Letter From An Enemy of the State (November 1972)

Speaking with people around the country, I’ve found that “technology” serves an almost universal function in justifying the state or in explaining why resistance to the state is futile.

Liberals use “technology” in their explanation of the world as complex and interdependent in a way that requires massive institutions, such as the state, to correctly or efficiently (liberals use the terms interchangeably) deploy capital, resources, and manpower (liberals, along with conservatives, consider all those factors as roughly similar, objects merely to be manipulated).

Conservatives often use “technology” in their explanation of why the corporation should be permitted to supplant the state in the management of most important affairs. It is their notion that the bureaucrats of the corporations handle technology more effectively than the bureaucrats of the state—except, of course, in the matter of mass killing, a function which conservatives joyously support as the highest function of the state, in fact, virtually its only function.

It has seemed more and more significant to me that one bond that links most of the liberals and conservatives with whom I have had contact lately is that they, personally, have little or nothing to do with technology; they understand it at best in a passing way and have devoted their own lives mainly to matters administrative rather than matters material and technological. This hardly means that no scientists or technicians or craftsmen are not liberal or conservative. It means simply that the loudest noises you hear on campuses or on streetcorners are likely to come from people whose skill is theory, whose ambition is to manage, and whose lust is for status (as sharply differentiated from stature).

Of further significance is the distressing fact that, indeed, most matters of science and technology in this country, as in nation states everywhere, are matters viewed mostly in the context of control and coercion of the population rather than as matter of creativity, possibility, alleviation, or, in short, ways to make the human condition more practical and more enjoyable generally.

Since I have a purpose far more ulterior than theoretical in bringing this up, a couple of comments only on the specific matters mentioned:

Liberals, as usual, evidencing the least possible connection with common sense and material reality, misunderstand science and technology altogether. Science is seen by most of them as some sort of white-smocked mystery in which balding gents chalk up the equations which permit liberal managerial schemes to have their widest reach. It is assumed that science is somehow still struggling to shed light on eternal mysteries—mysteries which only the liberal’s advanced breeding, sensitivity, and education make bearable for the rest of unschooled and red-necked humanity.

The interesting fact about science is that is has so opened the old mysteries and so thoroughly enlightened the immediate material world that many scientists today must push forward into altogether non-material realms (such as non-Euclidean geometry) just to keep busy. In significant respects, science has passed well beyond the age of exploration (in mundane terms) and into the realms of pure speculation. One implication of this passage for the earthbound is that at this level of scientific discovery, we have edged into what may be called a design phase. Basic principles being well known, the task at hand becomes one of applying those principles to whatever it is that the person wants to do; to design the world, if wanted, rather than still try simply to understand it.

Example: Genetic engineering is not merely imaginable, it is actually manipulable at a rudimentary level, roughly at a level analagous to the airplane at Kitty Hawk. It might have been hoped that when the DNA molecule was exposed, liberals would have recognized that there ceased to be a place anymore for elitist political illusions that included the possibility of total genetic control of populations. Such control, especially if confined to a priesthood, could be deadly. Therefore, this liberal elitist dream must be abandoned in favor of a culture in which the widest diffusion of knowledge, and power, would be possible.

Set against a culture in which diffused knowledge and power makes people participants in, rather than helpless victims of, history (a term so far defining the grand plans of grand planners), such a matter as genetic engineering can be seen as an advance in health care. But a desire for feeling good is a general and “natural” tendency among humans, while control and manipulation—the other side of genetic engineering—is a tendency only of certain humans, notably humans who have power. Only a liberal would want to confuse these tendencies.

Conservatives, on the other hand, often take the view that law and order will handle science and technology quite nicely. That is, if the patents are held by the right people (and they almost always have been), then all is right with the world. In short, just keep science and technology out of the hands of the rabble (people generally, as opposed to Rockefellers, Mellons, etc., particularly) and it’s cool.

That system, incidentally, also effectively keeps science and technology out of the hands of the people who create it. By and large, the beloved patent system of the conservatives rides roughshod over human creativity. Instead, it enshrines human avidity, or, in the words of some conservatives, “selfishness.” Under the patent system, of course, the great creators and innovators are always shunted aside in favor of the great manipulators. The person who simply wants the most emerges as the most valuable, while the person who simply creates the most is lost in the executive-office shuffle.

And, since most of the actually innovative scientific and technical people are consumed not by greed but by curiosity, this is, alas, an endlessly repeated situation, with the parasitic manager and manipulator leeching off the creator. (How many of your conservative friends, for instance, tell you that Carnegie created the modern steel industry? What ever happened, you may ask wistfully, to that fellow Bessemer?)

But, on to the specific point.

The subject of technology has become of very special and immediate interest to me and to some of my friends. (Science is not stressed for reasons which will, I hope, be apparent.)

First of all, we view technology in the sense of tools. It is our view that neither science nor technology have an intrinsic power to shape humans—rather, humans, the discoverers of the principles, have an intrinsic power to shape the tools and their use. The technology which appears frightful because of its use by some humans (the laser as a Defense Department horror weapon) appears altogether different when used by other humans (as a retina repair tool in the operating room).

