People love talking about the future, as it allows them to project their own narrative onto the present, without actually having to argue from facts and reason. The robot future is the best example. Those inclined to doom and gloom assume the robots take over and the result will be awful. Libertarians imagine the robots take over and immediately realize a society based on private property is the only viable option. In other words, when we start imagining the glorious future, we do so in order to make points about the present.
The fact is, the future is never what is promised. Those inclined to dark thoughts in the middle of the last century were sure Orwell’s vision was mostly correct. We live nothing like that today. Yet, people insist he will be proven correct any day now. Of course, the glorious future promised in the middle of the last century never happened either. Instead of flying cars, hot women in tight fitting jumpsuits and colonies on Mars, we have traffic jams, fat single mothers scurrying over the southern border and an emerging police state.
Just because the futurists always seem to be wrong, it does not mean no one warned about what was coming. Every society has its prophets. That’s because the future does not spring from nothing. There are always signs early on, suggesting what comes next and the ramifications of it. In retrospect, those signs seem obvious, of course, but the fact that some people saw them suggests people chose not to see them or to simply ignored them for short term reasons. Immigration policy is the obvious example.
What commonplace items today will be things the robot historians look at and wonder how we missed them? This story at the Huffington Post on DNA testing is an example. The story itself is unimportant. It is the sort of thing that would have appeared in a woman’s magazine fifty years ago, except the topic would have been French cooking. That’s a clue, for sure, but not one being has missed today. Popular culture is now awash in females playing roles, other than the one for which they evolved.
The interesting bit is the writer. Her name is Julia Ries, a young graduate of Boston College, working as a freelance writer. Here is her resume. Boston College is one of the more prestigious schools in America these days. It is in a new class of colleges called the “New Ivies” because their admissions standards are similar to the Ivies and their name carries a lot of weight in the managerial class. That means young Mx Ries is fairly emblematic of the type of woman who will be taking up a position in the ruling class.
Look at the job titles. It is a dog’s breakfast of managerial speak. For example, she was a media planner for health and wellness clients. The word “wellness” is a neologism that means the state of not being sick. In other words, instead of being sick, people have degrees of wellness. No one can ever be completely well, so there is a whole industry to promote wellness. If you read that entry carefully, what you see is she spent her days recommending keywords that would work in a Google search.
The next entry is “Digital Content Strategist” which she describes as “we’d listen to clients talk about the growing pains their brands were experiencing and we’d whip up some powerful campaigns to create some buzz and punch things up.” If you want to know why corporate communications is a tangle of neologism and nonsense phrases, there’s your answer. It’s bright young people spending their days coming up with new ways to say what their parents said. It’s a thousand monkeys pounding away at search engines.
The point here is this women is pushing thirty and her career thus far as been a series of nonsense jobs with clever titles. She no doubt thinks they are important steps on the career ladder and they very well may be essential steps. The managerial system is really just an apprenticeship process bolted onto an exam system. If you want to know why mass media is populated with middle aged airheads, incapable to dealing with observable reality, the answer lies in the resumes of young people like Mx. Ries.
The managerial system is not just selecting for the weak and frivolous within its ranks. It is breeding a generation of hot house flowers with its exam system. This story Sailer linked to is a great example. The Hindu comic gets the hook, because his jokes made the Columbia students uncomfortable. The thing about it is the students did not rush the stage or stomp off in a huff. They sat there in various states of emotional distress, until their handlers rushed the stage and shut down the the comedian mid-set.
The point of all this is there seems to be a strange old flaw in the managerial system, that will probably seem obvious in another generation. That is, the system selects for and cultivates increasing weak-minded people. As the system becomes more complex and interdependent, the people become more helpless, depending on the inertia of the system to supply the courage and resolve. In a system built by people with the soul of a human resource department, the greatest skill is doing nothing while sounding essential.
Perhaps the system will become self-aware before this becomes a crisis, but that’s not the way to bet. Instead, we’ll reach a point at which the people in charge are emotionally, morally and intellectually incapable of addressing the inevitable crisis. We may be getting a glimpse of this in France, where the ridiculous fop Emmanuel Macron is quickly being undone by men in safety vests. Macron is an example suggesting the managerial system is not going to be producing a Napoleon or even a de Gaulle to save the day.
The Mongols figured out that invaders from the hills had a habit of taking on the habits of the people they conquered in the valley. The conquers got soft and were in turn conquered by a new tribe from the hills. The Mongols tried to remedy that by being raiders and never settling the lands they conquered. In the West, allowing talent to bubble up from the bottom, often in military service and later business, was a way to keep the ruling class vigorous and on edge. This used to be way things were done in America.
Today, the ruling classes of the West are a closed system. The children of the elite head off to prep schools nestled away in secluded areas. They head off to nice colleges and then start their apprenticeship in the system. Outsiders can only gain entry by first proving they are no threat to question the system. The managerial class is becoming a hot house of make believe work and fatuous airheads. Like the people in the valley enjoying the good life, they are wholly unequipped to handle the next conqueror.
And then there’s the fact that Americans are becoming dumber every year, as evidenced by declining test scores since the 1960s, and every other measure of intellect…Most kids are baffled by the Harvard entrance exam that was used around 1900…Mouse Utopia.
Pre and Post-WW2, the left used to be the cream of the working-class. Their hearts and minds were guided by blue-collar sensibilities and an ability to understand white culture. Today however, the managerial class is the dregs of the middle-class. It isn’t sure who exactly it is building a future for. It has no skin in the game and no motivation to preserve its heritage. In fact it has been taught to hate where it came from and to spend every dollar possible to avoid looking and acting like the people who raised them. They have no identity, no loyalty and unlike any humans through history, no cause to die for.
