Dominion capital: III

The use of skills and connections to create spurious expertise

This is the forty-sixth piece in

Lorenzo Warby

’s series of essays on the strange and disorienting times in which we live.

This article can be adumbrated thusly: The academy’s incentive structures do not reward truth, they reward popularity.

The publication schedule and links to all Lorenzo’s essays are available here.

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The central aim of contemporary left-progressive politics is to insert the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible and then to defend and extend such insertion through control of public discourse legitimacy.

The sustained, and accelerating, social imperialism of the activist professional-managerial class has become progressivism’s central dynamic. The rise of populism—especially national populism—is one (major) a response to the social imperialism of the professional-managerial class (and pervasive contempt for the concerns and interests of the working class).

The current disruption of the Western alliance comes from Trump 2.0 prosecuting a cultural class war against that social imperialism, both domestically and internationally. Because this social imperialism has sought to bypass wider electoral consent in multiple countries—indeed, to block the articulating of dissent—various Western nations (particularly the Anglosphere)—are experiencing preference-cascades where people become aware of how unpopular various “compulsory” views actually are and move sharply away from them.

The activist professional-managerial class prosecutes its insertion into as many resource-flows as possible by creating and using dominion capital. As defined in a previous post, dominion capital is (slightly reworded):

the skills, knowledge, motivation, and networking to coordinate entry into organisations and institutions, shifting them towards serving the status and social-leverage strategies of those who possess said capital.

It’s a matter of skills (human capital) and connections (social capital) coordinated by commitment to shared beliefs, narratives, and patterns of language so as to interactively protect and elevate status and access to resources. Dominion capital is thus what is mobilised by activism when it practises the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

Activism has a tendency to degrade everything it touches, as it imports its assumptions into each area of human action as it is imposed on them, overriding earlier patterns. Activism also tends to attract manipulative, Cluster B, personalities, as it represents power without responsibility and lauds aggressive behaviour.

Not the Emancipation Sequence

Much of contemporary activism needs to be distinguished from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery; that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics; that gave us universal male and then female suffrage; that got rid of Jim Crow and associated racial exclusions in the US; that gave us equal rights for women, and for gays and lesbians.

This was the Emancipation Sequence, where free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men to get rid of exclusions on women, straights to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. The Emancipation Sequence represented a form of persuasion. It mobilised the institutionalised political bargaining which had existed within European and Anglo-offshoot societies for centuries. This bargaining had roots in medieval European Christendom and its development of Parliaments incorporating elected representatives, albeit on very narrow franchises.

The Emancipation Sequence’s movements allowed formerly excluded folk to participate in political and social processes that already existed. Such activism did not give institutional power to activists. Nor did it give moral projects to bureaucrats. Indeed, it sought to get rid of exclusions—often themselves moral projects—so as to enable wider participation in social processes: enabling people’s choices was the point.

The activism of the Emancipation Sequence is and was—despite fraudulent attempts to lever off its prestige—different from left-progressivist activism based on mastery of Theory, and so of epistemic authority. The latter seeks some final form of society based on notions of proper historical direction. The activism of the Emancipation Sequence was very different from the activism generated thanks to the contemporary professional-managerial class’s claim to be superior deciders.

While mostly not Marxist, contemporary left-progressivist activism is Marxian in the sense that it descends—via Critical Theory—from the original Marxist template, which it has updated and whose basic patterns it replicates. Marx’s contemporary, correspondent and critic—the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin—understood what was wrong with Marx’s program of achieving an imagined final future through an activist state, a state with a bureaucratised moral project motivated by (allegedly scientific) Theory. In his chapter The State and Marxism—written in 1867—Bakunin accurately predicted the inherently tyrannical nature of Marx’s ideas:

It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!

The US civil rights movement went astray in part because it created (well-meaning) legislation that gave bureaucrats moral projects via a legal-bureaucratic structure. This bureaucratic regime treated the wider citizenry as if they were constantly hovering on the edge of wrongthink (racism) and wrongact (discrimination), so needed their actions, emotions and words to be policed.

Even worse, those bureaucrats became fixated on the belief that equality before the law would properly lead to equal outcomes between groups. Equal outcomes became the defining moral impulse behind what became Social Justice. This belief enabled Critical Theory to spin off rhetoric, narratives, concepts that were adopted more widely by folk who simply saw themselves as socially concerned.

