1. Note that much of the dignified part of governance is intended, not to wield power, but to draw attention away from those who actually wield power, who themselves may never run for elected office (e.g. Robert Moses) and who may not even formally be part of any government (e.g. Robert Kagan).
In fact, much of modern democracy is basically an exercise in passing the buck, because nobody has responsibility, except theoretically to the people, and the people themselves cannot exercise that responsibility in their own name. Where everyone claims to be acting on behalf of someone else, someone else who cannot readily hold the actor accountable, nobody actually has to answer for anything.
At least in a dictatorship, the dictator cannot dodge responsibility in this way. We all know where the buck ultimately stops. Even if everything fails, the dictator cannot simply resign his office and retire under a cloud but with his comfy pension intact.
2. Note how, when it comes to Ukraine, european politicians and governing institutions are quick to drop the same values they so piously proclaim. Like a hot turd.
No need for that quaint freedom of speech, press, association, etc., except when they offer a convenient stick with which to beat countries that their American Master does not like.
"It’s accepted now that the higher ranks of much of the private sector are filled by sociopaths, driven primarily by ego-gratification, and so essentially using the organization they work for, and the people who work for them, as devices for satisfaction of their own desires."
Odd their micromanaging perfectionistic antics suck the life out of the most dedicated workers, yet here we are. It has always struck me that Psychopaths will prevent any investment in studying their phenomenon, thus they perpetuate a state of affairs that is destroying all good. Getting and signing off on the ethical courses of ones profession, is a far cry from actually practicing moral behavior.
I was a bit amused to read your characterization of "American Political Science" tradition of overquantification. It's really a recent development: the older tradition was keenly aware that "power" rested on all manner of intangibles: Max Weber would have seen a lot of his ideal bureaucrat in the way classics (mostly predating 1970s) of American political science characterized how politics worked in Washington (and elsewhere). The question you're raising, in other words, is whatever happened to the Weberian bureaucrat, not just in government administration, but also in private enterprises and even electoral politics.
Somewhat of a pet answer that I've been cooking up on this question is that death of the community is at the core of this. A community is, along with many other things, an epistemic grouping. They not only know that members of their community share certain beliefs and such, but also their character, as reflected in all manner of things they do for and with the community in (proverbial) daily activities, far better than one would by examining quantified data. In the end, you rely on data and statistics because you don't know the "truth." Data is just truncated bits of pieces of real information, the parts that happen to be easily collected. Statistics consist of mathematically assisted mental shortcuts for piecing together the very incomplete pieces of information and reconstruct something resembling the truth. An obsession with quantification is a sign of ignorance, not knowledge: we do not understand what really works, so we will assemble pieces of easily gatherable information and piece them together. In one sense, it is the "dignified" part of the duality that you point to. This is something that I was consistently and reminded of in my background: there's data, then there's the substance. If you know the substance well, you may be able to simplify it so that you can describe it with data. But it doesn't work the other way.
Good post overall, but I don’t understand why you dragged diversity into it, let alone emphasized it in the title, as diversity is at best tangential to your argument.
In the private sector, the inefficiency is only supportable because the public sector stopped applying its competition rules. The result is much of the private sector is rent-seeking monopolistic firms with their own capitalization as top priority. This was possible because the public sector is corruptible by wealth of the private.
I think you are saying, by using the term "Paradox," that although we now, in theory, have a much broader poole, i.e., "diversity," from which to choose our leaders and officials, we find the superficiality of the actual job attracts fewer and fewer people of any quality. Those applying, or acceptable, are exactly the same insofar as what they are trying to get from these positions.
> "Western politicians have come to believe not only that narrative control is essential, but also that it is all that is necessary."
It's worse than that. PR (narrative control) is all that's left.
These politicians and their supporters in media care more about their careers and therefore the PR than the lives of 100s of 1000s of people. Anyone that far gone can't easily regain a moral compass and is therefore doomed to live in a reality believing what they say. The alternative would be to admit to monstrous errors (we all know plenty of examples). Hence the PR is the reality to them.
“We are heading back that way now, it seems, with today’s credentialed, allegedly “meritocratic” PMC becoming a new aristocratic class, with all the pretensions of the old one, but none of the culture.” And none of the aristocratic ideals that the class might have responsibilities to society.
Not that historical aristocrats weren’t predatory, just that it wasn’t all they necessarily were. There won’t be any pretensions this time around.
In relation to your point: “the decline of concepts such as “duty” to society”, Solzhenitsyn’s claim regarding the idea of freedom comes to mind: “You have preserved the term, but replaced it with another concept: a small [idea of] freedom, which is merely a caricature of freedom in the larger sense; freedom without responsibility or a sense of duty”.
Very well written and interesting! I like how you articulate some of the corruption angles: "How many MBAs does it take to take a sick child to hospital? None: there’s no money in it."
