A miracle, however, in which there is a
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: substantially universal consensus of ignorant belief. And finally it interest
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: flows to the capitalist without ever exhausting the capital from
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: which it comes, and therefore without any necessary limit to
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: its continuance. It is, if one may use such an
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: expression about mundane things capable of an everlasting life. Thus
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: it is that the phenomenon of interest as a whole
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: presents the remarkable picture of a lifeless thing producing an
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: everlasting and inexhaustible supply of goods. End was ever gross
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: superstitious ignorance or black art, More crastly at variance with
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: facts in nature's laws or the sciences of physics and
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: mechanics than this self filling magic purse of financial wizardry,
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: time turned tailward. If there is one fact in human experience,
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: the validity of which is beyond question, it is that
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: the onward flow of time is non reversible. The future
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: cannot help the present. We can change the direction of
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: motion in physical things, back up a horse, a train,
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: or a boat, or even in some instances, reversed the
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: flow of a river. But to turn back the inexorable
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: forward march of time is unthinkable. To suggest shooting the
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: Germans with future bullets and feeding our soldier boys with
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: future food. Substituting future savings of future generations for present
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: savings in present work seems to a mechanic, like the
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: insane imaginings of a magic crazed brain. Yet these are
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: the stupendous miracles which the magic of finance seriously purports
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: to accomplish for a small present consideration. Do I seem
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: to exaggerate? Then? Read the serious proposal of financial wizard
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: New York, quote, this war must be financed not out
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: of past savings, but out of future savings. Future savings
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: are for the moment not available, and some other device
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: must therefore be brought into play. That device is bank credit,
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: and this loan and subsequent loans will in the main
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: be floated through an expansion of credit. End quote. Truly
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: human credulity is limitless, or the day of witchcraft and
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: miracles is not past futilities of magic. Never, in one
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: solitary instance, in all the hundreds of years and millions
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: of sacrificial victims, did entrails of slaughtered animals foretell a
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: future happening. Never did any of the armies of devils
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: in familiar space, spirits invoked by magic incantations affect any
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: earthly result which would not otherwise have occurred. Never was
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: solitary grain of gold transmuted from base metal by the
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: magic of the myriads of guaranteed philosophers stones. Never did
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: any of these miracles happen except in the distorted imaginings
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: of the simple ones who paid the magicians for their futilities,
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: and the poor boobs who paid the piper. Didn't know
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: any more about magic then than the average man of today,
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: who frankly asserts, I don't know a damn thing about
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: economics and finance future savings, recalling practical warlike Rome fighting
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: her world, conquering battles, or refraining from attack on the
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 1: augury of fowls entrails, remembering philosophical Greece conducting her civil, military,
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: and economic affairs upon the assumed guidance of similar irrationalities,
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: not forgetting that in comparatively recent times, by selling indulgences,
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: dealing in future savings measures in heaven i e. Floating
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: super mundane credit, and by commerce in other optimistic and
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: supposititious commodities, the Church acquired legal ownership to over half
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: of the land and wealth of England, not overlooking the
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: fact that, by similar supposititious means modernized the Mormon Church
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: of the Latter day Saints has become one of the
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: wealthiest and socially most powerful capitalistic corporations in our midst
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: to day. Calmly and dispassionately, turning these facts over in
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: the mind causes one to pause and reflect. Indeed, mentally,
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: reviewing this age's long and unquestionable historical evidence, one imbued
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: with modern scientific notions, begins to wonder questions and doubts.
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: One wonders how dollars or debts can be magically endowed
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 1: with life how magically endowed with everlasting life, how magically
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: endowed with the capability of unendy reproduction a lifeless thing,
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: producing an everlasting, an inexhaustible supply of goods. And thus
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: wondering one questions and doubts, Can it be that the
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: miracles of finance and the magic of credit are of
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: a piece with the ancient miracles in magic, only in
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: keeping with the HCl gone up in costs to the
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: simple ones who pay for the miraculous performances. But what
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: a cost distribution? Science and mechanics have multiplied manifold the
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: productive effect of human effort during the past century, so
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: that the resulting products and instrumentalities of production have increased
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: in like ratio. So the question naturally arises as to
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: what disposition has been made of this great aggregation of
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: national commissariat stores in the United States under our alleged
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: economic system. How have the financiers our bookkeepers kept tab
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: on the debts and credits? How have they, numerically less
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: than one percent distributed this product of the combined work
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: of the twenty million families that, in round numbers constitute
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: the other ninety nine percent of the population. The balance
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: sheet in round numbers, the books show two hundred and
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: fifty billion dollars wealth, seventy billion dollars gross profits divided
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: fifty billion dollars income to the bookkeepers, twenty billion dollars
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: wage to the families, one thousand dollars average family wage. Thus,
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: the balance sheet shows that the self selected and socially
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: irresponsible scorekeepers, the financiers, have apportioned the gross yearly profits
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 1: of the United States National Industrial Enterprise in the ratio
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: of five sevens to themselves and two sevens to the
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: twenty million families. Business and instincts in the jargon of business,
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: the financiers charge fifty billion dollars yearly for financiering the
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: United States. That is to say, the interests assess the
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: people of the United States fifty billion dollars interests tribute
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: yearly in perpetuity for permitting the people the privilege of
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: practicing national honesty and for the magic of mysteriously conventionalized credit.
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: In other words, the capitalists tax the people of the
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: United States fifty billion dollars yearly for permitting the people
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: the privilege of utilizing the nation's human and other natural resources,
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: and for the miracles of capitalization. In simple terms of
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: human instincts, the instinctive takers take the instinctive makers makings
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: for permitting the makers to make the nation's natural raw
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: materials into desirable commodities. Feeding and breeding. The families must
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 1: of course be fed and clothed and housed, and the
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: children schooled, or the supply of makers would soon peter out.
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: For these unavoidable necessities, the financiers allow, on the average
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: one thousand dollars a year per family a bare living
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: wage in exchange for a whole year of the brief
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: work life of twenty odd years for life energy irrecoverably
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: used up in the making the wealth, wealth out of
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: which bare sustenance is all that goes to its makers.
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: Worse and more of it. Nor is this all nor
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: the worst. It deals with things only now in existence,
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: and it refers to an apportionment of the gross profits
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: arrived at more or less by our own consent, but
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: by the wondrous working of credit. The financiers have virtually
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: pawned in their own pawnshop the whole industrial world. The
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 1: financiers have placed a perpetual mortgage plaster of at least
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: one thousand billion dollars on the work and products of
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: unborn generations of the hundred million families constituting the white world.
