The Technocrats

"I am an essential worker!"

The modern technological state is a bafflingly complex entity to the average individual within it; they do not (and feel they cannot) know or understand the function of each part of bureaucracy around them, even as it affects their everyday lives. This overload of information, rules, and regulations—and the sheer size and number of institutions—force individuals to concede within themselves that these institutions are necessary. Surely in some way they are needed for their continued peace and prosperity, even if they don’t understand how. There must be some unseen knowledgeable class of people who keep it all running and prevent the abject chaos promised should these institutions collapse. In the same way agents of opaque organisations such as MI5 or the CIA are posited as part of the “Thin Blue Line” between you and the violent tendencies of your fellow man, the managerial class are posited as the thin paper line between you and a world without order. They are the Technocrats.

How these technocrats view themselves and the people around them shapes the fabric of the modern state and enforces a hierarchy, where proximity to state power determines your status in wider society. They are the civilian foot soldiers of the establishment and play a less visible but equally important role to that of the security state. Their place within the system and their hopes to achieve a higher status within it drive their belief systems and inner self. There is no better example of a technocrat who has gained status in Britain over the past two years than a doctor. In terms of social status, doctors enjoy the highest non-elite rung of the technocratic ladder, and government involvement in health care ensures their place at the table when it comes to decisions on shaping society.

Doctors are socialised their entire lives to become doctors; most do not leave the education system until well into their mid-twenties. Often their entire identity is tied to the fact they are a doctor. Throughout their lives, their decision-making and the decision-making of their parents is guided by the goal to become “a doctor.” Most come from families already associated with the medical system or of some significant technocratic status.

They are an example of mass-credentialism and regulation creating an industry where only those with enough money, time, and connections can enter. Doctors and their associated raised status and power help perpetuate the credentialism of the system around them and are motivated to defend and enhance it; this further elevates their status over time and ensures the doctoral class can police who is and isn’t a high-level medical technocrat. Within a technocracy, their word holds more power both to themselves and the layman: they are a doctor and you are not. This extends well outside of their fields of study into the political sphere, where they can arbitrate with authority on topics they have no official expertise in. In a system of purely private property, this would make them arrogant and rife with cronyism, but once healthcare is codified as a branch of government, and when all technical credentials require government approval, this status is officiated, defended, and sanctified by the state.

The strata above medical doctors are those who are an active part of the elite class: the government “experts.” Technocrats in this sphere are disproportionately represented by medical doctors, upper echelons of the legal profession, academics, and journalists. This is where priests of technocracy reside, the amorphous group referred to in media as simply “The Scientists.” Their exact expertise, qualifications, affiliations, and agendas are rarely communicated; they are “The Scientists” and they police what is and isn't “The Science,” a set of beliefs which are settled, sanctified, and static.

This is how the use of massive organs of state to manage large aspects of an individual’s life is justified: they are neutral, objective, scientific, apolitical, and above all, necessary organisations, staffed with people who know better than you how a specific area of your life should function. The argument goes that although you as an individual have no direct control over their actions in any way, your vote—as interpreted by the political class—means you have indirect control over their actions. The logic then follows that these organisations are just giving you exactly what you’ve asked for, and the individuals within them are acting on your will and the collective will of the country as a whole. To question the actions of technocratic organisations is to question the will of the people; it is to reject the medicine democratically prescribed to you like a petulant toddler.

“Experts” and “Scientists” are also imbued with the power to defy the will of the masses when it is deemed necessary; their elevated status gives them a veto when the electorate make “the wrong decision.” The illusion of neutrality allows them to rubber-stamp decisions when they fall in line with their interests and to disregard them when they do not. It also means that passing legislation or conducting activism that conflicts with the interests of technocrats and the organisations they inhabit is a far more difficult proposition.

The highest strata of a technocracy are the political, judiciary, and monied elites—to whom elected officials are often subordinate. High court judges, special advisers, central bankers, and department heads. These may be national or even supranational in scale. Their combined influence and power is sovereign: the rules of the system by definition do not apply to their actions, as they decide what is and isn’t an exception and collectively define the system’s parameters. They are only accountable to each other, and very often have interlinked financial and power interests. They belong to an elite class who are raised, educated, housed, and socialised in virtual isolation from the rest of the population. These elites overwhelmingly come from high-level political and technocratic dynasties, being groomed for power from an early age, or have intentionally sought out positions of unaccountable power. They may publicly belong to different political causes, or have the veneer of technocratic neutrality, but privately theirs is a much smaller world with its own social, political, and moral norms. It is safe to assume that by demonstrating an ability to gain and maintain access to these strata of the technocratic and political power structure, they are capable of higher levels of Machiavellian thought and action than those subordinate to them. They must also then be the group most willing to wield power for self-interest, as well as the most capable of doing so in unaccountable ways. These elites are often cycled into different roles to maintain the illusion of meritocracy, or when they become unpalatable to the public in their existing role. Therefore, most will spend their entire processional lives within these elite strata.

