Speaker 1: Section five of Technocracy by William Henry Smith. This LibriVox
Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain, recorded by the Progressing
Speaker 1: America project Technocracy Section five Working Explosively, a protest against
Speaker 1: mechanistic efficiency, reprinted from Industrial Management, January nineteen seventeen. We
Speaker 1: all know the explosive worker type and generally recognize him
Speaker 1: with disapproval. The trouble with working explosively is that the
Speaker 1: individual addicted to this character of activity won't fit into
Speaker 1: any decently organized scheme of production. He's a sort of
Speaker 1: human bombshell, lacking a timer, so he goes off at
Speaker 1: any time, day or night, always unexpectedly, with the utmost
Speaker 1: disregard to sensitive nerves and established conventions. In the family,
Speaker 1: he's the juvenile problem. In school, the hopeless impossible, and
Speaker 1: in the shop, the idlest of vital apprentices with a
Speaker 1: big question mark. In the factory, he's the man one
Speaker 1: is always going to discharge. But or he's our boss,
Speaker 1: who is a holy terror. Working explosively, there are but
Speaker 1: two places for the explosive worker to land, at the
Speaker 1: top or at the bottom, and characteristically he's rapid in
Speaker 1: getting there. Still worse, when true to type, he is
Speaker 1: disconcertingly apt to reverse his location from time to time,
Speaker 1: whether top or bottom, with the speed of a lightning
Speaker 1: change artist. The efficiency expert has no place for the
Speaker 1: explosive worker, except in his vocabulary of dynamic expletives and
Speaker 1: fulmentative epithets. Of course, all this refers to the typical exploder.
Speaker 1: But curiously enough, each one of us at times looks
Speaker 1: back with self hugging secret joy to occasions and experiences
Speaker 1: of working explosively in our own otherwise humdrum career, and
Speaker 1: reflecting realizes with some surprise that these stand luminously out
Speaker 1: as our really worthwhile adventures, life's decisive battles. Such reminiscences
Speaker 1: and the feelings evoked jolt one into thinking to wondering
Speaker 1: work is human. There appears to be, Nay, there surely
Speaker 1: is something amazingly human about working explosively. We feel that
Speaker 1: there is truly something warm, vital, hot blooded about this
Speaker 1: sort of activity, which is lacking in the efficient routine
Speaker 1: of eight hours a day work at so much per
Speaker 1: in fancy, we flit backward and abandonedly re erupt our
Speaker 1: own little explosions. Eight hours Pah twenty four is all
Speaker 1: too short. Hours days what are they to the explosive
Speaker 1: worker during eruption mere irrelevant astronomical incidents, But with a sigh,
Speaker 1: returning to here and now from memories for cunded realm,
Speaker 1: where we too forge vibrant dreams, most strenuously into things
Speaker 1: of beauty, worth, and substance, painted with comets, tales, playing
Speaker 1: skittles with time and space. Oh magic state wherein all
Speaker 1: work is play, and play means working explosively. There still
Speaker 1: remains that work a day reminder, the vivid impression, potent intuition,
Speaker 1: the hunch of discovery, so suggestive of revelation in its
Speaker 1: flashlike clarity. And this is the hunch essence of living
Speaker 1: explosive working. Why explosive activity is not working at all,
Speaker 1: It is the essence of living life itself. Efficient working
Speaker 1: and working explosively are wholly and essentially different matters of experience.
Speaker 1: Efficient working expresses obedience to the outside pressure of brute
Speaker 1: mechanistic nature in the struggle to survive. Working explosively is
Speaker 1: inner life, insistent of self expression, the wilful impulse of
Speaker 1: vital personality and rapturous culmination. Realizing life the joy of
Speaker 1: being expressed in doing god like spontaneity. One means compulsion,
Speaker 1: the other freedom. Routine working is an efficient means to
Speaker 1: an indefinitely desirable end. Explosive working is an end in itself,
Speaker 1: regardless of outcome. The very joy of working self realization.
