Word: hougan
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...MAIN THING to remember is that it's only a matter of time. An Army group ominously called the Intelligence Threat Analysis Group has come up, Jim Hougan says, with 385 potential military conflicts that may come up by 1990, 145 of them involving the United States, and one, by god, involving the Army versus the American citizenry. We are almost assured of running out of oil by the year 2000, a crisis that will spawn countless other crises and lead to the collapse of American society. The land is full of false prophets preaching evil gospels. The question...
...Hougan's world is a gloomy one indeed, one so firmly in the vice-like grip of something called the technical chreod (like his world, Hougan is driven to neologisms) that nothing anyone can do could have any possible effect on its numerous ills. We are all slaves of a drive for the perfection of pure technique that is strong enough to have become self-sustaining and unstoppable; we live in a world full of machines and agencies that run themselves toward no particular end. It is absolutely inevitable that at some point the morass of technique will break down...
...none of this, to Hougan, is particularly good or bad. Technique does tend to isolate people, to negate any feelings people may have had for responsibility or creativity or ability to affect the world; on the other hand, a total eschewal of technique would be a backward, unproductive step. So, for that matter, would be a total embracing of it, an attitude he attacks various people--including Harvard professors Daniel Bell and B.F. Skinner--for espousing. The future in a world in the grip of technique is more inevitable than it is bleak...
...Hougan uses this idea to explain everything about American society these days, and in particular the fall of the various movements of the sixties. The counterculture, despite its noble opposition to technique, tried to create alternatives in a world where there can be no alternatives. It was reacting with hopeful millennial fervor to social upheaval, which was perfectly understandable but led nowhere. Hougan doesn't see the counterculture as political in nature, and in fact he reacts to the New Left with almost unremittent bitterness. The Left in the sixties was "blunt and calculated," he says, "exploiting Vietnam...
...answer, instead, is what Hougan calls decadence, which in turn, despite its bad name, is actually a kind of style, "multi-dimensional, coherent and complex." It involves making choices in a flamboyant and self-indulgent way--the best way to spend one's time while waiting for the chaotic forces of history to wash over society. Since changing the inexorable and self-controlling march of technique is futile, the best thing to do is give up, look out for yourself, have a good time and hope that the apocalypse will do more good than harm...