In the post “Hoffer on Scribes and Bureaucrats“, David Foster of Chicago Boyz excerpts a couple of timely passages from Eric Hoffer’s essay The Ordeal of Change, published about fifty years ago:
The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…
Hoffer was referring at the time, Foster notes, to “underdeveloped countries” and not to the modern west, but his description is an apt portrayal of our modern-day would-be central planners: bureaucrats, politicians, big-picture leftist pundits, and the chattering class of so-called progressive voters:
…there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them.
I liked the article. Social mobility is change engine for any societies health with growth. If not technical advancement.
Its like the Middle class is the shield of individual rights. being the first line of defense for the wealthy. By establishing Equality of Law, along with stability.
JMO
Those who can do. Those that can’t teach. Those who care, do and teach.
Even when he was a longshoreman Mr Hoffer had a great deal of wisdom to offer. Be careful how far you go with his reasoning, because he did like the extreme left.
Read his book “the True believer” to get a good taste.
The real problem is not whether the bureaucrats are “talented” but rather that they presume too much. The premise underlying the progressive vision is that a talented and educated mandarinate can direct society into better outcomes than could be obtained by laissez faire policies. The problem is that even the best and brightest bureaucrats do not know enough to control and direct something as complex and reactive as an economy or a society. Unintended consequences always trump bureaucracy.
A related problem is that most of the social and economic policy-related academic fields (e.g., economics, sociology, social psychology, political science)upon which the modern mandarins rely are at best quasi-sciences and more often complete frauds. In short, there is no scientific expertise on which even the best and brightest can rely for guidance. Their governing theories are unproven (and in practice usually unprovable) hypotheses. Free market economies compensate for this lack of theoretical knowledge by allowing millions of individual private experiments in which good policies succeed and unworkable policies fail. Top-down governments instead make general rules which tend to immortality regardless of whether they succeed or fail.
The truly clever marxists/progressives of the 20th century realized they would have to be patient and wait until the
counterproductive external threats posed by the poster boys for crude communism, Stalin, Mao & Co, were no more.
Marx was of the opinion that true communism would first come to a very wealthy country, probably the USA.
Today you can see the outlines of a far more sophisticated program where those deemed a hindrance or unwanted
are provided with their toys, drugs, and especially barren sex with easy abortions, to while away their lives.
It is as if the last hundred years were an uncontrolled detour and now the elites are back on the progressive fast track to a brave new world.
I just said that Barry…
I understand life better, I think, because of reading Eric Hoffer’s writings some forty years ago. Cheers;
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Pharisees were such scribes, rules and regulations for everything.
Jesus didn’t care for them much…so they had Him crucified.
“central planners: bureaucrats, politicians, ”
holy mackerel. just like during mikey ‘six toes’ harris’s time at queens park.
emphasis on CENTRAL PLANNING. because that’s EXACTLY what harris wanted; the entire province run by a couple lackeys down the hall.
“Jesus didn’t care for them much…so they had Him crucified”.
fiddle
Good analogy that fits perfectly with today’s individualism vs the establishment.
Jesus was a Libertarian…The forefathers of the American Constitution were Libertarians, at least in mindset because it is based on the Bible.
We have abandoned and are deliberately made to abandoned Christianity which is the religion closest to Libertarian values (Individual freedom and equality).
In other words we are heading for bondage on a planetary scale and the most frightening part is that the percentage of humans who are aware of what truly is going on is becoming a smaller and smaller number…Engage dialogue on the subject with the average person almost anywhere (Including the Christian based churches nearest you) and you will know exactly what I mean.
…”People sleeping in their shoes”…Says Neil Young.
hi terry! couldn’t agree with you more.
it’s all part of a generations long slide to a world where 0.01% of the population owns 99.99 % of all property.
dumb it down, dumb it down. minimum wages across the board. curious how the period of greatest prosperity, smack dab in the middle of the 20th century, coincides with the time when organized labour was at its peak.
see, all that whining and bytching about work place safety, benefits, decent wages is the one thing that really did TRICKLE DOWN.
but the right wing cannot tolerate social fairness because it doesnt fit with the agenda of the masters.
Barry is right – he’s describing the middle class:
“Free market economies compensate for this lack of theoretical knowledge by allowing millions of individual private experiments in which good policies succeed and unworkable policies fail. Top-down governments instead make general rules which tend to immortality regardless of whether they succeed or fail.”
