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.
For decades I've talked about what I call the comfort of numbers. Some problems are difficult because interests conflict. We want different things and can't satisfy all of them. Numbers are attractive because they give us the sense that we are making rational decisions using them while distracting from the uncomfortable truths obscured by the abstractions. The comfort of numbers.
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.
A lot of these articles are very good and I want to share them but they are seasoned with the author's pet peeves that I know will be a turn off. You mentioned one. Another is the attack on feminism in general although the characterization of feminism given is rather narrow and exaggerated.
I wasn't intending to be controversial. I was making the simple point that, in contrast to what one might have expected, all the social, political and economic changes of the last fifty years have made organisations, and political life, a lot worse rather than better. I tried to explain why I thought this was so. The diversity point is one of the puzzles: logically, opening senior positions to a wider range of actors should improve the quality of those who get the jobs. The reverse has happened, because organisations now overwhelmingly select for sociopaths, as do political parties, and sociopaths therefore apply. A diverse ruling class of sociopaths is not evidently better and more skilled than a non-diverse class of sociopaths. It's the sociopathy which matters not the diversity. My impression was that this was a well-recognised argument: it certainly is in those parts of the Left with which I identify.
Thanks for responding! Many authors tend not to respond so politely to criticism.
I understand the point you made in your comment and agree with it (and have seen it before); in your post, it was not clear to me that this was the argument you were trying to make. Instead (to me) it came across as what Tom below refers to as grumpy harrumphing (great phrase BTW!)
The feminism and the feminists of today’s Professional and Managerial Class are much different than those of the 1960s. The early members were trying to connect with and bring in working class and minority women.
During the 1960s women like Gloria Steinem hijacked the movement and jettisoned anything having to do with class or minorities; NOW (the National Organization for Women) was changed into an advocacy movement effectively just for college educated, upper class, white women. The other plus 90% were ignored. Unsurprisingly, Gloria Steinem was found out to be a freaking CIA operative from the 60s onwards. She was one of those who did great job destroying a movement.
A similar process happened with the Civil Rights Movement after MLK’s assassination. Both King and the early feminist leaders were interested in the entire society especially the poor and working class. Racism and sexism only being A primary concern, not the Only concern. Since poverty and civil rights affects everyone, they wanted to create mass movements with mass protests, but the leaders were either murdered or removed from positions of leadership.
He might have a point but a) there are a lot of conceptions of feminism, many of which are in conflict with others, this is only of them, not the one that I cherish, it's one of the odious ones and a caricature of it at its worst. So it takes a word that means different things to different people, attaches it to something repulsive to say that it's bad.
And b) it's tangential, like Issac said of the diversity thing.
If you want to attack feminism, go ahead. But the main thrust of this article, which is a good one, has nothing to do with feminism. So why is this cheap insult included?
The article overall is very good and I'd like to share it but it's seasoned with this grumpy harrumphing about the orthodoxies of the new liberal fascists. So I'd have to try to persuade people I want to share it with to overlook these aspects. That's a drag.
The Substack experience usually tends to give the feedback to authors from readers that most vigorously agree. And there are lots of readers, I'm sure, that enjoy some grumpy harrumphing. I'm here to counter that echo-chamber feedback and hope to persuade Aurelien that addressing a wider audience of potential fence-sitters is politically more effective than preaching to the converted.
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.
“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.
> "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.
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
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”.
"So politics has become marketing, and individuals and groups try to promote themselves to market segments," I was just thinking about this last week on how "Progressive", at least in my country, has become a shallow and confused term more akin to a market segmentation label than a set of achievable political goals.
It's look as if large portions of Latin-American leftists that think of themselves as "progressives" don't really want to change anything they want instead consume things and ideas that resemble themselves and indeed look "Progressive" from outside, whilst in reality the old alliance of crony capitalism and self-serving elites goes as usual. I call this a promotion of "neoliberalism with a human face". Markets and brands noticed this trend and begin to promote their products with black smiles and body positivity for people who confuse the image in the commercials for real "progress" in society. Even to the right this seems to be the case.
Latin-American right-wingers are almost always reactionaries disguised as conservatives, (the real "conservatives" are on the left because they give up trying to change anything meaningful) but the only thing they can reasonably do after achieving power is preserve market stability for an increasingly financial economy that doesn't generate real jobs nor make it easier for people to buy homes.
They, too, become an entity competing in the "political market". They are selling revolt and anger for a 'segment of people' dissatisfied with a dysfunctional system just to betray their slogans as soon as the presidential sash sets on their chests.
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?
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.