Use of solar energy is another example of a tool with several cutting edges. Today, we are heading toward a nightmare of monopolization by three major corporations (including our old friend Honeywell) who are snapping up patents willy-nilly. It is their hope, apparently, that all solar power converters will one day be owned by them and leased to people generally, thus keeping people tied tightly into a specific social structure. The technological truth of the solar cell, however, is that the science and engineering involved is widely-diffused, and cannot be pinned down to corporate efforts at all. Therefore, if treated as the widely-diffused technology which it actually is, solar energy offers an imaginative way for people to detach from huge social systems, exercise maximum volitional direction, create community, and so forth.

Conservatives will shout with joy that the bureaucrats at Honeywell have once again socked it to the scientists and the craftsmen. Liberals will launch new campaigns to replace those bureaucrats with state bureaucrats of their choosing. The people will remain dependent and regimented, while the creators will remain looted, left in the lurch, and working on for the crumbs from the administrative table.

Our interest in this matter reflects several positions. First, scientific discovery and the creation of tools (technology) cannot be eradicated, as some wistful advocates of a return to natural innocence might wish. These things are products of the human mind, of human minds generally, and would, we assume, be re-created even if all the books were burned and all the tools banned.

Next, there is a belief on our part that the use of tools by humans is indispensible to survival (short of the full development of psionic which could replace most tools, perhaps, with the single, self-contained tool of the mind itself).

We, incidentally, are a group of friends who are working together on the “Tools” volume of an extraordinary undertaking by the Institute for Policy Studies—an encyclopedia of “Reconstructive knowledge.” Our purpose is to develop, in a systematic way, the possibilities of human progress when viewed from perspectives different from the conventional, institutional wisdom.

It is exciting to me to realize that the majority of those working on the volumes share with those of us working on the Tools volume an attitude which you will appreciate: that the scale of human organization is crucial, with freedom and the most humane life possible in small-scale, and least possible in large-scale organizations; that top-down, hierarchical organization must be destructive of freedom; and that whatever its virtues in “social efficiency,” hierarchical organization exhibits overpowering tendencies toward coercion, alienation, and corruption.

There is, as a result of this attitude, a spirited debate as to the role of law versus culture as a civilizing device. When it comes to science and technology, I take the side that says that positive law, when associated with technology, with tools, is very dangerous. More dangerous than volitional, or cultural social arrangements. Because, to be effective, positive law must have access to the tools of violence—how else can the law givers give, and be obeyed? This access, experience indicates, leads to monopoly (the police, for instance) of the most pernicious kind.

At any rate, our tools are not to be taken lightly. And, indeed, we do not. Nor do any of those working on the other dozen or so volumes of this immensely promising and exciting project—although various notions regarding the use of tools remain to be fully debated.

All this is preliminary, in this instance, to a plea for help. I am quite aware that among the readers of this journal there are some who have long concerned themselves with the promises and problems of creativity and freedom, of tools and volition, of competence and non-exploitative community.

Without restriction, then, I would welcome beginning a discussion with you regarding tools and technology in their most liberating sense. Particularly, in terms of their immediate role in opposing the state, advancing freedom, and, indeed, in advancing the space in which the creative and co-operative urges of the human mind will have the greatest chance for expanding. (And let me stress that we are working with the widest possible definition of tools and technology; certainly wide enough to include knowledge itself, which I count as a tool, the premier one, in fact.)

Areas of specific interests, at this point, include the questions of ownership and laws pertaining to tools, patents, licenses, etc. The patent system, in particular, seems absolutely pernicious and without redeeming value (a position valiantly taken well in advance of most of us by Murray Rothbard). How may we attack it? What could the world be like without it? What does ownership mean with regard to ideas? How social is knowledge, and so forth?

There must be ingenious thoughts abroad already as to the use of tools and technology in both urban and rural contemporary settings—as liberating steps!

How may we best de-mystify science and technology? Einstein once said that science is simply the refinement of everyday thinking. One problem today surely is that not enough people have confidence in their own ability to solve problems, not enough confidence in their everyday thinking—and how can there be freedom without people confident in their ability to be free?

How might those who believe in freedom and who oppose the state best organize among scientists, technicians, and craftsmen? Perhaps one way would be to de-mystify the notion that these people require the vast power of the state or of corporate bureaucracies to do their work.

What might actually free, volitional human communities look like if available technology was used to enhance life generally, rather than to advance ideological blueprints in particular?

Is the distribution of tools, of technology, perhaps a gauge of freedom?

What, if any, notions of human cost accounting need to be added to the deployment of tools in order to determine, sensibly, not ideologically, their actual cost (remember the DDT problem)?

The subject is nothing less than the subject of the human condition itself inasmuch as tools are both the way we survive and a way we most savagely abuse each other and the planet.

Please, then, think about it and keep in touch.

Co-operation, I have found, is itself a tool of considerable strength.

[Readers interested in joining Karl Hess in this endeavor may reach him c/o Outlook, 208-A Mercer Street, New York, N.Y. 10012.—Ed.]