One part of my job as a (drafted) young man in the professional managerial class (PMC) was to throw job applications unopened into a paper shredder. That was a life time ago and things have only gotten worse today.
David Graeber, in his much maligned 2018 book 'bullshit jobs', pointed out that many if not most jobs in the modern world make little or no socio-economic sense. Many jobs today are pointless social constructs. Which explains a lot about the problems in the developed world today.
The fast majority of these 'bullshit jobs' can be found in bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are arguably the first AI we developed as a species. Though we went from clay tablets to AI generated spread sheets, the modus operandi has remained the same. A bureaucracy's prime directive is to grow in size and power.
This works until the bureaucracy's drain on the resources within a society becomes to great. The nefarious role that bureaucracies play in the inevitable fall of civilizations is grossly being underrated by scholars.
During my stint at the EU I quickly found out that the best paying jobs were dissed out because of political connections, rather than any hard earned merit. This nepotist social rot has permeated ever niche of economic and social life in the Collective West.
AI ain't gonna change any of that, but I agree it could make things worse. We are now effectively a kakistocracy that is being driven and maintained by algorithms.
There is no self cleansing ability within the current power structures left. Eventually the harsh reality of declining resources will have to tear them down. And that ain't process gonna be pretty.
'A bureaucracy's prime directive is to grow in size and power…The nefarious role that bureaucracies play in the inevitable fall of civilizations is grossly being underrated by scholars.'
More people need to realize that bureaucracies are kind of an emergent lifeform. This includes things like NGO ecosystems. If you feed them, they will grow.
Graeber? I once had a set-to with him on a blog comments thread. His replies were a mixture of the irrelevant and the mendacious. Eventually the penny dropped - maybe the man was drunk.
Graeber, being an insightful anthropologist, rightly criticizes both Hobbes and Rousseau.
Indeed, it's not only human animal nature that's responsible for violence in conditions of uncontrolled freedom. It's aided "from the outside." Humans are not beasts.
And, conversely, humans are not angels. They need to creatively work for social harmony. As Viktor Frankl, mentioned in the essay, said: «Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.»
But David couldn't understand what should emerge from such creativity and how to remove the "enemy pest." Replacing Wall Street with communes was clearly not considered a reasonable option. This impasse apparently tormented him so much that it led to illness and psychosis.
And in Washington the King of England etc more or less declared war on Russia and continuation of war on Iran. To the applause of the clapping seals of the US Congress who had just previously voted to stop themselves being able to stop POTUS from continuing his support of Israeli war mongering.
And you can bet that when the rationing comes, there's a high likelihood lines will be drawn, and one of them will be by age. Those above that line will not be saved, or even allowed to remain.
The King can say whatever seems diplomatic to him and his team. He has cultural power, but no power to shape policies in the UK, Canada, or any of the Commonwealth nations.
Our new glib, vacuous PM (Netherlands) actually welcomes the idea of oil shortages, because it would be bringing us that much faster to net zero. If people can't buy petrol for their cars, they will have to buy EV's, he reasoned. It's the new "let them eat cake".
The Dutch PM has no priority other than The War On Russia and justifying the same. If the War brings shortages of petroleum, then shortages are good. If the War brought a flood of petroleum, then that would be declared to be good.
This 'plasticity of truth' marks the final stage of a system that has stopped delivering abundance and is now focused solely on managing perception. As Orwell warned, 'The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.' When you can no longer solve problems (high-entropy flow), you simply redefine reality to maintain structural control. It’s an attempt to preserve complexity through narrative when the underlying energy of consensus is exhausted
Thank you for this clear exposition of the emotional infantilism of our present PMC. ‘The reality is that all these people resemble each other to a frightening degree’. Indeed they do. Mind numbingly boring.
If Jorge Semprún had been born in a postwar America around sixty years later, I believe that he might have grown up to be a lot like the socio-political analyst on substack, Jared Yates Sexton.
Word of the times is Kakistocracy: government by the least qualified, most incompetent, or unprincipled citizens. It characterizes regimes defined by corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence, often resulting in widespread public dysfunction, failure of state services, and the exploitation of the populace for the benefit of inept leaders. Why, it's almost like these elites were chosen for their incompetency, n'est ce pas?
