[whswhs]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

It seems to me that in technocratic reality people don't set fire to things by training for years and then staring at them (the exclusionary, aristocratic paradigm); they set fire to things by picking up a cigarette lighter or a microwave emitter or a laser and pointing it at them (the universal, socialist paradigm). My understanding of the Technocracy, which admittedly was formed in the early Mage days and may be outdated, is that they want everyone to be able to share in the power.

Of course as a human organisation they're intrinsically broken and reserve some of the neat stuff for themselves rather than giving it to everybody. ("They're not ready yet.")

Or "this is really advanced technology, and it's likely to be unreliable outside the controlled setting of the laboratory."

While I quite agree about the Technocracy's aspirational goals, they do have people whose mission is to track down mages (and monsters and the like). Some of those beings CAN set fire to things by staring at them. So there needs to be a "scientific" explanation for how they do it. And ideally that explanation needs to support the need for a mission of putting a stop to that sort of thing, and the possibility of doing so by scientific means—not by "thinking about reality differently to make reality deviance impossible."

So what is that explanation? Well, for the Sons of Ether, "mad scientists experimenting irresponsibly with poorly documented phenomena." For spirit-based mages, "making contact with alien beings from other dimensions with different natural laws." But for a lot of mages, "human beings with abnormal brains" seems like a plausible handwave, something in between X-Men and Alphas. All that stuff about "spells" is partly the product of prescientific theorizing about things that aren't yet understood, and partly fetishistic behavior to allay the anxiety of having a brain that does unaccountable things—and of course there is no element of either in the careful procedures and documentation of SCIENCE.

So I think what I'm trying to do is come up with a model of Technocratic beliefs about the universe, as a basis for describing Technocratic activities and policies, so that I can script or roleplay Technocratic characters without turning them into anything as unsubtle as out and out consciously villainous villains.