I recently read, can't remember where, about a family in Virginia that had their son taken away because of the "trans" thing. They're conservative Christian. Worse than just being told "you're wrong" by the kidnappers---er, child welfare services, they were forced to talk to a trans pastor of who knows what denomination who was trying to argue with them using a wild misinterpretation of the Bible.
It was incredible. I can handle a direct attack on my faith, bring it on; but there's a particular effort to take over Christianity, China-style. State approved interpretations only, please.
To be frank, I don’t know what to make of you. You’re a puzzling figure. Here you are boldly exposing the source of Western ills: Liberal democracy; You are absolutely correct that it is striving towards its culmination. Yet, at the same time, you seem well connected to tier 2/3 power centres (First Things, Unherd, City Journal), whose board members and donors have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo myth of liberal democracy.
People are complicated, man. And besides: writing for a living is a nice gig; being unconstrained by editors (at least for pieces he writes on here), delving into what you really believe to be the truth - not to mention revealing it - will do a lot to a man. A man must make do with the skills, talents, and opportunities that are afforded to him, and of course, that he works toward cultivating.
As the below commenter observes, yes, we do still have to *live* in this world, and whether we like it or not, there are still ways to do that which are more appealing than most. At this point, I couldn't imagine anything worse than working for a corporation solely for the paycheck. Personally, I'd rather write for a living and get paid a pittance than destroy myself from within - rupturing my very soul - by working for a soulless corporate.
Perhaps Mr. Lyons is not so different? Perhaps we shall never know. But I'm happy to support such an insightful and erudite writer. (:
This is very good. The quality of content from N.S. Lyons helps me justify having to subscribe to Substacks like Heather Cox Richardson to dialog with the insane coastal liberal Democrat types.
My reflection of this topic is that of a CEO with decades of experience working to combat the sickness of bureaucratic bloat in organizations.
"Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex"
My response to this is that I think it is spot on with one modifying caveat.
It is the "protection of mastery" sickness. People strive and struggle to get to a higher status secured by a mastery of some domain or discipline, and then they revert to defending their position instead of welcoming more striving and struggling. They also collect with like-minded people because there is blocking strength in numbers.
This human tendency for the higher status people to protect the status quo is a ubiquitous behavior. It is why we end up with bureaucratic bloat in organizations.
Modern management sciences have identified this problem for decades. Edward Deming, his Total Quality Management (TQM) teaching was rejected by American industry and so he took it to the Japanese who then kicked our ass in improved automotive manufacturing. Process Reengineering and Six Sigma are other more current methodologies that private industry has adopted to combat the sickness of efficiency and quality-killing bureaucratic bloat.
Remember IBM hiring Lous Gerstner in the early 90s? IBM was declining because it had grown into a bureaucratic mess. Gerstner broke up the single centralized corporation into separate business units and culled the IBM workforce of older employees resistant to change.
During this era, Peter Drucker, a management guru, suggested that corporations hire a CDO (Chief Destruction Officer) to report to the CEO and who’s job would be to constantly break apart any bureaucratic bloat to keep the organization nimble and change ready.
Elon Musk is a current example of the managerial approach for this. He fabulously and famously cut over 50 percent of Twitter’s workforce after buying the company… culling the entrenched and productivity-stifling bureaucracy and leaving the workforce that supported the business change that Musk envisioned. Tesla, Space-X and all Musk businesses are successful primarily because Musk keeps them nimble and change seeking.
The trajectory of managerialism as defined by NSL, and the forces of mastery and status-protecting bureaucratic bloat that contribute to it, in my view, are the same forces that derive authoritarianism, totalitarianism… and the various control ideologies defined as tyrannical (regardless of dictatorial or collectivism).
Rise up to become a master of some domain, and then shift to defending it by strengthening all barriers to entry including increasing the size and complexity of the surrounding bureaucracy. Ideally you secure a position of power to control those that might pose a risk to your status, power and money.
Organizations, without management attention to prevent it, become too large and too complex. The larger and more complex the organization, the more it serves the type of managerial entity that works to reinforce their position by collaborating with other like-minded people to reinforce all the change blocking mechanisms. Upstarts cannot break in because of the blocking, and because the effort to master the forced complexity has become profoundly more difficult for even talented competition. Those with the capability to become new masters first must learn how to navigate the inefficient processes before they can rise to a position to challenge those inefficient processes… but by the time they get to a master position they too are older and tired and more likely fall into the trap of blocking their position. Bureaucratic bloat becomes more difficult to stop.
Again, I see this as ubiquitous human nature. Scramble, struggle and strive to get to a higher position, and then they shift into defensive mode.
I think the founders of the greatest country on God’s green earth had this in mind when they called for limited government. They knew from history that tyranny evolved from the nature of big… the bigger the organization the more likely it would harbor a large population of those types of personalities that play defense in hording their position of power rather than continuing to compete on merit.
There is another related personality type that resists the struggle to compete on merit. They are generally less competent and more insecure about their ability to rise through the current gauntlet of talent filtering.
