A FAIRLY educated Filipino can describe what a Republic is. They can also describe what a Democracy is. But very few, in my experience, can describe what a Technocracy is.
A technocracy is a form of government where specialists are in charge. You’ll have doctors managing the countries health, teachers managing its schools, economists managing its finances etc.
Based on this definition, the Philippines government has a level of technocracy through its various departments. For more on this subject, I recommend James Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World”.
Why does this matter? Because, in a way, technocracies have the potential to supplant democracies and republics, and I would argue that the technocratic paradigm is swiftly overtaking democratic liberalism.
Rule “By the People, For the People” sounds nice on paper but what if the people decide they want to trash the environment, start wars or, heaven forbid, vote the wrong way?
In such situations, technocratic elites may feel the need to step up, and wrangle the people’s will, because obviously as experts, they know better.
This is already the case in Western countries, where governments behave as though they have veto power in certain situations. For example, when they call any problematic discourse as “misinformation.”
The situation there can easily happen here, because we are following the same patterns and trends. We live in a mass society, and such a society requires the support of technocrats.
That’s the argument, but the unspoken problem with technocracy is that technocrats are not just specialists who can impartially decide the best course of action based on their specialization. They are also bureaucrats and politicians, and they will rule based on those incentives and their own motives.
A specialist who claims he knows what’s best because of his credentials is a dangerous tautology, and yet that’s where 21st century politics is today.
The end result of such a government is less the rule of the specialist, and more the rule of the manager and the credentialed bureaucrat./PN
