American Thought Leaders - N.S. Lyons: The Growing Impulse Towards Societal Engineering

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

In certain ways China and the United States—despite being vastly different—are slowly converging, with technocratic managerial regimes playing an increasingly important role in each society, argues N.S. Lyons in his essay “The China Convergence.”Lyons’ writings can be found on his Substack titled “The Upheaval.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

How the party line functions, it's a measure of loyalty to the system. And so the fact that it changes only helps do that. Because if you just happen to be saying the right thing ideologically one day, and the next day it's completely opposite, if you stick with what you said before, because you're a true believer in whatever that is, you're no longer loyal to the system. Nathan Lyons is a writer and commentator. His substack, written under his pen name, NS Lyons,

is titled The Upheaval. In his essay, The China Convergence, he argues that in certain ways, China and the United States, despite being vastly different, are slowly converging, with technocratic managerialism playing an increasingly important role in each society.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Nathan Lyons, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's wonderful to be here. For some time since you wrote your essay, The China Convergence. This has, I don't know, troubled, inspired, give me lots of pause to think. There's a lot more centralization in society that we're seeing in the West. And we also hear these narratives that, you know, the West wanted to change China, but really China changed the West. And in the China conversion, you touch on all these elements.

Maybe tell me a little bit about it. So what I argue in the essay is that both China and the United States are changing, and they're changing in their own way, at their own pace, and from different directions, but they're headed towards the same, towards the same point. They're converging rather than diverging. And I think that has to do with the system of governance in society that both have begun to tend towards in very different ways, I should say, of course, because the Chinese Communist Party, very different from the United States, but they have their similarities, and I think those similarities are worth discussing.

Well, absolutely. And I think as you note as well, it's a crazy, frankly, idea. And I point this out to people regularly that somehow the U.S. or frankly, any Western liberal democracy is like China. I mean, it's not, obviously, right? But, as you say, there may be some things to be learned. Right. I mean, I absolutely agree. We can't directly compare liberal democracy like the United States or a country in Europe to China under the Chinese Communist Party

that killed millions of its own people during its history. So it would be absurd to compare them directly and to try to make a moral equivalence, for instance. But I think that that shouldn't scare us off of discussing some very real similarities that we do see occurring in how they are both approaching their internal and external Thursday. Why don't you trace for me a little bit of this development of what's called managerialism. And this is one of these things where you find some kind of convergence, obviously.

But this is something centuries old, and a way of looking at the world, a way of operating. Explain to me how that works. This is a very old process. I would call it a process. A managerial revolution has occurred. And it has occurred since the, let's say, the Industrial Revolution, roughly around then. So there's a big change in society

because there's a revolution in mass and scale. There's more people, the cities are bigger, companies are bigger, and so you start to need managers. You need specialists, experts, experts whose job is a specialized job with special skills, and they organize things and people can just think of you know a manager and normal middle-level manager in a business they don't produce anything by hand they don't come up with

new ideas necessarily what they do is manage people, information, existing ideas, and sort of organizational structures and techniques. And this becomes a new class of people in society, the professional managerial class. And so this transformed all of society, not just government, although it did, but how companies are run, how schools are run, how everything is run. And this has been sort of a great explosion since the Industrial Revolution. And I think the impact of this on our systems of government has been underestimated because essentially we

have changed who rules from either democracy, the people rule, or a king who rules. A managerial system is fundamentally different. It's essentially an oligarchy of experts. And we talk about technocracy and things like that. The managerial system is fundamentally different. It's essentially an oligarchy of experts. And we talk about technocracy and things like that, but that's what this means, that the manager runs these organizations and not the owner, whether that's the people in the government

or even a CEO in a company, has much less power than one might imagine. There's a number of ideas that emerged out of, let's say, the Enlightenment period that really led to the emergence of managerialism as what we could describe as an ideology. And those are, I think, above all, the idea of a materialistic technocratic approach to the world, or we could call it scientistic. So the idea that you can, that human beings can and should manage everything, control everything, which is what management is, control everything if they have enough knowledge. So if you have enough scientific knowledge,

