patrick.net

The elites are an interesting bunch; they are actually intellectually lazy. They have made a mistake to believe because they have intelligence, they don't need to gather facts before having an opinion. They actually assume that the liberals at the NYTimes tell them what they need to know.

Remember that guy Andrew Lahde (not Dr. Burry) who made a fortune shorting the housing mortgage derivatives? He closed his hedge fund making fun of the Ivy League dimwits on Wall Street.

"The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."

He actually had visited California and saw who got mortgages; for example, an illegal allien who picked strawberries bought a $750,000 house.
"How will I pay it back?" Mortgage broker: "Don't worry about it."

I knew some illegal aliens in California who got mortgages; one told me she and her brother immediately defaulted when the value of the house dropped. Why not? They likely used fake names on the app, or names of dead people.

I digress. The true elites are the vast army of government employees who fear and hate guys like Trump who will scrutinize their pay, pensions, raises, budgets, and nonsense called "work".

Why is there a Federal Department of Education for example? These and others are afraid of Trump or someone like him focusing attention on them.

clambo says

Why is there a Federal Department of Education for example? These and others are afraid of Trump or someone like him focusing attention on them.

Exactly. It should not exist and knows it. Thus the apoplectic fits of hate for Trump.

My current working assumption is that no federal agencies should exist at all except for the military and whatever agency sets US trade policy. Defense and trade, that's all the Federal government should have.

Everything else should be left to the states, as the Constitution says.

The Federal Reserve in particular should not exist, as it isn't even part of the government, but somehow has a monopoly on the issuance of money.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/forget-being-the-science-apparently?publication_id=323914&post_id=76294669&isFreemail=true

Trump did make some mistakes, imho:

Choosing Pence.
Cozying up to the Saudis who murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11
Trying to take credit for the dangerous and ineffective toxxine.
Failing to dismantle any of the Deep State.
Failing to pardon Assange and Snowden.

But he remains the most effective president any of us have seen.

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/crowdsourcing-request-what-are-the/comments

Great post ! Without reading the 380 comments I'll just say that in my experience THEY WILL NOT ENGAGE. I stopped trying as I only receive blank stares and they walk away. If you send them links they do not respond with "Thanks for sharing I'll take a look." they say nothing. (Even though you are my sister, or best friend, who I was close to for 50 long years and you do have a master's in Critical & Creative Thinking...I'm not looking). What is mind blowing to me is that they have zero consideration of your research and how you came to your opinion. Rather they have outsourced their thinking to their traditionally trusted sources, NYT, NPR, etc. and those sources in my view are telling them that even considering an alternative version of the narrative puts them in the dreaded 'conspiracy nut' basket. Thinking themselves the academics (many I know are) they can't stomach the idea of the label. (Your average Joe doesn't have this fear and knows that they have been treated as 'less than' for their blue collar work, when they are the ones keeping the lights on, so they have always smelt shit from these main stream sources.) The best way in my view is not to try to have any conversation rather it is putting the truth out on T-shirts from sea to shining sea. This way everywhere they look they are seeing that their sources are not being trusted by millions. They will not lose face by having to back down in a conversation but the exposure of these alternate opinions will then will have them secretly questioning their stance. As much as they don't want to be labeled 'conspiracy theorist' they also don't want to be left behind as 'stupid' for being the last one to 'get it'.

Patrick says

The best way in my view is not to try to have any conversation rather it is putting the truth out on T-shirts from sea to shining sea.

I've been doing this for over a year now. I have several t-shirts now. The last one I bought says..."Noah was a conspiracy theorist and then it rained" on the front. I'm going to add "Are you jabbed?" on the back.

GNL says

."Noah was a conspiracy theorist and then it rained"

That slogan may actually be detrimental, as it can be dismissed as coming from someone with dogmatic beliefs. Better to point out current relevant facts, like "Biden, fully vaxed, fully boosted, and fully Covid positive."

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

What the elites are executing and succeeding at, is a slow but surely moving insurrection. And this is why it was worth it to go after Trump for the supposed insurrection, as a distraction. The printing of trillions and the Ukraine pony show is a part of this plan.

Patrick says

Elon will be shut down, they cant let him continue to do what he is doing today, they can't let Twitter be used by people to empower themselves.

Patrick says

I'll just say that in my experience THEY WILL NOT ENGAGE. I stopped trying as I only receive blank stares and they walk away. If you send them links they do not respond with "Thanks for sharing I'll take a look." they say nothing.

There is no reason for them to engage because engagement doesn't benefit them, power often works this way.

richwicks says

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

I have 2 family members in healthcare industry and they both believe in vaccines, I don't know, I am confused.

cisTits says

Need to line the elites up against a wall and, well...you guess the rest.

So let's be like China during the cultural Revolution?
Elites serve their purposes, but the rank and file need to elect people who keep them in check.

But what if we don't really have elections anymore?

gabbar says

I have 2 family members in healthcare industry and they both believe in vaccines, I don't know, I am confused.

@gabbar There is a big difference between previous vaccines and this mRNA crap:

- the toxxine is new tech, no long term safety data
- short term safety data is far worse than any other vaxx ever
- the mRNA can integrate itself into your genes, and possibly the genes of offspring
- rushed through development
- rushed through testing, and testing results were bad, especially for pregnant women
- forced on the public through threat of job loss, expulsion from school and military, exclusion from public life; this has never been done before

gabbar says

There is no reason for them to engage because engagement doesn't benefit them, power often works this way.

Might be better to send them a few choice memes, because they can often make the point before defense mechanisms kick in.

https://patrick.net/memes

Patrick says

gabbar says

There is no reason for them to engage because engagement doesn't benefit them, power often works this way.

