16 Comments

Thanks for the reference to late stage bureaucracy! The technocrats have tried to address the point you make here: "It’s in bureaucrats’ interests to substitute measures of activity—justified by stated intent or purpose—for measured outcomes and effectiveness. Note how the bureaucratised academy substitutes things easily measured—total number of publications, say—for something actually useful."

They do this by differentiating measures of performance (what you're calling measures of activity) from measures of effectiveness. Every initiative these days is supposed to have both clearly delineated. Now, in a bureaucracy there are few if any incentives for the measures of effectiveness to actually BE such...

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The expansion of bureaucracy and hoarding of authority includes bureaucrats managing the grievances of their subordinates, and then stoking the market for their own services. I've written elsewhere how this fosters a moral dependence on authority characteristic of victimhood culture: https://jasonmanning.substack.com/p/moral-cultures-4-moral-dependence

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Woke as the Official Religion of Bureaucracy means tens of millions depend on it for livelihood and it being government their entire life is people like them.

We aren’t talking our way or voting our way out of This Jonestown at National and Global scale.

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The numbers are not quite that dire, but the problem is serious.

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In America we know Jonestown when we see it, Sir.

If you want to argue the global numbers, fine. That it’s scaled Continentally in America is the hard fact. If you meant other countries by “numbers.”

The actual numbers of the committed are irrelevant at any scale since the rest go along to keep their livelihoods or lifestyles. Married with children has livelihoods , no children has lifestyles, as the results are same irrelevant.

Relevant; Woke is America’s official religion. Woke is Jonestown-which had a very large sexual degradation component to add to Maoist struggle session, male and female both being vigorously trained this way by Jones.

This is quite documented, Chris Bray went into details on Jim Jones was normal-he’d fit right in now.

The Flavor Aide came at the end.

Most of Jones followers were educated, the core White people from Ohio.

As for bureaucracy, yes the entire country including the ostensible actual government ends up working for them be they King or Congress. As for it being useful...I sense an interest here, or perhaps a desire to...Reform?

A Reform movement?

No. Where the Communist Party in Russia and China failed, never mind America, you will not succeed. Stalin was the most effective bureaucratic reformer ever, and he had to accept limits.

If there’s any chance of this succeeding in America, it will be because of money, but the problem of tens of millions* of bureaucrats probably can’t be bought off. This has been tried before, it failed. We could have automated most of it a generation ago, instead computers super-empowered bureaucracy.

*tens of millions;

America has officially 19 million government employees, but this doesn’t count contractors. Contractors by policy at the Federal level...aren’t counted.

Cute trick, eh?

Many of the government employees have family or spouses as contractors 🤣

Yes...

Now since Clinton reinvented government in the 90s it has become a contractor brokerage, you begin to see perhaps the symmetry of interests.

Woke is just the cynical yet passionately sincere casuistry they garb themselves in...

It could change tomorrow and they always were against it.

Woke pays far too well to appeal to reason or right. Woke could be Nazi tomorrow and today, never mind yesterday is misinformation.

This is when you see Orwell really did write 1984 as a parody just as he said.

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LLM aka ChatGPT (misnamed AI) can do most of this in 1/278th time, but that’s tens of millions that would have to work, so NO.

Thanks for telling us what we already know, however.

We need to talk about your approach of challenging them;

You the retired Finance lawyer are set, perhaps Lorenzo is too;

Meanwhile, every time one of you shoots your mouth off the system retaliates against the Commons. That’s why when Karen voted wrong in America and complained to the school board about playing doctor (sex education aka grooming) the system escalated to Dr. Mengele.

(Fiendish sex transition operations on children).

So they’re serious, you just draw heat on the rest of us. So seriously - act, or be silent.

As we say in America;

Democrats Kill

Republicans talk.

The Democrats are serious, you aren’t, stop inviting retaliation.

I seem to see across the waves that the same or worse applies in England and Europe.

STFU until you’re as serious as the Democrats. I realize you’re in England, that parts of it and Germany are beginning to resemble Detroit just confirms you’re in a Democratic run location, don’t want to hear about Labor or conservatives or the rest. If you look like Detroit ....welcome to America.

Now get as serious as the Democrats or go away.

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May 28, 2023
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Ron, if ? For my comment above;

We have to stop talking.

We do or don’t.

Every time the system hears backtalk they retaliate against the commons, especially if voters don’t vote as directed.

This is normal human governance .

Further- In American politics;

Democrats kill.

Republicans talk.

More talk means more suffering.

More poverty, war, death.