Any attempt to impose equality of outcome as the highest moral goal must, over the long term, be destructive of freedom as it does not accept the contingency of human choices—and their consequences—which is fundamental to freedom. Achieving equality of outcomes requires the trumping of human choices.

Max Horkheimer, the founder of Critical Theory, was very clear that the pursuit of liberatory—i.e. equalitarian—justice requires the crushing of freedom:

Marx did not see that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts. The more freedom, the less justice and the more justice, the less freedom.

Dysfunction via moral projects

It’s a bad idea to give bureaucrats moral projects. It elevates their authority. They became moral masters and the apparently benighted citizenry their moral subjects. This profoundly undermines any notion of service to the wider citizenry while denigrating that citizenry’s status and authority.

The EU’s moral project of Ever Closer Union has undermined any ethic of service from the EU’s institutions to the wider citizenry in the EU. Like any proper-direction-for-history project, it is intrinsically hostile to the whatever-they-decide of democratic choice. The votes of citizens become “good” or “bad”, legitimate or illegitimate, depending on whether they move towards, or away, from The Project.

All forms of Hegelian politics—from the Marxist to the Fascist—are hostile to democracy precisely because they buy the idea that history has a proper direction, one not to be degraded by inconvenient voting and election results. Hegelian thought—whether Marxist, Marxian or Fascis—generates myth rather than history. It gives people pre-set roles in the course of events that are profoundly antithetical to the whatever-folk-happened-to-do that is the essence of history. Such mythic history is, however, very good at motivating activists and generating rhetoric.

Giving bureaucrats moral projects also undermines accountability, as any criticism of actions in service of the moral project by the bureaucrats becomes an attack on the moral project of which they are now the avatars.

The Activist’s Fallacy:

We are doing X to achieve Y,

You are criticising X,

Therefore,

You are against Y,

can be mobilised to defend almost any action by moral-project bureaucrats—no matter how incompetent, destructive, dysfunctional or wasteful—if any criticism becomes immoral because of the splendour of the moral project.

DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) is destructive of competence and coherence within organisations—dividing folk by preset moral statuses—and runs “training” that’s often not much more than struggle sessions. It was pushed in part by declaring that it was for good things, so any opposition must be motivated by bigotry. The Trans-agenda—extending to the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors—was pushed on the basis of a (spurious) equation with the struggle for legal equality for gays and lesbians that dismissed any push-back against its claims, including its lies, as “transphobia”.

Legal equality for gays and lesbians simply meant treating them as other folk. The Transcult demands that all agree to its lies: that someone with a penis is a woman, that the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors is “care”, and that there is no problem having biological males in women’s events and activities, in the spaces of the systematically physically weaker sex. This series of lies has been prosecuted in the only way they could be: by bypassing citizen consent and the harrying, abuse and exclusion of those who resist lies.

Spurious expertise

Dominion capital rests on devaluing the choices, the standing and authority of the wider citizenry. The latter are expected to defer in the face of Special Knowledge held by those with dominion capital. A classic mechanism for it to do so is to create or mobilise spurious expertise.

Both the DEI push and the Transcult used utterly spurious claims of expertise to push their claims. The notion of “sex assigned at birth” is not only a ridiculous lie—sexually reproducing organisms have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to recognise sex within their species so they can breed—hence the issue Transfolk have with “passing”. The lie of “sex assigned at birth” is also used to signal adherence to the moral in-group. It is a grotesque manifestation of spurious expertise generated out of academe by Queer Theory.

The longer the abolition of legal restrictions on, for instance, African-Americans failed to produce equality of outcomes between social groups—despite racial discrimination being banned—the greater the need for the spurious expertise of Theory to postulate the necessary invisible sociological gremlins to “explain” why social outcomes had not equalised.

The presumption that, in a fair society, different groups will achieve identical social outcomes is nonsense. Humans, and human groups, are simply too varied for that to happen. All human societies of any complexity have average differences between groups.

Parasitism through the unachievable

That the expectation of equal outcomes between groups is evolutionary and historical nonsense is not a barrier to the advance of dominion capital. It’s a huge advantage.

