Arguably, one of the most important political concepts to come out of the 20th century was James Burnham’s theory of managerialism. It is important mostly because it is a set of accurate observations that allow for a further understanding of what is happening in Western societies since the Second World War. Once you understand that our society is organized like a corporation, with senior management and a large layer of middle-management, things make much more sense.
The trouble is most people do not want to see this. Instead, they indulge in reductionist theories about secret cabals manipulating the system. Others pretend that the system is what is advertised and you just have to vote harder. Still others insist we have drifted into something randomly called socialist, Marxist or communist, not because the system possesses these qualities, but because those words are epithets. Despite being incredibly useful, the concept is hardly used.
One reason for this is the managerial class controls access to that which has value in modern society. If you want your ideas to get heard, you must pass muster with the people who keep the gates of the system. Just as in a corporation, you are not going to get to speak your mind around the bosses if they are not going to like what you have to say about them. Management always gets conservative about its position within the organization which means it is naturally defensive.
Another reason this idea languishes on the fringe is that most political commentary comes from mediocrities excluded from the elite track. The commentariat is populated with people unqualified to run a hotdog stand. As you see in the dreaded private sector, middle-management tends to be a cheering section in this system. Unlike a private company, the managerial class never has to worry about making a profit, so the cheering section can be stuffed to the gills.
There is also the fact that the commentariat is devoid of people who have experience in the dreaded private sector. Someone like Sohrab Ahmari struggles to understand managerialism because he never read the source material and he has no idea what goes on inside a company. He cannot see the parallels between the corporation and the corporate state. It is extremely hard to use a concept when you do not understand it and lack the capacity to comprehend it.
Interestingly, the people at the top of the managerial class and especially those seeking to reach the top are ignorant of the concept. They have achieved class consciousness to the extent that they naturally identify with the others in their class. They mark themselves with their dress, their language and political beliefs. The latter jumps out at the lower ranks where they tend to embrace the most extreme versions of elite opinion as a way to gain attention from the bosses.
The idea that animates the people in the system comes from Gramsci. They seek to control the centers of cultural production and they are aware of it. They want to control official truth in all areas of society. They do not see themselves as controlling access to and the benefits that are derived from property, capital or information, even though that is exactly what they are doing. Controlling institutions is about controlling access to what is valuable within the domain of the institution.
This means the managerial class has achieved class consciousness, in that they consciously identify with those in their class. They see themselves as distinct from the rest of society. On the other hand, they suffer from false consciousness in that they think they are motivated by altruistic reasons, like the spread of liberal democracy, individual freedom and equality. In reality, these social causes are a defense mechanism to protect their power over society.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Background
- The Terms
- Marxism
- Burnham’s Innovation
- Managers
- The Managerial Class
Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed
Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On Odysee
You tried to kill the Jews. Dummies. Jews can’t be killed. Not all of them. Now they’re killing you and you can’t handle it. That’s why you’re all here. Typing away like neurotic lost-cause secretaries of the realm. Hitler’s lost-cause bitches. Your little brother beat you up and you can’t get over it. You had your chance in 1940 and blew it. Cry cry cry .
Good ol’ Frip!
Worse, brah. They told us the plan, and we ignored it.
The people are the body of a church. Likewise, they are the body of a nation.
The Antichrist arrived, and seated his throne in Jerusalem, to rule the world with the false peace, as he said he would do.
The Antichrist arrived in 1948.
The nation of Israel is the Antichrist.
Very informative podcast this on Managerialism.
It’s nice to register a return to one high-brow theme in place of the lighter commentary on deranged press articles – although very funny indeed – of the past few weeks.
I have to find Burnham’s book.
I read this in the introductory piece though: Once you understand that our society is organized like a corporation, with senior management and a large layer of middle-management, things make much more sense. The trouble is most people do not want to see this. Instead, they indulge in reductionist theories about secret cabals manipulating the system.
I don’t see how the proliferation of middle managers, who inside the podcast are compared to intermediaries in business transactions, would exclude the presence of a cabal of very powerful individuals whose behaviors the middle managers imitate and mindlessly conform to.
That is, I cannot see an argument here so much overwhelmingly in favor of the emergent behavior of the Cathedral, that can completely dismiss the presence of a cabal hetero-directing things by nudging, here and there, emergent trends in the directions of the cabal’s choice.
The organic growth of the managerial governmental system out of capitalism is said to recall the growth of capitalism out of old feudalism. Suggestive, but while capitalists managed to propel mankind a long stretch forward harnessing the power of technology, what exactly governmental (and corporate) middle managers are going to contribute to humanity, with their own “managerial revolution”? The custodian State, yes, but anything else of substance that can concretely improve quality of life?
I mean, is the acknowledgement of the extent Managerialism able to reveal the hierarchy within the Elites? To me, managers look just another layer of servants.
If a Cloud person holds some kind of managerial position, I don’t think it adds that much to his personal power. It’s just a title, like the titles of nobility of yore, baron or marquess or esquire.
An example is Anderson Cooper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrmwLFi0v5s. A Cloud person, could be argued he has the credentials to be part of the higher cabal.
He probably will never be touched by scandals, and his prestige among the Clouds, being Old Money, goes much beyond his mass media prominence, his inter-sectionality or his progressive views.
I mean, is the acknowledgement of the extent Managerialism able to reveal the hierarchy within the Elites?
Should be
I mean, is the acknowledgement of the extent Managerialism has spread across society able to reveal the hierarchy within the Elites?
What’s being manigerialized in the YUK is the cops, they ain’t copping no-one. The cars batteries run out.
https://www.westernjournal.com/electric-police-cars-running-juice-way-rural-emergencies/
“I am down to six miles of battery on the Tesla, so I may lose it here in a sec,” he radioed at the time. “If someone else is able, can they maneuver into the number one spot?”
The suspect being chased got away,
No shit Sherlock.
This is in a Country of 1200 sq miles: area if a square 35 x 35 miles.
County not country.
Heavy acceleration is a great way to rapidly run down the charge on EV batteries.
Rapidly pulling all that current out of the cells is a great way to set oneself up for overheating issues. Trying to shove chage back into the cells can produce similar effects.
The opening music is redolent of Firing Line. But Buckley never lived up to the genius of the Brandenburg Concertos and should have opened his weekly talkshow with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0CyOAO8y0&list=PLyN0GYQy_cl-4bxf6AbEJvs1ahNcdsrPQ
Weekend Whitepill #1:
Due to spiraling youth unemployment, the Chicoms are literally telling their college grads to go forth to smaller cities and rural areas and decentralize:
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/china/unemployment-growing-among-chinese-youth/
That is a remarkable directive from a group that are arguably the #1 statists and centralizers on the planet. It also flies in the face of the globalists’ Agenda 2030/Smart Cities goals.
Weekend Whitepill #2:
Elon has forced Twitter to admit that their account review process has no automation, AI, or machine learning, just some humans randomly sampling 100 accounts per day:
https://nypost.com/2022/07/15/elon-musk-responds-to-meritless-twitter-suit-says-he-wants-to-push-trial-back-to-2023/
So, it is abundantly clear that Twitter has been pulling a fast one all along. I think this admission also supports my contention that much of what is being batted around as, “AI,” are simply somewhat improved algorithms powered by the sheer brute force of incredibly powerful, cheap, and reliable computing hardware.
Z: “Arguably, one of the most important political concepts to come out of the 20th century was James Burnham’s theory of managerialism.”
You often see this error in ranking talk. “Arguably” is needed if you’re saying something was at the very top. E.g. “THE best” or “THE most influential”. Or you specify the number of top spots, e.g. “Top 3 of all time.” But when you say “One of the most”, you’re giving the subject enough breadth that there’s no argument. No knowledgeable person would disagree.
