Technocracy

A good handful of modern leftists believe in the Soviet idea that good communists do not have a religion. It is also perceived that any ideology that explains the modern world in enough detail makes religion redundant or that the persistence of religion is an anomaly in a society where oppression and suffering is remedied sufficiently or does not exist. However, the Marxist idea of religion being the opium of the people does not necessarily explain all belief systems that people have.

God building is an idea that to understand why people believe in a religion is to look at it within its context or circumstances. For example, people living in a desert may worship a sun god because the heat and light has such a profound effect on their lives. Another example is how people in Japan may engage in rituals and ceremonies to preserve their culture even without an intentional faith or belief with the deities involved. Modern new age practices around manifesting money can be tied back to neoliberalism’s focus on the individual instead of the system, and can show how in a society where people have so little control over success in life they may actually be more able to endure their challenges when engaging in metaphysical thinking regardless of whether outsiders believe it has an effect or not. Even beliefs in major religions can be analyzed in a meta-religious context, such as the idea that all people need religion to be virtuous is a reflection of thinking people are naturally bad. This is not done to contradict people who engage in the practices, but rather to understand these ways of thinking and be able to make policies that are respectful to all members of the society and their belief systems while remaining unbiased and scientific.

The idea of whether deities exist or not, is entirely irrelevant to us for the purposes of Technocracy. As people of science and progress, we will make decisions based on data and science. Even if a prophet comes down from the sky or the world is visited by an ancient god, that changes nothing in regards to data-based decision making, energy accounting and the application of science to government. Regardless of whatever supernatural entity exists that humans do not yet understand, I will want what is best for humanity as determined by our secular principles. I am not anti-religion or pro-religion when it comes to politics, but religion exists completely outside of Technocracy. Our ideology is so unrelated to religion that even declaring it secular is a bit of a stretch.

There is talk of the president wanting to annex multiple foreign governments, and at the same time there is talk here within the Technocracy movement about appealing to the people of the country by Americanizing our movement and making flags with red, white, and blue colors on them. While this may work in increasing the number of people willing to identify as technocrats, this strategy has very recently led to ideological hijacking such as the patriotic socialist movement that tried to americanize socialist ideas, but instead devolved into an incomprehensible and mostly right-wing frankenstein movement once the patriots joined. While it can be a valid strategy to support nationalism in some countries to increase appeal of an ideology, there are some characteristics about the nation-state of America that make it incompatible with left-wing ideas at its core.

The first thing any decent leftist group will tell you about the United States is that it is a settler-colonial nation. This means that when White colonists came from Europe, they violently displaced the original population of this continent and engaged in genocidal policies to limit the well-being and population growth of any person who was not white. They had an idea similar to what Nazi Germany had with Poland, that over time they would breed out or exterminate any ethnic group in the country who was not their own, and eventually be able to claim the entire landmass for their group. I’m not saying this to cause discomfort to any person, but I think it is important to be aware that American national identity was always defined by this history, and even minorities in this country have a lot of culture based on resisting this and we even see the spirit of settler-colonialism reflected in modern day gentrification of black communities and the theft of Native American land which continues to happen to this day. Many portrayals of the early US are romanticized or heavily biased because only White citizens would have been able to leave official accounts or even been allowed to be literate. Many citizens of this country read about these events in history books but the significance of them is downplayed or a cognitive dissonance develops causing them to not fully realize what it means to the society they live in.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that technocrats take on an anti-american stance either because that would be alienating to most people. However, keep in mind that this country had its entire military declare on oath to defend its constitution from both foreign and domestic threats, which could very easily be technocrats one day. We are advocates for a futuristic and more progressive government system than the world has seen yet, and giving technocracy an American aesthetic is comparable to revolutionaries against a monarchy wearing crowns and sitting on thrones. I believe that the people who choose to follow us will do so because they realize that the old ways do not work, and want to try something new.

In the US. they cannot get enough people to use public transport to make it profitable, so it does not happen and the process is self-reinforcing as the lack of quality public transport. However, I am imagining that placing social housing units in transport hubs like subways, bus stations, train stations, or maybe even airports would encourage people to use other forms of transport besides cars, and also help the economically disadvantaged people to access the forms of transport literally outside their front doorstep. The ideal layout I imagine is large hexagonal food courts with passages to subways or whatever transport is present in the area, or exits to the surface.

At first I thought subways should have entrances at the top and trains at the bottom with housing in multiple floors in-between, but I realize now that is likely to cause inconvenience for those trying to use the subway without living there. The subway should have a hexagonal food court or hub with shops and services, and the social housing should be on floors above it with balconies looking down and some kind of glass ceiling at the top to allow sunlight in, maybe with some kind of greenery or art in the center at the bottom level.

