Why The Total State Is Doomed

Chapter 9

The preceding chapters have not painted a rosy picture. The march of the total state has been relentless and the mechanisms that were championed as ways to restrain power have failed to halt its advance. Managerial bureaucracy has become the default structure for social organization, destroying all competing spheres of social influence and homogenizing all cultures in an effort to manufacture a more compliant populace. The capture of most critical institutions can make the total state seem like an insurmountable foe, but there is one critical piece of good news. The foundation of the total state is fundamentally flawed. The power of the managerial elite, which operate the structures that enable the expansion of the total state, is based on a vision of humanity that is inaccurate and will collapse under sufficient strain. The total state is doomed to collapse under its own weight though, as we will see, that process will come with its own consequences.

Before we look at how the modern total state will fall we need to better understand how ruling classes throughout history are either renewed or replaced. As we discussed previously, Italian political theorist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto observed that all ruling classes contain a balance of what he referred to as residues, and of those residues, two types are most prominent: the type one residues, or foxes, and the type two residues, or lions. Foxes are the elites who are crafty and clever. They focus on combinations to create new ideas and solutions. Lions are strong and brave. They focus on persistence of identity and tradition.

Foxes are academics and merchants; lions are generals and police captains. While one group may dominate at any given time, all ruling classes contain a mixture of these two primary residues. A ruling class is always present, but no healthy society has a totally static set of elites. The conditions a nation faces are constantly shifting, and the composition of a ruling elite must also constantly adapt in order to meet new challenges. During a time of war or physical danger, a society needs an elite composed primarily of lions to provide a steady stream of commanders capable of training and leading an army into battle. In a time of peace, economic or logistical concerns may require solutions that only foxes can provide. The elite class will always require some mixture of both skill sets, but it must be fluid enough to adapt its composition to the needs of the civilization over which it rules.

Aristocracy is an inescapable fact of human organization. Just as there will always be a ruling class, that ruling class will always seek to pass its power and privilege on to its heirs. Whether fox or lion, all members of the ruling elite grant preference to their friends, families, and other members of their class. This means that no ruling elite is ever completely open to the elevation of common members of the society to its ranks. This preference serves a practical purpose. Those descended from the ruling class are more likely to have the natural ability and receive the skills and training necessary to lead. A completely open ruling class leads to instability, as those of dubious qualification engage in a never-ending struggle for power and dominance. But even if a totally open elite were desirable, it never exists for long, as the drive to pass property and privilege on to one’s lineage is one of the most powerful human instincts. Anyone ignoring this iron law of human nature when evaluating power will fail miserably.

While aristocracy is unavoidable, an elite must change over time to reflect the needs of the society, so every healthy ruling class allows some method by which new members may be elevated into positions of leadership. The ruled class will always contain capable and ambitious individuals who can bring new skills and solutions to bear on the problems currently facing their civilization. In some societies, aristocrats adopted exceptional members of the lower class. In others, the church or military were used as institutions to sort and elevate those of extraordinary talent. In many Western nations today, financial success or educational attainment are used as ladders by which exceptional individuals ascend to the ruling elite. No matter what mechanism a specific society uses, any ruling elite that seeks to maintain its power must strike a balance between the persistence of its own dominant minority and the circulation of capable individuals into its ranks.

The temptation to close the ranks of the elite is great, as it allows for a more extreme concentration of power and wealth among those who rule. In the past, the consolidation may have been based on blood or religion; today it is more likely to be ideological, but in either case, an elite that decides to limit access to the best and brightest will always set itself on the path to ruin. Over time, a closed elite will degenerate as it limits or completely ceases the flow of capable individuals who can shift the composition of the ruling class. 

“In virtue of class-circulation, the governing elite is always in a state of slow and continuous transformation. It flows on like a river, never being today what it was yesterday. From time to time sudden and violent disturbances occur. There is a flood — the river overflows its banks. Afterward the new governing elite again resumes its slow transformation. The flood has subsided, and the river is again flowing normally in its wonted bed. Revolutions come about through accumulations in the higher strata of society — either because of a slowing down in class-circulation or from other causes — of decadent elements no longer possessing the residues suitable for keeping them in power, and shrinking from the use of force; while meantime in the lower strata of society elements of superior quality are coming to the fore, possessing residues suitable for exercising the functions of government and willing enough to use force.”

