Wilhelm A. Tietz 1995 Published in: Social Trends Newsletters, Aug. 1995, No. 138
The renaissance of science took place at the beginning of a European age of trade. It was born among a materialistic people whose business entrepreneurs perceived that science could be used by them for power and profit, and with its application they reinforced their exclusive claim to the Earth and the Universe, reflecting the tyrannical absolutism of antiquity. “Might is right. Justice is in the interest of the Strong” is borne upon the heraldic arms of all exploiters whether King, commissar, president, theocrat or business/financial entrepreneur, who, since time immemorial, has with consummate deception and propaganda created a coven of witches, heretics, communists, or dissidents to divert the attention of their sycophants and moronic followers from their sophisticated, calculated control and corruptions.
Prior to science there was no dependable relationship between cause and effect; all “knowledge” and all theory were colored by man’s prejudices, superstitions, and by his religions and their arrogant power and interpretations. All the provable knowledge we have by the exercise of reason has been given to us by science.
In the advancement of mechanics and engineering, in medicine, and in all the other fields of research, the honesty of scientific investigation toward objectives requires the abdication of bias and prejudice. With this commitment, in a few centuries man has traveled by accomplishment from horseback to the supersonic plane and space vehicles, from ignorance of the circulatory system to electronic microscopy and now to genetic engineering. Our boots are not merely seven leagues: they traverse the universe. Our vision encompasses light years. Our hearing, made ultra-sensitive, seeks the voices of the unknown. Meanwhile we lack understanding.
Man’s physical senses and productive abilities have been extended enormously, and the degree and speed of that achievement are the most common source of our contemporary vanity. Science has contracted time and space through electronic communication and space technology and, once again, as in the days of Inquisition, offers a new mental challenge to the uniqueness that is human life! We have confirmed legends, the finale of fairy tales. All the physical imagining of man when he was limited to the powers of his own body is being realized. But not yet has any good whatever comes of it — only the greatest evil man has yet endured.
The advancement of science hardly taxed the human species compared with the human labor expended in the erection of tombs, pyramids, walled cities, altars, cathedrals, monuments and other structures in the name of gods, generals and exploiters. And now the human troglodyte, in an attempt to escape from his own aberrations, constructs and seeks his shelter in a hole in the ground. So is the descending spiral of man’s imagination and self evaluation.
Material wealth supplanted wisdom as the entrepreneurs and their political collaborators subsidized and proselytized scientists to conform to the lowest common denominator — greed, and to unquestioning political loyalty enforced by “hit lists” that are the instrument of all closed societies, thereby compromising their integrity; and this represents the dilemma of the scientist who exemplifies knowledge with a dedication to Reason, and of a society purportedly dedicated to liberty and freedom.
As a social critic 40 years ago stated, “The electron tube, the locomotive, the internal combustion engine, the suspension bridge, vaccine and the glass giant of Palomar were turned over to the cruel bumpkin of the Middle Ages and his pal, the naked bushman leaping around his tribal fire.” (Witness today our political leaders, their generals, and the purchasers of their loyalties and services.)
No other attributes of man were, in any way, either extended or vitalized by science to justify the claim that we are civilized.
A few suits of clothes, some money in the bank, and a new kind of fear constitute the main differences between the average American today and the hairy men with clubs who accompanied Attila to the city of Rome. (During this century) the behavior of Attila’s boys was duplicated by millions upon millions of Nazi soldiers and laymen, in detail. They were Western men, scientific and Christian, like us. Each acted from an environment as modern as ours. Each had studied science and each had gone to church — each of millions — and yet each was able to embrace rape, murder and torture, larceny, mayhem and every other barbarous infamy the minute opportunity spelled itself in letters acceptable to him.
Rotterdam, Coventry, Nanking, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Stalingrad and Vietnam are monuments of man’s barbarism, his failure to seek enlightenment, — stumbling in the penumbra of political sophistries and evasive equivocations.
With the exception of Technocracy, there is no Reason visible today in a whole world implemented by reason. A world that at last has unlocked the secret of objects whose strength is as the strength of suns (accomplished only because of the pure part of a few minds) has become a world of muscle, carnivorous, with very little brain. A new beast of prey — Man, destroying, huge — who dimly blinks at the shape of extinction, sees the coming of hunger on a planet his own strength has scourged. A stupid character who has sought violence as the means of his arrogant perfection, and hypocritically to protect himself; who now sits in the gloom of a nonradiant mind, waiting for radiation to consume his tissues. The one animal that ever feared himself — as well he might.