Crime may be an issue, but police are typically located in these areas. However, police brutality or community mistrust of law enforcement can also negatively impact satisfaction of those living in transport hubs, who may feel they are always being watched. The large amount of people and witnesses that can see the subway from their units is likely to discourage more serious crime, but property crime and vandalism would probably happen often just like in other high-traffic places. The large amount of traffic through the hub where people are living may also negatively affect their satisfaction there, but it would be similar to a big city and they would normally be above all of the higher traffic areas which makes this issue less severe. People who are not used to city environments may be intimidated or less comfortable in a housing project like this, but it would be better for the planet, public transport, and it can help the issue of homelessness. This ideas also assumes construction of a new subway or transit facility designed for living, not the currently existing ones.

The Technate should of course be democratic, but I think we need to think about ways to exercise democracy and what systems are best suited to meet the needs and desires of the people. Democracy in these times is synonymous with electoral systems and western-style governments, despite in reality these systems being unfair, harmful to minority groups who have less population to vote in their interests, or in many cases outright corrupt with lobbying of politicians being completely legal in The United States. Elections and electoral systems have become completely divorced from any traditional sense of democracy and are used to exercise plutocracy. The fact that lobbyists need to exist for issues such as gay marriage or trans rights is especially dystopian, because it means vulnerable people realize they live in a plutocratic system but then decide the best course of action is to raise more money than their political opposition just so they can have civil rights.

Many people recoil when I say that I am not fond of voting. They think that in a society without voting or some other form of participation in government, they would be politically helpless and subsequently treated badly or have no recourse against tyranny. I perceive that to already be the reality for most people in the current society we live in. Even if the majority of people support something, lines are drawn for districts to suit the results the elites of society need to get their legislation passed. If that fails, they just outright change the rules of the elections. Here in Florida, a law was passed that changed the necessary majority for votes from 50% to 60%, most likely to stop the citizens of the state from passing certain legislation as law.

Besides these obvious political schemes, there are also issues that never have elections to allow input from the citizenry and are decided by political representatives with no input from the society. These are issues such as international policies such as support of the US government towards Israel or even wars, such as its invasions of Vietnam or Libya. People have even been arrested for protesting these issues and the media tends to fall in line with whatever the regime needs the people to believe, with protesters being suppressed violently. Imperialism is a huge red flag for any society that considers itself democratic, because it complicates the narrative they are attempting to create about their society being more advanced or progressive than others that do not cause death and destruction abroad, sometimes even despite being oppressive dictatorships themselves.

While I am very disappointed in the results of the systems that exist in the western world and continually fail to stop oppression, poverty, and imperialism, I am not advocating a Singaporean-style approach where the will of the people is simply suppressed and brute force is used to keep technocracy in power. People should participate in government, but they need to understand certain things about how the government works, the ideologies behind current systems, and the reasoning behind various laws. In the western world where people are spoon fed politically biased information and then sent to vote are set up to screw themselves. However, political parties are not their allies in this system, which brings me to my next point.

In a technocracy or a society where the economy does not create conflicting economic interests, there will be a lack of conflicting political interests as well, allowing society to be more cohesive and progressive that can function logically. The reason for different parties and political ideologies goes back to the economic system, and that is why communist societies consistently produce better results for their citizens’ well being and quality of life despite being one-party systems and being perceived as corrupt dictatorships by those in the west, who believe that multi-party democracies are ideal. This means that if we want to create a democracy, we need to think about the reasons that people have different ideological goals and preferences and adjust the system according to it, and remove any possibilities of an upper social class hijacking the system as they have in the US. In the absence of economic interests, many hate groups or kakistocracy groups such as flat-earthers would most likely disappear, since the masses would get education, psychiatric care, and there would not be a sense of competition that the ruling class creates to make us more productive workers for their interests.

You may be asking what the party for working class people is in the United States, but there exists none because that would be the communist party, and anyone who tries that ends up as a political prisoner. The best you see in the US are center-right parties that act in the interests of the middle class. The further right party in the US benefits the elites of society, but a lack of education and religious and nationalistic appeal is used to make this party palatable to the more conservative minded population of the society. It may seem the US system was once a genuine attempt to be democratic at one point and then corrupted, but the reality is that the entire system was rigged by the people who created it, and only included non-landowning white men when not doing so would cause the entire system to collapse in a violent revolution. Every citizen may need to be entitled a right to vote to stop a large revolution, but that is exactly why the ruling class is so subtle with the ways that it manipulates and distorts the desires of its citizens as well as how their votes affect the system. It is also why liberalism, despite appearing progressive on the surface, is so afraid to do anything that goes against the system, the economy, or the ruling class.

As a technocrat, please do not buy into the narrative that the United States was ever a model for democracy at any point in its long history of brutal violent oppression.

Society may not have reached the level of cultural and political development yet to achieve technocracy, but there exist many ideas now that reflect the ideals and spirit of technocracy even if they do not necessarily come from the technocracy movement.

