The technocrats are running the asylum

But not for long.

I have been reading a lot about professional-managerial elites changing our world against our wishes.

More commonly referred to as technocrats, these are the educated professionals running our institutions and systems.

They are products of our modern universities and are therefore steeped in the post-nationalist rhetoric of academics and other members of the intelligentsia.

Since the 1970s this layer of society has predicted numerous calamities we must be protected from like the end of oil, famine-inducing population explosions and the disappearance of icecaps leading to widespread flooding.

None of these predictions have come to pass.

They have many other prophecies too, and these will no doubt share the same fate. Indeed, our soothsayers are characterized by their devotion to any number of observably wrong ideas few rational people could believe.

The academics in particular have become enslaved to mental models that bear no relation to reality, and this has seeped into the media and political classes who transmit these bad ideas to the rest of us.

Because they believe untrue things they are probably doomed.

Conspiracy theories are exciting

There is much chatter online about what the technocrats will do to society.

They are pursuing digital tools to enslave us, from controlled electronic currencies to social credit systems. These will be tied into energy sources, our homes and the areas we live in. Travel will be restricted and food will be rationed alongside energy.

It is all very dystopian and public. Critics are not exaggerating as technocratic events routinely showcase bizarre plans like new digital currencies to control the food we can buy and other restrictions on how we live.

The World Economic Forum often talks of such high-tech initiatives and the glorious future they will usher in. Under their control tomorrow will be a futuristic science fiction success. Unlike us peasants, they will manage resources in an enlightened way, just like the communists promised.

And that is all it is, modern day central command and control. They live in an era where they can’t use the word “communism,” but the urge comes from the same place, a desire to manage everybody’s lives.

Lurking behind the desire for socialism is usually a battery of mental distortions, anxiety and ignorance that is uncomfortable to confront so it is avoided and instead manifests as unrealistic schemes to solve the world’s problems.

Their urges are often triggered by real life observations that create a kind of meltdown the rest of us take in our stride.

Money is unevenly distributed; some ethnicities fail in advanced economies; few women prioritize career over relationships. Mundane observations are compared to a pristine world inside their heads and the result is unwanted improvements the rest of us must endure.

A false sense of clarity

The key failing of this approach is mental models are by necessity simplifications of life. Those simplifications are everywhere we look.

Antisocial people with obvious mental and behavioural issues become the homeless; open borders are about upholding the dignity of human life or exercising human rights; observable differences between people can be relabelled as inequality and fixed with speeches.

The simplicity of utopian schemes is often mistaken for clarity. That apparent clarity transfers easily into glossy brochures and slick videos. Which is pretty much all we see.

Like an artist’s impression of a forthcoming housing estate it looks lovely and clean with thin, attractive women and frolicking kids and sunny skies. Who wouldn’t want to live there?

But the artist’s impression ignores the building site that will actually be created and the all-too-human residents who will ultimately populate it with their bad habits, their pets and their tat.

The very simplicity of these visions is what makes them seductive to the professional-managerial class. Not only do they seem more appealing than real life, but they have a place for themselves. All that central planning needs clever planners.

None of their plans work

Central planning is not just ineffective, it tends to be disastrous.

But the intelligentsia remain entranced by the fantasies in their heads. They are equally repelled by real life with its grime and squalor.

The academics are especially caught up in these schemes; they invent them. Then they train the next generation of professionals. It is them who are now convinced about Net Zero and the advantages of diversity.

The legion of clowns destroying economies to save the planet while birthrates plummet and foreigners enter our nations in uncontrollable numbers.

All this and more is their grand vision. Melting pots with windmills and international cuisine on tap. Everyone living in some gleaming city with no crime or litter.

Resources must be strictly rationed with them doing the rationing. The people who have failed to get a major prediction right tell us they can plan what we eat, what we spend our money on, how much energy we can use and how we live our lives.

Only a simpleton believes any of this is plannable at all, and only the deranged would believe today’s feckless professional-managerial class are the ones to deliver it.

What is unfolding is not a utopia but observable decline, dysfunction and unrest.

Most of our nations are no longer nations, one of the key dreams of the dreamers. They imagined this as a kind of supranation where we all came together under the banner of humanity. Instead we are getting balkanization, fragmentation, and alien peoples exploiting our European-style open democracies to vote for their own people and their interests while our superplanners look on confused.

Just one example but typical of the approach.

The result? Nothing works well because plans are fantasy. It is governance by PowerPoint and speeches.

Total failures

Our world is run by the university educated, immersed in groupthink and divorced from normality. This is the same layer of society that was once entranced with communism.

They have had a lot to say over the last few decades. They got a boost thanks to the technocratic nature of the Covid response which helped them practice some of their ideas like biopassports and restrictions in movement. Breathless emergencies help sweep away the common sense that tends to hold them in check.