Might be better to send them a few choice memes, because they can often make the point before defense mechanisms kick in.

https://patrick.net/memes

T-shirts

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/greg_price11/status/1599786392363892739#m

Greg Price
@greg_price11
Dec 5
Sen. Kennedy: "These woke, high IQ stupid people, they walk around with zip lock bags of kale that they eat to give them energy. If you want to eat kale, that's up to you. I don't eat kale. You know why? Because kale tastes to me like I'd rather be fat."
Townhall.com

GNL says

T-shirts

Yes, maybe T-shirts are better because a lot of people get to see them.

gabbar says

richwicks says

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

I have 2 family members in healthcare industry and they both believe in vaccines, I don't know, I am confused.

I believe in SOME vaccines, just not this one.

It obviously doesn't work. It doesn't prevent spread, it doesn't give immunity, and it's for a disease that is RARELY fatal. Why mandate people take it?

How can somebody in health care not understand this?

No vaccines work against airborne viruses. You need mucosal immunity. You need an INHALED vaccine to get that - not a shot.

We're being set up.

richwicks says

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

Almost. But the proper analogy is

Iraq WMD : War in Iraq :: Wuhan Virus : Mandatory Vaccination

So my line is: "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (so I didn’t support the war in Iraq), and I don't believe in a deadly supervirus from Wuhan (so I don’t support mandatory vaccination)”

Not very catchy I admit.

https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/thinking-points-december-7-2022

Maginot Line

All of the academic scholarship of the last 100 years failed to protect society from the mind virus of fascism. It was another Maginot Line that provided a very expensive illusion of safety yet it was easily circumvented when the fascists launched their blitzkrieg. One by one the heroes of the anti-corporate left pledged their allegiance to the Fascist Pharma State and support for the iatrogenocide — Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, George Lakoff, Michael Moore, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Micah White, Slavoj Žižek.

If we survive, we have to completely dismantle and restructure all of the institutions that failed over the last three years, especially education. If the system fails the moment it is tested, then it was never a good system to begin with.

Undoctored says

richwicks says

How about "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and I don't believe in this vaccine".

Almost. But the proper analogy is

Iraq WMD : War in Iraq :: Wuhan Virus : Mandatory Vaccination

So my line is: "I didn't believe in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (so I didn’t support the war in Iraq), and I don't believe in a deadly supervirus from Wuhan (so I don’t support mandatory vaccination)”

Not very catchy I admit.

No.

The point is the government tells huge lies and it's not just the Republicans that do, the democrats do too

It's stupid to trust this government. You have to be a fucking retard to trust it still.

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/former-top-cia-analyst-condemns-fbi/comment/11795879

Clever Pseudonym
6 hr ago
Not only is the Trump phenomenon the most important event of our time, but now (oddly enough) it looks like Trump and his 4 years in power are only a footnote in comparison to the reaction he engendered.

Trump in his way almost qualifies as a revolutionary moment, but which has been swamped almost entirely by the counter-revolution.

Every single power center in our society, from the FBI and State Dept to the legacy news corps down to your local branch library and county clerk, were jolted into some kind of allergic response where (mostly because all our modern modes of communications work best as conduits of mass hysteria) nothing mattered except ejecting the Orange Beast of the Apocalypse.

This has meant blasting through every possible guard rail and tradition, tearing up the Bill of Rights like Pelosi tore up his speech, and nothing has been off limits: 2 spurious impeachments, the prosecution of anyone who worked for him, the social blackballing of anyone who supported him, up to and including unleashing massive riots in the hope of dislodging him.

I am not as optimistic as Martin Gurri: our Corporate Social Justice ruling class is officially post-democratic, they simply do not recognize any legitimate political opposition, and they absolutely believe that the only reason anyone opposes them (on any point) is retrograde bigotry.

They would sooner turn our entire culture into one single endless Maoist struggle session than admit any possible mistake.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/indoctrination-reputation-and-evolution

it’s an old saw that “the smart, educated people become liberals because progressivism is somehow the “better” or “more intellectual” or “higher” position on the political spectrum.”

the leftward shift among the more and most educated and especially among the faculties at schools and universities is often trotted out as evidence to this end.

but what if the causality flows the other way?

what if this “blueshift” among the most credentialed who spend the most time in school is not illumination but indoctrination and capture?

what if they are just being inducted to this worldview from long years in institutions designed for just that purpose and then locked into durable allegiance by the elevation of “credentialed classes” into preferential guild-like structures around things like law, science, medicine, and academia where one must be granted and maintain some sort of accreditation to participate?

because there sure seems to be a lot of that going around. ...

the civil war, we were assured, was about nothing but slavery. issues like state’s rights, secession, free association, preferential internal mercantilism, and large scale tax and spend infrastructure projects were not mentioned. the same idea of “no taxation without representation” was not applied to tyranny of the majority and north vs south or industrialized vs agrarian. ...

i have spoken before about the importation of prussian notions that school was meant not to “educate” and generate free thinking but rather to mold model citizens loyal and subordinate to the state and its ends. ...

the minds of the young are not like the minds of the adult. they are missing parts and far more prone to intense irrational loyalty that lacks the basic self-awareness and self-governance that comes later. the human mind is not really fully finished until into one’s 20’s. before that they are more malleable, more easily programmed. how tantalizing then that this is just the age that “school” seems to have evolved to finally let them go. one might well wonder what it evolved to optimize…

but what happens when these systems of indoctrination become utterly corrupt?

and what happens when the fact of this really starts to leak out? ...

these wizards of woo woo ran into a buzz saw of people who had real domain expertise outside the walled gardens of academic endeavor and the pattycake peer review of friendly guild systems. they came from a world where one has to actually be right for a living, not just “socialized and credentialed.”

the “experts” ran headlong into the reputation economy and it turned them into mulch.

and it’s going to keep coming.

