La psicologizzazione del discorso pubblico (2019)

di Federico Soldani – 10 Aprile 2021

[Questo breve scritto del dicembre 2019 circolato tra diversi amici dell’autore nel 2019 per avere un parere, viene pubblicato qui per la prima volta oltre un anno dopo nell’aprile 2021.

Era inteso come riflessione per una discussione sul tema del rapporto tra psichiatria e societa’ e in particolare sul ruolo della psicologizzazione dilagante nel discorso pubblico. Molti temi connessi erano da me stati gia’ presentati e discussi nell’estate del 2019 a Londra]

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La psicologizzazione del discorso pubblico e’ una delle strategie principali di lungo periodo che servono a de-politicizzare e de-sovranizzare il cittadino elettore.

Uno degli aspetti e’ quello addirittura psichiatrizzante, si pensi solo a Trump o alla bambina svedese divenuta persona dell’anno per la rivista Time e a come i cittadini globali stiano imparando il linguaggio delle diagnosi piu’ o meno formali tramite questi personaggi pubblici.

Questa strategia coinvolge paesi diversi quali Stati Uniti e Regno Unito, o paesi del Commonweath britannico quali la Nuova Zelanda, ma anche paesi come la Cina in cui il linguaggio della psicologia viene insegnato alla popolazione tramite spettacoli teatrali.

Questa psicologizzazione e’ stata teorizzata per esempio in documenti quali “Salute Mentale e Cittadinanza Mondiale” durante il primo congresso internazionale per la salute mentale (Londra 1948), nel quale si prefigurava un cittadino del mondo inteso in senso non politico.

Passare a una fase pienamente post-democratica e post-politica con il consenso dei cittadini stessi che cosi’ rinuncerebbero anche al potere politico protetto dalle costituzioni richede una lunga fase preparatoria di psicologizzazione e soggettivizzazione.

Nell’ambito della soggettivita’ infatti, perdendosi il principio della oggettivita’ a cui puo’ appellarsi chiunque (es. “il Re e’ nudo”) si genera una cultura in cui l’unico principio valido resta quello gerarchico (es. solo l’impressione di un bambino qualunque del popolo). Tra l’impressione del piu’ basso in grado e quella del piu’ alto in grado vince strutturalmente la seconda.

La psicologizzazione svolge diverse funzioni tra cui soggettivizzare qualsiasi tema, ma anche individualizzare e piu’ in generale interiorizzare qualsiasi considerazione, anche pubblica che cosi’ diventa una “proiezione” in senso psicoanalitico (lo si attribuisce alla realta’ perche’ e’ prima di tutto nella nostra testa) invece che un elemento di realta’ (“il Re e’ nudo”) al quale ci si appella.

Si pensi anche all’esplosione nei venti anni passati delle neuro-versioni di qualsiasi disciplina, dalla neuro-economia fino addirittura alla neuro-teologia, etc.

In ambito economico il discorso su benessere e felicita’ rientra a pieno nella strategia soggettivizzante. Si pensi solo a economisti come Stiglitz o a iniziative come quella della neozelandese premier Ardern (dal PIL / GDP alla felicita’).

L’oggettivita’ verrebbe cosi’ lasciata, in un discorso di tipo asimmetrico, ai soli esperti e alle macchine che misurano, monitorano e calcolano. Non al cittadino ormai ridotto a consumatore che fornisce impressioni soggettive sui prodotti e servizi attraverso ratings di svariato tipo. Cittadino e istituzioni democratiche rappresentative presentate sempre piu’ spesso nel discorso pubblico, sia dai media tradizionali e sia da quelli digitali, come un idiota con centinaia di distorsioni/bias cognitive/i, facilmente manipolabile e dalle percezioni distorte e addirittura allucinate.

Il cittadino delle costituzioni sempre di piu’ viene rappresentato come un cervello primitivo che si e’ sviluppato durante l’evoluzione nella foresta e quindi sarebbe del tutto inadatto e infatti pericoloso in un mondo globalizzato ormai molto ampio e in gran parte lontano dall’esperienza diretta di ciascuno. Un mondo estremamente complesso e ricco di pericoli esistenziali quali il nucleare e il cambiamento climatico.

Cosi’ come nel mondo digitale tutto viene ormai “votato” tramite “like” o “stelle” o altri sistemi legati alla sfera soggettiva, la de-sovranizzazione si presenta come opportunita’ per contare di piu’ e per potersi esprimere pienamente in una realta’ virtuale fatta di icone colorate e divertenti. Una realta’ virtuale sempre piu’ cooptativa e invitante.

Fa parte del suddetto contesto anche il cosiddetto movimento per il rinascimento psichedelico che da oltreoceano si sta sviluppando come promozione attiva di sostanze allucinogene per gli scopi piu’ diversi, vuoi terapeutici, vuoi preventivi o puramente ricreativi o addirittura per diventare piu’ creativi ed avere una vita piu’ piena. La sub-cultura soprattutto californiana detta cyber-psichedelica si propone di cambiare la percezione della realta’ sia chimicamente che digitalmente; elemento preparatorio a una fase rivoluzionaria globale.

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /14 (2021)

“The Advent of Technocracy”

by Federico Soldani – 6th Apr 2021

The VII and last chapter is entitled “The Advent of Technocracy”. Harold Loeb’s post-capitalist and technocratic utopia ends with a chapter including some of the practical steps to take in order for a revolution to happen in capitalist America along the same lines of the Russian and then Bolshevik revolutions (bold added for emphasis as in all of the articles in this series).

A transformation described as an “advent” in quasi messianic terms but also in political and practical revolutionary terms:

“Since revolution should neither be desired nor expected now, and since the transformation from capitalism to technocracy is so drastic that certain of its stages will certainly be considered to be of a revolutionary nature, it may be asked what preliminary steps should be taken in order to prepare for the crucial moments.”

Loeb wrote: “History tells us how successive cultures, starting from assumptions which had come in the particular time and place to be accepted, have, like organisms, unfolded until a climax was reached – a climax marked by a burst of energy – and then by slow or rapid stages disintegrated. The final stage, in which the basic assumptions have lost their validity and intellectual questionings have replaced the fervor of a generally accepted faith, is known as decadence. It is marked by the unhappiness permeating the various social strata, by the poverty of aesthetic and other creations, by a substitution of material for spiritual values, and by a diminution of energy leading sooner or later to national disaster.

European civilizations may have reached this stage. The faith, bourgeois, Christian, capitalistic, sill strong during the nineteenth century, has been crumbling so rapidly of late that even the man in the street is often cynical. Only two branches of European culture seem still to have some strength; Russia by developing a new faith, Communism, has acquired new vigor; the United States by emphasizing one phase of the old faith, the capitalistic, has also created a new faith which despite recent material setbacks may be too vital to permit of the classification of its devotees by the term “decadent.”

Possibly the explanation of the youthfulness of these two branches lies in their history. Neither belongs to the main trunk of European culture. Both stemmed from it long after the culture’s inception and developed more or less independently of the parent tree. Consequently their vigor and optimism does not necessarily invalidate the pessimistic conclusion which Spengler reached by tracing the life curves of human cultures.

Nevertheless, the senile disease attacking Western civilization spares no branch. Russia, as has been suggested, by a radical operation seems to have arrested its own decay. The United States, favoring an opposite solution – palliatives rather than the surgeon’s knife – has pushed the economic phase of the Western culture to its farthest extreme and has made a faith out of it. Perhaps, as a consequence, the United States finds itself today psychologically vigorous and physiologically, if one may continue the metaphor.

Probably no other territory with the exception of outlying Australia is suffering so acute a paralysis of its physical system. Demoralized by its anomalous condition – spiritual health and material cramps – some Americans have sunk into a blue funk; others, their faith in capitalism unimpaired, deny the illness like good Christian Scientists although evidence of its ravages assail them on every hand. In a little while, they repeat, prosperity will return. It always has. It always will.