¹

A closed elite dooms itself in a myriad of ways. It degenerates and becomes decadent as those chosen purely out of nepotism become more and more sure of their right to rule. The elite lose any connection to the ruled as their interactions become increasingly insular, and they grow disdainful of the lower classes. All the while, they have denied themselves access to the skilled who would naturally rise to leadership and balance the mixture of the elite. This generally leads to an extreme imbalance of foxes and lions in the ruling class, as one residue becomes overrepresented in the nepotistic elite that now favors only those of the same disposition.

At the same time, those gifted and ambitious individuals who have been denied entrance into the ruling elite do not disappear. Some will give up their quest for elevation, but many will become disgruntled and seek alternative avenues of power. A dedicated counter-elite will often grow in institutions that become societal pressure points, seeking to leverage the increasingly alienated masses against the sclerotic ruling class that has become indifferent to the well-being of the ruled.

It is a common misconception that regimes fall when they are overbearing and totalitarian. Instead, regimes most often fall when they have grown weak and decadent, unable to control the population through the manipulation of the fox or the force of the lion. When the elite have degenerated and grown soft by closing themselves to the natural circulation of new talent into the ruling class, those denied access will eventually lead a far more sudden disruption of the status quo. Pareto uses the Greek civilizations of Athens and Sparta as examples of societies dominated by fox and lion residues respectively. While the openness and clever nature of the Athenian leaders allowed for a great success in areas like economics, art, and philosophy, these qualities also resulted in factionalism, scheming, and political plotting that weakened the unity of the people and made it difficult for them to persist through the Peloponnesian Wars. Sparta’s legendary military tradition gave it an incredible ability to endure adversity and maintain unity, but the failure of its elite to produce an empire or great cultural advancements meant that it could not adapt to rapid change and eventually faded in the shadow of those who could.

According to Pareto, over time, most elite classes tend to see a concentration of type one, or fox, residues and a waning of type two, or lion, residues. This leads to a loss of religiosity, identity, and martial prowess among the ruling class, which starts to select primarily for cunning and deception inside its own ranks. A healthy circulation of elites will temper this tendency, replenishing the ruling class with a supply of capable leaders who are still religious, patriotic, and connected to the people. A closed elite filled with foxes will lose connection to both its identity and the people and will create a surplus of capable lions who have been denied access to the ruling class, creating the kind of societal pressure that leads to more sudden and dramatic change.

“By opening only to those individuals who betray faith and conscience in order to procure the benefits which the plutocracy so lavishly bestows on those who devote themselves to its service, it acquires elements that in no way serve to supply it with the things it most needs. It does, to be sure, deprive the opposition of a few of its leaders, and that is very helpful to it; but it acquires nothing to replenish its own inner strength. So long as cunning and corruption serve, it is likely to keep winning victories, but it falls very readily if violence and force chance to interpose.”

²

The circulation of elites is an inescapable part of every society. A wise ruling class that seeks to maintain a healthy society will strike a balance between protecting its own power and allowing new and capable leaders to elevate themselves, providing their strength and skill to the ruling class. The elite class should always be changing and adapting, meeting the new challenges of its civilization with the right mixture of residues in order to overcome adversity. A ruling class that succumbs to the temptation to completely close its ranks does not escape the reality of the circulation of elites, but only delays it and ensures that the circulation will be more severe.

Even if the circulation does eventually take place through a more dramatic event like a cultural or violent revolution, Pareto reminds us that it is very rare for an elite to be completely replaced. The ruling class may be heavily disrupted by a sudden surge in foxes or lions, but it is very common for a large element of the previous elite to persist in the new arrangement. Unless a civilization is completely wiped out, there will usually remain some level of continuity through the persistence of its elites. For Pareto, the story of a civilization is the story of its ruling elites, and while that elite may always be in some degree of flux, the religion, art, and culture that define a society are inextricably linked to the elite class that guides it.