Incorrect: “Star Wars was arguably one of the most influential movies of the 70’s.”
Correct: “Star Wars was one of the most influential movies of the 70’s.”
Correct: “Star Wars was arguably the most influential movie of the 70’s.”
Downvote for writing nonsense that has no relevance to the thread
What we’re trying to do here is understand society in order to change it. So far the focus has been on identifying the locus of power, which is not necessarily the elected leaders. Allow me to summarise what I see as the general picture, which is certainly influenced by this site, but I think is significantly different.
For want of an outright dictator, power is generally seen as concentrated in the covert machinations of a disparate collection of individuals, ruled by intellect, and vaguely but nor formally connected through ideology (called around here the elites or the Cloud people). I’ve always argued that these people surely exist but not as a coordinated cabal. They rise and fade according to opportunity and fashion and they bubble up from the cauldron below, which is the middle classes, on account of their showmanship or their confidence (measured by their ability to give presentations in a managerial setting).
The middle classes are characterised around here as inert and apathetic or busy grilling things, but they are also the ideology factory ruled by their emotions, which is an entirely different way of looking at it. Empowered by social media, through which every individual voice can be heard, the sufficiently shrill can start a movement that can lead to hysteria.
At the bottom there’s the groundswell, those ruled more by instinct rather than emotion or intellect. These are generally ignored, as I think Marx ignored the peasantry, but instinct has a power of its own, especially through the megaphone of the media, and can be a ladder to the top. Point is, they are all part of the system and I don’t think any analysis can ignore any part of it.
How to change things the way we want, for example immigration? Perfectly rational arguments against it don’t work, which means we are up against emotion, which means we are up against the middle classes. The middle classes have enough leisure to nurture their emotions and enough intellect for emergent ideology. Their ideology, as far as I can see, assumes that, because THEY have enough, there is enough to go round for everyone. It’s simple Piagettian egocentricity – assuming that everyone else sees everything from one’s own perspective. They influence things in their own bubble – which is often their own corporation – exerting a downward-hierarchical pressure to conform (exactly as do dictatorships), which I assume is the point about managerialism. To that extent, today’s article is much nearer the practical nub of the power-flux issue than I have seen before (which tended to obsess about the elites).
The solution, to my mind, is to control bourgeois emotion. Reason doesn’t work, so they have to be controlled BY emotion. They need to FEEL the immorality. That will happen naturally when their precious utopia breaks down. How to do it before then? The plan around here seems to be to install a new set of elites with Zed/Alaric at the head (if the banner is a hint) to surreptitiously pull the strings of society through the media. That could only work if you believe in the plenipotentiary of the elites, which I don’t. The solution ought to be the emergence of a leader of the necessary charisma and wisdom, but I doubt modern society is capable of throwing up such a person.
Hope this has helped, but at this point I throw up my hands.
I agree that effective leaders exist in all societies and all eras, and the ideal is that these men will eventually rise to the top. In the hunter-gatherer tribes of old, this was the model because everyone in the tribe knew everyone else and when something “worked” it was immediately obvious to all. But then civilization happened and things got muddy. A good king was often succeeded by a derelict son because the “system” did not allow for the highly competent peasant to rise up.
Today, things are much worse. Our political system is now geared to promote corrupt showmen and con men to the highest levels of government. And incumbency is guaranteed by vote bribing of the stupid, who willingly sells his vote for a pittance. The problem isn’t that there are no good men, but that the force and inertia of government ensures that they will never rise.
The solution is to drive off the disease cells until only good men are left to take the helm. Hard truth, but ancient wisdom.
well thought out but you miss two points. the middle classes emotions are controlled by the 6 hours a day of media they consume . one picture of a drowned child caused every woman and simp man in Germany to weep uncontrollable and demand that Merkle open the borders to Europe . which they happily did . the media play the emotions of the masses like a violin . that’s why there are no videos available on YouTube of the hundreds of burning and semi roasted people jumping off the twin towers in agony to end their suffering . I saw them after the attack , but they disappeared like a fart in a hurricane because it made people mad at forces the media didn’t want them mad at .
secondly they have been organized for over 70 years. The organizations are the club of Rome , run by H. Kissinger, and it’s successor, World Economic Forum run by Kissinger’s friend Klaus Schwab.
The middle classes […] are also the ideology factory ruled by their emotions
Even though it sounds very sweeping, the above quote may very well be true. After all, the mere suggestion -as it is divulged by media- that agreeing to patriotic opinions or to anything Donald Trump says associates you with the dregs of society, is enough to achieve complete mental control of these people. I remember what it was like.
“today’s article is much nearer the practical nub of the power-flux issue than I have seen before (which tended to obsess about the elites).”
Totally agree. I would that the Zman do more, a lot more, in this vein.
His strengths really shine here.
This one lit my happy ass right up! Excellent.
I think this may be a great illustration of Zman’s point:
“”An official at the FDA put it this way: “I can’t tell you how many people at the FDA have told me, ‘I don’t like any of this, but I just need to make it to my retirement.’”
Without the order followers, the ticket takers, and the soul sellers, the cabal could never have brought their plans into fruition as far as they have.”
Do you think the assholes saying that realize they are allowing/perpetrating mass murder?
They scrupulously avoid that line of thought. They are orobably capable of drawing the syllogisms, but weakness intercedes. I watch enough “true crime” productions to know that this is all too common a course of action, whether from fear, or from some concern for the well being of themselves, or that of those who rely upon the individual in question. It is tempting to cast all of the blame on the individual, but the systems within which they must move, and over whose course they functionally cannot exert any influence, can instill a sort of learned helplessness. And that is unfortunately often the desired outcome by their superiors who wish to generate an air of menace in those over whom they have authority and influence over their career. This certainly doesn’t exonerate the individual, but it places their decisions and actions within a marrix of challenges.
Sucks, eh?
That should be “probably”, and “matrix”, of course.
Their current internal dialog is trying to rationalize away their complicity in mass murder and crimes against humanity.
“It’s not like I pulled the trigger!”
“I was just following orders!”
Uh huh.
I got news for you overeducated motherfuckers. You’re witnessing a genocide. Right in front of you, but you can’t see it. Sad shit, right there.
Yeah, but it’s the other guy.
Guess everyone thinks their gonna be one of the 500,000,000 allowed to live by the people perpetrating said genocide.
Dennis , you are correct . the WEF wants a very small number of easily managed peasants . If you read the book or revelation in the bible about the end times , it will make your hair stand up it is crazy accurate description of what is going on.
I think that the managerial state with the associated banksters grew so large and resentful of having to share the goods from the capitol that they regulated that they began to meet and discuss what to do about the great unwashed. I believe they probably got to gather and said to one another “now that we have automation and AI, why dont we get rid of all those useless eaters taking so much of OUR stuff to keep going? “. after decades of planning , I think they finally decided to implement their plan. I’d guess they would meet at a small mountain village so access could be tightly controlled. I’m sure they invited some of the politicians who worked for them to attend every year. then , they unleashed the plan to make sure that the peasants would own absolutely nothing . and the managers were happy
All of the mid 20th century ideologies – socialism, communism, fascism – are not accurate comparisons of what the so-called “elites” are trying to create for us. Of all of these comparisons, Mussolini fascism is probably the closest analog. But even it is not a good analogy. Managerialism is probably the best description of the current system and I consider Robert McNamara to be one of early creators of it. We had the managerial state in the 1950’s and 1960’s, which began to break down in the early 1970’s. It was largely discredited by the time Reagan came into office.
However, information technology has led to its resurgence starting around 1995 or so. I would call it information age managerialism, and yeah, I absolutely hate it. It does appear to be breaking down in the last year or so. This make me think we’re in for another 1970’s like decade. Not a repeat of the 1970’s (I don’t expect bell bottom pants to came back, for example, or all of the tacky styles) but rather it will rhyme with the 1970’s.