Speaker 1: One suggests force of mechanism, the other life and liberty.
Speaker 1: In one, we find function, contract, and serve a purpose.
Speaker 1: In the other, we live, expand dominate. In one, we
Speaker 1: work by necessity as more or less efficient elements in
Speaker 1: a mighty, but cold and incomprehensible machine. In the other,
Speaker 1: I am the living it Earth, God of things, of
Speaker 1: matter and of motion. The mechanition is human problem. This
Speaker 1: issue involves no mere moot or academic distinction about which
Speaker 1: idle men may split dialectic hairs or bandy fluent phrases
Speaker 1: to fill a vacant hour. Profoundly, it is otherwise, for
Speaker 1: it touches closely on the deepest and most significant of
Speaker 1: all human problems, the eternal paradox of freedom. At bottom,
Speaker 1: it is this question of human worth as against human
Speaker 1: productive efficiency, which is being fought out in the world
Speaker 1: conflict today, and not alone in the spectacular European tragedy.
Speaker 1: So much for the hunch, and now for the questions
Speaker 1: it raises. These are many tough conundrums, which I have
Speaker 1: no intention of now attempting to answer. Here is one,
Speaker 1: by way of example, is the ultimate outcome of mechanistic
Speaker 1: efficiency humanly desirable? Is the art of efficiency itself efficient? Clearly,
Speaker 1: there is no place in this art for explosive working,
Speaker 1: and less than no place for the exploder. Both are
Speaker 1: too spasmodic, orgastic, convulsive, and either would burst into its
Speaker 1: ultimate primordial atoms the most systematic efficiency organization ever invented.
Speaker 1: Yet almost equally clear is it that without both of
Speaker 1: these joyous, unruly factors, there would be no art, dramatic, artistic,
Speaker 1: nor even productive in which to be efficient. To practice
Speaker 1: the art of efficiency, often overlooked, a real art of
Speaker 1: human efficiency, must of course take cognizance of the inherent
Speaker 1: characteristics of the human elements, and the most basic quality
Speaker 1: of life, certainly of life exemplified in man, is this
Speaker 1: very quality of explosiveness, explosiveness which we all so commonly
Speaker 1: overlook and insistently ignore, till made to sit up and
Speaker 1: take notice by some extra violent eruption in our own
Speaker 1: vicinity or in one's own self here, then seems to
Speaker 1: be the fundamental difficulty. Efficiency requires control in order to
Speaker 1: be efficient, but human beings, to be human must freely
Speaker 1: effervesse uncontrollably erupt or contract to mere efficiency routine output
Speaker 1: producing machines. This raises the question at once, to what
Speaker 1: end is the modern art of efficiency directed? What is
Speaker 1: its consciously desired goal? Of course, we all know the
Speaker 1: obvious and seemingly conclusive answer, to make better men in
Speaker 1: order to increase their productiveness. This answer, it seems to me,
Speaker 1: instead of being conclusive, only raises another string of deeply
Speaker 1: vital questions. Is efficiency efficient? Can an art of efficiency
Speaker 1: dealing with human elements incidentally, but with products as its
Speaker 1: first consideration conceivably result in other than ultimate disaster to
Speaker 1: the incidental elements? Can the finished human output of our
Speaker 1: boasted art become more desirably human and less machines than
Speaker 1: the inefficient human raw materials? By efficiency's first law, must
Speaker 1: not the primary object necessarily divert to itself all consideration
Speaker 1: dehumanize the human elas element into highly efficient mechanisms for production.
Speaker 1: Is mechanistic efficiency? Humanly efficient? Is the art of efficiency,
Speaker 1: by any chance misdirected misdirected towards products as an end
Speaker 1: in itself, instead of towards the development of vitally initiative
Speaker 1: human individuals, joyous workers, to whom product is a by
Speaker 1: product wealth, and incident men who, for the very joy
Speaker 1: of the working, work explosively. Fernwald Berkeley, November nineteen sixteen.
Speaker 1: End of Technocracy, Section five