Pareto’s model of the circulation of elites gives us a valuable overview of how and why a ruling class is displaced, but it is only a general outline. Each civilizational form has its own specific political structure and character that determines the unique selection pressures which will drive its circulation of elites. Late-stage western liberal democracy is clearly a form that becomes dominated by fox-style elites and chokes on the consequences. The reliance of western liberal democracy on managerial power has allowed it to dominate the modern era and assemble the total state through manipulation and soft power, but it also creates critical vulnerabilities that will inevitably cause its demise.  

In his book, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre observed that liberal philosophy had more or less given up on determining metaphysical truth through reason due to the general failure of that project. As we observed earlier with the help of Carl Schmitt, liberalism instead swept the metaphysical problems, the larger conflict of moral visions, into the broom closet in hopes of creating a system of cooperation that ignored those questions. Liberalism promised to replace the existential conflict of the friend/enemy distinction with free markets, democracy, and proceduralism. Once all metaphysical questions had been purged the only objective good liberalism really had left to pursue was efficiency, and this is where the managerial class and their massified institutions became essential to the project. 

This is the reason that managers became the key building block of modern liberal society. Bureaucratic management is supposed to offer a morally neutral increase in efficiency. The telos for the organizations they operate is not the explicit domain of the manager. What is the goal of the organization? Is it a worthy goal, one society should be directing its energy towards? These are not issues for managers to decide. Managers, at least in theory, exist to make whatever process an institution is involved in more efficient. But, as we have seen, there is no such thing as morally neutral insulation, be it a government or a corporation. Managers are people with belief, goals, and desires and those forces act on the decisions made inside the institution. 

MacIntyre points out that, just as managers cannot actually be objective or neutral, neither can the efficiency they generate. Effectiveness and efficiency are concepts that cannot be separated from a type of human existence where nudging people into predictable patterns of behavior is a key aspect of the system. Since this has become a skillset central to the functioning of the current liberal paradigm, managers have claimed a large amount of authority in our society. Some might hesitate to describe this authority as moral, but it is clear that efficiency has become its own prescriptive argument, and moral decisions are made on that basis. This creates an implicit value judgment that defines the hierarchy inside our civilization. 

MacIntyre finds the implicitly moral claims dubious for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the fact that most layers of management do not provide the miracles of efficiency that they promise. The value of expertise does exist in a number of fields. Its power can not be denied when it comes to a number of critical advancements. But on the back of those important advancements, the justification for an almost limitless growth of managerial bureaucracy has been constructed. Both James Burnham and Samuel Francis would recognize that managers are essential for the operations of massified organizations, but MacIntyre asserts that most layers of modern bureaucracy are simply a product of the cancer-like growth of the managerial class and do not actually produce notable increases in efficiency. These layers of bureaucratic management exist throughout society for the purpose of facilitating power and not adding any value or efficiency. 

“It is the gap between the generalized notion of effectiveness and the actual behavior that is open to managers which suggests that the social uses of the notion are other than they purport to be. That the notion is used to sustain and extend the authority and power of managers is not of course in question; but its use in connection with those tasks derives from the belief that managerial authority and power are justified because managers possess an  ability to put skills and knowledge to work in the service of achieving certain ends. But what if effectiveness is part of a masquerade of social control rather than a reality? What if effectiveness were a quality widely imputed to managers and bureaucrats both by themselves and others, but in fact a quality which rarely exists apart from this imputation?...What would it be like if social control were indeed a masquerade? Consider the following possibility: that what we are oppressed by is not power, but impotence; that one key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not, as some radical critics believe, control the United States is that they do not even succeed in controlling their own corporation; that all too often, when imputed organizational skill and power are deployed and the desired effect follows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as that to be observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought; that the levers of power- one of managerial expertise’s key metaphors- produce effects unsystematically and too often only coincidentally related to the effect of which their users boast.”

