Technocracy
Yin and Yang? Chrome Pepsi? You decide!
What it is: A system of government where an industrialized nation, known as a technate, is governed by a hierarchical meritocracy where a combination of accomplishment and which traits are needed for the job earn an individual appointment or promotion, rather than elections. This would theoretically remove the emotions and irrationality of the voting base from decisions, leaving bureaucrats, scientists, and engineers who would govern free to make decisions logically.
Portions of the American Technocratic movement claimed it was only possible in industrialized nations, as underdeveloped regions would not be able to support such a rigid government. Interestingly, American technocrats freely admitted they thought technocracy was not a perfect fit for the whole world, at least until it was all industrialized, anyway. They said technocracy could therefore coexist with at least some other ideologies in foreign countries.
Technocracy was sometimes associated with eugenics, but this does not form a core of the philosophy. In fact, some segments of the movement vehemently opposed it as uncivilized and irrational.
As villains:
The meritocracy only seems to promote incompetents or outright psychopaths. The fairness of the system is a joke as nepotism rules the day. Cold, nihilistic and outright malevolent decrees come from the highest levels as the people suffer, unable to hold their own leadership accountable. The technate sweeps through unindustrialized countries, destroying their forests with factories and installing puppet dictators. The uncivilized races do not yet deserve technocracy, nor even the right to breed, after all.
As collectivist good guys:
The meritocracy works somewhere on a scale from just enough to well. Nepotism is uncommon, and appointees are generally decent at worst. The technate runs a command economy with good labor rights because all managers are former workers due to the exclusively bottom-up nature of promotion. The technate agrees with communists on a lot of economics, but argues over the issue of “hierarchy: To Be Abolished vs. Most Vital Crux of Society?” Capitalism’s market economy is decried as irrational. Fascism is hated as a violent, barbaric, irrational system for idiots and quacks peddling that cheap lie of eugenics.
As individualist good guys:
The meritocracy works somewhere on a scale from just enough to well. Nepotism is uncommon, and appointees are generally decent at worst. Most industry is privatized, but all corporations are run as mini-technocracies with a fair deal of government oversight. The technate cares not whether the worker answers to a private or public technocrat, after all, only that technocrats run things. The technate is not violently expansionistic and its theory allows for coexistence with other capitalist nations, as technocracy cannot work for everyone unless they choose it. Communism’s end goal of world revolution is considered an existential threat. Fascism is hated as a violent, barbaric, irrational system for idiots and quacks peddling that cheap lie of eugenics.
As neutrals: Not only is technocracy not just for everyone, it’s barely for anyone. The leadership says the technate can only survive exactly where it is located, and the rest of the world is not their concern. Eugenics are practiced against the infirm and mentally ill, but fascism is considered a bridge too far. Communism and capitalist democracy are much too irrational, of course.
Physiocracy
This Guy is the closest they have to a symbol because he's one of them
The Physiocrats, who called themselves simply The Economists, were a school of 1700s French theorists who broke from the dominant economic theory of mercantilism to argue for the distinctly modern economical perspective that material wealth comes from the value of an entity’s labor.
In particular, they argued that farmers were the most important part of society, responsible for the wealth of nations, and that “land development” products should be priced as the most valuable. They saw the aristocracy and industrial working class as “unproductive appendages” to agrarian labor. They viewed industrial labor as merely “rent” to pay off the debt all city-dwellers owed to the farmers that really owned the land.
In effect, they were a bit marxist in their criticisms of aristocracy, but instead of equalizing everyone, wanted to make farmers the new aristocracy, except these guys would have earned it.
They were definitely products of their time, when most industry was agrarian, and how they would deal with the industrial revolution provides for interesting possibilities…
As villains:
The theory, not equipped to handle the industrial revolution, has devolved into a maze of lies and hypocrisy. It’s clear to anyone that the work a city laborer does making munitions, tools, buildings and cars is just as important as the corn farmer who grows fat off of his work, but say that aloud and be disappeared by the all-powerful farmers’ unions. The farmers stay on top, precariously, by a sizable military force with a chokehold on the flow of food, the last useful thing the rural areas produce a lot of. Cities will often rise up in communist, capitalist or anarchist revolts, but those not crushed underfoot are simply starved out.
As collectivist good guys:
As the industrial revolution showed city folk were not inherently less valuable, the physiocrats had to get creative with their solution, read some Romanticist literature and decided to move anyone who could out of the cities. Today, most people not on farms are concentrated in communes or townships, which are effectively small strips of heavy industrial equipment located close by to the resources they need. The reduced cities are generally only useful as ports and for government usage. With the reclassification of all people to “farmer-class”, everyone is equal under the law.
As individualist good guys:
Aside from some bumps by the artificial price inflation of food, the Physiocratic country(s) is ticking along quite nicely. As the industrial revolution equalized the value of labor, “Farmer” started to sound like “worker”, and with the aristocracy long since overthrown, “worker” sounded like “literally everyone”.
Farmers’ unions are a cross between corporations and workers’ parties, with comprised of the employees of a certain number productive facilities, and represented in the government. Private property may be owned personally, but unions are managed democratically. A union may never seize private property unilaterally, and vice versa.
As neutrals:
The Physiocrats reacted to the industrial revolution by ignoring as much of it as they could. Technologies that might equalize the value of labor were not allowed. The Physiocracy is rural, agrarian, and generally uninteresting except as a shizio-tech tourist attraction, though dissatisfaction with the stagnant government is mounting.