Thank you, yet again brilliant sense-making. Just recently saw a theater performance version of Stalker, that Tarkovski movie. A central theme is a room that makes one's deepest dreams come true. A man goes in the room to save his brother from suicide, but then only gets rich. Saving the brother was a surface/conscious wish. The genuine hearts' wish was to get rich. Looks a lot like our civilization. Ostentatios virtue-signaling covering plain old greed. Many appear to think their shrouds have pockets. And then, as domesticated herd animals like sheep know, it is safest to be in the middle crowd, and dangerous on the edges. So life philosophy boils down to: Always be in the safe middle crowd, and get rich as quickly as you can.
Yeah. The 'life philosophy' you describe is the result, as Aurelian also describes, of the lack of a proper education system - where long ago values were taught, enabling an intelligent judgement of how to live well. Now only exam-passing is enabled.
It’s the philosophy of a Pierson’s Puppeteer from Larry Niven’s “Tales of Known Space” series of publications — their leader is granted the exalted title “the Hindmost” …
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression - anger is satisfying, addictive even, but I think we're well past time for acceptance.
The core logic of today's PMC is to intermediate genuine productive activity in order to skim as much wealth as possible. Finance, government, crime, the military and monopoly capital do the same. Eventually the parasites extract too much and the host dies, composts, and a new system arises. This is historically normal. It is sane to be angry. It's also pointless. One might as well complain that autumn becomes winter.
I am returning to David Fleming's Lean Logic. He was anticipating collapse when he passed in 2010. It has only become more certain since. We are well past our Wile E. Coyote moment, running on air. Physics is taking over. Delay or acceleration are beyond human capability. The suffering will be immense. Corrupt as the system is, we will miss it when it's gone. Attacking it is pointless.
The thing to do is build. We will have to when the time comes. Better to choose now than be forced later. Collapse now before the rush as John Michael Greer says. It's time we stopped wasting attention on failed elites. Their fate is sealed. But the future is up for grabs.
Well. A very accurate picture of the immediate future. If we are lucky, that is. It is likely to be worse, unless democracy manages to get some leaders who cuddle up to Russia. I saw this coming long ago, and have tried to prepare. But certainly some heavy stuff is now on the horizon. Get out of the cities if you can.
I am, probably stupidly, more optimistic than our host. Cometh the time, cometh the man, kind of thing. There are still highly competent people on the mid level, the current climate just doesn't allow for them to get into leadership positions. With the climate in society, this will change too. However, whether this will happen democratically or will be forced is anyone's guess. Probably it depends on how much the pain has to be, to enable the change.
While I always enjoy your work, and this one is included, I observe the following.
The lament about understaffing of bureaucracies fails to consider that in most cases what said bureaucracies actually do is malignant to start with, so the less effective they are, the better for all involved.
The same applies for funding. The more money the bureaucracy has, the more they waste on things that actively damage society, like teaching little kids how to masturbate or to applaud pederasty and sodomy.
The long march through the institutions has turned them irretrievably cancerous. No matter how vital the infected organ is, you do not feed a cancer. At the very least you starve it. If you can cut it out, then you do, but if it is too well protected behind a human barrier, then you cut off the supply of glucose. The patient may die along with the cancer, if the body cannot substitute the lost functions of the diseased organ (the simile stretches thin, but you see my point), but in such a case death was already inevitable.
We are all going to feel real pain when this shambling disgrace finally hits the bottom of the cliff, and much of great value will be lost, but it will afford real pleasure to see the parasites who have been sucking the lifeblood of civilization suddenly find themselves in the same boat as the plebes they so scorn. Witness the supposedly tragic cases of the fired USAID workers as portrayed in the NYT. Delightful schadenfreude!
'The lament about understaffing of bureaucracies fails to consider that in most cases what said bureaucracies actually do is malignant to start with, so the less effective they are, the better for all involved.'
The lament about understaffing struck me the wrong way also. Before you can provide redundancy, you have to make sure the thing you're multiplying is actually useful.
It's hard to see how any bureaucracy could be successfully overhauled, given today's propaganda war. USAID is a prime example. My liberal friends passionately believe it was doing good works, and its demise leaves the world (read: democracy) a poorer place (this is aside from the fact that most of its functionality probably migrated elsewhere).
One part of my job as a (drafted) young man in the professional managerial class (PMC) was to throw job applications unopened into a paper shredder. That was a life time ago and things have only gotten worse today.
David Graeber, in his much maligned 2018 book 'bullshit jobs', pointed out that many if not most jobs in the modern world make little or no socio-economic sense. Many jobs today are pointless social constructs. Which explains a lot about the problems in the developed world today.
