When any system of politics devours the surrounding culture, we have totalitarianism, the attempt to bring the whole of life under authoritarian control. We are bitterly familiar with totalitarian politics in the form of brutal regimes which achieve their integration by bludgeon and bayonet. But in the case of the technocracy, totalitarianism is perfected because its techniques become progressively more subliminal. The distinctive feature of the regime of experts lies in the fact that, while possessing ample power to coerce, it prefers to charm conformity from us by exploiting our deep-seated commitment to the scientific world-view and by manipulating the securities and creature comforts of the industrial affluence which science has given us.
So subtle and so well rationalized have the arts of technocratic domination become in our advanced industrial societies that even those in the state and/or corporate structure who dominate our lives must find it impossible to conceive of themselves as the agents of totalitarian control. Rather they easily see themselves as the conscientious managers of a munificent social system which is, by the very fact of its broadcast affluence, incompatible with any form of exploitation. At worst, the system may contain some distributive inefficiencies. From Roszak's 1969 Making of a Counterculture
Rereading Roszak almost forty years later is an interesting experience. Nothing seems dated--it's just as relevant now as it was when it was first written. But it reminds you that forty years ago, we thought that the evils in the "system" had been exposed and it was just a matter of time before we evolved beyond them. The counterculture was the future, and my boomer generation would be its vanguard, and Roszak was one of the people pointing the way.
I was 19 in 1969, and I believed then that we were at the beginning of something important and new. When I read Roszak now I am reminded how I felt then and how it contrasts with how I feel now about our collective future. And in reading Roszak now you cannot but be very impressed that despite my naive nineteen year old's optimism reading his book, none of that naivete is present in what Roszak wrote then. He understood the power of the system, which he called following Jacques Ellul the "technocracy." Ellul, Roszak, and Christopher Lasch all wrote on this theme concerning how our political disintegration was linked to our culture-wide surrender of our political will to the experts who always know better. We're seeing a perfect example of it now with this movement to destroy FISA: Listen to McConnell. He's an expert. Listen to the telecom experts. This is complicated. Trust us. We know what's best. We are all the "conscientious managers of a munificent social system." We've got it covered. Go shopping, mow your lawn, and leave the worrying to us.
Roszak's point is the same one I've been trying to make--it's not about Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives. It's about the fundamental matrix that shapes all our attitudes and perceptions about what is real and unreal. Roszak calls it objective consciousness. (See my posts about "The Myth of Objective Consciousness" here, here, and here.) I call it scientific materialism. It's the collective consciousness pond we all swim in whether we're religious believers or dyed-in-the wool atheists. And it's suffocating us in ways we all experience but fail to understand. That's what's so refreshing about reading Roszak. He understood it very well when he wrote forty years ago, and everything he said about what ails us then hold true now.
So while the technocracy is just as much or more of a dominating influence on our political life today as they was in the sixties, the main difference is the loss of optimism that the power of the technocracy would be dissolved or housetrained and made to serve the will of a nascent soulful counterculture. Instead the counterculture was coopted, housetrained, and trivialized by the technocracy. In the seventies the counterculture morphed into what Lasch described as the 'culture or narcissism', and its politics narrowed to sexual liberation movements driven primarily by feminists and gays. The broader hope for a revolution in consciousness evaporated as it became clear that any such revolutions required spiritual discipline and efforts not supported or reinforced by the technocracy and its need for predictable consumer behavior and prodigious military spending. Oh well, the sixties were fun while they lasted. Great music. The kids today are really into the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Good times. But the machine grinds on.