Time & Perspective Quote by Herman Kahn

Technocracy rarely admits it runs on storytelling, but Kahn does. Behind the cool, systems-analysis phrasing is a blunt diagnosis: societies don t move on data alone; they move on pictures of tomorrow that feel livable. A "persuasive image" is not a policy memo. It s a mental movie that makes sacrifice seem temporary, uncertainty feel managed, and disagreement look like a solvable engineering problem.

The context matters. Kahn was a Cold War futurist, famous for thinking the unthinkable about nuclear war and for building scenario planning into a kind of public craft. In that era, morale was strategic infrastructure. If citizens and elites believed the future was either bleak or incoherent, the state s capacity to mobilize would rot from the inside. So he links optimism to mechanics: morale, dynamism, consensus, smooth wheels. That last metaphor gives away the worldview. Society is a machine; friction is dissent; a good future-story is lubricant.

The subtext is both democratic and manipulative. Democratic because it recognizes that shared direction is a prerequisite for coordinated action at scale. Manipulative because "persuasive" is doing heavy lifting: who gets to paint the image, and what gets edited out to keep it "practical"? The line reads like an instruction manual for mid-century governance: if you want stability, design aspiration. Sell not just programs but a future people can inhabit in their heads, and they will tolerate the messy present with fewer questions.