The science-built world of engines and laboratories in which man lives has grown up apart from man himself. Science has not instructed man — it has only implemented him. Science, which has enjoyed its few centuries of light and truth, is locked up and made military. Liberty has been struck dead at its source, and the bony old man, the black-cloaked figure of death, has come to squat in every dooryard of the world.
Anthropus erectus, who can possess the living spark of the cosmos, the creative spirit, having discovered the scientific laws that govern the universe, wallows through rivers of blood and hatred and the rubble of disorder and discord. Cosmic is the vision of the world but also tragic. The world, which has struggled through chaos for eons, lacks the human spirit and will to create a humane society, the construction of a social order in harmony with Nature and noble purposes. To transvaluate all values, the disorder of unbridled competition, of cut-throat egotism and mass murder meets with doctrinal resistance.
Out of the cosmic power have come the organisms and cells that are life and man. It has assembled electrons and atoms and molecules that manifest a magnificence and infuse an order and law and sense of harmony into the universe that has a definite and glorious and marvelous intention with the human race. It is a power that has the intention of bringing about a more perfect unity that we can, and must establish! This hour! Through our thoughts, design and action.
The laws of nature, of the universe, encompass all humanity, one flesh, one blood. All that these laws ask is that humanity shall also live as one, though of singular diversity; to live in harmony with Nature in a unity of purpose and to practice justice. These laws are devoid of parochialism, theological or philosophical ponderings, and all irrelevant economic and political shibboleths. This creative force asks that now a new era begin.
In our aberrant society, everything in the intellectual, economic, political and moral realms is made subject to the criterion of success. As a result, science sees its focus changed from research or explanation to utility and adaptation, and there is no longer room for the integrity of thought; the critical method has now become retrogressive. Adaptation to the demands of a system that evaluates its success in terms of price, of fiscal profit, relegates humanity to the repressive ages preceding the Renaissance.
Justice no longer has the triumph of right as its exclusive objective, but rather the prompt execution of the commands of the State, whose elitist goals are a public swindle and an assassination of sanity.
And so man stands impoverished in mind, in body, in spirit; paralyzed, impotent, trembling as the meaning of existence remains as distant as the nearest star. Man, displaced from the Center of the Universe by science, in his programmed ignorance has become an unwitting collaborator in the denigration of Life, an acquiescent vassal in a feudal price system ruled by entrenched doctrinaires, egotists and elitists who have staked their exclusive claim to the Earth and the Universe. Never have so many over the millenniums given unquestioning recreant fealty to so few, to their lords and masters of the exchequer who in their arrogance proclaim themselves a chosen people.
Today in our Nation there now exists the narrow, intolerant spirit of Sparta, the concept of the individual sacrificed to the State, a State religion expounding a sham glory, spinning the old tangled web of intrigue, sorrow and suffering, heralding the tragedy of a thousand-thousand Hecubas. As a Nation we have not gained insight from the history of the Peloponnesian War to the present. The New Order of the Ages was not meant for a Greek tragedy — a contrived WarfareState, the last expedient of psychopaths where brutalizing fear holds sway. Once more we must put to use those same critical powers that have removed man from the Center of the Universe; we must dare to think, to see, to understand, to question and to challenge everything. The power is within us to give America creative significance never before achieved and bring about a renaissance, the splendor of man’s unalienable rights. It is time for a Declaration of Mental Emancipation.
The tragedies of humanity arise out of a lack of understanding of the evolution of culture and the development and purpose of social organization. Man is unique: he is the only living species that has culture.
Man has developed his own culture of tools, implements, ornaments, customs, institutions, beliefs, rituals, works of art, language, etc. It is divided into four categories: ideological, sociological, technological, and attitudinal.
The ideological sector is composed of beliefs depending upon symbolism or articulate speech for their origin and perpetuation. Under this category man created his gods and demons, heavens and hells, and their immortality; and by means of magic and ritual he sought to capture the illusion of power and control over things and events; in the process he seemed capable of accepting resurrection from the grave and levitation but incapable or unwilling to nurture life, liberty and freedom.
The sociological components are the customs, institutions, rules and patterns of interpersonal behavior. When these components are analyzed clearly, they indicate that the ruling elements of all societies today, as in the past, have special power and privilege primarily because they control the major means of coercion that enforce physical, economic and mental enslavement, and if unchallenged in their rule and purpose, they can end the long arduous evolutionary development of humankind in its search for individual and collective freedom and security.
