Normal and good people look at the unsettling and bewildering behavior of the Bigs that jostle our lives (business, government, entertainment, education) and inevitably ask, why?
As in, why would they: open the borders, open the jails, inflate the money supply, chemically castrate children, start proxy wars for Israel, create plant-based bacon…?
Do they do these things intentionally knowing they are being harmful/suicidal or are they just misguided do-gooders? Are they true believers or shallow thinkers just slogging through the day and looking forward to happy hour? Are they well-paid ad agencies who replaced White couples in insurance ads with impossible racial combos or cheery lesbians part of a master plan or merely a horde of shitbirds just cynically going along with the zeitgeist?
Setting aside metaphysical and spiritual questions about the meaning of life, the desire to find grand unifying theories to understand whose hand (or what species) is inside the glove guiding our politics and culture is hardwired in us. This compulsion for wanting to see patterns is what helps us solve problems and create systems for order. It’s why we have civilization.
The same compulsion is also what can lead us into delusions and fantastical conspiracies because any explanation for so much of the irrational behavior we see is better than contemplating what it means if it’s not guided at all, but a state of chaos. What if those who make big decisions really are stupid, or insane, or actually evil?
Well, there is no grand unifying theory. But it isn’t chaotic either. There are rules and there is logic and because of that, it is rather predictable how a particular actor (person or organization) will behave if you can figure out what character he’s playing and who is writing the script.
The Tyranny of Bored Midwits
James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, The War We Are In: The Last Decade and the Next), has had a minor resurgence because in the midst of World War II he had already assessed with prophetic clarity that neither strict capitalists nor the communists would be the victors, but instead a permanent managerial class would co-opt and inherit the levers of power across all institutions. This didn’t mean they were devoid of ideology, but that their governing actions and impulses were far more mundane rather than revolutionary.
These managers (better to think in terms of executives, the real decision makers) are the people literally in charge of producing things (widgets, laws, education, software, skyscrapers…). They didn’t conspire as a cohort to be the elite but rather, over time, gradually became aware of their positions of authority and influence. They matured into an understanding of the actual power they had. The naked wielding of this power as a self-aware elite—a new aristocracy— has only recently fully bloomed. The right schools, neighborhoods, and social clubs are now the networking and filtering mechanism controlling who is allowed to enter into the elite circles. It is as efficient and discriminating as any caste system in history.
In our own day-to-day experience, The Executive in Charge, better than any other theory, explains what we are actually seeing throughout all the institutions, from government to the classroom to the boardroom.
And if these are the villains, the ones slowly dismantling our world, it is all the more upsetting (and disappointing) because it isn’t some brilliant dark malevolent vision they’re architecting, but simply a banal strip mall being built, one that they don’t even particularly care about. These people crave status but more so predictable outcomes: revenue and results. If a hypothetical rightwing coup assumed control on a Friday, gave new orders, and allowed these people to carry on instead of facing the wall, come Monday morning it would be business as usual.
We’re not facing an honorable and worthy enemy willing to die for their cause. It’s a swarm of drones accidentally over-delivering a smothering of melted cheese. We’re being buried in the garbage avalanche in Idiocracy. It’s humiliating. This is why we want a bigger, more sinister explanation.
These people don’t have the incentive, let alone the intellectual ability and curiosity, to think like a committed ideologue. While Jeff Bezos and Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal undoubtedly have political beliefs, does anyone really think they are in the same league as Mao or Trotsky…or James Burnham for that matter?
Why We Care if They Care
It is not satisfactory knowing that the managerial elite do what they do because it pays well, gives them status, or that it’s in their nature, literally as part of their job description, to be systemizers.
The original question still stands: why do they do it?
What is actually implied in this question, however, is not why, but whether they understand the consequences of what they are doing. And the reason good, normal people keep struggling with this question is because lurking below the surface is assigning culpability.
No one believes any of this is sustainable and knowing whether or not the movie studio executive, or federal judge, or one’s house representative knew they were crashing a civilization has high stake significance. Our question is not why but what shall the verdicts be in the aftermath: mercy, the dungeon, or the gallows.
There is certainly a continuum of culpability, but as you reach positions of real decision making and influence, whether it’s a 500-acre almond farmer hiring illegals, a mega pastor or bishop condemning white privilege, or the president siccing los federales on the non-compliant, these are never innocent or simply misguided errs. They are thought through and deliberate because they have to be. It is actually impossible for it to be otherwise.
The bureaucratic engines powering the deep state, deep office, deep church, are made up of highly structured departments, with layers of managers, SOPs and guidelines detailing the minutiae of how the work gets done. As you enter the C-Suite, the highly developed discipline of brand management colors everything because this is what informs the tone and voice the outside world sees.
Every action, Tweet, product, speech, policy that is public facing is carefully controlled, reviewed, and scripted by redundant layers of people operating from the same brand manual, the organizational bible. And by scripted, I mean actually scripted at the very same level an author creates a character and knows what is and what is not “in character.”
Take a look at a small university’s brand guidelines on messaging. Now consider the type of scrutiny there is with the institutions and corporations that recognize their roles as the elites.
In a previous article I looked at the legacy of professional writers employed by governments. It seems unbelievable and stretches the imagination at just how crafted the narratives really are. But there it is.
No, the elites are not dogmatic ideologues advancing a master plan. Yes, they have simple silly motivations. No, they are not particularly bright or truly conniving. But yes, yes indeed, they are acutely aware of the game being played because it is a game whose rules they have written.
These people are fully culpable, your honor, and we demand their doom.
‘Cause down in Alabama, you can run, but you sure can’t hide.
Read the Protocols which were penned before us, our parents, or our grandparents were born.
This “forgery” is basically the outline for what is happening. Planned and being carried out.
“What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization; a steadily-growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing, social power and faith in social power diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income; production languishing; the State in consequence taking over one “essential industry” after another, managing them with ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally resorting to a system of forced labor. I can view it only as a logical and necessary step in a general course of “rebarbarization.””
Albert Jay Nock, ‘Memoirs’
“No, the elites are not dogmatic ideologues advancing a master plan.”
Uh… yes they are.
Avid TRS listener, vetted pool party member here. Unrelated to this episode but your knowledge of the true history of TRS has changed the entire direction of my life at this moment. Luckily I have a local support group with the same politics, but I’m reeling and looking for a new direction outside of the NJP. Praise Roscoe. -Anonymous
Just to be sure the point of this article is clear: there is a distinction between the top of the pyramid and the collusion and planning that we have to assume is taking place and that of the managerial CLASS that dutifully executes plans they are not fully aware of. We’ve all encountered the later. We’ll never know who the former actually are.
As the excellent Nock quote points out, the frightening thing about the type of power structure is that it takes on a life of its own. The managers of the gulag need little direction and high level programming to be effective for the system. Their loyalty is cheap: They only need to be treated better than you and I and told they have status. In true revolutions, many of them are the first to be shot behind the ear.