Oh, For a Competent Elite

Samuel T. Francis claimed, adding to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, that there are not only  managers of government and managers of industry, as Burnham claimed, but managers of public opinion as well. These managers exist in “advertising, publishing, journalism, films, broadcasting, entertainment, religion, education, and institutions for research and development,” NGOs, etc. We have seen from The Twitter Files that the FBI, CIA, and other governmental entities should be included here. These are “organizations that disseminate, restrict, or invent information, ideas, and values.” The CIA has interfered with and influenced foreign governments and their elections, and they do this with internal affairs, too. This was made legal through an executive order bypassing privacy protections enabled by Congress. The CIA is “bulk collecting” indiscriminate and untargeted information concerning American citizens and searching through them. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) made this illegal, but the executive order 12333 by Ronald Reagan in 1981 permitted it again. Notoriously, fifty-one current and former intelligence officers signed a fraudulent letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop affair with references to kickbacks for “the big guy” was Russian disinformation shortly before the 2020 election. Those officials are still relied on for analysis and advice. All this is in line with the topic of the book Engineering Consent by Edward Bernays, published in 1947, which wrote of this manipulation in an approving manner, seeing the masses as beneath contempt, the title of which was largely stolen by Chomsky’s better known Manufacturing Consent. The latter book complained that the government controls the media. Journalists who do not write within the approved narrative lose access to things like White House briefings. Chomsky states that the solution is to switch from private news media to public news media. Since “public” is a synonym for government control, this injunction makes no sense. What Chomsky had in mind instead was for “public” to refer to “anarcho-syndicalism,” a system that has never existed, except maybe for a few months during the Spanish Civil War, so much for that as an alternative to elite control.

It is the contention of The Populist Delusion that societies are run by a well-organized elite (elite merely in the sense of being the ruling class). The “elite” are always a tiny minority who can beat the rest of the population simply by being organized. A hundred organized people can terrorize a thousand disorganized people who can be picked off one by one. Recently, membership in the elite has been determined by attendance at expensive and exclusive universities with very narrow qualifications and skills, making the elite more uniform than at any other time in history. It is claimed that capitalist entrepreneurial and feudal systems were more diverse. The current promotion of extreme egalitarianism aimed at people of color and excluding white people means that incompetent and poorly qualified people are being promoted to the elite despite a noticeable lack of talent. Hence, our institutions are crumbling. In a recent attempt to buy airplane tickets, none of the aggregators worked. After selecting a price and a route at that price, a message would appear saying that that price was no longer available. The round-trip ticket to New Zealand went from $2,700 to $7,000. This happened multiple times using multiple aggregators. On a recent trip to Europe, nothing went as planned, with extreme incompetence being displayed by the airlines. This happened to almost everyone flying to the same destination (Vienna) we met. When my wife’s luggage was lost on the return trip, we happened to get a competent airline employee by crashing the priority queue. The ticket agent informed us that we had got lucky and that only she was sufficiently knowledgeable to fill out the necessary forms and do the required searching. Someone on Facebook was so uninformed that he thought that egalitarianism could be used to attack the elite. Not at all. Larry Fink of BlackRock investments, for instance, controlling over 9.43 trillion [sic] dollars, has been one of the prime enforcers and promoters of ESG, “environment, social, governance” aimed at further disenfranchising productive, money-making companies and employees, and choosing people based on identity politics. How many women managers one has, for instance, is a prime ESG concern. In a free market, if having lots of women really is an asset to wealth creation, any company not women will be outcompeted. The fact that they must be strongarmed into doing that tells a different story: an imposed ideological directive that ironically limits the freedom of businesses and women (by forcing them to think a certain way about their lives).

In a bizarre process, students attend non-elite colleges in huge numbers at great expense to themselves and potentially to the country if their student loans remain unpaid, thinking they will gain membership to the ruling class. It mirrors the phenomenon of people putting “Harvard” stickers on the rear windscreen of their cars to signal their elite status, and inexplicably, this being copied by hoi polloi adhering their own “Podunk State” version of these decals as though that were meant to impress anybody. They clearly did not get the point. “You played in the NBA? Well, I have played in several street pick-up games.” This over-production of elites sets up all sorts of resentments of entitled-feeling know-nothings looking for a scapegoat to blame for their failure, some of whom can be channeled off into “diversity” promoting job-creation programs. A recent message from our local college president stated that changes would be made to the diversity office. Instead of its dissolution as the only logical and moral thing to do, it announced its expansion with additional over-paid staff members with made-up titles.

The creation of social media has meant that, for the first time, people can become aware of the ruling class’s manipulations on a mass scale. The elites need a certain amount of buy-in to their messages and programs. They cannot diverge too wildly from the great mass of people without having to exert extreme authoritarian suppression, which just makes them seem less legitimate and awakens everyone to what the puppet masters are doing.

