The Beginnings Of The Expertocracy (a.k.a. Managerial Society) Starts With Napoleon

The French Revolution is directly responsible for the creating the soil in which the managerial society grew. The Cult of Reason alone proves this.

The initial flowering of the managerial society came through Napoleon, who formally started it. Since Napoleon, it has only accelerated, consumed more minds, and over the last fifty to seventy years has changed character into what I call the Expertocracy.

The Expertocracy is the managerial society—the rule of managers as described by inter alia James Burnham and Sam Francis—but imbued thoroughly with the false spirit of scientism, and with a greater emphasis on Equality, another gift of the French Revolution. The scientism creates Experts.

From Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon: A Life (my emphasis):

Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardized system of law and justice, uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralized education system, one that would allowed talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth…

…The new code [Napoléon] helped cement national unity, not least because it was based on the principles of freedom and contract. It confirmed the end of ancient class privileges, and…of ecclesiastical control over any aspect of French civil society…

The Code Napoléon simplified the 14,000 decrees and laws that had been passed by the various revolutionary governments since 1789, an the 42 different regional codes that twere in force, into a single unified body of law applicable to all citizens… [p. 275-277]

It’s all there, is it not? The hunger for top-down control of all things, where rules are designed by Experts (savants, then), and mandated for indigenous populants. All the richness of local custom wiped away in the desire for absolute unity. Which we nowadays, following a trend to name all things by their opposite, call “multiculturalism”.

The purging of the transcendence, the evisceration of custom and Tradition by replacing them with contract and tests, the beginnings of scientism. A code or system of measurement that all must use can scarcely be called a “principle of freedom”. It is the very opposite. Yet these are the very words we would now use.

That “modern world” bit was invented in the writer’s mind, who looked back from his present and saw what has happened as inevitable. As perhaps it was. But these anachronisms must be purged when writing or thinking about history. The worldwide nature of the Expertocracy was not in the minds of all rulers in 1800, as it is in ours now.

And it is in your mind, right now. You are thinking “How could we possibly function if every state was allowed its own system of laws and of weights and measures! I like and we need the convenience of mandated uniformity.” Only you’ll stop short of saying “mandated uniformity”, because you desire and willingly follow dictates from above. You scarcely feel the pressure. You only chafe at new mandates, until they become familiar enough to become “obvious”.

The transformation from managerial society to Expertocracy occurred sometime after World War II, driven by the then tremendous successes of science. Managers ran the government in America under FDR. Experts run the government today under, or rather around, Biden. I take this to be so obvious as to need no argument, but if you need one, or rather two, I’ll give them to you: coronadoom and “climate change.”

Those two usurpations of power are not the whole of the Expertocracy, of course. The control goes much farther and deeper, and must go farther still. Having a society designed and controlled by Experts makes all non-uniformities stick out and appear more prominent and important than they would otherwise be.

This was obvious to the Club of Rome founders even as early as the 1970s.

https://twitter.com/wideawake_media/status/1654794691466997760

(Substack no longer embeds tweets: you have to click to watch the short video.)

Alexander King, Director of the World Bank, is asked about how to stop the “climate change” of the day. He said, in effect, this could only be done by lessening the sovereignty of nations. He didn’t mean this in a cackling-rubbing-hands-together kind of way. He was sincere. He could not—it was impossible for him, as it is to our rulers now—envision any other way than by imposing Expert-created rules.

The scientism is right there, reeking. For that computer output showing the world would fall to “climate change” unless Expert-created “solutions” were imposed was only saying what it was told to say. All models only say what they are told to say.

But none of these rulers could see that. Scientism blinds you to the true nature of science.

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