Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #395: Why Modern Societies Drift Left: The Rise of the Managerial Class

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Being Catholic #395: Why Modern Societies Drift Left: The Rise of the Managerial Class · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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We're going to have a great show for you today. I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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Give us a call there, and we're back again.
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I guess we've been gone for three weeks. this real cold weather is difficult
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to get out in anymore and the holidays and everything else going on here not
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too long ago and the snow and the ice and whatever's going on this winter,
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has caused us to do some missing and some things at the radio station needed to be done.
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John busy and so forth. So it happens. And I guess the winter time is a good
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time for it to happen, to hold up and stay inside where it's warm.
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And as I said, I'm here with my wife, Lynn, and I'll let her talk a little bit.
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I want to mention before I get started and turn this over to Lynn that we are
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going to continue the series I was talking about before we left.
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People probably have forgotten about it.
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The last time I was here, I was talking about the affordability crisis,
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and I said that I would explain why a lot of those kinds of things are happening
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in our society and why the Western civilization leans to the left and leans
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to liberalism and what's the cause of that.
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So we'll continue with that. But first, I'm going to turn this over to my wife
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and let her say what she has to say.
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My goodness, the time goes by so fast. You realize this is, what,
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just two weeks till lunch starts?
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It's all impossible. Even less than two weeks. Yeah, I think it would be less
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than two weeks. I think it was two weeks from Wednesday, so this is already Saturday.
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Yeah, so it won't be long at all, a week and a half. That means Easter's going to be early.
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Maybe we won't even have, maybe, well, I can remember Easter's when we've had
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sleet and rain and freezing and snow and cold.
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You never know. And then there are other times, Easter comes and it's beautiful out.
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It's the most beautiful time and warmer than it was in May.
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So who knows? Yeah, it won't be that long. We just had Groundhog Day and I got
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to watch one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day, with Bill Murray. Yeah.
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I hope people out there have seen that movie and watched it.
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I think it's one of the best movies he ever made.
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It's a funny movie. I enjoy it. I always look at it as if Bill Murray is sucking
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purgatory. That's how I look at it.
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Well, it seems to be, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And then little by little.
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Until you get it right. Right. Little by little, he gets it right.
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Yeah. But it's quite a roller coaster ride until he gets there,
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and it's sort of fun to watch. Yeah, it is fun to watch. Yeah.
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One of the funniest parts of the movie that I like is, you know,
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there's no tomorrow. I mean, tomorrow never comes.
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Every day is the same. And he goes to a psychiatrist.
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And he's telling the psychiatrist this, you know, about how tomorrow never comes.
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And he doesn't know what he's going to do. And he's very distraught and so forth and everything.
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And the psychiatrist says, can we talk about this tomorrow?
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I thought that was one of the funniest lines in the movie.
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I like the one where he's sitting at the bar with those other two guys.
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Yeah. And he's going on and on about everything's the same every day.
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Two guys say, yeah, that's how my life is, too.
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Yeah, yeah. You go to the factory and it's the same thing over and over and
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over again. Yeah, that guy's going on with his long litany.
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Yeah. Like every morning I get up and it's the same day, same everything.
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And that guy's sitting there drinking a shot of whiskey or something.
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He looks at him and he says, oh, that about sums it up for me, too. Yeah.
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That's hilarious. It's a good movie. Yeah.
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And very, very. We watch it every year. Hit some realistic points of,
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you know, people's lives, really. Mm-hmm.
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So, okay. But I don't think, well, who knows?
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You know, got to go to purgatory to get it right, I guess.
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Okay. You got anything more to say? No. Okay. So, what I'm going to do is review here a little bit.
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We talked about last time the affordability crisis, and I'm going to review
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that just a little bit, And then we're going to go into the fact is,
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why is it that in Western civilization, in our civilization especially,
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but also anymore in Europe and other places too, why is it that just worldwide,
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it seems like, at least in all advanced countries.
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Liberalism seems to be, you know, the...
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Sort of a default setting. Everything leans to the left.
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And why is that? Why not something else instead? So we're going to talk about
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that today and read a little bit about it.
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But the last time we talked about the fact that we have built a country in which
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a young person can do well in school, take on debt, get a degree, work full-time,
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delay gratification, even postpone marriage, and still fail to secure middle-class life.
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And, you know, that's got to change, or people in New York, because of that,
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I think that's one of the huge reasons why people voted for Mondani.
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I don't think they voted for him simply because, you know, he's a socialist
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or a Muslim or anything else.
