Amerika

Our world is still trying to figure out the twenty-first century despite being almost two decades into it. We know that the twentieth century paradigm of equality has fallen, and that it has been replaced by a grim pragmatism.

Another movement is building, however, and that is against the managerial civilization. We would tolerate a society that bullies and nannies us if it managed to avoid long-term problems like pollution and decay. Instead, it made everything worse.

It turns out that states cannot say no to any growth, so they expand recklessly, and this simply amplifies every existing problem. With this, we see the problem with government itself: states are self-interested corporations, and they expand through bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy seems to be as old as humanity. It means treating people like equal objects in a factory. You line them up, perform the same procedure on them, and subject them to rules. It seems “fair” but in fact is wholly inhuman and infuriating, but only to the above-average.

This produces an effect of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. Instead of dealing with everyday challenges, people rely on government to take care of them, which lets them stop worrying. Poverty? There is a government program for that. Ditto environmental pollution.

As a result, people become removed from everyday life and go further into themselves. They no longer engage with anything real, and so notions like Leftism seem plausible, since for them life consists of a job and shopping, and the only remaining question is how to divide up the taxes so that everyone is taken care of.

Perhaps the twentieth century was merely the growth of bureaucracies, and now we are seeing a revolution against the notion of bureaucracy by those who are tired of “fairness” becoming an excuse to treat us all as the lowest common denominator:

Currently, unelected officials of the European Commission construct regulations for the EU member countries. The citizens of Great Britain have no method of recourse; because the members of the EU Commission are unelected bureaucrats, they can never be voted out of office.

The average EU bureaucrat’s salary is nearly $25,000 per month with generous benefits such as housing and entertainment allowances. The Telegraph reported that approximately 10,000 (one in five) of these bureaucrats make more than the Prime Minister of England.

The shift against the power structure occurred on June 23, 2016. Globally people celebrated when the populous of Great Britain voted for the Brexit referendum and won. Around the world, citizens felt that perhaps in their own countries, they too could fight the bureaucratic elite running their nations. Brexit not only empowered the people of Great Britain but also inspired populist movements in France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, the United States, and others.

Bureaucrats answer to no one, like government itself. There might be an election, but you elect candidates, not details, so if you a bureaucracy treats you badly, nothing will be done about it.

If you find something is wrong with one agency, you can make it your life’s quest to change that agency. You will be like other special interest groups in that regard. However, most of us just move on, ignoring the parasitic agency that does a bad job but takes our money anyway.

Worse, the parasite grows as it feeds, recruiting more people to be bureaucrats for life. Soon all of society is administered by people who are paid a lot of money to boss us around. People rightfully note that democracy was, in theory, the opposite of this.

As it turns out, power has its own rules. No matter how much you try to avoid it, you will end up having some kind of management. Good management is organic and local, and bad management is factory-style modern bureaucracy.

Like many “miracle methods” of the twentieth century, bureaucracy has finally reached its logical conclusion and now, we want the heck away from it. Populism is the rising movement not just to swing Right, but to transform society from what Leftist methods made it into.

Tags: bureaucracy, populism