In the same way that the murder of Jesus brought to our attention the scapegoat mechanism for the first time in history, an innocent person killed by the mob for the purposes of social cohesion, social media gives private non-elite individuals the opportunity to point out the lies, half-truths, and omissions of corporate media. It is tempting to imagine that this presages some brave new world where “the news” becomes unbiased. Instead, we get super-biased, ridiculous news. Why?

The avuncular Walter Cronkite is used by a great many people as a symbol of the old state of affairs. People would watch “the news,” with the definite article, “the,” implying its singularity. We all got the same news, more or less. And, because it was aimed at America as a whole, it had to be relatively centrist. If it was not apparent that the audience was being manipulated at the time, it is certainly obvious now. Social media has pulled back the curtain, and lies and obfuscations can be revealed practically in real-time with a means to communicate the discovery available to all. But, in the days before Twitter, etc., these lies and obfuscations could not be widely known. Nor could “the news” be too extreme or designed to appeal just to Democrats or only to Republicans. Buy-in from nearly everyone was necessary since it was addressed to all.

Again, most people do not like the idea of being manipulated or told what to think. Or, at least, they think they do not like it. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, has Ivan in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor, suggesting that most people actually like moral certainty. Thinking for oneself means going out on a limb. And God forbid, personal moral responsibility. Tell us what the rules are. Tell us what “all good people” are supposed to say and believe. And do not make it too difficult. None of this “love your enemy” stuff – a sheer impossibility. Journalists and academics want to know what the “consensus” is before saying anything, as Nassim Taleb comments. If you write and say what everyone else writes and says, on what basis can one be called out and criticized? Being the embodiment of Das Man is the safest thing to be; Heidegger’s “They Say,” “They say it’s going to be hot today.” “Oh, it wasn’t. Sorry. Don’t blame me. I was just repeating what ‘they say.’” Evidence for this tendency can be seen in those who change the flag in their profile picture as though on command from the elite in exact conformity to their edicts. They can switch from being anti-vaccine when Trump was promoting it to pro-vaccine when it was Biden.

Liberals like to claim that a college education teaches “critical thinking.” It does not. It teaches conformity to current egalitarian, identitarian politics and to fear the consequences of stepping out of line. Burnham notes that mass literacy did not create independent thinkers. It generated a populace that could be fed with propaganda more effectively. Critical thinking depends on having a great deal of knowledge about a topic. The more you know, the better you are at assessing the plausibility of assertions. If one knows nothing about baseball, one is in no position to judge the veracity of claims concerning it. And students know very little. It can seem like “Wednesday follows Tuesday” would be news to some of them. Some recent unexpected examples of giant lacunae in their vocabularies (“lacunae” would be one of them) include “nuance,” “unintelligible,” and “promiscuity.” I was trying to explain that extremism is a sign of low intelligence and that, almost by definition, a more intelligent person’s thinking will be more nuanced, only to find that none of them knew what “nuance” meant. Good grief! A large vocabulary is one proxy, at least for intelligence, and provides the means for more dexterous thinking.

Kierkegaard wrote two hundred years ago that journalism is about telling people what to think, not neutrally informing them about anything. Perhaps people would be happier with the Walter Cronkite method of operation. We all get the same lies. To that extent, we share a world in common.

There are now many competing sources of news, or at least opinions masquerading as news. In truth, there are far fewer reporters doing independent investigative journalism. Newsrooms have few, if any, foreign correspondents, an expensive commodity, and so, in some ways, the sources of news are more restricted than in the past. “Our man in Egypt” could at least make his observations firsthand. Once it becomes practically the man in Egypt or none at all, things are likely to be worse.

Corporate news still determines what gets reported and talked about to a large extent. Alternative media is still largely driven by what corporate media chooses to report and emphasize, and alternative media is often just commentary on the mainstream, not producing its own entirely independent content.

Competition in a free market is generally good, producing lower-cost, higher-quality products. Competition in the news market, however, involves striving for attention. Clickbait headlines are produced that have nothing to do with the actual article or are hopelessly misleading. News articles make outrageous claims only to renounce their assertions in the final paragraphs. Definitively wrong and damaging assertions are made about individuals, only for the retraction to be buried deep in a later edition of the paper and generally unread. Fear and outrage predominate in the unnatural selection of what gets published.

