The new year needs a declaration of principles to contain the technocracy

The article below was tossed at another publication a couple of weeks ago, but went unpublished by them… which is fine, but I decided to drop it here for a couple of reasons. One, it actually references the Biden admin proposal to ban the sale of gas stoves, and that conversation, which was mostly under the radar two weeks ago when I wrote the thing, has blown up over the last couple of days. And it’s worth stressing here (and is sort of the point of the article)… folks, the problem is not this proposal or that proposal, the problem is a state that thinks literally every aspect of your life is their business and should be subject to their regulation. That mindset needs to be rejected. Otherwise we will spend an absurd amount of time fighting every new proposal until the day we die. The ideas of “limited government” and even democratic government (the rules that most affect your life don’t even come from an elected legislature anymore) seem to be gone from the United States circa 2023.¹

And two… well if I post it here, then I can keep linking it elsewhere, which is helpful to me. It was targeted at another publication so the “voice” may sound a little atypical for here, but I am leaving it mostly as it was two weeks ago.

Therefore…

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The new year needs a declaration of principles to contain the technocracy

The modern technocratic bureaucrat in the free states of the West is a greater threat to liberty, often a greater threat to a good and well-balanced human life, than were most of the monarchs and autocrats of days past. Whatever they might have desired, practical and technological limitations curtailed the historical authoritarians. As a friend quipped recently, disrupting a king’s speech in medieval Europe might have earned you an arrest, but otherwise free speech for the general population was a de facto necessity. There were no resources or technologies available to police the speech of the common folk in such a realm. And micro-managing the work of the local barber, or deploying the resources of the state to disrupt your kid’s unlicensed dog-grooming salon, would have been incomprehensible to most societies throughout history.

But, as proof that the universe will not allow humanity to live in a utopia, conquering many of our basic human problems, growing our economic and technological power, has permitted us to invent brand new ways to diminish human existence. The modern state now has the resources to do… pretty much whatever it wants to do to you. And the modern technocrat empowered by that state doesn’t believe that any aspect of human existence lies outside of his regulative powers. The historical barriers of “at least, you cannot enter the walls of a home” and “at least, you cannot interfere with relationships inside the family” mean nothing to the eager-to-save-you modern technocrat.

Did you know that gas stove in your kitchen releases all kinds of stuff into the air? Maybe, mused one member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission last week, we could just ban them completely. Did you know that homeschooling is a threat to children and society? The practice should be outlawed. Please register your home’s fireplace with the state… yes I said register your home’s fireplace with the state, so we can make sure you aren’t introducing too much particulate matter into the air. Why do you object? No man is an island. Don’t you know that everything you do is everyone’s business?

And for the technocrat, their belief that they have a right to regulate anything and everything is really only half of the problem. The other half of the problem is that, in order to produce their rules, they are constantly deciding what matters most in a human life (an inherently religious exercise, I would say), and they’re really bad at the job. They live in a world of spreadsheets, and management, and efficiency. If something isn’t calculable (if it doesn’t “count”, we might say), then that concern is invisible to them. You say it’s a pleasant experience to gather with the family around a crackling fireplace? Uh… I’m sorry, but our spreadsheets have no row for crackling, or any other such intangibles. But particulate matter has a number.

The technocratic regime must be contained because it will certainly not contain itself. It looks at something like China’s social credit / public health credit system, or even something like rules governing how many children you’re allowed to have, and it has no problem with such state interventions. Oh, it may think that such and such a rule isn’t necessary or isn’t a good idea, but it certainly doesn’t believe, a priori, that the state isn’t allowed to make such rules. The state, through them, is allowed to make whatever rules it deems proper.

Language must be provided to leaders directly, and to the people in an educative way, that says to the technocracy, “this far, and no further”. I suggest a public statement, signed by many prominent individuals. There is a decent history in this country of widely signed public statements; the Nashville Statement is a recent example from Christianity and, importantly, it attracted a fair amount of press and even reaction from elected leaders. One form such a statement could take is affirmations and denials (it eliminates ambiguity to tell people what you believe, and then immediately tell them what you do not believe), but other formats are possible as well.

For example, such a statement might include things like the following:

“We affirm that children are a blessing. We deny that the state has any right to limit the number of children a family may have, whether in the interest of reducing climate change or reducing resource consumption or for any other reason.” (And if you think it isn’t important to include such a line because who is proposing such a thing anyway… just do it, and then watch the reaction it produces. Yeah, that also will be educative.)

“We affirm that parents are to be the primary educators of their children. We also affirm that the state may reasonably determine curriculum for government schools. We deny that the state may outlaw homeschooling, or be too great a burden upon or exert too much control over the choices of homeschooling parents.”

That’s just a beginning - more prominent people than me should take it from there. But let’s create some language to contain the technocracy this year.

1. It is fascinating in that depressing sort of way that right now, the United States has an elected president who clearly isn’t really the person running the executive branch. And we have a legislature that votes on giant omnibus bills that they haven’t read and for which they don’t even know who exactly wrote much of the text! And of course, most rules don’t come from the legislature at all anymore. So… what form of government do we have in the US right now, really?