And that’s the point. All those societies – Egypt, China, medieval Europe – collapsed. That’s because they were organized, politically, socially, economically, within a two class structure: the Rulers and the Ruled. The bureaucrats were part of the centralist Ruler Set.
There was no middle class, defined as the population engaged in private enterprise, operating as individuals with the capacity and right to question, dissent, explore and generate new technologies.
Two-class infrastructures have no capacity to change; their universal laws are inviolate; the focus is on stability. BUT – when the population increases beyond the current technological ability to support them – since no adaptive dissent and change is enabled…famines, disease etc set in and the society collapses.
What is needed, and this developed first in the West, is the emergence of a flexible, questioning, exploring, free class: the middle class, whose members are not hereditary but strictly defined by productivity and functional interaction with the envt and market. This class must be politically empowered – and that’s the origin of democracy.
Removing or disabling the middle class’s freedom to analyze, dissent, and economically prosper – will destroy a society (eg, Obama in the US).
@the imposter at 8:30 am…
The only thing trickleing down during your so-called “golden age” of organized crime er, unionization, was the $millions$ of dollars trickeling down into the mafia bosses pockets.
Now off you go …your school bus is waiting.!
Bemused,
I read a bit of “Occupy wall street” mindset in your comment…Let me be clear that people who work harder and desire to amass more is totally an individual right and that no one should be able to take the fruit of someone else’s labour IMO.
We all need to accept the fact that vast majority of men are born inherently good and that pure individualism will always ensure that sharing of blessings will be maximised. Au contraire, the more there is groups to impose on others; via Governments, unions or organisations the more selfishness and injustice will occur.
The biggest enemy of man is Government…The only organism that can create and impose laws and regulations on others. Corporations or individual rich men cannot do this on their own.
Let’s not dream here though, mankind has never experienced pure freedom and never will because we are not and never will be perfect…We will always be at least tribal in nature.
The key is to keep the “tribe” AKA “Government” as “small” AKA “Least powerful” as possible.
Exactly. I like to call them (Bureaucratic class) the new Praetorian Guard. They exist not to serve the multitudes, but to protect the system, because it is from the system they draw their livelihood. It is a self serving society. All they need to complete the transition to Roman Era times, is to implement hereditary legislation. Then the coup will be complete.
“Corporations or individual rich men cannot do this on their own.”
precisely.
it is a symbiotic relationship which explains everything.
including all the clucking and strutting done over the years by the right wing having yet another temper tantrum and the mere faint notion that jeepers, spread the bounty a tad eh?
as far as wee willy wonka is concerned, he’s talking about jimmy hoffa. and I couldn’t agree more with that view. but hoffa was the exception in that the links to organized crime were real. but that had to do with the decline and very predictable rot that set in after the golden age was over.
so, now we get back to the way things are ‘supposed’ to be and were for thousands of years; an aristocracy surrounded by grinding poverty and an unending flow of blame-the-victim propaganda slurped up unquestioningly by the right wing attempting to curry favour with the masters.
…spread the bounty a tad eh?
Here’s an idea, make your own bounty. Rather than envying others bounty.
Remember the “Pet Rock” mania from a generation ago?
Just shows the intelligence of the average consumer.
But they clamour the rich are rapeing them… good grief.
Remember the children’s story about the Little Red Hen and how she worked to gather wheat, mill it then eventually baked it into bread? Or the story about the ant and the grasshopper?
Every kid who heard or read those stories inherently understood why those who didn’t work didn’t eat in the end…WTF happened between kindergarten and graduation from university?
Right Honourable Terry Tory do you project much? Sheesh. “Jesus was a libertarian” BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! If Jesus was a libertarian why did He inform everyone that not one jot or tittle would disappear from the Law until the Law had been fulfilled? If Jesus was such a libertarian why did He tell his followers to watch their speech warning them that he who calls his brother fool will be subject to the flames of hell?
Back on topic: Yes we have too many people who are trying to use their education as qualification for a job. They don’t realize that education was never meant to qualify you for a job it was to help you learn to think. Unfortunately the original methodology of higher education has been diverted into indoctrination not education and we as a society are the poorer for it.
Sadly … the post secondary education business has been busy … very busy producing mediocrities with no humility …. or common sense.
There is a place for them in this world … behind a service counter in an airport … or … at best … in a call center.