Those personality types that shy away from competing on merit, either because they are masters of the current bureaucracy and change averse, or because they are malcontents that cannot or will not compete... and both are plentiful in the modern Democrat party. They have derived ESG and DEI and a general ideology of victim preference not because they care for victims, but because it is a blocking mechanism against competition on merit. These people tend to stay in school longer to both delay their needed launch into the private economy, and because they can layer themselves with the insecurity southing armor of academic credentials... or because it is a required element in their pursuit of mastery.
The solution for most of this is to simply cut the size of government significantly. Delete entire agencies and significantly reduce the mission of others. Cut the size of the federal register. Implement term limits. Clean up the unnecessary complexity of how the country is managed and operated.
The sick and malicious managerial class cannot thrive in small and nimble agencies.
Elect Trump who will appoint Musk as the government efficiency czar and get to work killing the managerial class tyranny that is destroying the US and the world.
Yes, “the swamp”. President Trump had no idea how infested the swamp is in his first term. The bureaucrats,
Civil Servants are part of the swamp and it was something Trump underestimated and could not counter it. It’s a monster hard to tame. I also wonder how to handle NGO’s. Perhaps, a leader like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayib_Bukele of El Salvador? We live in a very interesting time.
> Again, I see this as ubiquitous human nature. Scramble, struggle and strive to get to a higher position, and then they shift into defensive mode.
At some level it sounds prudent and justified. The total alternative would be an endless rat race, with humans as mere cogs, to ever increase their performance or be turned into Soylent Green when they can't anymore.
Like a grind "I'll sleep when I'm dead" mindset of hustle culture, that can get you ahead, but in the end will make you sick and burned out, it's not like this cult of management worked well in the end for Japan. It turned it into a society that lives for its corporate jobs, and will die for them, overworked with below replacement fertility. And it replaced their culture with consumerism and media consumption - the two things an overworked cog can passively enjoy.
Interesting. Is there a top to this competition? I look at the Olympic competition where world records continue to be broken and think that there is no top.
More importantly I think is the assessment of the alternative. There is an old Russian saying that the workers pretend to work and the bosses pretend to pay them. I don’t think we survive as a species unless we protect a system that rewards based on productive merit.
Yours is a more typical young person view and I can understand how after they crashed the economy in 2008 and then bailed themselves out there is a negative view of the system where you work to earn your own good life… but just consider if everyone had this view that you don’t need to struggle and hustle. If everyone adopted that attitude, who would pay the tax bill that flows to your universal basic income so you can afford to visit Europe?
> I don’t think we survive as a species unless we protect a system that rewards based on productive merit.
I think the opposite: that the main reasons we wont survive as a species is our endless competition - from wars and nuclear arm races, to eating the environment alive through overproduction and consumerism, to destroying culture and human relationships in the same pursuits...
> If everyone adopted that attitude, who would pay the tax bill that flows to your universal basic income so you can afford to visit Europe?
Ah, no problem with that. I'm already in Eurpope. And not as young. Or rich.
We will need to agree to disagree on this. Here is one homework assignment for you. Find any example from history or present that meets your expectations for this lack of merit based competition. You might recognize that this is the ubiquitous condition of the entire animal and plant world on this planet. How else will you decide to reward people if not by merit based competition?
Listen, I understand that some people fail to find their way... either lack some capabilities or otherwise just don't handle competition well. I have empathy for that. It is why we need a very robust economy with many paths for people to find there way.
I was a musician in a band in the 80s. I am still friends with my old band mates that are still alive. One who is the most dear was a die-hard liberal who even though he has a college degree, was a sweet dude that could never handle conflict. His family stepped all over him. He has a string of business moves that always ended up to his detriment. He is 62 and living off social security and his income from playing music for hire.
Several years ago were debating politics and I told him that if I cared for him I would want the government that made it easy for bars and restaurants to exist so that he would have more gig opportunities. Then the pandemic hit and we watched our liberal state destroy bars and restaurants and prevent him from playing gigs. He is now a Trump supporter and registered independent.
There really is no rat race unless you are doing something for a living you do not like. And more people have to do jobs they do not like because our politicians have exported so much of our working economic opportunity that your options are limited.
"The world had once contained not one but three rival ideological forms managerialism: liberalism, communism, and fascism."
That you call all three "forms" of managerialism is very important, and I think a point of potential further development. As time has gone on managerial liberalism appears to be more like communism and fascism every day. The universal managerial urge has completely subsumed whatever political philosophy justified it, or ever attempted to use it. Has man, due to technology, or our spiritual state, such a deep and abiding temptation to that evil that no matter what we do managerialism will be with us?
And has that changed? Or has it always been with us?
“And has that changed? Or has it always been with us?”
I think it has been with us for a long time - in 1945 it would seem apparent to C S Lewis…
Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the NICE is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's done properly, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us - to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're nonpolitical. The real power always is.