you can control nature. You can control the physics of reality. So this is where we get fundamentally this idea that you can not only engineer things, material things, but socially engineer things, like a government but socially engineer things like a government. So this becomes an extremely important revolution in the worldview of people from a more traditionalist religious viewpoint that everything had a sort of God-given telos and you had to stick with that, you didn't interfere,

to this idea that modern man could sort of re-engineer everything. If you can engineer things to be improved, to function the way you want them to, then the logical step is that if you did that well enough, if you had perfect knowledge and perfect engineering, you could create a perfect system, a utopian system. So this is where we get this idea which, you know, comes to us in a big way in the 20th century

of utopian ideologies. These all flow from the same idea, which is really a managerial idea, that you can engineer your way to a perfect society. There is a direction to history that utopia is at one end and we could move in that direction and we will move in that direction if we can perfectly engineer everything. But that creates a sort of moral implication for society, which is that now there's a right side of history and a wrong side of history. That if you are moving

closer to utopia, that's good. If you're not moving, progressing towards utopia, then you are holding back not only history, let's call it, but the improvement of life on earth. So that sort of de facto makes you a bad person if you are conserving the current way of living and not progressing. So this is where we get the the sort of political idea of progress and therefore progressivism the idea that we should use power state power and other power to improve society and progressivism is a sort of important very important part of managerialism because it incorporates this idea of constant advancement, permanent revolution, to sort of sweep away the old things, the old institutions, the old traditions. All of these things

become the enemy. And to managerialism they are the enemy because if you have an established way of life with established institutions, like a church or a local government. Or if people are governing themselves, doing things how they used to be doing it, and you wipe all that away, what you do is create a vacuum into which top-down engineering can be applied, which means you grow management. You take on more. More things come under the umbrella of managerial control. idea, certainly of the US system, post 1776, is that government is sort of a necessary evil,

and that you want to create systems to kind of prevent it from doing kind of what you're describing, which is accumulating power, because the idea being people will just always tend to do that. And once they get it, it's hard to give it away. So you set it up. And I think, and certainly every liberal democracy really came from that original animating idea. But you're saying this is happening contemporaneously, this vision of the world, right? Yeah, I think you're exactly right. The American system and others like it were set up in order to try to prevent, let's say, the concentration of power through checks and balances, prevent that, and therefore keep government limited.

But that's not what we've seen happen. There's been a great expansion of bureaucracy, say, in the government. Government's gotten a lot bigger. But power has also sort of moved outward into this managerial blob where power is diffused and accountability is diffused. So no one really knows who's running anything. The founders set up this system in what I think was a way that overlooked a key threat. Because that threat did not yet exist. Because this sort of industrial revolution, this revolution of mass and scale that we saw create

managerialism, didn't yet exist when the founders set up the Constitution. Because the real threat to American self-governance, we want to say that that's sort of the ideal of the United States, that the people would rule themselves. Almost all the decisions would rest with the people. The government would remain small. The threat to that didn't come from a tyrant taking power like a king, like they were afraid of.

Around the 20th century when, say, Woodrow Wilson appears on the stage, this sort of progressive vision of politics, this progressive idea that we've been discussing, you get this great enthusiasm for depoliticizing politics. And how do you do that? You do that by making politics rational, scientific. You establish a scientific system of governance and Wilson called that scientific administration. So instead of having these debates, democratic debates or political contests, we're going to use scientific rational principles to revolutionize the system.