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It's because they don't know what else. They're reaching a point where it doesn't
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seem from the Republican side or the Democratic side, things are working,
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so they try something else. I think it'll be a disaster, but nevertheless, people are that way.
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They're going to say, well, at least we'll give it a try.
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And our country isn't just dealing with mere financial problems.
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The way it is governed is becoming unaffordable, and something has to be done.
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And that's what we talked about last time.
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Unless the American right decides to grow a spine, there's a risk that it will
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have accomplished very little at the end of President Trump's second term.
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Well, why is that so? Why will this dissipate and things won't really change?
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They may, and we hope they will. And if we have enough information about what's
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going on, maybe they will.
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Trump seems to be beginning to understand what it is that's going on.
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And that's what we're going to talk about again today.
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It says, you know...
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It will have accomplished very little, you know, if everything is allowed,
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all of Trump's accomplishments are allowed to expire.
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And, of course, I know some people don't agree that Trump has made accomplishments.
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For those people that do, though, the accomplishments can expire without any real effect.
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And things can fall right back to the way they were. And if they do,
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it's not good for the country.
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We need change whether you agree with Trump or not.
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This despite having a majority in both chambers and a national mandate from the American people.
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So Republicans cannot afford to let 2026 pass without pursuing an offensive
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legislative playbook for our nation's future.
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But things keep going back all the time to dead center. Now,
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why do they do that? So we're going to talk about that today.
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American people, especially younger voters, can tell when a party is fighting
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to win and when it is just buying time. So one party or another or somebody
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needs to start doing something that really counts.
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And many thinkers have taken the time to lay out how our country has arrived at this point.
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But we need to understand why it has arrived at this point.
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And so that's what we're going to do. And we'll get back into that in just a little bit.
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And I think we summed up in the last session three weeks ago that a country
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is not held together by quarterly earnings.
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It holds because mothers and fathers believe they can raise children in peace,
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because young adults see marriage as something attainable rather than aspirational,
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because church views are full, because the young man in his hometown can imagine
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the future there rather than hitting the road.
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Without those basic conditions, everything else is just decoration.
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So the choice is simple.
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Keep celebrating the metrics of yesterday as custodians of a dying regime or
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produce for the families of tomorrow.
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If we choose the latter, then the future will belong to leaders who decide to
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grade the nation by what matters.
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Whether Americans can form families, own homes, attend church every Sunday,
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and plant roots in safe communities with work available to them.
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Those who anchor our country to these standards will write its next chapter.
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And that's what we talked about last time. And we're going to talk this time
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about why is it that we can't seem to get these things done anymore?
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And so we're going to read from another article that talks about the change
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that happened in American and other advanced societies and why.
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Most societies lean to the left, and that's what we're going to be talking about.
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So I'm going to read from an article here in the same magazine,
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Chronicles, and it's the January 2026 edition.
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And the title of it is, Woke Will Never Go Broke.
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That's cute. Pretty catchy little title there, but why? Why will woke never go broke?
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And this article explains that. And we're talking here about a thing called managerialism.
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The principle of managerialism dominates modern corporations and government agencies.
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Corporations, big corporations and government agencies are run by the same people,
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or at least if not the same kind of people in every instance,
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or not the same people in every instance, the same kind of people in almost every instance.
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A managerial class and a managerial society. And a managerial society leans
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to the left, and we're going to find out why that is and why modern societies go in that direction.
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The experts who run them, big corporations or big government bureaucracies,
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have a fundamentally leftist orientation.
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They're always searching for incremental progress on never-ending reforms.
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And there is right there in that subtitle is a clue to exactly why the left
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tends to, I mean, why managerial society tends to lean to the left.
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And the article is by Sean J.
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Gripen, and I'll get to him just a little bit later.
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So we'll start. Ordinary investors and casual observers might assume that Trump's
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second inauguration marked the end of bulk capitalism.
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They would be mistaken.
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True, consumer brands no longer denounce toxic masculinity or hire trans influencers to sell beer.
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You know what the fiasco happened there with the Budweiser beer.
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And Disney has stopped campaigning for the teaching of gay and trans themes to schoolchildren.
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Yet woke policies such as the Environmental, Social, and Governments Framework,
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that is ESG, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI,
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remain embedded in corporate employment practices and investment policies.
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And we're going to find out, you know, why is that so? Why do they remain embedded?
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Under pressure from the Trump administration, most have simply been renamed
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rather than eliminated.
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Diversity became belonging, and ESG became sustainability or responsible investing.
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In true newspeak fashion, the old words become unwords, but the project endures.
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Most importantly, the woke have not gone broke.