Entered into culture is the technological sector. The use of tools was a cumulative, progressive process that, as an example, distinguishes the Age of Coal and Steel from the Middle Ages. In the human tool process, one generation may begin where the preceding generation left off.
The purpose and function of culture when applied creatively and with equity are to make life secure and enduring for the human species. Specifically to relate man to his environment — his terrestrial habitat and encompassing cosmos, and to relate man to man. The life process is carried on collectively as well as individually.
For the effective conduct of life and for the survival of the human species, in the technological adjustment to and control over the natural habitat, social organization is imperative. The life-sustaining, life-perpetuating processes are technological in a broad but valid sense; that is, they are carried on by material, mechanical, biophysical and biochemical means that require functional coordination.
Knowledge and understanding in technological terms improve, increase and extend the life-sustaining and enhancing processes. Witness the great effect wrought upon knowledge, belief and outlook — upon philosophy — by the telescope and microscope, by the advances in agriculture, by technological explorations in the physical, chemical, biological, geological, and meteorological and astronomical realms.
Social systems were and are forced to change by technological impact or retrogress and disintegrate.
As the technological structuring of experience changes, the philosophic expressions of experience face either evolutionary change and adjustment or chaos. For example, a set of beliefs, or certain attitudes, may oppose medical technology as applicable to the life-sustaining capabilities of the terrestrial environment, but it is the finite biotic potential of the environment that will be the final determinant of man’s existence. When non-technological cultural elements, be they social, ideational, or emotional, oppose or misapply technological progress, such as the programmed scarcity in agriculture, the contrived waste, obsolescence and restrictions in the industrial process, the voracious destruction of natural resources and the poisoning of the environment for profit, the economic discard of humanity, or the enforcement of the status quo through political obstruction and corruption and the psycopathy of war, then man’s culture will develop stresses that in the past have resulted in the disintegration of dynasties and empires.
To define and understand a social system, one must progress beyond the labels of democracy, fascism, communism and socialism and treat human societies in the same attitude with which a physicist regards nebulae, stars or atoms. In each instance material systems are involved, systems that may be studied and interpreted from the standpoint of structure and function. This was the procedure involved in Technocracy’s Analysis and Design.
The “why” of a society or social system in a state of civilization can be justified only in terms of sustaining, perpetuating and enhancing life by concerted cooperative action.
Proceeding to particulars: The drama of terrestrial evolution, of galaxies, of all living organisms and of the society of man, and in particular our technological culture, can best be described in terms of matter and energy, or more precisely in terms of energy. “The Laws expressing the relations between energy and matter are not solely of importance in pure science; they necessarily come first in order in the whole record of human experience, and they control in the last resort the rise and fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movement of commerce and industry, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of the race.” (Soddy, F.) Energy is the dynamic, living force that animates cultural systems and develops them to higher levels and forms.
We can compare cultures in terms of the amount of energy harnessed and expended per capita per year. An average adult man is capable of generating about one-tenth of one horsepower of energy. Culture could not, and for ages on end did not, develop beyond the limit thus set by the one-tenth horsepower, and mankind would have remained in a primitive condition indefinitely had not an increase of his available energy resources been made possible.
Prior to the first great cultural revolution, the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of civil society, the economic systems of primitive society placed human relations — human rights and human welfare — above property relations and rights; they were human, or humane, ethical, and personal systems. Based upon kinship everyone had free access to the resources of Nature. This made for equality and freedom since equality precludes the possibility of the rule or exploitation of one class by another. It was not ownership but the right to use that was significant. The economic organization of primitive society was virtually identical with its kinship organization but went beyond the nuclear and extended family to include widows, widowers and orphans. With the evolution of the family and kinship unit and the acquired ability and means to behave cooperatively in life-sustaining and life-preserving activities, the door was opened to virtually unlimited social evolution because of the almost limitless possibilities of the development, the expansion and extension, of cooperation. The basic rights of primitive society stand out in bold relief because the political character of a society, whether it is democratic, feudalistic, or communistic, is determined by the way in which man’s relations to the resources of Nature are organized.