and it needs to keep coming. ...

universities and university systems hung together because this pvivileged class had FAR more invested in keeping this system intact and functioning than it did in knocking it down or pruning back its power or prestige over trifling matters like truth, honesty, or accuracy. ...

it’s tearing ivory towers down because this newly informed and enfranchised class does not care about “keeping the system as it is” and are happy to bulldoze the castles of the would be feudal lords of academia because they have come to realize that this group is not here to protect us from invasion.

it IS the invasion.

and this invasion is dishonest.

and it is weak.

it has succeeded because it retained sufficient reputation to gaslight society into being too frightened, too alienated, and too intimidated to challenge it. but it was all woo-woo, a kung fu theater of phony facility. it’s all flash, no substance; it’s all hat, no cowboy.

the true power of woo-woo lies in making you too afraid to challenge it.

and a lot more of the world works like this than you think. ...

the level of access and education available to any who seek it and engage with it is almost impossible to overstate and is certainly impossible to compete with. it just takes desire, diligence, and application. 3 years of arguing economics in earnest on twitter probably has more value than most econ degrees.

and the cream will find ways to rise.

i don’t know about cream. i see a lot of crooks, swindlers and professional liars rise. thats what our system rewards.

FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden says

i don’t know about cream. i see a lot of crooks, swindlers and professional liars rise. thats what our system rewards.

Yes, but that is the best of the crooks, swindlers, and liars.

https://notthebee.com/article/this-lad-from-deep-appalachia-knows-more-about-history-than-most-harvard-grads

This lad from Deep Appalachia knows more about history than most Harvard grads

Coastal elites look down on "flyover country," especially the Southern boys in places like Appalachia, like the Capital looked down on District 12 in Hunger Games. They imagine backwards, ignorant hicks when many of them are actually smarter and wiser than they are.

I'll post the full video if you want to watch more interviews with some of the poorest but best people in America - a place wrecked by the ambitions and ideology of the elites.

If you want the history kid, his interview starts around the 50-minute mark and he knows a TON more than what you saw in that short clip (and can sing to boot). Truly an amazing young man...

Fear of being outsmarted by ordinary white men is why poor white men are the most aggressively discriminated against in Ivy League admissions.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally. ...

They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public. ... both China and the West, in their own ways and at their own pace, but for the same reasons, are converging from different directions on the same point – the same not-yet-fully-realized system of totalizing techno-administrative governance. Though they remain different, theirs is no longer a difference of kind, only of degree. China is just already a bit further down the path towards the same future. ...

This managerial takeover was accelerated by what I call the managerial doom loop: the larger and more complex an organization grows, the exponentially more managers are needed; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power for the managers; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion, including by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucracy to take over ever more functions of the broader economy and society; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be educated, which requires more managers…

Utopianism: The belief that a perfect society is possible – in this case through the perfect application of perfect scientific and technical knowledge. The machine can ultimately be tuned to run flawlessly. At that point all will be completely provided for and therefore completely equal, and man himself will be entirely rational, fully free, and perfectly productive. This state of perfection is the telos, or pre-destined end point, of human development (through science, physical and social). This creates the idea of progress, or of moving closer to this final end. Consequently history has a teleology: it bends towards utopia. This also means the future is necessarily always better than the past, as it is closer to utopia. History now takes on moral valence; to “go backwards” is immoral. Indeed even actively conserving the status quo is immoral...

Meanwhile the managerial corporation also has a great deal to gain from the project of mass homogenization, which allows for greater scale and efficiencies (a Walmart in every town, a Starbucks on every corner, Netflix and Amazon accessible on the iPhone in every pocket) by breaking down the differentiations of the old order. The state, which fears and despises above all else the local control justified by differentiation, is happy to assist. ...

When the Communist Party took control of China, the bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy were not gently coopted into joining the managerial elite. Instead, as with the Kulaks (middle-class peasants) of Lenin and Stalin’s USSR, they were virtually exterminated. An endless series of bloody “campaigns” launched in the name of liberation by Mao Zedong against “landlords,” “rich peasants,” “rightists,” “counter-revolutionaries,” and “bourgeois elements” all had the same objective. Through relentless collective persecution, confiscation of property, and mass torture, rape, and murder, the bourgeois middle class that had begun to emerge during China’s Republican period was systematically destroyed.

This served a straightforward purpose. Political theorists since Aristotle have recognized that “a numerous middle class which stands between the rich and the poor” is the natural bedrock of any stable republican system of government, resisting both domination by a plutocratic oligarchy and tyrannical revolutionary demands by the poorest. By eliminating this class, which had been the powerbase of his Nationalist rivals, Mao paved the way for his intelligentsia-led Marxist-Leninist revolution to dismantle every remaining vestige of republican government, replace the old elite with a new one, and take total control of Chinese society.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

Thousands of American intellectuals became “disinformation” experts overnight. In coordination with these academics and NGOs, mass media leapt to set up “fact checking” operations to arbitrarily declare what was and was not true, selling the public a tall-tale of foreign meddling and dark tides of online “hate” that conveniently justified having their burgeoning independent competition deplatformed from the internet.

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was then seized upon as a reason to double-down on this attack on the public. As Jacob Siegel recently documented in a magisterial account of the origins of the “war on disinformation,” the managerial state quickly re-oriented all the tools, techniques, and swollen bureaucratic automatons it had developed to fight the “Global War on Terror” in order to begin waging a counterinsurgency campaign against its own citizens. ...

The most immediate explanation for why the managerial elite decided to hurry up and cast off any tattered remains of the old American values is simply that they panicked. They panicked because they experienced a moment in which they felt they nearly lost control. That moment was 2016, when the socialist Bernie Sanders had just nearly beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primary, the British people had decided they’d had enough of the EU, and then, most egregiously of all, the thoroughly déclassé Donald Trump won the US presidential election. None of this was supposed to happen; in each case the people were supposed to have voted the right way, the way the elite had planned on them voting, but they didn’t. Worse, they seemed to be voting wrong as part of a broader trend of populations specifically reacting against and challenging managerial elite control. ...