And we're not going to need to have these debates anymore. And I think that instinct created this whole thrust towards a larger and larger government, because we essentially began to turn over more and more aspects of what was once part of American self-governance to the state for two reasons. One is that we have this idea, sort of implicit idea, comes to the fore, that if we turn over governance to experts, to scientific experts, things will just run better and more peaceably and more stably. But also because we're starting to see this revolution from the top down to clear away the old ways of doing

things and make space for this revolution in governance at the same time, the permanent revolution. Well and it also, and I think you make this point, makes it so that there's a correct way, and that's the way that the experts have figured out. I think that's exactly right. If there's a correct way, which is determined through the science, which really means that the experts determine it, then all of governance becomes about doing the right thing, the correct thing. In that case, politics is not about debate anymore. It's about being correct and imposing the correct way on everyone else. And we see that not only in politics, but sort of in everything as the managerial revolution progresses. You see that in education, whereas once people may have been free to educate

their children as they like, you see ideas emerge that, no, we need to have a common way of educating people with the correct ideas and therefore it's the state's responsibility to do that. Or we see this in public health for instance or in any area of scientific expertise. It becomes no longer, science becomes no longer a process, a scientific process of determining truth. It becomes how are we going to administer the United States to Europe and elsewhere. And this is what I would say is the sort of essence of this convergence with China, because China is also a technocratic regime. This is sort of the key idea. They have very different ideas about what's right.

But the idea that there is only one scientific truth and the whole system should organize around that is sort of central to this, what we see happening today. Let's take at face value your assertion that there's an attempt to do the correct scientific thing. But that, often these days, people would argue is in direct contradiction to what science would tell you if you were to try to look at it objectively, which is indeed supposed to be the goal, right? Well, yes. I think science at its best, as it's supposed to be,

is a process for determining truth, right? Real truth, not politically correct truth. We talk about the marketplace of ideas, where ideas sort of compete. This is an ideal world. Then the best one comes out ahead. But at least in our managerial system as it is, that's not

how ideas function. Ideas enter the system and ideas have consequences in terms of, let's say, power. Let's say you are a public health bureaucrat and you do an analysis of a dangerous pandemic that's happening, or at least you say it's dangerous because you conclude that this is a dangerous pandemic and something needs to be done if you assert that idea then what that means is that public health bureaucrats like you and your colleagues need to be given additional power and resources to deal with this problem so what you've done by accepting this idea is benefit your whole organization of a managerial institution.

If instead you're a public health bureaucrat and you say, you know what, this pandemic is not really a problem. I think we can just leave it alone, and the situation is not that bad. What you are doing is effectively undermining your entire reason for existence as a public health manager, because you're not managing the thing that you exist to manage. And so you are undermining not only yourself and your own power, but the power and influence of all of your colleagues and your entire institution,

and ultimately the whole managerial system. So what's happened is that power has corrupted the method for determining which idea is best. I mean it's not a marketplace of ideas. Ideas are selected as truth based on the incentives to use that idea instead of another. One of my observations very early in life was that something happens to an organization

once it achieves some kind of critical mass. Like self-perpetuation becomes a higher value than the thing that that nonprofit, in the case I was looking at nonprofits, right, than the value that that nonprofit stands for. Yes, I think that's exactly right. And this phenomenon is a product of managerialism. You have to consider the structure of incentives and driving force of that organization that is run by these managers is not necessarily the stated mission of the organization. The bureaucracy takes on a life of its own, and it does things essentially to grow the bureaucracy just infinitely.

And we see that everywhere, whether it's in government bureaucracies or a place like a nonprofit, if you have a nonprofit whose mission is, say, to end homelessness, very quickly the real mission of the staff of the nonprofit become to hire, to gain a larger budget, gain more money in resources, hire more staff, gain more money, and so on, until there's this doom loop of managerialism that sort of takes over the whole organization. I can't help but remembering George Washington, specifically the idea that he decided to, you know, step down, right? And that's described as this kind of unbelievable thing, where America is yours and you make the choice to step away. Right? And it just seems like most of us don't have that. Don't have that impetus.