Keeping in mind this structure, we must analyse how technocrats are able to justify and implement policies—in a practical sense—that govern the behaviour of wider society. Within a modern state, this is functionally how the process takes place: the political elites in power formulate a referendum where they decide what question should be voted on, the electorate makes a decision on that specific question, the political class decide if that decision is valid or not then interpret what that decision means, the technocratic elites decide how that decision should be implemented in practice, the middle managers create a framework for what work will be required for implementation, and the front line technocrats below them set about using that framework.

For “the will of the people” to be implemented, all these steps must be followed in good faith by honest actors who are wholly competent, from the apex of the power structure down to the minimum wage worker. The politicians must ask the right question in an honest manner; they cannot use propaganda or coercion to influence the outcome. The electorate must understand this question and its ramifications and participate in a “neutral” election process free of influence from the technocratic or elite structure. The political elites must declare that the election was indeed a valid one, and those elites must then take action to implement the decision—even if it is directly against their self-interest—and interpret it in a “neutral” and honest way. The “experts” must then decide this decision is “good and neutral” and must themselves actively participate in deciding how to implement the decision (or whether it is implementable at all). All layers of middle management between “the experts” and those who deal directly with the population must also be on board with implementing the decision in the way the political and elite class have instructed and the lowly foot-soldiers must be able to stomach this system of implementation. The larger the institution and over-arching power structure, the more steps this game of telephone (or Chinese whispers for my fellow Brits) goes through and the greater chance there is for one group to simply say “no,” or for them to fundamentally alter—through malice, incompetence, or simply indifference—what that decision means.

Decisions that benefit the higher levels of the organisation—not the population it supposedly serves—are therefore the most likely to be fully implemented. In this way they act in a fashion that cannot be neutral and involves the active management of society to serve their own ends, or the ends of their organisation. To say otherwise is to say technocrats are incapable of acting in self-interest or in a Machiavellian fashion when presented with the opportunity. This is why institutions always tend towards expansion, why they fiercely resist all attempts at reform and why—as Ted Kaczynski lays out in his work—technocratic systems, especially monopolistic ones of the state, morph into simply being self-perpetuating and self-defending as everyone within them is incentivised towards this outcome:

“A subordinate system that a government creates for its own purposes can turn into a self-prop[agating] system in its own right, and may even become dominant over the government. Thus, bureaucracies commonly are concerned more with their own power and security than with the fulfillment of their public responsibilities. ‘[E]very ... bureaucracy develops a tendency to preserve itself, to fatten itself parasitically. It also develops a tendency to become a power in and of itself, autonomous, over which governments lose all real control.’” -Ted Kaczynski, Anti-Tech Revolution

To analyse those within these systems fully, we need to abandon the “neutral” sounding new-speak to describe how governance really functions. In his magnum opus, “Leviathan and its Enemies,” Sam Francis uses the word “managerialists” to describe technocrats who manage society:

“The technicality and scientism of the managerial elite suggest that a more appropriate term than ‘manager’ for the members of this group might be ‘technocrat.’ Indeed, those writers who have discussed the managerial revolution and the managerial elite have often used the term ‘technocrat’ almost as a synonym for ‘manager.’”

In his view, there is a distinction between the purely “technocratic” and the class of people who manage a society. Francis goes on to say:

“….the historical key to the managerial revolution lies in the revolution of mass and scale and the need for technical skills in operating the mass organizations that resulted from this revolution. The power that technical skills acquire therefore depends on and results from the nature of mass organizations. By themselves, technical skills and functions do not lead to power—a point similar to the criticism of Burnham by Mills and Gerth—and acquire power only when they are applied to the operation and direction of mass organizations in state, economy, and culture.”

Distinguishing all jobs that require technical skills from the modern form of state led managerial Technocracy is vitally important; those who occupy technical roles in the private sector do not carry the same mystique, elevated position, and self-image as those technocrats who operate under the direct direction of the state—but it can be lent to them when their cooperation is required. Large scale managerial technocracies require by nature the reducing of status those seen as not necessary or combative to the collective goals. Who is dispensable or indispensable becomes the purview of the state, down the arbitrary levels of who is and isn’t considered an “essential worker.”

No society can be truly egalitarian, and technocracy offers the illusion of fairness by adding a layer of mysticism to those higher up in the power structure as “experts,” be they medical, political, or monetary experts. The decisions of these “experts” are therefore no longer arbitrary, but neutral and scientific—they are “qualified” to know what is best for society as a whole and you must occupy a technocratic rung parallel to or above them to be “qualified” to question their decision making. We can draw recent examples for how this strict hierarchy works in practice: during the lockdowns some of the magical status of the technocrats has been extended to those who are required by the power structure to continue working. They are rewarded, not monetarily, but primarily with status: they are an “essential worker”—you are not. This new status comes with the other attached privileges of being a technocrat—the emergent “essential worker” class is now more qualified to comment on decision-making and their work was by definition more meaningful than the work of others. A large mass of people had their status and privileges elevated, whilst privilege and status was revoked from others. Those who find themselves below the bottom rung of the managerial pyramid face reduced access to resources and travel, state mandated unemployment, and exposure to new reprisals from the security state.