But much of that didn’t work which they seem to overlook. It certainly hasn’t lasted.

Most of their plans can’t work as they require us to be upgraded, the human pawns in their stupid games. They seem to have learned nothing from the mess of the twentieth century.

While their plans for a kind of digital panopticon are real, I believe their time has passed. Or is at least passing. They are yesterday’s men.

Their enemy is not us as such, it is reality. Net Zero, diversity is a strength, open borders, centrally controlled digital currencies, bugslop instead of steak, and on and on.

None of this works. It was never going to work.

The main characteristic of the technocratic layer, as characterized by former WEF leader Klaus Schwab and similar entities (like Barack Obama or Tony Blair) is not impressive vision, energy and insight. Rather, their chief characteristic is an adherence to fantasy and rhetoric.

They are not the doers in society. They invent nothing, they build nothing, they maintain nothing. Their principal skill seems to be networking followed by energetic bullshitting.

Importantly, the world their grand rhetoric builds is incompetent. Hiring for ideological purity drastically lowers quality, and that is ignoring the way the deeply dysfunctional who don’t belong anywhere are drawn to grand visions of the sort we see the media class enthusiastically broadcast. It all looks impressive to a certain kind of person. Many of those persons are demented oddballs.

Networks like this built on sophistry rather than visible accomplishment often fail even if they capture the media class. Barack Obama is the archetype; he was all talk, but the eloquence swayed many influential people while those more grounded looked on, confused as to the appeal.

He mainly impressed those who lived inside their heads where words carry weight.

Many are thrown by the completeness of what they see. The conventions attended by the great and the good. The slick videos. The gushing praise from leading media personalities.

It is well promoted too.

Money and clout can push a lot through, it can make things happen. A tame media can do even more; it can convince whole nations to bend out of shape. At least for a while.

But no rational person would replace coal-fired power stations with windmills and solar panels in Northern Europe, yet that is what they did.

No rational person would invite alien peoples into stable countries in huge numbers, yet they still aggressively pursue this. We quite literally see homosexuals angrily demand more immigration from cultures that will hunt them down and kill them if they gain power.

No sane society would then artificially elevate foreigners over natives for a sustained period of time and enshrine it in laws. But this is precisely what has happened.

As aggravating as these developments are they are useful illustrations of the mindset at work. People driving this forward are lost. They are certainly unable to plan coherently. And everything they dream of in their modern version of communist rule is based on centralized planning, a skill no one possesses.

The future is unknown

We are witnessing the limits of rational planning.

Most of what makes us strong has emerged over centuries. Picking this apart to pursue grand utopian dreams is not possible without widespread destruction. It is apparent the technocrats are oblivious to these constraints.

We have seen this before.

Over the last ten to fifteen years the new atheists thought they could jettison organized religion and keep the rest. They didn’t. They instead lost Christianity not religious belief itself and made room for other less compatible creeds.

The inherent religiosity of mankind became warped as the newly minted atheists seemed to fall for every bad idea going; climate, diversity, feminism, transgenderism, mRNA vaccines. Each eventually adopted aspects of religious fervour they could not easily control since it had not been battle-tested over centuries like Christianity.

Unintended consequences lurk behind every innovative plan to improve us and society no matter how eloquent the speeches.

Those who invent these ideas are no better at spotting them than the rest of us. And the greater the plan, the greater the disruption to how we live now, the greater the unforeseen effects will be.

Neither us nor them can imagine how much damage we will take when they try to force universal digital IDs, electronic fiat currency, experimental medical procedures, one billion people from the global south relocated north, vaccines in the food supply, the removal of meat from the diet, and on and on. All this and more is on the cards and none of it will work.

What the leading lights in the technocratic world demonstrate well is reality-based constraint. Even with tons of cash, powerful reach and media amplification, the powerful must pick fallible humans as their managers and operate within reality. All of it is destined to fail because reality always succeeds.

Meanwhile as our infrastructure collapses and life gets hard technocratic clowns tell us most people won’t have jobs even though all our countries need rebuilt. Enough work for 50-100 years. What they mean is nice office jobs done via Zoom will be gone. The only world they understand won’t exist. And it is exactly this kind of myopia that makes them yesterday’s men.

Their future is to become irrelevant along with their insane plans for the rest of us.

Hard times are ahead. But it looks increasingly unlikely a technocratic managerial elite will be running anything as they are proving too incompetent.

They will cause damage to us all of course. So perhaps our future, such as it is, will really be about who survives the ministrations of today’s neocommunists.

But then again, those of us not entranced by slick videos, or the promise of AI, and aware of the limits of modern medicine, have an advantage since we live in the real world.

Maybe that’s all this is. The fantasists have been running the asylum for some time now and have all but destroyed it.

Who better to rebuild, then, than those of us living in reality?

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