In the good old days Boston College was a safety school…
Vinny “The Animal” Ferrara would disagree.
The current carousel of incompetence will end…..it must. And history tells us it will probably end violently. A culture that has NOT surrendered to feelings and wishful thinking will come along to kill, conquer and enslave……the current candidate for this chore is Islam.
Great post. Here’s another useful insight. The incestuousness and lack of formative hardship in the ruling class is producing more than just weakness, it is making the whole ruling network extremely fragile. They have no resilience and rely exclusively on government force to keep then safe and in power, rather than traditional leadership skill. Macron is pissing his pants, not because he is flummoxed by a crisis, but because he wouldn’t last two minutes outside his security cordon.
“Like the people in the valley enjoying the good life, they are wholly unequipped to handle the next conqueror.”
What are we waiting for? Let’s get together and go take their shit.
I am not generally an optimistic person, but these days I have a strange sense of optimism. It’s as if God has blessed us by making our enemies fools.
As far as visions of the future go, I count the dystopias of Burgess in “A Clock Orange” and Houellebecq in “Submission” to be especially perceptive.
And there’s that one by John of Patmos…
“Those inclined to dark thoughts in the middle of the last century were sure Orwell’s vision was mostly correct. We live nothing like that today.”
Of course, the the real world is necessarily more complicated and messy than any dystopia described in a science fiction cum polemic novel, but Orwell predicted several key features of our world, for example:
1) Crimethink/Crimestop — To have.avoid such thoughts as diversity + proximity = conflict; there are measurable racial differences in behavior, intelligence and personality
2) Unperson — The consequences of Crimethink — Crimethinkers aren’t killed, at least not yet, but the are deplatformed, fired from their jobs, etc., which brings us to…
3) Two Minutes Hate — Crimethinkers aren’t just deplatformed, they are subjected to a period of scorn and ridicule so that the Goodthinkers can feel good about their ruined lives…
4) The Memory Hole — Circa 2000, all Goodthinking Democrats were opposed to “gay marriage” and open borders. The video records of this have not been destroyed, but Goodthinkers today put such hate facts (not a Orwell phrase) down a virtual memory hole
5) Doublethink — Race is a social construct, but all white people and ONLY white people are racists. Trump attacking the media is bad, but Obama attacking Fox News is good
6) In 1984, Oceania quickly and arbitrarily declares that former enemies are now allies, and vice versa. This is exactly what our Inner Party has done with Russia. They were our enemy, then in the 1990’s became our alley (Obama mocked Romney about this in 2012, then suddenly our mortal enemy again. Orwell would be proud…
7) And finally…two overarching themes of 1984 — Big Brother (Google, Twitter, etc.) and the Thought Police (freelance internet scolds and members of the so-called press) are definitely watching — hence, e.g., your “Z Man” persona as opposed you actual name as well as my decision to avoid all “[anti]social media” platforms
I live near Los Angeles, where they have their very own ridiculous fop – Eric Garcetti – as mayor. From the same mold as Macron.
Garcetti is mulling a White House run.
fredcdobbs: I live in LA. Garcetti would be better off mulling wine this time of year. LA produces incredibly vapid mayors.
One thing, however, we do know for absolute certain: the current Grand Solar Minimum. We are now able to predict pretty accurately what that is going to look like. Several governments are already making the necessary preparations (not ours, of course, but we never expected them to do it anyway). A great deal of the present-day foolishness will simply vanish, thank God.
” […] In a system built by people with the soul of a human resource department, the greatest skill is doing nothing while sounding essential. […]”
When describing a shemale of the Mx Whatever ilk, I am never wrong when I say, “She has the soul of an eel and the disposition of a tarantula.”
Instead of what this sad lady is doing, a lot of smart women could live a more meaningful life by “doing a Jane Austen.” Instead of puking up globohomo officialese, they could have a family life and write online (or in print, if they’re good and/or lucky) using honest, real language, about what life is really like. Then they would make a real contribution. Life for them and us would be much richer.
This lady is doing just as you suggest. She is a western woman who raised a family, lives in the panhandle of Idaho, keeps a homestead going with her husband, and writes for World Net Daily her weekend column. Meet Patrice Lewis. http://www.rural-revolution.com Please take a few minutes to relax with her remarkable website.
Most of you are city folks either midwest or coastal. You barely touch on issues of the west. My people are the people of the Nevada Great Basin and Range country (see http://rangemagazine.com Please take a few minutes to read Range Magazine to gain a better understanding of the jackboot coming down on us..and our western culture) and now currently the Intermountain West. When I lived in central Nevada, the jackboot regulators from Dept. of Interior and BLM were waging an ongoing war on the Hage Ranch in Monitor Valley (ongoing for over 25 years–see the book Storm over Rangelands: Private Rights in Federal Lands by Wayne Hage) to drive them out. Z pointed out Trump has done little; however, he did pardon the Dwight and Steve Hammond in eastern Oregon after they were thrown in jail for starting a backfire to save their range land that burned approx. 100 acres of govmint land adjacent to their own land. You folks don’t seem to be aware that the big govt. owns between 70-85% of land in western states. Trump has backed off some of the jackboot regulators. We’ll take that! The regulators continue the quiet but deadly push to control the western lands and people and destroy our culture! Don’t forget where that delicious steak, lamb chop or McBurgerDoodle comes from!
