I took a trip to Sam’s Club this weekend. Leaving my little elite/managerial class tech boom community and heading 15 miles to the real world. As I looked around the Mall parking lot and the surrounding community, I saw low-middle income families with their old gas powered vehicles living what had been for decades considered the American Dream. Buying the large scale treats/candies, picking up cheap toys and clothing that is characteristic of Sams/Costco. There’s no way of knowing how these people vote or even if they vote. Looking around at them, I wondered if the managerial/elites are aware that there is a huge world of people out there who could not care less about their pie in the sky agenda (green energy, white supremacy, etc.) I just don’t see these people adopting this stuff. These folks only briefly touch up against social media and when they do the marketing agenda of the woke corporations isn’t relevant to their world. I’m reminded of the Amish communities that interact with “the English” . For the most part, they dismiss the “English” values and utilize their innovations only when their found to be meaningful to the work at hand. I just don’t see how the managerial/elites infiltrate this huge swath of the world that has clearly tuned them out.
Thanks for sharing this. It was a touching reminder of the world outside of the political.
I confess to mixed feelings on this topic. Part of me, when pondering such things, is moved to recall Trotsky's warning: you may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you. By which, I take him to mean, people who ignore the forces of history will become its victims and tools.
On the other hand, like you, I take some comfort from the knowledge that there are people just living the best life they're capable of, under the actual circumstances they face. That is what humans have always done. I hope it's not just the deluded hope that if you ignore the bully that he'll eventually go away. That won't work in this case. Hopefully, it's more that there's a limit to how much power someone can have over you if you refuse to give them that last vestige of your freedom, in caring about them. The question is what is the definition and implications of that limit.
Brilliant! Reminded me of: "the moral order, when suppressed, reasserts itself as an avenging monster in the midst of the chaos and suffering of cultural revolution."
'' And just as it seemed they were on the pinnacle of their great technological achievement,''
I don't think the achievement belongs to the current managerial class. They are largely thieves, bullies and inheritors of those who did. That's probably why the shift in the current managerial class behavior. They don't have the talent, merit or foresight of those who set up the system for the .
I suppose there may be a definitional misalignment between us, here. While I certainly agree that those on the lower rungs of the managerial class hierarchy, generally operating as bureaucratic functionaries, are inclined to considerably exaggerate their cleverness, it's also the case that -- pretty much by definition -- the smartest people in the world are going to be members of the managerial class. General intelligence is largely a function of abstract symbol manipulation (look at the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test) and that's what characterizes the class for me. And while it's certainly true that in the second industrial revolution the managerial class were leveraging off of the earlier achievements of bourgeois capitalists, the point was that it was the managerial class who had the scientific and engineering skills to take those industries to scales which would have been unachievable in the absence of such skills.
But I'm always interested in hearing alternative interpretations. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
I'm coming to appreciate your more broad definition of the Managerial Class, though I resent being grouped among them just because I've manipulated symbols for a living.
Have you written of "Philip Dru: Administrator"? That seems like full-on managerial class.
The superlegality push underway is IMO a response to the emergence and persistence of populist resistance. By its nature this resistance makes the rule of the professional and managerial classes contestable. It is a political challenge of the first order. It is also an ethical challenge because the aspiration for autonomy, for the opportunity to develop or defend organic, freely developed, community genuinely shocks the technocrats and strikes them as unconscionable.
The reliance on superlegality, as opposed to any of the possible alternative responses, is that the system cannot rely on the old structure of civil society to discipline or contain opposition (this has been hollowed out by social engineering and the relatively successful disruption of most forms of organic community). Neither can it rely on representative democracy to function as a safety valve for disaffection because the political system is losing credibility. Poor economic performance precludes buying off the discontented. The mass media no longer convinces. All they, the PMC, have left is replacement level immigration and superlegality.
The political narratives of the PMC do not allow for opposition to either social engineering or the class privileges of the PMC. To acknowledge the legitimacy of opposition risks exposing the fact that the regnant ideologies are largely composed of self-serving fictions rather than unassailable truths. Opposition from below also reveals the fact that the masses, or at least growing elements of it, do not truly believe in the eudaimonic character of our masters. This scepticism reflects the lived experience of those who are the objects of the therapeutic dirigisme of the PMC. For believers in the system, the criminalisation of dissent is easier, or more palatable, than compromise, let alone admitting that the PMC may be deeply flawed or fundamentally objectionable.
Accepting the legitimacy of countervailing political force (the Polybian solution to the reality of competing interests) is impossible because the PMC's collective self-understanding rests on a conviction that the masses exist as the object of politics, never as its subject.