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Okay. Americans still drink Bud Light while watching NFL games,
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broadcast by a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation, and the league still
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stencils end racism and stop hate in the end zones and on the players' helmets.
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Woke capitalism's staying power is not, as some suppose, the result of a cabal
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of crypto-Marxists marching through the corporations to impose revolution from within.
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While there are many valid criticisms to make of the World Economic Forum,
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it simply isn't true that CEOs and investment bankers go to Davos to plot the
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overthrow of capitalism.
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The apparatchiks running human resources aren't revolutionaries building bombs
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in a West Village basement.
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They're out buying organic kale from a farmer's co-op.
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Nor is it clear how many of these people really care about the goals they claim to serve.
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This is true even among the intelligentsia. A leading legal scholar once asked
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me, Why bother worrying about ESG?
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Isn't it just a collection of symbolic gestures companies perform so they can
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get back to business as usual?
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Maybe, but if its adherents are not entirely committed, why is woke capitalism so resilient?
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Why is it pervasive, yet half-hearted, superficial, yet ineradical?
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And if it is mostly symbolic, why these symbols, rather than something else?
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What explains the peculiar persistence of woke capitalism?
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The answer lies in managerialism.
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ESG is not really about doing ESG.
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It's about entrenching the managerial class. Yes.
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Recognition of managerialism in American business can be traced to Adolph Burrell
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and Gardner Means, who observed in their 1932 book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property,
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that the separation of ownership and control is characteristic of the modern corporation.
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They argued that this separation, together with the scale of modern enterprise.
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Concentrated massive wealth and power in managers who were minimally accountable
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to the contributors of capital.
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So it took a different turn. It put a lot of power in the hands of management
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rather than the hands of ownership.
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We're going to stop here and take a break, so stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnson. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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We're back from our break, and we're talking about the managerial society,
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and we're talking about it as why there is a turn to the left in modern Western
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culture, both here and abroad,
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and why it is so difficult to avoid the left-liberal.
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Culture and liberal power, and why it seems to be the default setting in America
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and in other modern countries.
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And it's because it is very, very suitable to the managerial society.
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And we're talking here about a discovery by a couple of gentlemen,
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Adolph Burl and Gardner Means back in 1932, who wrote The Modern Corporation and Private Property.
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And they began to see and understand that
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there was a change from the power
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of ownership of private property in
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corporations to the power of
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the managerial class in managing that money
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and property in corporations by a
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managerial class who has more and more power because of their expertise and
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because of the change in corporations to such a large size and so big that it
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needs a managerial class actually to run and control it.
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And actually the ownership in a way and in that sense has been taken from the
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actual owners of the property and the money and put into the hands of people
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who do the controlling and the managing.
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And the liberal paradigm is very, very amenable to how they operate and what they want to do.
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And that is why it is a default position in modern societies,
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as we'll see as we go along here.
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For Berlin means the modern corporation amounted to a new form of property, a quasi-public company,
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to which traditional laissez-faire assumptions no longer apply.
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Managerial enterprises, they argued, should serve a broader range of public concerns.
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Control of the great corporations, they wrote, should develop into a purely neutral technocracy,
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balancing a variety of claims by various groups in a community and assigning
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to each a portion of the income stream on the basis of public policy rather than private cupidity,
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rather than private greed or private ownership.
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Writing a decade later in the Managerial Revolution, James Burnham credited
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Berlin Means for their insight, but he criticized them for not seeing it through
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to the logical conclusion.
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The separation of ownership and control, Burnham argued,
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signaled a revolutionary change in which a new class had emerged to challenge
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bourgeois capitalism in the same way that bourgeois capitalism had challenged
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and eventually supplanted the landed aristocracy.
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This was the managerial class.
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The managerial class claims the right to rule not through land or capital, but through expertise.
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Its rise marks the ascendancy of technocracy, and its dominion extends beyond
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the business corporation into the administrative state.
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As I said here in the beginning, the same people,
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or at least the same types of people in most cases, a lot of times the same people,
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but in a lot of cases, if not the same people, the same types of people work
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both in the business corporation and also in the state, in the large corporations and also in the state.
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It puts the two of them in the same category.
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Here, Burnham saw what Berlin means did not, that the same type of person rules in both.
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The public-private distinction, in other words, is illusory.
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When you have big corporations and big public bureaucracies,
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the difference between the two is just an illusion.
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The two go hand in hand with each other, and they're both alike,
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not only as they're managed,
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but they're both alike because they often have the same people in each,
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and if not the same people, at least the same kinds of people that think alike.
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The administrative state is as much an organ of managerial power as a quasi-public corporation.