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy, #3)
Joseph Hex, the answer resides with Marshall McLuhan - the medium is the message - technology gave us our current world and it is not amenable to change based on how we use it. This situation will persist.
I haven't read Marshall McLuhan, thanks for that. I was leaning towards the same, that the Technological Society (Ellul) necessitates a managerial state. That means that the problem is deeper than our political organization. Kind of like Conquest's rule that any organization not explicitly anti-progressive will soon become progressive, any government not explicitly anti-managerial will soon become managerial. Is that what you mean?
That rule appears to be merely descriptive of a tendency.
But I think Diamond Boy McLuhan's reference points to a mechanism: that technology itself is not neutral, but necessitates, enables, and pushes for a specific direction of social operation, government, etc. At least technology beyond a certain point.
Yes necessitate, I would say facilitate. We will use the facility that technology gives us. To wit, electricity usurped time and space it collapsed our world into a global village. All information is now instantly available to all people. So information is now our battle space.
“The successor to politics is propaganda”
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no separation between civilian and military participation”
Marshall McLuhan 1965
Notice he uses the present tense in 1965.
We extended our central nervous system, and now our consciousness to envelop the planet. All previous culture is being eviscerated. I think we’re entering a new dark age.
As Pratchett might have opined, there's a "god shaped hole in society" that if you remove "god" by applying a separation of church and state, another moral ideological ecosystem evolves to fill it. It's just religion with a new hat.
it does seem that the proverbial center of liberal managerialism will not hold. this is evidenced by the panic and desperation we see in the West to censor and control the narrative that is slipping away and the attempts to squash the emergent populist movements. it might still be years away, but I assume we will soon approach a “gradually, then all at once” stage. I imagine and hope that parts of America can lead the way forward in building parallel institutions away from centralized control. despite the myriad of problems here, I agree with the observation Eric Hoffer put forth, that the American underclass was “lumpy with talent”.
If all else fails, especially since the economic future and the technogical utopias promised don't hold, they can always resort to more control and class divide, making the masses depend on them for substinence (UBI is one of such schemes for that) or closing their gated communities further and just letting the masses rot in slums, kind of like in the movie Elysium or modern day Brazil and other such places.
“The totalitarian movements that have arisen after the First World War are basically religious movements. Their aim is not only to change political and social institutions, but also to remodel the nature of man and society.”
Waldemar Gurian, The Totalitarian State
Mangerialism is built on the belief that mankind can recreate the world and a new golden age can be constructed under the direction of all-powerful and all-controlling managers.
Managerialism is a religion, the religious projections have largely fallen away from the divine figures and have necessarily settled in the human sphere…the modern intellect cannot imagine anything greater than . . . those tin gods with totalitarian pretensions who call themselves managers.
To use an analogy offered by the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, the managers see the earth as a garden to which they are anointed to cultivate, and the sinners as the weeds that must be exterminated to bring about the full flowering of the managerial utopia:
“All these type of visions of society-as-garden define parts of the social habitat as human weeds. Like all other weeds, they must be segregated, contained, prevented from spreading, removed and kept outside the society boundaries.”
I love your general analysis but, in my opinion, you may potentially need a more elaborate and more carefully described causal explanation(s) of managerialism and its internal dynamics, which have lead to what you accurately describe as our contemporary totalitarianism situation.
You say that managerialism is rooted in techniques of bureaucratic organization and scientific management that sprang from the revolution of mass and scale brought on by the Industrial Revolution. But you also claim "other core tenants," like the early progressive movement and its never ending liberation impulse as being or perhaps sounding as even more causative. Are these two factors separate or are they somehow linked (bureaucratic techniques and the more ideological liberation impulse)?
As an aside I believe that what has made the Mike Benz analysis of the major mechanisms of American foreign policy persuasive, in my opinion, is that a reader can clearly see and understand the causative train of his explanatory framework-- it runs from the policy planning staff of the State Department, acting as the in-house think-tank which articulates U.S. national interests (in the political, economic and national security realms) and it then instructs the Defense Department and the CIA to cary out these State Department visions/goals.
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Back in Feb. of 2024 Branko Milanovic argued, in his review of Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution," that your conception of managerialism is based on ideology ("first and foremost liberation" and/or "... dissolving traditional bonds and limits."
There are those who resist the Western version of the universal empire either through conviction or allegiance to an alternate empire. And the latter group has nuclear weapons. I don't think this will end well.
Indeed! I agree the article must be widely read. Thanks for this. I just read Nathan's article this morning and printed off all his past articles from First Things to reread. I'm looking forward to reading this article later today. Again...thanks.
“Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.”
This has been driven by technological change. The same change that China now excels at and intensifies. The technology of the internet made the prying into personal lives so easy and leaped ahead of not only any checks and balances we had to prevent it but of any philosophical and political principles we once had.
“Leftist intellectuals were among the first to recognize the collapse of the old liberal separation between state and society. In their view, neoliberalism was to blame. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the private sector began to take over the public one; corporate power took control of the state, and economics captured politics. But this analysis gets ¬reality backwards. The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.”