The first one which is obvious to most people is to take the money out of politics. Even the liberals do not like money being the basis of politics. There are various propositions for this. Most want to end lobbying, others want to increase political education because they believe that will cause people to take actions that will prevent it from continuing. Even though they would kill someone for advocating against plutocracy or spreading political education in the United States, it remains possible and can be made easier through the internet. While a technate would take money out of politics in a different way, the removal of money from politics would allow society to progress and bring humanity closer to achieving technocracy without a ruling elite sabotaging their progress.

Participatory planning is a policy where every person provides an estimate of the products they will consume, so that production of them can be matched. While obviously this is never exact, this policy helps prevent waste and stops the excess production of resources such as food, clothing, or other amenities. It is efficient and pro-environment and would change the functioning of the economy to suit actual needs as opposed to excess production for profit leading to waste and invented scarcity.

Universal Basic Income is another idea that has gained attention, but struggles to become reality in some parts of the world. Some may even advocate giving more UBI to more productive citizens which defeats the purpose and is against the spirit of UBI. People struggle to think that every member of the population would get a certain amount of income just for their basic needs or whatever else. In the modern era where work is scarce and there is not a large amount of labor needed this will be a requirement. Even under Technocracy, it will be difficult to find outlets for all of the human labor that society can produce as well as with the technology that will make it more efficient. This would also allow the population to explore other ways of contributing to society that they can appreciate or to cope with disability if they suffer from it. It’s not energy accounting but it seems to be the closest that a non-socialist economy can get to it.

15-minute cities are cities where every amenity or necessary shop can be accessed within 15 minutes of walking. Infrastructure designed around cars exclusively is harmful both to the environment, those who cannot afford cars and those who cannot drive cars for whatever reason. Cities tend to naturally develop in walkable ways, and the idea of exclusively car-dependent cities is unique to the west. Car-exclusive infrastructure is also used by authoritarian regimes to make it more difficult for people to gather and protest against them, or to segregate neighborhoods so that only those who can afford cars can enter them. I could go on, but in summary a technocracy naturally strives for eco-friendly and human-friendly ways of public transport or walkability. This is basically a less radical restructuring of cities than turning them into urbanates.

So while technocracy seems very far off, these ideas show that people want various kinds of changes in society that reflect technocratic ideas. If we can push for these ideas or use them as examples of how technocracy functions, we can show the power of science and data in policy making.

The black and white checkered flag associated with racing is an apolitical symbol, but technocrats should adopt it even if just as an alternative to the current one. We should keep our gray and persimmon historical flag, but in contexts where it is absent or there is no practical way to obtain a technocracy flag such as when buying them online, using flag emoji or with flag patches, a checkered flag could be a very useful substitute. It is already commonly used and it also follows one of the design principles behind the technocratic flag, which is that both colors share even amounts of space to represent equal amounts of production and consumption. The Monad symbol itself causes some confusion, but I believe it should still be kept.

Of course if we’re displaying a flag online or the internet where physical flags are not needed we could make the colors gray and persimmon to stay consistent with party colors, but until the technocracy movement is popular enough to have flags widely available this can be used as a symbol of the movement. If it’s too ambiguous we can also modify the checkered flag in some way such as painting red, black or gray stripes on it at the base, or other simple modifications to it that allow it to be accessed by technocrats. I find the checkered flag to be very aesthetically pleasing personally but other ideas are welcome.

Pacifism is great, but as technocrats we most likely believe in energy accounting or other kinds of economic ideas that are incompatible with capitalism. This would make us all targets for surveillance and even assassination assuming you live in the United States. Martin Luther King was a pacifist, de did manage to change society, but he died as a martyr. and government documents exist suggesting he was psychologically tormented by the CIA until his death, even with letters being sent to his house encouraging him to commit suicide.

We are people that look at data and make decisions with logic free from influence of other systems, so from this point of view I’m sure some of you noticed how society works against any person that threatens the social order that exists. We are encouraged to be pacifists in a country overrun by gun violence and police brutality. When people defend themselves, suddenly there is a rush of sympathy for the oppressor. “They have a family” but so do the oppressed. “They are wrong for using violence” but the oppressor can do it with impunity. “They could have voted or protested peacefully” but the elections are rigged and peaceful protests get brutalized by the police. What am I supposed to think? I believe pacifism has its validity in certain situations, but the regime has turned it into a default mode of thinking to make dissent less of a threat to the system. If we truly want a technocracy or even a change to the system, will it just happen one day while we are all sleeping, with a peaceful transition out of a system that has been maintained through violence and colonialism for hundreds of years?