³

Whether real, or merely projected to secure power, as stated before, managers rely on their ability to coerce humans into compliant patterns of behavior in order to produce their promised efficiency. Spontaneity and unpredictable responses must be suppressed or eliminated in order to maximize control and produce the highest yield with the resources available. However, MacIntyre goes on to cite a number of sources showing that increased predictability beyond a certain point dooms an organization, eliminating its ability to seek new and novel solutions outside its well defined and optimized system. 

“Since organizational success and organizational predictability exclude one another, the project of creating a wholly or largely predictable organization committed to creating a wholly or largely predictable society is doomed and doomed by the facts about social life. Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember, however, the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is.”

⁴

The indispensable utility of the bureaucratic managerial class is, to MacIntyre, an illusion projected to justify power. This may be an overstatement, as managers are at some level an essential part of the massified way of being that has come to dominate the modern world, but his point about the diminishing returns of compounding bureaucratic layers is well taken. It is clear that much of the managerial apparatus creates no material benefit and now only exists to generate power and control for the total state, and the totalitarian system that it generates is ultimately doomed to fail. The extreme flattening of culture and tradition required to generate the control that managerial efficiency brings contains the seed of the regime’s eventual defeat. Centralization is always power’s natural goal but the vast bureaucracy that is required demands ever increasing levels of predictability and therefore, as power gets nearer and nearer to its goal of centralization it necessarily renders the system sterile, unable to produce new ideas and solutions. In the end, the regime will only be able to more efficiently manage its own decline. 

Western civilization is already encountering the limits of the managerial structure which facilitates the modern total state. Both Joseph De Maistre and Carl Schmitt believed that political theology was inescapable and that governments will always be patterned after a relationship with the divine. Liberal democracy made several key promises, but the most important was arguably the miracle of progress. Material abundance, a longer life span, and technological innovation were, in theory, the product of a society that abandoned the backward and superstitious world of enchantment and tradition for the scientifically managed utopia of modernity. As the world went from the horse to the train to the car to the airplane and lifespans extended into the 70s it seemed, for a brief time at least, like the miracle really could go on in perpetuity. This progress, however, was not without cost. As we have seen, a fundamental transformation of society was required to create the structure that undergirds the modern world, and while the managerial system is attempting to globalize in an effort to outrun its own limitations, this strategy is already showing diminishing returns. 

Globalization brought new markets and a vast network of massified production, raw materials, and cheap labor, enabling a just-in-time delivery system which maximized efficiency. In theory, everything can be manufactured at its cheapest price because materials are delivered to their point of production and end products are delivered to their consumers without the cost of storage. The site of production is no longer restricted to a specific geographic location in relation to either raw materials or the end user so the cheapest labor and materials can always be selected regardless of the location of the consumer. Loss of efficiency due to the storage of either raw materials or finished inventory is reduced because materials arrive just in time for production and finished products are shipped out just in time to meet consumer demand.This system works beautifully as long as goods and labor are allowed to flow without restriction or interruption, but this requires a high degree of competence and coordination which is increasingly difficult for the managerial class to produce. 

Once again, the Covid pandemic provides an excellent opportunity to observe the current system under stress and reveal its weaknesses. Labor was massively disrupted as many fell sick and the rest were locked down. International shipping became a logistical nightmare as fear of spreading the pandemic made routine transportation a health hazard. Americans discovered that, due to an overriding drive to increase efficiency and profit margins, production of key medical machinery like respirators and prescription drugs like antibiotics had all been outsourced to China, the country that served as the origin of the disease in the first place. In the name of managerial efficiency the United States had not only made itself vulnerable to the spread of a pandemic from China, but had also made itself reliant on that very same nation for the treatment of the same disease. That nation also happens to be the United States’ primary global competitor. Most concerningly, no lesson has been learned. No serious effort has been made to transfer the production of these essential products to more local and secure facilities, and America remains just as reliant on its most serious geopolitical foe as ever.