When you have, you know, a government bureaucracy or even a charity and the problem is over, what are they going to do usually they don't shut down they they either find a new mission a reason to exist and perpetuate themselves and keep getting the money coming in or they you know don't really solve the problem and avoid solving the problem so they can keep going. So it's very rare that an institution will be set up to do something and then do it and then shut down. That's not how we see things work in our society. So this makes sense to me. You can sort of imagine it in a government context, government

bureaucrats context or a nonprofit context, but in a corporate context where there's this, you know, there's the fiduciary responsibility that's, you know, guiding everything that you're trying to maximize the profits. It's not obvious that that would be helpful. In fact, I would suggest that it might be the opposite, right? Well, I think it's often, in terms of for the shareholders, to maximize profit in a company, it's not helpful. And that's why many companies that began as lean, purpose-driven startups end up as these bloated, bureaucratic organizations that can no longer function very well.

I think that happens a lot in the private sector. But it's not just that in terms of the sort of organizational structure that starts to become overwhelming. It's that the mission of the, this is the owner-agent problem, as business people talk about. The structure and mission of the organization, the people running it, become captured by different goals than the owners, whether that's stockholders or the people, in the case of the government.

Expand on that a little bit more for me. Why does that happen? Well because the the mission of a managerial system is always the expansion of managerialism. And this this manifests in some very strange ways. Take for, Bud Light. There's this great controversy about Bud Light having a marketing campaign that involved transgender influencers. And this caused a lot of political controversy, tanked the stock of the company. And you might wonder, why are corporations involving themselves in political messaging, whatever you feel about it,

that might hurt their sales? And they seem to do this a lot now. So if you are a corporate executive, you are a member of the managerial elite within society. And so you have certain objectives and incentives driving you. And those aren't necessarily the objectives of your own organization. You want, you know, normal things, status, money, the respect of your peers and so on. But the managerial system, which has been created by,

well, to back up a bit, you go to university just like all your peers. You learn the same ideas as all your peers. You enter into a system in which your skills are essentially transferable. You can make a PowerPoint at the company, or you can make a PowerPoint in government, or you can make a PowerPoint in a philanthropic organization. And you can transfer laterally between these organizations because you are of a certain class, a professional manager and this is what you do.

So what becomes important to you is what gives you status within not the specific organization you are in but the entire managerial system. Staying on the right side of the values and the ideas and the politics of your class of people, the managerial elite, is much more important to you than even your success within one organization. If you say the right things you can always move to another organization just fine. But if you don't say the right thing you're blacklisted essentially from every organization at the managerial level, which is an entire global network

of public and private institutions. And this is where we approach some of these similarities, I think, with China, where we have, in an explicit communist system, what would be called the party line, or the explicit guidance of things you're supposed to say or not say. And you have to stay on the right side of the party in order to operate in any area of life.

And I think we have accidentally, or by coincidence, sort of stumbled into a very similar situation in the West. The term political correctness obviously comes from, I think, Lenin originally? Yeah, political correctness is from the Soviet Union. And it meant being literally politically correct, being on the right side of the party line.

Correct is a very important word in a Marxist system, like in Russia or China, the Soviet Union or China. You want to be correct. That means you are on the right side of politics, the right side of history even. And if you're not correct, then that's a problem. What that correct thing is changes, and sometimes in quite significant ways. And in a top-down system like the Soviet Union or Communist China or something like that, the leadership tells you what that is, and it's pretty clear, right? But in these kind of emergent systems, or what you would call soft compliance. How do you know what it is that is the correct thing as it

changes, because the change is actually an incredibly important part of how that system works. This is a really important point, because yes, you don't know what's correct. Because what's correct, that doesn't mean the truth. It means saying the right thing. It's not about the content. It's about the loyalty, because what you're doing is signaling your ideological loyalty to the system. So, you know, Isaiah Berlin, talking about Russia, said

that the most important knack any citizen could have in a communist system was the ability to follow the party line wherever it was moving. And even in such a system, you didn't really know. You had to pay close attention to make sure that you knew on any given day what the correct thing to say was. And so how the party line functions is it's a measure of loyalty to the system. And so the fact that it changes only helps do that. Because if you just happen to be saying the right thing ideologically one day, and the next day it's completely opposite. If you stick with what you said before, because you're a true believer in whatever that is, you're no longer loyal to the system. It's your loyalty to power that really matters.

