The Originator's Introduction
The institutions we inherited are primitive shelters, designed centuries ago in an environment with social conditions much different from our own.1 Because of rapid technological change, they are now absurdly out of their element, like igloos at the equator and thatch huts in the Arctic.2
We continue to live in them, shivering and sweating. We insist they are still habitable through chattering teeth and feeble moans. Rotting walls? Patch them with reforms! Leaky roofs? Mend them with laws!3
The futility of these repairs doesn’t stop us from attempting them again, and each failure only raises the temperature of our desperation. Citizens toss and turn, restless and fevered, convinced in their delirium that another law, another reform, another election will finally fix what is broken. Do you hear them wailing out in anguish?4
“WE MUST FIX OUR INSTITUTIONS!”
The question is not whether our ancient institutions are crumbling. Even the willfully blind see their deterioration. The question is, how long will we cling to their existence as we waste away inside their ruins?5
Do we have the courage to build them anew from the ground up? Can we engineer them to not only withstand, but thrive in, our new environment? How do we abandon the traditional establishments that still give us comfort, but not warmth or shade?6
We can critique our institutions until we are red or blue in the face, but no matter how earnestly we try to repair them, they simply weren’t built to suit the conditions of technological society. It is time to stop renovating and start rebuilding.7
Technocentrism is the blueprint for a new government, economic, and value system, designed for human flourishing in the digital age. It is a sociopolitical theory and ideology of technology, but more than that, it is the foundation of a new civilization.8
E. O. Wilson: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
Nicolás Gómez Dávila: “Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”
Oswald Spengler: “You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.”
Edward Bernays: “Civilization is limited by inertia. Our attitude toward social relations, toward economics, toward national and international politics, continues past attitudes and strengthens them under the force of tradition.”
Nietzsche: “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.”
Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Arnold Toynbee: “Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements [of civilization]. Only birth can conquer death―the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.”