But the disease is organic and cannot be exorcised by faith.”

~~~

The extended and explicit use of medical, even surgical, as well as psychological and spiritual metaphors in a political and revolutionary discourse, including denialism of illness, is truly impressive especially seen today as we are witnessing the widespread mass use of “psyspeak” or “ideopathological lexicon” – also including labels of political phobias, paranoia, and denialism – for the first time in history.

In the summer of 2019, well before the CoViD-19 pandemic, I proposed use of the terms “ideopathological lexicon” – from ‘ideological’ and ‘pathological’ – or in short “psyspeak” to mean psychologized as well as medicalized lexicon used outside of the clinical context especially when applied to the wider societal and political world.

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“This fact, however” – Loeb continued – “gives the United States an advantage denied those nations which are sick in spirit as well as body. The trouble in the United States is material, that due to the inability of the producers of its commodities to distribute their products. If this problem were solved, the nation would undoubtedly once more leap forward, its communities bubbling with zest although somewhat lacking in taste, as is the way of young cultures.

If a means could be found to attack the simple engineering problem of production and distribution scientifically, a solution could easily be worked out – even though the territory stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific […].

However, in all probability, a solution will not be reached by such logical means. Too few men understand the difference between knowledge, acquired and tested by the scientific method, and inherited prejudices. The great majority pay more respect to the latter. Such Mystic Money tenets as “enterprise must be fostered by the profit incentive,” “competitive business is the most efficient system for producing goods,” “private property is the foundation of our free institutions,” “American democracy guarantees freedom and justice and is the best possible variety of government,” “merit is always rewarded in the end,” “Socialism, which redistributes wealth in equal shares, would result eventually, in everyone being back where he started from, the rich rich, the poor again poor.” (Thought this assertion has been listened to repeatedly, it is not believed that the speakers believed their words.) And so forth, as well as a whole series of tacit beliefs such as “money is the measure of success,” which are acted upon thought not really credited.

Several of these tenets, it may be noticed, have been undermined of late. Nevertheless, most Americans propound them with religious fervor and would not consider putting them to the test of trial-and-error experimentation. The few whose faith in the scientific method is greater than their faith in current tenets have unfortunately no power.

Such men never, for obvious reasons, gain political power, seldom earn big money – other goals seem to them more important – and only rarely, because of their fewness, inherit money or social prestige. Consequently they cannot hope to convert the nation by the weight of their influence to the desirability of a scientific examination of our economic system and its revision along lines approved by the intellect.

Therefore fundamental social changes must come from the great majority whose intellectual processes are elementary, and not from the small minority whose intellects function even on familiar ground. Thus it has always been when social groups too large for one great personality to sway are concerned. Thus the inauguration of technocracy depends on outside forces rather than on leadership.

Probably the one event capable of instigating so fundamental a change would be a major collapse. Only if the present producing and distributing apparatus should definitely break down, only if hunger and cold should spur the minds of a majority of the nation into unaccustomed activity, could a revolution conflicting with nearly every current belief gain momentum.“

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“Eventually, by imperceptible steps, changes of ideology are effected. Thus early capitalism turned into late capitalism and the Mysticism of Money shook “thrift” from its gallery of virtues and hung “push” in its place. […] Society is transformed by the accumulation of slight changes as well as by drastic mutations. Fundamental transformations of social life are accomplished by a combination of these two processes, the revolutionary and the evolutionary. Sometimes one process predominates, sometimes the other.

In France the eighteen-century political transformation was revolutionary in character although preparatory steps had been taken before the seventeen nineties. On the other hand England accomplished its similar political transformation so gradually, by a series of crises so little upsetting, that its transformation had an evolutionary character. Technocracy may possibly be installed by a combination of both processes, and one cannot foretell which process will predominate, will give its character to the transformation.

The evolutionary process is to be preferred. This is not quite so self-evident as it seems. Revolution, in that it accomplishes in months what may otherwise take years or decades, has its advantages. Those obsessed by injustices and the inefficiencies of the present order are likely to favor the more drastic method. […]

In order to chose between revolution and evolution, other factors must be weighed. It would seem that the problem is one of engineering. At any rate emotion has little place in the discussion.

Evolution should be favored because the machinery of capitalism, the tools and the plants for making the tools, are so intricate, so interdependent, and so important in any scheme of life conceivable with present populations, that their destruction, or even their injury in the passions of a revolutionary struggle, would inflict intense suffering. Centers such as New York are at the mercy of transportation. Even a temporary tie-up would cause starvation and disease. Serious effects would result from damage even to the utilities or the water system. Furthermore, when order had been restored after a struggle, it would be difficult getting the machinery running again because of the dispersal of the human personnel. Skilled, specialized work is the crucial factor in production. Russia has had to pay heavily for the demoralization of its technical staff. The United States, in case of a like cataclysm, would find a restoration of its more delicate machinery even more difficult. In the United States any new order would be imperiled by revolution and the consequent industrial disorganization. So long as the unavoidable suffering lasted, blame for it would be attributed to the new order rather than to the real cause, the revolutionary process.

Aslo, revolutions are expensive biologically. Mob passions have a way of choosing exceptional individuals for destruction. Both France and Russia sacrificed important human strains in their blood orgies. Mobs hate those who do not share their lusts. Only the highest type of men are capable to resisting mob contagion. Consequently the human loss, though numerically seldom higher than the industrial mortality of an average year, or of a minor war, is actually more costly. […]

The revolutionary process tends to favor the average undistinguished gregarious individual and to discriminate against all conspicuous human specimens. Consequently revolution would seem, from the point of view of biology, to be seriously detrimental to the racial strain.

Furthermore, anti-social passions, suppressed in normal times, are released by disorder and quickly become habitual. Later, when discipline and patience are needed, these passions will not be stilled but continue to interrupt the unsteady early rhythm of the new system long after their minor usefulness as destructive agents has been outlived. These and other similar considerations more than balance the advantage of speed and absoluteness which the revolutionary process insures.

Lastly, America is not ready for a revolution. If the advent of technocracy depended on the sudden forceful overturn of American institutions, the citizens of the United States would have to get used to hunger and cold even while foodstuffs were rotting on the sidings and fuel was clogging the railways. Revolution, as Trotsky puts it, can only occur when the class in power has outlived its usefulness and thereby become rotten. In America, the class in power may be criticized for fatuity and surely for pigheadedness, but not for rottenness. The American system so functions that the serried ranks of the class in power are continuously reinforced by strong, ambitious, energetic recruits from all the nation. Few ruling classes possess the health of the American moneyed aristocracy. A cursory visit to any fashionable college demonstrates the anomaly of a body of men combining strength of character and intellectual feebleness. The recitation rooms will be cluttered with splendid forceful physical specimens, healthy, tall, and vital. One of them rises to speak. Suddenly the auditor realizes that the mind of a child is fumbling behind the self-confident facade. However, it is just because the average student’s thinking apparatus is elementary and his ideas stereotyped and static, that revolutionary ardors find no soil in which to germinate. Instead marvelous fables about “things as they are” usually replace the worn-out Santa Claus legend at the approach of adolescence.

Thus revolution in America should neither be desired nor expected now. Even though the present crisis doubles in intensity, the nation is so illy prepared, mentally at any rate, for instituting a more efficient system that the fate of the new order would probably be imperiled by a premature move. If economic distress forced disorder at the present time, sentiment might smother reason, and passion extinguish whatever vision prevailed regarding ultimate ends. Yet it is believed that technocracy is inevitable.

The first machines, utilizing stored power, gradually compelled the formation of the social system, known as early capitalism, with its degradation of labor and is compensatory, biologically expensive sentimentality, known as humanitarianism.

The more efficient, though still batch process, machinery of the present day reduces the amount of spirit-breaking labor and lowers the relative income of labor. It has also gradually forced the adoption of another idea system which calls spending a virtue and dreams of an ideal state in which everybody is kept so busy playing with gadgets that the disturbing search for real values is relegated to the halt and the blind. […]

Heaven given over, before labor-saving machinery, to unadulterated leisure, golden harps, and honeyed gutters; Heaven, recently brought down on earth, owing to the needs of late capitalism, and pictured as a wonderfully equipped nursery, in which the toys are profuse and infinitely varied, is again being revised. It is in this sense that technocracy is inevitable. Technological processes will compel a social system congenial to their operation or they will ruin the state.

The society suggested in the previous pages is merely a tentative sketch of the new heaven or ideal state. By following the direction social evolution would be forced to take when technological processes became general, its main features were gradually revealed.

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Loeb then moved on, at the very end of his utopia, to describe the preliminary steps for the revolutionary change in America:

“(a) A few people should organize themselves for the purpose of preparing for the coming crises and, by their awareness of the goal, prevent as many false starts in wrong directions as is in their power.

(b) The Sherman Anti-Trust Act should be repealed. Since the “money powers” favor its repeal, since the common man is indifferent to its fate, and since only reactionary liberals can be counted on to rally actively to its support, the repeal of the act should not be hard to accomplish. With the anti-trust act out of the way, the merging of industries could proceed at an increasingly rapid rate.

(c) The major corporation in each industry should be encouraged to gobble up its competitors. Little active encouragement is needed. The successive economic crises demand the formation of monopolies in order to make possible the limitation of production. Monopolies in several industries would have already been organized were it not for the government prohibition.

(d) The profit of monopolies should be limited. […] With all, or even many, industries on a controlled, monopolistic basis, this technically honest and transparently simple method of evading profit limitation would be largely prevented.

(e) Technological economies should be handed on either to the worker or to the consumer, different names for what eventually will be the same thing. This measure also imposes itself. […] As a result the standard of living and the average of intelligence would tend to rise and the birth rate to fall. Thus technocracy would be brought appreciably nearer.

(f) The next step is the first to possess an unprecedented and revolutionary character. Steps a, b, c, d, and e, once taken, we have a society in which profits are limited and price is regulated in the public interest. The public interest however is a vague term. Regulation in its name will not work out satisfactorily.

However, the present ingenious and nonsensical system of setting the price by allowing two opposing forces, the buyers and the sellers, to engage in a free-for-all, has, after steps a, b, c, d, and e, been definitely discarded. As a result, capital has been shorn of its function though the realization of this may not immediately percolate through the group consciousness.”

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“Today capital is the instrument with which promoting and underwriting function. When profits are both limited and assured, which should be the case if the producing units were monopolies and not competitors, underwriting will be automatic just as it is even now for stable governments. […] Capital fulfils a real service only when profits are problematical. […] If capital should be shorn of underwriting function by limiting and assuring profits, the concept of money, that is to say, the notion that gold and paper or metal certificates supposedly entitling the holder to gold, are wealth – a concept undermined, even among the people, during the late war and its aftermath, because every government was forced to spend money which did not exist if the gold basis had been strictly adhered to – this concept would suffer a rapid disintegration. Gold is not wealth. Gold is a rare commodity, once useful to most communities as a medium of exchange. […]

What would happen to the high cost producers? If they were forced to shut down, unemployment and a shortage of goods would result. Thus, this last stage of capitalism would, in its working, be only slightly superior to the present stage. However, this last stage would possess one advantage. With industries integrated and prices fixed, even the untrained mind could perceive the source of the trouble. Once the play of supply and demand had been discarded as the price fixer, there would be no turning back. A scientific cost accounting would have to be devised; production would have to be governed by consumptive needs and not by the lure of profit; consumption would have to be based on need and not on ability to buy. […]

We have already at hand, as was suggested in an early chapter, a means of measuring the real cost of a commodity; a measure of energy called the erg, and its multiples. […] Dollar costs vary continuously since prices vary continuously in the open markets. Erg costs are absolutes, changing only when raw materials become more difficult to extract because of approaching exhaustion, or more easy because of new supplies becoming available or when technological improvements devise economies in the utilization of human or natural energy. […]

Capital is not capital when shorn of its reproductive power, shorn of its underwriting function. An era will have terminated.

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The other steps toward technocracy follow inevitably though not instantaneously. Since x-ergs are usable but not hoardable, since wealth, the capacity to produce, is wealth only when exerted, wealth (it would soon be realized) can be used but not possessed.

When such concepts are generally recognized, the conclusion will be inescapable that commodities should be distributed equably for service. A community convinced of this principle wold become a technocracy since industrial planning, the castration of political government, and the decentralization of social life would ensue, sooner or later, as a result of putting these convictions into actual living measures.

As this evolution proceeded, certain individuals will lose out, but neither so many individuals as the present anarchic system inconveniences nor such valuable ones. Inheritors of capital who have ceased rendering service, those whom Veblen dubbed the “kept” classes, would be forced to render service. But the spectacle of horse and ball faddists, sideboard females, and sex appeal sirens scurrying around in some useful pursuit for some sixteen hours a week might be amusing. Anyway it might be cheaper, in energy terms, to let such individuals continue to pursue their habitual vocations for the duration of their natural lives. There are not so many of them.

As for power magnates, these find their solace in wielding power, not in consuming inordinate quantities of goods. In America, at least, many of them are frugal. […] And the new purpose, efficient production, would seem at least as interesting, and perhaps as exciting, as their present purpose, private gain.

It is admitted that this progression from capitalism to technocracy is too logical to be probable. Since the evolution of man’s social institutions is forced by circumstances and not directed by reason, logical progress is practically unknown. Technocracy will surely come, if Western society is not doomed to disappear, but not by a series of steps so perfectly gradated.

To hitch which would prevent the orderly approach to the new order would probably arise in step (c). To permit the major corporations to gobble up its competitors, even against their will, requires a law like that which permits railroads (an enterprise of high importance for the Loeb family, ed.) to acquire land for their right of way. Such law, a law permitting individuals and corporations to be forced our of their chosen pursuits, outrages the dearest convictions current today. It is a denial of economic freedom, and the benefits of capitalism are all credited to this freedom. It may prove impossible to pass such a law.”

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“When business falters and stumbles, too many individuals are ruined by factors beyond their control, too large a class is thrown without warning into abject destitution, for the present faith in the present order to remain unimpaired. And once the faith is undermined, once the belief that economic suffering, like physical suffering, is divinely inflicted, is discredited, discontent will turn to violence and society will lose its equilibrium.

Then if technocracy is clearly envisioned by even a few, and some steps have been taken to reduce the extent of the change, America may accomplish the miracle of changing its mores and its faith in a moment of tension without incurring the awful price, the infinite suffering, and the appalling waste, which Russia was forced to pay.

In the confusion and misery resulting from a stoppage of the industrial round, it is possible that power would be acquired by a group with sufficient vision to cut through the maze of traditional processes and institute a technique of economic production closer to the eventual goal. Doubtless a quota of prejudices and passions would hamper the realization of a strictly logical system, but such wasteful appendages are usually sloughed off when the real objects of a revolution become apparent.

Thus it has been in Russia. The original cry for the rule of the proletariat has gradually changed to the slogan of efficient production for the benefit of the social body. An outburst against injustice has been deflected into an energy burst against intolerable living conditions. Valuable ideals, by necessity, have been compromised on the way. But the transformation should be much easier in America and the projected ideal kept more steadily in sight.

In Russia not only has a new economic system had to be devised, but the machinery of modern industry had to extemporized. In America the most efficient productive machinery ever installed is ready to operate at the word of command. The capitalists cannot give the command. Sabotage is their order. Their spokesman, the government, advises a destruction of one third of the cotton crop and a reduced acreage of wheat. Just as if everyone in the land had more food than he could eat, more clothes than he could wear.

There is another reason why America may not have to pass through an orgy of violence and waste. Judging from historical analogies, the first break with an old order is always the most difficult, the most destructive. Later breaks in other localities have been of a less drastic nature. Probably a precursor is of great advantage in that many individuals are prepared thereby for what is coming.

The French Revolution, for example, received so much publicity in England that the political transformation there, when it finally arrived, was not even considered revolutionary. Possibly the publicity now being given the Soviet Five-Year Plan is preparing the ground in America for such efficient preparatory measures that the illness of late capitalism may be curbed without the necessity of blood-letting.

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It would seem that the main obstacle hindering the advent of technocracy is the present faith, the Mysticism of Money. Americans, with few exceptions, believe its main tenet, that progress is dependent on an untrammeled economic field. They assume that every citizen with initiative may engage in business, in the profit pursuit. Though it has been recognized that many economic territories are posted against trespassing, the faith in the benefits, even in the necessity of economic freedom; in the sterility, even the unworkability of planned, restricted enterprise, is as yet unscathed.

The old faith persists despite the fact that William James (considered the father of American psychology, ed.), among others, pointed out some years ago that private enterprise, freely operating, had improved only slightly on the methods of housing in vogue before the industrial era, while planned enterprise directed by the state had, during the same length of time, remolded several times the offensive and defensive technique of warfare. The technique of wholesale murder advances ruthlessly and continuously, while the technique of decent living lies dormant for long stretches and then advances by inches, piecemeal, harassed by the impediments inherent in the property system. The government can afford to scrap outmoded equipment, private enterprise often cannot. Even under the capitalistic system of industry and the democratic system of government, it is doubtful if private enterprise is a more efficient medium of material progress than public enterprise.

It may well be that the benefits of capitalism are due in the main to the scientific method of research, evolved independently of capitalism; and not to the sanctification of greed, inherent in capitalism. And not one, certainly not the technologist, is advising the relegation of the scientific method. On the contrary, technocracy raises to a pinnacle this rigorous system for acquiring knowledge and would try to extend its application beyond its present scope.

Humanity has done amazingly well in its endeavor to understand the relationships, the how, of physical forces. It well be that it will prove equally successful in the future when it turns from the contemplation of dead things to things that are becoming, to things that are alive. It may be that here, too, humanity will develop a technique of research capable of infinite extension.

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It has been suggested that technocracy is inevitable. […] Technocracy may be inevitable and yet Herculean efforts may be needed to push civilization over the ridge where it will soon be hanging, hesitant whether to advance toward a new life-creating valley, or whether to fall back upon itself as every civilization in the past, when it attained a height comparable to ours, has done. Judging from analogy, Western civilization, as Spengler has attempted to demonstrate, is doomed to decline. Maglopolitanism has always been the last stage. One can forward only to decadence, and the fruits, sometimes tasty, of decadence.

Analogy, however, may prove a fallacious guide. A new factor has to be considered which may alter the curve. Our system of acquiring knowledge by controlled experiments is an instrument no former civilization possessed. If it could be allowed to function on fundamental economic problems and if the resulting knowledge could be applied, the direction of society’s evolution might well be altered at the nadir of the curve and the process of disintegration brought under control. […]

Not a single idea in the past pages was original. The handling of the various notions could have been carried though more effectively by many other minds. In a recent collection of the beliefs of some fifteen philosophers and thinkers, much of technocracy is implicit. In the work of Thorstein Veblen, all of technocracy is implicit. By saying technocracy is inevitable I mean, then, that an unprejudiced examination of the capitalistic system compels an open mind to formulate a new system for providing man with the goods necessary for life on earth. […]

If technocracy is inevitable in this sense, and not retrogression and decay, book will follow book, mind will succeed mind, until in a short time, that active minute fraction of humanity which blazes the path for the great inert body will preoccupy itself with directing the practical and theoretical phases of the revolution in living which has ben under way ever since the last years of the late century.”

(14 – fourteenth of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13)

[In the photo the cover of Vol. 2 No. 3, June 1922 of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts – published in Rome – established and directed by Harold Loeb.

According to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website it was “a modernist magazine founded by Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg and published from November 1921 to January 1924. Loeb was the son of two powerful New York families—the Guggenheims on his mother’s side (cousin to Peggy Guggenheim) and the Loebs on his father’s side. Loeb came from a rather affluent background, which allowed him to produce a magazine that was instrumental in introducing Americans to European avant-garde.”

Associate Editor of Broom at the time when the magazine was established in Rome in 1921 – main office was in Trinita’ dei Monti, 18 – was Giuseppe Prezzolini. “Initially, the magazine was printed in Europe, first in Rome and then in Berlin, with the intention of bringing new, avant-garde art back to the U.S.”]

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /13 (2021)

“ By art … I mean the development of those faculties by which man adapts himself to his environment”

by Federico Soldani – 5th Apr 2021

The chapter about ‘Art’ – discussed in the previous four articles in this series – of ‘Life in a Technocracy’, Harold Loeb’s post-capitalist and technocratic utopia, was about topics way beyond any usual understanding of art and it largely addressed psychological issues in relation to the political dimension.

In a technocracy, a utopian system of production, government and life largely inspired by the Soviet communist experiment and which imagined to substitute largely human labor with mechanical or automated production and distribution, “the energy surplus” – Loeb wrote – diverted from the problems that now take it up, would surely turn eventually toward discovering new ways of life.”

~~~

“Since the prescribed duties would fill but a small portion of time and the balance would be at the disposal of the individual, everyone would be in the favored position of the present leisure class. Undoubtedly as leisure and means gradually became available, most people would attempt to mimic the escape stratagems of the contemporary rich man. Many of these devices are ludicrously pathetic. They do not even satisfy the rich, who enjoy a titillation of vanity due to their being somewhat conspicuous. Convinced eventually of failure, having learned that fox chasing, parlor lion snaring, competitive games, fast motion, gossip, drink, and so forth give but a limited satisfaction to the mentally mature, a percentage of the more advanced communities would doubtless turn to quacks. Men with assurance would rapidly gain a following somewhere. Religious fanatics, psychoanalysts, nudity specialists, sexual mystics, magicians, campfire girls, musical bugs, rhythmic dancers, as well as the disciples of Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Mrs. Eddy, and the other time-honored teachers would all have their chance, but with a difference.

Under capitalism society’s trend is toward greater and greater centralization owing to the exigencies of business. In a technocracy, the compulsion toward national conformity in matters outside the scope of the technological products and processes would not exist.”

About capitalism, Loeb added: “Not only is the effect of this injurious from the point of view of eugenics, but it tends to merge the nation’s talent into a vast conglomerate mass, where individual differences are ironed out and the germs of potential genius suffocated. New York stimulates certain talents to full realization […] great centers are excellent for bringing out the genius of those individuals whose expressions happen to be fashionable, but they are death for most of those others whose hope was to force the acceptance of their peculiar vision by the strength of their personalities.”

~~~

“In a generation or two, when the toys of the rich have begun to bore and the pretension of the quacks have been exploded, society, confident in its security, and humble in its knowledge that the good life is not to be attained by satisfying material needs, would gradually, inevitably, and with cumulative intensity, turn to art.

By art I do not mean shadowy studios crowded with broken statues, heavy draperies, and crossed legs, or even bright studios filled with experiments in combining oddly colored shapes and empty highball glasses. I mean the development of those faculties by which man adapts himself to his environment.

Wild animals adapt themselves to their environment by instinct; their natures are such that they automatically fit into their environment. The external world seems made for them, they for the world. This does not preclude calamity since tragedy is part of the texture of life. It does not preclude shame, boredom, even dullness, except when the animal is made for a dull life and exults in it.

Domestic animals are not so well adapted to life. Man, for his own ends, frustrates their innate fitness. Thus throughbred horses and pekinese dogs, though beautiful and equipped for special functions, have lost some of the zest for life innate in their ancestors. Neglected by man, they would either revert to their original forms or perish.

Man is a domestic animal, self-domesticated, but thoroughly domesticated. He has thereby acquired, in the case of certain individuals, a beauty unattainable by natural processes, and a capacity for expression also alien to the natural state. He has sacrificed, especially among the tribes called civilized, that fitness for life which graces the existence of all wild things. Consequently he suffers innumerable frustrations.

The natural outlets for his energy are stopped. The goals, longed for instinctively, are unsatisfying when attained. He has invented melancholy, boredom, shame, a sense of inferiority, and many other moods which pretty well cancel the good things domestication procures. To persuade him to expend consecutive energy, which seems to be necessarily for health, physical and mental prods or promises have to be used just as if he were a donkey.

By domestication man has lost to a considerable extent that sense of imminent wonder, beauty – no word exactly describes it – which all live things are heir to. Of course, wild animals and the lower domestic animals, unencumbered by intellect, by the power to reason, do not consciously realize that the twilight is lovely. Swallows cavort before the setting sun to catch their supper. Yet they seem to exult in their rhythmic motion, in the strange hush for the hour, in the vivid tints that the leaves assume. Coyotes singing to the full moon are an even better example because their motive is quite unmixed with any utilitarian purpose..

Man has not entirely lost this sense. Sometimes it comes to him unexpectedly. He desired to dance steps he has long forgotten, to sing notes he has never heard. Sometimes he obtains the vision through his invention, romantic love. Sometimes he sees it clearly and recurrently. Then, if he troubles to perfect a technique for fixing the vision in some more or less permanent and communicable form, he is called an artist.

The artist is not an undomesticated man. He is infinitely more. He has regained the natural gift of all live free things and maintained the special aptitudes acquired by domestication. He is thus more than an animal, wild or domestic. In his moments of conscious vision he is akin to those supernatural deities evoked by human imagination. He sees and he knows he sees. […]

Man’s so-called progress is a retrogression unless eventually he regains his animal birthright and at the same time keeps the self-consciousness acquired during the millenniums of self-imposed discipline.”

~~~

In the above passage, it seems to me that Loeb is equating the function of art to that of the psy disciplines, which is whenever there is a friction between the external environment and the internal individual a change of the individual is necessary, especially if the technical and scientific discourse and its experts are in a technocracy firmly in charge of the external objective world where not political discussions or democratic debates of sort would be needed or desirable. A technocratic society could be able to divert the human energies liberated by the abolition of capitalism: “By guaranteeing economic security, much of the race’s surplus energy would be diverted from the obsolete money competition toward a search for vital values,” this way becoming “unlike any society ever known on earth.”

