The Garrison State

Abstract

The garrison state is a developmental construct about the future course of world-politics, whose function is to stimulate the individual specialist to clarify for himself his expectations about the future as a guide to the timing of scientific work. The trend of the time is away from the dominance of the specialist on bargaining, who is the businessman, and toward the supremacy of the specialist on violence, the soldier. Methods: It is probable that the ruling elite of the garrison state will acquire most of the skills that we have come to accept as part of modern civilian management. Particularly prominent will be skill in the manipulation of symbols in the interest of morale and public relations. Unemployment will be psychologically abolished. Internal violence will be directed principally against unskilled manual workers and counter-elite elements who have come under suspicion. Incomes will be somewhat equalized in the interest of maintaining morale under modern conditions of socialized danger. The practice will be to recruit the elite according to ability (in periods of crisis); authority will be dictatorial, governmentalized, centralized, integrated. Value distribution: The power pyramid will be steep, but the distribution of safety will be equalized (the socialization of danger under modern conditions of aerial warfare). The income and respect pyramids will be between the other two-each pyramid flattened at the top, bulged out in the upper-middle and lower-middle zones. Value production: The elites will seek to hold in check the utilization of the productive potentialities of modern science and engineering for nonmilitary consumption goods. The rate of production will be regularized. Production will be affected by the tendencies toward rigidity in a military state, but these effects will be largely neutralized by the skill groups of science and technology.