To be clear I am not telling you to commit violence or encourage people to commit violence, but when an oppressor in society is the victim of violence, sympathizing with them is egregious. If we do not disqualify people from sympathy due to being oppressors then by that logic we can literally argue sympathy for slave owners who were killed in revolts, or war criminals who suffer from harsh consequences in trials. If you think about what people are actually saying when they express sympathy for those kinds of people, it’s not a good look. If any leftist political movement starts taking positions like this, they are contradicting themselves ideologically, assuming they believe what they say they do. Sympathy is great and it is our natural human response, but manipulation through empathy is a tool used by various abusers. It’s why victims of various crimes by various organizations are so difficult to help. Politics is just like our personal lives, there are times to be sympathetic and there are times to be cold and calculating.

The better thing to do is to be honest and say that you are personally uncomfortable with violence. There is nothing wrong with you opposing violence itself, but some reactions that come from discomfort to violence can be disrespectful to the people defending themselves and supporting one side. An example is during Israeli-Palestinian conflicts where less informed commentators condemn the violence “On both sides” which condemns Palestinian self-defense. The recent shooting of a healthcare CEO is another example where the working class people of a country were being oppressed by an organization, one of its high ranking members was killed, and now there is no sympathy. Sympathy for the man almost feels ridiculous considering how many people suffered, were unable to receive medical care, or died due to his company keeping the money that would have been used to care for them. Having sympathy for this person almost feels like a dismissal of all the harm they have done. If we start going down the path of giving eulogies to people like this, the technocracy movement will die out fast.

I think that assassinations and violence are what happens when laws and legal systems fail to protect people, so from that perspective you can argue the breakdown of society is way overdue. I think technocrats should speak out in favor of Luigi Mangione since from a logical rationalistic perspective, I cannot think of a reason to sympathize with the CEO, besides police possibly harassing you or maybe if you are scared of the current society falling into chaos. What do you guys think?

People have a tendency to want to include as many people in their groups as possible. However, the Technocracy movement simply is not for everyone if it is meant to stay true and conducive to its purpose. It is theoretically possible for some right-wing ideas to be compatible with rightism, but there is a lot we must unpack and analyze before we can have that discussion. I am going to separate both cultural rightism (Reactionary thought) as well as economic rightism separately so these ideas can be discussed coherently.

First, you need to really understand their ideology which is difficult because they speak in ways that make their desires and ideas less immediately identifiable as problematic or offensive to the average person. We can separate their talking points into “The spoken part” and “The quiet part”

For example, when the spoken part is “I’m scared of white people becoming a minority in America” it’s practically an entire manifesto in one sentence, and I will explain why.

They realize (Whether they admit it or not) that minorities are treated badly in the country, but Instead of changing society to treat minority groups better, they just want to make sure they never become one. They believe white people have some sort of inherent right to be the majority group of the country. This goes back to eugenics and white supremacy. The implications become dark when the possibility is considered of actions being taken to alter demographics, such as increasing white birth rates or decreasing others. Mass support for deportations, removal of public services and excessive policing seem to be a manifestation of this.

The modern rightist will never say these things because they know they would be too extreme for potential viewers to be radicalized. However, before a person can get warmed up to these more extreme ideas, rightist propaganda exists to ridicule cherry-picked examples of leftism and/or pure misinformation to create the impression of progressive ideas being extreme or the lifestyles of modern people living outside of traditional established ideas (Which may be based in colonial ideologies) being nonsensical or ridiculous. Examples are ridiculing women who embrace feminism or dress in alternative style, or ridiculing gender identities that fall outside of gender-binary. These people either do not have good intentions, or are being influenced ideologically by people who do not have good intentions. Religion can fit into this as either establishing what is considered traditionally acceptable or putting social pressure on people who do not conform. To say the very least, cultural rightism is based on a very distorted basis of what is actually going on in the world and what issues are important in politics.

Getting cultural rightism out of the way, we move on to the issue of economic rightism. Policies that fall under economic rightism tend to favor elites of the country, business owners, wealthy people, or even those who have conflicting incentives with the working class such as landlords or anyone who makes profit from land, labor, or capital. Marxism defines this, and explains in great detail how the ruling classes use economic systems to extract labor and the value of services from the rest of humanity, and how right-wing economic policies exist to keep these economic systems going and prevent any of the current beneficiaries of capitalism from losing their privileged status. Monarchies fall into the category of economic rightism in most cases but they tend to lean culturally right for their own preservation. These things do not have a good performance record for the economy for the entire population, more so for the ruling class and it is why socialist states are so hostile towards the accumulation of wealth if they allow it at all.

Singapore which is believed by many to be a technocracy is an example of what a right-wing technocracy would be in practice, an authoritarian state making great progress, but with 25% of the population in poverty and an authoritarian conservative government that punishes its citizens for not voting how they want. Singapore is technocratic as far as meritocracy, but rightism makes it so the main beneficiaries are the ruling class of their society just like in any other capitalist regime in the world.