Mentioning of “the tribes called civilized” reminded me also of Aldous Huxley‘s numerous writings on similar topics and of the necessity for an “ego dissolution” or “ego death” that is one of the main tenets of the contemporary discourse, including the one of the so-called “psychedelic renaissance” movement, see for instance the organization “Decriminalize Nature – Restore Our Roots.”

~~~

“Science” – Loeb continued right after the above passage – “the use of our logical, intellectual faculties to generalize from data acquired through our senses and through mechanical extensions of our senses, can discover only how things work. Science, therefore, is useful in ameliorating the conditions of life and in amplifying the interest of life.

One hesitates to make generalizations about the meaning of life. Yet it seems to me – though I am well aware that the “seems to me” on this subject of countless individuals since speech was acquired, seems to us ridiculous and stupid – yet it seems to me that we have the germ of a faculty shared with all organic matter, but complicated in the case of man by the fact of his domestication and the resulting intellect which tends to smother this germ of a faculty in a pother of thought processes – that we have the germ of a faculty with which to discover the why of things.

Occasionally the meaning of life is, or seems to be, visioned in moments of ecstatic tension. Civilized man prefers to pursue this vision by the practice or contemplation of what is known as art. Other routes are also used, Voodooism and magic, for example, though, because of their frequent abuse, these routes are in disrepute. […]

Despite the vagueness of the whole subject, because the intellect is stultified before it, there is no a priori reason why a sustained, even intelligent, study of the phenomena which induce these visions cannot eventually permit us to attain them at will.

And when a being is in possession of them, he knows or thinks he knows the meaning of life and thus, as a secondary benefit, reduces, by the aid of memory, to their proper unimportance, the sorrow, the tragedy, even the ostensible evil which is woven of necessity into the texture of our temporal days.

Many teachers both of ethics and aesthetics have glimpsed this consummation. Even the renunciations commanded by the various religions have usually been for the purpose of assisting mystic visions. But renunciations, except for the psychological effect, are no longer necessary. Man may enjoy all earthly goods and still have time to delve into these mysterious and satisfying aspects of existence.

Art critics when they speak of significant form, of plastic import, are referring to an inexplicable harmony perpetuated in form and color. Literary critics, when they praise a poem for some happy metaphor, are referring to a specific revelation of the wonder implicit in some phenomenon. Music which uses sound relations, dancing which uses the relations of motions, and all other aesthetic expressions are seeking the inner rhythm which man, when attuned, instinctively recognizes to be fraught with meaning, the only meaning that matters.

Science cannot identify this meaning but of late has been forced to hypothecate some unknown which is concerned with value. Of course artists, in their search for aesthetic values, may apply themselves directly to shaping the outside world. This phase of their activities is not so crucial. It might be better if aesthetic considerations were completely neglected when constructing objects and their utilitarian function alone considered. […] Even the implicit harmony in a composition of billboards, ashcans, and the back of a hideous brick house can be made manifest by a photographer whose eyes and hands know their job.

Thus the primary function of the artist is to make manifest the beauty implicit in his environment so that all men can recognize it and thereby better adapt themselves to their environment, to the external world.”

“Human relationships are in most dire need of an overhauling. The whole conception of society based on the family unit may have outlived its usefulness. In the nomadic tribal days, in feudal days, even in early handicraft days, the family had a fundamental as well as a consanguineous unity. This has disappeared under late capitalism. Similar functional interests are probably a more suitable basis for social intercourse than accidents at birth.

The sexual relationships, also, might be investigated scientifically. The laws and the customs which govern them, especially the taboos, originally imposed by Christian and Calvinist dogma, seem both to exaggerate their importance and degrade their repute. In fact the satisfaction of nearly every instinctive need is harassed by inhibitions based on superstitions and enforced by social pressure.

In a technocracy, with will and time available, with the tendency toward centralization reversed, with each community trying to solve its particular problems in its own peculiar way, it is hardly to be doubted but that new and better ways of living would be devised. There is no reason why man, equipped with reason, should not be able to adapt himself to his environment at least as well as those forms of life governed solely by reflexes. Self-consciousness complicates the problem, but self-consciousness would make its resolution infinitely worth while.

~~~

Another interesting reversal of trend, which may be mentioned here although it has nothing to do with art, would occur in the field of biology. Capitalism and its curious opposite side, known as humanitarianism, has pretty well reversed natural selection and warped sexual selection.

Because of complicated social pressures, men of distinction, men who stand out as individuals, tend to limit their progeny to such an extent that their stock is gradually extinguished. On the other hand humanitarianism attempts to preserve every human life brought into the world. It has succeeded passably well. As a result the weaker stocks, who do not as a rule know how to limit their breeding, multiply tremendously. Under capitalism, instead of the survival of the fittest, we have the survival of the less fit.

Sexual selection also is deflected under capitalism. Heterosexual organisms in their natural state tend to choose for mating those individuals which please them. In the capitalistic societies, because of an inherent economic insecurity, such valuable factors as beauty, strength, mental agility, nobility of character, charm, and the capacity for provoking sexual release, which normally attract, are replaced, in some social strata, by those biologically unimportant qualities which enable certain individuals to make money. […] Natural selection in any case is nearly always nullified by domestication. […]

Technocracy would not restore natural or sexual selection. For this a real anarchy would be necessary […] Pure anarchy must remain a dream until the human species has developed a character less egoistic, or all the real acquisitions of man’s thousands of years of self-domestication are likely to be sacrificed.

Technocracy envisages another form of domestication, a form in which man may become more than man. It is the opposite of the system invented by the thinkers of conservative India, a system of stratified castes and wholesale renunciations, which, if carried to its logical conclusion, would transform the human species into a race akin to the ants and termites. Technocracy is designed to develop the so-called high faculties in every man and not to make each man resigned to the lot into which he may be born. […]

Every woman who wanted to and who was not disqualified by the medical department would probably find means to enable her to bear children. […]

This would lead to an enriching of the racial stream and to a tapping of human faculties as yet unsuspected.

In prehistoric times man developed, as a by-product of the domestication process, intellect, self-consciousness, and a capacity for expression unattained by other branches of the living world. With natural selection again permitted to operate, and with the ideal types, at which sexual selection aims, chosen for the possession of those qualities which society, free of economic pressure, tends naturally to admire, the very nature and look of man might in time be transformed even without taking into account the improvement which immediately occurs to every stock when environmental conditions are bettered.

The possibilities in this field are unimaginable. What can be done by skillful selection among plants and animals is recognized. What can be done with man by utilizing the laws of heredity and the effect of environment is completely unknown.

The domestication of man was doubtless directed in the past toward increasing man’s group power in order to attain and secure his dominance over nature. It has accomplished marvels and has paid in other ways for the marvels accomplished. Though breeding with specific individuals for specific purposes, by which means the Japanese have produced an extraordinary type of wrestler, is not contemplated because no superman is available to supervise the job, natural and sexual selection should probably effect remarkable changes once the inhibitions inherited from tribal days, and the false ideals promulgated by late social eras, were done away with.

A technocracy, then, should in time produce a race of man superior in quality to any now known on earth, a society more exciting, interesting, and variegated than has ever been possible, and a nation in which no individual should be unhappy or discontented for remediable causes.”

(13 – thirteenth of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12)

[In the photo the cover of Vol. 6 No. 1, January 1924 of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts – the last issue, published in New York – established and directed by Harold Loeb.

According to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website it was “a modernist magazine founded by Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg and published from November 1921 to January 1924. Loeb was the son of two powerful New York families—the Guggenheims on his mother’s side (cousin to Peggy Guggenheim) and the Loebs on his father’s side. Loeb came from a rather affluent background, which allowed him to produce a magazine that was instrumental in introducing Americans to European avant-garde.”

Associate Editor of Broom at the time when the magazine was established in Rome in 1921 – main office was in Trinita’ dei Monti, 18 – was Giuseppe Prezzolini. “Initially, the magazine was printed in Europe, first in Rome and then in Berlin, with the intention of bringing new, avant-garde art back to the U.S.”]

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /12 (2021)

“Now that we have harnessed the lightning, curbed the plague, and circumvented the flood, it would seem reasonable to survey once more the taboos which were originally intended to propitiate a terrible and temperamental deity“

by Federico Soldani – 3rd Apr 2021

The chapter about ‘Art’ of ‘Life in a Technocracy’, as discussed in the previous three articles in this series, is the longest of the book at it takes about a quarter of the entire text of Harold Loeb’s post-capitalist and technocratic utopia.

“Consumers as such will need no organization, no protection” – the chapter about ‘Art’ continued – “since every consumer is a producer. Men would differ not in consumptive power but in productive function. […]

The Russian Communists have had to vary consumptive power, have had to reward effort at different rates, in order to encourage skill and care. This relegation of Marx’s fundamental principle, that everyone should contribute according to his ability and receive according to his needs, is considered necessary because in Russia consuming power is so low that it has become, or rather, had remained, the pre-eminent interest of life. When food is lacking, hunger overshadows all other needs. Consequently nothing is more effective as a stimulus to effort than the promise of more food, clothing, and so forth.

In an American Technocracy, inheritors of the productive machinery evolved in American capitalism, there would be no lack of material goods. Consequently the offer of more food and clothing could not be an effective stimulus of effort. In fact, even today with most Americans not far above the subsistence level the probability of material reward is not the basic incentive of American energy. Those enjoying full satisfaction of their primary needs exert themselves at least as energetically as those who frequently experience actual privation.

Marx’s doctrine is based on a conception of human nature that unfortunately is over kind. Only exceptional man works according to his ability without the prospect of a tangible reward, that is to say, of a reward beyond the inner satisfaction of work well done. The technocracy, at least as realistic as communism or capitalism, would also offer a tangible reward in order to induce the maximum of skill and care.

But a technocracy would not adapt the current system of reward since variable consumptive power inevitably leads to all the old corruptions, ostentations, and gluttonies. The technocracy would go farther back to the fundamental incentive of human effort and reward valuable service with prestige, the open acknowledgement of a man’s prowess by his fellows. As a matter of fact it is only recently that monetary inducements have superseded the time-worn glory, honor, respect, with which older civilizations spurred on their members. Though prestige cannot be hoarded, it is much dearer to the human heart than any symbol of spending power. Money is, of course, more easily measured but even money owes most of its strength to its symbolic meaning.

This long excursion was an attempt to discover whether vice would be a convenient outlet for the surplus of energy released by the technological system of production and distribution. Vice, it seems, would not do. In fact vice has never functioned even adequately as an energy outlet.

Suetonius has given us a detailed account of how some score of Roman emperors, under ideal conditions, attempted to utilize their spare time in the pursuit of what is called vice. Not one of them succeeded in becoming passably contented. The several who undertook creative tasks did much better for themselves. Vice enjoys an unwarranted prestige, just as gin does in the dryer parts of America, because of the difficulties put in the way of its indulgence. Destroy the difficulties and much so-called vice would disappear.

~~~

The consideration of vice has brought out how fundamental is the change which the control of productive processes and the non-control of living mores would induce (Italics in the original, ed.).

During the late centuries experimentation in the technique of producing goods has been encouraged. A revolution in the technique of production, making possible a social organization in which every man for little effort might have everything he needed, has resulted. The job is done, not finished, but well enough done to permit of the consolidation and utilization of the knowledge gained.

On the other hand, society since the beginning has discouraged by means of church, school, and statutory restrictions all experimentation in the domain of spiritual living. The consequence has been a stultification of the intellect, a frustration of the emotions, and a damming up of nervous energy which is bringing many people to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

A technocracy would attempt to set free that great surplus of vital energy now burning itself out, uselessly, in the business game, and redirect it into unexplored channels. […]

Still the novelists, the highbrow novelists, not those clever craftsmen who provide vicarious emotions for fear-ridden maidens of both sexes, do much of the critical thinking of our time. Their messages have but a limited effect, the forces of society being arrayed against social iconoclasm.

Men still try to live by the rules of nomadic desert tribes. The threats and taboos held over the heads of those simple desert peoples had some justification when lightning, the plague, the flood, and the drought were felt to be the weapons of an avenging deity. Now that we have harnessed the lightning, curbed the plague, and circumvented the flood, it would seem reasonable to survey once more the taboos which were originally intended to propitiate a terrible and temperamental deity.

At any rate man with all his material achievements seems no happier, if as happy, today than at the beginning of history. His miseries have other causes, that is all. Research work, directed toward discovering the causes of his psychic maladjustments, may prove more difficult than devising a machine to pick cotton; and successful achievement in this field will surely be harder to measure; still it is doubtful if the goal, a life that satisfies both our instincts and our aspirations, looks as unattainable to us as the goal of our ancestors, the conquest of nature, looked to them.”

~~~

This passage reminded me of two other authors, one of them antecedent to Loeb’s utopia, Aldous Huxley in what was probably his first published essay making reference to both psychology and “our ancestors”:

“The invention and development of the modern science of psychology” – Huxley wrote in 1919 – “has made us regard as important and interesting a multitude of small odds and ends of thought, emotion and sensation which seemed to our ancestors almost negligible. They did not insist on the phenomena because they were interested primarily in what they regarded as the reality behind them.”

~~~

The mention of “research work, directed toward discovering the causes of his psychic maladjustments” reminded me instead of a speech that thirty years later, during the sixties, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave in slightly different versions each time, including at the convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. in 1967.

Here are a few excerpts from one of those speeches (UCLA, 1965; bold added for emphasis; frequently used sentences, absent from this particular delivery of this speech, in square brackets):

“This problem will not be solved until we develop a sort of divine discontent all over America.

There are certain technical words within every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and cliches. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature.

Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word “maladjusted.”

[This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology.]

Certainly, [we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities,] we all want to live the well‐adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But I must honestly say to you in this afternoon, my friends, there are some things within our world and our nation which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I call upon all people of good‐will to be maladjusted until the good societies realize.

I must honestly say that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never intend to become adjusted to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. But I recognize that there are between forty and fifty million of our brothers and sisters in this country who are perishing all along the island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. And I will never adjust myself to these conditions, I will never be satisfied until of God’s children will have the basic necessities of life.

I must honestly say, that I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to the self‐defeating effects of physical violence. We are in a day when Sputniks and Explorers are dashing throughout the space and guided ballistic missiles are causing highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or non-existence.”

~~~

~~~

(12 – twelfth of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11)

[In the photo the cover of Vol. 5 No. 3, October 1923 of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts – published in New York – established and directed by Harold Loeb.

According to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website it was “a modernist magazine founded by Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg and published from November 1921 to January 1924. Loeb was the son of two powerful New York families—the Guggenheims on his mother’s side (cousin to Peggy Guggenheim) and the Loebs on his father’s side. Loeb came from a rather affluent background, which allowed him to produce a magazine that was instrumental in introducing Americans to European avant-garde.”

Associate Editor of Broom at the time when the magazine was established in Rome in 1921 – main office was in Trinita’ dei Monti, 18 – was Giuseppe Prezzolini. “Initially, the magazine was printed in Europe, first in Rome and then in Berlin, with the intention of bringing new, avant-garde art back to the U.S.”]

[cite]

‘Psyspeak’ on PsyPolitics and ‘therapy-speak’ on The New Yorker (2021)

by Federico Soldani – 31th Mar 2021

In the summer of 2019, I proposed the use of the terms “ideopathological lexicon” – from ‘ideological’ and ‘pathological’ – or in short “psyspeak” to mean psychologized as well as medicalized lexicon used outside of the clinical context especially when applied to the wider societal and political world, during a talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London.

~~~

On the 26th of March this year, just a few days ago, The New Yorker magazine online published the following article, under the heading Cultural Comment: “The rise of therapy-speak. How a language got off the couch and into the world” by Katy Waldman, a magazine staff writer.

Waldman uses the expression “therapy-speak”, a term also used by a senior editor of Slate, Shannon Palus, in “Therapy Speak” Has Invaded All Our Relationships” (20th Nov 2019): “In fact, it’s just the kind of formal language one might pick up from a mental health professional. In 2019, it’s infiltrating our everyday interactions. Let’s call it “therapy speak.” The term was occasionally used in the press previously, but not in relation to the widespread societal use of psychological language, see for instance “Give up on this absurd therapy-speak” (29th Sept 2003).

Using “therapy-speak” from the title, Waldman relates it, in the sub-title, to a rise in the wider world (bold added for emphasis):

“We “just want to name” a dynamic. We joke about our coping mechanisms, codependent relationships, and avoidant attachment styles. We practice self-care and shun “toxic” acquaintances. We project and decathect; we are triggered, we say wryly, adding that we dislike the word; we catastrophize, ruminate, press on the wound, process. We feel seen and we feel heard, or we feel unseen and we feel unheard, or we feel heard but not listened to, not actively. We diagnose and receive diagnoses: O.C.D., A.D.H.D., generalized anxiety disorder, depression. We’re enmeshed, fragile. Our emotional labor is grinding us down.” […]

Waldman adds: “As philosophers from Michel Foucault to Peter Conrad have observed, medical vocabulary lifts up the speaker—claiming that your intrusive neighbor has “borderline personality disorder” cloaks you in authority while pathologizing him. Using these words as bludgeons strips them of complexity; the problem with armchair therapy, or what we now might call “Instagram therapy.” […]

“One concern that I expected to hear was that the mass adoption of psychological speech might disserve people with severe mental illness. Wasn’t it disrespectful to toss around terms—trauma, depression—that can imply so much suffering? Where was the line between unravelling a taboo and draining a word of its value? The psychologists I spoke to surprised me: steeped in a counter-history of silence about and vilification of mental illness, they could not bring themselves, it seemed, to worry about this particular aspect of therapy-speak’s rise.” […]

“It only makes sense, then, that the language of psychology has seeped into the rest of our lives; psychology itself is entwined with the rest of our lives.”

~~~

Just three days after the New Yorker article, on the 29th of March, the Guardian website published an opinion piece by psychologist Lucy Foulkes dealing with the “increased use of psychiatric language”: “What we’re getting wrong in the conversation about mental health. Increased use of psychiatric language means ordinary distress is being medicalised, while the seriously ill are not being heard”:

“We all want language and labels to interpret our experiences, especially difficult ones, and thanks to the public conversation, psychiatric terms such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety disorder are readily available. And they have power.“

This article appears more in line with an established tradition of writings related to the lines separating normal from pathological and does not explicitly touches on the widespread use of psychological or medical terminology outside the clinical context.

In both the New Yorker and Guardian articles, the political dimension of the spread of psychological, psychotherapeutic or medical languages – called “therapy-speak” and “psychiatric language”, respectively – is not contemplated, instead a purely therapeutic view is taken about such more and more omnipresent technical, scientific and professional languages. Considering the psychologized or medicalized lexicon as simply pertaining to treatment, or to establishing what is clinically normal vs. pathological, or possibly to be evaluated or treated vs. not either through psychotherapy or a more medical approach, also means attributing an exclusively positive connotation to such language, which this way semantically becomes only the language of treatment or of care.

But what about – to quote Dr. Allen Frances – the dangers of “medicalizing politics” or of psychologizing, for that matter, society at large?

~~~

As written on PsyPolitics in an article about “Trump, his worst critics, and diagnosis outside of a clinical context” – the first of a series of three about Trump – originally intended for the blog “Mad in America” and that was in the end posted independently by the author via social media on the 15th of March 2020 and published on the PsyPolitics.org blog on the 27th of June:

“Nowadays, at the beginning of the 2020s decade, the rapidly spreading “contagious” language of psychiatry applied to politics might be referred to as “psyspeak” or “ideopathological lexicon”, as I recently proposed at the beginning of September 2019 during a talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London.