So you're expected to change your view overnight. In a soft system like ours, soft managerialism being, well let's just say it's not explicitly controlled from a centralized body like the Chinese Communist Party. The party line is emergent from the system. We could even say it's sort of like a hive mind like Twitter, you know. Who knows how real, what is really, how these ideas bubble up out of the collective unconscious. But you'll see, you know, someone is canceled for something one day that they wouldn't have been a week before and they wouldn't have been a week later. But what's important if you want to be, you know, remain on the right side of this de facto party line,

is that you, in the moment, you say the right thing and you enforce that with others. There's a whole network of organizations that work together not in coordination directly, but because of these managerial incentives, work together in a de facto synchronicity because they all have the same interests. And I think it's very important for people if they're watching and they wonder, you know, the media always seems to say the same thing at the same time. You know, the mainstream media, they seem to go along with whatever the government is saying, or they all jump on the same thing at once, and there must be a conspiracy that the media are working together in a sort of conspiratorial way. I think the great advantage of managerialism as an idea is that it can explain this behavior without any explicit conspiracy by anyone, although those may exist. But

that's not the key driver of what we see when, say, the universities and the media and the government all move in the same way at the same time. That's happening because those organizations are all run by the same class of managerial elites. They all think the same. They all have the same incentives. And they all receive the sort of same information, the same stimulus to act.

Tell me a little bit about your background here. So well I'm now a primarily a writer but my background was in the study of China and the Chinese Communist Party and U.S.-China relations. So I worked in a number of think tanks and consultancies and other positions for a long time in Washington, D.C. And so, you know, what really made you kind of step out of that? Say about 2020, 2021. You know, I had worked in this space a long time. And the great topic on everyone's lips was strategic competition with China. But when we discussed long-term strategic competition, the only thing anyone in Washington

wanted to talk about was the things they were familiar with, like diplomatic strategy, you know, military security or economy like trade and tariffs and so on, which are all important. But what I found was that what we are not talking about ever were some of these other issues that are very relevant to long-term strategic competition when you think of it as this competition between systems. So things like education or culture, ideological problems, questions, political problems, like internal political problems, all these things that sort of were raging debates elsewhere, like the culture war, no one wanted to apply these deeper questions to this area of sort

of sheltered international affairs. Whereas I think that those issues and many more are sort of inseparable from U.S.-China strategic competition as a competition of civilizations or systems. When we talk about things like debates over censorship in our system or even things like health or education. Those are really fundamental to who is going to come out ahead, let's say, in the world. And so I grew frustrated and bored, I would say, with keeping too limited to the debate. And so I wanted to write about some other things that were going on in the world that applied to this geopolitical situation. To build on that just a little bit, I recently had John Lenczewski on the show.

You actually criticized the Reagan Clinton years a bit in your piece. I remember that. One of the things that made the Reagan administration different in this John Lenczewski and his role as his NSC Soviet affairs advisor, ideological warfare and public diplomacy played a huge part in what happened during those years, and arguably the collapse of the Soviet Union. And for some reason these two things are not really considered much. The Chinese Communist Party today sees themselves as in an ideological war with the United States. They take that ideology extremely seriously.

They see liberalism, Western liberalism, as determined to destroy them ideologically. So it's central to their vision of the world. Whereas it's not for us. We in the United States or the broader West have trained ourselves not to think of ourselves as ideological actors. And this goes back to the idea of depoliticization and progress and utopia. We think of our system progressive liberalism let's say as sort of the natural endpoint of history and therefore it's not an ideology it's just correct it's just rationally correct so ideologies are only you know these crazy systems that are outside the the liberal truth and and so we avoid thinking of it in those terms but the Chinese certainly see liberalism as a concrete discrete

ideology and I'm using liberalism here because it's easy to use, but it's not really quite what I'm trying to describe because I think our system is a little different. Let's say managerial liberalism. That would be a good qualifier. That's exactly what I was thinking as you were saying that. But that strikes me that that puts us at a huge disadvantage. Would you agree with that? I think it does put us at a huge disadvantage. Would you agree with that?