The fast majority of these 'bullshit jobs' can be found in bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are arguably the first AI we developed as a species. Though we went from clay tablets to AI generated spread sheets, the modus operandi has remained the same. A bureaucracy's prime directive is to grow in size and power.
This works until the bureaucracy's drain on the resources within a society becomes to great. The nefarious role that bureaucracies play in the inevitable fall of civilizations is grossly being underrated by scholars.
During my stint at the EU I quickly found out that the best paying jobs were dissed out because of political connections, rather than any hard earned merit. This nepotist social rot has permeated ever niche of economic and social life in the Collective West.
AI ain't gonna change any of that, but I agree it could make things worse. We are now effectively a kakistocracy that is being driven and maintained by algorithms.
There is no self cleansing ability within the current power structures left. Eventually the harsh reality of declining resources will have to tear them down. And that ain't process gonna be pretty.
'A bureaucracy's prime directive is to grow in size and power…The nefarious role that bureaucracies play in the inevitable fall of civilizations is grossly being underrated by scholars.'
More people need to realize that bureaucracies are kind of an emergent lifeform. This includes things like NGO ecosystems. If you feed them, they will grow.
Graeber? I once had a set-to with him on a blog comments thread. His replies were a mixture of the irrelevant and the mendacious. Eventually the penny dropped - maybe the man was drunk.
Yes. I had a similar experience with King Charles once. (Or Prince Charles, as he was then).
Graeber, being an insightful anthropologist, rightly criticizes both Hobbes and Rousseau.
Indeed, it's not only human animal nature that's responsible for violence in conditions of uncontrolled freedom. It's aided "from the outside." Humans are not beasts.
And, conversely, humans are not angels. They need to creatively work for social harmony. As Viktor Frankl, mentioned in the essay, said: «Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.»
But David couldn't understand what should emerge from such creativity and how to remove the "enemy pest." Replacing Wall Street with communes was clearly not considered a reasonable option. This impasse apparently tormented him so much that it led to illness and psychosis.
And in Washington the King of England etc more or less declared war on Russia and continuation of war on Iran. To the applause of the clapping seals of the US Congress who had just previously voted to stop themselves being able to stop POTUS from continuing his support of Israeli war mongering.
Evil is afoot and it's going to take us all down.
And you can bet that when the rationing comes, there's a high likelihood lines will be drawn, and one of them will be by age. Those above that line will not be saved, or even allowed to remain.
Surely that won't include His Majesty Big Ears and Cruella the Queen?
Of course, only as found amongst the unworthy, as so deemed by the plutocrats cum psychopaths.
That was the whole point of the trip.
The King can say whatever seems diplomatic to him and his team. He has cultural power, but no power to shape policies in the UK, Canada, or any of the Commonwealth nations.
Our new glib, vacuous PM (Netherlands) actually welcomes the idea of oil shortages, because it would be bringing us that much faster to net zero. If people can't buy petrol for their cars, they will have to buy EV's, he reasoned. It's the new "let them eat cake".
The Dutch PM has no priority other than The War On Russia and justifying the same. If the War brings shortages of petroleum, then shortages are good. If the War brought a flood of petroleum, then that would be declared to be good.
Turns out “because markets” is no way to run a civilization, eh?
Hubris, meet nemesis …
This 'plasticity of truth' marks the final stage of a system that has stopped delivering abundance and is now focused solely on managing perception. As Orwell warned, 'The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.' When you can no longer solve problems (high-entropy flow), you simply redefine reality to maintain structural control. It’s an attempt to preserve complexity through narrative when the underlying energy of consensus is exhausted
Thank you for this clear exposition of the emotional infantilism of our present PMC. ‘The reality is that all these people resemble each other to a frightening degree’. Indeed they do. Mind numbingly boring.
If Jorge Semprún had been born in a postwar America around sixty years later, I believe that he might have grown up to be a lot like the socio-political analyst on substack, Jared Yates Sexton.
Word of the times is Kakistocracy: government by the least qualified, most incompetent, or unprincipled citizens. It characterizes regimes defined by corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence, often resulting in widespread public dysfunction, failure of state services, and the exploitation of the populace for the benefit of inept leaders. Why, it's almost like these elites were chosen for their incompetency, n'est ce pas?