First, because it gives endless scope for Theory—and spurious expertise therefrom—to postulate endless invisible sociological gremlins to “explain” why social outcomes are not equalising. Second, it massively elevates the grandeur of the project—“we will achieve what no human society has ever achieved!”

Even better, it can postulate ever greater social transformation—so ever greater control over discourse and resources—to achieve this grand vision. Third, the pattern of programs aimed at achieving such social outcomes can go on indefinitely, endlessly consuming resources, justified by the continuing inequalities of outcomes between groups that (inevitably) never go away. Such endless—because unattainable—moral projects are catnip to the professional-managerial class.

Yes, it’s destructive of freedom. Yes, it massively wastes resources. Yes, it empowers a mass of morally grandiose social parasites who consume resources far in excess of any value they provide. Yes, it’s destructive of social order in seeking guilty parties to blame for failure to achieve the impossible. The demand for racism greatly exceeds the supply. Yes, it degrades the operation of institutions and organisations. But, so long as equal outcomes between social groups is accepted as the marker of Social Justice, none of that matters, for the game can just keep going.

Well, that is until the devaluation of competency leads to a cascading collapse of complex systems. The recent LA fires gave us a taste of that, both in how appointing folk on criteria other than competence degrades the functioning of institutions as well as how destructive of policy competence restricting what it is legitimate to discuss can be.

While civil rights activism did create advocacy organisations that lingered on past their use-by date, activism based on Theory—and especially Theory that generates invisible sociological gremlins—has a much greater possible ambit for operations than the Emancipation Sequence’s “let us in” activism. It demands the achievement of pre-set social outcomes, not “mere” participation in social processes declared illegitimate because they don’t lead to equal outcomes between groups. Advocacy-activist non-profits also have interests in the designated moral or social problems continuing—or being seen to continue—so that supporters will continue to donate.

It can easily be in the interests of those allegedly dedicated to the eradication of a designated problem for it to continue. Given the power of incentives, and our capacity to moralise and rationalise our self-interest—if necessary, quite self-deceptively—you functionally pay people to do what makes their income and authority go up. Spurious expertise based on identifying invisible sociological gremlins which “explain” why the impossible has not happened is a boon to the activist-advocacy economy.

No-one finds spurious expertise more useful, even necessary, than social parasites. It provides necessary cover for social parasitism—their consumption of more value than they provide—plus protection against the inevitable inconveniences of reality. But who can generate required spurious expertise?

Well, that’s what the academy is for.

Academics and intellectuals typically do not have to make anything work—not even analysis and description of reality, if feedbacks do not systematically punish falsity and failure. Moreover—if the feedbacks about what works are weak enough—not having to make anything work means people can be as morally grandiose as they like: they’re not constrained by requirements to make things work.

If the feedbacks are sufficiently poor, then generating entire Theories and disciplines of spurious expertise is—demonstrably—easy. Idea laundering is key here. Superficial markers of knowledge, of expertise—justifying the epistemic authority of dominion capital—are generated via mutually-cited publications in academic journals.

The incentive structures of academe do not reward truth, they reward popularity. Academics only have to make what they produce appeal to other academics (or funding bureaucrats). Mobilising the moral self-satisfaction academics are so prone to is a great start. What can be more morally grand than being the Masters of Theory that will usher in Unparalleled Social Grandeur?

As academics are dependent on the opinion of other academics—and the more spurious a field or Theory, the more so dependant they are, as there are no reality-tests they can invoke in their own defence—it’s easy for risk-adverse conformity to become, as it is, pervasive within academe. The weaker the capacity to achieve the prestige of genuine discovery in a discipline is, the stronger the drive to support the Grand Virtue of social transformation—a self-serving propriety—and the greater the willingness to wield stigmatisation in its defence.

A recurring pattern in progressivism has been to use the grandeur of the Moral Project, of the Imagined Future, to justify freeing oneself from the constraints of civility, decency, or basic morality. Freeing oneself from the constraints of truth, or the inconveniences of genuine reality tests, is easy by comparison.

The combination of moral grandiosity and risk-adverse conformity in milieus of weak or absent reality-feedbacks is excellent for generating spurious expertise. Whole areas of academe thereby consume more value than they produce, so are parasitic, even toxically so. From such spurious expertise does the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors become “care” and “compassion”.