I think it does put us at a disadvantage. In part, for example, because the competition is not just a competition directly between the West and China, but it's a global competition. We're competing for allies and partners and trading partners and the affections of the world, just like the first Cold War. And I think that when we underestimate how ideologically we can act and appear, oftentimes

that fails to resonate with others around the world. So for example, the Chinese are very antagonistic to progressive NGOs, let's say, that spread progressive ideas in their country. So they've cracked down hard on those. So they're no longer in China. But we sort of deployed a lot of our own ideas in their country. So they've cracked down hard on those. So they're no longer in China. But we sort of deploy those NGOs around the world to advance progressive ideas in a way that strikes us, or at

least the American government, as such a natural thing to do everywhere. But that tends to alienate a lot of people around the world who don't share our sort of ideological presuppositions. But because we can't see that, see these progressive liberal ideas as an ideology, I think it's very difficult for the government and broader society to understand why anyone would be opposed to these ideas spreading everywhere.

Often you hear this narrative like, well, no one really in China really believes in communism anymore. They're not communists. So how do you respond to that? I'd say I understand why people make that argument. I think it's sort of half right. I mean, if you think about what communism is supposed to be issuing in this glorious workers utopia of equality, this is one of the most unequal countries on Earth

economically today. It's spent the last few decades essentially getting rich. So it's true that that is not particularly communist. On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party is definitely a Marxist-Leninist regime and it takes those ideas very seriously. Moreover, I think that the basic ideas that govern the Chinese system are a managerial system. And those ideas flow through Marx from this idea that you can control the society from the top down and control everything in society and manage it at a broad level. And so I think fundamentally the current Chinese system is very much still that way.

I've read a number of analysts, and they're kind of persuading me to this view that the communist utopia, true egalitarianism across society, that that in a way isn't actually the real purpose of that system in the first place. It's just sort of the window dressing for something else. I don't know how you see that. Yeah, I think that's true. Now, obviously, among communists, let's say communist revolutionaries in Russia or China, there were some true believers who really believed that. There were others who, no, no, what the revolution was really about was about power and taking control and establishing

a new oligarchy to rule the country. And I think, broadly speaking, those are the people who won out. On the other hand, I think that ideologically, there are some very important tenets of communist ideology if we want to call it that that we have to take seriously in terms of their desire to fundamentally revolutionize society and destroy the old ways and traditions and institutions of society and replace it with a new vision

that is constructed from the top down, even to change the people themselves into a new communist man. I mean, that kind of revolutionary zeal was very real and still exists. I want to talk a little bit about the United Front work department. Typically, we think of it today as this massive influence operation, tens of billions of dollars a year into influencing all sorts of entities outside of China to kind of follow,

especially Chinese diasporas, to follow the Chinese regime's bidding. But it's more than that. Yeah, I mean, the United Front is a lot more than overseas influence operations. That's sort of what we're familiar with, because it's what affects us. But inside China, the United Front is, let's say, a huge

network. So it was this idea created first by Lenin and then adopted by Mao. And in the Soviet Russia, the original idea was we were going to try to align as many political parties and fellow travelers as we could, in order to defeat their enemies, first in the Russian Civil War and then later.