State-led distinction between what is and isn’t “essential work”—and what “undesirables” are prohibited from undertaking it—is the bread and butter of tightly managed socialist societies. “Western liberal democracies” have also been primed to accept this practice when it is presented with a veneer of crisis. Both the First and Second World Wars brought this distinction for the first time to the economy at large, and throughout the lockdowns technocrats have talked glowingly about the peace-time war economy of Covid and how it allows governments to exercise tight controls.

Whether or not you think the measures are “justified” to combat “the crisis” does not change the realities of the power transfer to the technocratic & political class in these instances. Once again, the clearly totalitarian measures put in place are framed as the neutral will of experts, assenting control for the survival of “the people,” much like a Roman emperor suspending the bickering senate in a time of crisis. As seen with vaccine mandates, when the lower rungs of the technocratic class turn against the programs of their managers, they are dealt with in ruthless fashion—expelled wholesale and economically disenfranchised. Those who do not serve the interests of the elite strata are systematically weeded out of large government organisations. It is a powerful demonstration of the hegemony these institutions must enforce and how, when they come into conflict with the realities of power, protest and appeals to democracy are fruitless.

The French author and World War One solider Georges Bernanos put it thus when addressing Franklin D. Roosevelt:

“I am tired, Mr. Roosevelt, of hearing it said that the democracies are the opposite of the dictatorships. Democracy offers no defence to dictators, that is the truth. Every democracy can at any moment have an acute attack of dictatorship, as one has an acute attack of appendicitis; and national temperament can do nothing about it.”

If a “liberal democracy” can simply cease to be governed as such at a moment’s notice, then functionally it was never “liberal” or truly a “democracy” in the first place—those are merely platitudes to placate the populous once those who manage the state declare there is “normality” again. This ability to “suspend normality” also means those who benefit from a managerial state are incentivised to generate and perpetuate periods of crises to enshrine permanently the temporary measures imposed under crisis conditions. This cycle of change—creating a ratcheting effect—is described in detail by Robert Higgs in his book “Crisis and Leviathan.”

Technocracies are by nature of their complexity highly compartmentalised. The technical elites of this present moment are not the architects of the system; through generations of technocratic rule and technological development—both in complexity and scale—they are by definition a product of it. On the lower rungs, their role is simply to turn their specific cog within the great machine of a technological society, having the collective illusion of piloting events on a societal level. This mentality of being dwarfed as a human being by the sheer mass and scale of the state at large is shared by both managerial technocracy and liberal democracy.

Ultimately what technocrats and managerialists do is propagandise and seduce an agitated mass of people with promises that they, the “experts,” will handle all the problems of the modern world the populous find too scary, confusing, or difficult—if they just hand over the power to do so. This also comes with the implicit and sometimes explicit promise that they will quell—by force if necessary—those “anti-progress” forces who do not want to hand over that power. As society becomes more complex, it requires further management by technocrats—who in turn make society more complex and demand greater powers from the populous in response. The populous then becomes abstracted from the realities of how those functions are performed, instead entrusting ever greater parts of their lives for the technocrats to manage as they become ever more helpless and docile. This reality cannot be reformed away; adding systems of control to prevent or mitigate it only further bloats and perpetuates the system. In short: there is not a managerial answer to managerialism.

Food production, policing, justice, education, medicine, transportation, and the arbitration of property rights are mysterious abstract systems to modern populations—but for all of previous human history they were immediate and vital parts of life to be actively participated in. We see our current situation as simply “the way things are” when to previous generations it would be an unthinkable dystopia they were assured would never take hold by the elites in power at the time. If we trust a technocratic class to manage society—down to the level of controlling our basic necessities for survival—then what happens when those technocrats fail to do so, or bleaker still, decide certain “non-essential” sections of society no longer deserve to survive? And what hope do those people have of resisting if they can no longer survive without the permission and assistance of the managerial technocratic class?

“In a modern mammoth state the individual at national elections is nothing more than a microbe… thus, ‘ Nobody is indispensable ’ is a highly democratic slogan. The conservative and personalist would say: ‘ Everybody is unique. Everybody is indispensable. Nobody can be replaced.’ Even at the risk of being accused of delighting in exaggerations and hyperbolic statements, we insist that the aforementioned democratic slogan leads straight to the cremation-stoves of Treblinka” - Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time

"I am an essential worker!"- Kraków Ghetto Jew, Schindler's List

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Big thank you to Plasma Rob for the copy editing.