(Worth Repeating) The underlying question is ‘Why are western institutions so vulnerable to the female method of warfare against our institutions (Woke and Neocon) using credentialism and propaganda and baiting into hazard (finance, commerce, politics)?
I can only speak to this from the perspective of American history, not western culture in general, but don’t modern bureaucratic institutions basically guarantee this behavior? And America ended up with that kind of institution being dominant all of a sudden because we did not have a strong state or church or alternatives, and most Americans couldn’t really imagine what Progressives were up to in the late 19c/early 20c, when the hope in scientific bureaucracy and impersonal central planning was at its height. The new college-educated elite class and mass immigration/migration, as well as the rise of mass media and really concentrated power/nationalization, had disrupted everything for a while. Most of all, there was a belief that we really were breaking fundamentally with the past, esp. among the elites, given all the changes, and if that was correct, America was best-positioned to just jettison its own tradition and identity and seize the opportunity to lead the modern world. We just went off the cliff, which happens, but we simultaneously scaled up our society massively, made it way more complex, became a wealthy world power, and messed around with our whole legal system, federal arrangements, natural rights theorizing, and civic religion. So retracing one’s steps or defaulting back to normalcy wasn’t an option. Recovering from the confusion was difficult, and it was easy to use the old structures and new money to build new scams. Early (all-male) academics and professionals/experts were generally just as into this behavior, with some modifications for the time. Credentialism was seen as the hot new thing at the time, a way to get excellence, not an excuse to hoard power. Sincerely, in many cases, but stupidly, and once they had the systems built, they were immediately corrupted. Emerson warned about it many times. The early Republicans/sharper Brahmin types in Boston had a lot of this right, IMO, and tried to guard against these precise problems. The rest of the country was generally not responsible enough for self-governance yet, even their elites, and as they got control away from Boston, that was the beginning of the end. I always say the only viable American conservatism is the MA kind. One can argue this is because the best Brahmins and their allies really felt responsible for America’s success, and had a paternal relationship towards it and other Americans. They were loyal and dedicated in a way others were not. Responsible. When I look at the record, everyone else strikes me as obliviously irresponsible, and rather frighteningly incompetent when it comes to maintaining basic civilization. Someone from MA built virtually every school and curriculum in this country with the exception of those built by religious minorities who value schooling, religious or otherwise (Catholics, Jews, etc.) The passion for universal education and literacy, the more I look at it, is undoubtedly a religious belief of the Puritans of MA, later Congregationalists/Unitarians/Transcendentalists, etc. They took care of almost all of it, and were good at preventing corruption of the system for a long time, in part because no one seemed smart or motivated enough to try. After the Civil War, we were kind of doomed, because, while you can understand it to a degree, many white southerners didn’t feel like doing anything but undermining the system, or co-opting it for their own purposes, which in the case of things like schools did not mean “change the curriculum to be more in line with our needs and values” so much as “use the schools as patronage schemes while ignoring the curriculum or centering it around romanticizing the Confederacy and giving the North Hell.” This made it very hard for Republicans to deal with the threats of socialism and bureaucracy because the country was divided and the Northern Democrats had an interest in staying alive by finding an issue like championing the economically oppressed and civil service reform and opposing the old-fashioned, elitist or corrupt status quo. It wasn’t like they had a plan that to calm down the South, but the South gave them the votes for that nonsense as long as they upheld segregation, etc. The Republicans didn’t know what to do when the other party didn’t really see itself as responsible for America’s well-being…the Republicans’ reputation for responsibility gave them credibility for a while and they did okay, but eventually, as professionalization and war and foreign policy and universities became the norm and we *needed* bureaucracy, because that’s what modern countries do, the Republicans had no real answer to that. The good ones knew enough to try and avoid imperialism and WWI nonsense, but once that genie was out of the bottle….I mean, we were dragged into a world and into institutions for which our political system(s), society, and culture(s) were not designed. Most people never figured out what happened. And we were unable to generate an elite class that could handle this sort of world, because it’s unnatural to our social arrangements and self-understanding. So we get pseudoelites. As far as I can tell, and whether or not it was fair or realistic, the plan after the Civil War was for Boston to kind of run the country for the foreseeable future. The other regions were seen as incapable of self-government without being closely watched and discreetly mentored for a time (with the South under martial law or close to it). This had been going on for some time, in a lighter way. Much to my surprise/horror, these regions do not seem to have ever really launched, even now, and the Boston elites were eventually overthown. (Leadership quality degraded everywhere, plus bad luck, social change, and addition of new states to challenge them/failure of Reconstruction). The idea was that Boston would kind of have final editing rights on the national identity, ideals, and basic ground rules/legal system, and work overtime on bringing everyone up to speed, bribing and resettling as necessary to get the South to some level of functionality. Once they lost control of the schools they’d built to the South after Reconstruction, and then lost control of most federal policy, literature, and some other things, their tools were corrupted and used against them, but it wasn’t just lack of imagination. They truly had never intended for those tools to leave their hands. They wouldn’t have built them otherwise. They didn’t expect Lincoln to die, and then Garfield, and the Dems to be back so soon, or 1876, or Sumner to die just as their other Senator left to be VP and Emerson got hit with Alzheimer’s. Or for a bunch of competing universities promoting European and scientific materialist ideas to take over and shred the social consensus when combined with immigration and anti-New England spite. It was rough. We’ve long had a shortage of men serious enough to handle governing America without significant guidance and training, because we don’t have institutions that select and train them, and there’s no shared consensus across the whole country. Boston and people wiling to join the Boston institutions were our main hope there, and it worked for a while, and then did not. But I think you overrate the WASP leadership of the early 20c. They were living off Boston’s capital and obliviously opening the doors to what came later, not sufficiently rooted in our civil religion because that was pre-modern and not scientific, etc., and it was cooler to be an Anglophile right-progressive or something and try to compete with Europe? They adopted whatever rationalizations they could for their cool schemes, and in the mass media world, that was the end. There were also ways in which American mythology was an unusually good fit for certain things going on at that time, and could be exploited or awkwardly misappropriated in a way that, over time, led to seriously co-option. We were just ripe for confusion with our weak, fractured national identity and institutions, and all the changes going on in the world. Spelling things out again, as you try to do, is what is needed. It was done, but not in a way that all groups found convincing or intelligible. And there’s just a lot of resistance to basic limits and realism. Sorry for the long post.
