Why They Are Creating The Dystopia
“The government of man will be replaced by the administration of things.”
May 14, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
10:21
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| Four Essays on Liberty, published in 1969 by Latvian Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin, begins with an essay entitled Political Ideas in the 20th Century. | |
| In it, Berlin spends the first few pages charting the intellectual development of the West and how it has accumulated at the end of the 19th century between the two great liberating movements of humanitarian individualism and romantic nationalism. | |
| The conflict between these world views was settled in World War II, with humanitarian individualism defeating Romantic nationalism. | |
| From then on, the question was what kind of humanitarian individualism would prevail, with liberalism winning out over Soviet communism. | |
| Berlin would describe his kind of liberalism as encompassing a plurality of values contained within a tolerant society, negative liberty from coercion and unjust interference from the state or groups within society, a commitment to the dignity of the individual above all things, and a moral humility that acknowledges that no single doctrine can encompass the good life for each person. | |
| The issue which Berlin raises in this essay is that both his humanitarian individualism and romantic nationalism agree that the problems of individuals and societies could be solved if only the forces of intelligence and virtue could be made to prevail over ignorance and wickedness. | |
| And on the face of it, that seems very reasonable. | |
| Surely the questions that face the modern world can be answered by the rationalistic and moral people over the irrational and immoral people. | |
| Who could doubt it? | |
| For much of the 20th century then, the liberal tradition occupied itself with answering questions which seemed not to admit of obvious answers, but were indeed a core part of our daily behaviours that we had simply always assumed. | |
| What is the good life? | |
| What obligation does the individual have to society? | |
| What obligation does society have to the individual? | |
| What are the limits of the state? | |
| What claim does the majority have over the minority and the minority over the majority? | |
| How do we balance all of these completing claims in a fair framework of laws that work for everyone? | |
| These were the kind of things that needed to be settled in the end of history, and so these were the kind of things that liberals thought about. | |
| Liberals had their answers, which were usually more pragmatic and grounded, and in return the communists had their own answers, which were usually actually more in line with liberal theory, rendering them abstract and utopian. | |
| Previously, the conflict between the humanitarian individualists and a romantic nationalist had hinged on who had the correct answers to these questions, but at least they agreed that the questions themselves were valid. | |
| Now, however, Berlin observes that the liberal state of his day was coming to the conclusion that the questions themselves did not need to be answered, and in fact, the issue was in the person raising them to begin with. | |
| The actual nature of the debate had changed from one that is no longer philosophical and inquisitive, but instead to one that was mechanistic and utilitarian. | |
| The question of value sets and the human good had subtly, at some point, been talked past, and indeed the reigning orthodoxy of the liberal society had agreed upon the point that, in fact, the questions the new order raised were not really legitimate, and if there were any issues, the problem stemmed instead not from the system, but from the nature of the people who questioned it. | |
| Questions for whose solution no ready-made technique could be easily produced are all too easily classified as obsessions from which the patient must be cured. | |
| The worried questioner of political institutions is thereby relieved of his burden and freed to pursue socially useful tasks, unhampered by disturbing and distracting reflections which have been eliminated by the eradication of their cause. | |
| This is how communist and fascist states and all other quasi and semi-totalitarian societies and secular and religious creeds have in fact proceeded in the task of imposing political and ideological conformity. | |
| Even the most bleak-minded nineteenth century philosopher would react in horror to such a turn of events. | |
| De Maestra or Carlyle may have cynically regarded the majority of mankind as stupid and incapable of answering such questions, but at least they regarded the questions themselves as valid. | |
| Berlin recognises that in the liberal state's attempt to avoid having to resolve the difficult questions of life, it instead subverts the necessity of answering them, which itself causes the increase in the size and bureaucratic power of the state, as it decides that instead of being a rational organization in discourse with those over which it presides, | |
| it is instead a leviathan whose duty is to ensure its own perpetuation by taking on its charges as dependents. | |
| There is, as Berlin puts it, a tacit acceptance of the proposition that the responsibilities of the state to its citizens must grow and not diminish, a theorem which is today taken for granted by masters and men alike, to a degree which seemed utopian only thirty, let alone fifty years ago. | |
| Since the premises of the state are set and accepted unquestionably by it, everything becomes a materialistic utilitarian calculus as to how best to arrive at the most optimal conclusion by the bean counters who have, by degrees, annexed to themselves administrative power over practically everything. | |
| Berlin points out that this is actually very similar to the Soviet method of addressing its own issues, which is to deduce logical answers from their scientifically demonstrated premises and reduce all issues to technical problems of varying levels of complexity with all of their moral content drained out. | |
| To achieve a condition of stability, safety and material security requires a level of predictability only achievable by intense bureaucratic scrutiny, and thereby this gives the bureaucrat unlimited license to by any means necessary accomplish their goal. | |
| If this means reducing dissenters and criminals to the position of the mentally ill, then that's what they will do. | |
| Again, Berlin observes, Growing numbers of human beings are prepared to purchase this sense of security even at the cost of allowing vast tracts of life to be controlled by persons who, whether consciously or not, act systematically to narrow the horizon of human activity to manageable proportions, to train human beings into more easily combinable parts, interchangeable, almost prefabricated, | |
| of a total pattern. | |
| We can now see why our education system is so dire, and the reason that it has been stripped back to its most bare bones. | |
| The reason you know so little about the philosophical skills of thought but have been programmed with the technical ability to operate within the system is because the system itself has transformed you into what it finds useful and denied to you those things that would be useful for you but would present an unacceptable level of uncertainty to it. | |
| I could list the ways in which this trend has simply intensified in the modern era, but you are at this point no doubt reminded of a dozen particular ways in which you have seen this kind of scientific bureaucratic thinking applied to the entirety of our civilization regardless of the impact that it has on things like civil liberties, the common good, or the dignity of the individual. | |
| Indeed, the increasing bureaucratization of liberal civilization comes more to resemble something akin to the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier and his phalanster, who expected that people would be divided into communities which shared a planned palace in which people would have separate sleeping quarters but communal living areas, which would have no permanent employment but instead rotate between jobs, the family abolished, | |
| the genders made equal in all regards, and each would possess shares in society, from which they would be paid like a universal benefit system, so that we all might live in harmony with nature. | |
| Berlin quotes another utopian socialist, Saint Simon, who led the way in the technocratic utopian socialist thinking in the early 19th century with his possibly misattributed phrase the government of man will be replaced by the administration of things. | |
| The point being that this has been coming down the pipeline for a long time, and it seems inevitable that the therapeutic state can do nothing else than reduce the people it is charged with governing to the status of things which it is attempting to administer. | |
| And if those things challenge its right to rule or the method it employs, rather than viewing them as people who are entitled to their opinions and ask questions which must be answered, it instead interpolates them as malfunctioning units in a bureaucratic schemata which must themselves be modified in order to fit. | |
| These malfunctioning units must either be repaired, neutralized or contained in such a way that the administrative leviathan can maintain itself indefinitely. | |
| This is indeed the very point of therapy itself. | |
| The primary assumption of therapy is that the system does not need to change, and whatever negative exigencies it imposes on the people within it are in fact a kind of defect in those people that they must process themselves, rather than changing the system that produced them. | |
| The therapeutic state will never accept the validity of the proposition that it itself is the problem. | |
| And there is no or else for the administrative leviathan either. |
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