Understanding Managerial Wokeism

just rulers wanting to run everything, as usual

Our lefty friends like to imagine that they are devoted cultural Marxists storming the Bastille of white privilege in the name of the Oppressed. Or something.

But Michael McConkey writes that, nah, it’s been a managerial technocracy all along. Just the names and faces have changed. Managerial technocracy has now become managerial wokeism.

[M]anagerial wokeism offers us nothing but an endless battle for the unattainable world of zero-injustice, -discrimination, -hate speech, -carbon emissions, etc.

Or, to restate it, Managerial wokeism is

the perpetual pursuit by the administrative state of an infinitely receding set of zero-stasis goals: zero-racism, zero-covid, zero-carbon. Wokeism becomes the excuse for the relentless management of all human life by the authoritatively designated technical experts.

The notion is, of course, that the wokist managers are forever battling against enemies, and stand by and wait for orders until the war is over. McConkey invokes the “oppressor-oppressed dyad” which has been a political formula down the ages:

I'm pretty sure that that same dyad informed domestic political conflict at least as far back as the Roman Republic. And probably back to Periclean Athens. In fact, I'm guessing some version of that social frame can be found in most reasonably complex human societies.

Now, I’ve tended to think that most societies are naturally hierarchical, and everyone accepts their place. But maybe once you get to “reasonably complex” — e.g., cities — then any ruling class finds the need to be fighting for the oppressed against the oppressors.

Probably even in complex societies in normal times everything is copacetic. But if there’s a famine, or an economic crisis, then people want someone to blame, and it couldn’t be the rulers, oh no! Therefore, if the poor are suffering, it makes sense that it must be because of the lenders, the Jews, the employers. But not the rulers!

You could say that this is a society, of, by, and for the Woking Class. Other classes should stand by for instructions.

I suppose it’s natural for all rulers, and indeed all superior classes, to believe in some kind of managerial society, run by the best and the brightest. And whenever you have top down, you need an enemy to fight.

The Science says that it ain’t so. Human society is far to complex to be run from the top. Human society works by social interaction, horizontal interactions with immediate feedback, particularly if things go wrong.

But rulers, and Woking Classes, never seem to learn. Until it is too late and the butcher’s bill is past due.