I’d take another embarrassment like Vietnam over bellbottoms, TBO.
A pair of well-fitted Angel Flights? Ohhh yeah. Bring ’em back, along with muscle cars, Aerosmith concerts, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Streaking! Every halftime was waiting for the streaker!
I wouldn’t rule out bell bottoms. I see a lot more women and girls wearing those thick soled sandal type shoes that were popular with gals back in the 70’s. Also making a seeming comeback are the old canvas style Keds that were staple footwear when i was a kid…
Well I think TPTB have another ‘Nam repeat on deck, embassy rooftop evacuation and all.
Didn’t we just do that?
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria
And now Ukraine.
Told yesterday get shit togeather
Standing up an FRA
Doing it again.
If only I still believed.
X is not only more complex than we understand
X is more complex than we can understand
Haldane
Thinking back, when Ray Manzarak joined Exene, John Doe, DJ Bonebrake, and Billy Zoom on stage, that was peak rock and roll. Los Angeles has to be one of the most in-your-face songs ever recorded.
All these years reading your comments and I never knew you were a boomer. Sad!
“Peak rock” happened somewhere nobody noticed, while a band that would never be famous played to an empty bar in full daylight.
It probably happened in the mid ’90s.
Not a boomer. Gen X. We are legion. Grunge killed rock, along with Rrrriot Grrrrls
Peak rock and disco was 1978. Best year in music.
Uh, GenX is much smaller than the Boomers or Millennials.
The grunge scene had extremely strict self-limitations built into it from day one. They were always going to sell out after a few years of success.
Neil Young’s [asshole, but musically…..] Rust Never Sleeps, cf. Powderfinger, was the fin de siècle dirge
of the Rock era.
I find it interesting how back in the day – you had people like Gene Kelly or Jim Garner who supported liberal causes – but still seemed like normal all american guys. Did the left lose its ability to self discipline?
That what happened with the “managerial class ” after Second World War is simply bound to happen. Its natural result of the. winning side of this war .It was inevitable. Every other explanation is nothing but a pointless babble. If you want different results, you must have taken the opposite side in the Second World War.
Results would have been bad regardless of who won WW2, just in different ways. I would argue that truly the wrong side truly lost WW1. If the central powers win WW1, WW2 almost certainly never happens. Tens of millions of Europeans never get slaughtered and we see more robust populations today. The Germans don’t go stark raving mad with guilt. Perhaps Europe doesn’t import tens of millions of refugees. Maybe the US never becomes the world’s sole super power with the ability to export its corrupt globalism.
Don’t you realise that Usa fight on the side of Stalin and Mao in Second World War?? Do you know who this two represent ?? Comintern .Do you know what that mean .Communist International. Usa fight on their side in the most important war in last 200 years after Napoleon wars and you are asking yourself questions like “what happened with our Christian European civilization may happen anyway. Not.. It happened because of our wrong choice. The greatest blunder ever in the history of Christian nations in last 1700 years .Constantin made Eastern Roman empire Christian in 325 .That started all modern European history. We simply choose that path.To change that path will take as same amount of blood proportionally to the population as it take last time. Minimum .To change our path we have to say publicly, the majority of us. THAT WAS Mistake. We choose the wrong enemy .Do you know in war sometimes you can win the battle, but actually lost the war in the end with very wrong choices. That is what happened to Usa and European Christian ancient countries. We won the battle but lost the war .Everything what followed after Second World War is inevitable. THIS BOOKS ON THE MANAGERIAL CLASS ARE NOTHING BUT POINTLESS WRITINGS .Hitler and Rosenberg predicted what is going to happen if they lost even 15-20 years before the Second World War. It is in black and white in their writings .They clearly predicted today Usa and Europe and disgusting cultural and moral emptiness and madness of today .They predicted it as clear as bright day,what will happen if they lost .Just read it .General Paton understood what mistake we made in first weeks after the war .He was real, but real Genius.
Sorry General Patton .For misspelling YOUR NAME .IT BOTHERS ME .
Another great podcast. Educational, enlightening, and esoteric knowledge of which I was substantially unaware. But now what?
Of what use is this unique knowledge? Do we really have the luxury of absorbing some random arcane history just for general interest? Are we supposed to use this newfound information in yet another attempt at persuading others to reacquire sanity. Does this knowledge inspire innovative thinking that may lead to a novel remedy? When the house is on fire, does a lecture on fire prevention have any immediate value? As the spring winds tighter, and the economy/inflation turns the screw, methinks people are going to start looking for solutions rather than ruminations.
I don’t think there is a solution. As many have said, including Machiavelli, every society is cyclical regardless of its system of government. For some time it is virile and achieves peace and prosperity through strength, then those goods weaken the society and it declines. You are here.
All we can do is observe and prepare. And record for posterity, I suppose. Things won’t get better until they get bad enough to make the poz untenable.
Think about it this way: how would anyone have fixed Rome circa 350? It was too far gone. Human affairs are like a force of nature, sometimes all you can do is duck for cover like you would a cyclone.
This may be true, and if so, then the personal goal for each of us should then be to go out like a gladiator in the ring. Fight it out with all your heart and soul, and let the chips fall where they may. Die with a sword in your hand knowing that you gave all you had to give and let that example be your legacy. The famous motto . . . “Today is a good day to die” . . . spoken with pride and a stiff back, should be your last words.
We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, who survived great hardship so that our genetics would persist. We should honor that inheritance with a display of courage equal to that achievement. We were built by our ancestry to move and prevail against long odds. Win or lose, go out like a man. And fuck the society that lacks this spirit.
Boots on
In a pile of hot brass.
Sorry, but depending on circumstances, that’s just insane suicidal talk. Should the last of the Trojans have just stood their ground and been slaughtered after the Greeks breached the walls? Or was Aeneas right to lead survivors to found a new settlement? The new world was filled with groups forced out of the Europe in the early colonial days. Joseph Cotto recently wrote a book about the Huguenots doing exactly that in Florida, and talked on Greg Hood’s podcast about how this could serve as a template for dissidents in the current age.
The valorous die but one death, the coward dies a thousand. You sure you want to pass on those genes to your offspring, assuming any woman would willingly mate with you.
Great rational retort. The stupid don’t pass on their genes either.
To what extent extent is “managerialism” just another obscurant word. Or put it another way to what extent is managerialism itself the problem and to what extent is it really women, j-ws, female j-ws, homos, j-w homos etc. There’s definitely a comorbidity here.
I tend to fall on the side of not finding all of this durable enough to warrant a precise and lasting definition. So I think you and I are in agreement in not wanting to make too big a deal on the terminology.
And for me it’s obvious that the managerial state came into being because of surplus wealth. No surplus wealth, no managerial state. So I see it as more of a sorry effect of things rather than a cause of things. If money is tight and controlled you don’t get these kinds of managerial state problems.
You have a nice and efficient system. Sort of like plant life in Southern California. The plants and flowers are intricate and beautiful and get on fine with the little amount of water they get, from the atmosphere, morning dew, perhaps something of a water table. But when there is a sudden rain, they don’t prosper and get stronger and become hardier or more special. No, all you get are a bunch of ugly weeds.
I see the managerial state as these weeds. Stop overwatering the soil and you will instead get a much better and higher quality level of plant life.
1000%, Falcone.
I used to blame the overpopulation and pollution (same thing) spilling over our borders on white success- we gave the wogs plastic trash that they were not prepared, mentally, to handle.
But no. The excesses of corporatism are solely due to the inflationary effects of imaginary money.
It no longer reflects weight or worth; it fuels ruinous expansion breaking natural limits.
The fiat is the sugar feeding the cancer.
No war loans, no global wars, no global piracy, no druglord dollars. No corporatism or Green New Deal.