Don’t apologize for the long post – it was a pleasure to read. And I can’t argue with it at all. It’s correct. some of the insights are more than correct – they’re uncommonly insightful for all of us to understand. I would say that yes, (a) all bureaucracies tend to evolve toward deceit. (b) yes your analysis of the post civil war period. (c) yes to the ‘managerial’ belief that the state could be managed like industry. yes to all of it. I’m trying to solve the problem, the big problem, of political deception of the people whether in the bureaucracy or out. To do that I need a science and logic of decidabiilty that can produce a test (organized protocol for decision making) that can be used in a court of law. In that process I’ve accidentally produced the science of lying as well as speaking truthfully (testifying). We can study the classical restoration in Europe, British empiricals, the protestants, the puritans, the enlightenment (at least empirical sects) and especially the MA-CT river valley political innovations that led to the formation of the founding theories, methods, and organizations. But … it wasn’t enough. it wasn’t enough because they couldn’t reduce what they were doing to a formality, the same way the marxists and the progressives reduced their theories to formalities. So I’m reducing it to a formality (a science, formal logic, of decidability, law, governmnet, economy, family, and society. The oddity is that they were right. They had removed more falsehood from the human mind than any other people in history – because polities were small. In order to scale polities we can either try desperately to indoctrinate by religious or philosophical means (via positiva teaching) or we can prohibit behavior (via negativa) by scientific and legal means. And strangely indoctrination into a fixed system of positive thought (the good) turns out to cause stagnation and decline: the slow spread of dark ages of ingorance. But by education in, and governancy by, and judicial rule by via-negativa means people will continuously re-organize to product positivas (goods) as needed in time and space, while the law (the science of cooperation – or rather, prohibition on non-cooperation, irreciprocity, parasitism, and predation) remains relatively constant, just increasing in precision, like all other ‘settled’ sciences. So when I read through your passage above, I realize it’s all correct. But the presumption we all make is rather interesting: we think via-positiva ideation, philosophy, ideology, and religion that tell us what is good, and teach us to be good, through imitating a presumed or established good, is in fact good. It’s not. It’s the reason the gains of the agrarian age was extinguished by 800ad and everyone who had been ‘civilized’ by the major religions had ceased development. In the case of Islam they destroyed the arts and knowledge of six great civilizations of the ancient world – all of which were more advanced. In other words, we presume we need a ‘way’, rather than a way not. We presume our religion matters, when it was our law that matters more. We presume that we are conscious actors, when in fact we are carrying a metaphysical set of presumptions (a group strategy conveyed as subtle values) that matters more. And that strategy is sovereignty. And sovereignty must lead to trifunctionalism. And trifuctionalism will lead to a market for competing ideas. And so we are successful in the west, despite our attempt to create via-positiva religion (children) and philosophy (adults), but limited by our via-negativa (law and metaphysics) that ensure the competition continues eternally without stagnating as long as religion(seduction), philosophy(choice), and command(authority) can never win the competition against the other two factions. So to maintain that competition and prevent any ‘sect’ from monopoly, I’m just codifying the science of cooperation that’s the foundation of our law, and expanding it so that it prohibits the new kind of criminality that arises as populations, economies, and institutions scale. We were right unconsciously – our metaphysics(group strategy). We were wrong consciously – or search for agency Everyone else was even more wrong because of both metaphysics and search for agency. How to make us conscious of our strategy? Write it as a science of cooperation: Law. I hope that was clear enough. But it’s a profound shift in our understanding. Why? what we do doesn’t matter as long as it’s not what we shouldnt do. ;).
As I was responding I kept thinking … –“She really has a great corrective narrative of ‘what went wrong’ – that would make a great paper, and that paper would make a great book. Because that’s a book we need.”–
As for formalization, if you’d asked me even fifteen years ago I would have said ‘no’. But, it’s on the scale of the Darwinian or Electromagnetic revolution. Not only is it possible. It’s not that hard. In retrospect the constitution has about six or eight holes in it that need plugging. That evidence – that it’s that small a correction – has more explanatory power than I’d ever have imagined. So, you know, I”m not some utopian. I don’t ask people to think or believe anything. I just lay out the science, and the logic it exposes, and the result is what it is: there is a reason for the disproportionate success of European peoples in the bronze, iron, and steel ages. (And a reason for deviation of it into our dark ages too.) We just got less wrong than other civilizations. And that’s because we maximized responsibility not minimized it.