In the West, this underdog public rebellion is not only directed against the ruling managerial technocracy, but, critically, has been conducted by precisely the managerial elite’s historic class enemies: the remnants of the old bourgeois middle class.

For the managerial elite this was the apparition of a terrifying nightmare. They thought they’d broken and cast down the old order forever. Now it seemed to be trying to climb out of the grave of history, where it belonged, to take its revenge and drag them all back to the dark ages before enlightened managerial rule had brought the word of progress to the world. The prospect of real power returning to the hands of their traditional enemies appeared to be a mortal threat to the future of the managerial class. ...

This elite revolt against democracy cannot be fully understood as a reaction only to proximate events, however – no matter how outrageously orange and crude their apparition. Rather, the populist revolts that emerged in 2016 sparked such an intense, openly anti-democratic reaction because they played directly into a much deeper complex of managerial anxieties, dreams, and obsessions that has roots stretching back more than a century.

It was 1887 and Woodrow Wilson thought America had a problem: too much democracy. What it needed instead was the “science of administration.” ...

By this he meant that all the affairs of the modern state, all the “new things the state ought to do,” should be placed above any vulgar interference from the political – that is, above any democratic debate, choice, or accountability – and instead turned over to an elevated class of educated men whose full-time “profession” would be governing the rabble. ...

Over the course of his presidency (1913-1921), and seizing in particular on the opportunity provided by the crisis of WWI, Wilson would oversee the first great centralizing wave of America’s managerial revolution, establishing much of the initial basis for the country’s modern administrative bureaucracy, including imposing the first federal income tax and creating the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Labor.

He also ruled as perhaps the most authoritarian executive in American history, criminalizing speech through his Espionage and Sedition acts, implementing mass censorship through the Post Office, setting up a dedicated propaganda ministry (The Committee on Public Information), and using his Attorney General to widely prosecute and jail his political opponents. More dissidents were arrested or jailed in two years of war under Wilson than in Italy under Mussolini during the entirety of the 1920s. ...

The People’s Republic of China has already taken this logic to its fullest conclusion. Popular voting may have been done away with all-together in China, but it too is still a democracy (it says so right in its constitution!). Instead of elections, the Party (which exists solely to represent the people, forever), rigorously assesses the will and interests of the masses through a process of internal consultation and deliberation it calls “people’s whole-process democracy” – also known as “consultative democracy,” for short. ...

No risk of the populist rubes ever getting to fondle any delicate machinery here! It should be no wonder that Western managerial elites have been smitten by this vision and the many advantages its offers (to themselves), and have thus everywhere rushed with growing fervor to adapt and implement it at home as fast and to the greatest extent that they can get away with. Wilson would be proud. ...

Dewey the Great had already helped transform America. A leading light of the rising American progressive education movement, he had successfully led a mission to completely remake the American education system, remodeling the country’s historic liberal arts colleges into copies of Germany’s fashionable new centrally-managed “research universities,” as well as generally overhauling the purpose and pedagogy of public education. Whereas Western educational institutions had for centuries focused largely on cultural transmission and forming the character of the students in their charge through study of the humanities and the classical virtues, Dewey believed this approach was outdated and in fact immoral. ...

But of course Dewey and his likeminded colleagues did want to shape the character of America’s children, just in a different way from the old order. ...

Dewey believed public education was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform” precisely because it was, he wrote, “the only sure method of social reconstruction.” Social reconstruction meant reengineering society. Frank Lester Ward, Dewey’s teacher and mentor (and the first president of the American Sociological Association) was even less bashful: the purpose of formal education, he said, was now to be “a systemic process for the manufacture of correct opinions” in the public mind. (It should, he added, therefore be brought under the exclusive control of government, since “the result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.”) ...

Mao, meanwhile, would embrace the same project with particular gusto. ... Explicitly based on new theories of Pavlovian psychological conditioning imported from the USSR and much admired by Mao, it always followed the same distinct method: endless hours of “study” and “discussion” groups where silence was not an option; repeated “self-criticism” and writing of confessions, allegedly to “lay one’s heart on the table” in the name of benevolent collective self-improvement and education; encouragement of neighbors and colleagues to report each other’s alleged harmful faults, wrongdoings, and wrong ideas; separation of people into “good” and “bad” classes or groups; isolation of one target at a time and the “persuasion” of former friends and allies to join in a simultaneous attack; mass “struggle” meetings designed to overwhelm and humiliate the target, and to turn a purge into public spectacle and object lesson; forced groveling apologies, followed by “magnanimous” temporary mercy and redemption or rejection and destruction of the individual as a warning to others; cyclical repetition with persecution of new targets. ...

This conditioning method was combined with an effort to create a fully controlled and wholly fluid information environment, where no one could be quite sure what was true or “correct” at any given moment. Journalism and literature were strictly censored; satire was outlawed. (Patrick's emphasis here) ...

In time the whole country would be reduced to the same state of stifling conformity. ...

Still, it’s true that Mao’s brute force method was particularly crude. In the soft managerialism of the West the effort to build a politically safer, more right-thinking New Man would adopt far more subtle, sophisticated, and gentle methods for washing brains. ...

Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945, but World War II didn’t end. Managerial liberalism had engaged in its first global ideological war, and once the shooting had stopped the ideological struggle was just getting started. Europe and even the American homeland itself still had yet to be truly liberated. The problem was: fascism continued to lurk in minds everywhere. Eradicating it would require nothing less than the psychological transformation of entire populations.