Positive-sum commerce, zero-sum coercion

The coercive power of the state is a boon to social parasitism. It is much easier to consume more value than you provide if resources are coercively transferred to you.

This is one of the many antipathies of commerce compared to academe and politics. Folk engaged in commerce have to make things work to stay in business—this can become an amoral opportunism, though much less so if one is engaged in repeated interactions where reputation matters. Marginalised groups have consistently done better through commerce than politics.¹

Commerce also has a dynamism to it that can conflict with the pre-set social schemas intellectuals like to come up with, not to mention generating much more wealth than intellectual activity typically does, and so also a stigmatising envy.

These different experiences (and natural vices) produce an antipathy to commerce and the commercial that runs through much intellectual output, at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Marx is the epitome of this, to the extent that he is reduced to what Noah Smith correctly labels pseudo-economic reasoning to make his system “work”.

Commerce is about creating gains from trade, so positive-sum interactions. It, along with science and technology, is deeply intertwined with prestige, with status through conspicuous competence; with encouraging actions that generate benefits for third parties, what economists call positive externalities. However wealthy entrepreneurs of technology have become—from railway and steamship magnates to contemporary tech-bros—they capture but a small fraction of the wider social benefits they generate.

Unless it enables social order that then generates positive-sum interactions, coercion generates negative-sum interactions. The characteristic forms of predatory, parasitic, negative-sum interactions are slavery, serfdom, banditry and predatory aspects of the state.

A presumptive caution about mobilising state action is always appropriate. This is especially so given the deep problems of knowledge, of knowing the consequences of regulation and other state action, of oversight in spending other people’s money. State action based on spurious expertise is very likely to be destructive, as the entire history of Communism—based on the spurious expertise of Marxism—demonstrates.

Dominion capital seeks to establish status and social leverage through epistemic authority, through de-legitimating alternative views and concerns. Propriety, especially stigma, can readily be mobilised to generate social coercion. That, after all, was why it evolved. To deter and punish folk from undertaking actions that undermined the functioning of the foraging band and its networks by generating negative externalities.

Adapting these evolved mechanisms is why the claims to epistemic authority by contemporary dominion capital has become so associated with stigmatisation via terms of moral abuse—racist, sexist, misogynist, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc. The entire campaign against hate speech, against dis/mis/mal-information, serves the interests of dominion capital and its claims of epistemic authority.

Replacing the prestige of achievement with the stigmatising of dissent

A key element in this process has been a recurrent push to replace prestige with an imperial, censorious, stigmatising propriety. A major social turning point was Shirtgate in November 2014. A rocket scientist had led a project that did the very, very clever thing of landing a probe on a comet for the first time (“like landing a fly on a bullet” in the words of one engineer friend). This was classic conspicuous competence granting prestige that had fuelled the Scientific Revolution and the technological take-off underwriting mass prosperity. He was then publicly humiliated by social-media-enabled self-righteous harpies over … his shirt. (A gift from a female friend, as it happened.)

The issue was that his loud Hawaiian shirt depicted young women in bikinis. This was part of a wider attempt to police speech and artistic expression justified by utterly spurious expertise based on media effects theory, which is false.

Even when expertise is real, it’s narrow in its ambit. Given that we live in a world of trade-offs, where there are no permanent solutions—hence all species eventually go extinct, though lineages continue—even genuine expertise has to be traded off against other considerations. Spurious expertise parasites off the notion of expertise while seeking to inflate its ambit, so as to force deference from others. Precisely because it is spurious, it is not grounded in reality, so can make ever-grander claims.

Who cares if some women were offended by a shirt because it reminded everyone that straight men usually find nubile women desirable? Those offended had neither superior expertise nor superior moral standing. But this is precisely what is created by the combination of (1) making allegedly marginalised groups sacred—as political scientist Eric Kaufmann notes, the key element in “wokery”—plus (2) creating spurious expertise in social dynamics and social transformation: a moral hierarchy of presumptive deference policed by abusive stigmatisation.

Political scientist Jonathan Rauch enunciates in his Kindly Inquisitors the epistemic principle that is the basis of free society:

No one has special authority. No one gets the final say.