News outlets get siloed, appealing to a particular segment of the population, flattering them that they are the morally upright ones possessed of true knowledge (gnosis). The siloing is particularly bad on the “left” because the “right” cannot avoid hearing what the left has to say, not because they are more virtuous. The left dominates “advertising, publishing, journalism, films, broadcasting, entertainment, religion, education, and institutions for research and development.” Applications for professorships now require signing a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement and explaining what the applicant has contributed to “social justice.” Research grants, even in the sciences, must also explain their relevance to social justice in many instances. Colleges will self-describe as “social justice institutions,” leaving no official room for dissent. Regarding leftist siloing, anecdotally, I know of two academics who learned the term “woke” just a few months ago, despite both being politically interested. Since “woke” has become a term of abuse denoting anything that divides people into oppressors and oppressed, with whites playing the role of the former in all instances, it can just be called anti-white hatred. And since the “left” is unlikely to use the term about itself anymore, exclusive reliance on left-wing “elite” media sources means that they will remain oblivious to a large portion of the culture war.

The Biden administration, like any elite, is desperately trying to suppress any view that deviates from the agenda they wish to promote. Biden just published an executive order saying that any new AI, like ChatGPT, must conform to his diversity, inclusion, and equity agenda, making AI useless as a source of truth and in line with current elite concerns. The Twitter Files reveal the Biden administration and the FBI and CIA operating as an extension of the Democratic party, all coercing Twitter, now X, into banning, censoring, shadow banning, and suppressing almost exclusively right-leaning content in something like a 12 to 1 ratio. Since the government is not allowed to censor Americans directly as a result of the First Amendment, their actions can be seen as a violation of that Amendment by getting social media entities to do their censoring for them. The government does this by threatening them with the removal of their Section 230 “provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that protects companies that host user-created content from lawsuits over posts on their services,” which would make their platforms unusable. Most platforms, such as Google (YouTube), Facebook, and Instagram (both owned by Meta), simply comply. Elon Musk bought Twitter expressly to provide pushback to this manipulation, as stated on the Joe Rogan podcast #2054. In his view, the accident that technology companies are centered in San Francisco is a disaster. San Francisco has its own weird, counterproductive politics that has resulted in San Francisco becoming unlivable in many places, covered in human feces, tents, and open-air drug sales. The problem has skyrocketed despite an ever-increasing amount of money being spent on it, while “homelessness” (really mostly just drug addiction and mental illness, often both) has declined on the East Coast, in New York and Florida, and lots of other places, like Houston. This is all explained wonderfully, with copious amounts of data, in San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruined Cities, by Michael Shellenberger. This sick brand of politics has now been exported internationally, thanks to the tech industry, whereas normally, this Berkeley-influenced craziness would have been restricted to a ten-mile radius, but is now a national concern.

Neema Parvini, author of aforesaid The Populist Delusion, contends that we are always ruled by an elite, no matter the system. Iran has democratic elections, except that the candidates are handpicked by the regime, making the choice meaningless. Nonetheless, going through the charade of an election makes the whole thing seem more populist and legitimate. We might denigrate the politics of Iran, but our own are similar. The elites choose who the candidates will be, and the rest of us stare in disbelief at the often pathetic options displayed before us. The Democratic party insisted that Bernie Sanders would not be the Democratic candidate in 2016 and simply presented Democratic voters with Hillary Clinton, regardless of popular Democrat sentiment. Donald Trump seems to have been a genuine renegade, with the Republicans appearing to have less control over who wins the primaries than the Democrats. But it was no real problem. Civil servants and the like just refused to implement his policies, and Trump was largely shut down as an effective president.

Parvini thinks a competent elite would allow Trump back in office rather than inventing spurious charges against him for things for which no one else would be prosecuted. It would give conservative America reassurance that the political system is not completely corrupt and bring them back within the fold, to a certain extent. And then, Trump could be expected to be just as helpless and ineffective as last time. Left control of all the institutions would continue unabated. One suspects that the reason they do not do this is because Trump serves as a role model of someone who questions elite-determined orthodoxy. His verbal pushback to this was a huge part of his appeal for many, regardless of his effectiveness as a president. The ruling class has nothing much to fear from his actions, but open deviation from elite messaging cannot be tolerated.

Scott Adams, whom Parvini seems to listen to and respect, notes that every single American institution is corrupt and morally and politically compromised. Giant tech companies like Google and Twitter get hacked with their massive resources and expertise available to prevent this from happening. We are lied to, and truths inconvenient to the elite regime simply are not mentioned on CNN or other mouthpieces. With the news siloing, half the country discovers them, and the other half never hears of them, and then, if they are told about them, they can just say, “That’s a right-wing fabrication. I listen to the news assiduously, and my trusted news sources didn’t mention it.” Bill Maher, on the podcast Triggernometry, still believes that the few pathetic Russian-sponsored attempts at persuasion, spending a mere $100,000, swayed the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. The memes were amateurish and seem to have persuaded precisely no one. Only 100 overtly mentioned either Clinton or Trump out of 3,500. And he did not know that Hillary Clinton repeatedly insisted that she had been robbed of the presidency in that same election, just as Trump claimed in 2020. “Hillary Clinton dismissed President Trump as an “illegitimate president” and suggested that “he knows” that he stole the 2016 presidential election in a CBS News interview to be aired Sunday.” So, with all this pervasive hacking, lying, manipulation, and corruption, is the electoral system magically as pure as the virgin snow and unimpeachable in its integrity? How could that be? Where there is a huge incentive to cheat and manipulate and no way to catch this manipulation thanks to a lack of transparency, it is inevitable that the electoral system will be compromised.

