Social Engineering: the Moral Descendants of Henry Ford Are Still With Us

So I was watching this Henry Ford Documentary on PBS the other night. It was fascinating to hear about his many experiments in social engineering.

It was interesting to hear toward the end how his grandson “ended all activities in social engineering.” Yikes. Sorry, PBS, you got that all wrong.  They didn’t stop, we just don’t notice it any more.

I grew up in Toledo, essentially an industrial suburb of Detroit. Every car in the world has windows, someone has to make all that glass, and Toledo is where they make it. Glass, fiberglass, corningware, fiberglass insulation, you name it. And the school I went to would have made Henry Ford proud. They spent all day every day making us ready to work in a car parts factory.

As I look back on it, the entire school system was, in fact, one big attempt at social engineering. Every aspect of our little lives was designed to turn us into the optimal factory worker. No one really cared if you passed or failed history, but every single one of us learned to obey authority without question, especially that of male authority figures who wore neckties. Being on time was more important than anything else. And when I saw in that documentary how the Ford factory workers who talked to eachother on the line were suspected of union organizing, I suddenly understood why inter-student communication was so highly frowned upon.

It went way beyond that of course. We were taught to think of the founding fathers and presidents as perfect omniscient beings. The history we were taught put America in the center of the universe. And I still remember the boys all taking mechanical drawing while all the girls took home-ec that same period. They were preparing us for both our factory centered lives and our factory centered marriages.

Things have been updated since my days in school of course. But make no mistake, social engineering is alive and well. Henry isn’t doing the planning any more, but there are all sorts of groups with a desire to remake society, and they do this any way they can, from making rules about what teachers can do and say to what the food pyramid is supposed to look like, from sanitizing great works of literature to telling illustrators of children’s books what they can and cannot draw. And never mind what the pharmaceutical companies are doing on television.

I have no doubt but that there some very well meaning visionaries out there, but there are also a great many people who have a social change axe to grind, and they are determined, persistent, and well funded.

So when you find yourself feeling conflicted or confused or dealing with behavior in others that seems irrational or nonsensical, bear in mind, it was all created for a purpose somewhere upstream. The best way to overcome it is to understand it.

After I went to the “poor kid gonna-be-factory-worker” school, I went to a rich kid school. Then I got into the world of classical music. Because I was so severely jounced from one culture to another, I had an unusual opportunity to develop objectivity about social engineering generally. It has become my passion in life to free myself and others from the social engineers who think they knew better than us how we should live our lives, or worse, those who are simply trying to engineer us to be better customers.

© Justin Locke