That at least was the conclusion of the politico-psychoanalytic movement led by German self-described Freudo-Marxist Wilhelm Reich, who became convinced that working class Germans were susceptible to authoritarianism because of their unhealthily “repressed” sexuality and attachment to traditional gender roles. Only by liberating them from sexual restraint (Reich coined the phrase “sexual revolution”) and especially by destroying forever the rigid structure of the family and the authority of its patriarchal father figure – i.e. the Fuhrer – could they be reformed and their psyches made safe for liberal democracy. ...

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

By far the most influential work, however, would be conducted by the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno, who produced a new model for psychological assessment called the “F-Scale” (the F stands for Fascist).

The F-Scale, which Adorno pulled straight out of his ass, was a questionnaire that evaluated subjects’ agreement with standard conservative or right-wing beliefs and traits (such as religiousness, belief in inherent gender differences, or overall “conventionalism,” i.e. “conformity to the traditional societal norms and values of the middle class”) and chalked these up as evidence of latent fascist sympathies. Since Adorno and his disciples were Marxists, the survey originally ranked subjects on an authoritarian vs. revolutionary axis (opposition to revolution being “authoritarianism”), but in order to better play to their American sponsors this was re-labeled to read as an authoritarian vs. “democratic” axis. ...

In 1946, President Truman declared a mental health crisis in the United States and the Congress passed the National Mental Health Act, empowering an arm of the administrative state – the National Institutes of Health – with a mission to manage Americans’ psychological state. Hundreds of new psychoanalysts were trained and dispersed to set up “psychological guidance centers” in towns across America. Therapists, counselors, and social workers began to nose their way into every aspect of family, school, and working life.

The therapeutic state had been born. From now on managing the mental and emotional lives of Americans would be a duty of the state and its “civil society,” not just the individual and his or her immediate social community. Dewey’s project of conditioning had expanded from the child to the whole adult population. This of course fitted perfectly into the core imperative of the managerial regime, which seeks constantly to draw more and more aspects of existence into the tender embrace of its fussing expertise. But the development of the therapeutic state also conveniently allowed the managerial elite to further marginalize, and indeed pathologize, their middle-American class enemies. Now the rubes weren’t only backwards, they were mentally broken and unstable. Only by washing their psyches and adopting all the same thoughts, beliefs, and liberal ways of living as the professional managerial class could they possibly hope to be cured. ...

“Anti-fascism” could now take on the same meaning and function as under Mao: tarring any opponent of the managerial regime’s revolutionary project as someone necessary to preemptively destroy, not debate. ...

For the ancient Greeks and Romans the highest possible conception of liberty was thus to live as part of a self-governing polity made up of self-governing individuals. This old idea was then taken and expanded on by John Locke and, among others, the American Founders. Americans became admired as the remarkable epitome of a self-governing people precisely because of their inseparable combination of self-reliance, collective self-organizing, and the system of political self-rule that these virtues supported.

The rise of managerialism and the therapeutic state changed all that. From the family up, even the most close-knit self-organized communities – Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” – were steadily broken down by the managerial regime and its relentless internal colonization and centralization. Decision-making power and responsibility was transferred from individuals, families, and communities to distant bureaucracies and credentialed experts, and action made subservient to an inscrutable thicket of abstract rules and regulations. ...

Not surprisingly, the 1960s produced a great explosion of bureaucratic administration in America, with the state happily taking on a series of grand social management projects, including the War on Poverty, the Great Society, and Civil Rights law. These not only turbocharged the growth of the administrative apparatus, but also proved fundamental to propelling the managerial system’s expansion beyond the confines of the state, greatly enhancing the managerial role of non-profit organizations and compelling the creation of such innovates as the modern Human Resources department, which now serves essentially as a compliance arms of the managerial state within nearly every private sector firm.

But even these utopian projects may have been less significant to the expansion of managerialism than the deeper psycho-political transformation of Americans that they reflected: from a people who fiercely valued their agency and self-governing independence to a people conditioned to eagerly trade away any essential liberty for security. A new de facto social contract had been established: the people would offer compliance to being managed, and in return the managerial regime would provide them with ever greater comfort and safety, not only physical but psychological.

Today America is hardly alone in this regard. When COVID-19 first emerged China’s managerial regime immediately imposed draconian containment measures in the name of public safety, locking entire cities in their homes, shuttering whole economic sectors, and splitting up families while dragging them off to quarantine camps. It continued these self-destructive national policies for three years after it had become scientifically clear that the virus was relatively mild and posed no health risks anywhere near necessitating that level of response. But as the virus began to spread around the world, managerial states in the West notably looked to China not with dismay, but with admiration. Still, they initially assumed the people of the West would never accept such a level of managerial control by their regimes. As Professor Neil Ferguson, who directed Britain’s early COVID response, admitted in a 2020 interview, public health bureaucrats wanted to adopt China’s “innovative intervention” but initially dismissed it as something Western people simply wouldn’t tolerate. But they were mistaken: “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realized we could,” Ferguson gloated. A majority of the British people in fact clamored for the security of managed life under lockdown (and still do). And so the “sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically” in the West, Ferguson explained.

Ferguson must be hanged as the architect of managerial elimination of human freedom, especially the freedom to choose what goes into our bodies.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

A cycle of co-dependency is created, which accelerates as the managerial regime discovers it can constantly prop up new objects of fear from which to generously protect the public. The regime becomes a devouring mother, projecting weakness onto her children in order to keep them attached and under her sway.

The “New Man” desired by managerialism is not a man at all, but an infant: dependent and incapable of self-governance; needy and consumptive; a blank slate, malleable and suggestible; loving and trusting of the caretakers it assumes to be omnipotent and compassionate – the perfect managerial subject. Preserving such a state of immaturity makes possible a historically new, all-consuming kind of regime. ...

