The Technocrat and the Socialist: How the Worship of Intelligence Paved the Way for a New Collectivism

I. The Cult of Intelligence

Modern civilization no longer worships gods or heroes—it worships the intelligent. The archetype of success has become the engineer-saint: the coder, the data scientist, the startup visionary who claims the authority not only to build the future but to define it. Our new moral order is ruled not by priests or generals, but by the “smartest people in the room.”

They promise efficiency, precision, and salvation through design. They are the heirs of the Enlightenment dream: that reason, properly applied, can perfect both nature and man. Yet this dream has quietly curdled. In the age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance, intelligence has been mistaken for virtue. The result is an emerging alliance between technocracy and collectivism—a world in which moral responsibility is outsourced to systems, and freedom is sacrificed to optimization.

II. From Meritocracy to Technocracy

The rise of the “knowledge class” began with noble intentions. Max Weber described the modern world as increasingly ruled by rational-legal authority—systems based on expertise rather than birthright. Bureaucracy, in Weber’s view, would free humanity from superstition and arbitrariness. The problem, he warned, was that reason divorced from value becomes an “iron cage.”

Jacques Ellul later deepened this insight in The Technological Society (1954). Technique, he argued, possesses its own autonomous logic. Once society accepts efficiency as the highest good, every other value—justice, beauty, even truth—must serve it. The “technical man,” Ellul wrote, “is not interested in the good; he is only interested in efficiency.”

Today’s elites embody Ellul’s prophecy. They are brilliant, tireless, and ideologically convinced that any human problem can be reduced to data, modeled, and solved. But when efficiency becomes morality, the human being becomes an obstacle. We no longer ask what is right?—only what works?

III. The Moral Vacuum and Its Political Consequence

The displacement of moral reasoning by technical reasoning has left a void. And nature, as every philosopher since Aristotle has known, abhors a vacuum. Into that void rush two forces: technocratic paternalism among elites and moral collectivism among the disenchanted.

Christopher Lasch diagnosed this dynamic in The Revolt of the Elites (1995). The professional class, he wrote, had withdrawn from the moral life of ordinary citizens, replacing shared civic duty with managerial expertise. The consequence was populist revolt: people who felt excluded from moral conversation turned instead to movements that promised solidarity, even at the cost of freedom.

The technocrat, certain of his intellectual superiority, seeks to govern through design; the ordinary citizen, alienated by abstraction, seeks redemption through equality. The two appear to be enemies but are, in fact, psychological complements. Each dreams of a world freed from human frailty—one through mastery, the other through merger.

IV. The Emotional Logic of Neo-Socialism

Why does the cult of intelligence produce sympathy for socialism? Because a society that measures human worth by cognitive performance inevitably breeds moral resentment. The more we celebrate the “smart,” the more we imply that the average person is undeserving.

Michael Sandel captured this paradox in The Tyranny of Merit (2020):

“When success is seen as the measure of virtue, the unsuccessful are seen as morally lacking.”

Technocratic meritocracy transforms inequality from an economic fact into a spiritual judgment. Those left behind seek absolution not through self-improvement but through collective moral redemption. Hence the revival of socialist and communitarian rhetoric among younger generations: a yearning not merely for redistribution of wealth, but for restoration of dignity.

Socialism, in this sense, becomes the revenge of the soul against a system that values intellect over empathy. It promises to humanize the world that technocracy has sterilized. The irony is that its chosen instruments—bureaucracy, central planning, digital surveillance—are the very offspring of the technocratic mindset it opposes.

V. Technocracy and Socialism: The Dialectic Twins

The supposed opposition between technocracy and socialism conceals a deeper unity. Both originate in the Enlightenment faith that society can be rationally designed. The technocrat says: Let experts plan the economy. The socialist says: Let planners redistribute the wealth. Both require centralized power, universal data, and unquestioned belief in human perfectibility.

Yuval Noah Harari has noted this convergence in his discussions of “Dataism.” In a data-driven world, the ultimate authority is no longer God or the People but the Algorithm. Decisions are justified not by tradition or consent but by computation. Whether labeled capitalist or socialist, such a system erases the boundary between efficiency and morality.

What emerges is a soft authoritarianism that governs by metrics and sentiment simultaneously: moral rhetoric for the masses, data analytics for the rulers. It is compassionate in tone and total in reach—the digital echo of the planned societies of the twentieth century.

VI. The Loss of the Philosopher-King

Plato’s philosopher-king governed because he had mastered the discipline of the soul. He knew that wisdom without virtue is tyranny. Our modern elites imitate his intelligence but not his humility.

Their education is technical, not moral; specialized, not synthetic. They can code a neural network or optimize a supply chain, but they cannot articulate why one outcome is better than another. They are, in the words of C. S. Lewis, “men without chests”—brilliant minds unmoored from moral imagination.

Hence the paradox: the smarter our rulers become, the less wise they seem. They do not seek to serve but to solve; they view citizens not as participants in the common good but as data points in a grand experiment. Plato would not have recognized them as philosophers at all—only as artisans who mistook their craft for truth.

