Social media is ephemeral while something like The Forbidden Texts has more permanence. Occasionally on Telegram we have some exchanges that I think are worth preserving. Joel Davis has made a long post to which I have replied. I will reproduce the exchange below then make some further elaborations. However, I wish to stress that this not at its core a disagreement over elite theory or ‘bottom-up’ versus ‘top-down’ explanations of politics, but rather the overall shape of history and the pattern of empires. I believe this topic to be of paramount importance.
Here’s Joel:
All anarchic (retarded) worldviews require that one doesn't understand the cybernetics of managerialism.
As the complexity of the social system increases, the complexity of management must also increase (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_requisite_variety), this renders social organization necessarily more:
- impersonal
- technical/specialized
- centralized
The more functional complexity you can develop in a control system, the more powerful it will be. Anarchistic analysts will point to failures of complex control systems as if this is evidence evidence that complexity itself is a flaw. This is the same thing is arguing that having too much horsepower is a flaw in a racecar because it handles poorly - when in fact the problem is that it needs a better differential.
The problem with states is never their excess complexity, it is poor design (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union). In raw power terms, you want the maximum complexity you can translate into functionality. At the cutting edge of statecraft then - where the most powerful modes of social organization compete - you will never find decentralized systems. Just like in elite motorsports, you will never find low horsepower engines.
For all its ideological talk about how great the free market system is, the US government still has more civil servants per capita than the "Communist" Chinese government. It is not the "free market" which was responsible for driving the technological power of the 20th Century United States - it was state power (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State). The last century of world history has been a story of rival attempts at managerial statism - the only question has been which ideological form it should take, no viable alternative to it was or could be presented (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.46583/page/n129/mode/2up).
To all this I responded as follows:
This post by Joel is correct until it isn’t. There is a tendency towards centralisation (bureaucracy) but also a countervailing tendency towards feudalism once the bureaucracy becomes too large to confer benefits to power. For example when people are chosen for ideological conformity over their skills (aka bioleninism). These things are discussed by the elite theorists. Joel seems to ignore these points in favour of a quasi-progressive view that things only move in one direction (towards greater complexity). This isn’t borne out by history which shows clearly a pattern of rise and fall. The US apparatus, for example, is plainly less competent — or to use Joel’s language “more retarded” — in 2022 than it was in 1952. Joel imagines a solution that “corrects” this but it is more likely that it won’t be corrected and continues to weaken and splinter. The world is more “anarchic” now than it was ten years ago because the global hegemon has weakened. If you prefer a Jouvenelian frame: the Centre has been outmanoeuvred by its subsidiaries at an international level which has resulted in a weakening of empire. The Ukraine conflict may have strengthened the power internally but overall it has exposed the extent of its diminished status. I believe my fundamental disagreement with Joel is over his view that that we will be headed to the managerial techno-future *no matter what*. To my eyes we are headed to the idiocracy and barbarism, and “decivilisation”. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
We do not need recourse to the Roman empire for a model, even though its lessons still hold, if Spengler is too much to read you could do worse than looking over John Bagot Glubb’s essay, The Fate of Empires, which looks at the decline of eleven empires.[1] Since then we have seen the collapse of another great power: the Soviet Union. The USSR – this great bureaucratic machine –was there and then, one day, it wasn’t. There was no revolution, and it wasn’t conquered by a foreign military power, rather the will of its elites faltered and very soon it became, in Monty Python’s terms, an ex-parrot. What followed was balkanization, the break-up of an empire and barbarism. I do not simply mean the breakout of wars and civil wars, but the reversion at a societal level to a form of ribald gangsterism – of the kind typified by the Zelensky regime in Ukraine and of the kind that necessitates a ‘strong man’ leadership style in Putin.
I want to suggest that the West has also been trending in this direction by suggesting something controversial: first, that the USA did not ‘inherit’ the British Empire and, second, that its ascendency as global hegemon per se is proof of Western decline. As regards the former claim, I recommend tracking down ‘Globalism versus Colonialism’, episode 47 of Bronze Age Pervert’s podcast Caribbean Rhythms.[2] This outlines the basic difference between traditional empires and the American project. BAP particularly emphasises the ‘international gangsterism’ of the globalist elites. He also shows how the British Empire, while it had its elites, also benefitted the ordinary British subject. In contrast, the American project does not benefit its subjects at all but is more obviously extractive in nature. Rather, the American project imports the third world, exports jobs, deindustrialises nations, insults its people, culture, history, and religion. In other words, the US Empire – if it is one – is recognisably a decivilizing force. Unless, that is, you think Paris is better off with hundreds of thousands of Muslim and African migrants in its streets as Notre Dame literally burns.
As regards my second claim, that US hegemony itself is proof of Western decline, let us remind ourselves of a core tenet of elite theory, the well-spring from which theories of managerialism originated. Here is James Burnham on Vilfredo Pareto:
The character of society, Pareto holds, is above all the character of its elite; its accomplishments are the accomplishments of its elites; its history is properly understood as the history of its elite; successful predictions about the future are based upon evidence drawn from the study of the composition and structure of its elite.[3]
Now let us take a look at the American elite in action. Watch this clip of Ben Shapiro taking on a “mathematician and physicist, double major”:
Before saying anything else, a point that would be immediately obvious to any of our ancestors – let’s say Thomas Carlyle – is that the expert speaker is Jewish while the student is black. If Carlyle could be here now he’d ask what on earth had happened to the institution for it to depreciate to this point. Then we might look at the substance of the exchange: they were debating something that should be perfectly obvious to any functioning society: the difference between men and women. The alleged mathematics and physics major led with a barrage of credentialism, he made no arguments beyond an appeal to authority, and Shapiro dispensed with him by a direct attack on those credentials. This moment, of course, was manufactured so that conservatives could post the clip of Shapiro owning the libs on social media. This event was openly setup to make Ben Shapiro look good. If you’d like such an event at your school, just follow this link: https://www.yaf.org/shapirotour/! This is politics as performance in an intellectually bankrupt culture. The people who sponsor Shapiro, not to mention Shapiro himself, are directly responsible for fostering this climate of intellectual poverty. Now consider the difficulty and complexity of explaining this to 99% of people. Even people in my own audience do not understand this. That Shapiro is as much the problem as are the moronic student and his teachers. It would be immediately obvious to our ancestors, but today so little is obvious to so many people that now we debate whether men are really men as opposed to women. I find it puzzling that Joel Davis imagines that the society that produced this exchange will march on into the techno-managerial future. What happens when the student we saw – a mathematician and physicist no less(!) – ends up at NASA? You think I am joking but I am not.
[1] John Bagot Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (1978; Uckfield: Windmill Press, 2002).
https://bronzeagepervert.gumroad.com/?recommended_by=library
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[3]James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (London: Putnam, 1943), p. 154.
A fragmentation of society on all levels is most certainly coming down the tube for the GAE. I hear of the totalitarianism of California and NY; while simultaneously hearing my own state is allowing concealed carry without a license. The center breaks and the edges scatter.
I do enjoy these non-tete-a-tete's that AA has with others....here's the rub: the underlying worldview of the current elites is that man can be 'cured'; that evolution, once prompted, will result in something 'not-man' and society will follow. Underneath this thought is the quiet acknowledgement that modern man is not really modern at all and they only need create a system to accomplish the change in man. Is it any wonder that this system would become more and more complex to attempt this feat of increasing magnitude and ultimate futility? Burnham was correct to title it the 'Suicide of the West'. What will it become? Where the current elite stay in power, Forever Gotham; in others, transcendent renewal. We won't be alive to see either.