And yet, the more the public has been successfully kept “in perpetual childhood,” the more the regime – being no true loving parent – has come to view them only with pure contempt and to treat them with complete disregard. Not all have taken it politely. A good portion of the more willful children still refuse to behave and keep rebelling against their teachers. Despite much effort, the demos so far still hasn’t been made safe for democracy. What is to be done? Using force on these holdouts doubtless grows more and more tempting, along with more and more rigorous forms of conditioning and control. Exchanging some tricks of the managerial trade with harder, crueler siblings may therefore seem like an increasingly necessary and natural evolution for our managerial order. ...

Managerial technocracy has a big problem: it doesn’t really work. Building the Tower of Babel never works, because not everything can be completely controlled by human cleverness. The larger and more enveloping the system of control grows, the more complex it becomes. The more complex it becomes, the exponentially more difficult it becomes to control. Entropy and dysfunction inexorably creep into the system; addressing one problem then only creates multiple new, unexpected problems; the tower begins to wobble. ...

The only real goal and method of managerialism is to expand management, and management itself produces nothing except further artificial complexity. So at some point the self-serving expansion of managerial bureaucracy overtakes any gains in organizational efficiency produced by the application of managerial technique.

Nonetheless, the managerial regime is capable of only one response to the emergence of such instability, which is to double down: more top-down control; more layers of management; more insistent claims to expert knowledge; more efforts to spare the people “all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living”; more clearing away of any perceived resistance to utopia. ...

For the managerial regime, stability of course means unquestioning public compliance with managerial authority. Blocking such complete managerial power is, as always, all those spheres of authority that could possibly compete with the regime: i.e. any remaining stable institutions, communities, independent economic networks, religions, norms, traditions, and ways of life that make possible and encourage self-governance – or at least organization and decision-making outside and independent of the managerial Borg. These obstacles, these recalcitrant remains of the old order, stand in the way of change, of consolidation, of reconstruction, of progress… so they must go; they must be smashed! ...

This means conservative preservation of old customs and forms and legal structures is always utterly inimical to the managerial regime’s objectives and nature. ...

“Wokeism” is a Marxism-derived ideology/radical religious cult that seeks to establish heaven on earth (the utopia of universal “social justice”) through the simultaneous and total liberation of all those who are “oppressed.” This is to be accomplished through the creation of a New Woke Man (they/them) awakened through a process of reeducation into a new consciousness of their oppression, the subsequent seizure and redistribution of all power from “oppressor” groups, and the sweeping away or inversion of all established hierarchies, moral norms, and other “social constructs” of the past that place any limits on infinite self-creation of identity and broader reality. It is absolutely revolutionary to its core.

So at first glance it might seem like an odd choice of ideology for all of the institutions of the establishment to enthusiastically and simultaneously adopt and promote, as they swiftly did after 2016. Doesn’t the state want order and control, not revolution? ...

But this shouldn’t be such a mystery. Wokeism poses no threat to the basis of the managerial regime – quite the opposite. First of all, it is a radical but straightforward extension of soft managerial ideology. It maintains and advances all of the same core tenets (remember those?): scientism, utopianism, meliorism, liberationism, hedonism, cosmopolitanism, and dematerialization (to which we could arguably add safetyism, as described earlier). ...

Or as Mao put it in a letter to his wife in 1966 when he decided to kick off China’s hugely destructive Cultural Revolution (mainly so as to consolidate his own waning personal power) the method was to stir up “great disorder under heaven” for the purpose of creating “great order under heaven.” Only through the emergency of chaos and mass disruption could he find the latitude to take bold action, make sweeping changes, eliminate rivals, reorder allegiances, and seize control of new power centers in ways that would previously have been impossible. (Hence why he is reputed to have remarked during the height of the bloody madness that, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”)

This dialectic can work at any level. As a simple hypothetical example, let’s say you’re a political bureaucrat and you want to seize factional control over a department of police so as to wield them as your personal jackbooted thugs. That might ordinarily be pretty difficult, since the public would complain, the department itself is an established institution with rules, and it is already filled with seasoned men loyal to an existing hierarchy who are united in not liking or trusting you, you little psychopath. But there’s a way: you find a reason to have the department defunded, forcing most of those disagreeable people to leave and find other work during this difficult fiscal crisis; now the streets are overrun with crime and all is chaos under heaven, so the public angrily demands you re-fund the police and enforce some law and order; you graciously acquiesce and fund the department – in fact, you, a champion of the people, double its budget, hiring all your chosen thugs, and at generous salaries. Presto! The department is back bigger than ever, but now loyal to your patronage. Through disunity has emerged a new unity.

Broadly speaking, establishing a new, more centralized and tighter order is the whole goal of every revolution. The iron-fisted tyranny of a Mao, a Stalin, or a Napoleon is not some unfortunate accident of well-intentioned revolution gone wrong, it’s the point.

The goal of the Woke revolution is not “deconstruction,” lawlessness, and social chaos forever; it’s the forceful refounding of a new and far more totalizing order. The managerial regime quickly intuited that this ideology, which it found lying around in a squalid corner of academia (its specific lineage doesn’t really much matter), presented an ideal tool for destroying its enemies and extending its power and control, and so opportunistically picked it up and adopted it as a hammer with which to smash things. ...

Then there are the Black Categories, the reactionary bourgeoisie, the fascists of the working and middle class, who can now also be branded as white supremacists and all other manner of ‘phobes, and then be righteously beaten down and tormented and isolated and surveilled and dispossessed anew for their deplorable bigotry and hatred. Oh, how the tired old class struggle has been reinvigorated to provide such delicious new moral delights! ...