They accepted the nationalists and the liberals and the trade unions and so on and they put them all together into a united front. That was the idea. So in China today the United Front is still very much present as sort of a communist, a core communist idea of the Communist Party, which is to unite all of the organizations of society that you can into a whole of society network included in the United Front or sort of every organization and institution that has been co-opted by the Chinese Communist Party through cells of party members that are present in

the organization. And this isn't just, you know, government organizations, it's, you know, every major corporation in China. And even things like the Chinese triads, the Chinese gangsters have been brought into the United Front in order to be useful whenever they're useful, as we see in Hong Kong, for example. And so the United Front is essentially the gigantic network of Chinese Communist Party institutions of control beyond the state. It's very important to understand China as a party state. There's the state and there's the party. These are a parallel system of separate positions. So the people are appointed to positions in the government, but they're all Chinese Communist Party members. And many people have a corresponding position in the party and in the state, but sometimes they are only in the party and not in the state,

and they still wield tremendous power, or whatever power is relevant to their position. So the point is that there is sort of this shadow state, which is the party, which is, in fact, controlling your position in society even more than the state positions. So, the United Front sort of, it helps put this into practice. If you have Chinese Communist Party members running a private corporation, those members of the party are loyal to the party and so the party is de facto controlling the interests of the corporation even if they do not issue direct orders to do this. So because, as in any managerial system, in order to get ahead as a good member of the Chinese Communist Party, or even just a non-member citizen of China,

you have to take into account what the party wants, what you should be doing as a party member, and not just the interests of your organization. And so the sort of web of the party manages to control even the most far-flung organizations that officially have no connection to the party at all. You make also a fascinating distinction in the essay

about the distinction between rule of law and rule by law. And I'd like to get you to comment on that a little bit. RICK LOWEY PEREZ- Rule of law is a, if you think about it, quite interesting and odd idea that is sort of unique to the Western world. And the idea is that law itself rules. There's no one above the law. No matter how powerful your position within the government, even if you're the president, you are ruled by law. In China they do not have rule of law. And they say this explicitly.

They have rule by law. So the little people have to follow the laws. But, and they say this very explicitly, the Chinese Communist Party is not, and its leadership are not subject to the law. Because they can't be. Because they are the top power. There's nothing above them.

And so the law cannot be above them. And so law is just a tool to be used of control. Whereas in the West, traditionally, we've had this odd idea that the law is on top. top and I think for for very deep reasons going into you know Christian theology about essentially about there is a higher power so that sort of holds the people accountable to the law whereas the Chinese Communist Party, officially atheistic, the hard managerial regime in China cannot accept having anything above them because that would prevent them from controlling society. So when the party says, okay, well, we need the law to change for us or for you, then law sort of just changes on the fly to accommodate the interests of power. And unfortunately, I think in other places around the world, including in the West, increasingly we see

similar development where law is used as a tool to achieve the goals of power but is not held as essentially a sacred thing that is above anyone. In a managerial system nothing can be allowed to be above control because that is sort of the central directive of managerialism is to control things more and more and to control more and more things for the good of society for the good of society right but if there's anything that isn't subject to control, any eternal things, and this is why I think that managerialism

is very inherently hostile to, say, religion, because a religion posits that certain things are beyond the world and beyond change and beyond control. And so... Well, there's a higher authority. And there's a higher authority, whether that authority is the law or God or whatever authority that is transcendent. And a managerial system cannot allow that because that means there's a portion of the world of society of life that is off-limits from

managerial control. It cannot be reorganized by the permanent revolution and taken over by managerial technique and improved and incorporated into the sort of managerial project of utopia. You mentioned in the China Convergence this idea of permanent revolution. Yes. Right. And so just explain that. For many people, it might be confusing to talk about a regime, a government that is a revolutionary regime. Because if you think about it, it's kind of odd. Doesn't a government want stability?

But in fact, not only in China, but elsewhere, I think we often see revolutionary regimes. And what that means is they initiate and maintain a process of continual revolution, in Mao's terminology, in order to achieve their objectives of, usually it's consolidating power, but other objectives as well. And they do that, as Mao said, by creating chaos, essentially. Chaos is good because when there's an emergency, a chaotic period, things are scrambled. You can undo the status quo of the past and destroy it and replace it with a new thing, a new order. So out of chaos comes a new order. And that's fundamentally what a revolution is.

