22 Comments

The only logical solution is a One World Government, a Microchipped population and a Worldwide Electronic Banking System that can be turned on and off depending upon if we behave or not.

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The managerial class we have couldn’t chip a sedated hamster, and have no idea what a chip is, never mind how to build one.

Cheer up this part is ending.

If you want to Doom good news!

They have no replacements.

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They can’t get there from themselves… and they’re out of suckers

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No one actually believes in this Managerialism crap anymore. Burnham was a "former Trotskyite" who spun a yarn to cover for his intellectual brethren who were busy taking over the country.

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Why is managerialism theory wrong?

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It's not wrong, it's just focused on something superficial. WHAT the people in charge believe in is much less important than WHO the people in charge actually are. People change their politics all the time, but not what tribe they belong to. I think the focus on Managerialism is a cynical attempt to distract from WHO rules us.

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We can attack both the ruling tribe and their managers, just like He did.

This managerial thing is also important, we must know how they organize.

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I just think it's funny that Auron, Yarvin and all the others who preach the doctrine of Managerialism miss mentioning the ethnic group who obviously rules the West. Coincidence? I doubt it.

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Is there a point at which this centralization scheme fails? When it fails, is there a manner of managing that failure? How does controlled collapse look?

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Yes, like now. They’ve run out of competence and they’re running out of suckers. A key part of managerialism in practice is getting people below you as sub managers to take the blame.

No responsibility is a key benefit of being a manager. Or was.

The other fatal flaw is the need to create sub layers of responsibility to insulate yourself is this strips away the bottom talent who know the score, so you end up with far too many managers and not enough workers or line. I see this in corporate America and I saw it in the Army.

The scheme is ending and their time is up. As the Boomers acutely never trained competent replacements we’re going to have a hard landing. You’re watching the end of managerialism and it’s necessary ideologies die in real time…

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Great but we’re in the end stages of managerialism. No one sane or strong will touch management. They’ve run out of competence, they’re running out of suckers.

No conspiracy needed.

Examples; Kabul, Boeing, Butler.

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While certainly true for the USSR, Burnham's critique when applied to America at the time he made it was inaccurate. His argument that a new type of bureaucratic management structure had risen in the United States that represented some sort of radical and uniform transformation that was all encompassing was way off the mark in the 1940s. The United States of the time was still running on a tradition of entrepreneurial capitalism and political and economic decentralization, with significant variability in practices across the country. All across the country you could find many economic practices and governance structures that diverged from the centralized bureaucratic model Burnham said had become universal. And the nation as a whole had only slightly shifted in the centralization direction, it wasn't until the early 1960s that it made a bigger move and it wasn't until the mid 1980s that we'd reached private sector and public sector central planning

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Burnham didn't claim it had become universal. He said all 3 nations were moving towards Managerialism, at different rates and in different ways. He predicted that it would become universal by the early '60s at the absolute latest. Most of his predictions turned out to be wrong, as like many True Believers he thought he had the One True Faith that was deterministic over all other factors.

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Hi. When I wrote "universal" I was referring to within the USA, he described the USA as one entity with the same organization paradigm(s) running all throughout it, but in the fact the USA of the time was decentralized and heterogeneous with large degrees of variation in organizational designs, structures, and policy.

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Burnham didn't claim it had become universal. He said all 3 nations were moving towards Managerialism, at different rates and in different ways. He predicted that it would become universal by the early '60s at the absolute latest. Most of his predictions turned out to be wrong, as like many True Believers he thought he had the One True Faith that was deterministic over all other factors.

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You didn't change what you argued, so I'm not changing what I replied with.

Burnham didn't claim Managerialism had become universal, anywhere. He argued the world was on the inevitable path towards it becoming universal. In the US much of that path was called "The New Deal," which Burnham correctly interpreted as a big step towards Managerialism. Hence Orwell's '1984', which was strongly influenced by Burnham's predictions.

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I didn't change what I argued, you misinterpreted it, but that may very well have been my fault. And what I said was correct. Burnham's interpretation of the New Deal was verifiably false, He believed that the features he associated with it extended both across and within policy spheres far more than it actually did and he was super off about how uniform and "managerialist" it was. Just one of several examples from the book: lets take his reference to the TVA on page 50 where he wrote:

"Under the chief operating executives of a corporation like General Motors or U. S. Steel or a state enterprise like the TVA there are dozens and hundreds of lesser managers, a whole hierarchy of them. In its broader sense the class of managers includes them all; within the class there are the lesser and the greater. But, it may well be commented, there is nothing new in the existence of managers. Industry has always had to have managers. Why do they suddenly assume this peculiar importance? Let us examine this comment. In the first place, industry did not always require managers, at the very least not at all in the sense that we find them today. In feudal times the individual serf and his family tilled the small plot of soil to which he was attached; the individual artisan with his own tools turned out his finished product. No manager intervened to regulate and organize the process of production. Managers entered in only to the negligible sector of economy where larger­ scale enterprise was employed"

But this in my view mischaracterizes* the TVA: Burnham perceived the Tennessee Valley Authority as a highly centralized and professionally managed state enterprise, quite similar to mega caps like General Motors or U.S. Steel, with a strict centralized and hierarchical command structure. But this is wrong. In reality, the TVA's operational structure was quite decentralized and involved significant, small "p" and in the expansive historical meaning of the term, populist involvement. Local communities, farmers, area small and medium sized businesses (and some of these SMEs could be significant but most al them truly were indies back then) and various other interest groups played real roles in the choosing, formulation, design, and executions of the TVA's policies and projects. The TVA's initiatives were tailored to regional and often time local needs and different groups would effect things in their area, often to the chagrin of the national center's overall bosses of the program (as well as "managers" they'd sent to the area, they would sometimes make big edits or even brand new editions in ways that were firmly against the will of the TVA center's management structure, in so far as there was one, because again, it simply wasn;t structured like US Steel. And as an aside, these regional and local groups were proven right far more than they were proven wrong!

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They are simply acting wisely since this isn't telegram, getting loud with it in controlled social media will only weaken us.

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Great Read! This is why I always say what's coming is Technocracy or Technopoly if you go with Neil Postman's writing and not "muh Communism" as almost everyone on the right loves to tout.

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Solid, I learn anew from you!

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