Techne is differentiated from episteme. Roughly, they differentiate how to do things from “what is true”. The first is for plebians, the second for the elite. Plato was concerned with episteme. His sandal maker with techne. This is a rough distinction, the further differentiation of which does not interest me.
For my purposes, I would differentiate a telearchy, as I call it, which is an emergent order based upon shared common principles understood as ends, and ontology, which is a fabricated pseudo-reality created and extinguished with words.
In my view, something is real, but it is in constant motion, making a full knowing impossible, and not worth the pursuit. What we can know is what we can see, and what we can see are practical results, which would include the observation that having an internal moral compass in general makes people happier, and that living in a group of people with shared moral values also works to make the aggregate happier.
I cite principles, because as Orwell showed and subsequent reality has amply validated, it is quite possible to be a part of a group with mutable values. What he suggested and what I will echo is that in such a situation, individuation is impossible, and so too is the happiness enabled by moral freedom and following consistent choice.
Practically, and this is the point of this post, episteme continues to be sought,but in the form of machines. Machines are real. Human inner consciousness is not. It is not true to say that no techne with regard to improving the contents of human consciousness is being pursued–Positive Psychology as one obvious example seeks this–but it seems the overall thrust of our global social order has in general given up on the elevation of the human race through moral growth. Our growth is to be through machines, and in particular through the consideration of society as one large machine, to be manipulated by “experts” using techne, but really feeling episteme, or perhaps, rather, the acute need for and lack of any sense of ontological grounding.
They feel lost, so they must fix the rest of us like butterflies on pins. That is George Soros’s project, and as he recently revealed, even as good a mind as that of Bill Gates at least claims publicly to believe in this farce of global warming, and that we must be all pinned for our own good.