Dear George,
What a time it was as the nineteenth century knee-jerked its way into the twentieth. Beneath the screeching wheels of progress those who had ears to hear heard a snapping sound as science broke the shackles of the physical world and begins to spread its tentacles into morass of human endeavor. A pioneering age saw the emergence of new disciplines such as eugenics, phrenology, pathognony, ethnology, characterology, and sociology.
But out of the miasmic mist of industrial particulates strode a giant of a man who would soon be recognized as the Moses of the twentieth century. He was a man whose contribution would cast a shadow over all other disciplines, for his work made possible the modern corporist state, as we know it today. The man was Frederick W. Taylor. His book, Scientific Management was the scripture of the new age of rational totalitarianism.
Now, the necessary condition for a scripture to grow in power and influence is for its followers and disciples to corrupt it beyond recognition. This is how Taylorism came to be pressed down upon the soul of man. Today, we honor him for the following principles which may or may not have been his in the beginning, but who really gives a shit as long as they resonate.
- The sole goal of humanity is efficiency; efficiency means productivity. The key to productivity is to cut, cut, cut! While you are cutting, you must demand standardization. The efficient operation has no room for diversity. United we stand; divided, the operation moves overseas.
- Technical calculation is superior to human judgment. The chances are that whatever a person thinks is wrong. All thinking gives us is a cacophony of conflicting opinions and ideas that bang against each other like drunken billiard balls. Thinking is the source of dissension and political partisanship and eventually leads to stuff like democracy.
- Human judgment cannot be trusted because of its laxity, ambiguity and inefficient complexity. Read Hegel’s Phenomology if you have any doubt about that. The only thing human judgment is good for is generating the impulses that can only be satisfied by buying something. Anything beyond that and it becomes dangerous.
- Subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking. This explains why clear thinking is an oxymoron, because all thinking is subjective.
- That which cannot be measured does not exist or is of no value. Quantification is all; if you cannot hang some numbers on something, it is a waste of time. Let numbers rule. Reduce life to a profit margin; reduce children to test scores.
- The masses are best directed and controlled by experts. The masses are too mired in non-quantifiable excesses like morality, honesty, loyalty, and faith. All of them are impediments to the efficiency that is the destiny of the corporatist state.[i]
George, the man deserves a monument, a granite slide ruler rising hundreds of feet above the Washington Mall, taller even than the Washington Monument, taller even than the capitol dome. The slide rule symbolizes something bigger than Washington’s character, bigger than the government. The slide ruler was the midwife of the corporatist state. And even though the calculator has replaced it, it bears the same relationship to the rise of rational totalitarianism as the Minuteman’s musket bears to the nuclear bomb.
Let Jesus be for the masses, for the elite, Taylor is sufficient.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
[i] This summary of Taylor’s work is taken from Neil Postman’s Technopoly. He is not responsible for what I have done with it.
9:05:15 PM 
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