Posted on 04/16/2023 1:30:06 PM PDT by Noumenon
Managed Dehumanization And The Global State
In 1941 James Burnham published his book The Managerial Revolution in an attempt to explain the fundamental transformation that the world around him was undergoing. To most observers it appeared that communism, fascism, and liberal democracy were the three major systems competing for supremacy on the world stage. Burnham noted, however, that these three systems shared one trait: a class of highly specialized managers operating a network of large bureaucracies with the goal of standardizing and planning their societies from the top down. Initially this was easier to observe in the hard totalitarian states that existed under fascism or communism where official state organs dictated social and economic behavior. The tight grip of the managers in those societies drove them to collapse, but in the liberal west managers used a gradual approach that proved more resilient.
The more methodical approach taken by the managerial class in the west allowed the citizens of liberal democracies to believe they had escaped the fate of other nations who succumbed to the temptation of suffocating modern bureaucracy. While the comforting notions of the free market and social tolerance made American citizens feel victorious as the last remnants of the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of hard totalitarianism, the soft managerial elite that dominated the west were able to bring more and more aspects of society under their control. Government agencies, corporations, media outlets, and educational institutions increasingly seemed to act with one voice and one agenda, instead of behaving as the separate self-interested actors described by classical liberalism. With the incredible degree of coordination our elite institutions demonstrated during events like the 2020 elections and pandemic lockdowns this truth is now much easier for the average American to observe.
The cunning manipulation of the foxes who operated the managerial infrastructure in liberal democracies has outlasted the nakedly authoritarian approach of more lionish managerial competitors. Social engineering through the soft but firm manipulation of institutions which were presented as culturally neutral allowed the total state to mold the populace into more compliant subjects without triggering the adverse reaction that more direct force usually engenders. Individuals, who had slowly been stripped of the intermediate social spheres that sheltered them from the totalizing state, saw themselves as liberated individuals making selections inside a free and open market. Few thought to ask who had engineered the choices available inside that market and what was driving the individual to reliably make predictable selections that favored the power of the state and its institutional allies.
While society celebrated the expansion of individual choice through liberation from traditional social bonds, the average citizen became more reliant on the media for their sense of identity and more reliant on the state for their day-to-day needs. Despite the theoretical check on power that a voting populace was supposed to represent, the expansion of the franchise always correlated with an increase, not a decrease, in the size and scope of the government. As the total state solidified its capture of media and educational institutions and perfected its shaping of subjects through the application of managerial therapeutic processes it secured the ability to reliably engineer outcomes through the democratic process. In a process counterintuitive to the modern western understanding of state power, the distributed theocratic oligarchy of liberal democracy proved to be a far more resilient method of establishing totalitarian control than the hard and obvious centralizing powers in other managerial regimes.
One of the key aspects of conditioning subjects for ease of rule through managerial techniques is the deracination and dehumanization of the individual. Human identity is not an individual construction, but is instead assembled through a series of dependencies and duties in relation to the community in which the individual resides. When we are young, our identity is formed by our relationship with our parents and extended family due to our total dependence. As we reach adolescence, a wider network of cultural institutions gains influence due to our increasing need for their social utility. In adulthood we gain additional duties that bind us to our own set of individuals dependent on our protection, provision, and guidance. This web of dependence and duty weaves the social fabric that binds a community together and gives the individual identity.
Human identity is not forged through a set of absolute freedoms or rights, but is instead found in the limitations that culture and circumstance impose on the individual. It is the dependence on and duty to local and regional institutions that creates the true manifestation of cultural diversity. The idiosyncrasies produced by dependence on a particular set of natural resources from a limited region are what create different varieties of cuisine, dress, and architecture. The varying regional pressures on courtship, habitation, and familial succession shape very different understandings of family and community. Even in widespread faiths like Christianity or Islam, regional differences can have a dramatic impact on ritual, worship, and the relationship between church and state. Humans identity is shaped far more dramatically by what the individual is not, rather than what the individual is free to become.
This is why individual liberation is a consistent theme throughout the social engineering necessary to produce subjects for the modern total state. Instead of seizing authority through direct force, the managerial elite ruling western liberal democracies found it much easier to expand their power by first assuming the duties that once belonged to opposing social spheres like family and church, and then gradually usurping the power that naturally flows from that dependence. The individual felt increasingly liberated from the heavy burden of care for relatives, the education of children, and duty to maintain community. Citizens barely noticed as their ability to maintain a culture slowly atrophied and their connections to an identity, once defined by a tight web of social bonds, faded away.
