LAST TIME IN DEEP SOCKS
Today: the conclusion the second chapter of our book project, DEEP SOCKS. This chapter covers the divisions and breaks in the world production machine/metasystem, governed by a body we call managerworld, or the managerial society. The first chapter roughly surveyed the origin, development, and envisioned future of managerworld.
In chapter 2, we have covered the synchronic world of the world production machine, its fault lines, energies, and conflicts. And these fault lines of the social point to a world that is fractured, drifting, and bent to conflict over resources and technology. These conflicts occur not at the level of the political, but one of survival of specific localities of production.
Further, we examined the personal level, that of self-management, points at a world of schizophrenia and the endless salami slicing of the self by technology, and a potential way to begin harnessing the technology available to us to arrest and divert the process of cultural cretinization.
A fundamental question about power
Who is managing what, and whom, in society today? Are politicians in charge? Is it my boss? Your boss? Their boss? The question of ultimate responsibility, and the devices that allow one to claim power, or for a network to claim power and thereby obviate the question of ‘who’ are central to any exploration of managerial society.
What is the character of commonplace experiences of daily life? Many do not see them as work-related, and therefore solvable under the patterns of economics. In fact, for most, the commonplace experiences of daily life political in character and tone. To repair the world is to repair its politics. The experience of life is the experience of living inside of a sphere of politics, where the ‘private’ has the character of the ‘public.’ There is a vast conflation in our heads of the public and the private.
This is because the existence of the public and private is mythological, it is no longer real. It is a free-floating metaphor to describe the ostensible separation of competition for power and social body advantage and the competition for wealth and personal advantage. And the primary experience of politics is as a tutelary fantasy—the fairy tale. Today, we will examine these fantasies, and their purpose in managerworld.
The function and purpose of fairy tales
Fairy tales are fantasy-morality stories, intended to impart a lesson of practical, upright, or benevolent behavior in the frame of a story where a naive figure encounters a wicked and mystical underworld, accessible just within the world we live in. A young woman goes into the woods, and is nearly devoured by a cunning, shapeshifting wolf before she is saved by an upright and strong laborer. Children are lead along into danger by the supernatural appearance of sweets, and rescued only by recognition of danger and quick thinking. So on, so forth.
Fairy tales have instructive power, but they also function at a deeper level of instruction, that of providing ready solutions for fundamental problems in the form of narrative.
We quote here happily from Wikipedia regarding Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment:
“Bettelheim presents a case that fairy tales help children solve certain existential problems such as separation anxiety, oedipal conflict, and sibling rivalries. The extreme violence and ugly emotions of many fairy tales serve to deflect what may well be going on in the child's mind anyway. A child's unrealistic fears often require unrealistic hopes. And furthermore, "The Frog King" may be superior to modern sex education in that it acknowledges that a child may find sex disgusting, and this may serve a protective function for the child."
What are the political fairy tales living with us now?
In this current system of political economy, managerworld, fairy tales have a very strong ordering and anxiolytic property. Politics may seem objective, but it is animated by a fantasy at its core, its teleology is often as fantastical as the creation of the nation. Fantasies serve a function of hormesis in politics. They obscure and distort reality to assist in the function of reality.
In terms of ‘the world production machine’ or the global economy, and how local and national actors relate to it, they provide a function and purpose for the local pieces of the world production machine. A way to ascribe purpose and a type of morality to everyday activity done to sustain oneself and enlarge the power of others.
The political fairy tales in managerworld are very linked to the ideas of fairness in the global economy, to justice in the division of international labor, and to a fervent desire that it remain permanent amongst the current wealthy nations. For the less wealthy or less prestigious among the world’s nations, they too live under managerworld. Every nation must develop its own fairy tale, a fantasy that instructs, guides, and creates dreams out of fears. These fairy tales can be used to justify and avenge the collapse of the fortunes of Slavic people after the Soviet Union fell, or after the Second Industrial Revolution defeated Qing China.
Four Types of Fairy Tale
Like Bettelheim, or whomever he plagiarized his work from, it is helpful to find typologies of fairy tales, to help see where they are used, and why.
