An argument in favor of technological dystopia.

Every philosopher, from Plato to Krishnamurti, has stated that democracy doesn’t work. The reason they give is that the general public is not informed or experienced enough to elect a competent leader. If proof of this truth is needed, just turn on the television. What they didn’t say, and probably didn’t understand, is that human behavior is deeply conditioned into feudal systems from thousands of years of practice. Thinking that it would be possible to simply shift to something else in one step is naive and immature.

I am of the opinion that, if we are lucky, we are at the end of an awkward transition into a next step towards something that, while not a democracy, is more equitable and sustainable. The secret to completing this transition is to bring an end to what we currently understand as “economics”.

It began as Oikonomos in ancient Greece; “household manager” evolving into “political economy”. And it made perfect sense relative to how things functioned back then. Economies were very simple, and using supply and demand to manage a society was easy enough. Especially considering that commerce was ninety-nine percent local. Feudal systems managed small populations by manipulating the marketplace and it all worked well enough until the mid nineteenth century.

The Industrial Revolution destroyed the old feudal empires more than anything else. Primarily because their economics was no longer effective. Economies became very complex and exponentially increasing trade was simply too much for such rudimentary systems. As the feudal empires fell, people clung to economics as a solution even though the very thought of controlling a society through the marketplace is rooted in feudalism. (And yes, even the Capitalist’s mantra that a free market will fix everything is a delusion rooted in the idea that the marketplace is the only tool needed to manage a society.)

Everything has become scientific. Finance and money management used to be viewed as alchemy as late as one hundred years ago. Today, however, finance and money management is more hard science than anything else. Dreamy theories of supply side or demand side manipulation is like using leeches to cure cancer.

To move forward from here we must have a serious well designed system to manage the marketplace so it functions as nothing other than a marketplace. And, separately, we must have a serious well designed system to manage people. These two things cannot be woven into the same system anymore. Everything has become too complex.

I appreciate that it might smack of fascism, or feudalism to people, but this is who we are and where we came from. If we wish to remove feudalism from our DNA, it is going to take much more effort and much more time to plan a step by step evolution away from it.