Your post describes what has happened in France since the 1980's with eerie precision. A large number of associations or collectives have sprung, mostly financed by public money, either from the state or the municipalities or from other public bodies. They receive media attention and parties take up their causes. The government instructs the civil service to provide solutions that invariably expand its powers. Sometimes laws are passed, sometimes decrees or administrative rule changes are enough. However the use of courts to promote these agendas took off only since 2010.
In France these associations play several roles. First they attract people who perceive that we are headed the wrong way and want to fight to bring changes : they are effectively enlisted in battles that bring the expansion of the administrative state and worsen the ills they aim at reducing. Second they occupy the media space and prevent other groups, organic groups, from gaining widespread attention. Third they can be used in street battles against those presented as fascists in order to obtain the pretext to dissolve the latter groups and sometimes imprison their members.
I must say this was an entertaining essay and far from “dry” subject matter. There is a book - a must read, I heard - called The Managerial Class on Trial, that I was hoping to get for myself and a few friends. Now, I wonder if it’s possible to obtain a few copies signed by the author... If anyone can help with this, I will be grateful for the assistance. Cheers!
The answer to the essay's final question is, I think, readily apparent: yes, it does. Censorship of social media and enforcement of speech codes has the same effect: artificial negativity creates a false signal; censorship buries the true signal; both conspire to create an illusion of popular support for managerial goals where no such support, and much opposition, exists. The result is what we see: a ruling class that is nearly hermetically sealed from the pulse of the popular mind, increasingly out of phase with it, and incapable of governing anything but their own illusory models. Hitler moving around armies that don't exist while planning impossible victories, in other words.
Dear Evolved Psyché,
Your post describes what has happened in France since the 1980's with eerie precision. A large number of associations or collectives have sprung, mostly financed by public money, either from the state or the municipalities or from other public bodies. They receive media attention and parties take up their causes. The government instructs the civil service to provide solutions that invariably expand its powers. Sometimes laws are passed, sometimes decrees or administrative rule changes are enough. However the use of courts to promote these agendas took off only since 2010.
In France these associations play several roles. First they attract people who perceive that we are headed the wrong way and want to fight to bring changes : they are effectively enlisted in battles that bring the expansion of the administrative state and worsen the ills they aim at reducing. Second they occupy the media space and prevent other groups, organic groups, from gaining widespread attention. Third they can be used in street battles against those presented as fascists in order to obtain the pretext to dissolve the latter groups and sometimes imprison their members.
I must say this was an entertaining essay and far from “dry” subject matter. There is a book - a must read, I heard - called The Managerial Class on Trial, that I was hoping to get for myself and a few friends. Now, I wonder if it’s possible to obtain a few copies signed by the author... If anyone can help with this, I will be grateful for the assistance. Cheers!
The answer to the essay's final question is, I think, readily apparent: yes, it does. Censorship of social media and enforcement of speech codes has the same effect: artificial negativity creates a false signal; censorship buries the true signal; both conspire to create an illusion of popular support for managerial goals where no such support, and much opposition, exists. The result is what we see: a ruling class that is nearly hermetically sealed from the pulse of the popular mind, increasingly out of phase with it, and incapable of governing anything but their own illusory models. Hitler moving around armies that don't exist while planning impossible victories, in other words.
>the managerial class has worked out a clandestine form of extra-parliamentary governance, which uses the public’s tax dollars
In the US that was achieved with Administrative Procedure Act