So I have a problem with conservatives, they summon Hell and have no response.

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I mean, in fairness you do spend a lot of time cultivating your conservative readership, Ron; is it really a surprise one of them eventually shows up with an, uh... extreme proposal for solving political problems?

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May 30, 2023Edited
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There will be no Heideggerian “only a god can save us now”. Or any other invocation of religion or religious hope.

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Sorry.

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> The stronger reality tests are, the more insulated from error pathologies is any given system.

There's something to be said for applying this lesson of yours (which to me feels central to everything you write) across domains. But aren't there exceptions to the rule where untested claims literally become a new social reality?

For example, when everyone believes the value of a stock will rise, the stock's value will rise. In such an instance belief creates reality, and anyone with some prescience regarding the trend can purchase the stock early and make money. Indeed, this game of trying to guess trends in social reality is the entire point of day trading.

Obviously when systems like that become completely untethered from reality, we end up with market crashes. But there are some systems where there is no reality to become untethered from.

For an example here, consider language. I insist on pronouncing the "h" in words "why" or "where," and loathe the common confusion between "lie" and "lay" enough to argue with unrelated people about it. But words ultimately mean what they are used to mean, and but the day is fast approaching when I will have to bite my tongue and live with what has happened to spoken English. Already I've experienced a small crowd of people shouting at me that "I will lay down over there" is correct, and it took almost five minutes with multiple appeals to dictionaries before the crowd agreed I was right (and made a series of private determinations that they didn't care and were going to speak English their way). Though things may be a bit better for you Down Under, here in rural America I doubt that I will be lucky enough to receive a second warning.

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The examples you use are where expectations create a social reality. In any asset market, expectations about the direction of future price of the asset feed into current prices. Language is a matter of conventions, so descriptive norms: you do things a certain way because everyone else does. E.g. use c-a-t to refer to (mention) cats.

Prestige opinion status-games are based on normative expectations (“to be a good and smart person you have to affirm X”), typically with attached sanctions (shaming, shunning, etc.).

So, folk are playing to social realities. Also, to their self-image. But these games make certain claims about reality. The weaker the reality tests, the more erroneous/false those claims (and expectations) about reality can be, and will tend to be, as the status-feedbacks generate purity spirals, for example.

Stock markets adjust to new information. Indeed, because they are so based on expectations, they are both hungry for, and very responsive to, new information. Language has to “work”, it has to be understood. A certain level of reality test is built in in both cases.

The more complex and prosperous societies become, the more insulated from such reality tests many decision-makers are. Reality wins in the end, of course, because those sorts of claims can obviously influence social reality, but not the rest of the structure of reality. A huge “reality debt” can build up before the payment comes due.

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I think I mostly agree, but the case of language is one where the reality is, in fact, purely social. Words are sound or letter combinations which encode meaning in agreed-upon ways. It's the agreement, a totally social phenomenon, that makes communication possible. Thus "You're spelling it wrong / pronouncing it wrong / using it wrong" can be stated *only* with reference to an arbitrary social reality.

Such a situation is admittedly rare. The only instance of this I can think of outside of language, economics, or politics is combat, and it isn't an example where coordination but rather *discordance* is necessary. Musashi says, "If the enemy thinks of the mountains, attack like the sea; and if he thinks of the sea, attack like the mountains," and if you've ever sparred you'll find that at least something *like* this is true not because he says it, but because it's the way you physically defeat an opponent who fights on equal footing against you. The reality of one person winning or losing - in many cases, literally living or dying - depends entirely on the social context. And Musashi records even that this principle is so strong that it can overturn a physical equality; he defeated an opponent armed with a katana whilst himself wielding a sharpened oar. If you believe what Musashi recorded, "There's no way I'll fight you with this oar, is there?" gave him the edge he needed to win.

From this I take away two things:

Firstly, Lorenzo's Rule of Reality Tests seems indeed to be very broad. One needs to think carefully to come up with situations where, in its strongest or most literal form, it isn't true.

Secondly, Lorenzo's Rule in its weaker form is probably universally true, without any exception or need for caveat. In a system where the relevant reality is purely social, one still needs tests of reality - here, social reality - to avoid pathology. In the 2016 presidential election, Clinton erroneously believed that the wheel of social destiny had turned according to plan; that her opposition was largely restricted to a political fringe; that her dream of being The First Woman President of the United States was literally and directly what the voters shared with her; and so she lost. Her reality test came too late.

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By coincidence, I had just finished reading this post.

https://ponerology.substack.com/p/marxcissism-is-real

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Poor Hillary.

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So good.

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