I think this is a two-way street and has two directions of travel. Both have happened. We might also note that cancel culture is the same two-way street in that government has pressured big-tech (Facebook and Twitter) to censor. So the state and corporations merge and democracy is diluted. The government no doubt did deputise “key players in the private economy to become its enforcers”, but those key players in turn came to wield political power. (Interesting to note, China has prevented this symbiosis by putting its corporations in their place at some cost to the economy).
More interesting to note is that the leftist intellectuals first recognised it. Vivek Ramaswamy claims that the Democrat Party had lost ground to the Republicans by the 1990s as big business favoured the latter. And by a huge, concerted effort to woo corporations, over the next decades that reversed to the extent that the Dems campaigns in recent elections have been funded to the tune of 100s of millions of dollars more than the Republicans. The tables turned as the left accepted the dirty money even though it compromised them to the extent they could no longer be called ‘left’ in any meaningful sense. So much so that the working class driven ‘mini-revolts’ of Brexit and Trump are cast as right-wing despite opposing corporate state control.
To fight this, we need to fight technological control. “Cancel culture is ¬corporate and academic culture”; indeed, and Substack is one such means to fight. VPNs and technology that fends off surveillance replace the clandestine distribution of illegal publications. And so on. Hopefully, we have begun.
N.S. is always mostly right. I'll add my reaction to his interesting comments.
Late 19th century ideas of democracy and progress set up expectations that could only be fully addressed by a managerial class. Viewed in this way, the managerial class is an historical necessity for the expression of those late 19th century ideas. Managerialism is (unfortunately) the only possible system of control today for a society which grew out of those ideas of democracy and progress.
This is not to say that the managerial class and its elites cannot be overthrown, but anti-managerialism is not compatible with philistine ideas about democracy and progress. Underlying managerialism is a robust philosophy of egalitarianism and consequentialism which must be discredited before managerialism can be successfully addressed politically.
“What they approve of today would scandalize any 1920s Leftist. Even 1950s Leftist. But it's all the same thing, following the same incentives: how to build a cohesive ruling class to monopolize state power. It used to be class struggle. Now it's gender-struggle and ethnic struggle. Ethnic struggle works in America because immigrants have no territorial power base, unlike in Russia or China. So the old game of giving status to low-status minorities works better than ever. It works even better, unlike Lenin's Russia, America has now access to every single minority on earth. Which is why the American left is busy importing as many Somalis as they can. The lowest performing minority on earth. Just perfect.
“America has legislation which forces every private enterprise of size to have a proportion of women, of black people and sexual deviants; who of course know they don't belong there, and thus are extremely faithful political commissars.”
Bio-mercantilism/bio-Leninism are good terms for it. Explains Saint George and Kneeling Nancy. Also partly explains why so much modern art is really ugly. You pay or give enough buzz to Jean-Michel Basquiat to maintain loyalty to a kind of Ponzi scheme. It also helps to describe the hive mind's ability to react like a flock of starlings.
I read his piece and then your response. I agree with all of your critiques. I did learn quite a lot about why it sometimes (often) has seemed like the D or R side are the same. They are. Until Trump disrupted, but we still have along way to go on bith sides to get all of those people out. I'm not sure we have the time. Something must be done to topple these tyrants.
What is the reason they care so much about how people feel about others race? Why did they decide to label Trump supporters white supremacists or nazis and the biggest threat to our nation? I've never understood that. I haven't seen them anywhere.
Divide and conquer. Pretend to care for the interests of some minorities you don't give a crap about, label your opponents as being against them, and you can use that as a justification to do whatever to the majorities you don't approve.
If your opponents are not really against some sizable minority you'd wish they were, find ever more niche minorities to champion, emphasizing those with ideologies and lifestyles your opponents disagree with, then pretend those tiny niches you champion and the increased demands you make about them, are the biggest issues of the day.
Classical "projection", a prominent feature of Borderline Personality Disorder. Take exactly what you do and project it onto your ideological adversaries. Elite progressives obsess about skin colour and ethnicity. Thus they are the definition of racists.
They then flip this onto conservatives and Republicans. This is pretty much true across the board with all the specifics of their distorted worldview.
Gut the illegal "4th" branch of government. Pass laws that mandate mandatory sunset provisions for every single regulation that then have to have their costs verses their benefits reviewed in order for them to be renewed. Our government agencies should fit in a single 30-story office building.
I recently read, can't remember where, about a family in Virginia that had their son taken away because of the "trans" thing. They're conservative Christian. Worse than just being told "you're wrong" by the kidnappers---er, child welfare services, they were forced to talk to a trans pastor of who knows what denomination who was trying to argue with them using a wild misinterpretation of the Bible.
It was incredible. I can handle a direct attack on my faith, bring it on; but there's a particular effort to take over Christianity, China-style. State approved interpretations only, please.