The Eurasian Empire
In this story, action is driven by resentment at the present world order and exclusion from it, in spite of a history of greatness. Action seeks the recreation of a fundamentally better ‘Old World Made New’ of imperial power and society, directed most often by a leading ethnic group within a tolerant, pluralistic society of subordinate ethnic groups. Following its achievement, then the narrative shifts to an expression of a belief in progressive perfectibility of a bureaucratic and autocratic state-led ordering of the public and private using any and all techniques appropriate, as long as they are under this order's control, in conformance with imagined historical social boundaries and ideals.
The Liberal Left
In this narrative, participants strike forward calling themselves progressives, leftists, greens, and social democrats. Their actions express their desire for the perfection of bureaucratic management and therefore a holistic society integrating the functions of postwar ideals regarding justice, and egalitarian beliefs about social constituent groups into the private world, and the subsuming the private by the public.
The Liberal Right
Here, our protagonists are economically oriented, anti-bureaucratic, and moralizing. Libertarians, conservatives, right wingers, even many described ‘fascists’ have this order as the goal of their life’s work. They work for the enlargement and empowerment of monarchical management and therefore markets, following postwar ideals of the marketplace, atomic individual and their ascendance in social life. Their order is order emerging from the private world without intervention from the public world, and the ultimate subordination of the public to the private.
The Theocratic
The story of theocracy is the story of the Word made Law, the Book made the Constitution. There are very few Christian theocrats today, fewer Buddhist, but many Muslims. Its characters see in the world and their actions the perfectibility of public and private life but only through the organization of all levels of society along religious lines. There is a special pride of place given to religious codes and doctrines, from which all basic laws and special laws are derived. Through ordering of moral life at the individual level, society can be fractally ordered, with the religious binding of society to its god repeated from individual to sovereign.
Success!
Many societies have achieved success under any of these models, and found harmonious relationships with other societies under the thrall of different sorts of fairy tales. They will invariably form prosperous, pluralistic societies governed by a market-based economic order, with access to a globally competitive range of consumer goods and services. These are the nation-states where one of these fairy tales has completely met its purpose, providing a narrative that justifies action and generates prosperity, and therefore is in no short-term meaningfully rivalrous competition with a competing social fantasy narrative.
Success is eventually met by its shadow-self, failure. New myths and fairy tales to justify action will come. And certainly, no fairy tale will comport with reality or provide a model for projecting current action into the future, for any ‘dream of the common man’ it must eventually be fulfilled or betrayed, and lose its usefulness. Following the Second World War and into today, these categories have served well enough, and obscured and structured intranational conflicts.
The Underlying Myth
The fairy tales all serve a very important purpose, of relating the ‘public,’ the world of the political, to the world of the ‘private,’ the realm of the personal. This is to say, the fairy tales rest atop something much more fundamental, a Jungian, archetypal myth in society that has changed its shape so many times it is hard to find its original form, or even to argue it had one. This is the myth of the public and private.
Let us use Hannah Arendt here to talk about the origin and dissolution of the second, fundamental distinction of the political world, that of the home and the polis.
The polis was distinguished from the household in that it knew only “equals,” whereas the household was the center of the strictest inequality. To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and not to be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled.22 Thus within the realm of the household, freedom did not exist, for the household head, its ruler, was considered to be free only in so far as he had the power to leave the household and enter the political realm, where all were equals. To be sure, this equality of the political realm has very little in common with our concept of equality: it meant to live among and to have to deal only with one’s peers, and it presupposed the existence of “unequals” who, as a matter of fact, were always the majority of the population in a city-state.
Equality, therefore, far from being connected with justice, as in modern times, was the very essence of freedom: to be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed.
However, the possibility of describing the profound difference between the modern and the ancient understanding of politics in terms of a clear-cut opposition ends here. In the modern world, the social and the political realms are much less distinct. That politics is nothing but a function of society, that action, speech, and thought are primarily superstructures upon social interest, is not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the contrary is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the political economists of the modern age. This functionalization makes it impossible to perceive any serious gulf between the two realms; and this is not a matter of a theory or an ideology, since with the rise of society, that is, the rise of the “household” (oikia) or of economic activities to the public realm, housekeeping and all matters pertaining formerly to the private sphere of the family have become a “collective” concern to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed.
-Hannah Arendt, from “The Human Condition,'“ Chapter 5 “The Polis and the Household”
Thank you, Hannah.
