“Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.” Alfie Kohn
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets … Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers — a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars — and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.” W. Edwards Deming
“When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity.” David Korten
Stuart Chase, the Boston Fabian economist cum an extremely prolific author who became one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)’s inner circle, first met FDR in 1931, when the latter was the governor of New York. In his Presidential acceptance speech, FDR had promised “a new deal for the American people” — a term Chase coined for his A New Deal book.
In Foundations: Their Power and Influence, Rene A. Wormser, general counsel to the Reece committee in 1953–4, shared how American foundations had orchestrated the “New Deal” which he described as “a modified form of socialism” by financially supporting people like Chase who had had a long history as a pamphleteer:
“Mr. Chase was retained by The Twentieth Century Fund to write, among other books, Goals for America, which appeared in 1942. This work advocated a “mixed economy.” In 1946 appeared his For This We Fought. He had the advantage of advice and criticism from the Twentieth Century Fund staff, but the Fund took the precaution to say that “the opinions and conclusions expressed by these books are those of Mr. Chase.” Among his conclusions were these: He recommended a government-manipulated economy; as a new twist he asked for an “intensive stimulation of the social sciences, to help them to begin to catch up with the runaway physical sciences.”
The Twentieth Century Fund was incorporated as the nonprofit Co-operative League in Massachusetts in 1920 by Edward and Lincoln Filene. It then became known as The Century Foundation (TCF):
“Solving Tomorrow’s Problems. Since 1919.
J. Robert Oppenheimer. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. John Kenneth Galbraith. Patricia Harris. They shaped a century of progressive public policy. And they’re all part of The Century Foundation’s legacy. TCF scholars and trustees advised President Roosevelt to form what became the Securities Exchange Commission, administered the Marshall plan, and provided the first examination of Asian economies.”
Chase’s A New Deal book had recommended:
(1) a managed currency;
(2) a drastic redistribution of the national income through income and inheritance taxes; and
(3) a huge program of public works.
A man who “has in his work definitely indicated his leanings towards collectivism and social planning,” Wormser shared that Chase had advocated nationwide economic controls “from the top,” proposed a National Planning Board, and claimed that his plan attempted “to dissolve capitalism with a minimum of government interference” (p. 24). His blueprint for a new America ends with this question: “Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”
Over in the United Kingdom thirty-seven years earlier, the Conservative Government had appointed Beatrice Webb, co-founder of the Fabian Society, as the Royal Commissioner. The Commission was set up to enquire:
Into the working of the laws relating to the relief of poor persons in the United Kingdom, into the various means which have been adopted outside of the Poor Laws for meeting distress arising through want of employment, particularly during periods of severe industrial depression and to consider and report whether any, and if so what, modification of the Poor Law, or changes in the administration or fresh legislation for dealing with distress is advisable …”
In An Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto quoted Kitty Muggeridge, Beatrice Webb’s niece:
If you want to pinpoint the moment in time when the very first foundation of the Welfare State was laid, a reasonable date to choose would be the last fortnight of November in 1905 when Beatrice Webb was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, and she convinced her protégé, William Beveridge, to join a committee for dealing with employment …
During Mrs. Webb’s tenure, she laid down the first blueprint of cradle-to-grave social security to eradicate poverty “without toppling the whole social structure.” She lived to see Beveridge promulgate her major ideas in the historic Beveridge Report, from which they were brought to life in post-WWII Britain and the United States.”
“In 1905, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society was created under the direction of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and others for the active promotion of socialism … Robert Morss Lovett, a man with a total of 56 Communist-front affiliations, became the first president of the Society. Stuart Chase, selected by The Social Science Research Council to write the showpiece on the achievements of social scientists, was an early writer for this organization. This Society was no transient organization. It still exists and operates today as a tax-exempt foundation, having changed its name some years ago to The League for Industrial Democracy.” Rene A. Wormser
In terms of the social fabric of our world, The Beveridge Report, officially titled Social Insurance and Allied Services, could be the most important document of the 20th century. It was published on December 1 in the year Chase published The Road We Are Traveling, 1914–1942 : Guide lines to America’s Future, as reported to the Twentieth Century Fund.
He titled Chapter 4 “Back to Business As Usual?” (page 93) to outline the direction “the system of planning the Fabian Socialists had in mind”:
“We have something called “X,” which is displacing the system of free enterprise, all over the world. If we do not know yet what to call it, we can at least describe its major characteristics. They include, in most countries:
Free Enterprise into “X”:
A strong centralized government.