Well, women and other (((immigrants))) have been in America since the early 18th but Managerialism has only really taken off in the last eighty years, so it should be pretty obvious which variable is the one most on play.
A bit of crow and its aquired taste, but I was hastily dismissive and rude to Le Comte, D. Heretic, and Outdoorspro yesterday. Wrong tone, wrong approach, I regret it and apologize.
Re JFK Jr., he probably flew home nearly every day; knowing the lethal history of all things Clinton, I don’t think his crash was merely a connivance.
I think it was a statement, a message.
The Kennedy dynasty was finished, and with it, the last shreds of the old American system. Nothing but raw power and no-holds-barred grudge matches by gauche criminals left.
Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, the list is long, are formulaic:
“Oh No! Look at what they are doing Now!”
“They” can be Liberals, Luciferins, mangers, something unidentified so it can’t be combated.
The thing is presented as fate accompli. Thus it is gets accepted as irredeemable.
The audience just gets another load of emotion, that sinking feeling, well it’s too late now, nothing we can do, we’ve lost again.
But see here, there are real people doing real things. They can be combated. Bad doings are reversible.
We can act to our own good outcomes. .
Take the beatings until the other guy gets exhausted. Wouldn’t want to be evil, like THEM, right?
The beatings will continue until morale improves, and morale is so low right now everything is backwards. Can hardly blame people for expecting to lose, or trying to make losing out to be a path to victory, but it’s still frustrating, hard to take, and hard to not mock.
Mocking and its cousins irony and critique, are potent as a Saxon sword. They have to be used consciously. One has to wield the pen without becoming tattooed. Yes? The ironybro is a given up pose, which is to be rejected. Strengthen useful meaning-frames for us; destroy enemy meaning-frames. The enemy seeks to wrap their meaning frame upon us, we reject that. We establish own beneficial frame as the superior overarching frame.
Optimism is a force multiplier. We do have winning options. By keeping that in mind we are more likely to execute upon those and to conceive of even better options. As leading men we have contagious optimism.
The enemy cooked up the winning by losing plan. They themselves pursue the winning is winning plan.
“The enemy cooked up the winning by losing plan. They themselves pursue the winning is winning plan.”
Why I was ambivalent about accelerationism. Losing is losing, but it does eventually light a fire under self-respecting people. Hard to watch, though.
Agreed on all points.
The managerial class has made the US one of the most unproductive places in the world. The managers all live off of us and what is left of our productivity and what is left of the wealth we once possessed. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the American managerial revolution really got started as America began to wind down as an industrial and economic powerhouse.
I was born into a world where Americans had, by a very large margin, the highest standard of living in the world. In every way that could be measured, Americans were far better off than any other people in the world. This was only 50 years ago. America was so productive we could import raw materials from the other side of the globe, transform those materials into manufactured goods and then ship them to the other side of the globe and sell it for less than a local manufacturer could. Today, it is more cost efficient to ship American grown cotton to China and have them process the cotton into socks and t-shirts and then ship them back to the US. That is largely because we have to support this enormous class of “managers” and all their retarded rules.
Great show. I hope there will be a part 2.
Part 2 is the smoldering ruins of that once great country
We are living it now
I think Part 3 is what is going to mean something and that is years out
I used to not want to die for reasons as simple as I didn’t want to miss out on what great technological achievements were going to come, flying cars, visiting other planets. Now I am more bothered that I may. It get to see western civilization reclaim its greatness. Part 3.
The robotic space exploration technology is actually pretty impressive, the problem is that its overshadowed by all the other technology developed that just makes everyone miserable: smartphones, ubiquitous spy cameras, and man-made viruses.
Yes to your observations.
People talk about loafers on relief, but there are no more effective scammers than bureaucratic scammers, and no more pernicious parasites to be observed; they constantly contrive to sustain, nay, intensify the freeloading through surreptitious apologia for their fecklessness and waste.
That chinese-made clothing supply chain example is only possible because our tax dollars subsidize the whole agreement. Products would never travel around the world safely and cheaply without our tax payer funded US navy guarding all the trade routes for free. If china was required to protect the trade routes themselves, the products would be too expensive. We’re 30 trillion in debt partially because it was cheaper to use china.
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Zman, how could you betray your Nazis?!
Both heads of my double-headed eagle hang in shame!!
Okay, the double eagle is Polish, but still…
Quite intriguing, really. I’d like to see more of this expanded on by both the Z and Captain Willard. I like the idea that even conspiratorial cabals and cartels are more ruled by their own structure than rulers of it.
That would make them predictable.
Perhaps…exploitable. Can we use that to better the interests of white people?
Alzaebo: “I like the idea that even conspiratorial cabals and cartels are more ruled by their own structure than rulers of it.”
You simply cannot begin to understand “managerialism” without acknowledging the underlying psychological engine which is Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder.
PAPD is the meta-sociological cancer of end stage civilizations.
PAPD destroys everything in its path.
All you can hope to do is to stay out of its path, and watch it self-immolate from afar.
And woe be unto the ostensible Free-Thinker who believes anything constructive can come from standing athwart history and yelling, “Stop!”, at the Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex.
Unless you’re a stalinist, that’s simply a fool’s errand.
It might do some good to repeal the Civil Service Act of 1883 [and e.g. the Lloyd–La Follette Act of 1912, and the reform act of 1978, etc etc etc], but I doubt the Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex would allow you to do that; they’d likely have you assassinated shortly after you first announced your intention to repeal the act.
Ergo the 21st Century Patrick Henry must confess: “Give me stalinism, or give me Death.”
And if you don’t have the gonads to be a Patrick Henry, then keep to the shadows, and watch it all self-immolate from afar.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
The double-headed eagle is Byzantine/Austrian/Russian. The Polish and German eagles have one head.
One thing I constantly see in my corner of the world is the utter cultural ignorance of the PMC.
I feel like I see the same thing in Brandon’s treatment of and trip to Saudi.
Americans have this very snarky, sarcastic, even snotty way of speaking to each other. They also have an expectation the other party will ignore or even return insults in kind.
Most of the rest of the world does not communicate in this fashion. Especially Gulf Arab cultures like the Saudis.
On top of that, the GAE PMC is constantly hectoring the Saudis about going green and slurping more alphabet soup.
So, because of the ideologically driven cultural stupidity there is already a ton of baggage dragging down the situation.
On top of this, there are the very real issues of selling valuable physical commodities to the GAE for increasingly worthless FRNs, the crap performance of GAE armaments versus the Houthis, and GAE’s terrible treatment of its so-called allies.
I won’t be surprised when Saudi announces they will join BRICS and sell oil in a variety of currencies, probably within weeks, maybe even days.
I’ve been hearing the term “brics” being thrown around again lately. People seem to forget the B is Brazil, the I is India and the S is South Africa. Russia and China are the only real powers in this BRICS thing. Yes, Russia and China are formidable powers, but that’s it. India has an average IQ in the low 80s. it’s a 3rd world country. South Africa is, well, South Africa aspiring to be a 3rd world country and Brazil is a Latin American 3rd world country. China and India don’t even like each other and each would be happy to see the other nuked into the stone age.
BRICS will be commodities based. Those players have tons of that and will thus dictate to much of the world the price and so forth. That’s the power of that confederation. Now sure, you will need white people to turn those commodities into something people want, inventions, etc. but they might have all of us over a barrel.
And they will be getting richer and richer while we get poorer. At some point the IQ line intersects with the productivity/ROI line and if the lines start altering you could find that a 95 IQ is sufficient to generate significant ROI because they control the commodities. And in turn our collective IQ might even fall if it isn’t being stimulated by access to materials for us to express our inventive genius etc.