Thank you, yet again brilliant sense-making. Just recently saw a theater performance version of Stalker, that Tarkovski movie. A central theme is a room that makes one's deepest dreams come true. A man goes in the room to save his brother from suicide, but then only gets rich. Saving the brother was a surface/conscious wish. The genuine hearts' wish was to get rich. Looks a lot like our civilization. Ostentatios virtue-signaling covering plain old greed. Many appear to think their shrouds have pockets. And then, as domesticated herd animals like sheep know, it is safest to be in the middle crowd, and dangerous on the edges. So life philosophy boils down to: Always be in the safe middle crowd, and get rich as quickly as you can.
Yeah. The 'life philosophy' you describe is the result, as Aurelian also describes, of the lack of a proper education system - where long ago values were taught, enabling an intelligent judgement of how to live well. Now only exam-passing is enabled.
It’s the philosophy of a Pierson’s Puppeteer from Larry Niven’s “Tales of Known Space” series of publications — their leader is granted the exalted title “the Hindmost” …
👍 Niven ref
That was a long time ago - I'd forgotten all about them.
I am old, and so far the memory is holding up alright … 🤞
Good article. I love a takedown of the PMC.
So, what now?
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression - anger is satisfying, addictive even, but I think we're well past time for acceptance.
The core logic of today's PMC is to intermediate genuine productive activity in order to skim as much wealth as possible. Finance, government, crime, the military and monopoly capital do the same. Eventually the parasites extract too much and the host dies, composts, and a new system arises. This is historically normal. It is sane to be angry. It's also pointless. One might as well complain that autumn becomes winter.
I am returning to David Fleming's Lean Logic. He was anticipating collapse when he passed in 2010. It has only become more certain since. We are well past our Wile E. Coyote moment, running on air. Physics is taking over. Delay or acceleration are beyond human capability. The suffering will be immense. Corrupt as the system is, we will miss it when it's gone. Attacking it is pointless.
The thing to do is build. We will have to when the time comes. Better to choose now than be forced later. Collapse now before the rush as John Michael Greer says. It's time we stopped wasting attention on failed elites. Their fate is sealed. But the future is up for grabs.
Well. A very accurate picture of the immediate future. If we are lucky, that is. It is likely to be worse, unless democracy manages to get some leaders who cuddle up to Russia. I saw this coming long ago, and have tried to prepare. But certainly some heavy stuff is now on the horizon. Get out of the cities if you can.
I am, probably stupidly, more optimistic than our host. Cometh the time, cometh the man, kind of thing. There are still highly competent people on the mid level, the current climate just doesn't allow for them to get into leadership positions. With the climate in society, this will change too. However, whether this will happen democratically or will be forced is anyone's guess. Probably it depends on how much the pain has to be, to enable the change.
When a sternly worded letter has no impact on the powers that be what will be the next tactic employed?
Where once we prized competence, now we see obsequious conformity.
Karma is definitely a bitch.
Thank you again for your insight
A high-quality essay. Thank you very much.
Long time reader,this has to be one of my favorites, well done sir!
While I always enjoy your work, and this one is included, I observe the following.
The lament about understaffing of bureaucracies fails to consider that in most cases what said bureaucracies actually do is malignant to start with, so the less effective they are, the better for all involved.
The same applies for funding. The more money the bureaucracy has, the more they waste on things that actively damage society, like teaching little kids how to masturbate or to applaud pederasty and sodomy.
The long march through the institutions has turned them irretrievably cancerous. No matter how vital the infected organ is, you do not feed a cancer. At the very least you starve it. If you can cut it out, then you do, but if it is too well protected behind a human barrier, then you cut off the supply of glucose. The patient may die along with the cancer, if the body cannot substitute the lost functions of the diseased organ (the simile stretches thin, but you see my point), but in such a case death was already inevitable.
We are all going to feel real pain when this shambling disgrace finally hits the bottom of the cliff, and much of great value will be lost, but it will afford real pleasure to see the parasites who have been sucking the lifeblood of civilization suddenly find themselves in the same boat as the plebes they so scorn. Witness the supposedly tragic cases of the fired USAID workers as portrayed in the NYT. Delightful schadenfreude!
'The lament about understaffing of bureaucracies fails to consider that in most cases what said bureaucracies actually do is malignant to start with, so the less effective they are, the better for all involved.'
The lament about understaffing struck me the wrong way also. Before you can provide redundancy, you have to make sure the thing you're multiplying is actually useful.
It's hard to see how any bureaucracy could be successfully overhauled, given today's propaganda war. USAID is a prime example. My liberal friends passionately believe it was doing good works, and its demise leaves the world (read: democracy) a poorer place (this is aside from the fact that most of its functionality probably migrated elsewhere).