Our Rulers Really Aren't into the Boring Stuff

so stop throttling us with your top-down systems

Just a week ago I wrote “Towards a New Narrative” trying to imagine how government and society would work in the Next Regime after the end of the Educated Class Dynasty. I wrote that with the breakup of Mass Media and its One True Narrative and the rise of Independent Media we should see, in the next regime, a balance between the top-down administrative System of big government and the “intersubjective Lebenswelt in which humans share their experience of the world in conversation using their shared language.”

The very next day began the Los Angeles wildfires. I suppose a conventional response was that of Claire Lehmann at Quillette. She goes with the climate change narrative, the inevitability of climate disasters, and notes the difficulties of mitigating the buildup of brush with government-administered regulated controlled burns.

My take is rather different. I view it all through the lens of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who asserts that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. The consequence of putting so much of our affairs in the hands of the politicians produces, on the one hand, a narrative about fighting climate change, and on the other hand a narrative from the local public officials about achieving equity and justice for oppressed peoples in the government workforce. Nobody seems to be in the least interested in the complex work of building and maintaining a city in a dry climate that is subject to wildfires and requires careful organization and cooperation between everyone from firefighters to homeowners to building codes to the question of who does the periodic burns of the undergrowth.

Dickens illustrated the problem over a century ago in Little Dorrit with his government Circumlocution Office run by the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings. In other words, there are two kinds of government employees. There are the Barnacles, hanging on, doing the least amount of work needed to get to the government pension. Then there are the poseurs, the Stiltstockings, looking to use their government jobs to pose before the world and acquire status. Notice that neither the Barnacles or the Stiltstockings are particularly interested in doing the boring work of making things work.

How should we citizens cooperate to build and manage our vast cities and suburbs so that we have everything we need, from streets to electricity to water and sewer to garbage collection to fire control? Is a government bureaucracy and rules and regulations the only way to go? Or are there other possibilities?

There used to be other possibilities. There used to be fraternal organizations. There used to be barn raisings. The Amish still do it.

Barn raising also helps give the Amish a sense of security, since they know that others will be there to help them in times of need. If an Amish family loses their home in a fire, the community will work together to quickly build them a new home.

That is something that Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt doesn’t mention. His system has the political, the moral, the economic, the aesthetic. But not the communal. But do people need to belong to a religious community in order to cooperate in the way the Amish do?

Today, we all take it for granted that anything that isn’t produced by business has to be done by a government bureaucracy. I suspect that this assumption has arisen over the last century in parallel with the growth of the administrative state by, for, and of the educated class. Used to be that people belonged to community groups, to fraternal organizations and so forth. But our liberal ruling class has developed and enforced the narrative that all activities of a communal nature should be organized by government and paid for with taxes.

That is a far cry from my ideal society is one in which education is run by women in homeschools and micro schools, and welfare is run by women in welfare committees, and most community improvemets are run by HOAs. And emergency operations are done by voluntary male organizations similar to the Cajun Navy and the Redneck Air Force and Operation Helo. And that would just be the start.

Is it practical? Even possible? We don’t know, because we haven’t really tried. And our liberal friends have dominated the narrative with their government programs operated by liberal bureaucracies. They can’t imagine anything different.

In other words, an awful lot of communal work these days is done by system, by bureaucracy, by government program, by force. All the world’s a system. But German philosopher Edmund Husserl came up with his idea of the Lebenswelt, or life-world,

a universe of what is self-evident or given, a world that subjects may experience together.

Jürgen Habermas developed his Theory of Communicative Action from Husserl’s Lebenswelt. The idea is to blend the power of hierarchical system with the interpersonal interaction of life-world. You can see that the society that our liberal friends have developed relies heavily on system and compulsion, the educated class directing traffic from on high. But humans are not just hierarchical, not just obedient soldiers. They are also social beings that interact and develop consensus in conversation.

In the new world that is to come, I prophesy, there will be much more interpersonal interaction and a lot less top-down system.

And the fact is that our current rulers aren’t too interested in the nuts and bolts of making things work. They are into politics, fighting enemies and gifting friends. But humans are so much more than that. As usual, it goes back to Shakespeare and As You Like It.

All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

I say: let our liberal friends strut and fret his hour upon the stage. And let the rest of us work together out of the glare of the klieg lights and build a society together.