Sudden Prosperity and spurts in intellectual development seem to work in tandem, like water dropped onto a starving flower, and it may also be the reverse where poverty results in our getting dumber or we get overtaken by weeds So the idea of BRICS is that it is looking toward a brighter future, and that cannot be discounted, where we are looking at stagnation and decline.
At least that is the writing in the wall. Not saying it is permanently etched in stone.
Brilliant insight there, Falcone, although it might as well be etched in stone. When high IQ individuals cannot accept reality, two things happen: IQ drops while reality stays. To borrow from Z, reality is the one thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.
I once made the category error of thinking the fantastical beliefs of the intelligentsia were formulated and pressed as a control mechanism. That may have been the motive way back but for a long time those beliefs have been seriously held. Even more than the transgender psychosis, the belief that product magically appears on shelves is so divorced from reality it cannot help but have dire consequences, which have manifested already and will grow worse.
The managerial class is the useless eaters because it produces nothing and consumes everything. As material wealth disappears, the managers and middlemen will be as relevant to everyday life as non-binary genderfluid queers. The attempts to impose totalitarianism, some of which has been quite successful, is an acknowledgement the present situation has moved from ephemeral to terminal.
Russia and China are on the rise and the Empire is in rapid decline. All have nukes, which is the most troublesome aspect at the moment since the Empire naturally does not want to let go regardless of cost.
The proxy war with Russia is the last gasp unless that even more ominous possibility happens. The managerial elite apparently believed China would not hinder their efforts to subdue Russia and would stay on the sidelines and continue to play ball and prop them up.
Again, reality is greater than IQ.
Brazil may be Third World and lower in intelligence, but it is much more likely to exist in thirty years, and that is generous, than a cognizable United States and most of Western Europe.
India has its own home designed and produced jet aircraft fighter. They produced atomic weapons and a missile delivery system. They build and run nuclear power plants. They did that on an 80 IQ population?
Well yes, sort of. India a huge, but not homogeneous population. Really, Indian is a country of many populations. Reich identifies 5 major ones and discusses even more importantly, India’s caste system.
The higher castes, e.g., Brahmins sit on top of the heap (with a couple of others) and there are millions of those folk—all with high IQ’s comparatively. They compose what may be termed the “critical fraction”. Those people are the ones who make India an up and coming power. They are the ones who in prior generations migrated out of India. Now with opportunities at home, they stay.
India in bed (alliance) with China however is difficult to imagine. It bodes poorly that the US has pushed India into such an arrangement whereas I expected the US would have leveraged India against China.
if you have a 1.4 bil population , the 7 sigma above the mean super genius population is still huge .
brasil is a 2nd world country.
Karl, you’re too kind here. Hell, Brazil couldn’t even maintain their newly built Olympic pools for the duration of the games.
yes, but in a 3rd world country the pools would have had crocs in them!
Tars-
You make many good points.
I would only add that, based on what they are doing, the countries under discussion are moving to position themselves ahead of a petrodollar collapse.
The other key motivator, beyond exchanging real commodities for nothing, were the openly piratical actions of the US’ seizure of Russian assets in response to the Ukraine invasion.
The high level of global trust in the USD was a priceless asset, perhaps the most priceless asset any nation has ever held.
Tossing that trust aside like a piece of litter will prove to be one of history’s most foolish decisions.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and one other just announced that they want to join BRICS+
And just to rub it in Saudi did it while Biden was visiting.
@ CrispyCreme
I appreciate your tenacity, but they are in fact exceptions.
You say no one cares about the governor of Wyoming? Or that he is on par in importance and influence with the CEO of an insurance company?
I find that preposterous on its face. For one is raw power. A governor can marshal forces such as the guard and police agencies. He can veto legislation that affects everyone in the state. The residents of Wyoming care about him far more than people care about the CEO of a company. They go out of their way and arrange their day to go out an vote for him. They spend months hearing the candidates out on tv and in debates and see countless commercials on the people.
Every government office in the state has a pic of the governor there. That alone should tell anyone quite a bit as to how the society holds the person and the position in high regard. And importantly he can’t be fired on a whim.
And what’s a corporation? I’m a corporation. I own one. It’s just me and my wife but it’s still a legal entity. And there are millions of people like me. Corporations are not just national or global entities. But I don’t want to get into the weeds, just making a quick observation.
In over 200 years we have had 46 “CEOs” as a nation. Anyone here can name at least half of them. They send men into battle. They have hundreds of books written about them. Today they are in TV everyday. Hundreds of newspaper men follow them and report on their every move. When I go and spend money I don’t see Lee Iacocca on the currency, and who even remembers him? I don’t remember Steve Jobs sending men to die in Iraq. But I do know historically that popes have done that, they had their faces on currencies, etc. and so the historical analogy of the us government and the Catholic Church has far more in common.
Let’s say this, we are taking the SAT and this question comes up toward the end when thugs get more nuanced and difficult:
The President is to the US government what the —— is to the ——
A. Don is to the mafia
B. Pope is the Catholic Church
C. Den mother is to the Boy Scouts
D. CEO is to a corporation.
😜
Answer: E. All of the above.
I hope Zman will review the “public choice” economists’ commentary on managerialism. These Economists, led by James Buchanan, explained this gov’t managerial-class/”agency effect” stuff very well. Their work was at first hotly debated. My professor/advisor derisively joked with me the week Buchanan announced he was leaving our university : “Buchanan thinks he’ll win the Nobel Prize some day for this stuff, hahahaha”.
So this conversation has been going on a long time (40+ years). In contrast with public choice economics, the idea of emergent, rent-seeking behavior in private managerial classes was never controversial and was discussed widely by the mid-80s; it was standard business-school case study fare in those days.
So what’s new is what Zman correctly highlights: the seizure of the cultural “commanding heights” by the elite and the managerial class. The standard public choice/agency effect stuff is now well-worn ground. But the cultural “means of production”, because of the impact of social media/internet, in the hands of these managers is a whole new ballgame and is a serious problem for the DR. The old Right-oriented thinkers didn’t even dream of this, even though they understood standard propaganda and maybe even had read Gramsci.
(Buchanan did in fact end up winning the Nobel Prize in Economics, which is going to be the last time a right-leaning guy ever does.)
This is good information.
The problem with this discussion is how many wings/variants of the managerial class there are. They are not all equivalent.
The cultural wing is its own topic. In my experience, the HR people have been granted their authority by the more technocratic wing. That is true in my experience where the HR commisar(s) have been given license by the business managers who don’t have the intellectual means nor the sense of self to tell those people to pound sand. It is poorly formed men in dereliction of their duty. That these are men is dubious. Between the infantalization of people and the transformation of the academy from a place for scholarship into a job training and credentialing center, these men are not formed enough to be able to stand up to the moralizers.
You are on to something here in that we need to analyze and view the next gen managerial class through another lens. This class and this project is far too vast and has too many branches to view in broad sweeps.
As complex as it is, the fix for it is pretty simple. Take the money away.
OT:
Anybody heard any updates on when Bidump is ending the mandatory science juice jab for foreigners to enter the US? I can get into Mexico, EU, UK, Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia with no jab, but not the land of the free.
The border guards are generally not asking about vax status at the land borders but it’s too much of a question mark to try it right now.
We will know when and if Novak is allowed into the US to play at the Open
It’s embarrassing how ridiculous this country has become. And the land of the free no less.
Glad to hear the French government vetoed Macron wanting to impose the Vaxx mandate on anyone entering the country. But my understanding is that I would not be allowed into Canada without Vaxx proof.
LA county is maybe going to reimpose the mask mandate. Like it’s going to be more effective than the juice which even Fauci admits is weak protection, if any at all, Ok so Dr Fauci, is a mask better than protecting me from Covid than the juice? Someone should ask him. Watch the little man squirm.