“Eloi” posting…
I forget the Russian word, but the Soviets had a name for the kind of guy who will actually run things in our Human Resources-ruled future. He might have actually been a lowly shift supervisor or something, but he was the “fixer” — he knew everyone, could get with his fellow fixers, and actually get the materials a factory needed to meet its targets outside the cumbersome requisition system. (When the USSR collapsed, these guys found themselves owning the newly “priviatized” utilities). Maybe some lessons here for us.
When I was in the Marines, we would just go steal the shit we needed from the Army.
https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/
“Back when evolution was under attack from proponents of Biblical Creation and Intelligent Design, academic scientists were under no pressure to hold back criticism. This is because these anti-evolution movements were almost exclusively a product of right-wing evangelicals who held no power in academia”
Now you see, our gatekeepers will not actually do anything like giving the right-wing power in academia. But the Right is supposed to support the FACTS and LOGIC and SCIENCE of neoliberals. #NotYourFreikorps
The Missus and I were installing a new kitchen sink a few weeks ago, one of those big enameled cast iron farmhouse style deals, about 250 lb. worth. We set up the cherry picker from the garage and suspended the thing over the hole in the counter to do the deed, like a crane in a construction site.
The 20 something kiddos were passing through, along with a few of their friends. One of them, of the predominantly female appearance, started talking about the whole thing triggering her and making it hard for her to breathe.
I told her xe better get out of here, because when the sink starts dropping and the silicone starts flying, we might endanger the health of some corian. I honestly don’t know how these hothouse flowers are going to manage adulthood.
This is a column about the future, you say? Humbug – it’s clearly about the past, because what you describe is exactly what has happened to every single rusty, sclerotic empire whose time was just about up throughout all of history. You might as well have written it about the last of the Bourbon kings, or the Qing Dynasty in the 19th century, or Rome under Julius Nepos. We know the drill – the civil service gets filled with increasingly unimaginative, out-of-touch yes men who know how to climb within their closed system but never talk to the peasants outside Versailles/the Forbidden City/Palatine Hill and have no idea what’s really going on out there, much less what to do about it. The next act in this drama is as predictable as the ending of the next mass-produced Hollywood superhero movie – except that in the movie, Captain America is sure to save the day, and in real life, he’s sure not to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_protests_in_the_United_Kingdom
https://vimeo.com/159436632
An Onion newscast from the year 2137 which someone linked to over on Sailer (made in 2013). I had never seen it. Probably the best/funniest thing they ever did. Only unrealistic thing about it is that there are too many white people. Or maybe not, perhaps we regain our preeminence after the great die off.
One of my cousins works for a corporation we’ve all heard of and would be described as “socially-aware.” Her position is Digital PR, lives in Hipster City, USA, she’s in her mid-thirties and is married but has no children and isn’t planning on having any. But she has a dog, who’s treated like a child. She sprinkles words in her conversations like “unpack” and “non-binary” and is into “world” charities.
I also have cousins who live in the rural upper Midwest, who seem like they’re from central casting for 1950’s America. They’re into things like hunting and fishing with their many kids, or going to the local high school football game on Friday nights. The way they talk, their values, interests, food, their big families are all very alien to my hip, cool cousin and, I’m sure, to this Julia Ries.
What has surprised me so far is that Macron has been quite light handed, almost indifferent to the protests. The French government could easily just lock up the leaders under “hate speech” laws, and produce trumped-up evidence they were Russian-backed. Macron would ride a wave of popularity for standing up for “law and order”. At this point, early elections would still be a surprise, which the FN would have a low chance of winning.
So far, the real leaders have been careful to not make themselves public. Instead, they appear to be allowing dummies to pretend to be the leaders.
People in the know are being careful NOT to use social media, which are under surveillance. Communications are sent via encrypted private messaging.
So called 4th generation warfare or 4GW point is that there are no leaders and chain of command. There may be some think tank, inventing new methods and recommending action but generally, people on the place decide what and where to do.
You can invent trick how to take Macron down, write this idea for example right here and hyperactive trolls take care that next weekend every last Frenchman have heard it.
Good blog about 4GW in English.
https://www.traditionalright.com/
In our day and time a police record is all that is needed to make one an outlaw. The only thing keeping these groups of people in check right now is that they are tenuously holding on to their meager position in society. If you started to make huge chunks of them outlaws, then you are just creating a structured opposition that has nothing to lose. It would be better to kill them, but that is a whole other can of worms.
Could it be that Macron is under the impression that these are “his” protesters, just a liitle off message for the duration? He doesn’t seem very bright.
The President in the French system of government is not as powerful as the American President. The day to day business of government is handled by the Prime Minister. Think CEO/COO. Macron prefers to be detached and focus on the “big picture”, that’s why he looks clueless in public. The prime minister can be thrown to the wolves. The current situation is odd because the prime minister is actually polling higher than Macron.
Hey, I got a down vote. Who’s the cuck?
What I’ve told my nieces and nephews, my own children being too young to worry about it yet, is to go to College to join a guild. There is no education in the classical sense to be obtained so don’t bother and college has become the gatekeeper to the best guilds and cartels. Get your state stamped certification in nursing, medicine, law, engineering, accounting, or whatever the hell you want as cheaply and as quickly as possible. It’s all in the game. The game might change and realize that it is just a game, but for now play the game.
As an aside, Universities sprung up around libraries, not the other way around. I have the largest, most comprehensive library in the history of mankind in my pocket. If a kid wants a classical education he has only to swipe.
This is very true. If you have enough AP credit from high school, as I did, you can pursue a dual degree—one in your “guild” and another for liberal education. But you have to have a strategy for future employment because our education system will be more than willing to sell you useless African Pygmy film studies degrees for years.