To be frank, I don’t know what to make of you. You’re a puzzling figure. Here you are boldly exposing the source of Western ills: Liberal democracy; You are absolutely correct that it is striving towards its culmination. Yet, at the same time, you seem well connected to tier 2/3 power centres (First Things, Unherd, City Journal), whose board members and donors have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo myth of liberal democracy.
It doesn’t add up.
At some point, I assume, all will be clear.
In the meantime, keep up the good work.
🥷
Sorry. I'm too old and out of the loop for emojis. Can you signal in some other way? Words perhaps?
The emoji is 忍者 - a ninja.
どう致しまして 。
People are complicated, man. And besides: writing for a living is a nice gig; being unconstrained by editors (at least for pieces he writes on here), delving into what you really believe to be the truth - not to mention revealing it - will do a lot to a man. A man must make do with the skills, talents, and opportunities that are afforded to him, and of course, that he works toward cultivating.
As the below commenter observes, yes, we do still have to *live* in this world, and whether we like it or not, there are still ways to do that which are more appealing than most. At this point, I couldn't imagine anything worse than working for a corporation solely for the paycheck. Personally, I'd rather write for a living and get paid a pittance than destroy myself from within - rupturing my very soul - by working for a soulless corporate.
Perhaps Mr. Lyons is not so different? Perhaps we shall never know. But I'm happy to support such an insightful and erudite writer. (:
Isn't that like saying "you oppose the modern world but still write on Substack or wear jeans".
It's not like he's writing for the NYT, or that those "board members and donors" are anywhere near the main stakeholders of that vested interest.
Perhaps it's this demand of perfect purity that doesn't add up?
This is very good. The quality of content from N.S. Lyons helps me justify having to subscribe to Substacks like Heather Cox Richardson to dialog with the insane coastal liberal Democrat types.
My reflection of this topic is that of a CEO with decades of experience working to combat the sickness of bureaucratic bloat in organizations.
"Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex"
My response to this is that I think it is spot on with one modifying caveat.
It is the "protection of mastery" sickness. People strive and struggle to get to a higher status secured by a mastery of some domain or discipline, and then they revert to defending their position instead of welcoming more striving and struggling. They also collect with like-minded people because there is blocking strength in numbers.
This human tendency for the higher status people to protect the status quo is a ubiquitous behavior. It is why we end up with bureaucratic bloat in organizations.
Modern management sciences have identified this problem for decades. Edward Deming, his Total Quality Management (TQM) teaching was rejected by American industry and so he took it to the Japanese who then kicked our ass in improved automotive manufacturing. Process Reengineering and Six Sigma are other more current methodologies that private industry has adopted to combat the sickness of efficiency and quality-killing bureaucratic bloat.
Remember IBM hiring Lous Gerstner in the early 90s? IBM was declining because it had grown into a bureaucratic mess. Gerstner broke up the single centralized corporation into separate business units and culled the IBM workforce of older employees resistant to change.
During this era, Peter Drucker, a management guru, suggested that corporations hire a CDO (Chief Destruction Officer) to report to the CEO and who’s job would be to constantly break apart any bureaucratic bloat to keep the organization nimble and change ready.
Elon Musk is a current example of the managerial approach for this. He fabulously and famously cut over 50 percent of Twitter’s workforce after buying the company… culling the entrenched and productivity-stifling bureaucracy and leaving the workforce that supported the business change that Musk envisioned. Tesla, Space-X and all Musk businesses are successful primarily because Musk keeps them nimble and change seeking.
The trajectory of managerialism as defined by NSL, and the forces of mastery and status-protecting bureaucratic bloat that contribute to it, in my view, are the same forces that derive authoritarianism, totalitarianism… and the various control ideologies defined as tyrannical (regardless of dictatorial or collectivism).
Rise up to become a master of some domain, and then shift to defending it by strengthening all barriers to entry including increasing the size and complexity of the surrounding bureaucracy. Ideally you secure a position of power to control those that might pose a risk to your status, power and money.
Organizations, without management attention to prevent it, become too large and too complex. The larger and more complex the organization, the more it serves the type of managerial entity that works to reinforce their position by collaborating with other like-minded people to reinforce all the change blocking mechanisms. Upstarts cannot break in because of the blocking, and because the effort to master the forced complexity has become profoundly more difficult for even talented competition. Those with the capability to become new masters first must learn how to navigate the inefficient processes before they can rise to a position to challenge those inefficient processes… but by the time they get to a master position they too are older and tired and more likely fall into the trap of blocking their position. Bureaucratic bloat becomes more difficult to stop.
Again, I see this as ubiquitous human nature. Scramble, struggle and strive to get to a higher position, and then they shift into defensive mode.
I think the founders of the greatest country on God’s green earth had this in mind when they called for limited government. They knew from history that tyranny evolved from the nature of big… the bigger the organization the more likely it would harbor a large population of those types of personalities that play defense in hording their position of power rather than continuing to compete on merit.
There is another related personality type that resists the struggle to compete on merit. They are generally less competent and more insecure about their ability to rise through the current gauntlet of talent filtering.
