Quote:
Originally Posted by baakyocalder
The Technocracy understands Avatars as Genius, but tries not to discuss it. Essentially, the Technocracy knows that those with will and focus can do things ordinary people cannot, but they try and view it in the form of science.
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Well, this is the thing that makes it interesting for me, and it may be that I'm doing things that are extracanonical.
My take on the Technocracy is that they are explicitly anti-supernatural, and have been at least since the Crystal Palace. But Prime (like Spirit) is clearly supernatural. So I take a hint from Ayn Rand's contrast of "mystics of spirit" and "mystics of muscle," saying that the Traditions take an idealist or dualist approach, but the Technocracy a materialist one:
* The superhuman entity that is the source both of moral values and of extraordinary powers is not God, but Society
* The crucial resource that enables technocrats to do Advanced Science is not Quintessence, but Capital (this was the central clash of the Electrodyne Engineers with the other technocrats)
* Bankers and financiers are in effect doing hedge magic with money and capital, tapping the creative powers of society without fully understanding what they're doing
* Enlightened social scientists use the sphere not of Prime, but of Society
* Tass is special not because it embodies a form of supernatural power but because Society gives it special significance
But that seems to imply a radically different construction of what "mages" are doing. And what I'm trying to do is work out this paradigm more fully. Without denying the validity of the Hermetic paradigm that the Traditions rely on! If reality is subjective, then it's entirely possible for both paradigms to be "true," for local values of truth. But a technocrat who wants to explain why certain people can set things on fire by staring at them would not think of it as a result of spirits, or magic; they would need to come up with some other explanation, which would then be true in technocratic areas of the world, if they persuaded the Masses to accept it. (And of course, radical new ideas would be vulgar as hell until the Masses did accept them!)