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So you get the two working together, and you get a lot of times conservatives
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treating the two as if they're different, treating the two as if they're separate
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from each other when they are not.
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Managerial control does not depend on regulatory capture or the proverbial revolving
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door between agency and industry.
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Such explanations assume hierarchy and intention, individuals in charge, pulling the levers.
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The managerial theorists instead describe a diffusion of power across institutions,
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a network of shared interests and assumptions that transcends any formal chain
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of command, and it transcends the corporation over to the state bureaucracy,
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and it transcends the state bureaucracy over to the big corporation.
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The same class runs both sides of the table, transmitting its interests seamlessly
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from boardroom to bureaucracy and from bureaucracy to boardroom.
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What are these interests? As Berlin Means recognized, they are not the interests
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of capital, the shareholders who own corporate equity.
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In creating the modern corporation, the capitalists animated the managerial
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class which, like Frankenstein's monster, soon slips its master's control.
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Nor do the politicians command it, though they too help bring it into being
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through the establishment of expert staffed administrative agencies.
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They merely use it, displaying its accomplishments or denouncing its excesses
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as the politics of the moment require.
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Either way, as Trump's ongoing struggles with his own agencies have shown,
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they are no longer his or any president's to command.
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In the end, whether in corporations or government agencies, the managers serve only themselves.
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Just as Robert Conquist's second law of politics predicts, the second law is this.
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Every organization appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents.
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In other words, every organization appears somehow or another as if secret agents
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of its opponents are running it. you'd wonder why is this so?
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Well, it's because you have a managerial class that is running it actually,
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not the owners that you're looking at.
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And vice versa, over on the other side of the table, you have the state and
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its bureaucracy in conjunction with those managerials also running the state
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in conjunction with the managers of the corporations.
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So you have the same people on both sides of the table running the thing,
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and you're treating it as if it was two separate things when it is not.
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The managerial class claims the right to rule by virtue of technocratic expertise,
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but expertise, unlike title or wealth, is not hereditary.
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You can't pass down expertise.
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If a father or something builds a huge corporation or builds a huge business
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in the old days, He said, let's just say he built a business and let's not even call it a corporation.
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And the business consists of buildings and money and so forth and goods and so forth.
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He can take all those buildings and money and goods and wealth and hand them on to his son.
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His son can inherit all that wealth.
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But if a managerial body is running the thing, actually has all the power,
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and knows what's going on, and the corporation is too big for one man to actually
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understand and run, he can't pass that on to his son.
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That expertise is something that the son doesn't get by just being born.
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You have to be part of the managerial class, and you have to have it.
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And how do you get to be part of that managerial class? Part of it,
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of course, is to get an education along those managerial lines,
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but there's more, as we'll see.
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There are tests that you have to pass, tests among the managerial class.
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The managerial class claims the right to rule by virtue of technocratic expertise, again.
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Expertise, unlike Tyler Wealth, is not hereditary, as I've said.
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Jamie Dimon's heirs have no greater claim to the chairmanship of J.P.
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Morgan than Hunter Biden has to the presidency when he was the son of President Biden.
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The managerial class, therefore, needs other means to define and police its boundaries.
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That is the role of ESG. It is the orthodoxy that binds the managerial class.
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Admission to the class depends on demonstrating fidelity to a set of shared
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values nestled neatly under the acronym ESG,
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climate engagement, anti-racism, and perpetual liberationism.
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These are the markers of belonging. They are inculcated early,
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hence Disney's zeal to defend the teaching of queer theory in grade school.
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The same values become mandatory in higher education, where schools build safe
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spaces as sanctuaries of orthodoxy.
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Problematic discourses are treated as heretical, and apostates are excommunicated.
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It's almost like a religion. In other words, you have to mouth the right things
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and say the right thing. you have to, in effect, be liberal and tow the liberal
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line and go down the liberal path.
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If you don't, you won't really be admitted to the managerial class,
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even if you do have the expertise of the managerial class.
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So this is one of the things that you have to pass, one of the tests that you
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have to pass to be in the managerial class.
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And once you're in it, the managerial class, you're not likely to leave it.
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Whether you believe in those things or not, you're going to pretend that you do.
30:35
The process intensifies in professional life. Advancement within the managerial
30:40
regime operates on tournament dynamics.
30:44
Success means beating rivals at each stage, rather than attaining any absolute
30:51
standard of excellence.
30:52
This form of competition does not ensure that the best man wins, only that someone does.
30:59
Moreover, behavioral economists have shown that promotion tournaments favor
31:06
ethically plastic contestants whose subsequent behavior tends to increase systemic risk.