The latest example, among too many to count, is libertarian magazine Reason calling the political proposals of presidential primary candidate Sanders “socialist delusions.”

~~~

In another article on PsyPolitics, “Trump, mass hallucinogens, and the cyber-psychedelic transformation of capitalism” (13th Oct 2020) it was noted:

“As an example, in October 2019 in one of the oldest and most prominent U.S. magazines, the Atlantic, formerly Atlantic Monthly, citizens were encouraged to read DSM-5, the “bible” of mental and behavioral disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, and become as a result political diagnosticians:

“Understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others.

Nevertheless, how the mental-health community goes about categorizing those characteristics and traits can provide helpful guidance to laypeople by structuring our thinking about them […]

One scholarly paper has suggested that accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him [ed. Trump] might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.” 

~~~

In another article in such series of three about Trump, (“Trump, spectacle, and psyspeak” 27th Sept 2020) it was noted about the phenomenon of mass psyspeak learning:

“Trump has been “diagnosed” with an unspecified number of mental labels, from formal, to metaphorical, to informal ones on the media, including so-called social media, over the years, probably too many to count.  Among those: narcissist, pathological narcissist, sociopath, anxious, obsessive, compulsive, paranoid, conspiracy theorist, angry, autistic, etc.

Such unprecedented spread of psyspeak has surely helped the public becoming more versed to attribute diagnostic labels and to use psyspeak as a new cool language for politics and beyond.  

The same is happening to other public figures.  What is the diagnosis of Trump?  Malignant narcissism?  Paranoid personality? Autism? And what is the diagnosis of Greta, the climate change enfant prodige?  Asperger’s? Again, autism? 

President Trump has even proclaimed annually a World Autism Awareness Day in line with the United Nations.

The above questions are nowadays common among citizens worldwide, citizens who are largely viewing such public spectacle via mass media and new digital media such as Twitter, which has practically become a new institutional presidential communication channel.

The phenomenon of mass psyspeak learning includes citizens usually uninterested in politics; indeed such spectacle looks like entertainment, a so-called reality TV show, increasingly taking place on the Web” (bold added in this paragraph for emphasis).

~~~

In another article on PsyPolitics “About the psychologization of constitutional law via ’25th Amendment’ or ‘Articolo 3’” (10th Jan 2021) a double standard about stigmatization related to psyspeak in the public discourse was noted:

“If Biden is going to use Sec. 3 [of the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ed.] for instance and to let his Vice-President Kamala Harris become President, he will submit (and with him, symbolically, the political office he represents) to the technical-scientific medical discourse and will be seen as a good example of, or role model for, the new citizen who is increasingly represented as a patient.

We have observed a similar representation on the media already with Greta Thunberg, the young climate change activist who did not refuse the psychiatric label of autism or Asperger’s and indeed some of her positive characteristics were attributed on the media to such condition.

Instead, Trump by being considered via Sec. 4 of the 25th Amendment, hence refusing in the public image to submit to the medical, indeed psychiatric, discourse could be represented as a bad example for all citizens or as an example of the old citizen who is not fit for the new politics increasingly transformed into medicine and psychology. An old type of citizen who, against scientific reason, refuses to submit, symbolically as well as practically, political and legal prerogatives to the technical-scientific discourse instead of voluntarily accepting the new prevailing status of patient.

A double standard is affirmed: psychiatric terms and labels (including pseudo or quasi technical or metaphorical ones, or psychological insults) are used in the most stigmatizing way in the political arena, and those who do not voluntarily submit to such discourse are stigmatized badly, while at the same time global campaigns are promoting de-stigmatization of mental health conditions in the clinical context, and those who submit voluntarily are protected from stigmatization and presented as role models.

Such spectacle on mass and digital media, as previously highlighted in these pages, has also caused an unprecedented spread of ‘psyspeak’ surely helping the public becoming more versed in attributing diagnostic labels and in using psyspeak as a new language for politics and beyond.  

Not only this, disclosing in public medical and psychological diagnoses is increasingly presented as a civic virtue, instead of emphasizing as in the past the importance of privacy of health-related confidential information; for years now, celebrities have publicly disclosed medical diagnoses and conditions on the media.

Also, the clinical context is being increasingly, and more and more explicitly, extended to the whole of society. A global psychiatrization of politics and society at large is taking place under our eyes. The legal discourse is not spared.

The public discourse is currently inundated on the media by a “surrounded by idiots” rhetoric; human idiocy vs. artificial intelligence? Ordinary citizens are presented as full of cognitive biases (systematic errors of thought), hundreds of such biases according to the new rhetoric (an unscientific claim, given the time it takes to study even one or a few of these systematic errors and to understand their implications, see Tversky and Kahneman).

Citizens’ perceptions of the external world are presented as well as being highly distorted and unreliable (see for instance Perils of Perception | Ipsos).

The D.S.M. is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the so-called Bible of U.S. psychiatry, with the full list of mental and behavioral diagnoses. Former chief of D.S.M.-IV (4th edition, 1994, text revision 2000) Dr. Allen Frances wrote in his 2017 book “Twilight of American Sanity: a Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump”: “Trump isn’t crazy. We are.”

~~~

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, almost two years ago, on the 15th of May 2019 an abstract was submitted for a presentation in London, at the Philosophy special interest group biannual meeting, which was about “Madness, the mind, and politics.” It took place on the 3rd of September in the summer of 2019, the talk was entitled “Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power?”

The title was making explicit reference to Michel Foucault‘s “Psychiatric Power” series of lectures at the College de France (1973-1974).

Here is the original abstract from 2019 (bold added for emphasis), which was published in the Royal College conference booklet in 2019 as well as on PsyPolitics in 2020:

“In recent years we have observed an increasing focus on language and concepts related to mental health in the broader societal and political world.

For instance, political language related to “phobias” has rapidly surged to commonplace.

Similar lexicon derived largely from psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis might lead to a progressive internalization and de-politicization of civic concepts, without most citizens realizing it.

More recently, prominent groups of intellectuals including psychiatrists from global academic institutions argued explicitly for a new necessity of the psychiatrization of old political concepts and institutions.

Among others, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, in a volume written by 37 contributors titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (2nd Edition, 2019), asserted explicitly: “Those who pretend that we are in the realm of politics when we are really in the realm of psychopathology make the situation even more dangerous, because they will not be prepared while the future of the planet and the human race are at stake.”

Former DSM-IV chief Allen Frances, in his essay “Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” (2017) argued: “Trump isn’t crazy. We are.”

Michel Foucault, in his 1973-74 lecture series on “Psychiatric Power” at the Collège de France, pointed to the madness of King George III of England, monarch of a global British empire, as reported by Philippe Pinel in the seminal “Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale; ou la manie,” published in 1800 in Paris. According to Foucault, such emblematic scene of madness marked the birth of psychiatry as well as the passage from sovereign to disciplinary power in the modern world.

In this light, the current public psychiatrization of “the most powerful man in the world,” as the media often describe the President of the United States of America, could be seen as a new paradigm shift in contemporary power.

Such a public spectacle is broadcasted around the world via TV and digital social media (e.g, Twitter) in real time. In addition to the increasing use of a psychologized lexicon in everyday speech, a role might be played by such spectacle communicating symbolically, and contributing to, a global cultural shift towards a subjectivist worldview and a progressive de-politicization of citizenship.”

~~~

During the presentation a great emphasis was placed on the psychologization of political language – by this meaning the language of the polis, a much broader concept than what in the U.S. is usually meant by political, hence not limited to the world of politicians for instance – quoting authors such as historians Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Lasch as well as intellectuals such as Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, and his essay “Politics and the English language”. This is an essay which preceded Orwell’s last and most famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and its concepts of newspeak as well as doublethink.

The Foucauldian concept of biopolitics was mentioned in relation to the functions of psyspeak.

Significant emphasis was attributed to the role and functions of the emerging “phobic” political language and the functions of what I called “psyspeak” were explained in some detail, including in relation to “psychological name calling” or insults – an expression used just a few days earlier by Dr. Allen Frances on the media. Psyspeak included what I called “pseudo or quasi technical name calling or ‘diagnosis’” or, following Arthur Schopenhauer‘s reasoning about the types of arguments in a discussion, what I named ‘argumentum ad psychēn’.

During such talk, it was noted how the public discourse – and especially the political one – is presently shifting “from discussing to labelling (weaponized political parlance)” by “citizens assuming the expert psychopathological gaze”, who are transforming everyone as a net consequence “from active citizen to passive patient.”

It was highlighted how, by anyone becoming a diagnostician, the political exchange or discussion, as evident from the comparison of “anti” vs. “phobic” political lexicon – a graphic representation, in a slide below, that was seen by many colleagues as an instant classic – was not anymore happening on the same, democratic level. Instead it was moving from above to below or form top to bottom – see the arrows in the slides – in an undemocratic move away from civic dialogue and democratic discussion. Contrasts demarcating such transformation away form political and democratic language towards psychologized and pseudo / quasi / technical language were listed.

~~~

About such undemocratic mechanism of de-politicization and related de-sovreignization, individual as well as collective, via psyspeak, it is interesting to note how along the very same lines in January 2020, and to my knowledge not at any point earlier in the public debate, this reasoning was brought up in the media mainly by the prominent legal and constitutional scholar Alan M. Dershowitz in a heated exchange with a Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee. As noted in a previous article “‘CyPsy’ mind? Cyber super-ego and psychedelic id. Or digital surveillance, mass hallucinogens, and the new ‘black gold’ of the unconscious” (17th Oct 2020):

“Dershowitz has recently received public attention on TV and digital media as a legal consultant to the 45th U.S. President Donald J. Trump during the 2019-2020 impeachment trial. He has been involved in public exchanges this year with psychiatrists claiming that he and the President presented a contagious “shared psychosis,” among other psychological insults directed toward the President and himself. Dershowitz, one of U.S. most prominent legal scholars, complained in 2020 that such language was indicative of American citizens having become unable to discuss democratically about political divergences and complained about such “psychiatrization” of politics.”

The jurist and the psychiatrist in question mentioned at the beginning of January 2020, to my knowledge for the first time, concepts such as “language analysis”, “contagion” and “diagnosis rather than dialogue”. New developments very much along the lines already discussed in the summer of 2019 about psyspeak and its functions and effects. 

Dershowitz noted in an article “Yale Psychiatrist Issues Diagnosis of “Psychotic” for Defending Constitutional Rights” (11th Jan 2020, bold added for emphasis):

“Indeed, Dr. Lee went even further, diagnosing “the severity and spread of ‘shared psychosis’ among just about all of Donald Trump’s followers.”

Nor does she seem to be using these psychiatric terms as political metaphors, dangerous as that would be. She is literally claiming that we are mentally ill and our views should be considered symptoms of our illness, rather than as legitimate ideas.”

Dershowitz concluded: “Her resort to diagnosis rather than dialogue is a symptom of a much larger problem that faces our divided nation — too many Americans are refusing to engage in reasoned dialogue with people with whom they disagree.“

~~~

Such combination of factors, as presented in the summer of 2019 in London, is original and was not present in authors of the past, for instance in Foucault who focused on the birth of the clinic and of the clinical gaze, among other topics, or in other authors who focused on the medicalization of society.

Indeed such a combination has never been present before, for instance as there was not, historically, the massive spread of psyspeak we are witnessing today via mass and digital media – discussed in some detail in these pages on PsyPolitics over the past year – as well as the concomitant attempt to substitute even political language and everyday language with psy-words and related lexicon, which is not just a natural phenomenon but it is constructed.

On PsyPolitics, since its opening at the beginning of the summer of 2020, an entire category of articles – more than twenty – has included the topic of psyspeak and has been tagged accordingly.

Furthermore, such concept related to the transformation “from citizens to patients” (see in the link an online seminar offered in May 2020 on this topic) was developed before the 2020 CoViD-19 pandemic and its consequences, including population policies adopted as a response. In such respect, it was developed and presented not as a-posteriori explanation or narrative rationalization but as a prefiguration of a constructed discourse a-priori. This is in my view where tools developed by authors such as Foucault can help to understand contemporary phenomena.

Interestingly, about Foucault, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his “Between Two Ages. America’s Role in the Technetronic Era” (1969-1970):

“Foucault‘s views, associated with a school of thought called “structuralism,” have been characterized by a critic as the ideology of contemporary technocracy, for Foucault sees man as the object of a process which deprives him of any autonomy and rules him impersonally, according to a structural dynamic.”

For Brzezinski, Foucault’s views could be used to understand at some level contemporary technocratic views.

~~~

This is an original concept – the expert gaze assumed by citizens via psyspeak and its deep de-politicizing effects – that I had the opportunity to re-iterate in a TV interview in Italian (“psicolingua” for “psyspeak”), also published on the international blog Foucault News: Federico Soldani: intervista TV su politica, linguaggio medico-psicologico e tecnocrazia (2020), 9 Oct (“TV interview on politics, medico-psychological language, and technocracy“), as well as in a second “TV interview on the psychiatrization of language and comment on U.S. vote” (13th Nov 2020).

Below, the slides from the 2019 talk in London are shown in which the use of the term “psyspeak” was explicitly proposed as delineated above and the functions of the relevant lexicon were analyzed and presented publicly for the first time.

The video of the talk, to this day watched about two-thousand times on Google’s YouTube only, is linked right after the slides for the interested viewer.

~~~

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /11 (2021)

“As a last measure the energy certificate could be cancelled. This punishment should prove efficacious in most cases. When an individual proved obstinately recalcitrant for obscure reasons, the psychiatrists would attempt to unravel the trouble.”

by Federico Soldani – 28th Mar 2021

The VI and second to last chapter of ‘Life in a Technocracy’, as discussed in the previous two articles in this series, is entitled ‘Art.’

“The North American technocracy, then” – Loeb continued – “will consist of about twenty thousand communities, each with specific, compulsory, industrial function. […] No threat of destitution hangs over the individuals making up these communities. They have nothing to compete against, in their functional life, except perfection. If they wish to contribute their surplus energy to industry and the body social, they will extend their knowledge of the technological process which they have chosen as their concern, and attempt to rise in the organization to a position of responsibility and prestige. Industrial technique will not be crystallized. Invention and originality will have plenty of scope. Still it is unlikely that more than a small proportion of human energy will be directed toward this goal. The discipline will be very stiff, the required energy considerable. Quantities of effort will be left over for application in other fields since it is not reasonable to expect that the mere satisfaction of material wants – which are to some extent satisfied even now for most citizens of the United States – will transform the population into lounging, dilatory disciples of the dolce far niente persuasion” (Italics for emphasis in the original).

“A considerable amount of surplus energy must be counted on. With no effort prescribed beyond sixteen weekly hours, it may be asked if this energy would not breed mischief. It probably would, and if leisure were donated instantaneously by the sweep of a magic want, no doubt rioting, debauchery, and destructive orgies would result. But the leisure will be gradually attained.

Many years of effort in amount probably equal to the effort demanded under the capitalist system, but more equably distributed, will be necessary before the benefits of technocracy will accrue. Consequently people will be used to the idea of leisure and plenty, and more or less prepared for its realization. Still its effect must be considered even though its onset will be gradual.

~~~

The first energy outlet that will enter the mind of the cynic will be vice. But technocracy alters our conception of vice. One does not know where to begin its consideration. In a technocracy, if vice were under discussion, shirking would probably assume a prominent place. But shirking hardly looms serious in a capitalist state where so many other vices overshadow it.

Let us just take them as they come to the mind, vices, weaknesses, depravities, and consider how they would appear to a society in which economic security was the rule. Greed, for example, would be patently absurd in a community where consuming power exceeded consuming capacity. Doubtless it would disappear. After a few generations its manifestations would probably be seen only among little children. Avarice, likewise, would undergo a metamorphosis. Providing for the morrow was, during early capitalism, useful for survival. Its practice was considered virtuous. Its excess, avarice, was consequently common and more or less condoned. Late capitalism, however, has no need of careful spending. As a result, avarice has become somewhat rare in America and is not in social favor. In a technocracy provision for the morrow is automatically provided for everyone. Consequently even prudent spending would come to be looked upon as peculiar. People would naturally satisfy every need, even every whim, since everyone would have more goods at his disposal than could easily be used. Avarice would possess no practical utility.

Sexual aberrations would in a technocracy be condemned only when they injured society. Sex is the individual’s problem. During the ages when tribal or national survival depended partly on a high birth rate, sexual perversion was often considered vicious. A technocracy on the other hand would be more worried by a high birth rate than by a low one.

Also most sexual perversions today are not congenital. Individuals, frustrated by economic distress, distort their natures in a panicky attempt to find an outlet for the sexual impulse which, in their ignorance, seem mysterious. Thus many find relief in practices which they would not have resorted to in a technocracy where the relations of the sexes, owing to each individual’s economic independence, will be simpler.”

The chapter on ‘Art’ then continues about the more explicitly political vice of ‘corruption.’

“The vice of corruption has already been touched upon. When the nature of bribes is limited to works of art, of handicraft, or of personal favors, their power to tempt would be much weaker.

Quarrelsomeness is unaffected except that one source of dispute, money, is summarily removed. Also men may enjoy greater happiness in a technocracy and consequently possess more serene tempers.

Surliness is unaffected. Some men will always find cause for surliness. It is, of course, likely that the superior food possible in a technocracy will reduce this predilection. Surliness on industrial duty would, if it interfered with efficiency, subject the guilty party to transfer. A surly street cleaner annoys society but mildly.

Adultery, being a property crime, cannot exist as such in a technocracy. Since human slavery has been abolished or rather since human beings can no longer be legally owned, the crime of adultery, thought still on the statutes, is obsolete, in reality, today. The economic independence of each individual in a technocracy may definitely make an end of it.

