Note: The Sunday podcast is back!. It will be an evening performance until I get settled in the new place. There is a post about the cost of groceries and a post about driving the Jeep Gladiator for a week. Subscribe here or here.

Last week someone posted a video of herself getting fired by Cloudflare via a zoom call and the video went viral. It has nine million views at this point. The reason the video caused such a stir is it touches on many of the things that people find unpleasant about the current age, but either lack the language to discuss or feel they should not be discussing out in the open. That last part turns up in the resulting thread as people naturally turn it into a black hat versus white hat issue.

That last part is the most obvious, but the least interesting. Whenever these sorts of topics arise on social media, conservatives begin rhythmically chanting phrases like “toughen up snowflake” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” What they are instinctively doing is rallying to the defense of the giant corporation as they have been trained to do by conservatism. When challenged, the retort is some form of “The world does not owe you anything”, which is complete nonsense.

The basis of all human societies is reciprocal obligations. Social contract theory rests on this assumption. Monarchy rests on a collection of reciprocal vertical relationships that bind the king to the lowest peasant. The social club assumes the members will be loyal to the club and its members. In return, the members get benefits from the club and fellow members exclusive to them. A club that has no duties to the members is not a club, but a random collection of strangers.

This is the central defect of conservatism. When the people we call the left claim society has some new moral duty, conservatives never challenge the moral duty, but instead fall into a form of bourgeois anarchism. Terrified of challenging the left on moral grounds, they instead argue that society has no duties at all. In the case of the mega-corp screwing its employees, they say the company has no duties to them. Conservatism is always an answer to a question no one asked.

Putting that aside, you see the horrors of managerialism in that video. Clearly, senior management screwed up and hired too many new people. Instead of admitting this and reducing their staff, they send out flunkies from middle-management to chant nonsensical gibberish at people via Zoom call. Odds are neither of these two zombies could name a single metric they reference or what it means. For them these are abracadabra words that make the employee go away.

The woman getting let go has a reasonable expectation. She was hired under a set of conditions, and she met her end of the bargain. At one point she concedes that the company has a right to change the bargain. They over-hired and now need to trim the staff and her name was picked from the hat. If they were honest with her the video probably never gets posted. It is clear that the woman is not offended by the firing so much as by the lying about it.

This is one corrosive effect of managerialism. It turns everyone into a sociopath by forcing them to lie even when the truth makes more sense. The two zombies chanting corporate catchphrases are doing it so as to avoid being on the other end of one of these zoom calls. Like the Nazi camp guards given a choice of being a guard or being one of the guarded, millions of Americans are forced to be terrible people in middle-management positions, doing the bidding of management.

This is why we get the weird language. It is a way for the people at the top to manipulate their flunkies into doing this stuff. Instead of cutting jobs they are enthusiastically reducing newly discovered redundancies. They are not eliminating a department and the people in it, they are efficiently implementing a new compelling initiative in furtherance of corporate goals. No one can be upset at these words because they are stripped of anything meaningful to humans.

Managerialism, whether on the small scale like at a corporation, or at the large scale as in a society, is a system that seeks to socialize the cost of decision making while subtly privatizing the benefits. Senior managers enjoy the bulk of the benefits but spread the cost of failure across the organization. It does this by distributing the decision making across senior management. No one person at the top gets the blame when things fail, because it is always a group decision.

We see this in politics. The banks fail and the Fed has to print up trillions to bail them out and no one gets fired, much less jailed. Instead, all the top people agree that the system failed in some way. Top men are tasked with addressing this system failure, which of course pays them handsomely. After the banks get bailed out and things return to normal, the bankers congratulate themselves with bonuses. Managerialism is an aristocracy with none of the social benefits.

This is not without consequences, and we see it in politics. When no one in the managerial elite is ever held accountable, the selection pressure for membership in the elite shifts from aptitude to obsequiousness. You see this in every established corporation and in the government. The people at the top are increasingly incompetent while increasingly obsequious. Politics is packed to the gills with oleaginous grifters because the system selects for such people.

While it is true that the Pareto principle works in the elite as it does everywhere, eventually that smart fraction within the elite is overwhelmed by the growing number of sociopathic grifters slithering into the elite. Again, we see this writ large in politics where incompetence and failure seem to be the goal. The logical end of managerialism is a committee room stuffed with narcistic simpletons waving their credentials at one another as the riots rage outside the committee room.

This may be one bit of subtext to the statue toppling. “No one builds statues honoring committees” is an old truth that haunts managerialism. Statues to great men offend the managerial elite not just because those men were white. It offends because it is a reminder that it is great men that make the world, not the boring mediocrities who come to dominate managerialism. The latest thing is just a convenient excuse to remove the shadow of the great men that haunt the mind of the manager.

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