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 1: The financiers have chained thus a ten thousand dollars debt
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: paying interest tribute of two dollars per day, forever upon
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: in the back of each and every family in the
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 1: civilized world, a perpetual thralldom of debt, debt secured by bonds,
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: by mortgage, by capitalization, and by national debt conventions. The
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: financiers have thus placed this huge mortgage debt in perpetuity
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: upon future generations without their consent, the most stupendous case
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: of tyrannus taxation without representation in all the dark age's
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: long tragic experience of long suffering humanity. What petty pikers
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 1: were the shylocks of old Nehemiah's day compared to our
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: our financiers crowning paradox. Poverty is the opposite of riches,
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: Debt the negation of wealth, bankruptcy the reverse of solvency.
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: They are antitheticals, the plus and minus signs of human
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: interaction in the world of business. A modern man, by
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: the aid of scientific and mechanistic instrumentalities accomplishes more today
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: than one, two, and in some cases ten score men
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: of a hundred years ago. So, despite war and every
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 1: other destructive agency, production outstrips bear need to day, as
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 1: at no time in the past, the world is constantly
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: increasing its total products. Yet notwithstanding these facts, the richer
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: the world grows, the more it owes both relatively and actually,
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: the greater its wealth, the deeper it is plunged into debt. Thus,
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: under the regime of capitalistic high finance is achieved the
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: crowning paradox of all time, the acme of miraculous causation.
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: The functions of plus and minus are reversed. More is less.
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: The larger a thing grows, the smaller it becomes. The
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: more efficient men get, the less effective relatively is the outcome.
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: The faster the world's cistern is filled with wealth, the
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 1: more nearly empty it is. The more completely is the
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: white world bankrupt. The ancient miracle of the Widow's crewise
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: is inverted by modern financial magic, an old delusion. Now
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: it is not intended to impute deliberately dishonest or intentionally
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: unethical methods to our financiers and capitalists under a vague
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: and metaphorical term magic. On the contrary, I use the
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: word magic in its ordinary meaning, supernatural effects. I am
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 1: convinced that the great majority of US, capitalist and laborer
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: alike are still obsessed with the fallacy of magic causation,
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: an ancient delusion that has dominated men's minds and befog
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: their thinking from the very beginning of man's efforts to
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: explain the causes of unusual happenings. Magic is the oldest
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 1: and easiest way to account for strange things, and still
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: holds its ancient sway over men's minds outside the laboratory
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: of the scientist and the workshop of the mechanic. Elimination
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: of this fallacy as a controlling factor in the distribution
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: of products wealth is a necessary step towards a rationally
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 1: workable economic system, a system adapted to twentieth century life
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: and the mental attitude of our science made mechanistic age mystery.
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 1: Chance implies insufficient knowledge of causes, Magic implies misinterpretation of causes.
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 1: Mystery implies inherent unknowableness of causes, While increasing knowledge tends
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: ever toward minimizing the chance element and lessening of magic errors.
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: Mystery presents a different problem. The laboratory, or the factory,
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: or the workshop or the counting house is no place
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: for mystery, for to the workers therein, mystery means ignorance
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: lack of intelligence. In human life at large, it is
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 1: quite otherwise as concerns the essential, all inclusive mystery and
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: religious mysticism. This is a fact of profound significance in
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: relation to the larger aspect of our social problem. Our
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 1: new skill economics, therefore, may not discourage man's innate love
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: of minsas his inborn religious spirituality, nor curb the spirit
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: which tempts him to adventure courageously into the unknown, but
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: instead should provide advantageous scope for its personal expression. But,
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: as in the machine shop, mystery is out of place
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: in finance, out of place because the function of money
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: in an economic system corresponds to the purposes of checks
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: and gages, templates and measuring instruments of the technologist and
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: the mechanical constructor. The essentials of such devices or accuracy, certainty, invariability,
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: the antitheses of the qualities of mystery. Yet in no
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: branch of human activity or its measuring devices, so inconsistent contradictory, inaccurate,
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: so mysteriously variable, so subject to antisocial, self interested control,
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 1: as are those of the financier his twin mysteries, Money
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: and credit. Our queer dollar. One of the many quaint
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 1: functions of the dollar is that of a standard of value.
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, no one knows or can determine,
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: from moment to moment what is the value of a dollar.
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 1: We only know that its worth is diminishing variously to
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: the vanishing point. Neither the nation, nor the monetary experts,
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: nor the professors of economics, nor the financiers, nor the interests,
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: nor the capitalists, nor the common man have ever succeeded
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: in fixing our standard of value, standardizing the value of
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: our standard of value, the worth of our dollar. Mister
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: worker contends that the contraction of the dollar is due
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: to expansion in the cost of living, so he strikes
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 1: for more dollars and affects another shrink. Mister trader says
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: the contraction is due to the expansion of wages, so
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: he boosts up the price of products and affects still
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: another contraction, and so on and on, and the end
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: is not yet. Indeed, there are as many different explanations
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 1: of this mysterious, spooky phenomenon in our standard almost as
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: there are explainers, and their number is legion an elastic
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: foot rule. If our foot rule were subject to similar
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 1: mysterious fluctuations, its length would have increased to a yard
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: or more in the past five years, with innumerable variations
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: from time to time. Imagine the chaos had such a
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: mysteriously variable standard of measurement been used in the machine shop.
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: The stress of war conditions has so completely demonstrated the
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: inutility of our mysteriously elastic so called standard of value
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: and medium of exchange that it is now virtually in
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 1: the discard, stacked up uselessly in private and in national
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: treasury vaults. Our alleged standard of value and medium of
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: exchange never was a standard of value, and now it
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: is not even a medium of exchange quaint but true,
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: a practically costless, hence unvarying medium of exchange, A one
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: function money is another much needed step towards a rational
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: economic system. Credit. But if our money is a mysterious commodity,
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: what shall be said of credit money i e. Gold
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: coin of the United States of the present standard of
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: weight and fineness, even though lacking in practical utility, is
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: at least a physical commodity. It occupies space, however uselessly.
