MARCUS RASKIN
393
are induced-to follow . By ignoring all the anthropological and
philosophica l knowledge of history, law and therapeutic psychology,
the planners reduce a person to his behavior in isolation and make no
judgments about major social facts and organizations which affect the
situations in which he may find himself. There is no interest in the fact
that the draftee in the Indo-China war is not in the jungle by his
choice, or that the deci ions of the Open Market Committee of the
Federal Reserve System-which controls the money supply-do not
represent the thinking of workers.
By planning for the future on the basis of the existing social
organization-its class structure, its co lonizing technology, and its self–
protecting knowledge-we are robbing people of a future outside of
faulty superstructures. We are robbing them, as well, of their potential–
ity, requiring them
to
continue
to
define themselves through the things
which exist around them: the consumer goods, the police, the military
and the banking system. The faulty social system is not seen as the
problematic. Rather, it is the people who must internalize the idea that
they are problematic, and
0
they come to see them elves as the
potentially gui lty ones who are
to
be sacrificed or used.
Our artist have long understood the emptiness and desperation of
state and corporate planning. The great novels of dystopia, 1984 and
Brave New World,
started from a fundamental insight. These books
asserted that planning for the future through organizational and
hierarchical means (the State, the Party or the Corporation) without
the assistance of a moral cience in fact destroyed truth and justice–
those very impulse which gave impetus to the cultural and political
revolutions of the twentieth century. Orwell and Huxley damned
power and rationalization. They showed the reader the one–
dimensiona lity of bourgeois and state socialism which smothered
man's internal and external space. Children of the very class which had
committed itself to merely observable behavior, Orwell and Huxley
concl uded that a ll of modern life was nothing more than surface
phenomena. They seemed to be saying that bureaucratic planners, the
advocates of scientism, did not understand man 's internal life, that life
in which moral truths have their effect ·and the spirit of justice are
formed.
On the eve of the econd World War, Archibald MacLeish wrote
that it was on ly the poet who cou ld help us
to
understand and
transform the future:
The economist .. . cannot help us. Mathematicians of the mob, their
function is to tell us what, a a mob, we have done.... When they try