Jealousy of another’s possessions is largely done away with. Jealousy of another’s qualities or qualifications continues unabated. Sexual jealousy continues to exist in a somewhat different form. Men and women will probably remain interdependent under any system. If the union is dissoluble, one party will always realize the desirability or necessity of dissolution before the other. The other in such a case can be relied upon to suffer. Technocracy cannot mollify this form of suffering, in fact, owing to the decreased economic pressure, life in a technocracy will doubtless leave more scope for misery of this variety.

The love relationship, however, is considerably altered by the economic independence of the parties involved. At present pure love is among the rarest phenomena. Licit love is nearly always combined with pride in possession, economic dependence, family pride, or other property relationship. The confusing of these various bonds tends to debase the rather beautiful, late human invention called romantic love. Most so-called jealousy is evoked not by the ending of the love, the fading of which is likely to be mutually shared, but by the damage done one of the other factors. Life in a technocracy, in that love tends to be isolated and kept pure, will limit jealousy.

As the control of one human being by another becomes rarer, the opportunity for cruelty is reduced. On the industrial side, not only is arduous labor pretty well eliminated, hour of work diminished, but the privilege of transfer, open to all workers, would prevent a sadistic foreman from operating undetected. Also the workers’ organizations, which occupy themselves with conditions of labor, would not stand for malpractice.

In private life the independence of women and children, and of men, too, for that matter, would in a short time tend to reduce the quantity of home cruelty.

~~

Drunkness would not disappear in a technocracy. Some drinking is a result of too much leisure. Certain unimaginative types cannot enjoy themselves without external stimulation. Such types would drink even more in a technocracy unless the many new facilities for interesting occupation should stimulate their imaginations. Some drinking is for the purpose of relaxation, particularly at social gatherings. The stress of commercial and industrial life under capitalism is often so intense that many individuals need the aid of alcohol before they can throw off the tension under which they have been working.

Capitalism, being competitive, tends to create a feeling of suspicion, sometimes approaching hostility, between individuals. Since a mood of accord, of rapprochement, is essential for the success of a social gathering, alcohol is often commandeered to achieve this result.

The technological system of production should allay both tension and distrust. Consequently alcohol may not prove to be as useful in a technocracy as at present. In that case drunkenness would be reduced. Chronic cases would, of course, come under the care of the medical department. Real knowledge regarding the effect of alcohol on the human system would be sought. Perhaps some other drug might be discovered which would serve better than alcohol to lighten the spirit and brighten the eyes of one’s friends.

~~~

In a technocracy the punishment for habitual dirtiness would be transfer to the cleaning department if the dirtiness was indulged in at the factory, transfer to the department of sewage disposal if the offenses were committed in the residential district. Shirking would be penalized in much the same way, that is to say, by transfer to one of the less agreeable labor tasks. If this task also was shirked, as a last measure the energy certificate (a measure reminding of today’s Chinese ‘social credit’, ed.) could be cancelled. This punishment should prove efficacious in most cases.

When an individual proved obstinately recalcitrant for obscure reasons, the psychiatrists would attempt to unravel the trouble. In no case should real punishment, such as solitary confinement or labor forced by physical threats, be necessary.”

These provisions about psychiatry, punishment and solitary confinement might remind of the ‘Model of legislation in accordance with the intentions of nature’ contained in the ‘Code of Nature’ (1755) and its outline of a constitution including “penal laws” as discussed in a previous article in these pages.

~~~

“On first thought, tyranny, due to the human tendency to get drunk with power” – Loeb wrote – “would seem to be a grave menace to the technocracy. Our present constitution is so preoccupied with guarding against this menace that executive action is greatly hampered. In fact, action would be nearly impossible if every legal requirement were conscientiously fulfilled. In a technocracy there would be no statutory checks on tyranny.”

The chapter on ‘Art’ continued: “Tyranny can be private or public. At present our most powerful men, the men controlling the money are sometimes tyrannical. But it is curious to observe that they rarely use the power of their position to obtain their ends. In most cases they use the power of their money. In a technocracy, money being abolished, they would have to use the power of their position.

This is difficult in America. Perhaps the greatest asset of that unsound and appealing experiment called democracy has been the development of a race of men free from servility.

In particular on the Western Coast, where economic feelings are unusually intense, a sense of social inferiority is rare. Where there is no sense of social inferiority, private tyranny outside the home is rendered most difficult. Few Americans take orders unless the command is sanctified by tradition. Many Americans take bribes but that would not be possible in a technocracy. Furthermore, most of the tyrannical abuse of power that occurs is for the purpose of obtaining more money, or more power. Again the structure of technocracy nullifies this procedure. Money cannot be obtained, and how one can obtain power by tyrannical means in an organization such as that of our business corporations is difficult to see with money bribery impossible. Possibly favors will be given for social favors, but that is hardly tyrannical.

The President of the Industrial Co-ordinating Board would possess enormous power. But his power is over policies, not men. […] money, the source of nearly all corruption, will not exist. A technocracy would seem to be somewhat paradoxical. The administrative head controls a force greater than any potentate of the past or present ever dreamt of. Yet to use this force for any selfish or anti-social end seems to be most difficult.”

(11 – eleventh of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10)

[In the photo the cover of Vol. 1 No. 1, Novermber 1921 by Enrico Prampolini – his initials visible – of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts – published in Rome – established and directed by Harold Loeb.

Prampolini’s work nowadays is visible in museums outside of Italy such as Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York City, where Loeb was from. Loeb first cousin was Peggy Guggenheim.

Prampolini later became a designer of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution – Wikipedia), an exhibition opened by Benito Mussolini that was held in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni from 1932 to 1934, estimated to have had 4 million visitors.

Associate Editor of Broom at the time when the magazine was established in Rome in 1921 – main office was in Trinita’ dei Monti, 18 – was Giuseppe Prezzolini. “Initially, the magazine was printed in Europe, first in Rome and then in Berlin, with the intention of bringing new, avant-garde art back to the U.S.”]

[cite]

Il ‘Grande Internamento’ (2019)

Breve guida psichiatrica per orientarsi in politica e in societa’

di Federico Soldani – 27 Marzo 2021

~~~

“Avvocato dell’accusa: lei ha affermato falsita’… per colpa di una psicosi?

Alex Jones: vede, sto solo dicendo che il trauma dei media e delle corporations che mentono cosi’ tanto, da li’ parte tutto – tu non credi piu’ a niente, un po’ come un bambino i cui genitori mentano cosi’ tanto e a piu’ riprese, vede, molto presto non sa piu’ cosa sia la realta’”

(Guardian; CNN – 2019)

[Questo breve scritto del marzo 2019 circolato tra diversi amici dell’autore tra cui esperti di medicina, politica, biblioteconomia, storia, media, cinema, fisica e piu’ tardi nel 2020 anche di giurisprudenza per avere un parere, viene pubblicato qui per la prima volta due anni dopo nel marzo 2021.

Era inteso come testo introduttivo sul tema del rapporto tra psichiatria e societa’ per un pubblico generale.]

~~~

Il caos e’ grande sotto il cielo. Il mondo appare impazzito.

La politica e’ fatta da matti? E’ fuori controllo? Il presidente americano, considerato l’uomo piu’ potente del mondo, e’ un caso psichiatrico? La societa’ nel suo insieme e le sue istituzioni fondamentali sembrano divenute incomprensibili e parlano come se si fosse perso il senno?

Per un motivo o per un altro, si parla sempre di piu’ in termini psichiatrici o persino esplicitamente di psichiatria in ambito politico, sociale, lavorativo.

Ma anche nello spettacolo: tra i film per esempio, quello mentale in senso lato, pare sia uno dei temi piu’ gettonati di sempre.

Ma che rapporto c’e’, tanto per cominciare, tra follia e psichiatria? E le altre psico-discipline come si situano? E che c’entra poi la politica?

Questa breve guida si propone di fornire alcuni suggerimenti su come orientarsi tra parole, concetti, discipline, autori chiave e dare indicazioni per chi volesse leggere di piu’ in merito a questo complicato, ma poi neanche troppo, rapporto tra psichiatria e politica, psichiatria e potere.

Si propone inoltre di impostare alcune delle questioni piu’ rilevanti in proposito.

E avanza una tesi: ci troviamo di fronte a un “grande internamento”.

Il mondo sta effettivamente diventando l’equivalente di un manicomio a cielo aperto e senza piu’ modo di essere dimessi per mancanza di un altrove dove andare, di un fuori dal manicomio.

~~~

Ogni questione viene sempre piu’ rappresentata come interna alla mente o al cervello, non piu’ come un elemento di realta’ oggettiva esterna sul quale poter agire, magari (sia mai!) per cambiarlo. La rivoluzione digitale e virtuale, con annessi e connessi, opera in questa direzione.

La letteratura sul tema e’ sconfinata, ma decisamente poco conosciuta ai piu’, persino tra i tecnici della mente (meno ancora tra quelli della politica, ça va sans dire).

Infatti molte delle chiavi di lettura utili si trovano sparse tra discipline anche molto lontane tra loro e che possono apparire non avere niente o quasi a che spartire le une con le altre: politica, medicina, storia, filosofia, neuroscienze, sociologia, antropologia, religione, ecc.

Un primissimo orientamento, senza pretese di rigore e tantomeno di esaustivita’.

~~~

Che cos’e’ la follia?

L’idea di follia e’ piu’ o meno antica quanto l’uomo. Si sono sempre riconosciuti due tipi di follia: acuta o episodica (es. follia d’amore, follia per la morte di qualcuno amato o per altra perdita grave) e cronica o permanente (es. lo “scemo del villaggio”).

Che cos’e’ la psichiatria?

La psichiatria e’ una disciplina e pratica che nasce circa 200 anni fa, nel contesto dell’illuminismo e anche delle rivoluzioni americana e francese. Il termine viene inventato da un medico tedesco, un accademico di nome Reil, amico di Goethe e figlio del clima culturale del suo tempo, nel 1808. La psichiatria e’ figlia del razionalismo e in quanto tale serve a limitare l’anti-ragione e a far funzionare la societa’ urbanizzata, industrializzata e la civilizzazione moderna organizzata sencondo i dettami della ragione e delle sue derivazioni: scienza, tecnica, economia.

Johann Christian Reil (1811) – Wikipedia

Per gli psichiatri e’ la branca della medicina che si occupa del comportamento e degli aspetti mentali e, quando possibile, cerebrali di questo.

Per intellettuali come Michel Foucault e’ una pratica disciplinare affidata a medici con la nascita della modernia’, in particolare con la rivoluzione industriale (si veda, tra altri testi, ‘Il potere psichiatrico’ Feltrinelli Editore 2004).

Michel Foucault (1975) – Wikipedia

Quali sono le altre discipline in qualche modo affini?

Le altre “psico-discipline”, le chiameremo cosi’ per brevita’, sono: psicologia, psicoanalisi, pedagogia, criminologia. Meno direttamente: antropologia e sociologia. Ancora meno direttamente: parapsicologia, spiritismo, occultismo.

Precedenti alla nascita di queste discipline abbiamo fondamentalmente la filosofia e la religione, le quali hanno, sopratutto la seconda, una relazione molto piu’ forte di quanto di solito si riconosca con i concetti di follia e piu’ tardi, storicamente, di psichiatria.

Cos’e’ l’anti-psichiatria?

E’ una etichetta che psichiatri verso l’inizio del novecento iniziarono a utilizzare contro chi criticava il loro operato e la loro disciplina.

Ri-utilizzata negli anni ’60 in Inghilterra da Cooper (riscopritore del termine) e Laing (diventato nella cultura pop l’anti-psichiatra per antonomasia) per caratterizzare il loro movimento (Laing e’ sempre stato ambiguo rispetto a questa etichetta, utilizzandola senza mai davvero sposarla) fu aspramente criticata da Szasz, il quale scrisse persino un libro feroce contro l’anti-psichiatria e contro Laing in particolare: ‘Anti-psichiatria: ciarlataneria al quadrato’ (2009).

Szasz sosteneva che avere creato il fantoccio polemico ideale per gli psichiatri, ovvero l’anti-psichiatria, indeboliva fortemente la critica radicale e motivata alla psichiatria; per gli psichiatri tradizionali pero’ Szasz e’ etichettato proprio come anti-psichiatra in quanto fortemente critico verso la disciplina, in particolare in riferimento agli aspetti coercitivi (ospedalizzazioni e trattamenti non volontari).

Ronald Laing – Wikipedia

‘Esperienza Trascendentale in Relazione a Religione e Psicosi’, R. D. Laing, Psychedelic Review (1965)

‘Laing e Anti-Psichiatria’ Boyers and Orrill ed. (Penguin, 1972)

~~~

Il “grande internamento”

La tendenza generalizzata contemporanea che, riutilizzando un termine di Michel Foucault, chiamo “grande internamento” e’ ravvisabile in tre tendenze in corso, che chiamo (1) mentalismo e (2) neuro-centrismo, assieme alla (3) rivoluzione digitale e virtuale.

1) La realta’ e’ una illusione o persino una allucinazione prodotta dalla mente (tendenza a soggettivizzare l’oggettivo).

2) Oppure la tendenza opposta a oggettivizzare il soggettivo: tutto cio’ che pensiamo ci sia nel mondo esterno ha un corrispettivo interno oggettivo e misurabile nel cervello: da qui gli studi di neuro-qualcosa (neuro-economia, neuro-politica, neuro-teologia, ecc.).

Entrambe queste tendenze opposte fanno pero’ una operazione analoga: interiorizzano rispettivamente nella mente o nel cervello, ma sempre dentro la testa, tutto cio’ che si trova nel mondo esteriore, riconducono all’interno cio’ che si trova all’esterno di noi.

3) A queste due tendenze, soggettivista e oggettivista, si accompagna una terza, la rivoluzione digitale, il cui ethos somiglia per moltissimi aspetti a quello della psichiatria (es.: utilizzo della metodica della domanda aperta o della pagina bianca; incentivo ad esprimersi il piu’ possibile, piu’ si rivela e si registra e meglio e’; estensione del modello medico anziche’ del modello legale a cio’ che e’ stato rivelato e registrato).

Per capire cosa passi per la testa della persona comune, non sono stati ideati scanner che violino direttamente, come farebbe una TAC o una risonanza magnetica, la privacy cerebrale delle masse, quanto piuttosto un sistema duplice di [1] misurazione del comportamento, quello che oggi si chiama fenotipo digitale, e di [2] rivelazione ed esteriorizzazione digitale di cio’ che si trova dentro: pensieri, emozioni, scelte, impressioni, etc. una enorme massa di informazioni in precedenza intime, private e passeggere entra cosi’ a far parte del dominio digitale, non si cancella con il passare del tempo e diviene virtualmente riproducibile e accessibile sia ad altri che in futuro, come una cartella clinica.

Non solo, gli strumenti di analisi di questa cartella clinica divengono sempre piu’ sofisticati e capaci di fare predizioni sulla base di informazioni simili prese ad altri: i “big data”.

‘Problema Globale – Salute Mentale’ Forum Economico Mondiale (accesso 2019)

‘Follia e Irragionevole – Storia della follia nell’età classica’ M. Foucault (1961) – Wikipedia

~~~

[Nella foto all’inizio dell’articolo la copertina di ‘La societa’ psichiatrica’ di Françoise Castel, Robert Castel, e Anne Lovell. Columbia University Press, 1982]

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /10 (2021)

“Human energy, applied to finding ways of life that satisfy, to creating values which uplift the spirit, may improve the lot of man on earth as emphatically in the inner psychic sphere as man’s genius, directed toward conquering the outer material world, has ameliorated the conditions of his physical existence“

by Federico Soldani – 26th Mar 2021

The VI and second to last chapter of ‘Life in a Technocracy’, as discussed in the previous article in this series, is entitled ‘Art.’

“Incidental to the pursuit of profit – Loeb wrote – capitalism has fostered the development of those processes which provide the goods essential to life. In continuing to foster their development, it threatens to destroy itself.”

“Capitalism has also fostered the development of certain new art forms and, in particular, the development of a technique for the mechanical transmission of these and older [art, ed.] forms so that every citizen of today might have various aesthetic mediums in his house or at his door. The latter accomplishment is probably one of the greatest boons ever given humanity.”

“Beauty is not absolute. […] Aesthetic pleasure, being subjective, varies with the race and the time, in fact with each individual.”

In this passage, Loeb appears to believe that aesthetic pleasure is entirely subjective and mixes up concepts of absolute vs. relative with those of objective vs. subjective. “The art of capitalism helps man to endure a capitalist society.”

“The toys and the industrial technique which makes them possible, could give leisure and plenty to every man. They have permitted the population of the earth to increase, and man cannot reduce his numbers by edict. And most of the toys are beautiful in themselves and conducive to pleasure and experience. Nothing can be said against them really if one disentangles them from the capitalistic social system, from the capitalistic religion, the outrageous Mysticism of Money, which inspires the social system, and from the art which enshrines the religion.

The skyscraper is a direct expression of the religion. Unlike a motor car, it is not essential to the producing process. Consequently it would have to go, in a technocracy […] The New York skyline is unique, original, and imaginative. It fulfils, admirably, the intention of its creators. It possesses a nearly universal appeal […] It would have to go, in a technocracy, because despite its aesthetic virtue, it is nearly useless to human life. It thrills the beholder now and again but is painful to live with. […] The sixteenth century had the same difficulty in judging the Gothic cathedrals, some of which were still rising.. Many critics of that epoch called Gothic art barbarous. We tend to underestimate likewise the aesthetic appeal of our expressions. On the other hand, most of us from over-familiarity are blind to their anti-social character, to their devastating effect on life, to their ethical worthlessness.

