Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...business of inventing and flourishing treacherous parodies of freedom, joy, and fulfillment becomes an indispensable form of social control under the technocracy. In all walks of life, image makers and public relations specialists assume greater prominence...
...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, the world.) Under technocratic domination, capitalist and collectivist societies come to resemble each other more and more. Compare...
WHAT ROSZAK is saying, in short, is that "objective consciousness is alienated life promoted to its most homorific status as the scientific method." This explains the willingness of social scientists to pursue "truth" for anybody's money and purposes. But its implications about our culture are more telling. We all treat one another and everything else as unresponsive objects from the start. Openness is precluded; locked into our own heads, we are unable and afraid to make real contact with anyone or anything. Psychic alienation, or repression by objective consciousness, is the central fact of our lives...
Alienation, that cliche. But it is a far more plausible explanation for the inhumanity of technocratic capitalists than the supposed social deficiencies of technocratic capitalism. And it is the only explanation for the unconcern of all of us as science undertakes the objectification and mechanization of everything human: intelligence, moral judgment, teaching, creativity, play, even child-making. As Roszak comments, it was once thought that such things were done for the joy of the-doing. Scientific culture, however, "makes no allowance for 'joy,' since that is an experience of intensive personal involvement." Nothing stands in the way of Progress...
TRANSLATED into political terms, the Great Refusal means the refusal to be co-opted. The social revolutionaries already have been. Frustrated by the technocracy's relentless inhumanity, they have come to hold some ideas more important than some human beings, and to place more value on some human beings than on other human beings. Just like the technocracy...