“The point of all this is there seems to be a strange old flaw in the managerial system, that will probably seem obvious in another generation. That is, the system selects for and cultivates increasing weak-minded people. As the system becomes more complex and interdependent, the people become more helpless, depending on the inertia of the system to supply the courage and resolve. In a system built by people with the soul of a human resource department, the greatest skill is doing nothing while sounding essential.”
Riesman called it “other-direction” as opposed to “inner-directed” pioneer and self-reliant types. This maroon thinks it’s a feature, not a bug:
https://www.amazon.com/Jordan-Peterson-Second-Religiousness-Explaining-ebook/dp/B07H3Q3BFJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543937282&sr=8-1&keywords=tierney+jordan
I think the antisemites you regularly tweak may have a point in that our ruling class has been judaized. Our ruling class has slowly, over a century or so, morphed from being a group that relied on action and deeds to make one’s reputation and move up, to being a group for whom words and poses are everything and deeds unnecessary at best.
Endless words, words, words; arguing over minutia and vigorously arguing reality away into a box that can be resolutely ignored. I don;t think it will end well for them.
That’s the situation in a nutshell.
At one time in this country, virtue meant living a life of personal integrity and doing the right thing. Not anymore. What counts in today’s society, especially among liberals and cucks, is not doing the right thing but saying the right thing and holding the right attitude. You could live your life in diametric opposition to your purported ideals, but that’s okay because everyone else is, too. So you feel free to utter the most lofty ideals because all it is is extravagant virtue signaling.
This is kind of the robot problem or rather the robot problem has already happened. Most jobs are a kind of make work: to provide the basic needs of the vast body of useless eaters only takes a small proportion of the population. Look how nobody is working in agriculture nowadays to produce corn or wheat, they’re commodities produced by soon to be fully automated processes.
The problem is the ignorant and largely stupid managerial class arrived at using wealth destruction as the method used to cycle money through the system: America is top dog because it has the biggest army breaking the most things. Along the way women got emancipated for no very good reason.
People don’t see the need to have children to work and support them in old age because robots / society do most of the support stuff anyway, so nobody pays much attention to children except as a vanity project. It’s a first world problem of affluence and mechanized production.
For the benefit of those who believe that the future is fictional but that the present is real it may be helpful to point out that the present is largely fictional as well. As for the past who knows, that changes from moment to moment.
I’ll throw a pitch in the prediction of future, based entirely on discoveries of quantum mechanics.
Neils Bohr in 1930 said everything we think is real is fundamentally unreal. Fast forward, with the big collider: Matter is unreal, a wave function prediction. Time & space are a kind of delusion.
Double slit, quantum eraser, and entanglement experiments strongly indicate true underlying reality of time & space is not what our brains perceive. Our evolution hides underlying reality.
What we think we know:
Time is always now, our brains tease out the past and future. What time was it, when you woke up yesterday? It was now. What time will it be when you have lunch tommorow? It will be now, because it’s always now in underlying reality.
Space is unreal, objects (that have no real existence) have no real distance (in absolute space), that’s why we know about things traveling faster than speed of light.
My prediction, in 500 years we will be laughed at for believing this dead, inert stuff called matter could create consciousness, just like we laugh a people before Galileo for believing in a flat earth.
The universe will be discovered to be a giant thought, not what we believe today (that it’s a giant machine). And that’s bid enough to destroy everything about politics and human society.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will
You are going to have to go a long way to find someone as vapid as Mx. Ries. The titles of her “articles” say it all:
WORSE THAN MORNING SICKNESS: THE CONDITION THAT LEFT AMY SCHUMER HOSPITALIZED
RBG’S QUICK RECOVERY: WHAT OTHERS CAN LEARN FROM HER WORKOUTS
5 TIPS FOR DEALING WITH DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME
NEW NUTRITION LABELS REVEAL HOW MUCH ADDED SUGAR YOU’RE EATING
LENA DUNHAM’S MULTIPLE SURGERIES HIGHLIGHT DIFFICULTY IN TREATING ENDOMETRIOSIS
MEGHAN MARKLE’S ‘GERIATRIC PREGNANCY’ PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON OLDER FIRST-TIME MOMS
DOES PAIN AFTER CHILDBIRTH INCREASE POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION RISK?
SALMONELLA AND LISTERIA OUTBREAKS SPARK MASSIVE MEAT RECALL
OXYGEN THERAPY CAN REVERSE SUDDEN HEARING LOSS
READ IT
YO-YO WEIGHT LOSS CAN HURT YOUR HEALTH
CALORIE COUNTS ON MENUS ARE WORKING
HOW THE KETO DIET CAN WREAK HAVOC ON YOUR GI SYSTEM
ANTIBIOTICS CAN HURT YOUR HEALTH IF YOU DON’T HAVE AN INFECTION
HAVING A CONVERSATION IN BABY TALK CAN SPEED UP AN INFANT’S LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
CAN EMSCULPT HELP YOU GET THE ABS YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED
WHY CLEAN EATING ISN’T GOING TO CLEAR UP YOUR SKIN
HAVING A BABY CAN AGE YOU ON A CELLULAR LEVEL
IT’S OFFICIAL: SCOOTERS CAN BE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH
THERE’S HIGH HOPES FOR “AM I STONED” APP TO STOP IMPAIRED DRIVERS
SICK OF THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET? CONSIDER THE NORDIC DIET
YOUR KITCHEN TOWELS ARE PROBABLY FULL OF BACTERIA
NUTS MAY HELP IMPROVE SPERM HEALTH
CALORIE COUNTS ARE NOW ON MENUS NATIONWIDE, BUT DO THEY WORK?
