When Man would try to become God - Homo Sapiens to Homo Deus as Yuval Noah Harari would say ...
The idea that the world would best be run by a class of intellectual elites and experts is hardly novel or original.
The Greek philosopher Plato theorized that until philosophers were kings, cities would never have rest from their evils. He believed these men alone were immune to the corruption of power and money that came with politics, and thus the only group capable of leading men into virtue and ultimately the good life.
His utopian ideal relied on authoritarian elites who would know better than everyone else and who would use their special wisdom to dictate the lives of others.
This strain of idealism has manifested in many ways throughout human history, but at its heart, it is based on the belief that a special class of men (the intellectuals, the scientists, the philosophers, etc.) could function as the high priests of society, dictating the lives of everyone below them who are too ignorant to know what is best for them, or would lack the moral fiber to do what is right without persuasion.
For anyone not belonging to this class of elites, thinking would then become a luxury - potentially even a liability - but certainly not a necessity.
Obedience is all that matters in such a state; one man becomes the conditioner, the other the conditioned.
C. S. Lewis wrote of this “man-molding” in The Abolition of Man.
Lewis referred to the universal values and mores which man has held since the beginning of time as “Tao,” or Nature (and Natural Law). It is the beautiful and the good, all things inherently true and right. Things like, “Do not kill,” “Do not steal,” “Speak the truth”- these are universal laws God has imprinted on the conscience of man, regardless of culture, age in history, or ethnicity. Yet Lewis warned that the conditioners were trying to produce their own conscience in humanity.
“For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please... The man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an 'omnicompetent' state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please…"
From extreme nanny states to brutal genocide, we can see that placing experts or science at the helm of authoritarian experiments has led to no utopias.
Scientists study what they want, and they study what they can get paid to study, so the work of science is not free from the pressures of money, nor interaction with the business world...In a hypothetical world where a single person decided policy based on precisely measuring the weight of evidence, how that person selected evidence would matter a great deal, and would likely come down to values.
We have more than a little evidence from history that science (or what was accepted at the time as science) has most certainly caused vast human suffering when wielded by unscrupulous men and fascist dictators.
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Appealing to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God,” the Founding Fathers established a form of government that recognized and upheld the rights of man. By forming a republic in which officials must be elected by the people, they were doing away with the notion that a high-priestly class was necessary to govern man.
It was a bold statement: man could self-govern. He was a capable, rational creature. And he had a responsibility to self-govern responsibly: he must think, he must reason, he must be moral. They acknowledged that only such a people could remain a free people.
Rather than codifying the special wisdom and knowledge of a few fallible men into governmental law, we must base policy on the protection of the rights of all men.
We need more critical thinking, less mindless trust; more responsible self-education and self-governance, less abdication of such responsibility to experts; more individual, informed decision-making, less acceptance of one-size-fits-all mandates.
We are not mindless robots; our politicians and their advisors are not infallible dictators.
Tabitha Alloway