Back in 1960, writes Jeffrey A. Tucker, Daniel Bell wrote The End of Ideology.
It argued that it was time to put aside all our ridiculous arguments of the past—socialism, fascism, liberalism, anarchism, technocracy, etc.—and just recognize that elites like him have it all under control. They had already established the building blocks of the administrative state so that real experts could be in charge and rule society with a steady hand.
Of course, the rule of the experts is what socialism and communism were all about: the conceit of the experts that they knew how to run the ship.
Then, of course, our rulers demonstrated to us that they didn’t know how the run the ship when the late COVID unpleasantness showed up. They overreacted, censored good science, and rammed their Plan down our throats.
Actually, the whole story of conservatism, as served up by Roger Scruton in Conservatism, is that expertise isn’t enough. A lot of the knowledge of how to live in the world is encoded in tradition and DNA and the face-to-face relationships of the Lebenswelt, and is just too complicated to be subject to centralized top-down administrative ukase.
That’s because all politics imagines itself in a war, and that everyone has to get in line because otherwise the enemy will win. It is beyond the imagination of educated people that ordinary people can get on pretty well without them.
Actually, my analysis of our ruling class is that, once the educated class had dispatched the monarchs and the aristocrats it had to find a reason to justify its political power. It had to run things or the workers would starve. Or people would die of disease. Or cities would die of pollution. Or the world would overheat from a trace gas in the atmosphere. And the victims!
In a way, the most interesting fallout of the whole procedure is how ordinary educated people just accept the latest humiliating ukase from above and follow orders. Their self image is that they are educated and knowledgeable and make educated decisions about everything. But really they don’t.
Instead, they make educated decisions to go with the hive. I’d say that the purchase of an EV is one such decision. People that drive EVs think they are “doing something” about climate. But actually they are just following orders.
I remember that back in the day all my liberal friends read Consumer Reports and made considered opinions before buying consumer products, and were the first to start buying Japanese cars. But when you think about it, we are talking abut the minutiae of life. It really doesn’t matter what car or what washing machine you have. They are all a country mile better than what we had a century ago.
Bad boy Curtis Yarvin argues that the next regime will have to be a monarchy, and the monarch has to be someone strong enough to stop the whole administrative technocracy in its tracks. And, after the Trump experience, I would have to agree. A half-way monarch like Trump is not going to solve the problem of the rule of the experts. The experts thoughtfully showed us in 2016 to the present what they can do to a monarch that doesn’t have the power to control them.
It’s pretty obvious that we have to take control of modern society out of the hands of the experts. The only question is how much force will be necessary. Back in the day, the French monarch Louis XVI pretty well surrendered power to the educated intellectuals of Paris without a fight. The fight came later.
Unfortunately our intellectuals still think they are the cat’s meow. They have not yet learned that they are less than perfect, and that an ordinary person can run her life a lot better than a bureaucratic administrator.
I don’t know what it is going to take to teach them the facts of life.