I’m not saying that a person who participates or previously participated in rightism cannot be a technocrat, but they should be ready to experience quite a whiplash once the data does not support anything they stand for and clashes with most things they believe. Technocratic policy making and theorizing does not serve the psychological motives of having arguments with strangers online, getting angered constantly or scapegoating groups of people for life problems. Of course, you can incorporate any vaguely-right wing ideas into a technocracy if they are supported by holistic and unbiased data.

Many people can easily realize that arguing online with one person about politics is a waste of time. However, activism and spreading ideas to change or improve the political system can often end up in a similar situation where the energy and emotional labor involved does not get your ideas and influence as far as possible.

The reason that many political discussions are as pointless and frustrating as they are is because many people living in the United States do not have actual ideologies they articulate and follow consistently. They want the candidate they view as better to win elections so they are constantly shifting and reforming their wishes and desires to match whatever the ruling class approves as a candidate for the elections they control. The politics that people believe within electoral societies based on liberal ideas are based on an idea that everyone has a valid opinion and through voting, the largest number of people get the decision they want. There is no objective truth in this ideology, it accepts what the largest number of people decide as the truth. Technocracy is an ideology based on scientific facts and data, so we are basing our decisions on the most objective facts we possibly can in our current time period and within our modern understanding of the world. This naturally also makes us incompatible with modern people who make emotion-based decisions unless those decisions are supported by the data. After a certain point the discussions are just completely unproductive.

Writing theory is more productive than speaking with other individuals who are just seeking out things to argue about, but even better is bringing attention to the theory and the ideas of technocracy. Writing theory is the most logical and effective way to participate in technocracy, because t. The theory is either well-received because it is intelligent and accepted by the community to advance and shape the ideology further, or it is ignored for not being a good application of the theories or the ideology. Accepted theory contributes to the overall ideology and gives outsiders more information about technocracy and the general thought process behind it which encourages compatible people to participate.

While this topic does not fit perfectly into the ideals and theories of technocracy, It has become a very prominent issue and cannot be ignored by any political ideology. Much of this theory also applies to various other groups in society and most likely will be relevant when a new group of people is marginalized or mistreated. In a society that uses distorted science to justify human rights violations and systematic mistreatment of groups of people they marginalize, I feel that technocrats need to speak up and make their positions known. Scientific research has shown brain differences in transgender individuals and current hypotheses state that hormone levels affect the brain of the person during development in different ways than the person’s body, and that there may be other genetic or prenatal differences that contribute towards a person becoming transgender. It is also noted that being transgender is intrinsic and support from family can lower the risk of self-harm or ideation from 60% to 4%. Many of the motivations that some individuals have to try and force transgender people to conform to their own ideas of gender or expression come from right-wing extremist or religious ideologies that have yet to be proven by unbiased science. Even the argument about chromosomes causes many real scientists to shake their heads due to many cisgender people sometimes having varied chromosomes or variations that make their chromosomes different from the assumed standard.

Additionally, technocrats must be aware of how the mistreatment of transgender people is being executed and justified by society. There exist claims of transgender people engaging in sexual crimes or using transition as an excuse to enter the bathrooms of the opposite gender, but the actions that the people suggest as solutions show that they are not honest about their own motives. Instead of gender neutral bathrooms or security to protect anyone in bathrooms from harassment, they go on to put bounties on transgender people in public bathrooms (Texas) or simply pass laws that allow for the arrest and detention of any person who uses a bathroom that does not match the gender assigned to them at birth (Florida). Trans people are not the first group of people to be denied access to bathrooms under shaky pretenses. Black Americans were historically forced to use separate bathrooms under Jim Crow and the justification at the time was just as unconvincing as the ones being used in the present day. The politicization of people’s human rights is a common tactic used by extremist groups and this kind of thinking should not be validated or it can empower bad actors to do more and more harm as well as give encouragement to hate groups. Historically, making the rights of any group of people into a political issue with different parties measuring the pros and cons has been itself harmful to the group while also allowing the society to descend into more barbaric behavior. In a society that has a history of internment camps (Japanese during the second world war and modern ICE facilities) I am very reluctant to yield to anyone wanting to make another person’s existence into a political issue.

While a technocracy is not typically equipped to handle social or cultural problems, technocrats make policy decisions based on experts and science, and this is an issue where the science does not support what is currently being done to a marginalized group of people, and most likely never will. Some people may feel the issue is too sensitive, some people may find it off the topic of technocracy, but being a technocrat means promoting the use of science and data in government policies so I cannot sit idly by when primitive appeals to religion or hatred of people are used by the regime to harass and bully people who need our support.

People view Howard Scott’s model of technocracy as being outdated, ideological, or in some way not as good as just putting the experts in charge regardless of the government system that exists. We live under capitalism, so the experts are going to say that the best course of action is to give all the political power to billionaires or other departments or organization that are indirectly controlled by billionaires since these people have always exerted undue influence on many parts of society, especially in the United States where plutocracy is the way that the government operates and major privately owned corporations are the ones who provide funding and resources to all of the elected representatives.