This is what claims to epistemic authority endemic to dominion capital denies. Since the claim is a lie, mobilisation by dominion capital of even genuine expertise can be made spurious by inflating its ambit beyond its actual expertise so as to serve dominion capital’s claims to authority.

A case study in how this works was provided during the official responses to Covid, when medical authority—some of it genuine—was wildly inflated to suppress other, very relevant, considerations. Such as: what is, or is not, appropriate in a free society; what past experience with mandatory vaccination had revealed; what past experience of pandemics told us; what the experience of clinicians was telling us; even what the patterns of illness and death were telling us.²

Central to the spurious expertise of dominion capital is its grading of expertise according to its own claims of epistemic and moral authority. Expertise from outwith dominion capital must either be characterised as not expertise, or as subordinate to the expertise of dominion capital. It uses its spurious expertise—necessary for its own epistemic authority—to grade genuine expertise.

“Don’t do your own research” is classic devaluation of citizen choice—in this case, the enquiries of citizens—to force subservience to approved narratives. The politics of being superior deciders that is the central claim of dominion capital is the politics of contempt for the choices of others. As the social leverage of the professional-managerial class comes precisely from claiming to be superior deciders—including deciding what speech, what language is, or is not, legitimate—the politics of dominion capital are deeply congenial to it.

Part of the process is generating credentials that provide leverage without earned respect. Bean-counting bureaucracy loves credentials—and other tick-boxes—as they are easy markers of who is, or is not, allowed to do what. Alas, precisely because the reality-feedbacks within so much of academe are so broken, it’s easy to generate credentials that provide much less expertise than what they say on the tin. This can extend even to serious professional training—hence churning out doctors with little training in human nutrition and its effects on human health. The record of Education Faculties in “training” its graduates in toxic falsities is far worse.

The epistemic authority of dominion capital comes from being superior deciders because they are the superior knowers. The more they can block questioning of their claims—such as by use of stigmatising moral abuse—the more dominant their social leverage becomes.

As literary critic and Slavist Gary Saul Morson notes:

Anyone can succumb to ideology. All it takes is a sense of one’s own moral superiority for being on the right side; a theory that purports to explain everything; and—this is crucial—a principled refusal to see things from the point of view of one’s opponents or victims, lest one be tainted by their evil viewpoint.

The key trick of social aggression is to parade it as being moral, as social concern. The more grandiose the moral or social concern, the greater the level of social aggression that it can justify to itself. The grander the moral or social concerns, the more wicked, the more illegitimate, dissent becomes. Such politics is compatible with neither a free society, nor a democratic one.

Conclusion

The trouble with the civil rights/anti-discrimination laws is that they did two things.

(1) Create a legal-bureaucratic network based on the idea that the citizens constantly hover on the edge of wrong think (racism) and wrong act (discrimination) and so sought to morally police the citizenry for words, emotions and actions.

(2) Create a very widespread moral expectation that they could create equal outcomes between groups.

The moral expectation of equal outcomes between groups mobilised a liberal-humanitarian sentiment that ended up, in political scientist Eric Kaufmann’s words:

making sacred of historically marginalised race gender and sexual minorities.

“Wokery” is the ever more elaborate search for malevolent reasons—i.e., invisible sociological gremlins—why such equality isn’t being achieved. The originally Marxist oppressor-oppressed template—updated via Critical Theory—provides a ready-made framing that can be adapted for any identified group open to such marginalised sanctification.

Our deeply dysfunctional universities have proved themselves more than up to the task of generating the necessary spurious expertise. They have produced politics of ultimately totalitarian arrogance that de-legitimise dissent and seek to extend claims of superior knowing—and so superior deciding—into all aspects of society (into comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies …) as part of a grand program of professional managerial class social imperialism.

——

References

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1. Via commerce, Jews, gays, and African-Americans could create connections—and achieve success—otherwise denied them within wider society. Many of the restrictions of Jim Crow in the American South—and of Apartheid in South Africa—were designed to stop people mixing through transacting to mutual benefit.

2. Covid was overwhelmingly a disease of the metabolically compromised, a basic reality with which public health across the Western world conspicuously failed to grapple, going instead with “one size fits all” responses that fed bureaucratic authority. That, in turn, has helped undermine overblown claims of expertise, making preference-cascades more likely.