HOW THE CONTROVERSIAL ‘FEMALE VIAGRA’ MADE A COMEBACK
A HEALTHY DIET MAY HELP DELAY START OF MENOPAUSE
COULD KETO COFFEE HELP YOU LOSE WEIGHT?
I offer Person Julia Ries a few titles, gratis. She can fill in blanks in her online template to produce career-enhancing “think” pieces:
“Don’t Look Now: Speed Reading Tips for Skimming Books.”
“Are Vegetables the New Carbs?”
“Don’t Let Cats Encourage You To Over-Nap!”
“Why Bathing Isn’t the Answer to Dirty Fingernails”
“Once in Your Lifetime, Travel Through the Sahara by Boat”
“Thrill Pills: Is Science Closing in on the Orgasm Capsule?”
“Be Someone Else: Rotate Your Identity In Tune With Your Menstrual Cycle”
“Can Learning Esperanto Recharge Your Brain Power?”
“Hello Darkness My Old Friend: Paint It Black!”
“Looking for My Kid’s New Daddy. Who Can She Be?”
“I’d Like To Propose a Toast: Manzanita-Smoked, Lightly Singed Corn Muffin Slices with Mulberry Acai Jam”
“Are Your Eyelid Muscles at Risk from Bikram Yoga?”
“Please Don’t Say Please: Assertiveness Over Bourgeois Power-Relation Enforced Courtesy”
“Pair Your Favorite Chocolates With Z Blog”
G.D., Great titles, satire of course, but, except for the last one, I don’t doubt we’ll see them in print by some “intellectual” some day soon. God save us.
James, Thanks. My inspiration was the clickbait pieces in the British tabloids. Here’s (a real) one from today’s Daily Mail:
Head:
‘Keep your clothes on and make sure you eat’: HR expert shares five tips to make sure you leave the work Christmas party with your career (and reputation) intact
Subhead:
With work Christmas parties in full swing, HR expert Karen Gately and founder of Corporate Dojo, tells FEMAIL the five ways you can unwind and keep your career and reputation intact.
(Keep your clothes on and eat. Never would have worked that out myself! So glad we have experts to turn to.)
“The greatest skill is doing nothing while sounding essential.” The biggest handicap one can have in business today is ability. When combined with the propensity to avoid the herd mentality it can make for a quick ending to ones career. At the very least you will be required to attend some kind of behavioral modification seminar or anger management program. It is all marketing. The idea we as individuals are a brand is, I don’t know what. Maybe we are. It all seems so nebulous. Today’s reality, ridiculous.
Even worse, people with actual ability become too valuable to promote into worthless management jobs. They get shoehorned into dead-end jobs because they are irreplaceable.
A lot of parallels with the rottenest periods of imperial Chinese history. Just three for now:
(1) A sclerotic bureaucracy, knowing little of the “real world,” bolted right on top of a stultifying “education” system based on formulaic essays on official texts. Co-opted the best and brightest, and strangled innovation and reform.
(2) An explosion of official job titles, from the boringly bureaucratic, to the Orwellian avant la lettre, to the hilariously-florid-in-translation. Feel free to help yourself to Professor Charles Hucker’s 676 page A dictionary of official titles in Imperial China.
(3) Eunuchs. The eunuchs, originally brought in to avoid trouble with the concubines, became a sort of “Deep State,” viciously and womanishly fighting for power. They were ascendant in the most corrupt period of several dynasties, often preceding dynastic collapse.
See the key parallel to today’s Zman article? Today, women function like the eunuchs used to: sterile, hysterical, alternately simpering and vicious, dickless men with little knowledge of the despondent people outside the walls.
China’s only way out was revolution.
The eunuchs sound like a Eastern version of the praetorian Guard
Whitney;
Very limited parallel. Roman emperors didn’t have formal harems but their female relatives filled in for the eunuchs in being the source of the usual intrigue common to centralized power. The Praetorian Guard, OTOH, were picked Roman soldiers and most definitely not eunuchs. Originally they were the Caesars’ bodyguard and insurance against the Senators getting ideas.
Later on they were able to auction off the Imperial power on a few occasions. Ultimately they were disbanded and their leaders killed as an insurance policy by some bad-a**ed general from the provinces who had just overthrown his predecessor as Caesar.
Regional generals able to use their legions to contend for power were the usual source of regime change, not palace intrigues.
Babe R;
Interesting parallels. Imperial China had a wall against the barbarians on the other side, though.
Apparently our Mandarins are not that smart.
Barbarians from the Steppe were the usual source of regime change for China AFIK. Hard to see that happening to us, but maybe a unified set of Mexican Drug Cartels taking us over is the future.
A quibble on typography: Ms is not an abbreviation and it should not be written Ms., with a period. Ms was coined by some catalog company back in the 50’s or 60’s so they wouldn’t have to worry about Mrs. vs. Miss in the address.
By extension, the neologism Mx should not have a period either.
That’s a good point, mostly because I think dropping the period looks better.
La wik seems to disagree with your history.
Be that as it may, every normal English word has vowels. Words without vowels are always abbreviations, initialisms, or other types of modern semi-words. If they are abbreviations, they are marked with a period. (Yes I know that this usage is being effaced. Call me reactionary.)
“Ms.” is an abbreviation, abbreviating both “miss” and “mistress”. “Mx” is just ridiculous, the fever rambling of idiots who are resolved to fight human nature to the bitter end. I find it funnier written without a period. But if I wanted to use it as a serious word, I’d put a period on the end of it too.
Not in British usage; no period (which they call a ‘full stop’). And being Brits, they must be classier. Although Dorothy Sayers was right, single commas for quotes are stupid.