A critical school which arose in the last years of the nineteenth century preached the unimportance of ethical values in art to such effect that many art twitterers have come to believe it. The theory, of course, was originally a stratagem mean to break down the effectiveness of the Victorian taboos which were cramping the artistic, and, as usual, ethical in the immorality or amorality, expressions of the time. The theory carried beyond some such purpose is of course absurd. Art must be ethical; perhaps the beauty cult, one of the most persistent ever preached by man, is the most ethical. At any rate, in the last analysis, expressions, whether primarily aesthetic or primarily utilitarian, justify themselves when they foster the good life among men. When they are conductive to unhappiness and all its concomitant ugliness, neither expressiveness nor technical excellence can restore the balance.

Technocracy requires the toys of capitalism as well as the instruments of capitalism. Technocracy does not need the Mysticism of Money, that religion of strife which makes avarice a virtue, and pretentiousness a policy, nor its expressions, no matter how magnificent. Buildings would no longer rise in competitive ostentation; advertisements would no longer entice the unwary to increase his wants […] Competition, at one time necessary for survival, is no longer necessary for survival. […] Man has become so accustomed to competition and strife, assuming that the tendency to strive was developed in man and not inherited from his predecessor, that a system which merely ceases to demand them will not, even in many generations, succeed in eradicating them.

It may be that human energy, applied to finding ways of life that satisfy, to creating values which uplift the spirit, may improve the lot of man on earth as emphatically in the inner psychic sphere as man’s genius, directed toward conquering the outer material world, has ameliorated the conditions of his physical existence.

That was what was meant by the suggestion that art might become the most important activity in a technocracy.”

(10 – tenth of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9)

[In the first photo ‘the Machinery’ / i macchinari, cover by Enrico Prampolini – his signature visible – of Vol. 3 No. 3: October 1922 of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts – the last issue that was published in Rome, the same month of Mussolini’s ‘Marcia su Roma’, before moving to Berlin – established and directed by Harold Loeb. Prampolini’s work nowadays is visible in museums outside of Italy such as Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York City.

Prampolini was also the cover designer – his initials visible – of Vol. 1 No. 1 of Broom, in the second photo, and later became a designer of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution – Wikipedia), an exhibition opened by Benito Mussolini that was held in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni from 1932 to 1934, estimated to have had 4 million visitors.

Associate Editor of Broom at the time when the magazine was established in Rome in 1921 – main office was in Trinita’ dei Monti, 18 – was Giuseppe Prezzolini. “Initially, the magazine was printed in Europe, first in Rome and then in Berlin, with the intention of bringing new, avant-garde art back to the U.S.”]

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /9 (2021)

“Other men remold human nature. Their attempt is to adapt man to his environment rather than vice versa“

by Federico Soldani – 14th Mar 2021

“The general consideration of art has been left to the last because art, using the term in its widest meaning, will probably become in a technocracy the most important field of human activity.” Chapter VI of Loeb’s utopian essay ‘Life in a Technocracy’ is about ‘art’ but indeed is about much more than that, in primis it is largely about psychological considerations.

If a large part of citizens will be devoted to leisure and broadly defined ‘art’, could this cause the citizenry to become potentially very critical of technocracy itself? The provision in the ‘Code of nature’ of 1755 essentially prohibiting citizens from any activity that was not technical or scientific might appear less prone to such potentially auto-destructive developments.

While dealing with issues related to government in a post-capitalist technocracy, Loeb referred in 1933 to an external and objective world, material and measurable, where no debate is needed since engineers, scientists and technicians of different types, including medical doctors, would decide the rational course of action in a “most undemocratic” – a quote from Loeb’s utopia – system of non-national state government adopting something similar to a utilitarian scientific stance. According to the ‘Code’ of 1755 citizens can only “submit to the orders and advice of those they believed capable of restoring“ the original laws of nature and the resulting regime would still be called a “democracy.”

The VI and second to last chapter of Loeb’s utopia instead – the VII and last one being on the “advent” of the post-capitalist system and about some of the exact steps to be taken for such a political revolution to happen – is about a subjective, internal world of the psyche in which artistic and aesthetic principles, considered by Loeb indeed entirely subjective, were dominant.

Such internal and subjective world would become more prominent as such in a technocracy – something which might appear paradoxical – and this would happen because of two related factors: [1] the disconnect that will be created between the individual citizen and his or her rationality, what in psychoanalytical terms has been called ‘ego’, on one side, and the external world of the environment, on the other side. A disconnect that is possible to see as related – this is my view – to what other authors including contemporary 21st century ones call “ego dissolution” or “ego death”. [2] The increasingly significant overall amount of leisure time that people, citizens out of work, will have available.

By the way, by being out of work the Hegelian dialectic between servant and master will be broken. We could also add a third factor nowadays, related to invasive and pervasive digital technology not available and perhaps imaginable in Loeb’s times: [3] by being closely scrutinized and via big data and predictive software / algorithms, everyone would be subject to electronic labelling, becoming as a result a candidate for potential interventions, whether psychological, medical, or otherwise.

Where there is a friction between the individual citizen and his or her environment the psy disciplines in general and psychiatry in particular, historically and looking closely at their origins and genealogies, tend to focus fundamentally on modifying the individual, in particular the internal world or psyche of the individual in question, and defocusing from his or her surrounding environment. This is a concept that I developed and had a chance to present for instance in an online seminar during the Spring of 2020.

As far as I am concerned, I arrived on my own at the concept of a crucial distinction and potential disconnect between the internal and the external worlds, two concepts I had not formulated as such in relation to contemporary political transformations or psychiatry until a few years ago, as I tend to assume there is essentially one world or one reality. This was done on my part mainly by observing contemporary events and analyzing them in recent years, including the changing public and political rhetoric.

Locating the specific historical origins, if any, of such contemporary and increasingly popular dichotomous worldview that I was arriving at by observing and analyzing contemporary political events was in my view not an obvious achievement. It is not of the Cartesian res extensa vs. cogitans that we are talking about here, or at least not only, but especially about a distinction between the individual citizen, especially his or her rationality, subjective view, and feelings / emotions vs. his or her surrounding natural, cultural, familial, social, work, economic and political environment/s.

It was only towards the end of December 2020 that I had a chance to read, while studying the history of utopias, Loeb’s ‘Life in a Technocracy’ (1933) for the first time. The extraordinary correspondences between my reading of current events and what Loeb wrote in 1933 in his technocratic utopia are in part analyzed in this articles series. This series has been indeed motivated by finding such correspondences in Loeb’s utopia.

Here is what Loeb wrote on the distinction between the internal and the external worlds at the beginning of Chapter VI of ‘Life in a Technocracy’, a chapter entitled ‘Art’:

“Man and his environment act upon each other. Both are altered in the process.

Some men work upon the external world. The remolding of the earth’s crust in order to make it more congenial to human life, and the use of natural materials to satisfy physical needs are functions of men of action.” These men are primarily “engineers“, “technicians“, and “practical scientists.” “Their effort – Loeb continued referring to contemporary capitalism – is directed toward making money and sometimes as a by-product, goods. In a technocracy” – sometimes written with a capital letter while at other times not – “the by-product would be the end and the no longer necessary and anti-social incentive called profit would be abolished. […]

Other men remold human nature. Their attempt is to adapt man to his environment rather than vice versa. The transmuting of the nature of man, the developing of his perceptions so that he is able to attune himself to those inner harmonies which give value to life, the digesting of phenomena so that instead of fear and disgust they give pleasure, and the interpreting of nature’s phases are the province of the artist.”

“Under capitalism” – and here becomes clearer how widely Loeb considers the province of ‘art’ – “this task has been delegated to teachers, scientists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, and preachers, as well as to the poets, musicians, painters, photographers, cinema directors, and acrobats, to whom the term artist is more frequently applied.”

(9 – ninth of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8)

[In the photo, covers of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts established and directed by Harold Loeb. “Initially, the magazine was printed in Europe, first in Rome and then in Berlin, with the intention of bringing new, avant-garde art back to the U.S.”]

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /8 (2021)

” Man, during the long character-forming ages during which the struggle for sustenance was more intense than at present, seems to have lost the natural faculty animals possess for finding happiness in mere existence“

by Federico Soldani – 13th Mar 2021

“When human skill is concerned, structural changes are more difficult than when mechanical devices have to be altered.” In Chapter V Loeb continued discussing his utopic projects for a post-capitalist technocracy.

“Gradually industrial schools would be developed, and the purely cultural turned over to those who sought culture for its own sake, or, at least, for those of its values that are not called practical.”

‘Life in a Technocracy’, not only in this respect, resembles the much older ‘Code of Nature’ (1755): the state will support technical or industrial education, which in the ‘Code’ was actually the only permitted knowledge for the people to develop. As highlighted in a review of the ‘Code’ published in these pages, the last part of the ‘Code of Nature’ presents an outline of a constitution, the supreme law according to such conception of nature. All philosophical, moral, or metaphysical studies are to be prohibited, with the exclusion of those on the ‘Code of Nature’ itself, only technical and scientific studies are to be encouraged.

“In a Technocracy education for practical purpose would, as suggested – Loeb continued – be taken care of by the industrial schools. […] “general knowledge would be subordinate to the practical end. It would be knowledge for the sake of use, not knowledge for the sake of the student’s satisfaction. Of course, in the higher research studies these two ends come very close together. In the schools not run by the state, the end in view, and the only end in view, would be knowledge for its own sake. […] Such loosely bound aggregation of teachers and students resemble the Universities in the Middle Ages rather than our contemporary schools. […] Some doubtless would acquire a religious bent, others would be agnostical.”

“In the first year of technocracy […] current beliefs could be examined Socratically; the history of the world reinterpreted in the light of the various industrial systems; an attempt made to rate human institutions more realistically than is possible today when every intellectual path is cluttered with the refuse of obsolete cultures.”

“The child would have been subjected to at least two influences, that of his school and that of his parents’ social group. Conflicting influences often induce mental freedom when mental freedom is congenitally possible. […] The decision before each child would be that of career; a decision as to whether his ambition could best be realized within the state industrial system or outside it. […] If a state career was chosen, the child could select an industrial branch comparatively simple, such as transportation, or one requiring lifelong study, such as medicine. In either case the schools would be closely bound to the industry so that the pupils could alternate theoretical study and apprentice work.”

“Though stored exhaustible energy, in a technocracy, would be carefully husbanded, human energy, being of the recurrent variety, could be expended more generously. […] Every opportunity would be given him to find himself even though the body social would thus incur a slight unnecessary waste.”

~~~

“The main features of a typical technological community” – this might somehow remind of the first industrial utopias such as those of Robert Owen or Titus Salt – “had better be suggested. Communal life would center about an industrial function. […] The community would be planned to serve its industry. […] The houses, single and multiple, are likely to be standardized. […] Every thousand houses or so has a center with a park, athletic field, theater, library, moving picture house (cinema, ed.), assembly rooms, elementary school, as well as commodities administrative and distributing unit. Every state commodity, that is to say, every essential article and others not essential but susceptible of mass production, is available on demand.”

“The architecture will probably be homogeneous and standardized. […] It might well be more pleasing than the present chaotic hodge-podge of pretentious gimcracks. Engineers impervious to aesthetic canons tend to create dignified objects. Objects functionally perfect possess a distinctive beauty. And neither standardization nor repetitiousness enjoins monotony. […] It is quite likely, despite the subordination of individual taste and the neglect of aesthetic considerations, that the ordered residential communities of the technocracy would surpass in beauty any house groupings seen at present. Of course, as the quality beauty has no objective reality, this question must always remain open.”

~~~

“The inhabitants of a technological community would tend to be both more homogeneous and more individualized than our contemporaries. […] advertising was invented, an ingenious method of creating general dissatisfaction with the individual’s possessions and position by means of repeated appeals to his lowest instincts – vanity, envy, ostentation, fear… above all, fear, fear of missing something, fear of being laughed at, fear of being surpassed, fear, even – and the misery this must cause, the hours sniffing and smelling – fear of his odors! A stranger would find it hard to believe that any society not only permits but encourages such an outrageous abuse of mankind’s trusting credulity in the written word and plastic representation.”

“Man inherits from the long ages when only the scholar could write a simple, rather touching faith in the written communication. Early capitalism adopted the apparently innocent ideal of general literacy. This attained, it proceeded to bribe certain clever and unprincipled craftsmen to prostitute their talent in its behalf. Of course each social system does the same thing. But the task capitalism asks of its craftsmen is probably the most anti-social. The first business men only wanted the artist to eulogize the goods they had to sell. However, since competition is the basic principle of capitalism, the forces involved, in their struggle to surpass each other, gradually created the present monstrous situation.”

“And as usual with slowly forming institutions, most people accept advertising as perfectly natural. […] In a technocracy, the pressure, to conform to every passing mode now exerted by advertising, would be definitely lifted. As a result the citizens may find it easier to be themselves. […] the abolition of advertising would not end the social pressure that drives individuals to conform to current modes. This pressure antedates capitalism and will doubtless survive technocracy. […] Advertising as it is practiced destroys local conventions and establishes national and international conventions. […] Pressures of this character have so impoverished the human scene in the industrialized world that the traveler of today has little novel to look at except antiquities. Technocracy would probably reverse this trend. With national pressure removed, local pressure should revive. […] no one alive in the West has known an advanced culture unblighted by the mob suggestion inculcated by business. […] Technocracy would attempt to continue bearing the good things, in fact to bear more of them, and at the same time to eradicate the elements in capitalism which taint human society.”

“One group of leading citizens would be composed of executives and scientists.”

~~~

“Even with the low, thought relatively high, American standard of life, the amusing of the populace, the offering of spectacles, the providing of activities, at which leisure time can be agreeably passed, is a serious matter; or rather, under capitalism, a serious business.”

“In a technocracy the problem of satisfying this human need would still be serious. Man, during the long character-forming ages during which the struggle for sustenance was more intense than at present, seems to have lost the natural faculty animals possess for finding happiness in mere existence. Technocracy would, it is hoped, eventually restore this faculty. But it is doubtful if such a consummation can be attained for some thousands of years. The character of man changes more slowly than that of his institutions.”

“To avoid an enormous increase in discontent and misery of the psychological variety, the consequence of multiplying the individual’s leisure, provision must be made for pleasure stimulation. The intermediate period would be particularly difficult. At first the state would have to support the existing movies, athletic contests, theaters, galleries, and periodicals. Doubtless it would use its control to inculcate the ideas on which the technocracy was founded as well as endeavor to fulfill their basic purpose, to amuse. Later a division of function would occur.”

Here Loeb makes a clear distinction about what is up to each individual, which is the subjective internal sphere of the psyche and of taste, and what is up to the technocratic state – which appears to be not based on a nation-state anymore – and its engineers, scientists and doctors, which is the objective sphere including that of health:

“The control of anything the appeal of which is subjective, such as the theater, or painting, should not be entrusted to the state. A state may be entrusted with engineering projects, with the production of goods, to a lesser extent, with the preservation of health. Values in these fields are objective and can be tested by trial and error experimentation. Consequently skillful work is easily recognized and successful accomplishment allows of no debate. This is not so with the more subtle longings of the human soul.”

“During the first century of technocracy, sport will probably flourish as it never has before. Leisure must be filled, and the majority of Americans seem to turn to sport in their spare time.”

“Writing enjoys a middle position. […] The state would present the work of popular writers on an energy-cost basis. The larger the circulation, the cheaper would be the cost of the periodical or book. […] in a technocracy every man could get himself printed.”

(8 – eight of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7)

[In the photo, covers of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts established and directed by Harold Loeb. “Initially, the magazine was printed in Europe, first in Rome and then in Berlin, with the intention of bringing new, avant-garde art back to the U.S.”]

[cite]

“La repressione e’ il nostro vaccino!” ‘Indagine’ di Petri, 1970 (2021)

Elio Petri e il cinema ‘psico-politico’ italiano degli anni settanta

di Federico Soldani – 11 Marzo 2021

Oltre mezzo secolo fa usciva uno dei film piu’ famosi del cinema cosiddetto ‘politico’ italiano: “Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto” del regista Elio Petri.

Realizzato nel 1969 usci’ l’anno successivo nelle sale cinematografiche. Il film vinse il Grand Prix Speciale della Giuria al 23º Festival di Cannes in Francia e il Premio Oscar nel 1971 come miglior film straniero negli Stati Uniti a Hollywood. Vinse anche il David di Donatello come miglior film e Gian Maria Volonte’ come miglior attore. Oltre 30 anni dopo nel 2003 vinse il Boston Society of Film Critics Award. Una lista dei premi per cui il film fu candidato o che si vide riconosciuti si trova su IMDb.

Il soggetto e la sceneggiatura – che l’anno successivo all’uscita nelle sale fu candidata all’ Oscar – furono realizzati in collaborazione tra Petri e Ugo Pirro. Lo stesso anno, 1972, Pirro (nome d’arte di Mattone) fu nominato a due Premi Oscar sia per la sceneggiatura originale di Indagine sia per quella non originale de Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini.

Le musiche del film furono composte da Ennio Morricone e il motivo musicale di fondo divenne celebre.

Il brano piu’ rappresentativo della colonna sonora originale composta da Ennio Morricone per ‘Indagine’ di Petri

Indagine fu ai tempi un film che pretendeva di presentare ed effettivamente presentava una critica radicale a certi aspetti del potere, in particolare poliziesco, dello stato. Qualche anno fa mi capito’ di vedere online una discussione sul film presso la New York University durante la quale non fu neanche pronunciata la parola ‘potere.’

Nei principali paesi del Patto di Varsavia il film non venne proiettato, con l’eccezione dell’Ungheria. Questo poteva avere a che fare con il tema del ruolo politico della polizia che il film presentava. In Italia la cosiddetta intellighentsia, soprattuto quella che si considerava di sinistra, era ai tempi piuttosto critica dei film di Petri, forse per la connotazione per cosi’ dire commerciale di stampo americano con cui si presentavano.

Interessante come nel film il protagonista, un ‘anonimo’ funzionario di polizia appena promosso a capo dell’ufficio politico – anonimo per gli spettatori che non ne sapranno mai il nome – che chiaramente fa parte integrante ed e’ uno degli emblemi di un sistema poliziesco repressivo, sia “complice” e cerchi di usare un giornalista di sinistra, se non proprio comunista, del quotidiano Paese Sera per i propri scopi.

Paese Sera fu l’edizione pomeridiana di un quotidiano riaperto nel 1948, primo direttore Tomaso Smith, su incoraggiamento del Partito Comunista Italiano – partito di cui si celebra in questi giorni il centenario – in modo da poter disporre di un quotidiano romano nei mesi precedenti le cruciali elezioni del 18 Aprile.