Yes, vax mandate is still in place for foreigners to enter Canada. Everyone also has to fill a tracking app with phone number including citizens. Unvaxxed citizens coming back in still need to test and quarantine.
It’s a disaster and tourism is hurting on both sides but especially on our side. Seems to be the goal though based on how our governments are acting.
10 Kansas city Royals players are skipping this upcoming series with the Blue Jays since they can’t cross (or don’t feel like dealing with the paperwork).
It seems like a giveaway that they are going to bring back another full lockdown in the fall. On a local level all our restrictions are gone (including isolation, testing, etc.) But the power hungry feds won’t let the charade go.
Sounds almost like you are required to have a smart phone ? Carry it with you at all times like a drivers license?
I have a smart phone and a flip phone. I don’t think the flip phone could many of the apps but ATT just made my first obsolete because it wouldn’t work with 4g so it just stopped working with no explanation or forewarning. So had to buy new one and deal with the ATT store where some black lady was screaming at the staff lol. They way the manager handled her was pretty good though, she was trying to suck him into her b.s. and he just ignored everything she was spewing and told her she had to leave. Oh, and before the black lady went overboard with her complaining there was this dumb white lady trying to take her side and complaining about the customer service too, but less obnoxiously. So when the manager tells the black lady that she is being loud and upsetting customers she calls out the dumb white lady “what about her ? “
The white lady shrank into herself trying not to be noticed, but so typical of blacks that they find an ally in a situation then don’t hesitate to throw them under the bus.
The only thing wrong with this story is that the black woman did not beat the White enabler until she pissed blood. Sex and violence are the only thing Karen understands and she doesn’t get laid often.
On July 3rd my son and I flew from Dixie back to my place of origin; Los Angeles. My mother and my brother and his family still live there. When it came time to buy tickets back in June, I looked at the LAX rubrics on Covid prevention and I realized that the airport authorities had the authority to take us, upon entering the airport, and sling us into a Covid hotel if they thought we looked feverish or sick or if we popped positive on one of their silly Covid tests. That’s too big a risk, so I decided to fly into neighboring San Bernardino County via Ontario International Airport.
San Bernardino County is filled with Mexicans and rednecks, and folks out there in the desert don’t care about Covid. It’s just the flu, dude. So even though it took my brother an extra 20 minutes to come pick us up in Ontario (versus LAX), my mind was at ease by flying into a place where normal people live and govern. And it all worked out fine.
However, going by the Covid protocols in Los Angeles County hospitals at this moment, I predict that by November the entire country will be back under the full draconian Covid rules we saw back in the fall of 2020. Which means internal travel restrictions, just like in Canada. I hope I’m wrong, but I’ll bet 5 bucks that I’m right.
NEVER! clearly there is a reason all the WEF controlled countries like canada and the USA are still mandating the military , health employees , any foreign travelers get their genetics modified .
given that it doesn’t prevent the disease , prevent the spread , or match the current variation at All , they must have a really sinister reason for doing this. God knows what it will do to people after 4 or 6 years. but it is clearly something . my guess is sterilization for population control. but thats just a guess based on recent data that says that 50 percent of women report menstrual problems after the shot .
Great explanation of the managerial estate.
Barnum understood the science and nature of power. He wrote:
“No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power.”
Nothing will ever prevent them from taking everything from the dirt people.
Except the ruler of another nation. Eat bugs, use the pronouns, live in the pod is not an inspiring way of projecting military power. This is the barren emptiness of the Managerial Class.
No one will fight and die for the Colors of Benetton. They will for Mother Russia and China.
If the regime manages to land us in a two or three front WW3 and tries to stage a draft to get bodies in the field, we are going to witness heretofore unseen levels of hilarity.
Time to get long popcorn futures!
Good point.
And all the major American corporations will be far too busy conducting racial equity audits until the very end.
“They mark themselves with their dress, their language and political beliefs. The latter jumps out at the lower ranks where they tend to embrace the most extreme versions of elite opinion as a way to gain attention from the bosses.”
Something similar occurs in academia. Specifically, professors at South Alabama and the University of Idaho see their colleagues at Harvard and Princeton claiming trannies deserve preferential treatment, and they respond by declaring that Plato, Aristotle, Mozart, Tolstoy, Copernicus and Einstein were trannies, and that earth’s survival depends upon imprisoning all and sundry who deny the central role trannies played in every form of progress. By out-crazying their superiors, these tertiary lunatics imagine their status in academia gets a mighty fillip. And, in a realm where madness is the reserve currency, who is to say they aren’t right?
See Falcone’s anecdote above about the black woman who turned on her White Karen enabler. The Ivies will do the same to the podunk schools that try to move the Overton Window leftward without their permission. Legacy status and gate keeping are all the Ivies have left since quality and originality have been deemed too White, and no South Alabama is going to encroach on that turf.
“The trouble is most people do not want to see this. Instead, they indulge in reductionist theories about secret cabals manipulating the system.”
It’s because I DO see this that I know there is a deep state. Because the country is a just a soulless corporation, I know that the trapping of so-called democracy, like elections and public representatives are total kabuki theater. There is a clearly a permanent unelected who own chokepoints of society.
Again Z-man, I question your credibility as I question how you can possibly deny a deep state “cabal” or believe Biden got 80 million votes. We saw with our own eyes in real time the deep state steal the election right in front of our eyes!
But yes, the Gervais Principle is far more enlightening on our system than the Constitution or old high school civics classes.
I wonder if we could meet Z Man half way and ask him if the managerial state and the deep state are the same. Why not?
You must be new around here, as Z has a pretty lengthy track record of claiming that and explaining how Biden stole the election. He’s also been pretty consistent about saying there is a group of people that put against the common good. That they can be named and easily identified pretty much disproves the bottom that said group is shadowy or secret
When Sailer demands of commenters that they state exactly who’s making Biden’s decisions for him (and then ignores whatever they say in response), I understand him. He’s signaling allegiance to the overclass idea men he imagines are out there jotting down Sailerisms to smuggle reworded into a Times column next year. (Sailer’s the only real example I’ve ever seen of Vox Day’s “secret king” type.) Sailer’s demand that we name names is purest who/whom: “Name the winner, loser.”
I don’t understand Z’s cabal/emergent distinction. The cabal is emergent. Great Sam Hyde quote: “Civilization isn’t dying. It’s being killed by people with names and addresses.” We could, with some effort, list them all—and trace their cabal lineage back several generations (professional and literal). That’s no more proof of conspiracy than the current generation on a family tree is, but it’s also *no less*. People decided to put them there.
The cabal’s ideology, such as it is, is the kind of accreted mess of mostly “junk” that evolutionary processes seem inevitably to produce. It’s *just* fit enough to survive. On average they win and we lose. (Maybe the difference between the two sides of the ledger increases until [extinction event], then repeat.) Every part of their ideology is a mutant inheritance from some prior thinker—all of whom also have names and addresses (mostly in cemeteries). We could, with great effort, list them. And we do.
Z especially does, especially in posts like today’s. It’s how we (and they) know he’s not one of them. Catch someone in charge of a captured institution saying “Gramsci.” You can’t. He a degenerate gene-sequence in them, but his name is *our* shibboleth. Not one in a hundred of them has heard it from anyone but us, and not one in a thousand knows what thought(s) it signifies.
The Biden admin doesn’t call itself WestExec, therefore Joe isn’t non compos mentis. Justin Trudeau is a cat lady masturbation fantasy who can’t name a single academic economist, so the WEF can’t do anything. Etc., Q.E.D.
Great comment.
“The Biden admin doesn’t call itself WestExec, therefore Joe isn’t non compos mentis. Justin Trudeau is a cat lady masturbation fantasy who can’t name a single academic economist, so the WEF can’t do anything. Etc., Q.E.D.”