Those personality types that shy away from competing on merit, either because they are masters of the current bureaucracy and change averse, or because they are malcontents that cannot or will not compete... and both are plentiful in the modern Democrat party. They have derived ESG and DEI and a general ideology of victim preference not because they care for victims, but because it is a blocking mechanism against competition on merit. These people tend to stay in school longer to both delay their needed launch into the private economy, and because they can layer themselves with the insecurity southing armor of academic credentials... or because it is a required element in their pursuit of mastery.
The solution for most of this is to simply cut the size of government significantly. Delete entire agencies and significantly reduce the mission of others. Cut the size of the federal register. Implement term limits. Clean up the unnecessary complexity of how the country is managed and operated.
The sick and malicious managerial class cannot thrive in small and nimble agencies.
Elect Trump who will appoint Musk as the government efficiency czar and get to work killing the managerial class tyranny that is destroying the US and the world.
Any sources on the business side of this that you'd especially suggest reading?
Related books on my shelf...
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change
The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Out of the Crisis (Deming)
Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution
The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook
Yes, “the swamp”. President Trump had no idea how infested the swamp is in his first term. The bureaucrats,
Civil Servants are part of the swamp and it was something Trump underestimated and could not counter it. It’s a monster hard to tame. I also wonder how to handle NGO’s. Perhaps, a leader like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayib_Bukele of El Salvador? We live in a very interesting time.
> Again, I see this as ubiquitous human nature. Scramble, struggle and strive to get to a higher position, and then they shift into defensive mode.
At some level it sounds prudent and justified. The total alternative would be an endless rat race, with humans as mere cogs, to ever increase their performance or be turned into Soylent Green when they can't anymore.
Like a grind "I'll sleep when I'm dead" mindset of hustle culture, that can get you ahead, but in the end will make you sick and burned out, it's not like this cult of management worked well in the end for Japan. It turned it into a society that lives for its corporate jobs, and will die for them, overworked with below replacement fertility. And it replaced their culture with consumerism and media consumption - the two things an overworked cog can passively enjoy.
Byung-Chul Han is very good on these phenomena/this subject.
Interesting. Is there a top to this competition? I look at the Olympic competition where world records continue to be broken and think that there is no top.
More importantly I think is the assessment of the alternative. There is an old Russian saying that the workers pretend to work and the bosses pretend to pay them. I don’t think we survive as a species unless we protect a system that rewards based on productive merit.
Yours is a more typical young person view and I can understand how after they crashed the economy in 2008 and then bailed themselves out there is a negative view of the system where you work to earn your own good life… but just consider if everyone had this view that you don’t need to struggle and hustle. If everyone adopted that attitude, who would pay the tax bill that flows to your universal basic income so you can afford to visit Europe?
> I don’t think we survive as a species unless we protect a system that rewards based on productive merit.
I think the opposite: that the main reasons we wont survive as a species is our endless competition - from wars and nuclear arm races, to eating the environment alive through overproduction and consumerism, to destroying culture and human relationships in the same pursuits...
> If everyone adopted that attitude, who would pay the tax bill that flows to your universal basic income so you can afford to visit Europe?
Ah, no problem with that. I'm already in Eurpope. And not as young. Or rich.
We will need to agree to disagree on this. Here is one homework assignment for you. Find any example from history or present that meets your expectations for this lack of merit based competition. You might recognize that this is the ubiquitous condition of the entire animal and plant world on this planet. How else will you decide to reward people if not by merit based competition?
Listen, I understand that some people fail to find their way... either lack some capabilities or otherwise just don't handle competition well. I have empathy for that. It is why we need a very robust economy with many paths for people to find there way.
I was a musician in a band in the 80s. I am still friends with my old band mates that are still alive. One who is the most dear was a die-hard liberal who even though he has a college degree, was a sweet dude that could never handle conflict. His family stepped all over him. He has a string of business moves that always ended up to his detriment. He is 62 and living off social security and his income from playing music for hire.
Several years ago were debating politics and I told him that if I cared for him I would want the government that made it easy for bars and restaurants to exist so that he would have more gig opportunities. Then the pandemic hit and we watched our liberal state destroy bars and restaurants and prevent him from playing gigs. He is now a Trump supporter and registered independent.
There really is no rat race unless you are doing something for a living you do not like. And more people have to do jobs they do not like because our politicians have exported so much of our working economic opportunity that your options are limited.
"The world had once contained not one but three rival ideological forms managerialism: liberalism, communism, and fascism."
That you call all three "forms" of managerialism is very important, and I think a point of potential further development. As time has gone on managerial liberalism appears to be more like communism and fascism every day. The universal managerial urge has completely subsumed whatever political philosophy justified it, or ever attempted to use it. Has man, due to technology, or our spiritual state, such a deep and abiding temptation to that evil that no matter what we do managerialism will be with us?
And has that changed? Or has it always been with us?
Thank for your work.
“And has that changed? Or has it always been with us?”
I think it has been with us for a long time - in 1945 it would seem apparent to C S Lewis…
Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the NICE is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's done properly, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us - to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're nonpolitical. The real power always is.