~~~

Lo scopo del protagonista appare nel film il voler dimostrare come il potere vada oltre i fatti, forse oggi si potrebbe parlare di una visione post-moderna o di un mondo in cui le notizie e non solo si trovano in una sfera di cosiddetta “post-verita'”. I fatti sono piegati e reinterpretati dal potere istituzionale cosi’ come da coloro che ne subiscono gli effetti in base al potere stesso. Il personaggio dello “stagnaro” interpretato da Salvo Randone, nella sequenza di fotogrammi qui sotto, e’ emblematico a questo proposito.

Il protagonista interpretato da Volonte’ quindi dimostra in ultima istanza come il potere si identifichi con la verita’ e come per questo scopo usi ogni mezzo anche psicologico e tecnologico a propria disposizione.

I temi che poi diverranno famosi negli anni ’70 anche tramite pensatori come Michel Foucault del panopticon e dell’archivio, qui entrambi in versione tecnologica, rivestono un ruolo predominante nel film di Petri: confessione, sorveglianza, archivio – e in altri film di Petri anche temi di bio-politica quali le epidemie e le vaccinazioni – il rapporto tra il sapere dell’archivio e il potere dello stato, cosi’ come il potere disciplinare anonimo delle istituzioni moderne.

In una serie di scene significative, prima un sottoposto spiega al capo dell’ufficio politico (fotogramma qui sotto) come l’archivio cartaceo – in cui si capisce siano schedati per gruppi di appartenenza cittadini attivi politicamente di tutte le tipologie senza necessariamente alcun problema con la legge – sarebbe stato presto contenuto in uno spazio molto piccolo. “Col progresso logicamente tutto questo verra’ distrutto – dice il sottoposto – e sara’ riunito in due piccolissime stanzette”.

Oltre alle intercettazioni telefoniche rappresentate come una vera e propria catena di montaggio, Petri introduce il tema dell’elaboratore elettronico che una volta ricevuta una domanda di prova, ovvero se l’omicidio attorno a cui ruota il film e in particolare l’indirizzo dove si e’ svolto in via del Tempio, 1 possa avere un legame politico, si mette in moto. “Facciamo una prova – dice il capo dell’ufficio politico – immaginiamo che il delitto Terzi abbia uno sfondo politico”. La messa in moto dell’elaboratore elettronico, il “regolatore” come lo chiamano nel film, fa esclamare al protagonista “Oeh! Ma che succede eh! E’ arrivata l’America, la rivoluzione!”

~~~

Il film, che venne girato prima dei tragici avvenimenti di Piazza Fontana, decisivi per la storia dell’Italia del dopoguerra, fin dall’inizio divenne oggetto di confronto e scontro politico, nonostante iniziasse con la dicitura “Ogni riferimento a persone esistenti o a fatti realmente accaduti è puramente casuale.”

Il periodico Lotta Continua – che passo’ da cadenza pressoche’ settimanale a quindicinale durante il 1970 – elogiò il film, invitando per altro i lettori a riconoscere nel personaggio interpretato da Gian Maria Volonté la figura del commissario di polizia Luigi Calabresi, che effettivamente lavoro’ anche all’ufficio politico. Accusato dal periodico di essere responsabile della morte dell’anarchico Giuseppe Pinelli divenne poi vittima un paio di anni piu’ tardi di un attentato i cui colpevoli vennero alla fine riconosciuti tra i membri della organizzazione extraparlamentare Lotta Continua. I procedimenti giudiziari si protrassero per decenni. Petri giro’ anche, proprio con Volonte’, un film documentario a forte carattere politico sulla vicenda: ‘Tre ipotesi sulla morte di Giuseppe Pinelli’ (1970).

‘Tre ipotesi sulla morte di Giuseppe Pinelli’ (1970) – Wikipedia – di Elio Petri, con Gian Maria Volonte’

Il connubio tra il regista Elio Petri e l’attore Gian Maria Volonte’ caratterizzo’ una parte significativa del cinema politico italiano degli anni ’70 e si concluse con l’interpretazione di Volonte’ come Aldo Moro (non nonimato come tale nel film ma apertamente ispirato all’allora Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri in base allo stesso Petri) nel 1976 in ‘Todo modo’. Il titolo era una citazione dallo spagnolo del fondatore della Compagnia di Gesu’ Sant’Ignazio di Loyola: “Todo modo para buscar y hallar la voluntad divina”, che in italiano si puo’ tradurre come “qualsiasi mezzo per cercare e trovare la volonta’ divina.”

Il film (video qui sotto) si apriva con una epidemia e la richiesta di vaccinazione obbligatoria della popolazione emanata da una ambulanza munita di megafoni che si aggirava per le strade della citta’.

‘Todo modo’, con Volonte’ e Marcello Mastroianni, mise in scena la morte di Aldo Moro due anni prima che questa effettivamente accadesse in modo tragico nel maggio del 1978. Quando usci’, il film fu messo sotto sequestro a poco meno di un mese dall’inzio delle proiezioni nelle sale.

Scena iniziale sull’epidemia e la vaccinazione obbligatoria con Gian Maria Volonte’ nella parte di Aldo Moro – Todo modo (film) di Elio Petri (1976) – Wikipedia

Il film Indagine ha indubbi aspetti psicologici e in particolare psicoanalitici, che meritano di essere trattati a parte, anche considerato che Petri era appassionato lettore di Sigmund Freud, come in anni recenti ha ribadito il suo co-sceneggiatore Pirro. Anche per questo motivo nel caso di molti dei film ‘politici’ di Petri cosi’ come di altri autori suoi contemporanei a mio avviso si puo’ parlare di un vero e proprio cinema psico-politico italiano.

Un altro film politico italiano degli anni ’70 con Gian Maria Volonte’ fu “Io ho paura” (1977) di Damiano Damiani, in cui temi in questo caso “paranoici” su uno sfondo politico venivano presentati apertamente.

Temi simili legati alla pazzia – la figura del “pazzo furioso” richiamata nel film – all’ememento “paranoico” e alla tecnologia usata per intercettare le comunicazioni di nuovo su uno sfondo politico si ritrovano in un film di colui che e’ stato considerato da alcuni l’iniziatore del cinema cosiddetto politico italiano, ovvero in ‘Cadaveri eccellenti’ (1976) di Francesco Rosi, con protagonista l’attore Lino Ventura. Era lo stesso anno in cui usciva ‘Todo Modo’ di Petri, in epoca di cosiddetto “compromesso storico” tra D.C. e P.C.I., ma mentre li’ si rappresentava l’uccisione del presidente della Democrazia Cristiana (D.C.) qui si rappresentava l’uccisione del segretario del Partito Comunista Italiano (P.C.I.).

Il protagonista alla fine del film viene accusato apertamente dalle autorita’ alla TV (primo fotogramma qui sotto): “tornato nella capitale ha dato segni di squilibrio, tanto che era stato messo in congedo. Vedeva dappertutto complotti e si era messo a seguirne gli inesistenti fili. Forse si era convinto che persino il segretario del Partito Comunista facesse parte di questa immaginaria macchinazione.”

Nel dialogo finale un giornalista (interpretato da Luigi Pistilli, nel secondo fotogramma sotto) aggiunge “non era un pazzo, il complotto c’era.” Gli viene risposto da un dirigente del P.C.I.: “Ma tu che cosa vuoi, la guerra civile, lo scontro frontale! […] Scatenare la piazza, questo vogliono!” Alla affermazione solo vagamente interrogativa del giornalista “allora la gente non dovra’ mai sapere la verita'” il film si conclude con la risposta del suo interlocutore dirigente P.C.I. secondo cui “la verita’ non e’ sempre rivoluzionaria.” Dopo i titoli di coda una frase simile a quella con cui si apriva Indagine di Petri: “I fatti e i personaggi di questo film non hanno riferimento con fatti e persone reali.”

‘Cadaveri eccellenti’ di Rosi venne incluso, assieme anche a Indagine di Petri, nel progetto 100 film italiani da salvare.

Psicologi in una societa’ militarizzata e colpita da una sorta di misteriosa epidemia sono presenti nel film ‘I cannibali’ di Liliana Cavani (1970), anche questo film accompagnato dalla musica di Morricone. Proprio come Indagine venne girato nel 1969 e usci’ l’anno successivo. Il film alla presentazione al Lincoln Center di New York City, secondo il New York Times, ricevette quindici minuti di applausi. L’attore principale Pierre Clémenti divenne poi famoso nelle cronache di quegli anni per problemi legati all’uso di droghe e fu successivamente anche protagonista di un cortometraggio realizzato per la casa farmaceutica svizzera Sandoz “Autoritratto di uno schizofrenico” (1977).

Claudio Bisoni nel suo libro dedicato a Indagine di Petri (2011) scrive come secondo Richard Dyer “il divismo e’ legato a un richiamo continuativo tra star-image e personaggio.” Come nel caso del divo Volonte’, anche per Clémenti l’immagine pubblica dell’attore e i personaggi recitati nei film agli occhi del pubblico spesso si mescolavano e sovrapponevano.

~~~

L’attore giornalista di Paese Sera in Indagine, chiamato Patane’ nel film, e’ il giornalista italiano Fulvio Grimaldi che successivamente lavoro’ anche per la RAI e come corrispondente di guerra. Grimaldi, giornalista apertamente impegnato in politica da posizioni di sinistra, e’ stato recentemente sostenitore del Movimento 5 Stelle di Beppe Grillo come riportato sul suo blog, e tra altre cose ha avuto uno scambio acceso con il collettivo di scrittori bolognese Wu Ming. E’ stato l’unico testimone italiano del Bloody Sunday a Derry / Londonderry in Irlanda del Nord nel 1972 come documentato in ‘Blood in the Street’ Guildhall Press (1998). L’ultimo suo libro e’ ‘Cambiare il mondo con un virus – Geopolitica di un’infezione’ Francoforte, Zambon (2020).

In anni recenti il film Indagine ha anche indirettamente ispirato la critica sociale, in particolare da parte di sindacalisti, agli obblighi sanitari sempre piu’ generalizzati come quando nel 2017 in Italia si e’ discusso dei provvedimenti di legge che rendevano obbligatori tutti o quasi i vaccini sul mercato praticamente per l’intera popolazione, si veda a questo proposito l’articolo ‘La libertà ai tempi del morbillo’.

~~~

“Il popolo è minorenne, la città è malata, ad altri spetta il compito di curare e di educare.

A noi il dovere di reprimere! La repressione è il nostro vaccino! Repressione è civiltà!”

Il discorso di insediamento dell’ ‘anonimo’ capo dell’ufficio politico della polizia interpretato dall’attore Gian Maria Volonte’

Intervista TV a Elio Petri del 1971, anno in cui ‘Indagine’ vinse il premio Oscar

Elio Petri compariva con alcuni camei nei suoi film, come gia’ Alfred Hitchcock. Qui in un fotogramma di Indagine, apparentemente assopito o distratto durante il discorso di insediamento dell’ ‘anonimo’ capo dell’ufficio politico della polizia interpretato da Gian Maria Volonte’

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /7 (2021)

“If technocracy should be successful, and when its success had become accepted even by the individual’s subconscious mind, religion might undergo a metamorphosis“

by Federico Soldani – 1st Mar 2021

“Technocracy is a technique of material living. It is merely a system for making and sharing the goods man has at his disposal, both the goods freely tendered by nature, such as grazing land, and the goods that require more or less effort to produce. Nevertheless, a change in the technique of material living affects every manifestation of the human spirit.”

After talking about how a technocratic regime would affect the external world and in particular the form and functions of government and its radically transformed political dimension, Harold Loeb described in chapter V on ‘Religion, Education, and Amusement’ and especially in the following chapter VI on ‘Art’ how the internal world – a distinction he makes in his techno-utopia – would be modified in turn.

“Not only would the concept of property and the incentive to effort be different in a technocracy” – Loeb wrote – “but religion, education, amusement, art, sport, culture, and every other human institution and expression would undergo transformations more or less radical. […] The only certainties are that technocracy, in so far as it releases men from economic bondage, will allow them to devote more time and energy to other pursuits.”

~~~

“Whether one thinks organized religion is as obsolete as political government or the dodo, or whether one thinks religion is a sustaining, eternal power for good, religion will not disappear with the advent of technocracy. Russian Communists expend much energy in trying to uproot traditional religion and to inculcate their own brand. They may or may not be well advised. In any case the situation differs there from that in America.”

“In Russia the Greek Catholic church was powerful, its institutions were rallying points of reaction. In America the fundamental faith is the Mysticism of Money. Though the churches uphold it fervently, and their own traditional religion of resignation more dubiously, technocracy need not destroy organized religion in order to destroy the Mysticism of Money. This latter faith with all its ramifications is automatically demolished by the cancellation of the exchange medium. One cannot maintain an ethic on a transient certificate of service entitling the possessor to a certain quantity of energy. Ethics requires at least the illusion of eternality. Ethics deprived of the immortal dollar might again interest itself primarily in spiritual values.”

“Technocracy, if it had anything to say on the subject [of moral and other values, ed.], would say: ‘Do that which is good for you.’ Its only prohibition would be acts definitely anti-social. Thus force could not be exerted by one individual on another. Property other than personal, which is strictly limited, could not be destroyed on a whim, or for gain as at present, and so forth. […] But most of mankind feel quite violently about certain inherited taboos.”

“The subscribers [to a church, ed.] might wish to gather together in buildings for communal professions of faith and for surveying each other’s actions. Such surveillance seems to fill a certain type of individual with pleasurable excitement. Thus, during the intermediate period, while humanity was learning to cope with a superfluity of leisure, the churches would help relieve the tension.”

“It is probable that religions would flourish, at least at first. During the period in which the nature of man was adjusting itself to economic security and a superabundance of leisure, emotional needs would doubtless be rampant. Religious devotion is probably a satisfactory emotional outlet for the average person. Only the few are capable of aesthetic or intellectual creation and of sustained sexual satisfaction. For others the communal hysteria aroused by religious fanaticism does very well. Individuals with mystic visions, genuine or faked, would probably circulate though the land uplifting subdued spirits, and distracting the unimaginative from their querulous plaints. […] Like political government, religious institutions, divorced of coercive power, would be incapable of hurting society.”

“If technocracy should be successful, and when its success had become accepted even by the individual’s subconscious mind, religion might undergo a metamorphosis. When man’s bugbears, hunger and disease, shall have been exorcised and some happiness made realizable, religion, always sensitive to the needs of contemporary society, might very well turn from the inculcation of resignation to the encouragement of joy.”

“A church could acquire no wealth since x-ergs cannot be transferred. […] As with all ownership, the possession of an edifice would, in a technocracy, depend on use.”

(7 – seventh of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6)

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /6 (2021)

“With doctors assuming the intimate role of family adviser, mental defectives would inevitably be recognized”

by Federico Soldani – 25th Feb 2021

In describing how government will change in a technocracy, Loeb wrote: “Having suggested how a technocracy will perform the functions which it has assumed, those functions of political government which it renounces, or which will be very much changed, will be considered.” Then he examined aspects of government such as foreign trade, police duty and public sanitation (police and sanitation considered together by Loeb), the judiciary, war, and political government.

~~~

About foreign trade, Loeb noted how “if the exchange is to be made with another technocracy, or with Russia, the barter is more direct. The Russian government would be asked what it wanted from America to trade for, let us say, manganese. The energy costs of the two commodities are calculated, an hour of Russian labor being considered equal to an hour of American labor even though the American would doubtless be more productive. The only cost item about which a difference of opinion could exist would be plant depreciation. However, a committee of engineers could quickly reach an agreement. […] Then the trade would be consummated erg for erg.”

~~~

“Political government assumes other functions whose nature would be transformed in a technocracy. Perhaps police duty and public sanitation are the most important of those not yet mentioned.”

“It is not known what percentage of crime can be traced back to want. It must be very great. Most criminals have warped natures due to suffering in childhood, either from their parents’ misery or their own destitution. In a technocracy these would grow up straight. Many crimes are directly impelled by hunger or cold. Such crimes also would not occur.”

“This leaves as potential criminals the mentally defective and those who from lack of control or over vehement emotion perpetrate some violent act. Both these classes would be left to the care of the state medical department.”

“A technocracy would have a sufficient surplus of human energy at its disposal to expand enormously the state sanitation work both in scope and personnel. Each branch of every industry would have its medical and psychological inspectors. Every residential community would have its corps of doctors. And doctors might have as their primary responsibility the prevention rather than the cure of illness. Some individuals consider periodical health examination an invasion of their private rights; but such invasions are not resented long.”

“Even now – Loeb continued – wealthy people of their own volition often incur more or less periodic examination. The poor, become well to do, would soon get used to doctors’ prying.”

“It is only the suspiciousness of the poor, whom experience teaches to expect no good of the unknown, which makes them recalcitrant to medical advice. When food and clothing are hard to obtain, suasion to be clean sounds both gratuitous and impertinent.”

“With doctors assuming the intimate role of family adviser, mental defectives would inevitably be recognized. When suspected of dangerous tendencies, their habits would be watched; when necessary their actions restrained.”