It’s a negative form of epistemic closure and thus quite real and quite destructive: Justin knows X and Justin doesn’t know Y, hence Z is impossible.
David Rockefeller founds and funds the Trilateral Commission in 1973. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Trilateral member and international affairs specialist becomes national Security Advisor for President Jimmy Carter 1977. Russia invades Afghanistan 1979. Carter bans wheat sales to Russia1980. Russia turns to South America for their wheat, where Rockefeller interests have become the largest landowners. U.S. farmers angry, Russia not injured. Rockefeller interests rewarded.
Tell me again about “…indulging in theories about secret cabals manipulating the system”.
Boy, that David Rockefeller was one farsighted dude. Perhaps he had supernatural powers.
you don’t have to be clairvoyant to see a future your money is creating
I really appreciate your writing and your commentary in your podcasts. Today’s essay wasn’t your best work. For this topic, you need specific examples to back up the claim, or it is very hard to follow. One of the reasons is that these cultural pathologies have a different purpose and meaning and motivation for all of the participants.
When a society offshores most of its productive activity, and imports labor en masse for the manual, entry level physical labor it is left with little to manage. I think the rise of the bureaucracy, the managerial state/class if you will, was justified if not motivated by creating jobs. Then, when that society leverages its hegemonic power to create an illusion of prosperity by borrowing from the future and leveraging up that borrowed money in the present it finances unproductive, often counterproductive, activity and jobs. So the climbers that could be a C-Level executive or a basement dwelling Tik-Tok’er are left without the means of production and most importantly the mindset to be creative, which is the highest form of productivity.
So they trade in garbage ideas – some to get a mid-level management positions where they will commit to diversity and inclusion and not have to answer to how much product they shipped or how many quality people were hired; some to ever more deranged and degenerate, “self expression”, to garner likes and clicks and views and ad revenue to replace meaning and accomplishment.
At the foundation of it all is a society that is confused about what rights are and what virtues are. Until the 20th century negative rights and the Greco/Roman/Scandinavian virtues were understood, accepted and enforced by the people. In the 20th century positive rights and anti-virtuous substitutes for virtue – credentials, titles, moralizing … were adopted and chaos has ensued. There may be a managerial state, but there isn’t much to manage, nor much that is worth managing.
Is this a centralized plot? Well, there are so many stages in the theater we can’t make a sweeping blanket statement. Likely some are organized plots. Others just self perpetuate as the system is based on a monetary departure from reality so individuals maladapt and cope in ever stranger ways – insects doing ever stranger rituals to obtain as many crumbs as possible.
The jobs programs from the outset, those with 10 men and 1 shovel were a moral desert – born of a deranged class bent on creating problems to create solutions. The jobs programs of asset price inflation and professional propagandists and those who manage their creation and perpetuation fuel the hottest, deepest bowels of the devil’s den.
I take the part about confusion about rights and virtues back.
There are those who are very clear about what rights are and what virtues are. We are in the minority. The rest are certain about what rights are and what virtues are. However, their certainty is based on a deep ignorance and a craven immorality. Moralizing is not being moral – it is morality’s very opposite. I see it in the teenagers raised in the Clouds on a daily basis.
an idle mind is the devil’s playground-
any discussion about this subject is incomplete without mentioning the role of government (i.e. public) schools in producing a corporate ready populace…
C’mon man, if you’re going to open with the old “Firing Line” music, at least you’ve got to do the whole podcast in an affected Knickerbocker accent.
And mention “Yale” every few moments.
I thought that was the “Of Cabbages and Kings” intro.
It was sort of perfect that Buckley used NPR music as his intro. Nice creases, that man.
That theme was the beginning of the third movement from the Brandenburg Concerto #2 by J.S. Bach, and a sparkling performance, too.
Bach composed 6 concerti as a job application to some nobleman. Not only did he not get a job from that jumped up ass, but there is no evidence that these works were ever performed during his lifetime, but the manuscripts were preserved. Let’s give a shout out to librarians.
As with most of Bach’s works, it was likely composed “ad gloriam Dei”, to the glory of God, whether he wrote it on the title page of the manuscript or not. It shows. If you are not familiar with these concerti, find a good recording, listen attentively, and be uplifted.
I just don’t see it. What we are witnessing in the west is way bigger and more sinister than what you get in large corporations where the mediocrities have pushed out the competent and the founders have long since checked out.
Only way you can make the analogy work would be if every director of a giant corporation had secretly shorted the stock, and held blackmail over all the C-level execs to get them to slowly but deliberately drive the company to bankruptcy.
It doesn’t matter if they are called “cabal”, “cathedral”, “globalists”, “communists”, “oligarchs”, or “juice”, it is self-evident that there monied-interests collaborating on a global scale to destroy the economies and societies of the (formerly) Christian west.
well, not only ‘christian’ economies are being destroyed. china, japan, sri lanka, et als are not christian…
Because that’s the real meaning of “trickle down.”
If they can take the top, that is, us, the rest down stand a chance. Easy pickings.
don’t stand a chance
This is true. But who’s to say a corporation cannot be evil when its controllers have adopted an evil ideology?
Now I am not entirely persuaded by the managerialist argument, but it seems to me that the organizational dynamic is far less important than the ideology which animates it. Whether it is a corporation, a Power Structure, or a Deep State is rather immaterial. The important thing is that, whatever the nature of the structure, it has adopted postmodern theory and used it to justify malignant anti-white racism.
Now it is too late to destroy the organization (whatever its form) and its ideology, but the future ethnostate, operating from a proper understanding of what happened to America, can take preventive measures against that ideology taking root again.
Also strikes me as being organized like the Catholic Church
Pope = president
College of cardinals = Senate / congress
Archbishop = governor
Priest = mayor
Altar boys, choir, etc = political volunteers
Flock = voters
One issue I have with the corporation analogy, and I think it’s important, is that no one slobbers over or worships a CEO, they are often shuffled in and out, and they rarely have much lasting importance to the organization. I say this as the son of a former president and CEO where the board of directors are all that mattered and the ceo was just a hired gun. Contrast that with the pope or potus. Even Biden has a press that treats him like he has been ordained by God and has millions of voters who will go and make some kind of sacrifice for him. And then there is the vote and all of its trappings and ceremony and so forth, where nothing in the corporate world compares, the upper staff are just hired with no real input from anyone. You wake up and go to work and lo and behold, you have a new regional director or CEO. He’s lucky if you ever see his picture hanging on the wall.
Yes, the corporation model makes sense from purely an organizational direction, but it doesn’t capture the religious or “holy” aspects of our government. And those things are integral to a deeper understanding imo.
>no one slobbers over or worships a CEO
Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, even Bill Gates in the 90s or Donald Trump long before he was president. I am sure there are many more.
I’m so old, I remember when Lee Iacocca was treated like a freaking rock star.
Exception that proves the rule
Not really exceptions
The high profile corporations have well known leaders just like the big important governments have well know leaders.
Nobody cares about the CEO of some insurance company just like nobody cares about the governor of Wyoming or the mayor of outer podunk.
Yeah, but you gotta balance the Ford Mustang, Mercury Cougar, Lincoln Mark III, Mercury Marquis, Dodge Daytona, Chrysler Minivans, and LeBaron convertibles with the Ford Granada, Lincoln Versailles, K-Cars going on waaaaaaay too long, and the Dodge Dynasty/New Yorker Landau. 😏
Ooh, Baby, let me enjoy those rich Corinthian leathers!
Soft porn came to auto ads with Ricardo Montalban and then we drove to hell with a handbasket in the trunk. 😉
Jack Walsh!
Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap!
Tom Peters!
Rosabeth Moss Canter!
Richard Branson!
Come pray at our feet…we’re a broad church.
I’m so old I remember when Cornelius Vanderbilt was simply the bee’s knees.
