Here we have a problem of very high importance and enormous magnitude. To
serve 1,600,000,000 living men, we have 11,600,000,000 dead man-powers and
all the sun man-powers—SEVEN SERVANTS TO EACH LIVING MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD
included. It looks like the millennium. It would be so if we but used all
this power in a constructive way, eliminating waste and controversy and
all those factors which hamper production and progress. The present
economic system does not realize even the beginning of the magnitude of
this truth and the tremendous results which are to be achieved through the
adjustment of it. The problem will be solved by Human Engineering, for
this will establish the right understanding of values and will show how to
manage world problems scientifically; it will give a scientific foundation
to Political Economy and transform so-called “scientific shop management”
into genuine “scientific world management.”(12)
There is a chasm between “Capital” and “Labor,” but nature does not know
“Capital” or “Labor” at all. Nature knows only matter, energy, “space,”
“time,” potential and kinetic use-values, forces in all their direct and
indirect expression, the energies of living men, living powers of dead
men, and the bound-up powers of Time and the ancient Sun. Nature made man
an increasing exponential function of time, a time-binder, a power able to
transform and direct basic powers. Sometimes we hypocritically like to
delude ourselves, if our delusions are agreeable—and profitable. We call
human work “manual labor” and we pretend that we need the laborer for his
muscular service, but when we thus speak, we are thoughtless, stupid, or
insincere. What we look for in the worker is his _control_ of his muscles;
mechanical work is or can be replaced almost entirely by machinery. What
we will never be able to replace by machinery is a Man, because man
belongs to the level of a dimension above machinery. Engine-power, sun
man-power, and capital—mainly the work of the dead—are inanimate; they
become productive only when quickened by the time-binding energies of
living men and women. Then only are the results proportional to the ever
growing magnitude of exponential power. In nature’s economy the
time-binders are the intelligent forces. There is none else known to us,
and from the engineer’s point of view, Edison and the simplest laborer,
Smith or Jones, are basically the same; their powers or capacities are
exponential, and, though differing in degree, are the same in kind. This
may seem optimistic but all engineers are optimists. They deal only with
fact and truth. If they make mistakes, if their bridges break down, then,
no matter how clever their sophistry, they are adjudged criminal. Like
severity must be made the rule and practice toward all those who control
the institutions and great affairs of human society. Periodical
break-downs must be prevented. The engineers of human society must be held
responsible, as the bridge engineer is held to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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