I took a trip to Sam’s Club this weekend. Leaving my little elite/managerial class tech boom community and heading 15 miles to the real world. As I looked around the Mall parking lot and the surrounding community, I saw low-middle income families with their old gas powered vehicles living what had been for decades considered the American Dream. Buying the large scale treats/candies, picking up cheap toys and clothing that is characteristic of Sams/Costco. There’s no way of knowing how these people vote or even if they vote. Looking around at them, I wondered if the managerial/elites are aware that there is a huge world of people out there who could not care less about their pie in the sky agenda (green energy, white supremacy, etc.) I just don’t see these people adopting this stuff. These folks only briefly touch up against social media and when they do the marketing agenda of the woke corporations isn’t relevant to their world. I’m reminded of the Amish communities that interact with “the English” . For the most part, they dismiss the “English” values and utilize their innovations only when their found to be meaningful to the work at hand. I just don’t see how the managerial/elites infiltrate this huge swath of the world that has clearly tuned them out.
Thanks for sharing this. It was a touching reminder of the world outside of the political.
I confess to mixed feelings on this topic. Part of me, when pondering such things, is moved to recall Trotsky's warning: you may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you. By which, I take him to mean, people who ignore the forces of history will become its victims and tools.
On the other hand, like you, I take some comfort from the knowledge that there are people just living the best life they're capable of, under the actual circumstances they face. That is what humans have always done. I hope it's not just the deluded hope that if you ignore the bully that he'll eventually go away. That won't work in this case. Hopefully, it's more that there's a limit to how much power someone can have over you if you refuse to give them that last vestige of your freedom, in caring about them. The question is what is the definition and implications of that limit.
Brilliant! Reminded me of: "the moral order, when suppressed, reasserts itself as an avenging monster in the midst of the chaos and suffering of cultural revolution."
from https://www.fidelitypress.org/book-products/monsters-from-the-id
'' And just as it seemed they were on the pinnacle of their great technological achievement,''
I don't think the achievement belongs to the current managerial class. They are largely thieves, bullies and inheritors of those who did. That's probably why the shift in the current managerial class behavior. They don't have the talent, merit or foresight of those who set up the system for the .
I suppose there may be a definitional misalignment between us, here. While I certainly agree that those on the lower rungs of the managerial class hierarchy, generally operating as bureaucratic functionaries, are inclined to considerably exaggerate their cleverness, it's also the case that -- pretty much by definition -- the smartest people in the world are going to be members of the managerial class. General intelligence is largely a function of abstract symbol manipulation (look at the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test) and that's what characterizes the class for me. And while it's certainly true that in the second industrial revolution the managerial class were leveraging off of the earlier achievements of bourgeois capitalists, the point was that it was the managerial class who had the scientific and engineering skills to take those industries to scales which would have been unachievable in the absence of such skills.
But I'm always interested in hearing alternative interpretations. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
I'm coming to appreciate your more broad definition of the Managerial Class, though I resent being grouped among them just because I've manipulated symbols for a living.
Have you written of "Philip Dru: Administrator"? That seems like full-on managerial class.
No I haven't. I'll check it out.
If it's any consolation, I'm quite confident that everyone who reads (and writes) this substack is a member of the managerial class. ;-)
The superlegality push underway is IMO a response to the emergence and persistence of populist resistance. By its nature this resistance makes the rule of the professional and managerial classes contestable. It is a political challenge of the first order. It is also an ethical challenge because the aspiration for autonomy, for the opportunity to develop or defend organic, freely developed, community genuinely shocks the technocrats and strikes them as unconscionable.
The reliance on superlegality, as opposed to any of the possible alternative responses, is that the system cannot rely on the old structure of civil society to discipline or contain opposition (this has been hollowed out by social engineering and the relatively successful disruption of most forms of organic community). Neither can it rely on representative democracy to function as a safety valve for disaffection because the political system is losing credibility. Poor economic performance precludes buying off the discontented. The mass media no longer convinces. All they, the PMC, have left is replacement level immigration and superlegality.
The political narratives of the PMC do not allow for opposition to either social engineering or the class privileges of the PMC. To acknowledge the legitimacy of opposition risks exposing the fact that the regnant ideologies are largely composed of self-serving fictions rather than unassailable truths. Opposition from below also reveals the fact that the masses, or at least growing elements of it, do not truly believe in the eudaimonic character of our masters. This scepticism reflects the lived experience of those who are the objects of the therapeutic dirigisme of the PMC. For believers in the system, the criminalisation of dissent is easier, or more palatable, than compromise, let alone admitting that the PMC may be deeply flawed or fundamentally objectionable.
Accepting the legitimacy of countervailing political force (the Polybian solution to the reality of competing interests) is impossible because the PMC's collective self-understanding rests on a conviction that the masses exist as the object of politics, never as its subject.