Amerika

Once upon a time, it was hypothesized that the anonymity of the internet made people behave badly online. Now we see that it is more likely that most people behave badly and, once they find a group that they think will back them up, use their bad behavior to demoralize and subjugate others.

What we see as “bad” behavior is in fact strategic behavior, a use of bullying and peer pressure to enforce agreement on certain vital things. And on the internet, they achieve this agreement by coming up with simple and tangible scapegoats in order to avoid looking at the question of what should be done to fix the situation.

It is far easier to blame someone or a symbol, which is a tangible representation of an abstract thing, than it is to look at cause-effect relationships and find out what works and what does not. You gain an audience by finding someone to blame and then arguing that what you want is the opposite or at least harms this scapegoat.

In reality, history has been advanced by ideas that masses consent to because they believe these ideas will provide the best possible future. This is the nature of democracy explicitly, but is true of any system: humans live by whatever notions make sense of the present and make the future seem like it will be positive.

On the internet, lots of people talk about “technocracy” or blame technology for our downfall. While these are tempting scapegoats, they miss the broader point that behind technocracy is an idea, the notion of scientific management of our societies.

Scientific management became popular after the Victorian Era in which science was seen as the new path — that is one of those ideas that rule history — forward after the collapse of religion and monarchy. There was not much left, and those in power wanted an alternative to the rising Leftism of the era.

In the 1920s, scientific “progress” meant moving everyone into cities, installing modern hygiene, building factories, and moving to an industrialized society. Eventually this same approach was extended to social problems, the favorite fixation of liberals everywhere, like poverty, drunkenness, and crime.

If technocracy is a thing, it is the public reliance on the idea of scientific management.

For the bureaucracy to keep going, it needs us to believe that there are universal solutions on the level of method. Anything else requires agreement that democracy cannot achieve because democracy focuses on special interests right now, not the future.

“Science” is a method of finding out about reality. It is not, in itself, a goal. Instead of having to come together on what we want, we can keep living in bourgeois armchair oblivion by trusting “science” like a form of “magic” to find a solution. Our fixation on AI is just the latest layer on this cake of lies.

Relying on science leads us to the urbanization of the 1920s, the industrialization of the postwar period so ably described by C.S. Lewis, the notion of world government from the late 1700s, and finally the administrative-bureaucratic “nanny state” that has made life a maze of red tape these days.

Interestingly enough the opposite approach that people take, “religion,” is another method masquerading as a goal. Like effects treated as causes (the cause of poverty is a lack of money, not a lack of productivity, the scientists say) these methods-as-goals occur when people do not want to think about actual goals.

To get free from technocracy, we have to state actual goals. Populism has taken the first step by identifying the spirit and preservation of people as goals over continuation of the bureaucratic system, but we will have to take this further in the future to exorcise the demon.

Tags: administrative-managerial state, ai, Nerdcore, realism, scientific management, technocracy