HondurasKeiser wrote: ↑Thu Feb 17, 2022 3:08 pm
N.S. Lyons has a kind of Marxian analysis of the truckers vs. Trudeau (though I doubt he'd like the idea that his is a Marxian one) over at
his substack. I found it quite interesting. He quotes my favorite social-critic/crank, the late Christopher Lasch; so I guess he had me at "elites".
In that essay, I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.”
In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism,” the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.”
I also quoted a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites that is worth repeating here:
"The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself."...
The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.
The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.
For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.
When considering the causes and character of the current protest, and the response to it, I would say the divide between Physicals and Virtuals is by far the most relevant frame of analysis available. In fact I’d say this is among the most significant divides in all of Western politics today...
The great Honkening of 2022 has already been revelatory to people around the world. It is the climax of a process in which all the divides in society, including between the “Physicals” and “Virtuals” I’ve described here, have been revealed by the pandemic and governments’ responses. At the same time, the pandemic served to clarify the continued reliance of the Virtual class on “essential workers.” The revelation of the exceptional vulnerability of modern supply chains has demonstrated very clearly to everyone paying attention that the Physicals still possess tremendous power of their own as long as they are able to act in unity and solidarity – or as many signs at the protests have pointed out to the Virtuals: “no truckers, no food.”
In this sense the Freedom Convoy has already become the most successful labor movement in decades, awakening a genuine new “class consciousness” (as a Marxist would put it) in the minds of the reality-based “working class.” And it is notable that this has already become a transnational phenomenon, with the convoy protests spreading like wildfire around the globe precisely because the exact same divide now exists in so many developed countries, where the Virtual ruling class has everywhere overreached with similarly hubris.
This morning I read
the following take on the managerial society that has become entrenched in Canada and it seemed to dove-tail with the earlier essay I had posted from N.S. Lyons. I wonder if our Canadian posters here see some truth in what Mr. Pinkoski writes?
The crisis had its origins in material conditions unique to Canada. A combination of elite overproduction and Canada’s position in the shadow of the United States has produced an ideologically supercharged managerial class that has accelerated the adoption of a new kind of emergency politics.
The managerial class in Canada is much more powerful than that in the U.S., for several reasons. First, the managerial class makes up a much larger share of Canada’s population, because far more Canadians go to college. Whereas 51.9 percent of Americans between the ages of 25–34 have tertiary education, in Canada it is almost 65 percent. While America’s elites are decentralized (Wall Street and Silicon Valley are very different), Canada’s elites are concentrated in the Laurentian corridor of Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. And there is a revolving door between the managerial institutions. Since Lester Pearson, prime minister from 1963 to 1968, every leader of the Liberal party has begun his career as either a civil servant, academic, professional party hack, Bay Street lawyer, or leader of one of Canada’s Laurentian “continental corporations”—or as the son of one of these. These institutions receive generous federal funding. So does the Canadian media, which is now financially dependent on the federal government. Because these institutions are regionally concentrated and rely on symbiotic relationships with one another, Canada’s managerial classes hold hegemonic political power.
Canada’s vassalage to the U.S. intensifies the harmful effects of this situation. Once Canada surrendered its British character and integrated itself into the American empire, it became part of the continental system of elite overproduction. Ambitious Canadians seeking the top-tier education that will gain them elite status quickly discover that Canada’s universities are, as one professor once told me, “frustratingly above-average.” The most talented young Canadians therefore tend to jump ship and move to the U.S. The sine qua non for their success is mastering the American empire’s language, which is the language of liberalism. Every ambitious Canadian learns that to ascend, you must talk like American liberal elites. The Canadians who become fluent succeed: They get a top-tier U.S. degree and join the prestigious American networks. By and large, these people do not then want to move back to the imperial backwater. The few who do—such as former Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff, who taught at Harvard, and the current Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who studied at Harvard and married a New York Times reporter—return home confident that they will be the big fish in the small pond. Hence Canada suffers a protracted brain drain to the U.S.
The most pernicious consequence for Canada is the influence of the large number of would-be elites who don’t quite make it. They are a case study in the “Janissary” phenomenon. In the Ottoman Empire, Janissaries were trained to be fanatically loyal to the sultan, and served as imperial shock troops. But they could never rule the empire and were condemned to be second-tier elites. Eventually, when they became too restless, the sultan imprisoned and executed them. Hoping to join the imperial elites, Canadian Janissaries demonstrate their unflinching loyalty to the imperial mission. They are good enough to advance, but not all the way. Their passion for the imperial mission persists even though, excluded from the highest elite circles, they know far less about that mission than they realize. Canada also attracts second-tier American elites. While they cannot ascend into the top-tier elite at home, they do in Canada. They bring their devotion to the liberal mission with them, skewing the institutions they run. Draft-dodgers and their children have been particularly influential.
These losers in the continental intra-elite competitive game are the people running the feebler Canadian counterparts of prestigious American institutions. Because the upper tiers of Canadian society have been saturated with them for several generations, standards have dropped. But Canadian elites have not noticed. Lacking self-awareness, they become more parochial than the unenlightened classes they scorn. As one would expect of Janissaries, Canadian elites are still determined to sound like their American counterparts. Consequently, they punch down with more zeal. Imagine a national elite composed of less successful versions of Sarah Jeong: They all mock the lower-class whites, but do not get jobs at the New York Times. That’s Canada’s ruling class.
This dynamic of surplus mid-level managers, with double the zealotry and mediocrity, has played out in the pandemic policy that provoked the protests, and set the tone for the government’s decision to enact a state of emergency. COVID restrictions are popular with the managerial classes because safetyist rhetoric is catnip to them. Sheltered from genuine hardship—job insecurity, physical danger, etc.—they live in fear of anything that threatens their comfort and sense of control. It is therefore unsurprising that Canada, dominated by managers, suffered the most draconian COVID restrictions in North America. And because the managerial class is huge and directs the media narrative, even the harshest restrictions have enjoyed a broad base of support. Canadian politicians often adopted harsher COVID restrictions than those recommended by their own scientific advisers. Whether it was mixing vaccine doses, distributing expired stockpiles, or attempting to steal from the global vaccine supply, Canada routinely defied the WHO. But national media directed Canadian attention elsewhere.
Affiliation: Lancaster Mennonite Conference & Honduran Mennonite Evangelical Church