A similar disruption in the global supply chain can also be seen in response to the recent war between Russia and Ukraine. NATO nations, led by the United States, assumed that they would be able to use economic pressure to bring a swift end to Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Instead, it was made clear how dependent Europe and the wider Western world had made itself on Russia for energy, fertilizer, and other essential resources. Instead of global financial markets bringing Russia to its knees, Western nations were rocked by skyrocketing food and energy prices. As a result, many foreign countries have now agreed to shift currency in order to buy oil from Russia and the famous petrodollar, the reserve currency of the world which has kept the American economy on top for decades, seems to be in danger of losing its status. An international logistics system which seemed destined to spread its hegemonic influence across the globe is now showing how easily it can be disrupted by incompetence, hubris, and the brute facts of human nature.

Ultimately, the total state will fail because widely different peoples spread across vast distances cannot, and will not, be governed as one unified whole. The total state may have dissolved social fabric, destroyed meaningful spiritual connection, and eliminated hard property in order to make its subjects easier to rule, but it has also made the human capital of the nation sadder, less healthy, and less competent in the process. Americans are watching life spans shorten, mental illness surge, and family formation dive directly off a cliff. In the effort to engineer a more compliant subject the total state has created a populace incapable of doing the one thing humans are actually supposed to strive for: living a life full of meaningful accomplishments and connections. The managerial elite may have hollowed out middle America in order to access wider consumer markets and cheaper labor in nations like India and China, but like Americans, those populations are not infinitely malleable and attempts to base the global network on their continued social engineering will inevitably fail. As Samuel Francis pointed out, humans are not interchangeable and programmable widgets, and the assumption that the nature of individual peoples can always be engineered into a universal, easily managed mass is a fatal error for our globalizing elite.

“The “open society” ideal of the soft elite, allowing it to sanction and subvert non-and anti-managerial authorities and values and to manipulate and accelerate ideas and values that enhance its own dominance, prevents the formulation or enforcement of an ascetic and solidarist orthodoxy that could satisfy psychic and social needs in ways that technocratic, hedonistic, and cosmopolitan ideologies cannot. The soft managerial regime, in its ideological illusion that human beings are creatures of their social and historical environment and can be ameliorated through the managed manipulation of the environment, has only dispersed authority and values and sought to manipulate their fragments. The soft elite does not recognize–and cannot recognize, given its worldview and the material and political interests on which its worldview is based–that immutable elements of human nature constrain the possibilities of amelioration and necessitate attachment to the concrete social and historical roots of moral values and meaning, at the expense of the mythologies of cosmopolitan dispersion and hedonistic indulgence.”

⁵

The materialistic and hedonistic pseudo-religion used by the total state to liquify cultures and produce more efficiently managed bureaucracies has no staying power. The ideological need to sever man from the transcendent abolishes that which truly makes him human. Replacing the natural bonds of family, church, and community with massified social structures grants the total state the ability to centralize power and remake the individual in its own image, but the process degrades the human condition in a way that becomes terminal for the regime. The posthuman future is not one of wondrous space travel but is instead the slow decline of a society which can no longer be capable of innovation, creativity, or even general maintenance. Each generation of managerial elites becomes more powerful by creating more uniformity, limiting options, and standardizing thought. Innovative solutions to problems become impossible, the ability to maintain current systems fades, and individuals become too atomized and hedonistic to sacrifice on behalf of the future. The attempt to organize the perfect posthuman managerial subject capable of integrating into a global society dooms itself by ignoring essential truths that are both material and spiritual in nature. As G.K. Chesteron rightly observed “Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.”

The Tower Of Babel is not an engineering problem that can be solved through the careful implementation of social control. It is instead a pattern repeating itself across human history. The hubris of a power centralizing in the hopes of reaching heaven, only to inevitably collapse under its own weight, and perhaps, a nudge from the divine. While there is hope in knowing that this corrupt system will not last forever, Alasdair MacIntyre was wise to warn us against forgetting the terrible cost that it can inflict in the meantime.

1.  Pareto, "Compendium of General Sociology," p. 279

2.  Pareto, "Compendium of General Sociology," p. 372

3. MacIntyre, After Virtue p.75

4. MacIntyre, After Virtue p.106

5. Francis, Leviathan And Its Enemies p. 682