N.S. Lyons on the panic of the managerial class

He interprets recent political conflict

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The latest essay by N.S. Lyons is long. I think it is worth setting aside time to read as much of it as you care to. I’ll offer a few snippets.

Sometime around the second half of the 19th century a revolution in human affairs began to take place. . .In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged in order to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. This was the managerial revolution.

…That previous order, which has been referred to by scholars of the managerial revolution as the bourgeois order, was represented … by the petite bourgeoisie, or what could be described as the independent middle class. The entrepreneurial small business owner, the multi-generational family shop owners, the small-scale farmer or landlord; the community religious or private educator; even the relatively well-to-do local doctor: these and others like them formed the backbone of a large social and economic class that found itself existentially at odds with the interests of the managerial revolution.

Think of what has happened to the primary care doctor in the 21st century. Burdened by insurance company paperwork, forced to work with complex, alien systems for keeping electronic medical records, and squeezed by low reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid, the independent practitioner flees into the waiting arms of the large hospital-run provider networks. The managerial revolution wins again.

Note: I am guilty of having once written Does Your Doctor Need a Boss? and answering “yes.” This was in the wake of my father’s last few months of life, in which his treatment was chaotic and the results were painful for me to observe. Today, I would reconsider what I wrote then.

Lyons contrasts the cultural values of the managerial class with those of the bourgeoisie.

bourgeois values consisted of a mix of conservative and classical liberal values. … an aversion to top-down control; an accepted diversity of regional and local folkways and traditions; a general mythic ideal of spirited individualism and energetic self-reliance; a counter-veiling tradition of tight-knit family life and exceptionally widespread participation in a proliferation of thick religious, community, and civic associations and affiliations (as most famously described by Alexis de Tocqueville); “Protestant work ethic,” and an attention to thrift and self-discipline as moral virtues; an intimate connection to the land, and a very strong attachment to middle-class property ownership as central to republican self-governance and the national character;

Following Sam Francis, Lyons describes the United States as a soft managerial regime, to distinguish it from China’s hard managerial regime.

soft managerial regimes are largely inept and uncomfortable with the open use of force, and much prefer to instead maintain control through narrative management, manipulation, and hegemonic control of culture and ideas. The managerial state also downplays its power by outsourcing certain roles to other sectors of the managerial regime, which claim to be independent. Indeed they are independent, in the sense that they are not directly controlled by the state and can do what they want – but, being managerial institutions, staffed by managerial elites, and therefore stakeholders in the managerial imperative, they nonetheless operate in almost complete sync with the state. Such diffusion helps effectively conceal the scale, unity, and power of the soft managerial regime, as well as deflect and defuse any accountability.

I would say that the attempt to defuse accountability is the Achilles’ heel of the soft managerial regime. As I once wrote,

I predict that you will only see high trust where you see effective accountability. I challenge you to point to an institution or segment of society that is accorded high trust with little accountability, or vice-versa.

The trust-accountability correlation helps us to understand the process of trust breaking down. Trust breaks down when accountability systems decay.

Lyons writes,

The most immediate explanation for why the managerial elite decided to hurry up and cast off any tattered remains of the old American values is simply that they panicked. They panicked because they experienced a moment in which they felt they nearly lost control. That moment was 2016

He says that Martin Gurri’s “revolt of the public” in 2016 took the particular form of a revolt by

precisely the managerial elite’s historic class enemies: the remnants of the old bourgeois middle class.

Lyons writes,

A self-governing individual is one willing and able to make his own decisions about what to think and do, and how to do it, rather than automatically looking to some external authority to do these things for him. To do so he must have first developed some trust in his own ability and authority to judge the truth, decide, and act, as well as the courage to accept and take on risk. He must have some faith in his own skill, agency, and ability to accomplish things in the world (including through cooperation with others) and to thereby influence his own fate and that of his community. In psychological terms he has an internal rather than external locus of control.

I would note that this concept of internal vs. external locus of control has come up a lot in my recent reading. There are those who claim that progressive ideology, including the oppressor-oppressed framing and the claim that people need “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” serves to guide people toward the unhealthy mindset of an external locus of control.

Safetyism is utterly typological of managerial societies everywhere, soft or hard, in Sacramento or Shanghai. At the top, a managerial elite is naturally obsessed with total control – with running society like their envisioned machine… For the professional managerial middle, doubting or deviating from the rules and procedures of the bureaucratic machine is not so much inconceivable as unimaginably immoral and déclassé…From below, the social atomization, empty relativistic nihilism, and learned helplessness produced by managerialism cultivates in the masses a constant state of anxiety; in an attempt to relieve this anxiety many among them then themselves demand greater and greater managerial control over life be exercised from above.

I say, and I think Lyons would agree, that our elites are caught in a vicious cycle in which as their prestige falls, their use of dominance strategies increases. (Recall my essay on prestige, dominance, and propriety). The soft managerial regime gets harder. But that will cause some of us to push back. At the end of his essay, Lyons hopes that we will

tear the false order of managerialism and all its poisonous ideological spawn root and branch from the world forever.

substacks referenced above:

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The China Convergence