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: It has color, weight, length, breadth, and thickness. It possesses
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 1: physical characteristics easily determinable by scientific tests. Not one of
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: these facts is applicable to credit. Credit is a state
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: of mind, a psychological condition, hypnosis, a mesmeric dream. Naturally,
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: it lacks all the qualities of physical things and possesses
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: all those of phanfasms. A man dreams he is wealthy,
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: and for all dream purposes he is wealthy, even though
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: in actual fact he is dying of starvation in squalor
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: and want so too. In like manner, a nation dreams
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: itself some or many billions of additional wealth, sets the
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: printing presses, going to record the dream in bonds and
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: forthwith becomes billions wealthier in its mind, though as a
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: matter of fact, the physical wealth may have shrunk to
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: the danger point of general indigence and starvation. This is
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: the danger fraught world condition. To day, boundless credit wealth
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: seemingly human stupidity is limitless, and human credulity infinite. This boundless, unwaitable, unmeasurable,
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 1: hope created dream stuff. Credit is sliced and apportioned like
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: beef or butter, and sold in the market place by
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: self appointed purveyors of public optimism. Yes, sold in exchanged
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: for the limited, measurable physical products of sweaty and grimy
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 1: toil and strenuous human effort. Like all other dreams and
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: dream stuff, credit visions know no bounds but those of desire.
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: Millions or billions or scores of billions. It's all the
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: same in the wonderland dream world of finance. Wish them
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: and dreamed them, and presto they exist. They exist, dream ships,
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: dream cannons, dream food, iridescent wealth bubbles blown up and
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: floated through an expansion of credit, as proposed by finance
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: wizard Vanderlip dream wealth. It is not surprising, therefore, that
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 1: in the wonderland of finance, this dream world's dream wealth,
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: credit as represented by credit instruments i e. Stocks, bonds, mortgages,
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 1: national debts, et cetera, transcends greatly the workaday world's physical
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 1: utilities real wealth. But what is going to happen when
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 1: we are jolted awake to the rationality of workaday reality
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: and dream visions? Vanish when the airy floating credit bubble
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: bursts as bubbles do when Germany and Austria follow Russia's
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: Bolshevik example, and Frameance follows Germany and then England, And
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 1: then then what. When this happens, the world will discard
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 1: the silly delusion that time is reversible by financial magic.
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: Credit credit the greatest of all myths in magic make
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: beliefs by which cunning men in all ages have sought
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 1: to get something for nothing. In all the historically recorded
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: cases of collective human delusions, from practical Rome's entrail augury
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: to shrewd Yankee Salem's witchcraft, there is none which surpasses
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: in collective crass credulity our great credit myth. A national
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 1: non tribute bookkeeping system equitably to determine real ownership of
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 1: the products of effort is a much needed economic convenience.
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: Experimental science. It would seem that with the advent of
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: experimental science occurred an epoch in the history of our race,
• 2:09:53
  Speaker 1: an epochal event to which none other is comparable, except
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: possibly the acquisition of self consciousness itself. Indeed, it would
• 2:10:01
  Speaker 1: seem that these two super significant events so unthinkably far
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 1: apart in time are in essence closely related. By coming
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 1: to self consciousness, the brute became man potentially, though not actually,
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 1: a self determining being. By the coming of science, based
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: upon the idea of the rationality and neutrality of nature,
• 2:10:23
  Speaker 1: potential freedom ceased to be a mere possibility and became
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: a realizable ideal to make or break shackles. Science and
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 1: technology are, however, but tools in man's hands, tools wherewith
• 2:10:38
  Speaker 1: to make effective man's transcendent privilege freedom of choice. Groups
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: of men, like Germany, may use these great instrumentalities to
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: forge social shackles upon themselves and upon humanity the bondage
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: of autocracy, or they may use them to make human
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 1: liberty effective, as in the ideal of the United States.
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: Human beings, whether as individuals or as groups or as nations,
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: are free, self determining only when purposively initiative, For it
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 1: is only in purpose of action that liberty can be expressed. Freedom,
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 1: then means will to intelligence, self expression, liberty expressed in
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: rational accomplishment. Reconstruction on all the foregoing considerations, our problem
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: of social reconstruction on a scientific basis implies systematizing our
• 2:11:31
  Speaker 1: great but incoegnation upon economic principles appropriate to an industrial democracy,
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 1: the basis of modern industry being scientific knowledge of nature's laws,
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 1: whereby nature's resources are made available for human use and
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 1: enjoyment through the aid and agency of technical skill. Reconstruction
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 1: becomes essentially a process of selective rejection of present inappropriate
• 2:11:55
  Speaker 1: economic usages, discarding customs which unduly facilitate the acquisitive instant,
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: and substituting others which tend to minimize social obstacles to
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 1: the freer expression of the constructive or industrial instincts in
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: the interest of the commonweal. As industrial processes involve specialized
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 1: skill and expert technical training made effective by intelligent coordination,
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 1: it is clear that a humanly efficient industrial democracy necessitates
• 2:12:22
  Speaker 1: leadership by those who possess the requisite knowledge, skill, and
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: technical training. So when we speak of industrial democracy, what
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 1: we really mean is nationwide industry managed by technologists, a
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 1: nation of free and socially equal workers, scientifically organized for
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 1: mutual benefit and unified purpose. A technocracy. Suggestions, by way
• 2:12:47
  Speaker 1: of summary, a few of the more obviously inappropriate present usages, which,
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: seemingly with advantage, we might consign to the limbo of
• 2:12:55
  Speaker 1: outworn social expedients. Here follow one dis us card usages
• 2:13:00
  Speaker 1: founded on the autocratic idea of the state, substitute therefore,
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 1: in fact, as well as in theory, others resting upon
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 1: the self evident right of a man to analienable and
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 1: complete ownership of himself, hence, in effect, inalienable ownership of
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: the industrial product resulting from the functioning of his mind
• 2:13:20
  Speaker 1: and body, limited only by others equal right. Two Discard
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: conventions resting upon the parasitic idea that legal possession is
• 2:13:30
  Speaker 1: equivalent to production. Substitute natural ownership based on making for
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 1: conventions that legalize taking. Three Discard institutions legalizing chance as
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 1: a controlling factor in the distribution of things. Substitute therefore,
• 2:13:44
  Speaker 1: collective foresight based upon experience and human need for instinctive
• 2:13:49
  Speaker 1: animal greed in the interest of the commonweal. Four Discard
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 1: financial magic practices resting upon the animistic fallacy that inanimate
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 1: objects can by convention be endowed with life's unique function reproduction.
