The second argument that John McDermott makes in Section IV of Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals is that “the social organization of this new technology contributes very heavily to the growth of social irrationality in our society”(McDermott 87). The technological society does this “by systematically denying to the general population experiences which are analogous to those of its higher management”(87). McDermott goes on to talk about how all people who work have a “job description” and they are to do only what is described within it (87). McDermott believes that the people who go outside of this description through “creative and autonomous behavior” “have no more place in a large corporation or government agency than squeamish soldiers do in the army”(87). The people “at the top of technology’s most advanced organizations” do not go through the same experience as people that are working to get to the top. This is due to the “psychology of an individual’s fulfillment through work has been incorporated into management ideology” called the Altruistic Bureaucracy (87). Many people that are at the top of their business would seem to be having a good life, but are living lives that are really not rewarding. They spend “killing hours looking after the economic welfare and the national security of the rest of us”(87). The “lonely and unrewarding eminence in the face of crushing responsibility, etc., tends to create an air of mystification around technology’s managers”(87).
The quality of the lower classes’ social experience lessens along with their literacy when the level of technology increases (88). They are cut off from the experiences where the social means and ends are “balanced and rebalanced, adjusted and readjusted”(88). The effective balancing and adjusting is where “social rationality derives”(88). But because it never seems that the social means are balanced correctly the society learns to live with it and “social paranoia” becomes “a recurring phenomenon”(88).
Laissez innover’s, which McDermott states as, "the premier ideology of the technological impulse in American society, which is to say, of the institutions which monopolize and profit from advanced technology and of the social classes which find in the free exploitation of their technology the most likely guarantee of their power, status, and wealth" (90). This idea can also be seen in the altruistic bureaucrat’s principles technology is the definition of the organization of knowledge (88). This leaves “the primary and really creative role” in society to the “technical elite.” McDermott gives an example that there is a “principle of equal opportunity for all, but…special opportunity for the singularly talented few”(88).
McDermott explains that these arguments are very basic arguments “which enhance the social legitimacy of the interests of the new technical and scientific elites”(89). Therefore there is no true egalitarian society that shows equality for all of its members, and the members of the society that have special interests are the ones that have a scientific knowledge (89). The equality that people seek to find for our society is one of the “main factors” that contributes to the growing gap between the upper and lower classes in our society (90). This is the same argument that he makes in the previous passage. He made the argument that the growth of technology was the cause of the widening gap between the upper and lower classes in American society (90). McDermott is still fighting the idea of Mesthene’s which says that technology is helping in making the two classes come closer together (86).
I feel that these are some of the reasons that McDermott is against the idea of Mesthene’s that says that technology contributes to society (86). In the society that depends on technology, a new social class will arise and be successful. To be in this class a person would have to be very technical and know about the latest advances in technology. This would leave a huge majority of the population out. The people at the top of big businesses, huge corporations, and nations would be the most technical people. The people at the bottom of the “totem pole”, so to speak, would be angry and offensive to technology because technology is the cause of their failed attempt to make it in society. These people would hate the upper class and a greater division in society would be caused rather than having a closely-knit society.
Works Cited
McDermott, John. "Technology: The Opiate of
the Intellectuals. " Ed. Albert H. Teich.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.