the facts answer

The God-Machine and
Those quiet Technicians
Democracy is being replaced by technocracy that tells the People what we need, leeching  freedom out of our hands.

by JOHN WATERS

Slowly, some sense of our precise social and political condition is emerging in these times of difficulty and austerity that was not detectable in the good times, when we took our freedoms for granted, assuming them to flow from the successful operation of some invisible machine. Then, we did not think about the machine–we just quietly celebrated its efficiency, so that prosperity and its freedoms were assumed to be natural phenomena, the result of doing things in a “modern” way.
Now that things are less auspicious, the machine has become visible, as never before. “Freedom” is still present, but contingently. On TV, we watch the goings and comings of our leaders and are continuously aware of some mechanistic fragility that seems to be a judgment on our use, or abuse, of freedom. Thus, we become aware of ourselves as ruled and enclosed by some kind of machine, which depends on delicate human intervention. If freedom is to be fully restored, a certain technical competence is vital. We see leaders regarded as lacking the correct expertise removed and replaced with quiet technicians, whom nobody previously thought about as leaders. But our inability to understand this represents some measure of its urgency. We are dealing, it is implied, with a deeply rational phenomenon, whereas we, the people, are otherwise. We must trust in the strategies of our leaders to restore our freedoms. This is far more important than what we used to think of as democracy.
But the machine still does not work properly, and it is difficult to say whether this has to do with those who are operating it or with the machine itself. The machine is a mystery, a godlike power operating to a hyper-rationality that can only be dimly intuited by man. If we appease this god with sacrifices, it may respond by looking on us kindly. Something is tried and briefly there is hope. But then the word comes back: it has failed; we must try harder.
In our thrusting forward to a more “modern,” more mechanistic, more “rational” age, we have surrendered something at both the level of the human being and the level of the collective. The human being can no longer intercede with the almighty power, but must wait for someone else, probably someone who is trained rather than elected, to do so on behalf of everyone. This collective intercession is conducted tentatively, with only a partial expectation and understanding. In truth, it is not a rational process, but the pleading of an irrational species with an instrument of an enhanced knowing.
Reflecting on this, we gain access to something that, in the good times, was perhaps unreachable: an understanding of what the ancients meant when they spoke, like the founding inspiration of the modern Irish Republic, Padraig Pearse, of the nation as spiritual entity.
Freedom, he said, was a “spiritual necessity” which cannot be yielded or taken away without serious adverse consequences. By this he meant the freedom to apply to reality a higher form of reason, in which trust in the creator of the universe becomes total, transcending man’s own tentative machinations. He meant that freedom was something that had to be understood as given–before man, before man’s machines, before arithmetic and logic and laws. Freedom was something absolute, and any attempt to escape this truth would end in disaster.