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: Substitute others on the evidential fact that only human beings
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: can make usefully available to things we call wealth. Five
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 1: Discard the mysteries of finance in wealth distributing processes. The
• 2:14:18
  Speaker 1: private purveying of public optimism for gain and the manufacture
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 1: of credit for sale. Substitute therefore, our community national bookkeeping system,
• 2:14:27
  Speaker 1: in which figures clearly tell what each individual and each
• 2:14:31
  Speaker 1: group has added to the common stock. Six Discard institutions
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 1: resting upon the erroneous notion that conventional symbols i e.
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 1: Representatives of wealth, bonds, credit, capital, et cetera. Are equivalent
• 2:14:46
  Speaker 1: to and can perform the functions of the instrumentalities they represent,
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 1: and can continue so to function long after the instrumentalities
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: have ceased to exist or have become obsolete. Substitute others
• 2:14:59
  Speaker 1: making the usuranti things i e. Usury interest correspond to
• 2:15:04
  Speaker 1: and be contingent upon the effective worth and the continued
• 2:15:07
  Speaker 1: usefulness of the things rented. Seven Discard customs based upon
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 1: mystic symbolism and the animistic fallacy that money can perform
• 2:15:16
  Speaker 1: the functions of the life, energy, or products represented. Substitute
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 1: a costless, one function national check medium of exchange. Eight
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 1: Discard business practices based upon the antisocial dictum that one
• 2:15:30
  Speaker 1: man's misfortune is another's opportunity. Substitute, therefore, the proposition that
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 1: the illhaps of unavoidable social hazards and chance. Favors of
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 1: good fortune should, in social effect, be equally shared by all. Nine.
• 2:15:45
  Speaker 1: Discard all institutions and conventions facilitating the functioning of antisocial, predatory,
• 2:15:51
  Speaker 1: and parasitic instincts. Substitute others tending to encourage willing, self
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 1: interested co operation energized by national unity of purpose. Ten.
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 1: Discard the strife inducing institutions of group industries based upon
• 2:16:05
  Speaker 1: the hunger slavery idea of employer and employee organized for
• 2:16:09
  Speaker 1: mechanistic human efficiency and output of products for purely private profit.
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 1: Substitute others based upon rational human initiative and development, with
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 1: the aid of all the resources of the nation, coordinated
• 2:16:22
  Speaker 1: for the commonweal under the management of scientific leadership, to
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: accomplish a consensus national objective save civilization. Whether these proposed
• 2:16:33
  Speaker 1: changes are effectively workable or are only visionary, impracticable utopian dreams,
• 2:16:39
  Speaker 1: is of course debatable, but there can be no question
• 2:16:43
  Speaker 1: regarding the truth of the solemn warning of Lloyd George.
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 1: Civilization unless we try to save it may be precipitated
• 2:16:50
  Speaker 1: and scattered to atoms. Responsibility that our civilization is in
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 1: danger of being scattered to atoms raises the question of
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 1: culpability for the present ominous state of affairs, and hence
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 1: of responsibility for averting the threatened outcome. The masses cannot
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 1: be held responsible for they are simply impelled by their
• 2:17:12
  Speaker 1: instinct to live. They do not think, they do. What
• 2:17:15
  Speaker 1: is much more important, they breed their magnificent all inclusive
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 1: social function is reproduction. Hence they feel, feel hunger, feel passion.
• 2:17:27
  Speaker 1: They feel with all the vital energy of the race. Thus,
• 2:17:31
  Speaker 1: when social conditions become unbearable or threaten their vital function,
• 2:17:35
  Speaker 1: they reflex with unrestrained ferocity against such conventional restraints to
• 2:17:40
  Speaker 1: the natural expression of their instinctive urges. The skilled artisans
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 1: cannot be held responsible for they are merely obeying the
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 1: instinct to make. Their mental activity is analogous too, and
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 1: for the same social purpose as the cycle of brain
• 2:17:55
  Speaker 1: functioning that produces the mathematical cell of the bee, the
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 1: carpentry of the bee, and the nest building of the bird.
• 2:18:03
  Speaker 1: Employers cannot be held responsible for they only express the
• 2:18:06
  Speaker 1: instinct to control the mastery instinct, an urge which could
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 1: not be satisfied unless others willingly submitted to domination. Their
• 2:18:15
  Speaker 1: social function is to energize to counteract human inertia for
• 2:18:19
  Speaker 1: the preservation of the race. The financiers cannot be held
• 2:18:23
  Speaker 1: responsible for They only reflex the instinct to take the
• 2:18:27
  Speaker 1: urge to hoard like and for the same social purpose
• 2:18:30
  Speaker 1: as the hoarding of the squirrel or the honey storing
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 1: of the bee. They probably are least imaginative of all.
