Technic And Psychotechnic

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, a civilization makes a wrong decision, thus initiating a cyclical decline (see here) whereas, in the same author's Psychotechnic History, the UN world government and its psychotechnicians struggle against an old and protean enemy that is essentially the primitive side of humanity. Thus, the Terran Imperialists face an outer social problem whereas the Un-men face an inner psychological problem. Thus, further, these two future histories are complementary, addressing opposite sides of a single coin. Is society the sum total of individual psychologies or are individual psychologies socially determined? The answer has to be both, dialectically speaking.

As another social theoretician wrote, man makes his own history but not in circumstances of his own choosing. Current society is not only individual psychologies but also an inherited:

technological level;
set of socioeconomic interactions;
corresponding legal, political, cultural and intellectual superstructure.

Thus, in the Technic History, unscrupulous traders have sold spaceships and nuclear weapons to savages and resistance to interstellar slavers leads to the founding of the Terran Empire whereas, in the Psychotechnic History, technology has made most people unemployed and the Humanist Revolt leads to the banning of the Psychotechnic Institute. In both histories, society and psychology interact.