As Leslie White, anthropologist, delineated in his book, The Evolution of Culture, with the advent of the Agricultural Revolution “the breakup of tribal society based upon kinship was attended with confusion and violence.” With the improvement in the art of agricultural technology and the development of field culture “there was a competition and struggle for natural resources — fertile lands especially — and for accumulation of wealth produced.” Out of this confusion, competition and struggle, political/military rulers and priesthoods arose to power, the one through physical force, the other by means of supernaturalism influence and control. Sheer possession of the land became the basis of power. This power was extended to the production of wealth and to control over wealth produced. The result was class division and class rule: a ruling class with a monopoly of control over natural resources and the means of production and a monopoly of military and political power; and a subordinate class whose lot was one of production, privation, and political impotence.
The transformation of social organization from tribal society to civil society in the Fertile Crescent of the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was made possible through the mechanisms of integration and control represented by the creation of the power structures of the state-church exemplified by Egypt and the mercantile oligarchies such as Sumeria and Babylonia. The economic systems of both engaged in the subordination of human rights and human welfare to property rights achieved by class status. In Mesopotamia religious temples also served as banks and the “contract” as a legal device for business transactions was invented by Sumerian temple officials. Land tenure unquestionably became the most important factor in the economic systems of the Bronze and Iron Age cultures and remained so with few exceptions until the Industrial and Fuel Revolution got underway in Western Europe after the discovery of America.
The disintegration of kinship societies and the structural erection of a civil society based upon class distinction and stratification, furthered under the auspices, assumed authority and power of the organized priest craft of the church-state and the commercial oligarchies, required special mechanisms to implement, enforce and perpetuate the power of the dominant class. Structure and function are closely related, and a social system based upon subordinate classes whose survival was subject to the power, capabilities and discriminatory practices of the dominant authority required the institution of social control to suppress any objections or rebellion.
The enforcement controls over individual and collective aspirations for liberty, freedom and equality were varied. Originally this position was maintained by the employment of military force but was not always successful as numerous uprisings of serfs and slaves made clear. And so the powers and controls of the priest craft and State were co-joined and elaborated upon, encompassing the mechanism of tribunals of self proclaimed infallibility issuing laws, commandments, interdictions and the loyalty oaths of antiquity. Thus came into being the ultimate control over humanity, the control and intimidation of the human mind that over the succeeding centuries and thousands of years to this day, and in this nation, were to witness judgment upon dissidents, freethinkers, including scientists, artists and educators as threats to the power structure with subsequent ostracizing, imprisonment and the issuance of death penalties.
The intent of control over the human mind was well expressed in the conception of education as a political process by Aristotle in his text, Politics: “Of all things that I have mentioned, that which contributes most to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to form of government…That education would be regulated by law and should be an affair of the state is not to be denied. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives.”
Over two thousand years later Napoleon Bonaparte expressed much the same view: “Of all political questions, that (of education) is perhaps the most important. There cannot be a firmly established political state unless there is a teaching body with definitely recognized principles.”
All the aforesaid is a brief outline of the origin of the Price System, of social control, of ownership, land tenure and monopolies created upon the exploitation of the human energy of serfs, slaves and peasants, an ownership of the man-hours of human energy that remains an integral part of our cultural system today. Imported into the New World, it became the foundation upon which our nation was created. It incorporated slavery, racial and sex discriminations, the serfdom of child labor and the denial of suffrage to approximately 75 percent of American citizens because of lack of property qualification. Ten United States presidents as the owners of slaves gave credence and/or support to this cultural system of class stratification and exploitation.
All the suffering, indignities and degradation that come from slavery, serfdom, prostitution, usury, dependence upon wages, unemployment, wars of conquest and expropriation, colonial rule and exploitation are inherent in the economic systems of civil society.
In commercial systems, anything may be bought or sold: political office, a judge’s honor, a citizen’s allegiance. There is no crime however heinous that men will not commit in obedience to their economic systems. What is one to say of social systems that condemn millions to lifelong poverty and want in the midst of plenty; and when one considers modern systems of mass destruction of human life, it would be rather difficult to make a convincing case for a higher evaluation of life in modern nations as compared with primitive tribes.
