Charles Hugh Smith – Those who don’t yet understand our centrally-planned cartel-state system will benefit from reading How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul (The Atlantic). I’ve presented related analyses in three recent essays:
The Protected, Privileged Establishment vs. The Working Class
25 Years of Neocon-Neoliberalism: Great for the Top 5%, A Disaster for Everyone Else
What we’re talking about here is the Triumph of the Technocrats. There are multiple levels to this triumph of the technocrat class:
1. The dumbing down of the Technocrat Class via a Higher Education system that optimizes technocrat specialization at the expense of real-world business experience and broad-based knowledge.
As a result, the technocrat class has a very high opinion of its intelligence and judgment because it has no idea how little it actually knows or understands. It believes Higher Education’s hype that specialization has given it a superior understanding that entitles it to control and power.
This overweening belief in its own superiority sets the stage for hubris and catastrophically ungrounded decisions.
Need we look any farther than the invasion of Iraq or the Establishment’s response to the insolvency of self-liquidating money-center banks in 2008?
The roots of the Technocrat Class’s hubris and self-congratulatory bias goes all the way back to the 1960s-era “whiz kids” described by David Halberstam’s classic account The Best and the Brightest.
The rise of computers (albeit primitive by today’s standards) enabled the first Technocrat romance with “big data”, i.e. a reliance on data analysis to make decisions about a real world that cannot be reduced to quantification without a loss of decision quality and humility.
This is how we ended up with a nation in which Technocrats with no real-world military combat experience are running America’s wars and Technocrats who have never started a single company or paid a single employee with their own money are running America’s economy.
2. As outlined in How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul, the Liberal Establishment melded Corporate-banking cartels and the central state into one centrally planned, technocrat-controlled cartel-state system. This has created millions of well-paying, protected Technocrat jobs in an expansive Deep State that stretches from universities to the corporate media to the federal agencies to Silicon Valley cartels and monopolies.
Here is my simplified chart of the Technocrat Deep State:
Here’s a chart that reflects the massive expansion of Technocrats in the healthcare system: charts of Higher Education track this same Triumph of Technocrats: the number of administrators has exploded while the number of tenured professors has essentially flatlined.
The top 5% is the Technocrat Class. The phenomenal rise in the income and spending of the Technocrat Class is illustrated in this chart:
No wonder the Liberal Establishment is freaking out: they’ve failed. Despite their multiple degrees, they are ignorant. Despite their confidence in “we’re the best and brightest,” The economy inhabited by the bottom 95% has stagnated, and all the wars of choice run by the technocrats have become unwinnable quagmires (despite Rummy’s claim that “we don’t do quagmires”).
Even worse, “lesser beings” (i.e. the rest of us) are challenging their central planning power, which they view as their birthright / entitlement. Here’s the Liberal Establishment’s view in a nutshell: How dare they challenge our power? The reality that “lesser educated” people actually have a better grasp of the real world than Technocrats is simply unacceptable to the Liberal Establishment Technocrats.
We cannot advance until we dump the Technocrat Class and decentralize the power that the Liberal Establishment happily concentrated into the hands of corporate cartels and the central state.
Charles Smith is a Contributing Writer for Shift Frequency
SF Source Of Two Minds Feb. 2017