In the New Atlantis, of Francis Bacon, like Bensalem itself, his utopia exists only for the sake of it. And in nothing more than in his ideas about education does Bacon differ from More. For More, education was a social and cooperative pursuit, with its object the increasing of the happiness and the enrichment of the personalities of the whole people: for Bacon it was the affair of a body of specialists, lavishly endowed by the state and carrying on their work in complete isolation from the masses (we are told that the visit of one of the fathers of Salomon’s House to the capital city was the first for a dozen years). Its object was not happiness but power: “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
And here we are bivouacked in post-modernity. A bit after WW1 and a bit before the next World War. We cannot count accurately after 1917.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/05/old-normal-vs-new-from-1980s-neoliberalism-to-the-great-reset/Bacon
Odd. It worked earlier. And now not. Lemme poke around.
I read the Boom Review and found this line of reasoning fascinating.