I know this sounds both silly and cliched, but I always can;t help wonder if tech is a significant driver here, not necessarily a huge driver, but a significant one. But who knows it may be huge. Just a couple of months ago there was a senior official intervention at the NIH to cancel, years into its operation and closer to completion than beginning, yet another study on the potential harms of cell phone radiation: https://www.saferemr.com/2024/01/breaking-news.html
Could it be that many people are being cognitively retarded by EM signals?
I so appreciate the elegant clarity and, to my mind, direct accuracy of your observations, Aurelien. As one who has spent the 26 years of my retirement to date in volunteer work in our small community, it worries me that much of what I do will disappear when I can no longer do it. Not that it's not needed or appreciated, but because the basic and boring qualities of patience, learning necessary skills and accepting responsibility, without pay or fanfare, don't seem to have much appeal. My generation took over the jobs from the elders that went before us, but the new retirees seem still stuck in self-gratification mode. We're appreciated alright, but also viewed as incomprehensible. I foresee a much shallower, more resentful, bewildered and fractious world ahead. I can only hope that this view is, at least in part, a predictable propensity of aging, and that necessity will again give birth to patience, effort and competence in service. At least at the community level, where we will have to survive and make do with the detritus from this collapse. Humanity is full of surprises, not all of them negative. But we won't get past this stage if we can't see it for what it is. For which I thank you again.
Can anyone suggest why the 19th was an age of building competent governments, institutions, and businesses while the second half of the 20th century onwards has been the destruction of them instead? Maybe it would be better to ask what triggered each process
It is central to Confucian governance that "the best people” (aristoi) should govern.
Such a junzi demonstrates compassion by selflessly serving others. Any righteous man willing to improve himself can become a junzi.
The junzi rules by acting virtuously himself and, by example, lead others. The ultimate goal is that government behaves much like family. Thus at all levels filial piety promotes harmony and the junzi acts as a beacon for this piety.
Today, they're selected from the top 2% of college graduates who have demonstrated exemplary service to others in the course of their education. They begin their careers in fly-blown villages, demonstrating compassion by raising everyone's incomes 50%. Then they get their first promotion.
1. Note that much of the dignified part of governance is intended, not to wield power, but to draw attention away from those who actually wield power, who themselves may never run for elected office (e.g. Robert Moses) and who may not even formally be part of any government (e.g. Robert Kagan).
In fact, much of modern democracy is basically an exercise in passing the buck, because nobody has responsibility, except theoretically to the people, and the people themselves cannot exercise that responsibility in their own name. Where everyone claims to be acting on behalf of someone else, someone else who cannot readily hold the actor accountable, nobody actually has to answer for anything.
At least in a dictatorship, the dictator cannot dodge responsibility in this way. We all know where the buck ultimately stops. Even if everything fails, the dictator cannot simply resign his office and retire under a cloud but with his comfy pension intact.
2. Note how, when it comes to Ukraine, european politicians and governing institutions are quick to drop the same values they so piously proclaim. Like a hot turd.
No need for that quaint freedom of speech, press, association, etc., except when they offer a convenient stick with which to beat countries that their American Master does not like.
"It’s accepted now that the higher ranks of much of the private sector are filled by sociopaths, driven primarily by ego-gratification, and so essentially using the organization they work for, and the people who work for them, as devices for satisfaction of their own desires."
Odd their micromanaging perfectionistic antics suck the life out of the most dedicated workers, yet here we are. It has always struck me that Psychopaths will prevent any investment in studying their phenomenon, thus they perpetuate a state of affairs that is destroying all good. Getting and signing off on the ethical courses of ones profession, is a far cry from actually practicing moral behavior.
I was a bit amused to read your characterization of "American Political Science" tradition of overquantification. It's really a recent development: the older tradition was keenly aware that "power" rested on all manner of intangibles: Max Weber would have seen a lot of his ideal bureaucrat in the way classics (mostly predating 1970s) of American political science characterized how politics worked in Washington (and elsewhere). The question you're raising, in other words, is whatever happened to the Weberian bureaucrat, not just in government administration, but also in private enterprises and even electoral politics.
Somewhat of a pet answer that I've been cooking up on this question is that death of the community is at the core of this. A community is, along with many other things, an epistemic grouping. They not only know that members of their community share certain beliefs and such, but also their character, as reflected in all manner of things they do for and with the community in (proverbial) daily activities, far better than one would by examining quantified data. In the end, you rely on data and statistics because you don't know the "truth." Data is just truncated bits of pieces of real information, the parts that happen to be easily collected. Statistics consist of mathematically assisted mental shortcuts for piecing together the very incomplete pieces of information and reconstruct something resembling the truth. An obsession with quantification is a sign of ignorance, not knowledge: we do not understand what really works, so we will assemble pieces of easily gatherable information and piece them together. In one sense, it is the "dignified" part of the duality that you point to. This is something that I was consistently and reminded of in my background: there's data, then there's the substance. If you know the substance well, you may be able to simplify it so that you can describe it with data. But it doesn't work the other way.
