1916's 1972: Technocracy Peaking

The 50s sees a heavy convergence between the ten technocratic Systems--with even ideas of a world state animating the inter-technocracy compacts of the era, against the actual cold war against several similar powers that increasingly reflect one another. WWII has a dual role: it proved that technocracy greatly facilitates war as well as peace, and that more management (and emotional repression) is needed to prevent "Man's dark side from bursting forth and causing war." The party line is that it's the most peaceful and healthy era in all human existence (i.e., they've outsourced any violence or misery, and they're also misrepresenting past and present anyway). However, the old belief that "humanist" scientists were peace-loving has entirely collapsed for the public: those objecting to poisoning chimps or planning nuclear winter aren't opposed because they know the equations. WWII and this Cold War can't be moralized as existential: it's hard to say if democracy/the race will be extinguished if "we" lose if everyone's a technocracy and there's eight of 'em. Only Russia really lost WWII, so all the technocrats can claim victory. The left is bought off with planning, the right with militarization, and the center with corruption (it's not an inefficient pathology--the Mob lets the System outsource domestically). There's "closed" research cities, some of them quite dark.

Economically workers are faced with Taylorist speed-up, a hierarchy of cities, giant mechanized ranches and plantations, consolidation, oil and strontium spills, wartime quotas, and dilution of pollution. Management style is "When this man tells you to walk, you walk; when he tells you to sit down, you sit down, and you don't talk back at him," since management, not labor, is believed to increased production. The solution is always more infrastructure, industry, fertilizer, antibiotics, vaccines, and DDT--just set it and forget it (until it leads to spiraling ecological and social disaster--in the 50s rather than the 60s, development undermining itself). But there's also land reform (and local credit and markets) as well as big ranches and suburbs, so it's not like 70s Mexico or 20s Japan. The regulation means TTL actually comes into the 80s with more small and medium businesses than OTL: the economy isn't collectivist, but there's communes, co-ops, untamed artisan and farmer unions, and Owenite megacorps. Garbagemen, firefighters, and bridge-builders are well-paid. The market doesn't take over every aspect of life--though managerialism does. Infrastructure is laid to serve everyone, not just the auto and aerospace industries. White and black slavery are problems, and the plentiful pirates have air and submarine support (lots of them are East Asian ex-captains).

Culturally, eugenics has never been discredited and there's still "Moron Institutions": women are fully equal if they're okay with pink-collar work and permanent maternity leave, and an M.D. can order you to do anything. Unmarried mothers' newborns are taken from them and forcibly adopted. Nudity is legal, prostitution semilegal and inspected, and euthanasia semi-mandatory (for financial reasons). White superiority is sublimated into technocratic supremacy--the System's simply stronger, faster, and better; it extends its beneficence to all races: if we're attacking a culture it's simply because its members are victims thereof and have to be "snapped out of it" and "broken" of superstitious patterns that have a hold over them. Homophobia is mostly denounced to pick on the religious or Black. Mass exercise replaces bloodsports. There's plenty of high-rises, but they're not abandoned to crime--but, since everything's an open meritocracy, the attitude is that one's poverty is a choice (and that everyone's fundamentally interchangeable). China, Africa, and Latin America see persecutions like Mao's Four Olds Campaign (or 20s Mexico, USSR, and Turkey), and the narrative is still "white men rescuing brown women from brown men." The humanities are strictly Classicist, and there's girl-meets-tractor paintings. But innovative and real art and literature are hardly suffering: they're well-funded for their own sakes. Jews are still seen as Mideastern and alien in worship (despite the state-appointed rabbis): there's plenty of Jewish technocrats, but other Jews are conflated with the Red Menace, same as the Christian and Muslim "menaces." Fezzes, veils, and turbans are only legal in Morocco and East Asia: everyone else has the equal freedom to wear suit and tie. Walter Freeman rampages through frontal lobes until WWIII (whereupon the Establishment pretends they opposed this sort of woo-woo from the get-go). TV is either classy opera or drivel about incompetent miners.

Politically, TTL has the advantage of effective and efficient management (despite paternalism)--there's a guarantee of basic competence as well as expertise. Society's not a sea of mediocrity but an (alleged) meritocracy encouraging people to excel, valuing the skilled, creative, intelligent, and ambitious. There's also vicious competition within the organs regulating competition, one branch working to isolate and attack another. "Political" is a dirty word (like under OTL McCarthyism): it means the wrong sort of politics, the Systems disguising themselves as apolitical and comprehensive. Non-technical administrators and lawmakers are chosen from a nonpartisan list: "mental criminality" or a "cretin" parent disqualifies you from voting; Reds, Greens, and Christians are sometimes seen as genetically defective, but they aren't being antiseptically gassed. The politics is like that of the PRI, the INC, the post-1980 CCP, McNamara's Best and Brightest, or Singapore--a conservative state with revolutionary rhetoric. The Systems are all designed to be revolution-proof: there's the occasional street protest dragging administrators out of their offices, and even major and unexpected changes--but the System endures. In Germany and East Asia the leaders especially see themselves as seizing and leading the mob. Latin America and China use force. The Systems are all "totalitarian" in the sense that they fight total war and "wage total peace" and "total prosperity" otherwise. Secret societies (like in 1770-1920) remain notable, the Masons and Mormons plotting to make the world more nerdy vs. the synarchists demanding magical fascism.