Would you like us to get off your lawn, or do you want to shake your cane at us whipper-snappers?
They were founders / inventors not ceos
Like comparing Orville wright to the ceo of delta
There’s probably some parallel with the normie-con worship of the Founders + Lincoln (second founding) and their relative lack of interest in those who followed.
Elon Musk didn’t found Tesla.
Yep, Bill Gates in particular. Before the Internet, MS had a subscription service for MS product line support where they’d send you cd’s with FAQ’s, new versions of software, patches, tools, documentation, and whatnot.
The first cd on the monthly set was devoted to *Bill Gates*—his musings on all things technical and political. Nothing to do with MS product maintenance, just Bill’s prognostications on the *future* and world events as he saw them. Some of these musings were quite staged, where he’d have a flunky employee “interview” him and ask obviously pre-planned questions. Gate’s “worship” was obvious and sickening. Every bit as bad as with Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
Gates was the “Elon Musk” of his day (he’s still at it, but more dangerous). I watched one of those cd’s one time and then learned to ignore the first cd in the set and go to the useful ones. Unfortunately I tossed all these cd’s out when they switched to Internet distribution and downloading for everything. Kept the boxes however for my own cd collection.
Ok, yeah, if you really think comparing Gates as CEO to a POTUS makes for a very strong analogy, be my guest
I think you guys are grasping for straws
I’m not comparing Gates to POTUS—only commenting on a type of “hero worship” we have seen during the dot com revolution. These CEO/Founders (IMO) got high on their own supply and began to pontificate in fields outside of their expertise. That coupled with the largest repository of wealth historically in private hands—theirs—is the cause of a myriad of problems and a reduction in the freedoms and liberties once enjoyed in this nation.
A materialistic society will worship the greatest producers of material.
our society is organized like a corporation, with senior management and a large layer of middle-management,
Or is it the other way around, the corporate organization being patterned after society? Couldn’t the corporate leaders be considered descendants of tribal chiefs or feudal lords and their henchmen the predecessors of the numerous vice-presidents and executive assistants?
Since no individual, not even John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, can become wealthy solely through his own personal actions, the corporate/capitalist scheme involves senior management whose primary role is financial innovation, the accumulation of investment funds from others. The real work is done by the plebs, given a tiny share of the proceeds that enables the huge income of the seniors. The most significant aspect of corporate/capitalism is that the financiers can become far more wealthy by sharing a small portion of the corporate income with their underlings and investors. This small amount is what drives the consumer culture that spurs the plebs to crawl out of bed every morning so they can earn what’s necessary to make the payments on a new Prius and a flat screen TV.
Where the analogy begins to wobble a little is that in 99% of the cases the CEO is a nobody, and Corporations are run by committee, the board of directors.
Even if the government is also run by committee, the POTUS gets far more reverence and gets the worship treatment by thousands, whereas the CEO is lucky if he has five guys in the entire organization he can trust. And it takes enormous skill in elevating them into positions to further on and expand his governance and influence in the organization. Most of the time they are blocked by rivals and the board. The POTUS has many of these advantages built in by getting pick his cabinet etc.
When any of us go to Best Buy or say an Amazon Fresh, do we see pics of the CEO displayed prominently? But when we go to any government office, post office, IRS office, we always see the pic of the president and governor. We go to any Catholic Church or outreach office and we always see a picture of the Pope hanging. I think this is telling.
Our government may have more in common with a religious institution than it does with a corporation. Organizationally, they are all pretty much the same, as are the military branches which also seem to have more in common with a religious organization than with a corporation.
My observations at least
Corporations have had an agency problem* forever. Governments have their own version of that agency problem*.
* Agency problem, where one person acts for another, making decisions, commitments or similar that impact that other person or persons. See shareholder, constituent.
Fair enough, but I think the corporation analogy is somewhat superficial in that the hierarchy tree of government and corporation might look similar, but then so does pretty much any organization’s tree look similar because that is just the nature of things. That’s the entire meaning of the ancient pyramids and a reflection of the natural order. Very few if not one special soul at the top and tons of average people at the bottom.
I remember in college that some leftist at the time was snarkingly going on about how rockets look like a male member, as if we only make rockets out of an obsession with our genitalia, and I responded, and I think rightly, that my apologies for the penis being more aerodynamic than the vagina. That she shut up instantly tells me I was onto something. But point being, we are products of our nature and that we literally can find any organization to represent analogously another organization because they are all reflections of our nature. The Boy Scouts is organized like a corporation, but does that mean the corporation looked to the boy scouts for structural guidance or that they just sort of followed what seems natural and orderly? The a
Mafia and the corporation have many similarities. Everything does.
Whether any organization has an agency problem is a feature of humankind that is not exclusive to an organization. It’s an eternal phenomenon.
Anyway, 3g4me once I said I tend to overstate my case, but what can I do. It’s my nature.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”
I’ve been reading a book of published 18 speeches put out by antelope hill recently. Mr funny mustache actually states that one of the several reasons the flag he designed had a large red field incorporated into it was to attract volks with communist leanings to his thing. Maybe we should incorporate a bull with a nose ring into ours if that day arrives for the obvious reasons.
I noticed years ago in my organization that our processes were becoming more important than our products. I figured if we kept on this trajectory we would eventually reach a point where our processes would simply become our products. Then I learned about Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Your points here and elsewhere about the “managerial class” tie in well with my own observations… and Pournelle’s!
Keep up the god work.
Ah, “in any organization most people reach their level of mediocrity and remain there.” I had a poster of “Murphy’s Law(s)” with that on it.
And while we might also say you ARE doing “God’s” work, do keep up the “good” work at least in the meantime! I love it when I try to carefully check my spelling and grammar and then come back and see I slammed myself once again!
You could say that Managerialism is the synthesis (in the Hegelian sense) of capitalism and socialism, as it builds on the “industrial management” aspect of both, but is neither wholly competitive and private nor wholly cooperative and public. Because the manager class is incompetent, and not too sharp, it has basically succeeded in giving the proletariat the worst of each system. The system could be fixed by an influx of talent, but human nature being what it is, incompetent people who have been promoted beyond the skill set will resist demotion no matter how deserving they may be. This is where we find ourselves. Our managers’ only skill is not management, but rather not getting demoted. I suspect the only way to demote them will involve morgues.
I suppose it’s a form of regimentalization similar to the military officer corps (or most national militaries I guess) where demotion effectively can’t exist. Usually an officer’s trajectory is either upward or resignation, the odd transfer to a “lower” position that’s more lateral to the rank rather than outright demotion. Though I did know of a few light colonels who screwed up somewhere, couldn’t get their bird, resigned, then went into the National Guard to become warrant officers.
Yes. And with respect to government the canard was always “Well, if you don’t like how their doing, throw the bums out.” But our electoral system has become so unreliable that it no longer seems possible to fire a bum via the voting box. Bad politicians, and their bad policies and poor execution, must now be suffered like an infestation of cockroaches. At some point, the problem becomes more than just an annoyance. Shortly thereafter the tools of the exterminator are sought and employed. Call me a Boomer, but I cling to the idea that even grillers will reach a point where they realize that we don’t eat bugs, we kill them.
Even if you throw the bums out, the replacements are also bums. The only people who can get “elected” in AINO are bad people, and it is the stupid masses who are doing the “electing.” That’s democracy for you.
Maus: “Call me a Boomer, but I cling to the idea that even grillers will reach a point where they realize that we don’t eat bugs, we kill them.”
Ostei Kozelskii: “The only people who can get “elected” in AINO are bad people, and it is the stupid masses who are doing the “electing.” That’s democracy for you.”
Ergo stalinism.
This is now almost forgotten, but I wonder if it can be applied to society as a whole: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
His book, “Be Slightly Evil,” is also quite good.