• 2:18:38
  Speaker 1: Their social function is conservation, the converse of progressive theorizing. Typically,
• 2:18:44
  Speaker 1: none of these social elements think think in the sense
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 1: of the imaginative pioneer theorizing of creative thought, seeking for truth,
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 1: apart from its immediate application to self preservation, searching with
• 2:18:56
  Speaker 1: spiritual insight for paths into the unknown to be later
• 2:18:59
  Speaker 1: tried by careless earth bound feet. The scientist is in
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 1: a different category. Characteristically, he lacks the instinctive urges which
• 2:19:08
  Speaker 1: distinguish the other elements of human society, but it is
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: his social function to think. He does think. He has
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 1: functioned with a vengeance. One of the results of his
• 2:19:20
  Speaker 1: high pressure thinking is that civilization may be shattered to
• 2:19:23
  Speaker 1: atoms or humanity raised to godlike heights by science. While
• 2:19:28
  Speaker 1: it is quite questionable whether science so far has proved
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 1: a blessing or a curse to humanity. There can be
• 2:19:35
  Speaker 1: no doubt that its potentialities in either direction are limitless,
• 2:19:39
  Speaker 1: praiseworthy or culpable. As the case now stands, responsibility for
• 2:19:44
  Speaker 1: the outcome rests squarely upon the shoulders of the scientist
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 1: national leadership, notwithstanding appearances to the contrary popular unrest, growth
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 1: of socialism, spread of Iwwism, the whirlwind of Bolshevism, and
• 2:20:00
  Speaker 1: other terrifying upsurgings of destructive massism. The masses do not
• 2:20:04
  Speaker 1: desire to lead, do not seek proletarian dictatorship. Human herds
• 2:20:10
  Speaker 1: have always followed leaders. Like other gregarious animals followed their
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: leaders willingly, blindly, thoughtlessly. The herd will follow till following
• 2:20:19
  Speaker 1: becomes vitally dangerous, threatens its social life, hinders the normal
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 1: functioning of its instinctive urges to growth and reproduction. Nations
• 2:20:28
  Speaker 1: have followed the leadership of autocracy till starved white by
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 1: plundering conventions or bled white by wars. Nations have followed
• 2:20:36
  Speaker 1: the leadership of theocratic mystics into mental chaos and confusion
• 2:20:40
  Speaker 1: of human ideals and social purpose. And we today, with
• 2:20:45
  Speaker 1: sheeplike docility, have followed plutocratic leadership into a social morass
• 2:20:49
  Speaker 1: of crazy financial conventions, till the raising of families has
• 2:20:53
  Speaker 1: become an unbearable burden, an impossible social handicap, till the
• 2:20:57
  Speaker 1: opportunity to work is a dubious privilege, till the future
• 2:21:01
  Speaker 1: of the worker and breeder the proletarian offers only a
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 1: soul shriveling bondage of debasing and inescapable debt. Modern manhoods
• 2:21:10
  Speaker 1: mandate the present world condition means only that the proletarian
• 2:21:15
  Speaker 1: has balked, revolted at this sordid threat to the sanity
• 2:21:18
  Speaker 1: and the sanctity of human existence. The world condition is
• 2:21:23
  Speaker 1: a world cry, a cry not for proletarian dictatorship nor
• 2:21:27
  Speaker 1: the mob rule, but for new leaders. The world demands
• 2:21:31
  Speaker 1: new leaders, not new and more efficient slave drivers, trust barons,
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 1: or kings of commerce or emperors of finance. The modern
• 2:21:40
  Speaker 1: world demands modern leaders, men, men with ideas that rise
• 2:21:44
  Speaker 1: higher than swapping jack knives, even in carload or shipload lots.
• 2:21:49
  Speaker 1: The world condition expresses this demand by modern men for
• 2:21:52
  Speaker 1: modern leaders, leaders with modern spiritualized ideals. Our social unrest
• 2:21:58
  Speaker 1: is a demand for torchbear and pathfinders to social freedom
• 2:22:02
  Speaker 1: of opportunity, a demand for leaders with luminous imagination to
• 2:22:06
  Speaker 1: visualize our war born nation's desired peace goal. Leaders with
• 2:22:10
  Speaker 1: scientific knowledge to realize and actualize the rational aspirations, ambitions,
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 1: and ideals of free modern American manhood. Scientists versus auto,
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 1: theo and plutocrat. While the autocrat, the theocrat, and the
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 1: plutocrat are decadent products of outworn ways and obsolescent materialistic
• 2:22:32
  Speaker 1: manners of thinking, the scientist, on the contrary, is the
• 2:22:35
  Speaker 1: most modern development of modern intelligence, modern ideals, and modern
• 2:22:40
  Speaker 1: spiritualized modes of thought. The scientist is essentially a pioneer,
• 2:22:44
  Speaker 1: a pathfinder, a torch bearer, a seeker after truth and rationality.
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: The scientist is the modern religionist, the priest of selfless truth,
• 2:22:54
  Speaker 1: truth which grows with man's growth and luminously emerges with
• 2:22:58
  Speaker 1: the purifying of human intelligence. Truth that all inclusive, something
• 2:23:03
  Speaker 1: behind the physical facts of nature, which makes for right,
• 2:23:06
  Speaker 1: for mechanical, for personal, for ethical, for spiritual, for social righteousness,
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 1: the ultimate unifying ideal. Truly, the stone which the builders
• 2:23:17
  Speaker 1: rejected is become the head of the corner, the keystone
• 2:23:20
  Speaker 1: of the social arch rational leadership. The scientist is seemingly
• 2:23:28
  Speaker 1: our one best, if not our only hope for rational leadership,
• 2:23:32
  Speaker 1: then too the scientist, by unleashing the limitlessly powerful natural
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 1: forces in uncoordinated, haphazard science made instrumentalities, has got us
• 2:23:41
  Speaker 1: into much of our present social muddle. So it is
• 2:23:45
  Speaker 1: up to the scientists to lead us out, or at
• 2:23:47
  Speaker 1: least to harness for human service. The science created non moral,
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 1: mechanistic monster that he has liberated guideless and aimless. But
• 2:23:58
  Speaker 1: if the scientist shirks this great tact, if he lacks
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 1: the desire for, or the courage of, or the will
• 2:24:04
  Speaker 1: to leadership, if for any reason he evades this obvious
• 2:24:07
  Speaker 1: responsibility or is daunted by its obvious difficulties, then indeed,
• 2:24:13
  Speaker 1: blindly plunging deviously onward, guideless and aimless, our civilization may
• 2:24:18
  Speaker 1: be precipitated and shattered to atoms, and our industrial democracy
• 2:24:22
  Speaker 1: adventure prove a world tragedy, yes, the most pathetic of
• 2:24:27
  Speaker 1: all human tragedies. Futility lacking purpose. Our nation of great expectations,
• 2:24:35
  Speaker 1: of magnificently vague hopes and stupendous possibilities, if nothing worse happens,
• 2:24:40
  Speaker 1: will slump into feudal, pottering, desuetude, lacking inspiring purpose, to
• 2:24:44
  Speaker 1: live for lacking worthy achievement, to work for lacking worthwhile goal,
• 2:24:49
  Speaker 1: to strive for lacking a great national objective Fernwald Berkeley,
• 2:24:56
  Speaker 1: March twentieth, nineteen nineteen, and of Technocracy, Section four, Section
• 2:25:16
  Speaker 1: five of Technocracy by William Henry Smith. This LibriVox recording
• 2:25:21
  Speaker 1: is in the public domain, recorded by the Progressing America
• 2:25:25
  Speaker 1: Project Technocracy. Section five Working Explosively, a protest against mechanistic efficiency,
• 2:25:36
  Speaker 1: reprinted from Industrial Management, January nineteen seventeen. We all know
• 2:25:42
  Speaker 1: the explosive worker type and generally recognize him with disapproval.