Ideologically, the technocracy above the local level is barking mad: some of them are upset by the idea of a square root to –1. Structurally, there's no castes or stagnation, and resources and urban surveys are thorough--but leave no ways of measuring other than those used in manufacturing and still valuating everything by number. There's no cynical Inner Circle (the Systems obviating the need for leadership per se), but an ideologically-synchronized summit of management experts, taking pride in their "creative" isolation and blind to their terrifying stuntedness. Nonetheless, they really do work harder than anyone else. To them, a society's goal is to order its surroundings, demanding discipline, diligence, obedience, precision, and efficiency--production, not creativity or satisfaction. Authority is the product of knowledge: we have only to discover the laws, and we won't need to make choices or take responsibility. Only they think that the truth matters and that we need real-world solutions--in fact, they're the only ones who think at all! Fear's just a distracting chemical reaction: what the masses--perishing beasts living in a slack-jawed haze--mistake for thought is just emotion. And indeed the consumers are themselves willing to relinquish human identity to become boobs--machines that feel, love, work, hate. Thought exists to save us from error--motivated by fear of being in error unless "sufficiently proven": this means that opposition can never be "sufficiently" proven. Fear is ended by ending aversion, by conditioning to accept any eventuality in order to overcome one's intrinsic need for balance or scruples. Stifling the deepest repugnance is the necessary first step to this science. Scientists and teachers especially have a pastoral role because of their unique thinking abilities, working to replace police, priests, managers, teachers, and therapists with cybernetic self-regulation. 

Their mission is to make the planet Man's property: farms are designed like they're spaceships, trying to substitute ecology outright--cattle stacked six stories indoors, powered by the Atom and shielded by weather control. They're yields, not plants or animals--carpets of crops. Even farm animals are too unruly! We can't possibly be dependent on any environment--just pump more N, P, and K into failing soils and concoct new antibiotics and pesticides if resistance develops; "our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, mental illness with a pill, poverty with a law, slums with a bulldozer." Science is the endgoal of all human activity--a harmonious new lifestyle of urban comfort and rural idyll, energy too cheap to meter and a 4-hour workweek. Education and informed labor can overcome any problem: technological progress means social progress and science is the endpoint of all revolution--so there's no need for the latter anymore! Technocracy offered an idyllic end to all pain, and would eventually wipe death itself from the mind of Man--benzodiazepine now and immortal godhood later. Given enough time we'll get it right. Betterment brings us to the point of perfection--of mortal divinity, a Heaven on Earth, reentering the Garden by eating from the Tree, robing ourselves in the constellations and wielding the fundamental constants of physics like thunderbolts. Our upcoming collective Godhood of course conflicted with the Everglades' existence--a mistake like the Aral. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness "have only a minor bearing on the survival of a culture," requiring an arms race to strengthen one's own system, so it's not outmatched and then destroyed by another.

They believe themselves to have no beliefs, so they don't address and examine them; they insist that everyone else leave their "culture" and personal "beliefs" at the door, pretending that worldviews and parts of life are eccentricities for after-hours. The transcendent is reified: immortality is just indefinitely prolonged mortality and godhood is achievable through machinery. There's actually a note of panic here--the past was supposed to give way to modernity once and for all, but people still aren't satisfied with technocracy: they're provincial and not nice, unlike us, who're the default for Mankind! The Golden Rule merely means Nice People in nice neighborhoods--to whom enemies foreign and domestic want to do Bad Things to. All their covering of their own tracks and history produces a vulnerability: they hate Freud but therefore unwittingly and crudely duplicate his maddest views. They've replaced ontology with epistemology: answering "how" also answers "why" and cause is made into purpose. (This is like how OTL British internationalists like Wells thought that transcending petty nationalism meant that everyone would read Shakespeare and drink five o'clock tea.) Purging theology only produces a crude Jack Chick parody: they seriously point out that nobody's seen God through a telescope and pretend to be battling false certitude, "privilege," and religious omertà. They're unaware that there's contradictions in or precedents for their beliefs, thinking them the logical product of one long upward swing, a grand trajectory that really belongs to everyone. They believe they've purged outside influence, so they end up completely slaved to some eccentric thinker. Monotheism is replaced by Man, an abstract figure erasing any diversity within Himself (meaning of course He's entirely a reflection of the technocrats) and laden with God's old titles and attributes, inheritor of the universe--eventually turning all of it into Himself, forever.

Life's a subset of physics. Any consideration of the human element is "bias," and they're vocally contemptuous of philosophy, morality, metaphysics, anthropology, history, and theology, ignoring their tools and concepts as "bygones" that haven't kept up with technology and thus declared no longer relevant. Whatever isn't science is both irrational and really not worthwhile. Their rationalism ridicules  ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics, but is incapable of generating values of its own, trying to become an end unto itself. Dissenters are ill-informed, to be cured or disabused like a hysterical mother. Society develops like an individual, from childish primitives to scientific adulthood: scientists are the species's only true adults, in fact. Insult and offense are unthinkable, alien words to them--it's wrong when others do it, and self-evidently right when they do it. This version of science is never wrong precisely because it can "change its mind" at the drop of an experimental hat--it's basically an abusive boyfriend.