Instead the total state insured its managed subjects that identity was like a seasonal fashion, something that could be tried on when it suited the individual and then discarded before the next exciting round of consumption. The very factors that had once shaped and defined essential aspects of being were now disposable products that could be switched out with startling frivolity. The individual was fed a narrative of freedom of choice, believing that they alone were shaping a unique and independent identity, never realizing that the rootless hedonism encouraged by rapid consumption of fashionable identities made them increasingly dependent on the state. In very short order, the average person was conditioned to find the rearing of children or maintenance of social institutions an insurmountable task that required the regular intervention of the state and the expertise of its managers. Tasks that had been a basic part of human life for most of its existence could now only be conceived as the highly specialized duties of an ever expanding state.
The deculturation and dehumanization of the managerial subject allows the total state to bring the citizens of the entire nation under their power by abolishing all competing entities that could create dependence. It is essential that no group or class is allowed to maintain alternative social bonds, everyone must become tied inextricably and exclusively to the total state and its constituent institutions. It is for this reason that the managerial class must attack all remnants of bourgeois independence which could serve to shelter remaining hold outs from the all consuming advance of the total state.
Hard property like housing, land, individual transportation and any other assets that could provide stability and opportunity outside of the continuous social engineering of centralized experts becomes a serious problem. There is a reason that the World Economic Forum has “You will own nothing and you will be happy” as its unapologetic slogan. The ideal system is one in which every aspect of the subject’s life is rented from mass organizations, ensuring that no stability can ever be achieved and total dependence on managerial bureaucracy is ensured. Similarly, independent employment and entrepreneurship is a threat to the total dependence demanded by the managerial formula. Every individual who is allowed to earn a living apart from mass bureaucracy is a threat because they escape one of the main avenues through which social engineering is effectuated and homogenization enforced.
This is why the eradication of the American middle class is a top priority for the total state. In the past, the managerial class in the United States may have expanded due to the vast consumption enabled by a booming middle class, but now the independence and stability generated by wealth has become a threat to their power. Originally, the American middle class was defined by the autonomy it achieved through the ownership of private property. Middle class families owned their own land, their own home, their own car, and very often their own independent business. The father usually could earn enough on one income, allowing the mother to homeschool children or be heavily involved in their rearing and education, removing the dependence on government subsidized child care. Churches, civic organizations, mutual aid societies, and fraternal organizations created a social fabric separate from the systems of the state. Regional identities and particularities could be sheltered from managerial homogenization, which is why this class became a favorite target of the total state.
Today, the concept of the middle class has transitioned from a degree of independence achieved through material well being to simply a more comfortable income bracket capable of selecting from a wider variety of subscription services. The traditional 20-year home mortgage was first extended to 30-years, and now families are looking at 40-year plus intergenerational loans in order to afford a home. Large investment capital and overseas firms intentionally buy up starter homes that would have allowed young families to become independent and convert them to mass corporate rental holdings. An entire generation has been intentionally priced out of home ownership with the end goal of conditioning families to rent for their entire lives. Automobiles have undergone a similar mentality shift as loan duration stretched from two years to five or more. Leases, where the individual would never own their car, became the norm and the practice of always trading an automobile in for another round of debt became widely accepted behavior.
Even the physical ownership of media has become a thing of the past as the population embraced the live streaming of music, television, and video games. The home bookshelf now exists as a subscription to services like Audible. Companies can and do censor their content in real time to adjust for “cultural sensitivities” manufactured by the total state. Being middle class no longer means independence, it means being able to afford a subscription to Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max. All of these services absorb surplus income while adjusting their content curation to censor any movies or shows deemed objectionable by the state. Streaming media also relentlessly produces thinly-veiled propaganda for their consumers, manufacturing the illusion of limitless options while drowning the watcher in an ocean of cultural hegemony.
Samuel Francis asserted that this reconstruction of the middle class through the destruction of economic and social independence made previous American values seem irrelevant to those living under the new managerial regime and allowed the total state to create a world in which alternatives to its power seemed increasingly impossible.
“The dematerialization of property and the replacement of the entrepreneurial firm as the dominant form of economic organization by the mass corporations and unions under managerial control eroded both the economic power base of the bourgeois elite as well as the institutional roots of the bourgeois worldview. The reorganization of the population from the particularized, localized, private, and family and community centered institutions of the bourgeois order into the massive, anonymous, highly mobile, homogenized, and routinized disciplines of the managerial regime subverted the bourgeois worldview and the ideologies base on it by rendering its ideas and values irrelevant to the actual life-styles of post-bourgeois groups. The proletarianization of the post-bourgeois social formations thus consists not only in the disappearance of economic and social autonomy through the erosion of hard property and independent ownership but also in the cultural dispossession involved in the deracinating transformation provoked by the revolution of mass and scale and the dominance of managerial elites.”
Engineering the citizens of a country into more pliable and dependent subjects has become standard procedure for the modern total state, but that project does not stop at the nation’s borders. As we have previously noted, managerial organizations expand their power by bringing the largest possible number of resources, both human and material, under the control of their bureaucratic processes. Once the managerial class has obtained sufficient mastery over its original host country, the national border feels like an artificial barrier to the continued expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus.