• 2:25:47
  Speaker 1: The trouble with working explosively is that the individual addicted
• 2:25:50
  Speaker 1: to this character of activity won't fit into any decently
• 2:25:54
  Speaker 1: organized scheme of production. He's a sort of human bombshell,
• 2:25:58
  Speaker 1: lacking a timer, so he goes off at any time,
• 2:26:02
  Speaker 1: day or night, always unexpectedly, with the utmost disregard to
• 2:26:06
  Speaker 1: sensitive nerves and established conventions. In the family, he's the
• 2:26:11
  Speaker 1: juvenile problem. In school, the hopeless impossible, and in the shop,
• 2:26:16
  Speaker 1: the idlest of vital apprentices with a big question mark.
• 2:26:21
  Speaker 1: In the factory, he's the man one is always going
• 2:26:23
  Speaker 1: to discharge, but or he's our boss. Who is a
• 2:26:27
  Speaker 1: holy terror working explosively. There are but two places for
• 2:26:33
  Speaker 1: the explosive worker to land, at the top or at
• 2:26:36
  Speaker 1: the bottom, and characteristically he's rapid in getting there. Still worse,
• 2:26:42
  Speaker 1: when true to type, he is disconcertingly apt to reverse
• 2:26:46
  Speaker 1: his location from time to time, whether top or bottom,
• 2:26:49
  Speaker 1: with the speed of a lightning change artist. The efficiency
• 2:26:53
  Speaker 1: expert has no place for the explosive worker, except in
• 2:26:56
  Speaker 1: his vocabulary of dynamic expletives and fulminative athets. Of course,
• 2:27:02
  Speaker 1: all this refers to the typical exploder. But curiously enough,
• 2:27:07
  Speaker 1: each one of us at times looks back with self
• 2:27:09
  Speaker 1: hugging secret joy to occasions and experiences of working explosively
• 2:27:14
  Speaker 1: in our own otherwise humdrum career and reflecting realizes with
• 2:27:19
  Speaker 1: some surprise that these stand luminously out as our really
• 2:27:22
  Speaker 1: worthwhile adventures, life's decisive battles. Such reminiscences and the feelings
• 2:27:28
  Speaker 1: evoked jolt one into thinking to wondering work is human.
• 2:27:35
  Speaker 1: There appears to be, Nay, there surely is something amazingly
• 2:27:40
  Speaker 1: human about working explosively. We feel that there is truly
• 2:27:44
  Speaker 1: something warm, vital, hot blooded about this sort of activity,
• 2:27:48
  Speaker 1: which is lacking in the efficient routine of eight hours
• 2:27:51
  Speaker 1: a day work at so much per in fancy, we
• 2:27:54
  Speaker 1: flit backward and abandonedly re erupt our own little explosions.
• 2:27:58
  Speaker 1: Eight hours ah twenty four is all too short hours days?
• 2:28:04
  Speaker 1: What are they to the explosive worker during eruption? Mere
• 2:28:08
  Speaker 1: irrelevant astronomical incidents, But with a sigh, returning to hear
• 2:28:14
  Speaker 1: and now from memories for cunded realm, where we too
• 2:28:17
  Speaker 1: forge vibrant dreams, most strenuously into things of beauty, worth,
• 2:28:22
  Speaker 1: and substance, painted with comets, tales, playing skittles with time
• 2:28:26
  Speaker 1: and space. Oh magic state wherein all work is play
• 2:28:30
  Speaker 1: and play means working explosively. There still remains that workaday reminder,
• 2:28:35
  Speaker 1: the vivid impression, potent intuition, the hunch of discovery, so
• 2:28:40
  Speaker 1: suggestive of revelation in its flashlike clarity. And this is
• 2:28:44
  Speaker 1: the hunch essence of living explosive working. Why explosive activity
• 2:28:52
  Speaker 1: is not working at all, It is the essence of
• 2:28:54
  Speaker 1: living life itself. Efficient working and working explosively are wholly
• 2:29:00
  Speaker 1: and essentially different matters of experience. Efficient working expresses obedience
• 2:29:05
  Speaker 1: to the outside pressure of brute mechanistic nature in the
• 2:29:08
  Speaker 1: struggle to survive. Working explosively is inner life, insistent of
• 2:29:13
  Speaker 1: self expression, the wilful impulse of vital personality and rapturous
• 2:29:17
  Speaker 1: culmination realizing life the joy of being expressed in doing
• 2:29:22
  Speaker 1: god like spontaneity. One means compulsion, the other freedom. Routine
• 2:29:28
  Speaker 1: working is an efficient means to an indefinitely desirable end.
• 2:29:33
  Speaker 1: Explosive working is an end in itself, regardless of outcome.
• 2:29:37
  Speaker 1: The very joy of working self realization one suggests force
• 2:29:42
  Speaker 1: of mechanism, the other life and liberty. In one, we
• 2:29:46
  Speaker 1: find function, contract, and serve a purpose. In the other
• 2:29:50
  Speaker 1: we live, expand dominate. In one, we work by necessity
• 2:29:55
  Speaker 1: as more or less efficient elements in a mighty but
• 2:29:57
  Speaker 1: cold and incomprehensible machine. In the other, I am the
• 2:30:01
  Speaker 1: living it Earth, God of things, of matter and of motion.
• 2:30:05
  Speaker 1: The mechanition is human problem. This issue involves no mere
• 2:30:11
  Speaker 1: moot or academic distinction about which idle men may split
• 2:30:15
  Speaker 1: dialectic hairs or bandy fluent phrases to fill a vacant hour.