An executive arm growing at the expense of the legislative and judicial arms. In some countries, power is consolidated into a dictator, issuing decrees.
The control of banking, credit, and security exchanges by the government.
The underwriting of employment by the government, either through armaments or public works.
The underwriting of Social Security by the government — old age pensions, mothers’ pensions, unemployment insurance and the like.
The underwriting of food, housing and medical care, by the government. The United States is already experimenting with providing these essentials. Other nations are far down this road.
The use of deficit spending techniques to finance these under-writings. The annually balanced budget has lost its old‑time sanctity.
The abandonment of gold in favor of managed currencies.
The control of foreign trade by the government with increasing emphasis on bilateral agreements and barter deals.
The control of natural resources, with increasing emphasis on self‑sufficiency.
The control of energy sources — hydroelectric power, coal, petroleum, natural gas.
The control of transportation — railway, highway, airway, waterway.
The control of agricultural production.
The control of labor organizations, often to the point of prohibiting strikes.
The enlistment of young men and women in youth corps devoted to health, discipline, community service and ideologies consistent with those of the authorities. The CCC camps have just inaugurated military drill.
Heavy taxation, with special emphasis on the estates and incomes of the rich. Not much “taking over” of properties or industries in the old socialistic sense. The formula appears to be control without ownership. It is interesting to recall that the same formula is used by the management of great corporations in depriving stockholders of power.
The state control of communications and propaganda.”
Let’s briefly explore Chase’s career path and Technocracy:
1917
Joined the Federal Trade Commission. His investigation and critique of the meatpacking industry subsequently led to his dismissal in 1920.
1921
Joined the Technical Alliance which later became Technocracy, and whose major figure was the economist Thorstein Veblen. Chase also worked with the Labor Bureau, an organization that provided services for labor unions and cooperatives.
1922
Wrote for the League for Industrial Democracy. The declared object was Education for a New Social Order Based on Production for Use and Not for Profit. Chase was named its Treasurer.
1926
Published his first serious book, The Tragedy of Waste. It attracted worldwide attention for its scrutiny of modern industrial systems and corporate advertising.
1927
· Went to the Soviet Union with members of the First American Trade Union Delegation, and co-authored Soviet Russia in the Second Decade with Rexford Guy Tugwell and Robert Williams Dunn. (It praised Stalin’s Russian model of central planning and its achievements in agricultural and social management).
· Also co-authored Your Money’s Worth : A Study in the Waste of the Consumer’s Dollar with Frederick J. Schlink, a fellow consumer-advocacy pioneer, to publicize defective and unsafe products. Together, they co-founded the Consumers’ Club with 300 members. With Schlink as its president and technical director, the club was incorporated as Consumers’ Research Inc. in 1931. It was the precursor to Consumers Union and its publication Consumer Reports.
1931
Chase first met FDR, when the latter was the governor of New York.
1932
· In his Presidential acceptance speech, FDR promised “a new deal for the American people” — a term Chase coined for his A New Deal book. The week that Roosevelt gave his 1932 presidential acceptance speech, Chase also wrote “A New Deal for America” as The New Republic cover story.
· Howard Scott, Walter Rautenstrauch and others interested in the problems of technological growth and economic change began meeting in New York City. Their ideas gained national attention and the “Committee on Technocracy” was formed at Columbia University.
1933
· In January, the “Committee on Technocracy” splintered into two other groups:
“Continental Committee on Technocracy” was led by Harold Loeb and “Technocracy Incorporated” by Scott.
At the core of Scott’s vision was “an energy theory of value.” As the basic measure common to the production of all goods and services was energy, he reasoned “the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy.” Instead of a monetary metric, Scott saw an energy metric (energy certificates or ‘energy accounting’) as a more efficient design of society.
Public interest in technocracy peaked in the early 1930s but its heyday lasted until January 13, when Scott delivered a confusing, and uninspiring address on a well-publicized nationwide radio hookup.
Following that, the press and businesspeople reacted with ridicule and almost unanimous hostility. The American Engineering Council charged the technocrats with “unprofessional activity, questionable data, and drawing unwarranted conclusions.”
