North American Technate becomes a reality?

Somewhereovertherainbow

In the early thirties and late forties a social movement called the Technocracy Movement was popular in the US and Canada for a short period of time.

Their farthest-reaching proposal was to unite Central and North America into a “technate”, their argument being that the natural boundaries and resources of the area stretching from the Arctic to Panama to make a self sustaining nation. In the year 1938 Technocracy Inc made this following statement:

"'Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population of this continent. For the first time in human history it will be done as a scientific, technical, engineering problem. There will be no place for Politics or Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers. Technocracy states that this method of operating the social mechanism of the North American Continent is now mandatory because we have passed from a state of actual scarcity into the present status of potential abundance in which we are now held to an artificial scarcity forced upon us in order to continue a Price System which can distribute goods only by means of a medium of exchange. Technocracy states that price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance the smaller the price. In a real abundance there can be no price at all. Only by abandoning the interfering price control and substituting a scientific method of production and distribution can an abundance be achieved. Technocracy will distribute by means of a certificate of distribution available to every citizen from birth to death. The Technate will encompass the entire American Continent from Panama to the North Pole because the natural resources and the natural boundary of this area make it an independent, self-sustaining geographical unit."

I'm curious to know how would a North American Technate could function as a nation in an alternate universe during the Second World War or after? How would it likely view fascism, socialism, and communism through the Technocrats eyes, and would NAT try to act as the "world policemen" due to it's large amount of natural resources?
 

overoceans

From what I know of the Technocracy Movement, a Technate might embrace some of the more secular and futuristic aspects of fascism. Or maybe even Bolshevism, though I think the Technocrats were still in favour of private property, no?

I have no idea what they would think about World War II. According to wiki, they were banned in Canada for much of the war, until they announced they supported the war effort. I'm not sure what their reasons for opposing the war were, though I'd imagine any movement taking that stance was regarded as no different from fascism itself.

And this is pretty subjective on my part, but the fact that Technocracy(unlike, say, Social Credit) seems to have been pretty marginal even in its day, and is barely remembered anywhere outside of academic literature and alternatehistory.com(not that there is anything wrong with that), leads me to think that the idea of them taking over anything, let alone the most prosperous half of the western hemisphere, is totally ASB.
 

Catsmate

overoceans said:
And this is pretty subjective on my part, but the fact that Technocracy(unlike, say, Social Credit) seems to have been pretty marginal even in its day, and is barely remembered anywhere outside of academic literature and alternatehistory.com(not that there is anything wrong with that), leads me to think that the idea of them taking over anything, let alone the most prosperous half of the western hemisphere, is totally ASB.
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Yep. Though you can add collectors of historical oddities like me to that. They make a wonderful antagonist group for a Pulp-era RPG.

overoceans said:
From what I know of the Technocracy Movement, a Technate might embrace some of the more secular and futuristic aspects of fascism. Or maybe even Bolshevism, though I think the Technocrats were still in favour of private property, no?
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Yep, they wanted to replace the current "inefficient and wasteful" price system with the erg (typical engineers, not even the Joule...), basically abolishing the monetary system in its entity.

overoceans said:
I have no idea what they would think about World War II. According to wiki, they were banned in Canada for much of the war, until they announced they supported the war effort. I'm not sure what their reasons for opposing the war were, though I'd imagine any movement taking that stance was regarded as no different from fascism itself.
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The grey and red uniforms and grey vehicles didn't help.
 

overoceans

Though you can add collectors of historical oddities like me to that.

Sure, and just to be clear, I wasn't criticizing anyone at all for having an interest in Technocracy. I'm a huge Social Credit buff myself.

The grey and red uniforms and grey vehicles didn't help.

Thanks for the heads up on their uniforms. I'm gonna try to find some photos(though doubt they'll be in colour).
 

overoceans

The grey and red uniforms and grey vehicles didn't help.

Hm, yeah. This is a rather suggestive photograph, though I suppose it's possible that the haircut and the general hang of the suit is just coincidence.

Apologies if it's hard to get that link to stay on the one photograph. Funny that people who can't even make a smoothly-running on-line gallery thought they were gonna transform North American into an engineering utopia.
 

overoceans

RiverDelta said:
Weren't they also genocidal or something and clearly Nazi-ripoffs?
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I've never quite heard that they were genocidal. Though they were more-or-less the people who brought us peak-oil theory, which can kind of shade into misanthropic forms of environmentalism of the neo-malthusian variety.
 

overoceans

As for clearly "Nazi rip-offs", yeah they did seem to have a thing for dashing uniforms.

Howard Scott

Though given the date of the photo, I doubt he was consciously trying to make himself look like a Nazi. Maybe more like a healthy FDR?
 

PBJ

They actually were genocidal. Scott himself admitted that certain undesirable elements, such as the Quebecois, various Latin Americans (as well as Native Americans), and presumably other minorities would need to be "preemptively killed," as they could not be trusted to integrate properly (because some were Catholic, while others were too "attached" to their identity).
 