We live in a world of surveillance, of totalizing production necessity, of the supremacy of law. It is a fact that is such a commonplace that it is the subject of family comedy. The idea that a child can call the state to intervene in their favor if a parent is abusive, a subject of frequent comedy in family sitcoms like The Bernie Mac Show, is a sure sign that there is no ‘oikos’ where a paterfamilias lives without the distinctions of law. The facts of telemetry, omnipresent surveillance, of ‘surveying’ for ‘product improvement’ are all sure signs that the world of production extends as surely as law into our lives. If the barrier is surmounted once, in fact, by any tendril of the law or machinery of production, then it is sure that the barrier can be surmounted readily and at any time for any particular reason. After all, when has power stopped when it merely had what it wanted?
So what?
Indeed! The public and private don’t exist. Not really. But they sure seem to, really really. But distinctions of convenience are not distinctions of fact. The superficial covering on reality often serves to help keep the very dysfunctional and dystopic system of reality humming along as it is intended to.
Previously, we discussed the concept of the Xer and Yer, the discipline-driven worker and the intrinsically driven worker. What are the systems that make you a worker at all above and beyond survival? What are the systems that make you a citizen, above and beyond the need of society? These two are very deeply interlinked questions: to be a happy worker is to presuppose being a good citizen, and to be a happy citizen is to presuppose being a good worker. There are no stateless successful people, and there are no citizens of any country not guaranteed at least the opportunity at prosperity.
But where many people see the legitimacy of a state, of the services and benefits of opportunity provided under the auspices of the state, very, very few see the fundamental legitimacy of their manager or corporation. Apple may or may not exist. But California? Apple is better run, kinder, more innovative, progressive, and less corrupt than California. But if California, the social body, were to disappear, it would be arguably a greater and more irreplaceable loss. How could this be?
The world of modern management is a world of continual surveillance and goal-oriented process. It is fundamentally harmonious, and offenses against its harmony are taken with great seriousness. It is a world of decorum, a world of process, a world of evaluation according to standards. It is obviously quite unlike the relationships of people under ‘normal’ conditions and almost all historical conditions.
‘Eurasianists’ see only its origins, and the insults inflicted upon their countrymen and fellow-travelers by it, though they seek to master this system so that they might do the same to their enemies.
Right liberals see its femininity, its lack of active vital principle, and its break with tradition and tolerance of error if it meets with consensus.
Left liberals see its inequality, invasive and exacting demands upon all, and its pervasive and inescapable injustice and lack of responsiveness to pressing needs of the unfortunate.
Theocrats see no god in it, only a worship of power, wealth, and status.
They are all quite right! Yet all of them live in managerworld, voluntarily, and work for its expansion, seeing managerworld as the only terra firma that produces their daily bread in surplus. It is because the critique of managerial society within the framework of the fairy tales of national legitimation displace the critique of managerial society, it becomes a question of how to make something alien and inhuman more like the dream of national rejuvenation, more like the dream of eternal harmony under god, more like the dream of the perfect market or the just and equitable state.
So who is writing the fairy tales?
Whoever has the will and power to.
Managerial society, managerworld, is a body of people who govern and control production according to a set of heuristics for what is success and what is failure. Its key innovations lie in its adoption and synthesis of bureaucratic, scientific, and market-oriented processes. Like Capitalism and Corporatism before it, Managerialism has inherited the baggage, debts, relationships and assets of its predecessors, and it is not, in any real sense, intelligent nor self-directing. It can be lead, it is being lead, by the beliefs of its constituent parts. It can be influenced by the joining of new constituent parts, as it was by the economic maturation of Japan, Germany, and China.
In other words, it is only managing itself, based on data available to it. It is not authorial, rather it is participatory in its own myths and fairy tales. It has inherited the form of the nation state, plainly because no other previous system of political economy had made such deep and effective inroads into the social functioning of a state. Management, elite or middle or low, merely participates unconsciously (or at best half-consciously), as a protagonist does, in the narratives of social legitimation.
The historical prerogative of hot potato
Today we are best by many grave crises. People seem to be getting worse. Governments, increasingly corporate in nature, lack the faith of many millions, except when appealing to concepts like national destiny and purpose. And corporations seem only to be trusted insofar as they produce new, diverting products. Were you to ask, ‘who is responsible for this grave problem’ in managerial society, you would be starting a game of hot potato.