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (The Space Trilogy, #3)
Wow, thanks for that quote. So true, and so good. I really need to read that book again.
Joseph Hex, the answer resides with Marshall McLuhan - the medium is the message - technology gave us our current world and it is not amenable to change based on how we use it. This situation will persist.
I haven't read Marshall McLuhan, thanks for that. I was leaning towards the same, that the Technological Society (Ellul) necessitates a managerial state. That means that the problem is deeper than our political organization. Kind of like Conquest's rule that any organization not explicitly anti-progressive will soon become progressive, any government not explicitly anti-managerial will soon become managerial. Is that what you mean?
That rule appears to be merely descriptive of a tendency.
But I think Diamond Boy McLuhan's reference points to a mechanism: that technology itself is not neutral, but necessitates, enables, and pushes for a specific direction of social operation, government, etc. At least technology beyond a certain point.
🎯
Yes necessitate, I would say facilitate. We will use the facility that technology gives us. To wit, electricity usurped time and space it collapsed our world into a global village. All information is now instantly available to all people. So information is now our battle space.
“The successor to politics is propaganda”
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no separation between civilian and military participation”
Marshall McLuhan 1965
Notice he uses the present tense in 1965.
We extended our central nervous system, and now our consciousness to envelop the planet. All previous culture is being eviscerated. I think we’re entering a new dark age.
I've got "The Medium is the Message" on the way, sounds like a great book.
It certainly doesn't look good for us, does it? It will be the brightest, flashiest dark age ever seen.
Thanks for posting this. Reading with great interest.
As Pratchett might have opined, there's a "god shaped hole in society" that if you remove "god" by applying a separation of church and state, another moral ideological ecosystem evolves to fill it. It's just religion with a new hat.
it does seem that the proverbial center of liberal managerialism will not hold. this is evidenced by the panic and desperation we see in the West to censor and control the narrative that is slipping away and the attempts to squash the emergent populist movements. it might still be years away, but I assume we will soon approach a “gradually, then all at once” stage. I imagine and hope that parts of America can lead the way forward in building parallel institutions away from centralized control. despite the myriad of problems here, I agree with the observation Eric Hoffer put forth, that the American underclass was “lumpy with talent”.
If all else fails, especially since the economic future and the technogical utopias promised don't hold, they can always resort to more control and class divide, making the masses depend on them for substinence (UBI is one of such schemes for that) or closing their gated communities further and just letting the masses rot in slums, kind of like in the movie Elysium or modern day Brazil and other such places.
Great points,
“The totalitarian movements that have arisen after the First World War are basically religious movements. Their aim is not only to change political and social institutions, but also to remodel the nature of man and society.”
Waldemar Gurian, The Totalitarian State
Mangerialism is built on the belief that mankind can recreate the world and a new golden age can be constructed under the direction of all-powerful and all-controlling managers.
Managerialism is a religion, the religious projections have largely fallen away from the divine figures and have necessarily settled in the human sphere…the modern intellect cannot imagine anything greater than . . . those tin gods with totalitarian pretensions who call themselves managers.
To use an analogy offered by the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, the managers see the earth as a garden to which they are anointed to cultivate, and the sinners as the weeds that must be exterminated to bring about the full flowering of the managerial utopia:
“All these type of visions of society-as-garden define parts of the social habitat as human weeds. Like all other weeds, they must be segregated, contained, prevented from spreading, removed and kept outside the society boundaries.”
I love your general analysis but, in my opinion, you may potentially need a more elaborate and more carefully described causal explanation(s) of managerialism and its internal dynamics, which have lead to what you accurately describe as our contemporary totalitarianism situation.
You say that managerialism is rooted in techniques of bureaucratic organization and scientific management that sprang from the revolution of mass and scale brought on by the Industrial Revolution. But you also claim "other core tenants," like the early progressive movement and its never ending liberation impulse as being or perhaps sounding as even more causative. Are these two factors separate or are they somehow linked (bureaucratic techniques and the more ideological liberation impulse)?
As an aside I believe that what has made the Mike Benz analysis of the major mechanisms of American foreign policy persuasive, in my opinion, is that a reader can clearly see and understand the causative train of his explanatory framework-- it runs from the policy planning staff of the State Department, acting as the in-house think-tank which articulates U.S. national interests (in the political, economic and national security realms) and it then instructs the Defense Department and the CIA to cary out these State Department visions/goals.
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Back in Feb. of 2024 Branko Milanovic argued, in his review of Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution," that your conception of managerialism is based on ideology ("first and foremost liberation" and/or "... dissolving traditional bonds and limits."
"dissolving traditional bonds and limits".
There are those who resist the Western version of the universal empire either through conviction or allegiance to an alternate empire. And the latter group has nuclear weapons. I don't think this will end well.
Indeed! I agree the article must be widely read. Thanks for this. I just read Nathan's article this morning and printed off all his past articles from First Things to reread. I'm looking forward to reading this article later today. Again...thanks.
“Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.”
This has been driven by technological change. The same change that China now excels at and intensifies. The technology of the internet made the prying into personal lives so easy and leaped ahead of not only any checks and balances we had to prevent it but of any philosophical and political principles we once had.
“Leftist intellectuals were among the first to recognize the collapse of the old liberal separation between state and society. In their view, neoliberalism was to blame. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the private sector began to take over the public one; corporate power took control of the state, and economics captured politics. But this analysis gets ¬reality backwards. The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.”
I think this is a two-way street and has two directions of travel. Both have happened. We might also note that cancel culture is the same two-way street in that government has pressured big-tech (Facebook and Twitter) to censor. So the state and corporations merge and democracy is diluted. The government no doubt did deputise “key players in the private economy to become its enforcers”, but those key players in turn came to wield political power. (Interesting to note, China has prevented this symbiosis by putting its corporations in their place at some cost to the economy).
More interesting to note is that the leftist intellectuals first recognised it. Vivek Ramaswamy claims that the Democrat Party had lost ground to the Republicans by the 1990s as big business favoured the latter. And by a huge, concerted effort to woo corporations, over the next decades that reversed to the extent that the Dems campaigns in recent elections have been funded to the tune of 100s of millions of dollars more than the Republicans. The tables turned as the left accepted the dirty money even though it compromised them to the extent they could no longer be called ‘left’ in any meaningful sense. So much so that the working class driven ‘mini-revolts’ of Brexit and Trump are cast as right-wing despite opposing corporate state control.
To fight this, we need to fight technological control. “Cancel culture is ¬corporate and academic culture”; indeed, and Substack is one such means to fight. VPNs and technology that fends off surveillance replace the clandestine distribution of illegal publications. And so on. Hopefully, we have begun.
N.S. is always mostly right. I'll add my reaction to his interesting comments.
Late 19th century ideas of democracy and progress set up expectations that could only be fully addressed by a managerial class. Viewed in this way, the managerial class is an historical necessity for the expression of those late 19th century ideas. Managerialism is (unfortunately) the only possible system of control today for a society which grew out of those ideas of democracy and progress.
This is not to say that the managerial class and its elites cannot be overthrown, but anti-managerialism is not compatible with philistine ideas about democracy and progress. Underlying managerialism is a robust philosophy of egalitarianism and consequentialism which must be discredited before managerialism can be successfully addressed politically.
Might be pertinent:
“What they approve of today would scandalize any 1920s Leftist. Even 1950s Leftist. But it's all the same thing, following the same incentives: how to build a cohesive ruling class to monopolize state power. It used to be class struggle. Now it's gender-struggle and ethnic struggle. Ethnic struggle works in America because immigrants have no territorial power base, unlike in Russia or China. So the old game of giving status to low-status minorities works better than ever. It works even better, unlike Lenin's Russia, America has now access to every single minority on earth. Which is why the American left is busy importing as many Somalis as they can. The lowest performing minority on earth. Just perfect.
“America has legislation which forces every private enterprise of size to have a proportion of women, of black people and sexual deviants; who of course know they don't belong there, and thus are extremely faithful political commissars.”
https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism
Bio-mercantilism/bio-Leninism are good terms for it. Explains Saint George and Kneeling Nancy. Also partly explains why so much modern art is really ugly. You pay or give enough buzz to Jean-Michel Basquiat to maintain loyalty to a kind of Ponzi scheme. It also helps to describe the hive mind's ability to react like a flock of starlings.
I read his piece and then your response. I agree with all of your critiques. I did learn quite a lot about why it sometimes (often) has seemed like the D or R side are the same. They are. Until Trump disrupted, but we still have along way to go on bith sides to get all of those people out. I'm not sure we have the time. Something must be done to topple these tyrants.
What is the reason they care so much about how people feel about others race? Why did they decide to label Trump supporters white supremacists or nazis and the biggest threat to our nation? I've never understood that. I haven't seen them anywhere.
Divide and conquer. Pretend to care for the interests of some minorities you don't give a crap about, label your opponents as being against them, and you can use that as a justification to do whatever to the majorities you don't approve.
If your opponents are not really against some sizable minority you'd wish they were, find ever more niche minorities to champion, emphasizing those with ideologies and lifestyles your opponents disagree with, then pretend those tiny niches you champion and the increased demands you make about them, are the biggest issues of the day.
Classical "projection", a prominent feature of Borderline Personality Disorder. Take exactly what you do and project it onto your ideological adversaries. Elite progressives obsess about skin colour and ethnicity. Thus they are the definition of racists.
They then flip this onto conservatives and Republicans. This is pretty much true across the board with all the specifics of their distorted worldview.
Gut the illegal "4th" branch of government. Pass laws that mandate mandatory sunset provisions for every single regulation that then have to have their costs verses their benefits reviewed in order for them to be renewed. Our government agencies should fit in a single 30-story office building.
It looks like Elon Musk might indeed be given this role. Let us pray.