In the end, critics believed that the socially desirable goals that technology made possible could be achieved without the sacrifice of existing institutions and values and without incurring the apocalypse that technocracy predicted.
The faction-ridden Continental Committee on Technocracy collapsed in October 1936 but Technocracy Incorporated continued.
· Chase first published Technocracy: An Interpretation
1935
“… his book Government in Business reprinted several of his magazine articles extolling the New Deal. Not satisfied with the degree of control already exercised by the Federal government, he advocated clearing the road through a straightforward revision of the Constitutions and presented a long list of activities to be assumed by the Federal government. In his later books, he consistently pleaded for government control of and interference with private investment.” Wormser on Chase
(Chase did not depart from the cooperative-Socialist line until he began to write for Standard Oil of New Jersey after World War II.)
1937
“… the president told (Stuart) Chase’s father that his son was “teaching the American people more about economics than all the others combined.” Others concurred: in 1942 a magazine writer noted, “[H]e perhaps more than any other one person has made economics interesting and understandable to everyday people like you and me.” Harvard Magazine
1938
“On Halloween morning, 1938, Orson Welles awoke to find himself the most talked about man in America. The night before, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air had performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria.” Smithsonianmag
1941
Chase first published A Primer of Economics and What the New Census Means. (On December 11, the United States officially entered World War II.)
1942
The year Stuart Chase published the headlined book about turning “Free Enterprise into “X” :
· Any relevance to the late 19th-century X Club in London?
A dining club of ten men who already knew each other well and supported the theories of natural selection and academic liberalism.
Thomas Henry Huxley — “Darwin’s bulldog” — had called the first meeting for 3 November 1864. The other members were George Busk, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Francis Galton, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, William Spottiswoode and John Tyndall, united by a “devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas.”
After Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species was published, they began to promote naturalism and natural history. A key aim was to reform the Royal Society and professionalize the practice of science. In the 1870s and 1880s, the members of the group became prominent in the scientific community and some accused the club of having too much power in shaping the scientific landscape of London.
· Any connection to Elon Musk?
In April 2022, filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed Musk had formed three corporate entities in Delaware, all under the name of X Holdings:
One entity was to merge with Twitter, Inc., while another was to serve as the parent company of the newly merged company. The third entity was to take on a US$13 billion loan provided by various large banks to acquire Twitter.
In 1999, Musk had co-founded X.com, an online bank and in March 2000, X.com merged with Confinity to create PayPal. Musk subsequently reacquired the X.com domain from PayPal as he considered forming a holding company named “X” for Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX in August 2012.
In October 2022, Musk tweeted that acquiring Twitter was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app” in “3 to 5 years.” On October 27, 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion and became its first CEO. At a Morgan Stanley conference in March 2023, Musk touted X as the potentially “biggest financial institution in the world.”
In January 2024, X “received a money-transmitter license from Utah, the 15th U.S. state to grant approval as the company explores offering payment features.” Reuters
· Any connection to the Great American Eclipse of 2024 on April 8?
It will complete the giant “X” over the New Madrid fault zone that the Great American Eclipse of 2017 in Illinois began.
1948
More from Wormser’s book:
Chase’s The Proper Study of Mankind was published, “at the instance of Donald Young then of The Social Science Research Council, and Charles Dollard, then of The Carnegie Corporation, to portray the condition and functioning of the social sciences.
This book had enormous impact. Approximately 50,000 copies had been sold, which, for a book of this kind, is truly monumental.
The first edition of his The Proper Study of Mankind, an Inquiry into the Study of Human Relations includes an introduction, “How This Book Came to Be Written.” It is quite clear, from this introduction, that Mr. Chase was chosen by two eminent foundation executives, Donald Young (then president of The Social Science Research Council and now president of The Russell Sage Foundation) and Charles Dollard (then president of The Carnegie Corporation of New York), to write a book for them. The book was intended as a popular publicity piece, to interpret the meaning and goals of the social sciences to the general public. Both these gentlemen must have been familiar with Mr. Chase’s previous work and with his well-publicized political convictions. The conclusion is inescapable that they selected Mr. Chase because they approved his bias, unless, indeed, one grants them complete indifference to his convictions.
