The New Class: Savages Amidst a Technology They Don't Understand
From Daniel Greenfield, "Government Is Magic," Sultan Knish, October 27th, 2013:
Our technocracy is detached from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.
...
The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.
And who consider acquiring such knowledge to be "dirty," a socially-inferior "lowering" of themselves -- literally declasse. This can be observed in the mechanism by which the ObamaCare website launch failed.
Notice what happened. A politician -- either Obama himself or the imbecilic Kathleen Sibelius -- decided that it would look bad to the American people if they saw the prices of the offered plans before doing an hour or so work inputting their personal data for the application. (Because of the mechanism of the fine structure, many would simply have decided at that point not to apply, but rather to pay the fines; and the politicians running the plan wanted to show "success" in the form of lots of people applying for ObamaCare). So the politician stretched forth His or Her shining hand, holding the crook and flail of the Two Kingdoms of Yankee and Dixie, and commanded "Let the data be entered first, before the user can access the list of plans." So it was written, so it was done.
Unfortunately, this meant a huge front-end jam in the system, to the point that the website was unusable. And, since the mission statement had been "get as many people as possible applying for ..." (rather than accepted for) Obamacare, the website had failed to ensure that applicants had submitted the correct information. (I rather think that the politicians wanted to get as much information as possible and failed to differentiate between important and unimportant data in the page forms).
Consequently, not only did the website fail as a means of accepting the data, it also failed as a means of getting people signed up for ObamaCare, because the majority of people who applied will be rejected due to the website failing to make clear which data was essential versus inessential. This means that there is now a large number of people who think that they now have coverage, but don't. It is icing on this delicious cake of failure that the people who have thus been betrayed are probably among Obama's most fervent supporters.
(Though not his most influential ones. Those lucky souls got exemption from ObamaCare. These are the people who love Obama but whom Obama doesn't love back enough to not inflict his program upon).
If the government can't build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn't like to squeeze for extra cash.
(Ibid)
Understand what this means. When people start actually relying on Obamacare for -- well, medical care -- they are going to try to get essential medical services and find themselves delayed for unpredictable lengths of time by a bloated and poorly-designed bureaucratic system. Their ILLNESSES will not wait on this bureaucracy. In other words, people will DIE waiting for health care.
Modernity has to be built. It has to be constructed brick by bit by rivet by cable by people who know what they are doing. Modernity without competence is as worthless as the ObamaCare website which looked pretty enough to give the illusion of technocratic modernity, but didn't actually work.
Competence is the real modernity and it has very little to do with the empty trappings of design that surround it. In some ways the America of a few generations ago was a far more modern place because it was a more competent place. For all our nice toys, we look like primitive savages compared to men who could build skyscrapers and fleets within a year... and build them well.
Those aren't things we can do anymore. Not because the knowledge and skills don't exist, but because the culture no longer allows it. We can't do them for the same reason that Third World countries can't do what we do. It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, but that the culture gets in the way.
What ObamaCare, and Obama himself, and the New Class in general -- focus upon is style over substance. Or, to put it in their terms, "image." "Spin." They have (I think) a real conceptual difficulty grasping that style without underlying substance is meaningless, that the Gods of the Copybook Headings (the Laws of Nature, for those unfamiliar with Kipling) will always judge and find wanting poorly-conceived programs, whether of the hardware, software, or social engineering variety. It doesn't matter how pretty is the website if it doesn't work. It doesn't matter how nice the politician looks on his podium if the policies he advocates are impractical.
It's often argued that the reason why the America of the early to mid 20th century could build "skyscrapers and fleets within a year ... and build them well," is because the products were simpler. It is true that the products were simpler. But it was also true that the tools we had to build them were also simpler. Today we have computers, design programs, word processors, spreadsheets, simulators and fabricators. The men of the last Civic-Heroic generation worked with slide rule, pen and paper, and tools wielded by hand. The difference is that they were focused on getting their jobs done, while we are focused on looking good while making the motions of doing them.
Our modernity is style rather than substance. It's Obama grinning. It's the right font. It's the right joke. It's that sense that X knows what he's doing because he presents it the right way. There's nothing particularly modern about that. In most cultures, the illusion of competence trumps the real thing. It's why so many countries are so badly broken because they go by appearances, rather than by results.
The idea that we should go by results, rather than by processes, by outcomes rather than by appearances, was revolutionary. For most of human history, we were trapped in a cargo cult mode. We did the "right things" not because they led to the right results, but because we had decided that they were the right things. There were many competent people, but they were hamstrung by rigid institutions that made it impossible to go from Point A to Point B in the shortest possible time.
And we're right back there today.
Exactly. There is nothing modern about a "modernity" based on style over substance. It is in fact a return to a pre-modern worldview, and the fact that the specific styles being chosen are different from those chosen by the Medievals is less relevant than is the inherent folly of choosing winners based on style rather than substance. At best it forces leaders to waste time and energy on presentation rather than performance; at worst, presentation and performance require opposite courses of action, and in that case we choose the path which leads to failure. Which is what happened with the ObamaCare website.
Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was "good". Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction, would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything would work out because it had to.
But unlike the Gods of the Copybook Headings, Progressia is unreal. And a bad plan doesn't become a good plan based on good intentions.
This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it's why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work.
But it doesn't. If you pick presentation over performance, then the project fails -- no matter how good it was at attracting support. Cheers can't substitute for competence.
Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won't work because you want them to, they won't work if you go through the motions, they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.
Which is to say the Scientific Method, applied to every aspect of life. That is true modernity.
The difference between savages and civilized men isn't that savages are dumb and civilized people are smart. Savages can individually be quite clever within their parameters and civilized folk can be quite stupid. It's the ability to extend that intelligence in groups that makes for a civilization.
Savages cannot work together. They can fantasize, but they can't build anything bigger than a small group can manage. Savages are warriors, but not soldiers, they are tinkerers, not engineers, they are inventors, not scientists, they cannot work together on a large scale and thereby push past their own limitations as a culture and grow. They may have individual geniuses, but they cannot pass on what they learn.
Very true. And a requirement of effective cooperation is to be able to detect cheating by one's collaborators -- which is to say, detect and reject attempts to sell style over substance. If one instead prefers style over substance, then one will choose to cooperate with poorly-conceived plans peddled by slick salesmen, and reject the advice of those who have less style because they have spent more of their effort learning how to actually do the job.
The United States government is the ultimate giant unworkable mess. It is a living cargo cult where everyone marches around following routines that are supposed to yield great prosperity, but never do. The processes themselves are broken and make no sense, but the cargo culturers of the government cannot and will not hear that. They know that the government will magically make everything work.
As I'm sure anyone who has had extensive dealings with bureaucrats will agree.
Because government is progress. Government is modernity. Government is magic.
Title Drop.
And of course government is actually more at best a symbiote which protects and at worst an outright parasite which destroys the actual productive sectors of our economy.
Build a website and it will work. Pass a law and they will come. Get a degree and you're competent.
There is no need to know how to do a thing. You don't need engineers or competent men. All you need to do is remember the great dreams of the past, listen to a few inspirational JFK speeches and then carve a computer out of wood and wait for free health care to arrive.
In cargo cult America, the food is free, the cell phones are free and the money can be printed forever because government is magic.
We are about to receive a possibly very painful lesson in why this doesn't work.
Pray that we heed it.
Our technocracy is detached from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.
...
The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.
And who consider acquiring such knowledge to be "dirty," a socially-inferior "lowering" of themselves -- literally declasse. This can be observed in the mechanism by which the ObamaCare website launch failed.
Notice what happened. A politician -- either Obama himself or the imbecilic Kathleen Sibelius -- decided that it would look bad to the American people if they saw the prices of the offered plans before doing an hour or so work inputting their personal data for the application. (Because of the mechanism of the fine structure, many would simply have decided at that point not to apply, but rather to pay the fines; and the politicians running the plan wanted to show "success" in the form of lots of people applying for ObamaCare). So the politician stretched forth His or Her shining hand, holding the crook and flail of the Two Kingdoms of Yankee and Dixie, and commanded "Let the data be entered first, before the user can access the list of plans." So it was written, so it was done.
Unfortunately, this meant a huge front-end jam in the system, to the point that the website was unusable. And, since the mission statement had been "get as many people as possible applying for ..." (rather than accepted for) Obamacare, the website had failed to ensure that applicants had submitted the correct information. (I rather think that the politicians wanted to get as much information as possible and failed to differentiate between important and unimportant data in the page forms).
Consequently, not only did the website fail as a means of accepting the data, it also failed as a means of getting people signed up for ObamaCare, because the majority of people who applied will be rejected due to the website failing to make clear which data was essential versus inessential. This means that there is now a large number of people who think that they now have coverage, but don't. It is icing on this delicious cake of failure that the people who have thus been betrayed are probably among Obama's most fervent supporters.
(Though not his most influential ones. Those lucky souls got exemption from ObamaCare. These are the people who love Obama but whom Obama doesn't love back enough to not inflict his program upon).
If the government can't build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn't like to squeeze for extra cash.
(Ibid)
Understand what this means. When people start actually relying on Obamacare for -- well, medical care -- they are going to try to get essential medical services and find themselves delayed for unpredictable lengths of time by a bloated and poorly-designed bureaucratic system. Their ILLNESSES will not wait on this bureaucracy. In other words, people will DIE waiting for health care.
Modernity has to be built. It has to be constructed brick by bit by rivet by cable by people who know what they are doing. Modernity without competence is as worthless as the ObamaCare website which looked pretty enough to give the illusion of technocratic modernity, but didn't actually work.