The post-colonial west has been setting the groundwork for this expansion for some time. It did not take long for countries like America to understand that formal colonization was an outdated and inefficient political technology. Traditional colonies are a messy and clumsy way to extract resources and create regional hegemony while also clashing with the western narrative of democracy and liberation. Instead of conquering and officially colonizing other nations, it is far better to ensure that they are run by local governments that are completely aligned with your interests. The themes of modernization and human rights can be particularly useful in this new form of cultural conquest.
Modernization is its own very powerful argument. Washing machines, indoor plumbing, basic medical care, and consistent calorie counts are a very compelling reason to seek alliance with the west. Of course western liberal democracies prefer to work with other liberal democracies and aid is usually dependent on adopting this governmental form. Nations who did not reach this level of development on their own will also need to import an expert class to implement the modernization and train its own managerial class to maintain it. Electrical grids, communication networks, highway systems, and the distribution of clean water are no small feat, and the rapid deployment of these systems is best handled by those trained in the management of mass institutions. That class will naturally take on much of the culture and priorities of those that trained it, ensuring that the newly formed managerial class works hand in hand with the one that spawned it. The newly modernized nations are also heavily dependent on trade with their benefactors as well as loans held by international managerial organizations. Non-governmental organizations play a key part in keeping newly modernized nations dependent on the managerial framework.
While the pull of modernization is enough for most nations, holdouts can be persuaded through a number of different means. Gunboat diplomacy may have opened up nations like China and Japan to modernization, but our current fox-style elites are far more comfortable with economic and cultural subversion. Color revolutions have become the preferred tool for dealing with nations who have not yet embraced democracy, or with democracies that have not proven sufficiently compliant. The ubiquitous nature of western media means that only the most isolated communities have been spared from relentless propagandizing about human rights. Those seeking cultural ascendancy in countries like Romania or Ukraine can be found complaining about abortion restriction in Alabama or the limitations on transexual rights in Tennessee. Classes like this are ripe for cultural manipulation and can easily be used to disrupt the internal function of any government that proves resistant to the spread of the global managerial regime.
While economic and cultural manipulation are the preferred vectors of attack, the managerial regime can fall back on brute force when necessary. Vastly superior air coverage, state of the art drone technology, and several naval carrier groups can go a long way to compelling a “rogue state” to fall inline. The increased reliance on complex technology and the ideological reconfiguration of western militaries has, however, lessened the effectiveness of this once overwhelming force. One needs only to look at recent embarrassments like the American withdrawal from Afghanistan after decades of nation building to see that for all their technical and organizational superiority, fox-like managers are losing the capacity to wield force effectively when the situation demands it.
Whether they are brought under power by material improvements, cultural subversion, or brute force, modernized countries quickly become dependent on the managerial apparatus. Democratically elected political leaders rely on the persuasion of mass media to maintain power, their economies depend on the material surplus generated by mass production, and the protection of their nation is usually dependent on a web of international mutual defense treaties generated by the economically intertwined network of liberal democracies. The new regimes which came to power through the assistance of the wider west owe their position not to the democratic will of the native population, but to the material improvements, cultural control, and military protection granted to the ruling elite by the managerial apparatus. Most of the ruling class are well aware of this fact, and those that forget are quickly made an example of through economic sanctions, mass media campaigns, and occasionally, brute military force.
After the first wave of managers is imported into modernized nations, subsequent generations will be trained through western educational institutions. The rulers of the nation might be fellow countrymen by birth, but they will gain their status and power by acquiring managerial skills and connections in western universities. Just as universities served to create a shared moral and cultural framework for the managerial class in America, these newly minted international elites will have more in common with other western elites than they will with their fellow countrymen. Despite very different cultural backgrounds, managerial elites from Eastern Europe, South America, and the United States end up spending their formative years sharing a similar experience and building a similar set of skills with which to maintain power. Whatever their original tongue, they now all speak the same language when it comes to gaining and maintaining power, and an international class of elites with a similar culture and set of interests emerges.
The ruling class of these newly formed modern democracies may be reliant on the west for their power, but that relationship eventually transitions to interdependence. The western managerial apparatus expands its operation into these new satellite nations, taking advantage of cheaper labor and a vast expansion of mass consumption in these new markets. An increasing number of highly specialized tasks are outsourced to different nations and sophisticated networks are created to coordinate the logistics of transportation, communication, and assembly required to extract the maximum efficiency and profit. Managerial techniques make this coordination possible, but they are stretched to their limit, relying on the regular function of bureaucratic networks established overseas in order to complete even the most basic tasks of production. With each expansion of this globally interdependent network the level of complexity grows, which creates an ever increasing demand for managerial expertise, and the self-exciting feedback loop becomes even tighter.