Yes, this angers the opposition, but the opposition is weak and timid and their actions can always be twisted to fit the chosen narrative and used to further isolate them. Combined with the opportunity to advance its core revolutionary drive, these benefits have made Wokeism potentially the single most useful conceptual evolution ever adopted by Western managerialism.

And the structure of the new unity that Woke managerialism intends to establish, if successful in this phase of the revolution, is quite clear. Its outlines are obvious, for example, in the proposal by one of America’s most celebrated Woke theoreticians, Ibram X. Kendi, for the passage of “an anti-racist constitutional amendment” that would make unconstitutional “racial inequity” and “racist ideas by public officials,” and “establish and permanently fund [a] Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.” This DOA would be “responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” In other words: a sweeping new order of total managerial control, policing even our most intimate affairs and the most private wrongthink, and overseen by a permanent unelected and unaccountable superstructure of “formally trained experts.”

Would any Western government really go this far? Of course they will, if they can, for the bear hungers after that sweet, sweet honey. In fact, with Wokeism having quickly spread beyond America, other managerial regimes in the West, such as Ireland (and the whole EU), are already rushing ahead of the United States to begin codifying similarly far-reaching plans into law. ...

Where will it end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone – that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master – the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

Fortunately this project has not yet fully succeeded. It has encountered some unexpected democratic resistance from middle-class “populism,” which has at least somewhat slowed its transformational march. Nor can it yet openly operate outside the framework of the old democratic order and the lingering moral legitimacy that moldy shroud still provides. The regime must continue to advance mainly through existing mechanisms of legal and civic authority. Hence the upside-down world of our present transitional period, in which the new order constantly and loudly insists its mission is to defend the old order even as it dismantles it.

This playacting is aided by the fact that – being essentially nihilistic – modern managerialism is difficult to place on the traditional left-right political spectrum, at least as most people understand it. ... This helps to confuse and disguise its radical nature and allow it to consistently drape itself in the shimmering cloak of the reasonable, moderate, representative middle, whether the “center-left” or “center-right.” Of course it is actually none of these things, except the center of power.

The “extreme center” is therefore potentially a useful descriptive term here. The term identifies the concentration of power into a single “establishment” or ruling class that is united by shared interests (no matter how many formal political parties this may include), and which portrays itself as the dispassionate voice of moderation and reason facing off against the “extremes” (any opposition outside this bloc). In this situation politics becomes a struggle not between two or more parties or factions debating which specific policies of government to implement, but a defense of the inner against the outer, of the center vs. the periphery.[16] The center defines the window of “normal,” “legitimate,” or acceptable policies and opinions, while the periphery and its views are painted as dangerous, illegitimate, and unacceptable for consideration or compromise (no matter how much popular support they may embody). Ideological clarity or constancy is of little importance here; the only unifying goal of the center’s bloc is to protect its comfortable monopolization of decision-making and status by excluding or subjugating anyone who might challenge its collective interests. ...

This paranoia engenders a sense of being under siege, along with a feedback loop that produces a steady slide into more and more suspicion and perceived need for greater security (this dovetails perfectly with the processes of bureaucratization and safetyism discussed earlier). Soon everything has become a matter of security. And once something becomes a matter of security, it becomes a matter of existential necessity, and therefore suitable for exception from the established processes and rules of collective decision-making and accountability (democratic or otherwise), given that in an emergency it is justifiable to suspend normal procedures for the sake of expediency. But of course once everything is a matter of security everything becomes an emergency, and so anything is justified – permanent emergency becomes a procedural basis for governance. ...

If for example you’re part of a Marxist student group in China today and are naïve enough to try to organize discontented local sweatshop laborers into an independent union, as foolish students there do now and then, you will be arrested faster than you can shout “workers of the world unite!” That’s because, just as de Jouvenel would have predicted, the one thing the CCP is absolutely not flexible about is its complete and eternal control over all power in the country. ...

Now also ruled by an extreme center, the United States has unsurprisingly begun to develop its own milder case of this “securitization of everything” in recent decades. This started in earnest after 9/11 and accelerated after 2016 with the manufactured panic over “foreign” election interference and “disinformation.” ... Then came the Great Awokening, the 2020 election year, and COVID. Securitization began reaching more “total” levels. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a new government body so besotted with security that its name includes the word twice, has for example embraced as its mission the need to use mass censorship of public and private communications to secure not only America’s network infrastructure but also its “political infrastructure” and even its “cognitive infrastructure” – i.e. the minds of every American. ...

The whole point of law is to facilitate the rule of the Party, so of course the Party’s leadership is above the law.

This is only logical: if the law is a tool of human management, how can it restrict and rule over the managers who create it? Laws exist to rule the ruled; if rulers choose to exempt themselves from rules that’s not “hypocrisy,” just power. After all, sovereign is he who decides the exception. ...

Managerialism of course cannot permit or even conceive of any power higher than itself; its entire raison d'être is to reorder and control all of existence, and to accept that anything is beyond its reach would undermine its whole basis. Therefore managerialism and rule of law cannot coexist.

So, in a rule by law America, laws (a great jungle of them) would still be on the books, but their interpretation and application would inevitably vary extensively in order to best suit the managerial regime in any given situation.

Ah! This explains the many recent extreme examples of "the law" being used purely as a weapon:

https://patrick.net/post/1379445/2023-05-30-the-us-government-is-illegitimate

Great articles, thanks @Patrick

Dewey, Marcuse, Reich, Wilson, the whole tour de force.

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence

Subjective interpretation of the law – as meaning one thing one day, another the next – would be not only acceptable but absolutely necessary so long as the purpose of the law (to protect the center and progress its managerial project) were to remain fixed as the guiding principle. Building vague and expansive language into the law to facilitate this would become the norm, much as the Chinese regime regularly makes use of laws against such ill-defined crimes as “spreading rumors” or “stirring up trouble” to flexibly do away with problematic people as needed. And selective use of the law as a factional weapon (aka “lawfare”) to undermine or destroy outsider political and class enemies, while sheltering insider allies, would become not only ethically permissible, but practically the civic responsibility of the center’s ruling elite. ...