Mr. Chase had conferences with Messrs. Dollard and Young in the course of his work, and they participated in the sending out of a questionnaire to social scientists and exchanged ideas with Mr. Chase. Their tax-exempt organizations assumed the financial risk involved in the project. The book, in fact, may rightly be held to have been a semi-official publication of The Social Science Research Council …
“There is Harry White of the Treasury arguing with Lord Keynes as to the best form of the World Bank and the International Currency Fund — then known as the Bretton Woods Plan.” And he lauded Lauchlin Currie as an able economist, a contributor to the federal agencies of the New Deal, and mentions his function on the board of economic warfare. The involvement of both Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie in Communist networks is well known.
The second edition of Mr. Chase’s book tones down the role of Messrs. Young and Dollard in the creation of the book, and omits the references to Messrs. White and Currie. Mr. Chase, in expounding the concepts of foundation-supported and directed social-science research, lays it on the line. We are to be managed by these experts, these social divines, with the new “scientific method” which he says can be “applied to the behavior of men as well as to the behavior of electrons.”
“Prepare now for a surprising universal,” says Mr. Chase:
Individual talent is too sporadic and unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization of society. Social systems which endure are built on the average person who can be trained to occupy any position adequately if not brilliantly.
And how is this “scientific” management to take place? One gathers from Mr. Chase’s book, which seems to represent the official line of the foundation complex, that it is to be through “cultural determinism,” via a molding of our minds by propaganda.
Mr. Chase wrote:
Theoretically, a society could be completely made over in something like 15 years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising group of youngsters.
Professor Hobbs in commenting on the book, saw “cultural determinism” as a weapon both of fascism and communism, a variety of “brainwashing” reminiscent of the Russian Pavlov’s experiments on the conditioning of dogs.
To quote Professor Hobbs again, he has said that the “zealots” of the new research in the social sciences lead people to believe that techniques exist in social science which provide accurate description and enable prediction of social behavior. We are told to pattern our behavior and to change our society on the basis of such conclusions regarding criminality, race relations, marriage, mental health, war, divorce, sex, and other personal and social affairs. Yet in these areas of behavior the pertinent knowledge is extremely limited and unreliable, the rules of behavior are vague and changeable, the techniques are crude and untested, and even the basic units required for measurement are non-existent. [Again:] Character and integrity are dissolved in the acid ridicule of cultural determinism.-)
From 1948 until 1952
The Harvard Economic Research Project became an extension of World War II Operations Research. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, it was begun by Soviet-American Wassily Leontief who remained its director until 1973.
Its purpose: To discover the science of controlling an economy: at first the American economy, and then the world economy. It was felt that with sufficient mathematical foundation and data, it would be nearly as easy to predict and control the trend of an economy as to predict and control the trajectory of a projectile. Such has proven to be the case. Moreover, the economy has been transformed into a guided missile on target.
According to Dr Jacob Nordangard, in the September 1980 issue of Scientific American, entitled The World Economy in the Year 2000, Leontief was recognized as the father of the Silent Weapons System. He was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Economics long after his creation (1948) became recognized by the elite to be a weapon (1965).
In 1983, Leontief had compared humans with horses: “The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished and then eliminated.”
1946 to 1953
Amid the founding of the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Macy conferences took place in New York. Known as the most important meetings of minds for understanding the control of human behavior, the ten meetings were initiated and organized by Warren McCulloch and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.
According to Frances Stonor Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation had close links with the Rockefeller Foundation and had served as a front for the CIA.
Late 1940s
The US Congress adopted a series of laws renaming (and reorganizing) the American national military establishment — the Department of War became the Department of Defense. Other countries subsequently followed the American example.
“by 1949, the British Empire was disintegrating in every region, as demands for colonial independence were made against the oppressive mother country. The British Empire was in the throes of the largest upheaval of perhaps any Kingdom in history … The long-discussed new concept of Empire, first introduced in the early years before World War I by Lord Lothian, Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes and the Round Table circle … was rapidly becoming reality.
Britain after 1945 would exert global influence indirectly, through developing and deepening a ‘special relationship’ with the United States. The seeds of this ‘special relationship’ had been carefully planted following Versailles, with the simultaneous establishment of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the New York Council on Foreign Relations, as conduits of strategic policy debate.” William Engdahl, Oil and the New World Order of Bretton Woods
This short introduction explores whether the direction for our shared future was set 91 years ago. If there is interest, I will finish the rest of the research …
References
Technocracy and the American dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900–1941
The League of Nations and the United Nations
The New Deal and the International Monetary System