VII. The Psychological Dimension: Inflation and Projection

Carl Jung would describe the modern technocrat as suffering from psychic inflation—the ego swollen by identification with an archetype of divine intelligence. The engineer-messiah believes he can redeem the world through design. Yet the repressed moral dimension of his psyche does not vanish; it returns in projection. The guilt he cannot face internally is displaced onto society, which must be “fixed” for its own good.

Likewise, the masses—disillusioned by the cold rationalism of their elites—project their longing for wholeness onto collectivist movements. Jung called this “possession by the unconscious.” The archetype of the Redeemer now animates political ideologies instead of religions. What was once a spiritual drama played out within the soul becomes a social crusade waged against imagined oppressors.

Thus technocracy and socialism feed each other’s pathologies: one offers salvation through control, the other through surrender. Both abolish the tension of freedom.

VIII. The Gamified Soul

The digital economy has transformed moral life into a series of feedback loops. Every action earns points, likes, or followers. We experience ourselves not as moral agents but as users optimizing performance. Neil Postman warned that we were “amusing ourselves to death”; today we are quantifying ourselves to death.

The “gamified mind” no longer distinguishes between virtue and visibility. Online activism replaces real sacrifice; symbolic outrage substitutes for duty. The individual lives in a simulation of moral significance, perpetually busy but existentially idle.

In such a world, socialism becomes a kind of meta-game—a promise to rewrite the rules so that everyone can finally win. Its appeal is emotional, not economic. It satisfies the longing for justice that digital life cannot deliver. Yet because it relies on the same data systems and managerial elites that created the alienation in the first place, it can only reproduce the problem on a grander scale.

IX. Data Collectivism: The New Moral Order

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism exposes how technology companies monetize not just behavior but prediction of behavior. The next logical step is prescriptive: to use data not merely to foresee what people will do, but to guide what they should do.

In China, this logic manifests as the “social-credit” system—a perfect fusion of technocracy and socialism, where moral virtue is scored algorithmically. In the West, the same impulse appears in corporate ESG metrics and “trust and safety” algorithms. The language is moral, the method mechanical. Virtue becomes compliance; dissent becomes error.

This is the world Ellul foresaw—a civilization where ethics are automated and responsibility diffused. The danger is not overt tyranny but moral outsourcing: citizens relieved of the burden of conscience because “the system knows best.”

X. The Return of Religion in Disguise

Every society worships something. When God retreats, ideology rushes in to take His place. The alliance of technocracy and socialism functions as a secular theocracy. Its creed is progress, its sacraments are data, and its heaven is an optimized planet populated by virtuous consumers.

Yet like all pseudo-religions, it lacks grace. There is no forgiveness in the algorithm, no mercy in the metric. One can only comply or be deleted. The ancient drama of sin and redemption is replaced by error and update. In the name of rationality, the soul is quietly abolished.

XI. The Crisis of Meaning and the Politics of the Self

When meaning disappears from the public realm, individuals turn inward or sideways—toward identity politics, transhumanist dreams, or digital escapism. These are all attempts to recover the sacred in a desacralized world.

But as Jung observed, the gods we do not recognize within return as diseases without. The cult of intelligence has created spiritual symptoms: anxiety, tribalism, and apocalyptic moralism. People no longer debate policy; they enact myth. Politics becomes theater, economics becomes morality play, and technology becomes destiny.

The path back begins not with new systems but with new selves—citizens capable of integrating knowledge with conscience. Without inner reform, outer reform only reproduces the sickness it seeks to cure.

XII. Reclaiming Wisdom

The antidote to both technocratic arrogance and socialist utopianism is the recovery of wisdom—a virtue older than both science and ideology. Wisdom accepts imperfection; it recognizes that human life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

This is not a call to abandon reason, but to place reason back under moral authority. Weber warned that a value-free rationality would imprison us in bureaucracy; Jung warned it would fragment the psyche. Both were right. A civilization that exalts intelligence but neglects virtue becomes clever at building its own chains.

We must therefore re-educate our elites—not in coding or finance, but in philosophy, history, and ethics. We must remind them that intelligence is an instrument, not a crown. And we must teach citizens that equality without liberty, like liberty without virtue, ends in servitude.

XIII. Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

The worship of intelligence has given us astonishing power and profound loneliness. It has created technocrats who rule without wisdom and social movements that rebel without direction. Together they form a new collectivism—one that speaks the language of justice while erasing the individual soul.

The future will not be decided by machines or by mobs, but by whether we can recover the moral imagination that makes both science and society humane.

As Lasch warned, “Without a sense of limits, the pursuit of progress leads to self-destruction.”And as Jung might have added: without integration of our fantasies, they will devour us.

Our task is not to destroy intelligence, but to redeem it—to restore its service to truth rather than power, to wisdom rather than pride. Only then can we build a world worthy of both the mind that creates and the heart that endures.

Selected References

• Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995)

• Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954)

• Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (2020)

• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)

• Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2016)

• Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922)

• Carl G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1957)