Good post overall, but I don’t understand why you dragged diversity into it, let alone emphasized it in the title, as diversity is at best tangential to your argument.
Thank you Aurelien🙏
In the private sector, the inefficiency is only supportable because the public sector stopped applying its competition rules. The result is much of the private sector is rent-seeking monopolistic firms with their own capitalization as top priority. This was possible because the public sector is corruptible by wealth of the private.
I think you are saying, by using the term "Paradox," that although we now, in theory, have a much broader poole, i.e., "diversity," from which to choose our leaders and officials, we find the superficiality of the actual job attracts fewer and fewer people of any quality. Those applying, or acceptable, are exactly the same insofar as what they are trying to get from these positions.
> "Western politicians have come to believe not only that narrative control is essential, but also that it is all that is necessary."
It's worse than that. PR (narrative control) is all that's left.
These politicians and their supporters in media care more about their careers and therefore the PR than the lives of 100s of 1000s of people. Anyone that far gone can't easily regain a moral compass and is therefore doomed to live in a reality believing what they say. The alternative would be to admit to monstrous errors (we all know plenty of examples). Hence the PR is the reality to them.
“We are heading back that way now, it seems, with today’s credentialed, allegedly “meritocratic” PMC becoming a new aristocratic class, with all the pretensions of the old one, but none of the culture.” And none of the aristocratic ideals that the class might have responsibilities to society.
Not that historical aristocrats weren’t predatory, just that it wasn’t all they necessarily were. There won’t be any pretensions this time around.
In relation to your point: “the decline of concepts such as “duty” to society”, Solzhenitsyn’s claim regarding the idea of freedom comes to mind: “You have preserved the term, but replaced it with another concept: a small [idea of] freedom, which is merely a caricature of freedom in the larger sense; freedom without responsibility or a sense of duty”.
Very well written and interesting! I like how you articulate some of the corruption angles: "How many MBAs does it take to take a sick child to hospital? None: there’s no money in it."
I know this sounds both silly and cliched, but I always can;t help wonder if tech is a significant driver here, not necessarily a huge driver, but a significant one. But who knows it may be huge. Just a couple of months ago there was a senior official intervention at the NIH to cancel, years into its operation and closer to completion than beginning, yet another study on the potential harms of cell phone radiation: https://www.saferemr.com/2024/01/breaking-news.html
Could it be that many people are being cognitively retarded by EM signals?
I so appreciate the elegant clarity and, to my mind, direct accuracy of your observations, Aurelien. As one who has spent the 26 years of my retirement to date in volunteer work in our small community, it worries me that much of what I do will disappear when I can no longer do it. Not that it's not needed or appreciated, but because the basic and boring qualities of patience, learning necessary skills and accepting responsibility, without pay or fanfare, don't seem to have much appeal. My generation took over the jobs from the elders that went before us, but the new retirees seem still stuck in self-gratification mode. We're appreciated alright, but also viewed as incomprehensible. I foresee a much shallower, more resentful, bewildered and fractious world ahead. I can only hope that this view is, at least in part, a predictable propensity of aging, and that necessity will again give birth to patience, effort and competence in service. At least at the community level, where we will have to survive and make do with the detritus from this collapse. Humanity is full of surprises, not all of them negative. But we won't get past this stage if we can't see it for what it is. For which I thank you again.
Can anyone suggest why the 19th was an age of building competent governments, institutions, and businesses while the second half of the 20th century onwards has been the destruction of them instead? Maybe it would be better to ask what triggered each process
It is central to Confucian governance that "the best people” (aristoi) should govern.
Such a junzi demonstrates compassion by selflessly serving others. Any righteous man willing to improve himself can become a junzi.
The junzi rules by acting virtuously himself and, by example, lead others. The ultimate goal is that government behaves much like family. Thus at all levels filial piety promotes harmony and the junzi acts as a beacon for this piety.
Today, they're selected from the top 2% of college graduates who have demonstrated exemplary service to others in the course of their education. They begin their careers in fly-blown villages, demonstrating compassion by raising everyone's incomes 50%. Then they get their first promotion.
Excellent observation on the social behaviour of our dominators.
It being for image I think
Has driven many to take drugs to find the Telos they miss.
No satisfaction in living a life which can’t be true through oneself socially.
The leaders do look juvenile . Curious for they seem to be pubescent in nature even at 50!
A culture devours itself thrilled by its riches.
I suppose I should write something displaying my strikingingly individual intelligence, but more appropriate is to simply comment "Well-said!"