Today we’re well aware of how applied science has made life easier for most of us; how it has served to give us a better quality of life. Under normal circumstances we don’t have to work anywhere near as hard as our fore-fathers; and we live longer, in better conditions, and in better health.

A 100 years-or-so-ago, however, Tolstoy saw applied science as the greatest of all threats to personal liberty – and argued that it would become the most dangerous instrument of oppressive power in the hands of manipulative governments, oligarchies, and tyrants. “If the arrangement of society is bad (as ours is)” he wrote “and if a small number of people have power over the majority and oppress them, every victory over Nature will inevitably serve to increase that power and that oppression.”

Every advance in science strengthens the power of the ruling minority. Our modern bureaucrats are much better equipped than their predecessors. In their hands, computers and databases let them know almost everything about everyone.

Thanks to modern transport, and the colossal armoury of modern weapons, they can range the globe and apply force almost instantly. Making use of the media of mass communication, they can bombard us with propaganda, coerce and persuade us, tell us lies; and manipulate us on a global scale. Their cameras and bugs are everywhere. They can control production and distribution, and manipulate economies to their advantage. Our jobs and livelihoods are increasingly in their hands. Until recently, such personal liberties as existed were safeguarded, not by constitutional guarantees, but by the lack of technology and the inefficiency of the bureaucrats of the ruling minorities.

For most of us, our hard-won liberties have not yet been eroded irrevocably by the political consequences of advancing technology. The many have been protected by laws, and they have fought to create trade-unions and cooperatives, and political machinery and lobbies; all systems of power designed to counterbalance the power of industrialists, and of governments and their armies, who can control the resources of modern technology. In the 20th century, in countries where the people were not so protected, where tyrants and maniacs seized and held power and the people were not able to create or maintain their own defensive power systems, Tolstoy’s prediction was proved correct.

Every ‘Victory over Nature’ has been at the same time a victory of the few over the many. And all the while the machinery of mass production; of industry and corporative global power, is growing larger, more elaborate, and increasingly expensive. As a result it is progressively under the control of those who wield financial and political power; in the pocket of big business, cartels, and controlling governments.

We have to watch it. Big Brother is here. The graffiti is on the wall. There never was a time for greater Eternal Vigilance than today. It will be the man who will have to say: “Enough is enough.”

Robert Weatherburn

Senglea