“The other kind of crime, that due to passion, can hardly be prevented. Probably life will be fuller in a technocracy, and shift of scene more feasible. The greater freedom which results from economic security may reduce that variety of suffering conductive to violent outbursts; but this cannot be guaranteed in advance. Technocracy does not pretend to abolish human suffering. Technocracy pretends to prevent only unnecessary suffering, suffering from hunger when food is rotting in the fields, suffering from pride when all respectable means of livelihood are refused, suffering from loneliness when beings equally lonely, behind a thin partition, are unavailable for the reason that our predatory system makes us suspect strangers. Men will still know hell on earth, but many more men will also know heaven.”

The problems of capitalism, according to Loeb, were “all for a fetish called the sacredness of private property, a fetish disregarded frequently for every kind of excuse except that of human happiness.”

~~~

“Judges will still be necessary. Disputes arise from the settling of which a referee is convenient. […] the judiciary will surely not be as important as it is today. […] Offenses not belonging to the doctor’s province should be much rarer. […] Arson? A case for the doctor.”

“In general, medicine and law would be directed in a technocracy toward the prevention of sickness and crime. The whole conception of punishment would undergo an overhauling. Anti-social offenses, like physical maladies, have always a cause. In a technocracy the department of state concerned with sanitation would have as its province the remedying of conditions leading to these diseases.”

~~~

About war (in the photos: Technocracy Inc. Total Conscription movement during World War II and a public meeting), Loeb wrote: “The first technocracy would not have to fear an attack. […] aeroplanes, tanks, guns, explosives, and poison gas would be turned out by mass production. […] the technocracy would send into the air swarms of aeroplanes, would direct toward the enemy regimens of tanks, would release over hostile cities clouds of gas. No nation would attack a technocracy once the technocracy had been organized. […] Otherwise the technocracy should refrain from martial thinking.”

~~~

“Another function of political government should be considered. It might be called showmanship.” – a topic already discussed in the second article of this series about Loeb’s technocratic utopia.

“It has always been important. It grew out of the original impetus which placed a man or group of men in control of a body of men. Strength of some kind obtained the initial leadership. Showmanship maintains it.”

“In times past showmanship often took the form of pomp. In fact, pomp is still an important abettor of prestige. Even the Communists take it into account if the stories of Lenin’s funeral and “canonization” are to be believed. England supports a large royal family in elaborate style. America, having discarded the older systems of showmanship, relies on the subtle strategy called democracy.”

“Every citizen is given the illusion that he, no matter how small or downtrodden, is part of the show. It has worked excellently in northern countries. The Latins being more cynical and not so prone to credulity find it less effective. Some Americans believe that the people run the government. Though it is frequently pointed out that a citizen’s vote counts only when it supports one of the two major parties, and that even the published programs of such parties are nearly identical and their actual programs can seldom be told apart, many men seem to obtain a gratifying sense of power from going to the polls or from not going to the polls.”

~~~

“The more successful politicians intuitively realize that showmanship is the key to their power over the public. One of them, Roosevelt, by artistically playing up this phase of his activities – by rough riding, tennis cabineting, baby petting, grimacing, advising foreign governments, big sticking, and so forth – attained such authority that he was able to quell the money powers for a moment and thus retard appreciably America’s march toward technocracy.”

“I refer, of course, to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which Roosevelt resurrected. Instead of encouraging the oil business to integrate, Roosevelt broke up the Standard Oil Trust with or without the connivance of the oil people. Consequently we have a dozen Standard Oil Companies ostensibly competing. Consequently we have millions of dollars of watered stock on which profits are sometimes earned, and haphazard exploitation of oil reserves and wasteful expensive competition in the retail field.”

~~~

“The American people, like other peoples, want showmanship in high places. The spirit of technocracy is utterly hostile to showmanship. To ask the men entrusted with running our delicate industrial mechanism to compete in showmanship with ball clouters, mug pushers, society stars, movie queens, and demagogues, would be wasteful, even dangerous.”

“The Russian Government has paid heavily for confusing its real job with emotional hang-overs borrowed from the publicity or showmanship department. In order to get the power to go to work, the Class War had to be popularized. Slogans such as “The bourgeois are strangling the workers! Throw off your chains! Let the workers own the factories!” and so forth were circulated. Of course, such nonsense has nothing to do with the inauguration of the industrial age, the event which is really taking place. […] Ownership in industry is as obsolete as feudalism. Factories are to be used, not to be possessed.”

“Political government is probably as out of date as the divine right of kings.”

(6 – sixth of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5)

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /5 (2021)

“Corporate monopolies would be the government.” “A most undemocratic system!”

by Federico Soldani – 24th Feb 2021

“Administration, in a technocracy, has to do with material factors which are subject to measurement.” Chapter 4 is about Government or the external world.

“Therefore popular voting can be largely dispensed with. It is stupid deciding an issue by vote or opinion when a yardstick can be used. Questions of taste, in fact all things affected by subjective valuations, are definitely outside the scope of the state. […] the answer depends on accurately weighing the various pertinent facts. Voting on such questions for which there is a right answer and a wrong answer would be even more farcical than voting for President.”

“To trained minds in possession of complete information, the answer in nearly every case would be incontrovertible. The more important questions, such as what to produce and how much to produce, questions in which individual desires enter, are left to popular decision, in fact, the people automatically command just what and how much it wants. The state is merely concerned in translating desires into satisfying commodities. Consequently, in a technocracy, the separation of private and public function is clearly defined.”

This could be seen, in Freudian terms, as a separation of functions between the internal, subjective ‘id’ on one side and a sort of external, objectified ‘super-ego’ on the other side; in the Freudian tripartite structural model of the human psyche, the ‘ego’ is the conscious component that interacts autonomously with the external world and which integrates the different mental functions. Throughout ‘Life in a Technocracy’ the ‘ego’ is systematically mentioned on multiple occasions and fundamentally attached to negative connotations, for instance when mentioning the instinct to possess filtered by the ‘ego’ that in Loeb’s essay appears as the basis for private property. Private property which, in a technocracy – in fact an engineered form of communist society – would be abolished along with money and the price system.

In the previous chapter ‘The Escape’ he wrote: “It would seem that the abolition of private property is unrealizable even if desirable, so deeply rooted is the possessive instinct. Man automatically attaches to his ego extraneous elements and calls them his.”

About such “separation of private and public function” Loeb added: “There would be no overlapping as at present, when the state defines what can and cannot be drunk, surely the personal prerogative of the individual, and individuals exploit natural resources (the forest for instance) in a wasteful, unsystematic, destructive fashion, surely an outrage against the body social.”

~~~

Loeb stated that in engineering problems “for each detail […] there is always a right answer” and clarified that “voting would not remedy the trouble.”

“Even the problem of organization, of personnel, of devising a technique whereby the more efficient human units are given the more responsible jobs, and each human unit is found the kind of work most congenial to his nature, consequently, the kind of work at which he will be most apt, can be partially codified. But unless psychology makes enormous strides in the next few years, personal intuition should continue to have much weight in this field.”

~~~

In the United States, “the alterations in structure are radical but simple. First the present tendency to merge the competing units in each industry must be carried to completion. The resulting group of great corporations would each control a basis industry. This integration is forbidden now because such a monopolistic control of a life essential would make the controlling corporation more powerful than the government. And a corporation under the capitalist system is created to make money for a body of individuals, called owners, or stockholders. These individuals, who in practice delegate their power to a smaller group known as bankers, have the right to charge what “the traffic will bear.” Theoretically a corporation having the monopoly of an essential commodity could obtain all the wealth in the country by raising the price of its product. To present such an outcome our absurdly wasteful system of competing producing units is preserved.”

“In a technocracy these corporate monopolies would be the government. The stakeholders, instead of being peculiarly fortunate or farsighted individuals, would be the inhabitants of the territory, the consumers of the product. The directors, consequently, would be responsible to all the people rather than to a certain few, and would have no interest in profit but only in quality and cost.”

“Since the corporation has no competitors, it would not be interested in maintaining or augmenting sales. Its job would be to produce the goods wanted by the consumers, and to distribute them.” “The coordinating industrial board. The chairman of this last body would be the highest official in the territory and would have certain fiat powers for emergency use. A most undemocratic system! True, but with money abolished and every material want satisfied, these men who must have undergone considerable discipline to reach their high position would have no temptation not to serve the state. What else could they serve?”

“There is no secrecy about engineering – Loeb wrote – The chicanery of finance, of vote seeking, of diplomacy, simply would not exist. We have then a territory openly governed by the organizations which produce the goods consumed in the territory. […] Even now, the producing industries are the bone and muscle of the state; the bankers, the brains; and the elected representatives, the voice. We would call the consumers the appetite, except that they are too docile to make the analogy quite accurate.”

~~~

Loeb described a “technological government” more radical than Russian Communism in which not only private property but even money would be abolished: “In a technocracy, the producing industries, having undergone a metamorphosis of purpose, become the government. This would be a great gain in candor if nothing else. Banking loses its function. […] Its first great asset is the impossibility of corruption. Even Russian Communism, with all its religious fervor, has not been able to eradicate corruption. Its dependence on foreign sources of supply has necessitated the use of the money standard. And so long as there is money, corruption is inevitable. The United States, with the trade balance all in its favor, with the material for nearly all essential goods within its borders, could afford to abolish money.” In his view “everyone will have, once the system is functioning, full satisfaction of his material wants. When this condition is subconsciously realized” the urge for corruption “will lose its force, or, at least be directed into other channels.”

~~~

“Political government is also inefficient because its executives are chosen for qualities other than efficiency. In a technocracy executives would be chosen, as in big business, for fitness in their field. This would tend to make the executives of a technocracy at least as able as those who now manage the producing end of private corporations.”

“The executives of private corporations are hampered by the anti-social purpose underlying their efforts. Business produces goods to make money. […] The competitive struggle takes more energy, thought, time, and skill than the producing itself.”

“In a technocracy […] scientific tests would decide which article best fulfilled [the needed, ed.] requirements. The engineers would calculate how to manufacture the chosen example by the least expenditure of energy.”

(5 – fifth of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, 3, and 4)

[cite]

‘Life in a Technocracy’, 1933: a soviet of technicians… in America? /4 (2021)

“Man automatically attaches to his ego extraneous elements and calls them his“

by Federico Soldani – 23rd Feb 2021

In the second chapter – ‘The Escape’ – of ‘Life in a Technocracy, what it might be like’, Harold Loeb immediately informed the reader that “the alternative is not dreadful.” This was a direct response to the question with which he closed the first chapter ‘Blind Alley’: “Is the alternative to capitalism so dreadful that it may not even be envisaged?” A formulation that in my view, along with its preamble, could be seen as the original idea at the heart of what has been called in more recent years “capitalist realism.”

~~~

“Scarcity – Loeb wrote – induces a price that insures a profit. Profit insures the ability to purchase and thus makes distribution possible. The problem is to devise a system of distribution that will function even when goods are redundant. […] and to distribute goods according to need,” which reminds the Marxian “to each according to his needs.” Such reasoning assumed that technology and social engineering in a technocracy would make the problem of scarcity disappear.

“A unit of measurement must be adopted which is capable of evaluating everything. Money based on gold, or even money based on a list of basic commodities, will not do because the value of gold like that of other commodities under the capitalist system depends on scarcity, and the purpose of the projected unit of measurement is to escape from the confusion inherent in scarcity valuations. […] The physicists have worked out a means of applying the erg, the unit of work, to all forms of energy. It is possible to state human effort, stored latent energy, recurrent solar energy, in ergs.”

Is it possible to see any influence of Auguste Comte – a pupil of the American and French revolutionary Henri de Saint-Simon and a man considered father of the discipline of sociology – and of his social physics, recently gaining new popularity, in using physical concepts in the context of social sciences?

“Howard Scott – Loeb wrote – lays much stress on the fact that energy of every sort may be measured in units of ergs. He has stated that “the solution of the social problems of our time depends upon the recognition of this fact.” […] The community has at its disposal all forms of energy, the stores of oil beneath the ground as well as the heat of the sun and the strength of the wind; the individual has nothing but his own time. In a technocracy the individual will exchange one hour of his time for some form of consumable good produced by, it does not matter how much of the energy owned in common, plus one hour of human time.” In Loeb’s view, the price system is based, among other factors, on “the fears of the scientifically untrained minds in control – the financiers – before innovations.”

Loeb also made reference to “mental energy” and to “negative wastes of brain.”

“The foundation of technocracy would be a kind of social contract not dating from a mythical past but incurred by each individual at the instant of birth. The individual may dissolve the contract without notice. That many will choose to do so is not likely. Living outside the system, living by Stone Age standards except for borrowed tools and gifts, would be disagreeable for most people. Doubtless, a few zealots – artists, nature lovers, ascetics – would try living on their own resources.”

“The state, or perhaps it should be called the industrial system, since it has few characteristics of a political state, will guarantee each member of the community a proportionate share of the energy production of the community. […] The valuation […] being an energy valuation, is an exact figure determined by the methods of physical science and independent of supply and demand.“

“To keep track of supplies a certificate would be issued to each human unit. This would entitle him to his energy allotment and specify his exact place and function in the industrial system. At birth, of course, his function would be to occupy a certain cot in a certain hospital. This non-transferable certificate is cancelled at the expiration of each year whether or not the energy quota has been exhausted. Since the quota represents energy which cannot be hoarded and exists only in the using of it, wealth accumulation becomes impossible. […] By using a system of descriptive numbering no difficulty occurs in recording even the smallest transaction. Totals would be telegraphed each night to the central accounting bureau and added. Thus an exact record of consumption would be always at hand. New trends of consumption would be recognized immediately, overproductions becomes impossible, and serious shortages most unlikely.”

A publication of Technocracy Inc. ‘The Energy Certificate’ (1938, in the main photo) contained similar considerations as well as an image of how an energy certificate (in the photo below) would look like. In the concluding part – called ‘Values and Marx’ – of the publication a reference was made to Major Douglas Social Credit theory.

Opening this Technocracy Inc. booklet there was also a statement: “That which cannot function ceases to exist.” A technical version of Herbert Spencer‘s social Darwinian “survival of the fittest”?

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“Children would only be required to attend schools where the elements fitting them for useful work were thought. – Loeb wrote – Reading, writing, figuring, and perhaps muscular control would compose the curriculum. Industrial schools wold be voluntary. Cultural schools, being of no concern to this purely productive state, would be outside of the system. […] psychological tests could be used to select those with an innate talent for engineering. […] In assigning vocations it will be possible to give weight to the desires of the individual as well as to the advice of the psychologist.”

“Where several successive assignments are not relished, specialists would try to discover the source of the maladjustment. In some cases compromises might have to be made since the needs of the community come, in the last analysis, before those of the individual. But so little effort is demanded of an individual in a technocracy that a freedom of choice, incalculably greater than that possessed at present, would be practical.”

“What northern man will do with his freedom, once it has been obtained, is not the concern of the state. Insects that have attained it fly around in the sun and whir. Birds sing. Man may not do as well. […] The fact that populations do not increase when the standard of life has been raised above a certain level, makes it seem eminently practical.”

As a side note, Loeb briefly discussed the example of cooking: “Cooking would be unpopular only if the process of cooking remained an art, as it is at present, and not a technology. Cooking could, of course, be standardized. […] Since the arts are outside the scope of technocracy, a way to divorce cooking from the system is desirable. Curiously, a device which will attain this objective has already been invented and tested. By means of a high frequency current, an object can be heated from inside out instead of from the outside in.”

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“The average person, if he does not stop to think, may assume that his energy is exerted for the sake of private gain. If questioned, however, he will immediately go behind the money goal and admit that he works for power or for fun, if he is very rich; for the goods or benefits that money brings, if he is poor; and for the self-respect that comes from success if he belongs to that extensive though vicissitudinary middle class. An incentive more important than those, at least for the upper and middle classes, is the desire for the approval of his fellows. […] The great majority of individuals desire with an altogether irrational hunger the approval of their fellows. […] Men work for private gain, for profit, it is true. But largely for the symbol, profit, not for the actuality. Their religion, the Mysticism of Money, makes profit the symbol of success, even of virtue.”

“It is already apparent that the concept of property would possess in a technocracy a connotation other than that which it bears today. However, there is nothing unprecedented or unusual in this. Though the concept of property is popularly assumed to be constant, actually its content differs in each epoch. It would seem that the abolition of private property is unrealizable even if desirable, so deeply rooted is the possessive instinct. Man automatically attaches to his ego extraneous elements and calls them his.”

“At an early age the child discovers that his toes belong to him. Somewhat later he asks for the moon. During life he learns which items society, through the operation of public opinion, concurs in his owning and adjusts himself accordingly. In the late centuries Western man has gradually denied himself the right to own other men, even of the female sex. At the same time he has extended the individual’s sway over land until the free domain has been limited to public roads and parks. Sunlight and air are still at the disposition of all. Water also is freely tendered to members of the community wherever water is not scarce.”

“Technocracy leaves as private property the standardized state-produced articles which wear out, such as clothes, and the unstandardized, privately produced articles which the individual chooses to make or collect. […] The state as a matter of course provides more than adequate housing for all of its citizens in proximity to their functions.”

“Property in a technocracy would be limited to goods used and possessed by the individual. On the other hand, wealth which has already under late capitalism become the capacity to produce goods and not the goods themselves – as was largely true in the past – would not be owned at all. Neither the state nor the individual can own a capacity, though either or both can use one. Thus wealth becomes a power exerted for and by the community, and property is limited to those static objects which alone in any real sense can be possessed.

Metal and fuel under the ground, land that is not cultivated, streams that are unharnessed, would be, like the wind and the sun, neither property nor wealth. When the community needed them it would know where to go for them. With scarcity abolished, no argument remains in favor of permitting their further exploitation by private initiative for private gain.”

(4 – forth of a series, previous articles here, 1, 2, and 3)

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