Populism is a delusion because it asserts that the disorganized rabble can run things. The rabble can perhaps demolish something, but it cannot replace it with a functioning system. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were small in number but organized with a plan. In the beginning, they expected to be ousted and even murdered. It took them a while to realize that they were, in fact, going to be able to rule.

What is different about this moment in time is that we are used to having a reasonably competent elite ruling us. Stalin’s evil totalitarian state did not say that all white men are evil or express confusion about who is a man and who is a woman. Nor did he attack the family as a pernicious source of unchosen bonds. He seems like a paragon of sanity by comparison. What we have now is an incompetent elite. Parvini claims that he would prefer a malicious set of rulers who were at least capable over the bunch we have now, saddled as we are with open borders, providing millions of new future Democrat voters, and a hatred of white men and Western civilization. The New York Times, which likes to see itself as the voice of the elite, recently profiled Les Knight, who advocates human extinction. The Guardian in the UK, also the mouthpiece of the establishment, did the same thing. “I campaign for the extinction of the human race,” Knight said. Bring back our old masters; all is forgiven! A hatred of America, its principles, and its history means that there is no motivation to defend it.

The successful continuance of a group depends on positive and negative ethnocentrism, a love of the group/tribe/country combined with hostility to those who might seek to harm it from outside. We have evolved to favor positive and negative ethnocentrism. Any group that did not vanish from the face of the earth. But, thanks to easy conditions brought on by the Industrial Revolution, harsh Darwinian conditions optimizing for health have been drastically reduced, and child mortality has dropped from 50% to 1%. Genetic mutations are not weeded out at anything like the same rate, and generalized social welfare programs keep people alive and having children when they otherwise would not. In a recent Aporia podcast, Joseph Bronski rejects the claims of cultural idealists who think that ideational pathogens are to blame for our current civilizational collapse and instead blames the mutational load of a sick population. Generally, individuals healthy of mind and body are good-looking, conservative, ethnocentric, and religious. Liberals, not so much. Over 50% of white liberal women, those who are currently the driving force behind woke politics, have been diagnosed with some kind of mental illness. Sick individuals do not feel group loyalty. They are neurotic, feel negative emotions strongly, are anxious and insecure, and do not feel like they can compete directly with others for fear of losing, so they engage in virtue signaling, expressing concern for the outgroup. As anxious and neurotic persons, they actually identify with the outgroup and conspire with them to overthrow the ingroup, using them to promote their own individual interests while claiming to be prosocial and concerned with others. Les Knight, for instance, has identified with the nonhuman outgroup against his own species, and what a lot of positive attention he has recently got from the rich and powerful! He can use the oppressed animals of the world to beat humans over the head while demonstrating his superior empathy and getting a supportive pat on his back for his efforts. What a great guy he is.

People are notorious for not being persuadable on matters of religion and politics. Our intuitions kick in, driving us to our political and religious affiliations. We feel first and look for rationalizations later, on those topics. That is why our political opponents do not care if they contradict themselves or if their policy proposals are counterproductive, with the evidence going in the opposite direction. San Franciscans, for instance, can see the results of their policies, hurting the drug addicts by enabling their activities and simply doubling down, refusing to vote for someone who does not share their preferences.

Thus, it is no use to write philosophical or political screeds pointing out the irrationality of pursuing various policies or supporting certain political parties. Articles like this one can, or new and better podcasts, at most perhaps, facilitate understanding but do not change anything. Bronski argues, contra someone like Gad Saad, that people are not the victims of mind viruses, which can be removed through the appropriate reflections or substituting them with less pathological ideas. People blame Herbert Marcuse for influencing progressives to think that “free speech” should only be permitted for leftists for the new discursive repressions. But, Bronski points out, the same things were happening during the fall of Rome: a sexual revolution, a decline in societal virtue, and an overburdensome welfare state.

The question is not who originates such ideas but why they find a receptive audience. Nearly all mutations are pathological, and with a huge percentage of the genome devoted to the brain, mutations tend to show up there. With the population as it currently is, if Bronski is correct, there will be no return to relative sanity and health anytime soon. Nevertheless, we must still have hope for the future.

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