In the 20th century of civil society, the military/industrial complex of our Nation invaded the higher academic facilities in the development of the ultimate weapon of the ideological enforcement of inequality and class stratification, and that is complementary to the vindictive ecclesiastic philosophy of “fall and redemption.” It was an advent referred to in the farewell address of President Eisenhower as also heralding “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars” in our free universities. Further penetration of the nation’s universities that threatens the free exchange of ideas and the freedom of research is in the seeking of control over genetic engineering by the commercial oligarchy with the potential on “The Human Agenda” of the creation of an inhuman race of “cyborgs”, or as has been proposed in England that Parliament enact an “aristogenics” bill that would grant to the aristocracy of blood and mind certain eugenical privileges. In addition theologians of various persuasions, with political support, continue their interdiction of science and public education as a threat to their oracular realm of belief, superstitions, and grotesque gargoyles.
To be human is a learned process affected by response to the cultural environment and whether humans are used as tools of society or become prime movers in the sociocultural order. It is not an unexpected irony that our temples of knowledge are not erected upon Olympian heights dedicated to wisdom, human cooperation and human dignity, but have become adjuncts to the Augean stables of exploitation and competition, and in the process have become the walls of redoubt that protect the status quo of the recorded six thousand years of Princely privilege. The human mind is relatively an uncultured energy source, a mental cosmos, capable of entertaining abstract ideas of great creative import. With abstract ideas being used for destructive ideological purposes, unchallenged by those engaged in apostate scientific endeavors, one must ask the question, “knowledge for what?” if not for a rational society, especially when freedom is under attack in our own culture. As in Technocracy there must be vital social analysis combined with needed social action. With special power and privilege in control of the major means of coercion, there can be no assumption of the hypocritical priestly posture of neutrality. It is time to question who benefits from existing social arrangements. We must ask what functions our cultural system serves, for whom is it functional? Under no circumstances must the forces of society, as power politics and the military/industrial complex do today, compel individuals to deform or falsify themselves. When you are confronted with a manure shovel, do not sanitize it as the politics of war and exploitation do today. If science and society are to become humanistic, facts must be depicted accurately and decisions made and acted thereupon accordingly.
Is life to be one Vast Imbecility, framed and played as some vast vulgar jest, each of us a practicing deicide, a killer of wisdom and the betrayer of the Future?
In one man’s viewpoint, the Earth that was meant to be a garden of Eden to nourish the mind (not just to surfeit the body) through ignorance, greed, indifference and ruthless exploitation has become our cultural manure pile whose fluorescent sheen and odor are the decaying dreams and aspirations of the young, the anguish, fears and insecurity of the elders, the poverty and functional illiteracy of tens of millions, the frustration and stagnation of the unwanted unemployed, the poisoned waters and air, and the wasteland of hundreds of millions of acres of eroded and exploited life. Its engulfing enormity needs interring to enable the sanity of mind to grow and blossom and perfume our lives.
From the Elysian fields of education, science, engineering and technology came the inspiration that created our Nation. It was a moment in history that held the high hope that an age of knowledge, enlightenment and equality would prevail only to end with the proponents of reason and equality virulently attacked and betrayed. At the outset a society of pseudo aristae of power and wealth used knowledge as an instrument of power and wealth and continues to do so to this day. What knowledge does to a man in clarifying what he is and setting him free — that is the personal ideal of knowledge. What knowledge does to a civilization in revealing its human meaning and setting it free — that is the social ideal of knowledge. John Adams wrote, “…Science, arts, taste, sense and letters, are employed for the purpose of injustice as well as for virtue.” That was in 1790; today we have good reason to know that it is so as the schemed betrayal of the ideal of knowledge halos power with authority.
In the 20th century the power of governance of our highly complex, technical society through elective or appointive office has been given to those whose previous incompetence were in the unrelated activities of second rate movies, haberdashery and other mediocrities, and whose political blathering are written by medicine-show pitchmen for the functionally illiterate. It is a method of operation found very effective by the PAC shills and very lucrative by the pickpocket exploiters.
Today when human survival is at stake, it is imperative that we Americans be informed that a new kind of knowledge is needed to unravel the nature of the cohesive forces that maintain man in an integrated state physically, psychologically and socially, and that would enable him to relate creatively to his surroundings. Science must be assigned this task of serving human knowledge in bringing understanding, freedom and happiness rather than power, regimentation and technological development based upon the destructive and selfish tenets of exponential growth and special privilege. Emphasis on such a humanistic criteria points to the need for an enlargement and rededication of scientific enterprise. This endeavor will see the successful weaving of the intellectual and practical applications of science into the fabric of modern life.
Technocracy finds that the day when social operations on this Continent can be based on a system of “values” has passed, and that it is now necessary that there be applied in the social field the quantitative methods of physical science.