Competence is the real modernity and it has very little to do with the empty trappings of design that surround it. In some ways the America of a few generations ago was a far more modern place because it was a more competent place. For all our nice toys, we look like primitive savages compared to men who could build skyscrapers and fleets within a year... and build them well.
Those aren't things we can do anymore. Not because the knowledge and skills don't exist, but because the culture no longer allows it. We can't do them for the same reason that Third World countries can't do what we do. It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, but that the culture gets in the way.
What ObamaCare, and Obama himself, and the New Class in general -- focus upon is style over substance. Or, to put it in their terms, "image." "Spin." They have (I think) a real conceptual difficulty grasping that style without underlying substance is meaningless, that the Gods of the Copybook Headings (the Laws of Nature, for those unfamiliar with Kipling) will always judge and find wanting poorly-conceived programs, whether of the hardware, software, or social engineering variety. It doesn't matter how pretty is the website if it doesn't work. It doesn't matter how nice the politician looks on his podium if the policies he advocates are impractical.
It's often argued that the reason why the America of the early to mid 20th century could build "skyscrapers and fleets within a year ... and build them well," is because the products were simpler. It is true that the products were simpler. But it was also true that the tools we had to build them were also simpler. Today we have computers, design programs, word processors, spreadsheets, simulators and fabricators. The men of the last Civic-Heroic generation worked with slide rule, pen and paper, and tools wielded by hand. The difference is that they were focused on getting their jobs done, while we are focused on looking good while making the motions of doing them.
Our modernity is style rather than substance. It's Obama grinning. It's the right font. It's the right joke. It's that sense that X knows what he's doing because he presents it the right way. There's nothing particularly modern about that. In most cultures, the illusion of competence trumps the real thing. It's why so many countries are so badly broken because they go by appearances, rather than by results.
The idea that we should go by results, rather than by processes, by outcomes rather than by appearances, was revolutionary. For most of human history, we were trapped in a cargo cult mode. We did the "right things" not because they led to the right results, but because we had decided that they were the right things. There were many competent people, but they were hamstrung by rigid institutions that made it impossible to go from Point A to Point B in the shortest possible time.
And we're right back there today.
Exactly. There is nothing modern about a "modernity" based on style over substance. It is in fact a return to a pre-modern worldview, and the fact that the specific styles being chosen are different from those chosen by the Medievals is less relevant than is the inherent folly of choosing winners based on style rather than substance. At best it forces leaders to waste time and energy on presentation rather than performance; at worst, presentation and performance require opposite courses of action, and in that case we choose the path which leads to failure. Which is what happened with the ObamaCare website.
Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was "good". Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction, would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything would work out because it had to.
But unlike the Gods of the Copybook Headings, Progressia is unreal. And a bad plan doesn't become a good plan based on good intentions.
This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it's why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work.
But it doesn't. If you pick presentation over performance, then the project fails -- no matter how good it was at attracting support. Cheers can't substitute for competence.
Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won't work because you want them to, they won't work if you go through the motions, they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.
Which is to say the Scientific Method, applied to every aspect of life. That is true modernity.
The difference between savages and civilized men isn't that savages are dumb and civilized people are smart. Savages can individually be quite clever within their parameters and civilized folk can be quite stupid. It's the ability to extend that intelligence in groups that makes for a civilization.
Savages cannot work together. They can fantasize, but they can't build anything bigger than a small group can manage. Savages are warriors, but not soldiers, they are tinkerers, not engineers, they are inventors, not scientists, they cannot work together on a large scale and thereby push past their own limitations as a culture and grow. They may have individual geniuses, but they cannot pass on what they learn.
Very true. And a requirement of effective cooperation is to be able to detect cheating by one's collaborators -- which is to say, detect and reject attempts to sell style over substance. If one instead prefers style over substance, then one will choose to cooperate with poorly-conceived plans peddled by slick salesmen, and reject the advice of those who have less style because they have spent more of their effort learning how to actually do the job.
The United States government is the ultimate giant unworkable mess. It is a living cargo cult where everyone marches around following routines that are supposed to yield great prosperity, but never do. The processes themselves are broken and make no sense, but the cargo culturers of the government cannot and will not hear that. They know that the government will magically make everything work.
As I'm sure anyone who has had extensive dealings with bureaucrats will agree.
Because government is progress. Government is modernity. Government is magic.
Title Drop.
And of course government is actually more at best a symbiote which protects and at worst an outright parasite which destroys the actual productive sectors of our economy.
Build a website and it will work. Pass a law and they will come. Get a degree and you're competent.
There is no need to know how to do a thing. You don't need engineers or competent men. All you need to do is remember the great dreams of the past, listen to a few inspirational JFK speeches and then carve a computer out of wood and wait for free health care to arrive.
In cargo cult America, the food is free, the cell phones are free and the money can be printed forever because government is magic.
We are about to receive a possibly very painful lesson in why this doesn't work.
Pray that we heed it.