Even members of the ruling class in America such as Elon Musk see themselves as technocrats because since they have the funds to conduct and facilitate research, they can simply justify the policies they want by controlling the scientific studies that they conduct and pay for. In their minds, they would be running a country with scientific governance but the science would be so influenced by them to cherry pick their desired policies, that it would be no different than the systems we have now. The only difference is that anything that the ruling class wanted would be justified with some biased studies.

The scientific method does not exist in a vacuum and with enough studies done to get the conclusion they want, any nation on the planet could claim to be a technocracy. And if we are defining technocracy as the rule of experts in general, why would any government not just claim their politicians are experts in politics since they know how the political systems work and gain power within them? Even an anti-science regime like America could claim to have technocratic principles since they have different agencies managing over things like the environment or public health. Technocratic principles themselves are good, but any successful government needs some scientifically based principles simply to stay in power because without them any policies put out would be completely unhinged nonsense.

I’m not saying it’s bad or that anyone is wrong for calling themselves a technocrat if they aren’t following the model of Howard Scott or Energy Accounting, but I think that you’re just pro-science and pro-meritocracy. Both of those things are good, but I think that if your technocratic goals can be satisfied under any government system, why be a technocrat? It is almost like being a Marxist-Leninist solely for the desire to get universal healthcare. It is technically correct, but your goals are relatively moderate which makes participation in a more radical ideology feel out of place. Additionally, any changes made to further technocratic principles can be undone by the ruling classes of capitalist regimes since the billionaires would continue to hold all of the wealth and power.

This does technically make Technocracy an ideology, but that just means a set of ideas and principles. Even a set of beliefs that lead you to avoid having an ideology is paradoxically an ideology. As such, nobody who is conditioned to live in a society is free from ideology which makes the whole conversation pointless. I do not mean to put down the non-ideological technocrats or those who think differently, but I hope I have successfully illustrated why the Technocracy movement exists in the form that it does.

Technocrats may wonder how they should view actually existing socialism, historical examples of socialism, and even modern countries such as the US or European nations in terms of political development. This does not mean technological development which can be separate and we have historically seen cases of technologically advanced societies actually being more primitive politically if we look at the technocratic markers of political development.

If we understand the four phases of development being religious, nationalist, marxist, and technocrat then we can look at historical societies as not just being exactly at each stage, but typically combining characteristics of these different stages, such as Christian nationalists and Socialist states with extremely nationalistic ideas and policies. For example, we see that many right-wing extremists as well as monarchists (Yes, people exist who advocate monarchy in the modern world) are somewhere between the stages of religious and nationalist. Modern China, Stalin and Mao would be in stages between nationalist and marxist. Modern Russia is even less politically advanced than the Soviet Union, regressing towards nationalism with religious backing. We can also begin to understand similarities in different societies in different stages in development, with the most barbaric societies in world war 2 being cult-like and therefore both religious and nationalistic in nature which shows how they are even more primitive and less politically developed regardless of their technological capabilities.

Many western societies are easily categorized as nationalistic, since they are engaging in various forms of colonialism and imperialism. From this point of view, we can even determine that liberalism is a nationalistic ideology and it all begins to make sense. However, regions of the country as well as some sectors of the population can be more politically advanced leaning into early marxism, or more primitive leaning into religious or tribalistic ideologies they apply to politics. However it should be noted that many liberal ideas are not progressive because they try to end the mistreatment of people and improve living standards through ways we would consider nationalistic and not Marxist. The ideas of creating more black billionaires or improving the standards of LGBT by allowing them into the military are extremely nationalistic ideas, because they serve to integrate minorities into a nationalistic and capitalistic society rather than progress it towards the next stage of development which is Marxist.

Party politics is also a good example of nationalistic thinking because all the parties of modern societies assume the national identity of the society, but represent the different social classes and interests which give an illusion of social cohesion, national unity and collaboration between all the social classes for the betterment of the nation. In marxist societies, it is understood that the origin of political parties are economic social classes and as such, a society with more equal distributions of wealth would find political parties redundant.

If you’re wondering what a society would look like once it passes the stage of Marxism where nationalism is entirely abandoned, you would find traces of the proto-technocracy. Many marxists and socialists can accomplish similar things to technocrats, but people are unlikely to accept ideas that are more politically advanced than what they understand because it will sound idealistic or unrealistic to them. The technology exists nowadays that allows technocracy or other ideologies to the left of marxism or communism to exist in the modern world, but political development is constantly being sabotaged and even violently suppressed which is why the world is stuck with nationalistic, religious regimes dominating most of the world with a few societies managing to evolve into nationalistic Marxist ones, usually requiring extremely large militaries or needing to constantly deal with interference and external sabotage from the less politically advanced societies that fear revolutions and the downfall of their ruling classes and social orders.

