Time & Perspective Quote by Howard Scott

“At this time, it’s all still proposed” is the kind of sentence that pretends to be modest while quietly trying to keep the steering wheel. Howard Scott, a self-styled scientist and the leading evangelist of Technocracy in the early 20th century, understood that the most persuasive future is one that never quite arrives. “Proposed” is doing double duty: it signals restraint (we’re not dogmatists), but it also frames dissent as premature (you can’t attack a plan that’s still “in progress”). The line reads like a lab note, yet it functions like politics.

Context matters. Scott’s Technocracy movement promised to replace messy democratic bargaining with rational management by engineers, often floating sweeping redesigns of economics and governance (energy certificates, continental planning, expert administration). Those ambitions routinely outpaced institutional reality, and Scott’s own credibility was contested. In that light, the quote becomes a defensive maneuver: a way to keep bold claims intact while dodging the demand for proof, timeline, or accountability. If the blueprint is “still proposed,” failures can be written off as misunderstanding, sabotage, or simply not-yet.

The subtext is an appeal to patience that also asks for deference: trust the experts, even when the expertise is aspirational. It’s scientific-sounding incrementalism used as a shield for grand redesign. The sentence is small, but it carries a whole ideology’s strategy: maintain authority by staying perpetually on the verge of implementation, where critique can be dismissed as obstructing progress rather than testing it.