• 2:30:20
  Speaker 1: Profoundly it is otherwise, for it touches closely on the
• 2:30:23
  Speaker 1: deepest and most significant of all human problems. The eternal
• 2:30:27
  Speaker 1: paradox of freedom. At bottom, it is this question of
• 2:30:31
  Speaker 1: human worth as against human productive efficiency, which is being
• 2:30:35
  Speaker 1: fought out in the world conflict today, and not alone
• 2:30:38
  Speaker 1: in the spectacular European tragedy. So much for the hunch,
• 2:30:43
  Speaker 1: and now for the questions it raises. These are many
• 2:30:46
  Speaker 1: tough conundrums which I have no intention of now attempting
• 2:30:50
  Speaker 1: to answer. Here is one, by way of example, is
• 2:30:54
  Speaker 1: the ultimate outcome of mechanistic efficiency humanly desirable? Is the
• 2:30:58
  Speaker 1: art of efficiency itself self efficient? Clearly, there is no
• 2:31:03
  Speaker 1: place in this art for explosive working, and less than
• 2:31:06
  Speaker 1: no place for the exploder. Both are too spasmodic, orgastic, convulsive,
• 2:31:11
  Speaker 1: and either would burst into its ultimate primordial atoms the
• 2:31:15
  Speaker 1: most systematic efficiency organization ever invented. Yet almost equally clear
• 2:31:20
  Speaker 1: is it that without both of these joyous, unruly factors,
• 2:31:24
  Speaker 1: there would be no art dramatic, artistic, nor even productive
• 2:31:28
  Speaker 1: in which to be efficient. To practice the art of efficiency,
• 2:31:33
  Speaker 1: often overlooked, a real art of human efficiency, must of
• 2:31:37
  Speaker 1: course take cognisance of the inherent characteristics of the human elements,
• 2:31:42
  Speaker 1: and the most basic quality of life, certainly of life
• 2:31:45
  Speaker 1: exemplified in man. Is this very quality of explosiveness, explosiveness
• 2:31:50
  Speaker 1: which we all so commonly overlook and insistently ignore till
• 2:31:54
  Speaker 1: made to sit up and take notice by some extra
• 2:31:56
  Speaker 1: violent eruption in our own vicinity or in one's own self. Here,
• 2:32:01
  Speaker 1: then seems to be the fundamental difficulty. Efficiency requires control
• 2:32:05
  Speaker 1: in order to be efficient, but human beings, to be human,
• 2:32:09
  Speaker 1: must freely effervest, uncontrollably erupt or contract to mere efficiency
• 2:32:15
  Speaker 1: routine output producing machines. This raises the question at once,
• 2:32:20
  Speaker 1: to what end is the modern art of efficiency directed?
• 2:32:23
  Speaker 1: What is its consciously desired goal? Of course, we all
• 2:32:27
  Speaker 1: know the obvious and seemingly conclusive answer, to make better
• 2:32:30
  Speaker 1: men in order to increase their productiveness. This answer, it
• 2:32:35
  Speaker 1: seems to me, instead of being conclusive, only raises another
• 2:32:38
  Speaker 1: string of deeply vital questions. Is efficiency efficient? Can an
• 2:32:45
  Speaker 1: art of efficiency dealing with human elements incidentally, but with
• 2:32:49
  Speaker 1: products as its first consideration conceivably result in other than
• 2:32:53
  Speaker 1: ultimate disaster to the incidental elements? Can the finished human
• 2:32:57
  Speaker 1: output of our boasted art become more desirably human and
• 2:33:01
  Speaker 1: less machines than the inefficient human raw materials by efficiencies?
• 2:33:06
  Speaker 1: First law must not the primary object necessarily divert to itself.
• 2:33:10
  Speaker 1: All consideration dehumanize the human element into highly efficient mechanisms
• 2:33:14
  Speaker 1: for production is mechanistic efficiency. Humanly efficient is the art
• 2:33:20
  Speaker 1: of efficiency by any chance misdirected, misdirected towards products as
• 2:33:25
  Speaker 1: an end in itself, instead of towards the development of
• 2:33:28
  Speaker 1: vitally initiative human individuals, joyous workers, to whom product is
• 2:33:33
  Speaker 1: a by product wealth, and incident men who, for the
• 2:33:37
  Speaker 1: very joy of the working, work explosively. Fernwald Berkeley, November
• 2:33:44
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, end of Technocracy, Section five, Section six of
• 2:33:57
  Speaker 1: Technocracy by William Henry Smith. This LibriVox recording is in
• 2:34:02
  Speaker 1: the public domain, recorded by the Progressing America Project Technocracy
• 2:34:08
  Speaker 1: Section six Working explosively versus Working efficiently reprinted from Industrial Management,
• 2:34:16
  Speaker 1: May nineteen seventeen. Between working efficiently and working ineffectively, there
• 2:34:21
  Speaker 1: can be no question as to which is more desirable,
• 2:34:24
  Speaker 1: nor would I raise any such issue. Working explosively is
• 2:34:28
  Speaker 1: not an argument for inefficiency. Quite the contrary. The article,
• 2:34:33
  Speaker 1: as I intended it, and as I think it indicates
• 2:34:35
  Speaker 1: to the thoughtful reader, is merely a stop look, listen signal,
• 2:34:40
  Speaker 1: a hand raised, a suggestion to pause, pause, a moment
• 2:34:44
  Speaker 1: to consider whether we are intelligently directing our efforts towards
• 2:34:47
  Speaker 1: the end for which we seek, the goal for which
• 2:34:50
  Speaker 1: we strive, the reward for which we all struggle. My
• 2:34:54
  Speaker 1: own experience with life ranges through the whole gamut from
• 2:34:57
  Speaker 1: the coarsest forms of manual labor up to original constructive
• 2:35:00
  Speaker 1: mental work, both as employed and employer, at the grind
• 2:35:04
  Speaker 1: of working efficiently and the joy of working explosively. I
• 2:35:08
  Speaker 1: have associated on terms of equality with hoboes, with laborers,
• 2:35:12
  Speaker 1: with mechanics, and with captains of industry and finance. And
• 2:35:16
  Speaker 1: far from being a socialist, I am individualistic to the
• 2:35:20
  Speaker 1: nth degree. Thus my stop, look, listen warning is based
• 2:35:24
  Speaker 1: on facts and upon experience, not upon the fancies of
• 2:35:28
  Speaker 1: an overwrought imagination. Importance of worker based upon this varied experience,
• 2:35:36
  Speaker 1: The question I wish to raise involves the relative importance
• 2:35:39
  Speaker 1: of the worker or his work, human worth or the
• 2:35:42
  Speaker 1: products of human toil. Efficiency is no new invention. It
• 2:35:46
  Speaker 1: is as old as intelligence itself. None realize efficiency so
• 2:35:50
  Speaker 1: completely as the creative genius our Darwins faradays Edisons and Fords,
• 2:35:56
  Speaker 1: and none so completely practice and exemplify working explosively. Genius itself,
• 2:36:02
  Speaker 1: we are told, is the capability for taking infinite pains.
