Guest Post by The Zman
One of the consequences of the neoliberal order is that labor markets in Western societies are at war with themselves. On the one hand, the relentless competition within the managerial class, the so-called meritocracy, results in a relentless, passive-aggressive struggle for status. Within that class of people it is a state of constant anxiety, as these people worry that one small misstep will cause them to lose their standing within the managerial class. Everyone is miserable.
On the other hand, the math of the managerial system means pitting worker against worker, usually relying on foreign mercenaries, to suppress wages and prevent class solidarity. In order to support the swelling army of otherwise useless people in the media, academy and government, it means extracting ever more from the laboring classes and their private employers. The typical private sector worker is under relentless daily pressure to do more with less.
Compounding this is the natural response to these pressures, where workers accumulate in areas shielded from competition. Government grows, as a jobs program and as a way to maintain support for government. The massive growth in government, education and now health care are responses to the relentless competition within the so-called private sector. Skip to the bottom of this post, where there is a graph showing the growth in administrators within the American health care industry.
One vice jaw is the relentless pressure for efficiency in the daily lives of most workers, while the other jaw is a metastasizing layer of naturally inefficient services crowding into daily lives. The typical American spends all day under relentless pressure to perform, while having to navigate a labyrinth of ineptitude in the other parts of their lives. A trip to your kid’s school or a visit to the doctor is like entering a secret world where nothing gets done, no one gets fired and no one cares.
A reason America is such an angry place, despite the massive material prosperity, is that the labor markets are upside down. Prosperity and efficiency should result in a more relaxed and predictable private work place. Good times are supposed to be good times, not a frenzied state of constant worry. Within living memory, a booming economy meant a rise in general happiness, as workers and business enjoyed the fruits of general prosperity. Today, good times are defined by constant dread.
On the other hand, the administrative side of modern society, government, education, health care, should be declining in the lives of the people. In the dreaded private sector, automation means reductions in labor. In the public sphere, automation has meant an explosion of people. The post-Cold War economic boom has seen government more than double. The education bureaucracy has swollen like a tumor. Health care, as seen in that graph, has grown to become a dominant part of life.
Now, the dynamics in the workplace are not the only reason for the rising unhappiness in the West. Importing those foreign mercenaries to undermine domestic labor markets and dilute the vote has consequences beyond economics. Today, people find themselves living among strangers, who practice weird customs and speak exotic languages. America is rapidly becoming a land of foreigners. Diversity plus proximity always results in conflict. No one can afford to relax anymore.
There’s also the massive wealth gap in modern America. As the middle-class is being squeezed to support the managerial class, the over-class is looking like the aristocracy of 18th century France. The tech and financial barons live lives incomprehensible to middle-class people. Worse yet, the reckless disregard of the over-class makes them natural villains. Americans have been trained to admire success, but today’s successful are ugly, un-American people, who elicit nothing but contempt.
The growth of mass media certainly plays a part in the general unhappiness. At the end of the Cold War, most people had television and a newspaper. It was impossible for unwelcome advertisers to invade the private space. Today, we are awash in media and most of it is terrible. How many times do you have to have a video start playing while you are reading the sports pages, before you are in a sour mood? Make that a constant state and it is easy to see how mass media immiserates us.
Immigration, mass media and massive wealth gaps are certainly sources of unhappiness, but they can be remedied. People can form local communities, tune out the media and enjoy their own prosperity. The conflict in the workplace and the growth of the administrative state are unavoidable. Even in traditional homes, worry about the workplace will cause private anxiety. The swollen ranks of single people, defined by their career, are beholden to the daily uncertainty of the workplace.
Turning America is an economic zone, modeled on 20th century business management techniques, has resulted in a marketplace of miserable customers. Rather than economic prosperity resulting in a happy populace, it is a free-for-all of Darwinian competition, where everyone sees everyone as a threat. Prosperity itself becomes a daily threat, as it is built on a relentless drive for efficiency. Bad times meant belt-tightening. Today, good times means being replaced by a Hindu.
That slams into the other jaw of neoliberalism, which is the incoherent inefficiency of the managerial class and their plaything the administrative state. Leave the office to attend to something at your kid’s school or get a physical and you are confronted with a world of negative productivity, run by people with prestigious credentials, frittering away their days in nonsense activities. The constant clash of unpleasant realities makes a normal man spit on his hands, hoist the black flag , and begin slitting throats.
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Socialism, Diversity, Incompetence, Frustrations, are our Kakistocracy and coming Dystopia: The Meritocracy is Dead, killed by Affirmative Action in 1964; pure Communist Tyranny Looms after 2020; total USSA collapse soon after.
Truer words have never been spoken. Get out of the cities if you’re inclined to survive the coming unpleasantness. As we approach the ‘20 election the potential for political violence will increase exponentially. Prepare accordingly.
“… a secret world where nothing gets done, no one gets fired and no one cares.”
-ZMAN
Could be a fantastic Twilight Zone program. Too bad it is a widespread reality.
Dickens nailed the essence of government , 160 years ago. Same as it always was.
This is an extract from CHAPTER 10 of Little Dorrit
The Circumlocution Office
The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving — HOW NOT TO DO IT.
Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be — what it was.
It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn’t been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn’t been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.
Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him. It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything. Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn’t get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn’t get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.
Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfortunates with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare (and they had better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that bitter English recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and never reappeared in the light of day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.
Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the Circumlocution Office. Sometimes, parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary motions made or threatened about it by demagogues so low and ignorant as to hold that the real recipe of government was, How to do it. Then would the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, in whose department it was to defend the Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make a regular field-day of the occasion. Then would he come down to that house with a slap upon the table, and meet the honourable gentleman foot to foot. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that the Circumlocution Office not only was blameless in this matter, but was commendable in this matter, was extollable to the skies in this matter. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that, although the Circumlocution Office was invariably right and wholly right, it never was so right as in this matter. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that it would have been more to his honour, more to his credit, more to his good taste, more to his good sense, more to half the dictionary of commonplaces, if he had left the Circumlocution Office alone, and never approached this matter. Then would he keep one eye upon a coach or crammer from the Circumlocution Office sitting below the bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with the Circumlocution Office account of this matter. And although one of two things always happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution Office had nothing to say and said it, or that it had something to say of which the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, blundered one half and forgot the other; the Circumlocution Office was always voted immaculate by an accommodating majority.
Such a nursery of statesmen had the Department become in virtue of a long career of this nature, that several solemn lords had attained the reputation of being quite unearthly prodigies of business, solely from having practised, How not to do it, as the head of the Circumlocution Office. As to the minor priests and acolytes of that temple, the result of all this was that they stood divided into two classes, and, down to the junior messenger, either believed in the Circumlocution Office as a heaven-born institution that had an absolute right to do whatever it liked; or took refuge in total infidelity, and considered it a flagrant nuisance.
good point about how automation has caused a rif in the private sector while govt has grown–
Today, people find themselves living among strangers, who practice weird customs and speak exotic languages. America is rapidly becoming a land of foreigners. Diversity plus proximity always results in conflict. No one can afford to relax anymore.
America is a hotel, now 3 stars at best, full of stinky foreigners and welfare vouchers.
Excellent analogy 22Win with the exception that it is a motel.