Saving face is a phrase we tend to associate with oriental cultures, but it is an expression used in the West. The idea is that one wants to avoid being publicly disrespected in order to maintain your dignity. This means either doing something in response to a slight or committing a ritual act when you fail. Famously, committing suicide is an act of saving face in order to avoid the shame of public humiliation for having failed in your duties.

Even though the concept is oriental it is not entirely alien to the West. In fact, face saving has become a cultural aspect of the managerial elite. We just saw this with Victoria Nuland resigning her post. She had failed to destroy the ancient enemy of her people, so she was allowed to resign and save face. If she had been fired, it would be a public acknowledgment that she had failed. Her standing and that of her cult would be lowered as a result, so she was allowed to save face and quit.

This idea of face saving is not entirely alien to the West, but it is not a natural thing the way we see it practiced by our elites. Western societies are moral societies, held together as much by a set of agreed upon codes, passed down from one generation to the next. Publicly shaming someone for his failure to live up to the prevailing moral code is part of reinforcing that code. Letting someone save face undermines this so it is not natural in Western societies. We punish the sinner.

This oriental idea of face saving is behind the phenomenon of failing up which has come to define the modern managerial class. Someone like Victoria Nuland, for example, has been a failure at every stop in her career, but at every stop she has been allowed to save face and move to some new position. You can be sure she will assume a spot at a think tank or university. If Trump wins in November, she will get a media gig to criticize his handling of Russia.

The norm for Western society, with regards to someone like Nuland, is she would have been flushed out of the system as a warning to others. Go back far enough and she may have been killed or exiled. Maybe after she had demonstrated enough contrition she would be rehabilitated to a limited degree. That would include publicly admitting to and accepting that she was a failure. This is now alien to the managerial elite, even though it remains the norm with the Dirt People.

This idea of face saving is behind the cancel culture stuff that soon became a pogrom against normal people who held normal opinions. For our elites, simply being exposed as having broken the new rules was enough to compel a self-imposed exile of some sort, in order to save face. The accused was allowed to depart and save face, without suffering more than a minor loss of social standing. This offered the hope of rehabilitation once everyone forgot about it.

Since this is alien to normal people, it did not work this way so tougher measures were rolled out to punish the hooligans and running dog obstructionists. Banning people from Twitter, for example, was viewed by the people we call the left as an extreme punishment, because the victim lost face. The fact that the victim just respawned as a new character was seen as proof of their evil, because good people wish to avoid losing face and would have accepted their punishment.

People have noted that the response of the West to the Ukraine war is a globalized version of the cancel culture and censorship pogroms. Most of what Western leaders did over the last two years was about “isolating” Putin. It was as if they thought excluding him from the cool kid table would humiliate him to the point where he would either resign or be deposed. It never occurred to them that he and his government did not understand what any of this meant.

The question is why has face saving crowded out the old, natural way of policing the ranks of the elites? Part of it, obviously, is the way in which the managerial elite now see themselves individually and as a group. Many still see themselves as a minority and they brought the minority viewpoint into the elite. Minorities are always aware of their standing with regard to the majority, so saving face is important. Many originate from face saving societies, so this comes naturally.

There is also the bourgeoise nature of the elites. Our ruling class is not filled with an aristocratic sense of position. Instead, they view themselves as having scored the better on the test, relative to others. In other words, they are a system dependent elite, while an aristocracy is an independent elite. The former are full of angst about their position in the system, so they obsess over it. The latter sees the system as an expression of their natural position atop their society.

Like all middle-class people, our bourgeoise managerial elite is riddled with self-doubt about their standing. As you see in any middle-class suburb, the primary obsession is with noticing what everyone else is doing in order to make sure you are seen as part of what everyone else is doing. Conformity is a defining feature of bourgeoise culture and is thus the defining feature of the managerial elite. The so-called “Karen culture” is a natural product of an elite harvested from the middle-class.

The formation of a middle-class is most likely a lagging indicator. The independent farmer is something that arises late in an agrarian society. The urban middle-class was a late development in the industrial age. Our bourgeoise managerial elite with its oriental outlook probably signals a late stage of managerialism. The committee mentality and face saving are all part of a general decline in competence, which also suggests we are in the late stages of managerialism.

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