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overoceans

Major Major said:
Oooh, a cape! Kewl! SuperEngineer, able to change great societies with a single whim!
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With groups like this(basically, amateur intellectuals with grandiose pretensions), I always like to imagine the contrast between their day-jobs and their political fantasy life.

I mean, Monday to Friday, you're a deskbound engineer, getting yelled at by some pencil-pusher over the location of a bridge, but come Friday night, you head out to the Technocracy Mansion and plan your upcoming kingship over the Technate!
 

MaxDivergence

In response to your question, I see the 1930's as a time when the situation was so desperate that any number of new political arrangements could have taken hold. FDR totally redefined the national government's relationship with the people. Perhaps if the assassin had shot and killed FDR in Miami when Mayor Cermak was killed, then a weak Garner presidency following traditional patterns would have been such a bust that the American people would have wanted "experts" and not politicians to solve problems. If Scott or others could have created a viable political form or made an alliance with a traditional politician then certainly. Can anyone find a traditional pol from the period who might have flown a Technocratic banner and been able to win?

On a "technocratic" approach to the Second World War, I would suggest that if the Japanese had not bombed Pearl Harbor, I am not sure FDR could have gotten America into the war. So I can easily see no Pearl Harbor, no American involvement in Second World War. To the Technocrats I would see war as not being rational and frankly the Third Reich I think "played" at being a highly engineered society with tremendous waste and lunacy built in from day one. While the Technocrats may have been more scientific than humanistic, I don't see them making an alliance with the irrational Axis Powers.
 

Deleted member 94680

If they planned to unite Central and North America into One Nation then that means a war. A long and drawn out war with multiple fronts, theatres and campaigns. Plenty of resistance movements as well, I’d wager.

Love this quote from the wiki article as well:
“Technocracy's heyday lasted only from June 16, 1932, when the New York Times became the first influential press organ to report its activities, until January 13, 1933, when Scott, attempting to silence his critics, delivered what some critics called a confusing, and uninspiring address on a well-publicized nationwide radio hookup.”

To create a continent-spanning super-nation you’ll need a ‘heyday’ longer than seven months.
 

Strategos' Risk

overoceans said:
With groups like this(basically, amateur intellectuals with grandiose pretensions), I always like to imagine the contrast between their day-jobs and their political fantasy life.

I mean, Monday to Friday, you're a deskbound engineer, getting yelled at by some pencil-pusher over the location of a bridge, but come Friday night, you head out to the Technocracy Mansion and plan your upcoming kingship over the Technate!
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The funny thing is with the advent of the Information Age, or at least tech billionaires, you have modern day engineering types like Thiel or Yarvin continuing this tendency, with mixed results. Social engineering is somewhat easier in our more advanced stage of mass media.

Technocracy is indeed like Social Credit, kooky attempts to deal with the economic and social breakdown of the Great Depression. I've been cataloging other examples of weirdo ideologies. For example, look up the Utopian Society. Utopian Inc. was a Technocracy-inspired movement based in California which similarly got very popular at one point, and incorporated "Babylonian rites" into their practices.
 
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overoceans

Strategos' Risk said:
The funny thing is with the advent of the Information Age, or at least tech billionaires, you have modern day engineering types like Thiel or Yarvin continuing this tendency, with mixed results. Social engineering is somewhat easier in our more advanced stage of mass media.

Technocracy is indeed like Social Credit, kooky attempts to deal with the economic and social breakdown of the Great Depression. I've been cataloging other examples of weirdo ideologies. For example, look up the Utopian Society. Utopian Inc. was a Technocracy-inspired movement based in California which similarly got very popular at one point, and incorporated "Babylonian rites" into their practices.
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It's funny how many of these fringe-economic outfits with hard-science pretensions ended up devolving into religious nutiness. Major Douglas of Social Credit was an engineer, but of course, in Alberta, it went heavily into end-times fundamentalism, followed by Quebec, where it was embraced by the most reactionary elements of Catholicism.

I can't seem to find anything that seems definitely to be about the California Utopia group, probably because "utopia" is a pretty generic word to put into a search engine. Would you be able to provide some other keywords, or a link?
 

Strategos' Risk

The line between idolizing scientific rationalism and cult-like religiosity is often fine, and ends up with reactionary politics. See the modern day. Digression aside, I've been looking into these different movements from the '30s and a bunch were just scams (the Ham and Eggs movement) or sort of boring by modern day standards (Francis Townsend's, and all the other pre-Social Security pension schemes). But Technocracy gets attentions because they thought big, dammit, and had an interesting aesthetic and visions even if Howard Scott ended up being a rotten orator who sank the movement that way.

The Utopian Society of America (mentioned in this prior AH.com thread on technocracy, haven't searched if anyone else has mentioned them on this board yet), are covered in pages 205-208 of Radical L.A.: From Coxey's Army to the Watts Riots, 1894–1965 and are the entire first chapter of this dandy text, Utopian Movements and Ideas of the Great Depression: Dreamers, Believers, and Madmen.
 
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