Word: roszak
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...Making of a Counter Culture must be described as a seminal work. Like any other seminal work, it has flaws, some of them serious-but they don't diminish its singular importance. Visionaries of all sorts have glimpsed the new life that man might lead. Roszak is the first to give us a scrupulously critical celebration of the new life now being made, the emerging counter culture, and to advise us concerning its further creation...
...also reveals the most plausible and terrifying picture vet of what the counter culture is countering. It demands considerable attention. Roszak sees the United States as a technocratic society, in which "those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge." Technocracy, to paraphrase an important communist concept, is the highest stage of industrialism: the mature product of a society convinced of the necessity for technological progress and deeply imbued with the scientific ethos. It all meshes quite nearly. Technological progress requires rational expertise, efficiency, order, predictability...
THIS GIVES us a clue to the awesome power of the technocracy in our world. Rationalized in the jargon of industrial necessity and Objective Science, the technocracy transcends political ideology, even revolutionary ideology. It grows without check in all industrial societies-capitalist or collectivist, Roszak emphasizes-while its often disastrous breakdowns are blamed on this political faction by that one. Everywhere, the dominant motives are social integration and control. (E. g.: big business in America, now assured of fairly steady profits, seeks along with the government to "rationalize" -manipulate and control-the total economy of the country and, if possible...
...time being, though, the United States has the most excellently crafted technocracy of them all. Long removed from political controversy (the think-tanks and universities work for every administration), it has consolidated its power behind a fantastic screen of hypocrisy and cant. Roszak sums it up well enough...
...That all makes consummate sense to me. Other critics have presented basically the same picture as Roszak's, but they didn't go any further. None of them went ahead to question and discuss the technological impertive for what it is, a profoundly potent ideology in itself...