An urbanate is the technocrat replacement for a city. An urbanate is a living environment where homes, amenities, and necessities would be within walking distance or a very short and comfortable commute away from the homes of its residents. Since a technocracy would be working towards environmental friendliness, access to facilities and living standards of citizens, an urbanate may even resemble some large hotels, cruise ships or amusement parks with gyms, hospitals, eco-units, grocery stores or even places such as theaters or pools accessible through a series of hallways or transit systems such as railways that require a fraction of the power necessary for cars and cause a hundredth of the environmental pollution.

While an Urbanate does not necessarily need to be completely indoors and some may be created with outdoor walkways and gardens where the climate is favorable, the creation of indoor urbanates would greatly increase the ease and desirability of living in the northern regions of the world, where the cold weather is extreme and can even be an existential threat. With the climate changing for the worse due to the destruction of the environment, this may even be desirable for the warmer regions of the world or even necessary in the coming decades.

An urbanate would be designed to be as resistant to natural disasters as possible. While we could technically build a large black cube or long rectangle city like a proposed Saudi mega project that is never going to be built, we must consider the aesthetic value and the desire of people to live in the urbanate environment. While a large metal or stone cube containing an urbanate would likely resist disasters well, there must be a certain degree of liveability that does not compromise its resilience against natural disasters, especially because there would be a large amount of people living in such a compact space. Perhaps even vault-like units built into the sides of mountains or cliffs could help to grant extra security to the urbanate during a storm or extreme weather events.

Despite even the best designs, a direct hit from a tornado may be a lot for any kind of man made building. An efficient urbanate could be rebuilt from the portions still standing and a technocracy would be able to assign the displaced citizenry accommodations and they could simply use their energy credits to replace whatever they lost. If all else fails, then the transportation systems between the urbanates should be designed to facilitate mass evacuations of urbanates. While this may seem like a grand task, it should be more rewarding and efficient in many ways than the maintenance and creation of the road systems we already have which are less efficient and cause even more problems than the automobile-based systems currently used around the world. With the increased efficiency that a technocracy would give society, this task will likely not seem as unfathomable to us as it does now.

We already have the architectural and logistic technologies to create urbanates, but the reason we do not see them happening is mostly economic. Billionaires are proposing to build new cities in land they own which are supposed to solve issues cities have, but without applying technocratic principles and even basing their city on capitalistic ones, this city would inherit a lot of the same issues that currently exist in cities, with land ownership preventing any authority from organizing it efficiently as a technate would. All across the US everything is so far apart because every person owns their own plot of land, and the road needs to connect them. The technate makes ownership of land obsolete, so they can instead create the urbanate in the way which benefits the largest number of people and expand or remodel it as necessary to keep up with demands of population, nightlife, amenities, healthcare, education, childcare, or anything else that the technate provides.

Rather than abolish the use of currency or have a ration-based economy that we see in Cuba and societies based off of Marxist-Leninist economic plans, Technocracy is based on a system called energy accounting. This system is based on thermodynamic interpretations of economics and the idea that all human economic activity requires energy. The currency of a technocratic society would not be money as we currently know it today, and would be a form of credit that represents the energy cost to create an item and available resources. Every citizen would be given energy credits and could then use energy credits to purchase what they want, and this would make the economy sustainable.

Because energy credits can be designed to expire and only a set number of them would exist within a given timeframe, this would safeguard against wealth inequality or abuse of wealth in ways we see in the modern world such as bribery of politicians, hoarding of wealth, or entire populations being deprived of resources in favor of a small elite. It would also remove poverty from anyone in the system, because energy credits would be given as a universal income similar to a UBI.

With profit and most of our typical economic incentives removed from the system, energy credits could be used by the vast majority of people to obtain their needs. Implementation of energy credits also makes the issue of private property irrelevant, because without money to be gained or lost, the technocracy can simply allow the means of production such as factories or markets to give the people their necessities. With money gone, the technocracy could distribute resources such as homes more efficiently, since landlordism and home ownership become redundant without a financial basis on which to benefit from them. Even the war machine we have in America now is purposeless without profits for the ruling class that uses news to push for war and foreign interventions across the world.

It should be noted however that the use of the word “Currency” for energy credits under a technocracy is a tricky one because of the nuances that come with the idea of currency and money. A good technocracy would put various rules and regulations on energy credits to prevent them from being exploited for the unfair personal gain of a single person or in ways that harm the technocracy, its citizens, or the environment.