This, perhaps more than any other symptom, would confirm and solidify the transition from a representative multi-party democracy to a one-party state. ...

And yet, the whole party-state system can pivot almost instantaneously to focus on – often to the point of unhealthy fixation – and massively mobilize around new priorities as if it were a single hive mind. ... That’s because the “whole of society” penetration and vast structure of the Party network allows it to automatically serve as a coordinating nervous system. And because in such a system loyalty to the Party, signaled through ideological conformity, is far more important for advancement than competency. Only the most general of ideological guidance is therefore needed to prompt Party cadres everywhere to strive (out of self-interest/self-preservation) to interpret, conform to, and at least rhetorically put into practice that guidance. As soon as the latest ideological system update is downloaded, everyone is off to the races, for better or worse.

So, does the United States, or the broader West, have its own united front? Inquiring minds doubtless want to know. At this point it is impossible not to notice the strong tendency of Western elite media, in particular, to move in near absolute synchronicity. It is no longer unusual for a dozen different articles from different outlets to appear touting exactly the same narrative on the same topic in the same week, or even the same day. In fact this is now the norm. For the glassy-eyed talking heads on television to all repeat, with identical phraseology, exactly the same talking points in unison hundreds of times within days is now the industry standard. The sudden adoption of the same linguistic taboos, redefinitions, and fads. The same claims to absolute truth, along with the moral necessity of “debunking” the “misinformation” of any alternative views, followed by the sudden, simultaneous, and wholly unacknowledged and unexplained shift to some different version of absolute truth. The simultaneous identification of the same enemies and pressing threats to the public. The same individual targets singled out for simultaneous hit pieces. The same niche objects of obsessive, swooning coverage. And the same topics of great public interest mysteriously left entirely uncovered by every outlet, as if an official blackout on even the acknowledgement of their existence had been suddenly enforced from above. This is all now standard for the media.

But of course it’s not only the media. The experience of having politicians, academics, major corporations, internet platforms, advertisers, entertainment companies, and all the neighbors you run into at Wholefoods all suddenly pivot to adopt the same weekly conception of facts, echo the same shibboleths, and hang the same flags of allegiance is now simply a normal, if bewildering, part of everyday life in the West. This mass, synchronistic adherence to the constantly shifting “current thing” naturally gives rise to suspicion that there must be some top-down coordination occurring. ...

Who controls this unified network of institutions? No one really controls the network; the network controls everyone. What controls the network? A narrative does. All the institutions in the cathedral seem like they’re singing from the same hymn sheet because they are. The essential unifying and coordinating mechanism of the managerial system is that all its constituent parts share a single doctrinal perspective, an adherence to the same motivational memetic narrative. It speaks with one voice as an emergent property of this fact. ...

But what determines which narrative adaptations are fit to be carried forward? Simple: they are those that make the system stronger. Curtis Yarvin, as part of his explanation of the cathedral, describes such an adaptation, which he labels a “dominant” idea, as one that “validates the use of power.” The system is always eager to adopt and perpetuate such ideas or narratives. In contrast, a “recessive” idea is one that “invalidates power or its use.” Such an idea is radioactive. As a simple example, a public health bureaucrat who advocates that the public health bureaucracy needs to be handed near unlimited power so that it can respond to the threat of a virus is a prestigious hero to the whole bureaucratic system for making them all more important and powerful. A public health bureaucrat who says publicly that the same virus isn’t actually dangerous, and that no action by the public health bureaucracy is really needed, is a traitor to the whole system. For calling into question the very necessity of public health bureaucrats, the blasphemer is going to be denounced by his peers, tagged as low-status, and have his career cut short – even if he is obviously right.

Out of self-interest, the whole system constantly rewards conformity with dominant narrative ideas and punishes dissent. The overall operating narrative is the accumulation of all the most effective justifications for validating the system’s existence and growing it to be as large, powerful, and prestigious as possible. Anyone in the system who wants to accumulate any personal prestige or benefit (which is basically everyone) must therefore loyally adhere to, uphold, and defend the dominant narrative at all times, or be severely disadvantaged. ...

Echoing the values and stories of the dominant narrative then serves as an indicator of belonging to system, class, and shared righteous identity.

Hence anyone in the professional managerial class who wants to become or remain a member of the managerial elite will almost inevitably conform to and parrot the same broad narrative belief structure, even if they are in completely different institutions and professions. Frank the FBI agent and Joanna the journalist are programmed to each react the same way to the same narrative stimulus, repeat the same slogans, and engage in the same required “not noticings” of reality, simply because each wants to avoid being shunned and to advance in status within the prestige hierarchy of their respective organizations. There is no direct coordination needed to get them to do this. ...

Why did Wokeism seem to take over every elite institution at once? Primarily because it was a dominant narrative innovation that justified making the managerial elite and the whole managerial system larger, more powerful, higher status, and of more central importance to society. Of course very few individuals in these institutions were ever going to stand against it.

AmericanKulak says

Great articles, thanks Patrick

Dewey, Marcuse, Reich, Wilson, the whole tour de force.

@AmericanKulak

It's all one gigantic Substack article. Really brilliant. I'm still not done reading and quoting it!

One thing I've noticed is that the managerial classes WANT their kids to get pozzed with woke in Private Schools.

It's the engineers, chemists, etc. that are not in management that get upset over Whole Math and CRT and Queer Theory in those Private Schools. As non-managers, they don't see all the 'benefits' of signalling in memos from HR and DEI and everything else; they're working on actual projects.