Technocrats Survive, Offer Ideas For '90S

The Great Depression spawned a variety of social and economic movements which the skeptical labeled pie-in-the-sky.

-- The Townsend Plan promised $200 a month for life.

-- Huey Long's ``Share Our Wealth Plan'' guaranteed a homestead of $5,000, an annual income of up to $3,000 and a $5 million limit on family wealth.

-- The technocracy movement said the four-hour workday and freedom from want could be every person's birthright - if only production and consumption were kept in perfect balance by science and technology.

In the case of The Townsend Plan, reality overtook the dream. And despite Long's share-the-wealth promise, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to grow.

But the philosophy known as technocracy still survives:

-- At Technocracy Hall, 6206 Phinney Ave. N., where the walls are covered with graphs and charts, and the site's code name is a cryptic 12247-3, which translates into ``122nd longitude, 47th latitude, third club in the Puget Sound area.''

-- At 7513 Greenwood Ave. N., where The Northwest Technocrat is printed every three months on a vintage Harris press, then assembled by hand.

``We believe in high-tech,'' says Keith MacLeod apologetically, ``but the truth is, we can't afford a lot of it, and we use a lot of hand labor.''

MacLeod lives in Vancouver, B.C., and is a director of the quarterly Technocracy Digest published in Canada. During a recent visit to the Seattle publication office, he chatted with fellow technocrats about the movement's roots and how it has managed to survive for six decades.

An outgrowth of the Technical Alliance, founded in 1918 by a Midwest engineer named Howard Scott, technocracy took off during the Great Depression. It reached its peak in 1933, when the movement's vermillion-and-silver yin-yang symbol - similar to the logo of the Northern Pacific Railroad - could be seen on yard signs and on the sides of gray cars throughout the country. Those days are gone.

To those who ask how many members technocracy claims today, MacLeod responds, ``How much is a small fraction of 1 percent?'' The numbers aren't important, he adds, and the same goes for circulation figures for the movement's publications.

But MacLeod and local technocrats do not shy from explaining why they think technocracy has a powerful message for the '90s.

Technocracy, says Florence Huntting of Seattle, a technocrat since 1939, was preaching environmental preservation long before anybody else gave a hang about saving the whales, purifying the water, breathing clean air or wisely using the world's finite petroleum resources.

Technocrats, Huntting says, also preached racial and sexual equality long before it was a popular cause, saying to anyone who would listen that everyone - regardless of sex, color or religious beliefs - was entitled to a fair and equal share of the world's wealth.

If it were not for their antipathy toward the ``M'' word (money) and political parties, technocrats probably could blend into most liberal political philosophies.

But they have an aversion to both politics and money, terming the present pricing system a wasteful and immoral way of determining who gets what share of the world's goods. So, out with the nickels, dimes, dollar bills and plastic credit cards.

In its place, technocrats would install a system based on energy credits - because, they say, energy created from fossil fuels, minerals, wood, water and the atom (if carefully controlled) is easily measurable.

In place of politicians, technocrats would substitute leaders chosen by peers in various disciplines. No more long-running political campaigns. No more conventions.

As a reward for being citizens of planet Earth, technocrats say, everyone should be guaranteed food, shelter, clothing, transportation, education, health care, recreation and communication. Use only what you need and there will be more than enough for everyone. You want a car to take your family on an outing, then drop down to the universal U-Drive and pick up the right model. Return it when you are finished. Need a microwave? Then pay a visit to the neighborhood microwave store and pick one up.

Work would be fun, because we would do what we like to do and are best-suited to do. Freed from grubbing for a living, everyone would have time to pursue hobbies, sports and the arts.

There are, says MacLeod, many similarities between the U.S. economy today and in the 1930s, starting with a ``vast discrepancy between our capacity to produce food and consumer goods and our ability to distribute them.''

``Technocracy seeks a balance between the two (production and distribution),'' says Huntting. ``It's science applied to the social order.''

The technocrats who gathered with MacLeod decried such things as government programs that pay farmers not to grow crops that could feed the hungry, surpluses given away to other countries while people beg on our streets, and the price supports for butter, cheese and grains.

Forrest Briggs of Seattle, a retired railroad worker, embraced technocracy after World War II ``when I realized that the only thing that got us out of the Depression of the '30s was a war, and the only thing that kept our economy afloat after the war was the threat of another war; and now that the Soviets have declared peace on us, we're having trouble finding what to fight.''

Edith Jess of Seattle joined technocracy in 1940 ``because it seemed like the next logical social advance in civilization.''

Political solutions don't work, she says, because they are based on compromise. ``It's the people, not the politicians, who are doing something these days. They fight the oil spills. The crime (with block watches and lobbying organizations). The drunken drivers (with MADD). The people who want to kill all the whales. The nuclear pollution. The developers who want to wreck our earth.''