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.
Also there was the exposure of Europeans to Eastern specifically Chinese forms of bureaucracy. The English were the first to try to get rid of the old way of giving away positions usually based on hereditary or money, and brought in an examination to find the best "scholar-bureaucrats". There was also a big oriental-streak to a lot of enlightment thinkers so there has to be a link imo between the growth of the expertocracy and the growth of imperialism
It was also the heyday of Marxism, evolutionism, and atheism.
I used to wonder why scientism arrived in the US a hundred years after it wreaked havoc in Europe. My best guess is that Christianity was much more alive in the US when scientism came in about 30 years ago, but scientism cannot win, unless Christianity is eliminated.
The central problem is scientism's default position of top-down centralization rather than locally evolved context specific solutions. But where does it get that from?
Why is the expert presumed to know more than the local, when we can presume that the local's observations, although perhaps not formally organised and recorded, are broader and deeper? To me, the problem with much of Science and the modern world boils down to an obsession with epistemology. The idea that I cannot know a thing unless I can articulate good grounds on which I know it. The centering of epistomology and communication does not select for those who have the most knowledge or the most correct knowledge but for those who are most argumentative, most concerned not with truth but with proving their own rightness(among which I number myself).
Isn't this where the gynocracy originated? For generations, men have been trained that we can only know things if we can demonstrate the derivation of that knowledge. Women, conversely, were allowed to know things intuitively, a way of thought that was formerly at least as much the province of the male of the species. But being allowed to know things intuitively is a huge advantage and inevitably led to the ascent of the group that possessed it.
For those of us who submitted to the discipline of science, we must regain the power to think outside of its framework, or we will forever be cripples.
💬 the rule of managers as described by inter alia...
Michael McConkey’s The Managerial Class on Trial (must read!™ 😁) springs to mind and refuses to leave.
[Managerial Revolution and] Circulation of Elites 👌 --> thecirculationofelites.substack.com
🗨 The bureaucratic state is a fourth branch of government, when there are supposed to be only three.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also there was the exposure of Europeans to Eastern specifically Chinese forms of bureaucracy. The English were the first to try to get rid of the old way of giving away positions usually based on hereditary or money, and brought in an examination to find the best "scholar-bureaucrats". There was also a big oriental-streak to a lot of enlightment thinkers so there has to be a link imo between the growth of the expertocracy and the growth of imperialism
Spot on.
Good stuff.
Let me add that scientism started out after Taine's positivist philosophy gained space in the second half of the 19th century:
https://yatesub.medium.com/positivism-and-hippolyte-taine-834ad900c23f
It was also the heyday of Marxism, evolutionism, and atheism.
I used to wonder why scientism arrived in the US a hundred years after it wreaked havoc in Europe. My best guess is that Christianity was much more alive in the US when scientism came in about 30 years ago, but scientism cannot win, unless Christianity is eliminated.
The central problem is scientism's default position of top-down centralization rather than locally evolved context specific solutions. But where does it get that from?
Why is the expert presumed to know more than the local, when we can presume that the local's observations, although perhaps not formally organised and recorded, are broader and deeper? To me, the problem with much of Science and the modern world boils down to an obsession with epistemology. The idea that I cannot know a thing unless I can articulate good grounds on which I know it. The centering of epistomology and communication does not select for those who have the most knowledge or the most correct knowledge but for those who are most argumentative, most concerned not with truth but with proving their own rightness(among which I number myself).
Isn't this where the gynocracy originated? For generations, men have been trained that we can only know things if we can demonstrate the derivation of that knowledge. Women, conversely, were allowed to know things intuitively, a way of thought that was formerly at least as much the province of the male of the species. But being allowed to know things intuitively is a huge advantage and inevitably led to the ascent of the group that possessed it.
For those of us who submitted to the discipline of science, we must regain the power to think outside of its framework, or we will forever be cripples.