Shouldn’t it be Mxy to cover both sexes?
I vote “Myx”. Like a mutt. No offense meant to the dogs out there.
BOTH sexes? How quaint.
That’s true, many of the Mx’s don’t have periods.
Touché
Har!!
BC sent me an acceptance letter. THAT should take care of that ‘elite’ reputation they have.
I think it’s not as bleak as you think it is. Based on your writings, I suspect you’ve had extensive interface with Fortune 50 or 500 enterprises, here and abroad. Thus you are slightly handicapped in assessing the Small Business (25-1,000 employees) picture.
Those entities are usually headed by someone who does NOT ‘fit’ the Big Corporate mold; they are strong-minded hard chargers. Eventually, as Big Biz entropies (see GE), the small ones will become large (see Danaher–which 35 years ago was a zit on the ass of the elephants.)
All is not lost!!
PS: The Green Bay Packers will be using Korn-Ferry to recruit their next Head Coach. Should be worth about $300K in fees and expenses…..talk about girly-girl moves in what’s though of as a Manly Man business!!!
Try teaching in an affluent high school. If you even suggest that a state college or trade school would maybe be a better fit, you are looked at as an alien. That’s the elitism at its best. Also, these kids don’t work very hard at really learning anything of substance, just getting a score on the SAT or ACT is the goal.
I hearken back to the philosophers Dire Straits,
“Now look at them yo-yo’s that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and chicks for free”
Our country won’t go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won’t be any America—because some foreign soldiery will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race.–Chesty Puller
It’s good for us that the managerial class is becoming so isolated. They’ll be easier to bring down. Look at that little shit Macron. Can you imagine the conversations in those bureaucratic salons in Paris right about now?
FWIW, just for the hell of it, I ordered myself a yellow safety vest.
We see this every day even down here at dirt level. I have had grown adults as managers – come up and insist that I do what they themselves cannot, and will not do. Oh – and do it for free, or else!
I learned early in the game (the hard way) that the ‘or else’ option is usually the best. Then these morons were shocked and horrified when I walked away. Most of them end up getting fired and replaced with more of the same because our ‘leaders’ tend to hire people like themselves. It all starts at the top and it all rolls downhill.
I am a middle-manager with a project management title. I think most organizations have people like me. I get crap done by avoiding Marketing, Legal, and Human Resources as much as possible. I have a network of other people like myself in Commercial, Billing, Operations, IT, and the Regions. We are the ones who actually take the better ideas in the corporate strategy and make them happen – and nudge next year’s planning in the right direction while gently talking our leaders out of dumb ideas. We can talk the corporate jargon and debate return on investment with Finance without getting lost in the nonsense.
Almost all of us I can think of are over 40. It will be interesting to see if there is a crop of millennials to replace us eventually.
That’s the 20% rule. 20% of the people do 80% of the work and 80% of the people do 20% of the work. The 20% all know each other.
Thank you for your service..you and your colleagues, who actually get the work done, despite the efforts of HR, Legal and Health and Safety, will be the ones left after “the revolution” or wharever we want to call it, to put the pieces back together, and get things going again!
Predicting future of communism or as people in the West say, liberalism is very easy. Communism always runs out of other people money. Next major economy crisis is on the front door and this will be end.
Yes, there is a systemic error in how we produce elites, no doubt. I agree that that it has a lot to do with the idea that absurd jobs are part of the apprenticeship program these days. Turns out, neither “clever,” nor “smart,” are virtues; they are really bad attributes to select for if you’re interested in making a healthy state. I feel like someone has thought about this somewhere before.
Consider a society like medieval Spain. Whatever its own faults, the system insured that leaders certainly had the virtues of courage, wisdom, and justice: the business of reconquest made these necessary for success.
I’d argue the central task of a society is creating a process that selects for virtue in its elites.
>>>the central task of a society is creating a process that selects for virtue in its elites.
Excellent observation. I believe many here would agree that a society that does not (consciously or unconsciously) set up such a selective process will fail within a small number of generations, to be replaced by a society that does so select.
I think of the gamesmanship and box-ticking involved in Ivy League college admissions… and laugh. We’d be far better led by Army noncoms.
Instead of looking to Orwell or Huxley, maybe H.G. Wells would be better. I know they are imperfect but Well’s Time Machine gets some things right. The Eloi representing the ruling and indolent class and Morlocks the lower and working classes. One fears the other and separates from them. The other, seething hatred. ( ok, they eat them too).
Kind of a science fictionalized Coming Apart of America.
The Eloi representing the ruling and indolent class
I can only assume people who say things like that have never actually read The Time Machine.
The Eloi were literally human cattle for the Morlocks. They had the minds of children. They didn’t “rule” anything. They grazed indolently on bounty provided by the Morlocks — the technological and actual ruling class — and were periodically harvested for their meat.
H.G. Wells stated as much, the movie does a different take and the book less so. The impetus for the story is pretty much as I stated.
As for ruling, most of the cloud people now are not rulers and are as powerless as we are. Just better situated inside the walls.
But correct, less so than I stated.
“For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children — asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! It let loose the judgement I had suspended on their clothes, their frail light limbs and fragile features. A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.” — The Time Traveler in The Time Machine, H.G. Wells.
The cloud people do indeed rule. The fact that they don’t do it well does not diminish that.
Once the slave undertakes all the duties on which the master relies for survival then doesn’t the slave become the master? It is obvious to me that the Morlocks were the slaves supplying all the requirements of life to the Eloi but then one day they realized they had all the power, and that shift in perception was all that was needed.
Sure, once upon a time. But to refer to the Eloi as they are encountered as rulers is incorrect. “Distant descendants of rulers,” sure.