You break things in order to build new things on the ashes. You know, so we live in a quite complex world. I find myself thinking, gosh, what to do now? It's a big question, and I'm not sure I have a complete answer, because if we're trying to discuss, say, what is to be done about managerialism, how could this system and all its problems be improved? One of the things you run into very quickly is that you need managers, you need technology, but managers have their own incentives to create more managers and do this whole doom loop. So what is needed is for managers to be kept in control in their proper place. There has to be authority over the managers that exists,

that transcends managerial control. And that could be in the system of government, there is, say, an executive authority that can sort of keep managerial bureaucracy under wraps. But ultimately, there have to be spheres of life, spheres of society in which managerialism is essentially excluded from taking over. I think the great enemy of managerialism is self-governing institutions that exist between the regime and the individual. This is the great point of many political philosophers of history, like de Tocqueville and Aristotle and so on,

that you need these middle institutions to exist between the state and the people, and they push back against control. Because self-governance is essentially the opposite of managerialism. People organizing themselves from the bottom up rather than the top down. Organizing organically based on their local reality rather than an abstract plan from the top. So managerialism is inherently opposed to these self-governing institutions, whether that's local governance or the ultimate and self-governing institution, the family.

Even that, it tries to break up because it gets in the way of managerial control. So I think those institutions need to be strengthened. But the only way you can strengthen those organizations, institutions, is to have a sort of framework of viewing the world that pre exists managerialism and is a higher authority than it. So I mean, the simplest example is religious in nature. If you are a religious organization that takes your faith seriously

and puts its principles ahead of managerial ambition, then that helps shield the organization from managerial control and lets it serve as one of these buffering institutions. If I may, though, but aren't religions themselves subject to this managerial ethos that we live in? Absolutely. It's very difficult, I think, for, say, a church to deal with managerialism, because if you are a church and you're growing your membership, and you have a big church now, it's very tempting to not only take on managers to help you manage that size and complexity, but managerial techniques. Even well-meaning religious institutions are

subverted into managerial institutions with managerial priorities. it becomes for them about growing their religious organization, making it more efficient, and so on. And that idea, managerial idea, has replaced their actual mission that they started with. You know, I can't help but think about the fact that this managerial ethos, it's almost found everywhere now. Managerialism is global now. And so managerialism has gone beyond the nation state. So we now, like in Canada, Trudeau has talked about a post-national country. I think that's sort of a common theme now, this idea of globalism. But what globalism is, this idea of

transferring power of governance from the nation-state, from the sovereign nation-state to a higher level, a supranational authority, whether that's the EU or the United Nations and so on or even just international agreements and institutions and bodies. This is about moving managerial control to a higher level across the entire world. And you can think of the nation state as one of these self-governing bodies that was in the way of increasing managerial control. And so today, there's hostility to the very idea of a nation. The ideas that we valued about democracy and sovereignty

and the local self-governance of our nations and states and towns and so on are being subsumed by this idea of overwhelming control. Nathan, I find you to be a very positive, frankly optimistic person. I don't know if that's accurate, but that's how I read it. This picture that you're painting, for a lot of people, it could be hard to see out of, right? So how is it that you keep yourself that way? Well, I would say that I often feel very pessimistic, at least, but I think that there is a core optimism or hope that I have. And that, in part, is because this sort of idea of a

totalitarian managerial regime, it's not going to work. I mean, the problem with managerialism is that it layers all these complexities on top of each other, like trying to build this tower of Babel of total control. But that's not how humans work. And the more they try to control things, the more unstable the tower gets, and eventually it's going to collapse. And in this context, I would say that that means that these attempts to create really totalizing systems of control, they won't last forever. I think that there has to be a sort of devolution of control back to a more self-governing level just to really to to in order to function

i think we we are seeing tremendous inefficiencies in in our countries in our civilization as a consequence of sort of the build-up of managerialism and that we eventually we're going to get back to a much more realistic and healthier style of governing not only our countries, but our societies as a whole, which is a more free method of approaching life in the world. Well, Nathan Lyons, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you all for joining Nathan Lyons, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you all for joining Nathan Lyons and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.