The international expansion of mass bureaucracy opens up vast reserves of new power to the managerial elite, but it also comes with a new set of challenges. If bureaucratic organizations are to operate internationally they must generate efficiency through the standardization of managerial techniques, just as they did inside their nations of origin. This means that the workers, students, consumers, and voters under their rule must become culturally homogenous so their actions become predictable and can be reliably managed. Bringing billions of people from wildly diverse backgrounds with competing moral and cultural priorities under the same network of mass organizations would be impossible. The conflicting moral visions and cultural nuances would make prediction and standardization an unachievable task. Mass production and mass consumption require absolute regularity to generate their efficiency and power, and become useless if creation and consumption are disrupted at unpredictable intervals.
For the ever-expanding network of managerial bureaucracy to spread profitably into new regions it must successfully homogenize the culture for those reasons. It is not enough for the culture to become uniform inside the nation, it must become uniform across the entire international network if maximum efficiency and control is to be achieved through the application of managerial techniques. The conversion of nations into liberal democracies assists in this process. Democratic elites must introduce mass media, bureaucratic organization, and therapeutic amelioration if they are to achieve the kind of social engineering that is required to maintain power under a system of popular sovereignty. The course of social conditioning needed to gain power has already been implemented by established western elites, and new democratic leaders in foreign countries benefit greatly by connecting their subjects to that global network, so they are often happy to take what the west has already laid out for them. Mass media begins its work and McDonald’s, Starbucks and Apple stores soon follow.
The cultural particulars and history of the nation are slowly worn away as a tide of foreign culture flows in through mass bureaucratic institutions which take over every major function inside the country. These international mass organizations become major employers as well as cultural staples and grow in importance until they are so integral to the operation of the country that no one can imagine how they ever got along without them. Managers and personnel for the mass organizations soon flow over borders as naturally as the good those organizations produce, the very idea that the people of any given country differ in any significant way slowly disappears. No particular group has claim to any given nation because all nations are now part of the mass managerial network. The managerial elite that rule each nation develop international class interests because their interdependent networks make the nation itself an interchangeable unit. Managing a government is seen as no different than operating an international corporation or non-governmental organization. All mass organizations feature a similar bureaucratic structure and managers have an easy time moving between them. Elites managing a nation's government could just as easily manage a corporation or an entirely different nation, and in many cases they do just that.
This global managerial class naturally gives rise to international organizations designed to coordinate their actions and act in their interests. Some, like NATO, may start as a military or trade alliance. Others, like the International Monetary Fund or World Bank, may claim to fight poverty or help developing nations. But the overriding purpose of these organizations quickly becomes the establishment and defense of mass managerial bureaucracies. Organizations like the World Economic Forum more or less do this explicitly, championing the abolition of hard property, destruction of national borders, and mass social engineering. The entire notion of the Open Society sees humanity as one interchangeable mass who, once properly conditioned by a set class of benevolent experts, can be ruled through one unified system. These organizations always emphasize problems of an international scale. Global warming, pandemic response, and world overpopulation are all issues which are too large for any one nation to address on its own. By focusing on large and abstract issues beyond the ability of any country to address alone, the managerial elite can locate their decision making centers well outside of the nation itself. This makes it almost impossible for the citizens of that nation to hold real power accountable even as they continue to participate in the democratic process.
Some nations, like China, understand that joining this western liberal democratic network means an abdication of sovereignty, and decide that the benefits of self-determination outweigh the costs of being excluded from the network. Any nation hoping to maintain its sovereignty must institute their own form of managerialism in order to compete, and those competing nations are now working to create their own block of international networks in order to resist the western attempt at globalization. Always and everywhere, power seeks to centralize, and the arms race between nations is perpetual. Once the total state has captured all the power inside its borders it will seek to expand those borders through globalization, and only another global leviathan can hope to resist its advance.
The other meme is that of the dehumanization of humanity itself - the reduction of humankind to things, animals or machines. Look to Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, B.F. Skinner, Dr. Peter Singer and the current crop of so-called ‘bio-ethicists’ for that particular chain of thought. You can hardly ask for something more insidiously evil than that.
Converged and combined, these two streams of thought have served those who have committed the most monstrous crimes in history. After a while, it ceases to be about money, as witness the likes of Gates and Fauci.
I highly recommend two recent works by Chantal Delsol: Icarus Fallen – the Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century – an Essay on Late Modernity. The insights are compelling and fairly leap off the page. The points of disagreement that I have with this author’s works are honest and thoughtful ones. Her European perspective often misses what makes America so unique among the world's civilizations, but is does provide valuable insights as to just why the lights are going out all over Europe. Even so, those points in no way invalidate the main themes of her works.
Well said.
Each of these "major systems" require and have ever required one trait above all others for their existence: Totalitarianism.
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