The prerogative of the manager, like the bureaucrat he descends from, is to escalate upward the difficult or thorny questions, particularly those of responsibility. After all, what is hierarchy for but to situate ultimate causes of action away from efficient ones? The game is now endless though, because ownership, the top of the pyramid, is as wide as any other layer. Ownership is owned by a group, within a class, all acting according to similar, but just variant enough principles and educations.
The 3 Ps
But managerworld is predictable, if nothing else, because it is processual, it relies on a heuristic to determine success and failure, to determine what needs iteration and what does not. They all descend from the mad principle of endless INCREASE.
Increase profit
Increase power
Increase prestige
Should any given project under managerial society fail to increase any of those 3 criterion according to the nearest most powerful supervising managers, it will be judged a failure, and cancelled or shelved or delayed.
The older game
Managerial society has inherited many, many things that it has sought to rationalize and set to order, and put into a process of continual improvement based on its troika of imperatives. It has not, to its detriment, sought to create new fairy tales for its own legitimation, and instead relied on existing ones. Managerial society perhaps does not see itself as the author of the world we live in. Perhaps they truly believe in reified capital. Reified markets. The reified nation, or God, the reification of all things. In any event, this short-sightedness and lack of vision of their own triumph has certainly hamstrung them.
Managerworld has not shed its fairytales and nakedly governed for itself and cast off the old forms of the state and nation, not just because of lack of self-knowledge or lack of self-confidence, but likely because doing so would be harmful under its own metrics. Very few people have drunk enough of the Kool-Aid to want a CEO of America. Maybe they want a king, a president, a leader who is like a CEO—efficient, efficacious, possessed of vision. But people do not like being at work all the time, and for all of society to be like work all the time is the quintessential dystopia. No one, least of all the ruling class wants to think of themselves as governing such a place.
So, in part because of the humble origin of managerial society from the ‘private sphere’ and in part because of their lack of desire to be seen to master the interlocking problems of the ‘public sphere,’ managerworld is made to enter into an active collaboration with politicians and bureaucrats. While they are certainly carriers of the same ideologies and thoughts, increasingly of similar behaviors politicians and bureaucrats are nonetheless social roles that are distinct from the manager.
The politicans and bureaucrats are possessed of the ideas and fancies of managerworld now, for sure. Not just in their fascination with ‘running government like a business’ in campaigns, nor in the endless cycle of digitalizing government, seeking feedback, and the naturally antidemocratic tendencies of True Government/Deep State (the oligarchy and the bureaucracies), but also in their standards of success being rationalized around personal profit, power, or prestige. Indeed, the state in managerworld can be seen as a corporation that acts for projects that advance the increase of power for its participants and managers, with the increase of profit, or ‘corruption’ as the naïve call it, is a happy externality that keeps all sides motivated.
The heuristics and lack of sentimentality of managerworld are keys to its success. But they are immaterial to anyone’s, least of all a manager’s, sense of subjective fulfillment. That comes instead from legacy structures, the narratives of legitimation—myths about the structure of the social world, fairy tales about the destiny, purpose, and potentialities of a nation.
More than anything, managerworld, to maintain its project, requires the appearance of a supravening authority over its activities. Kings and emperors in the past reigned under the divine right to rule, which was made manifest by divine favor for their subjects, and their own palpable justice and majesty. Capitalists in the past operated more simply, under the iron law of profit. Liberals governed under the enlightened and airy principle of popular sovereignty. Managers manage under what pretext? Is there any of their own, besides the benefits and goods they bring? Many find what they offer maddeningly needful and hateful. Rather than a justification for their conquest of all of society, managers manage us under an inherited pretext: that they are not the authors of society. But no one authors society, nor could they ever, in managerworld.
Managerworld then is under an acute, exploitable structural deficiency--it can only live so long as particular myths allow it to obscure its current performance failures, or shift blame elsewhere. To the state, to foreigners, to the God of the Market or the God of the Universe.
New myths, new fairy tales, can reorder people within managerworld, until it is some new thing. New ideas can capture what cannot be managed to sufficiency in life. If they are to succeed though, they must also capture and perform on a par with managerworld in terms of what can be managed.