The lower classes occupy themselves with entertainments and constant festival days--at least one Whoville-level show and shopping frenzy a month. It's a pushbutton Tartarus for the middle classes, with burger chains and malt shops plugged into the urban food pipelines. The CPUSA is quietly squeezed out by 1960, but the "TVA socialists" aren't purged: radical critique of the System is delayed, especially with no Vietnam. The dollar and pound are reevaluated according to energy and production, the "state" encourages economies of both scale and scope, and small farmers and farmhands are cushioned so the Midwest doesn't empty out so completely. Britain starts looking rather Clockwork Orange and tightens its colonial control to please the Col. Blimp types, making them dumping-grounds for "antisocial" undesirables; it's a multi-tiered system, with African officials in Africa but no equality of movement to the Home Islands. Africa gets bullet trains to keep the isolated colonies from wigging out, and Nairobi has cocaine-fuelled hunts. Bardolatry's back, and there's still right-populist fear of the grand Anglo-Masonic-Irish-Chinese-Commie-Jewish-Mexican-Black Conspiracy. There's regular civil examinations in schools. The 60s sees hedonism, but rebelliousness and new ways of thinking that focus on sex, race, history, and context are delayed until around WWIII. Proto-Oceania has avoided the contrived, deliberate rightward shifts of OTL 1919-20, 1947-52, or 1979-94. As the French attacks heated up in the Caribbean 1970, the states and provinces were all "rationalized" by Rexford Tugwell, just as the Latin supranational combines had abolished the old countries; the U.S. and Britain were also the last combine to introduce the internal passport.

Latin America is increasingly influenced by France, inspired by Algerian veterans "defending Western Civilization" through torture-murder. Alliance-for-Progress-type programs keep debt flowing north and lead flowing south into students. Argentina and Brazil encourage German immigration midcentury: they're quite friendly to the Fulcrum, and flip-flop constantly. LA elites have disdained Latin Americans since 1860, so impersonal, dehumanizing Bureaucratic Authoritarianism comes naturally: it's slightly less repressive than the Turkish and Japanese blocs, and Costa Rica (1948) and Honduras (1963) manage to disarm (OTL too) and Vargas's Brazil announces it's achieved "racial democracy." TTL's LA warfare is interstate as much as it is domestic. France encourages LA Catholic reaction, but Liberation Theology is unaffected as promises are increasingly unmet, merging into a social-democratic movement with Catholic theology (like IRL Honduras's XtnDems before the 90s). The Andes like reform and incorporation more than reliance on the army, which is often full of Reds. LA actually gets higher rural wages than OTL, but growth is still decoupled from export, so the campesinos are perceived as ungrateful, unappreciative, short-sighted confabulators. The Sandinos, Martís, Amaya Amadors, and Presteses are managed rather than jailed, but their message--a radical and non-technocratic Marxism--still goes out amidst exploitation.

In the long run, the Africans aren't staying bought off with their jobs as clerks, accountants, lawyers, doctors, biology and agronomy researchers, lab techs, mail carriers, factory workers, rail and cable layers, or merchants (alongside the Indo-African traders). There's African and Indian administrators at the top, embracing technocracy (as in OTL 60s): the idea is to have a world where colonial risings are bought off with profit-sharing and/or repression, but the edifice is large yet rotting and combining Qaddafi and Mubarak's approaches isn't enough. British Africa gets autonomy, Portuguese Africa corruption, and French Africa industrialization. Africa's agro-industrialization leads to chemical/mechanical agriculture and enormous social rearrangement for the crops' sake, in turn leading to dispossession, dependency, and guerrillas. The Afrikaners, bridling under the Oceanic thumb, turn to racism and the figure of Sir Francis Drake. Russia, Africa, Asia, the Mideast, and LA try force-industrialization once production stagnates. Autonomy, local (puppet) rule, and efforts to reduce intercontinental inequalities don't really blunt the artisan-crippling effects of extending mass production to the Third World. Intensive and extensive agriculture only ends up increasing population (requiring ever-more innovation and crop improvement), enhancing ecological and economic deformation and further painting humanity into a corner. Cheap Third-World labor within each currency bloc holds down the inflation. There's Great-Leap-level disasters--in the name of ending "hand-to-mouth misery" of course--in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Tanganyika, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali, Angola, Arabia. These Leaps all contain an immense tension between scientistic objectivism and scientistic human mastery of nature--indeed, eventual material omniscience and omnipotence. The lack of Soviet and Chinese examples and a tighter technocracy delays OTL's late-50s risings to TTL's late 60s, but unresolved tensions mean plenty of Communists no longer advocating for technocracy. These suit-and-tie Reds emphasize autonomy more than modernization: as colonial wars turn to proxy wars the units read a lot of Marx and Fanon and Gramsci and Castro (who are all well-dressed dissident academicians).