• 2:36:06
  Speaker 1: The art of efficiency proposes to substitute the shortcut of
• 2:36:09
  Speaker 1: imitating efficient mechanical tricks for the toilsome process of becoming
• 2:36:13
  Speaker 1: a mechanic. The explosive worker is a strenuous worker whose
• 2:36:17
  Speaker 1: intense preoccupation is with accomplishing perfectly that predetermined end in
• 2:36:22
  Speaker 1: which his interest is centered. He works with intelligent personal intention,
• 2:36:27
  Speaker 1: driven by the explosive energy of his purpose. If he
• 2:36:30
  Speaker 1: is driving rivets, he is driving them so that they
• 2:36:33
  Speaker 1: will accomplish the objective intended. Working explosively is human purpose
• 2:36:38
  Speaker 1: expressing itself through inanimate material. It is not the function
• 2:36:42
  Speaker 1: of an unhurried, efficient human machine. Striking so many well
• 2:36:45
  Speaker 1: directed blows in a definite time means personal energy. Working
• 2:36:52
  Speaker 1: explosively means personal energy strenuously applied to the accomplishment of
• 2:36:56
  Speaker 1: a personally desired result. Working explosively is not a matter
• 2:37:00
  Speaker 1: of habit, instinct, or routine. It involves the concentration of
• 2:37:05
  Speaker 1: all the faculties upon the work at hand to the
• 2:37:07
  Speaker 1: end of producing the result desired. It is subconscious impulse
• 2:37:12
  Speaker 1: raised to conscious effort of accomplishment. The efficiency expert joyously
• 2:37:17
  Speaker 1: fills his godlike function as he shuffles numbered human hands
• 2:37:20
  Speaker 1: and re arranges his human pegs into round or square holes,
• 2:37:25
  Speaker 1: so that hands and pegs shall contribute most efficiently to production.
• 2:37:29
  Speaker 1: But soulless pegs in automaton hands which will passively stay put,
• 2:37:34
  Speaker 1: are somewhat different factors from men and women with personal
• 2:37:37
  Speaker 1: likes and dislikes and smoldering passions, which must explode either
• 2:37:41
  Speaker 1: in work or war, hence industrial unrest and warfare. The
• 2:37:45
  Speaker 1: art of efficiency is merely a new name for an
• 2:37:48
  Speaker 1: old and very dangerous form or misdirection of effort. The
• 2:37:53
  Speaker 1: essential question is not how many more billion dollars worth
• 2:37:56
  Speaker 1: of product can be made or saved, but how many
• 2:37:59
  Speaker 1: more million human being being can express themselves in the
• 2:38:02
  Speaker 1: direction of personal accomplishment. And in my view, this latter
• 2:38:06
  Speaker 1: course is the more logical and the more likely one
• 2:38:09
  Speaker 1: to produce the former results indirectly through the interest of
• 2:38:13
  Speaker 1: the worker than directly through the efficient control of his
• 2:38:16
  Speaker 1: action outside worker. Working efficiently assumes control outside of the worker,
• 2:38:23
  Speaker 1: directing his actions and efforts toward a purpose in the
• 2:38:26
  Speaker 1: mind of the controller. Working explosively assumes control inside of
• 2:38:30
  Speaker 1: the worker, directing his action and energy towards an interesting outcome.
• 2:38:35
  Speaker 1: In a broad sense, one is autocracy and the other democracy.
• 2:38:40
  Speaker 1: Imperfectly but significantly. Germany and the United States represent these
• 2:38:44
  Speaker 1: two opposite ideals of human activity. The one represents efficient working,
• 2:38:49
  Speaker 1: the other a crude and embryonic form of working explosively.
• 2:38:54
  Speaker 1: One makes for mechanistic efficiency, the other for human liberty.
• 2:38:58
  Speaker 1: Hopefulness is a personal quality. It cannot exist in connection
• 2:39:02
  Speaker 1: with work in the outcome of which the worker is
• 2:39:04
  Speaker 1: not interested, and hopefulness is a fundamental factor in working explosively.
• 2:39:09
  Speaker 1: Working explosively and working efficiently express only imperfectly the underlying
• 2:39:14
  Speaker 1: idea in each In essence, they imply two opposite ideals.
• 2:39:20
  Speaker 1: In the former, emphasis is placed upon the worker. In
• 2:39:23
  Speaker 1: the latter, emphasis is placed upon the work. To my
• 2:39:27
  Speaker 1: way of thinking, the two points of view are essentially antithetical.
• 2:39:31
  Speaker 1: Of course, the only way of bringing about the welfare
• 2:39:34
  Speaker 1: of humankind is on the basis of right and justice.
• 2:39:38
  Speaker 1: But who shall determine these momentous spases? You or I,
• 2:39:43
  Speaker 1: the efficiency expert, or the pegs which he re arranges
• 2:39:46
  Speaker 1: into round or square holes, the employer or the employed
• 2:39:52
  Speaker 1: conflict exists. To close our eyes and pretend that there
• 2:39:56
  Speaker 1: is no conflict between employer and employed is futility itsself elf.
• 2:40:01
  Speaker 1: To say that the interest of these is mutual, when
• 2:40:03
  Speaker 1: the employer has all of the joy of working explosively
• 2:40:06
  Speaker 1: and the employed all the grind of working efficiently, is
• 2:40:10
  Speaker 1: equally futile. I gurd neither against employer nor employed. My
• 2:40:15
  Speaker 1: proposition is from the joy of the work, working explosively,
• 2:40:19
  Speaker 1: come better men, more worthy citizens, and greater commonweal. I
• 2:40:25
  Speaker 1: hold that a human being, human personality is of infinitely
• 2:40:28
  Speaker 1: more consequence than the product of the hands and brain.
• 2:40:32
  Speaker 1: That a true ultimate efficiency implies the liberation of man,
• 2:40:35
  Speaker 1: rather than the efficient control of his actions. That the
• 2:40:39
  Speaker 1: ultimate well being of all implies not the intelligent control
• 2:40:43
  Speaker 1: of passively efficient human elements, but the liberation of men
• 2:40:46
  Speaker 1: and women to purposeful joy of working explosively. Fernwald Berkeley,
• 2:40:52
  Speaker 1: March nineteen seventeen. Is the efficient control of men more
• 2:40:58
  Speaker 1: desirable than freedom? End of Technocracy, Section six. End of
• 2:41:06
  Speaker 1: Technocracy by William Henry Smith