It’s easy for the older generation to complain about these upstarts and their new words. People want friends and a salary. If you see things as they are, you don’t get too far with young educated whites.
What can a girl like Julia Ries do with herself? Remember, she is female and girls really want to fit in. She did what people of her (intellectual, social) level do, which is to say she tried to get into a good university and succeeded. At university, she will have been surrounded by a load of garbage that was a lot easier to go along with than fight against. Disagreeing with those around you (thinking for yourself) is more of a male thing. There are very few women like the Z-Man.
She did what she was supposed to do and what biology led her to do. The only reason a millennial like me has not fallen for all this stuff is because I have low social needs and I was fortunate enough to start working for myself at an early age. If I had to work for other people, I’d have to at least pretend to be one of these drones, as my friends do.
She did precisely the opposite of what she should have done and what biology led her to do. She’s a fairly attractive young woman who, judging by her resume, is approaching age 30. There’s no indication in her work that she’s in a serious relationship, married, or has children.
She wasted the most important asset a young woman possesses: the beauty of youth. She should have spent her twenties prospecting for a mate, getting married, and then starting a family. Instead she’s wasted her prime formative years churning out meaningless drivel that nobody reads.
The Wall comes at women fast. In a few years she’ll be writing pieces about the melancholy of single life at the Holidays, a few years later come the articles complaining that men no longer pursue her, and then the articles about the peaceful joy of evenings alone with box wine and cats.
And its not just that she has wasted her best pro-civilization assets pursuing the clickbait and google algo nirvana, but it is that in the practice of such waste she has likely become an unsalvageable cog in the wheel of misfortune.
Hitting the wall indeed brings the boxed wine and accumulation of flings and fur babies.
But what i’ve also noticed with these women is that their ego-investment in their flimflam “careers” and the corresponding facade of status is a powerful toxin when it comes to relatjonship formation and thus healthy family formation.
They not only spend all their precious years doing basically nothing in these jobs but while doing so they unwittingly hone skills that make them unmarryable to the types of men who might be able to lead them into a life well lived. The social media, phone addiction, tinder slooting, and dopamine dragon chasing buttessed against the wall results in habituated hedonism and spiritual vacuum that cannot be undone.
The bitter pills of reality, no matter how liberating and life sustaining, are no match for SSRIs and pretty lies.
And the accumulating high self regard and prog activist creep inherent in the fake strong independent woman empire pretty much assures that the “equal partners” they claim to seek once the shine comes off their 20’s will be just like them.
So much so that the idea of submitting to male headship will be just as stomach turning as the idea of his potential crotch spawn
interfering with her ability to maintain the precious career she will come to despise.
Luckily most of these women know the cure: a tattoo and a yoga retreat to costa rica.
Agreed that she has wasted and continues to waste her narrow window to get married and have a family – something that 90%+ of women want.
That said, women have another biological need: Stay in the good graces of the tribe. Her tribe – the dominant tribe of our times – has told her since birth that she should get good grades, not be a racist, get a job, don’t rely on a man, etc. She has been told this by her parents, her teachers, if she went to church her pastor, the media, government officials, her professors, her employers, her friends, every single person of authority in her tribe has told her these things.
She’s just trying to please her tribe and family. That’s what women do. (In this case, it happens to be destroying her life, but she doesn’t know that.)
She’s also seen what happens to people who buck the tribe, and it’s not pretty.
Superb observation, Citizen!
” […] In a few years she’ll be writing pieces about the melancholy of single life at the Holidays, a few years later come the articles complaining that men no longer pursue her, and then the articles about the peaceful joy of evenings alone with box wine and cats.”
True, true. But when she writes that drivel, she’ll “whip up some powerful [articles] to create some buzz and [she’ll] punch things up.”
You may rely upon it. It’s who she is. It’s ALL she is.
I also think free-lance writing is pretty economically unstable.
Yep. In another era, Julia would have been a (happy) Church-going, stay-at-home mother of three because that’s what would have pleased her group at the time.
If she had been born to an upper middle-class White family in the South in early 20th century, she would have favored Jim Crow and felt it natural and right for blacks and Whites to be separated. (Btw, it’s interesting to note that Southern women back then didn’t worry about what the NYT said.)
Girls like Julia Ries are just doing what nature pushes them to do. White men men should no more complain about them than we should complain that blacks score low on any IQ test. It’s nature.
BTW, why don’t you guys send a link to this comment thread to Ms. Julia Ries?
I’m sure it will become a learning moment for her.
;>)
Send her a link to Chateau Heartiste .
That will give her a reason to retreat to her apartment with a few gallons of box wine.
Let’s all agree to stop reading the Zman for about a month. Until Christmas. We take a break now. Walk. Expose our minds to the wintry air. We come back refreshed. Maybe less cynical. We open all the unread Z posts and podcasts on Christmas morning like they were presents. It will be fun and, I believe, healthy. Let’s do this you guys. As an act of good faith, I’ll be the first one not to comment again until then. Who’s with me?!
Liberals love saying that Fox News/talk radio brainwashes clueless Boomers into being conservative, “voting against their own interests”. So if they left the “epistemic closure”, they’d see the light of progtopia. Perhaps, but a sizeable number of them would become realtalkers without Ben Shapiro-types to be gatekeepers.
The problem with trying to extrapolate from current trends is that current trends are so malleable. It would have been impossible to forecast the 2000s from the 1990s without knowing about 9/11 in advance. One terrorist attack, a presidential assassination or a market crash, and your assumptions go out of the window. If North Korea drops a nuke on us today, we will be concerned with a whole different set of problems tomorrow morning.