For decades I've talked about what I call the comfort of numbers. Some problems are difficult because interests conflict. We want different things and can't satisfy all of them. Numbers are attractive because they give us the sense that we are making rational decisions using them while distracting from the uncomfortable truths obscured by the abstractions. The comfort of numbers.
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.
A lot of these articles are very good and I want to share them but they are seasoned with the author's pet peeves that I know will be a turn off. You mentioned one. Another is the attack on feminism in general although the characterization of feminism given is rather narrow and exaggerated.
I wasn't intending to be controversial. I was making the simple point that, in contrast to what one might have expected, all the social, political and economic changes of the last fifty years have made organisations, and political life, a lot worse rather than better. I tried to explain why I thought this was so. The diversity point is one of the puzzles: logically, opening senior positions to a wider range of actors should improve the quality of those who get the jobs. The reverse has happened, because organisations now overwhelmingly select for sociopaths, as do political parties, and sociopaths therefore apply. A diverse ruling class of sociopaths is not evidently better and more skilled than a non-diverse class of sociopaths. It's the sociopathy which matters not the diversity. My impression was that this was a well-recognised argument: it certainly is in those parts of the Left with which I identify.
Thanks for responding! Many authors tend not to respond so politely to criticism.
I understand the point you made in your comment and agree with it (and have seen it before); in your post, it was not clear to me that this was the argument you were trying to make. Instead (to me) it came across as what Tom below refers to as grumpy harrumphing (great phrase BTW!)
Aurelien might have a point.
The feminism and the feminists of today’s Professional and Managerial Class are much different than those of the 1960s. The early members were trying to connect with and bring in working class and minority women.
During the 1960s women like Gloria Steinem hijacked the movement and jettisoned anything having to do with class or minorities; NOW (the National Organization for Women) was changed into an advocacy movement effectively just for college educated, upper class, white women. The other plus 90% were ignored. Unsurprisingly, Gloria Steinem was found out to be a freaking CIA operative from the 60s onwards. She was one of those who did great job destroying a movement.
A similar process happened with the Civil Rights Movement after MLK’s assassination. Both King and the early feminist leaders were interested in the entire society especially the poor and working class. Racism and sexism only being A primary concern, not the Only concern. Since poverty and civil rights affects everyone, they wanted to create mass movements with mass protests, but the leaders were either murdered or removed from positions of leadership.
He might have a point but a) there are a lot of conceptions of feminism, many of which are in conflict with others, this is only of them, not the one that I cherish, it's one of the odious ones and a caricature of it at its worst. So it takes a word that means different things to different people, attaches it to something repulsive to say that it's bad.
And b) it's tangential, like Issac said of the diversity thing.
If you want to attack feminism, go ahead. But the main thrust of this article, which is a good one, has nothing to do with feminism. So why is this cheap insult included?
The article overall is very good and I'd like to share it but it's seasoned with this grumpy harrumphing about the orthodoxies of the new liberal fascists. So I'd have to try to persuade people I want to share it with to overlook these aspects. That's a drag.
The Substack experience usually tends to give the feedback to authors from readers that most vigorously agree. And there are lots of readers, I'm sure, that enjoy some grumpy harrumphing. I'm here to counter that echo-chamber feedback and hope to persuade Aurelien that addressing a wider audience of potential fence-sitters is politically more effective than preaching to the converted.
The term seems to have been diluted and hi-jacked in recent years, perhaps , along with inclusiveness, it should always be complemented by "of what?"
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.
“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.
> "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.
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
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”.
"So politics has become marketing, and individuals and groups try to promote themselves to market segments," I was just thinking about this last week on how "Progressive", at least in my country, has become a shallow and confused term more akin to a market segmentation label than a set of achievable political goals.
It's look as if large portions of Latin-American leftists that think of themselves as "progressives" don't really want to change anything they want instead consume things and ideas that resemble themselves and indeed look "Progressive" from outside, whilst in reality the old alliance of crony capitalism and self-serving elites goes as usual. I call this a promotion of "neoliberalism with a human face". Markets and brands noticed this trend and begin to promote their products with black smiles and body positivity for people who confuse the image in the commercials for real "progress" in society. Even to the right this seems to be the case.
Latin-American right-wingers are almost always reactionaries disguised as conservatives, (the real "conservatives" are on the left because they give up trying to change anything meaningful) but the only thing they can reasonably do after achieving power is preserve market stability for an increasingly financial economy that doesn't generate real jobs nor make it easier for people to buy homes.
They, too, become an entity competing in the "political market". They are selling revolt and anger for a 'segment of people' dissatisfied with a dysfunctional system just to betray their slogans as soon as the presidential sash sets on their chests.
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?
And serial bouts of Covid, leading in some to long-term cognitive damage.
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.