It should also be noted that the transition from current systems of money to energy credits would solve a large amount of issues, there will always be a few opportunists who seek to abuse any system and profit off of the expense of others. Without safeguards, a person could possibly be extorted or blackmailed for their energy credits or somehow coerced for them the same way that they could be for money. A person could also attempt to fraudulently gain energy credits or counterfeit them in some way. These issues do not necessarily disprove energy credits or are even unique to energy credits (As these same issues apply to the money we use now) they are things that a technocracy would likely end up dealing with at some point. A good technocracy would have a department to watch for abusive behavior and be two steps ahead of any person who tries to abuse such a system.\

Marxism is the third highest stage of development, after nationalism that most countries exist in now and with religion-based societies and tribes being the lowest tier of human development. Marxism is based in class struggle and most issues will be seen as issues of class, where the person will consider one option potentially benefiting one class and another option benefiting the greater society and the masses. Even if we are looking at an issue that seems relatively esoteric or awkward in relation to class struggle, it can somehow usually be related even distantly. An example is how the rise of flat earthers could be linked to a failing society and a public education system which has declined in quality due to political agendas that serve the ruling class. The existence of a bourgeois class is traditionally tied to capital ownership such as factories or any business profiting off of employees which is why many Marxists would want them owned by the state or a privately owned entity as much as they possibly can.

If you are a left technocrat like me and believe in the ideology of class struggle, there are two possible ways to incorporate it into technocracy. The first is to seek a society where the means of production are owned by the community through the technocrat party or some other publicly controlled entity that exists outside of private control.The other way would be strict ideological vetting of a technocrat party to ensure they will not act in the interests of the bourgeois class for whatever reason or take a big tent approach that will sometimes throw concessions to the wealthy.

It is very important for a technocracy to have safeguards against corruption and hijacking by wealthy elites, because they will engage in class struggle on behalf of their class every chance they get. Such a situation where the wealthiest of society take over a technocratic state would be a scenario out of dystopian science fiction. Comparable to how socialism is so fixated on defending itself from corruption by capital and money in politics, Technocracy would cease to exist as soon as money changed the motives and motivations of a majority of those in power. Of course, a single member taking a bribe and cherry picking experts from Trump university to justify a decision would be remedied by purging them from the party. However, large scale infiltration and corruption is always a potential threat.

A very special benefit of a technocratic government is that by doing what is scientific and logical in regards to economics and that would benefit the largest number of people, is that the existence of such wealth inequality are unlikely to reach the same proportions that they do under liberalism. There are of course neoliberal economists who will argue that privately owned corporations should have unlimited power and be free to ignore worker’s rights, but a good technocrat party will see why this is not scientific, logical, or beneficial to the largest number of people, aside from the obvious ulterior motive thinly hidden in such a statement. This power that technocracy has to analyze and make experts with data and concrete facts makes a technocracy especially difficult for the bourgeoisie or other malicious to manipulate without direct bribery or sabotage. Misinformation campaigns, propaganda and even radicalization towards extremist ideologies to the population of a country would not affect the technocratic party or their way of governing since they would still follow experts and not need input from the population or even elections. In regards to class struggle, this inability to manipulate public opinion against the technocracy helps put a muzzle on the bourgeoisie and other enemies of the working class such as violent hate groups or the clandestine agitators since they all tend to use similar methods of that a technocracy is well-equipped to defend itself against.

If you research the countries of the world who are called dictatorships by foreign policy analysts, they are called such because they are ideological regimes where a state ideology determines the actions and policies put forth by a government. This creates a society we would consider undemocratic, but this puts more pressure on the state to perform well even if it is just to prevent dissent. It must be noted though that true tyranny can exist under systems legitimized in both ways. South Vietnam was a brutal dictatorship and a colonial puppet of the US regime, and they were put into power by the US and considered the democratic alternative for Vietnamese people. Look at India, where people unable to vote are treated like garbage by politicians, and where the caste system especially shows how brutal elections can be. It can be argued that in America or the western world everyone has an equal say, but there are various reasons this is not true including but not limited to money, influence, marginalization, lack of political knowledge, misinformation, organization of the system, lack of party representation or even a complete lack of political representation as we see with third parties in the US.

In societies where political systems gain legitimacy through elections as we see in America, Western Europe, or elsewhere we see wealthy businessmen hijacking politics to serve their interests a majority of the time, and this is because they can give a candidate resources to put them in charge and have them win elections. You also cannot get any straight answers from your elected representatives because they want to keep themselves as ambiguous as possible to gain the most votes since they gain their power from votes and not real success or ideas.

I am going to be bold and say that the American experiment of democracy especially has proven disastrous for humanity, with their government participating in some of the worst forms of open corruption and imperialism the world has ever seen. The influence of capital has created a system where politicians serve the interest of capital almost exclusively and where voting in every election does not grant the people any real control of what happens in the country politically.

Living my entire life under such a government, I see no value in democracy and would prefer to live in a society where technocracy is a state ideology, and where we are given policy explanations and political theory by the party. A strong single-party state with no elections may not be popular for the perception it gives about limiting personal participation in politics, but it has historically been shown to be the most resilient to outside influences such as corruption by the bourgeois class and it must react well to challenges that arise because another party cannot be scapegoated for the current situation in an attempt to get votes and stay in power.