Through the years, I’ve noticed problems don’t get solved so much as they become obsolete as the action moves elsewhere. The cold war went away not because anyone had figured out how to solve it, but because the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight. The justice department quit hauling IBM into antitrust court not because they no longer have a monopoly on mainframe computers (which they do, more so than ever), but because mainframe computers have become a footnote in the technology market.
How our current ruling class will be ushered off the stage, I have no idea, but I suspect it will be through a confluence of circumstances, rather than any revolution. We don’t seem to be so good at taking effective action any more. The riots in France are amusing, but I doubt that in themselves they’re going much of an agent for change.
1. Reagan had the Cold War figured out. He quit subsidizing the USSR and forced it to compete. When it couldn’t, it fell apart. Sure, the leaders of the USSR helped out, but the trends were there.
No argument with the rest of it.
When it comes down to taking out a business or a country or nation-state in a preconceived way, the key is in recognizing a place where the marked organization has an exposed area it is unaware of or unprepared to defend. When Rome was sacked in 410 AD the barbarians entered the city via the aqueduct system and opened the gates. Pretty simple. But no one had thought of it before.
Sometimes weaknesses get exploited completely by accident and it is only in retrospect that what happened is realized, and even then one can’t be certain of the mechanism. A kind of natural selection.
2. One thing I keep coming back to is the dirt/cloud thing. As time passes, the cloud people become more cloudy, so to speak, more removed from reality. They can get away with this because they don’t have to deal with the consequences of their craziness as they would if things were in a more technically primitive state. I think that at some level the elites are vaguely aware of this and the sustainability craze is in part not only a means of increasing control, but also a hazy recognition that things that cannot go on forever won’t.
At some point the people who actually make society work are going to recognize this and demand a say in how it works, and in what direction it will go politically. This sounds very Marxist, but so what? Class consciousness matters. It may not matter the way Marx thought it would, and it may not be the class he thought it would be, but it does. And that class might be dominated by a certain race of people, too. But it won’t be pure, and it won’t put up with idiotic purity spiralling. It will be too busy fighting for survival and a voice.
I have never been able to shake off the statement of Henry Sumner Maine that “The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract”, and that our current problem with managerial elites is a bit of a hiccup in this progression, a hiccup in a series of hiccups.
There is something in all of us that sees a basic justice in being treated equally. There is also in most a latent potential for a desire to be either a supreme ruler or to be one in an elite. These are part of the irreconcilablity of the human condition that plays itself out through the ages. Cycles. Pendula.
Globohomo and the current elitism we see today may be the far swing of the pendulum in the direction of international aristocracy similar to the old regime of Europe when ruled by royal families. Populism may be the swing in the opposite direction. But there may be other factors in play, spicing up the stew.
It may just be that the only way we can keep the flow going from status to contract is in maintaining more homogenoous societies. I mentioned earlier the sustainability thing. Also note how libs in business and education insist on people fitting in with the “culture” of their enterprise. They think they can achieve a form of homogeneity that will sustain itself by getting people to agree on a checklist of current virtues. What they don’t seem to take into account is how various individuals or groups are going to react when those virtues change, as they always do. Their problem is keeping racially and sexually diverse people on the same page ideologically while wielding power over people who think they are incompetent, crazy, or simply hate them.
So my bottom line is this: dirt people will at some point decide that they are a class of people which is predominantly but not entirely white and call bullshit on the current system. Their distaste for what has been going on will be such that they will mark out certain classes for absolute destruction. That destruction may be done in a variety of subtle ways, and may not involve any violence whatsoever. It may simply be a matter of starving people out and seeing them deported. One big war might be won by simply not sending kids to university, or taking over tha armed forces, and staging a coup. Who knows? But those people will not be without any philosophical guidance whatsoever. They will develop it themselves, and will work through it until it arrives at its own point of self contradiction generations down the road. But they will strive toward seeing each other as equals before whatever laws they come up with, even as they exclude some groups from the process as being either ideologically or demographically incompatible with such a regime.
Color me skeptical about Reagan’s contribution to the cold war. It never made sense to me that the Soviet Union collapsed after Reagan left office, when the Soviets could well have anticipated a better deal under Bush.
It’s possible Reagan’s strategy sped up the collapse by a few years, but conservatives had been pointing out since the 1950’s, quite correctly, that the Soviet system was unsustainable and would eventually collapse under its own weight. Then it did exactly that, and now they’re taking credit for it.
I like Reagan as much as the next guy, but that’s laying it on a little too thick even for me.
Quote one conservative who in the 1950’s predicted that the USSR would collapse under it’s own weight.
Asking for a friend.
Look up Herbert Meyer. Most of the CIA had the conventional view that the Russians were still growing economically in the 70s and 80s and that trajectory would continue. Meyer was one of the first guys to start noticing that non-traditional sources of intelligence indicated something different and was green lighted by Casey to create something of an intel skunk works to develop alternate viewpoints on the Soviet economy. Meyers group drew the conclusion that the underpinnings were rotten…they were right and the conventional thinkers were wrong.
Looked him up. No wikipedia bio. Still working at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Was in Reagan admin. Doubt he was running around in the 1950’s telling everyone we could win the cold war. He’d be over a hundred years old.
Black identity politics will end as Hispanics take power, since Hispanics are unencumbered by any form of white guilt and have wants of their own. Sounds about right!
Works on the local level too. Local elites go to a big state college, attend a middle class church, rotary club, etc…
I think this is an entirely different brand of elite.
That doesn’t seem so bad honestly. The families at the middle class church are the people the local government exists to serve. That kind of relationship might actually facilitate good government.