31:14
So, in other words, you have to toe the line, you have to behave according to
31:19
the way that class behaves and so on.
31:21
If you want to win in these so-called contests of the managerial class,
31:27
if you want to be accepted as one of the movers and shakers in a big corporation
31:33
or in the government bureaucracy, either one.
31:37
Wherever tournament metrics admit subjective judgment, contestants can be denounced for wrong think.
31:43
In other words, if you start saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong things,
31:48
you're going to be criticized and you're not going to be accepted by your peers
31:53
and you're not going to get promotions and you're not going to really make it
31:57
in the managerial class.
31:59
ESG supplies the vocabulary of accusation, climate denier, sexist,
32:05
racist, heteronormative, transphobic.
32:10
As in East Germany under the Stasi, surveillance and denunciation enforce conformity,
32:17
not by argument but by fear.
32:20
The result is a tournament of virtue in which advancement depends on ideological
32:26
hygiene as much as it does on competence.
32:30
Hence, the prevailing strategy among the cognoscenti, moud the words and carry
32:37
on with business as usual.
32:39
In other words, as long as you moud all the words,
32:43
as long as you subscribe to all of the liberalism of the managerial class,
32:50
you can get on with ordinary business, but the business itself will begin to change.
32:56
So each round of the ideological filtration redefines what business means until, in 2019,
33:07
the Business Roundtable, a trade association of America's largest corporation
33:13
or largest corporate CEOs could declare that their companies would no longer
33:20
be run primarily for the benefit of shareholders.
33:24
Still, now here we come to the question, still, why ESG?
33:29
Even if we grant that the managerial class requires an orthodoxy to define itself
33:35
and enforce conformity, why this one?
33:39
You know, why this liberal one? Why liberalism?
33:42
Why climate, race, and sexual self-determination rather than some other creed?
33:47
Why don't they pick something else? The answer is that these fundamentally left
33:53
liberal commitments are uniquely compatible with managerialism. I'll say it again.
33:58
These type of commitments are uniquely compatible with managerialism.
34:04
In other words, liberalism is uniquely compatible with managerialism.
34:08
They define problems that invite technical expertise but never can be finally solved.
34:16
They are, in other words, forever projects. You can work on them forever.
34:21
They're never, ever going to be solved. And that's the kind of projects that managers love.
34:27
Something that they can constantly show that they're working on and improving
34:31
on and making progress on, but something that they never will really finally solve.
34:36
And we have a lot of that. We have windmills and we have solar panels and we
34:41
have all kinds of things that are supposed to supply an alternative form of
34:45
energy, and you can work on them forever and perfect them, and they never will.
34:49
But you can always get more of them.
34:52
Managerialism is fundamentally leftist, not because it seeks to apply Marx or
34:57
Marcuse, but because leftism understands the world as a collection of problems.
35:04
And those problems to be solved through coordinated administration.
35:09
The left defines the world as a managerial project.
35:13
And that's why the big corporations and government itself leans to the left.
35:21
So we're going to stop here and take a break. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
35:24
You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnson. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
38:01
We're back from our break, and we're talking about why big corporations and
38:06
why big government bureaucracies ultimately always seem to be leaning to the
38:12
left and why liberalism persists in most modern cultures and societies instead of something else.
38:19
And the reason is, is because we live in a managerial society in which big corporations
38:25
are no longer run by owners and, you know, owners of capital,
38:30
but they're run by managers,
38:33
people who have the expertise to run huge corporations that big.
38:37
And so our government bureaucracies run the same way that both of those societies,
38:43
big government bureaucracies, and also private managerial corporations are all
38:50
run by managers who have the expertise to run them.
38:54
And those are the same people in some cases in both groups, in both institutions.
39:02
And if they're not the same people, then there are people who are similar in
39:07
their thinking and people who are alike.
39:10
And they lean to liberalism because liberalism offers them projects that they
39:15
can work on and that they can show progress on and that they can show incremental
39:21
progress on and that they can have goals and so forth.
39:24
But these projects are endless.
39:27
They never, ever can be solved. And that's perfect for a managerial society.
39:31
And that's the direction in which they tend to lean.
39:35
And so if you join one of those societies as a manager in them,
39:39
then you have to show your managerial colors and show that you're one of the
39:45
managerial people by leaning toward those projects as well.
39:48
And so that's what's going on. That's why our societies lean to the left.
39:53
The reformist utopianism of wokeness suits management uniquely well.
40:00
From a manager's perspective, the best project is a goal toward which one can
40:05
claim to progress but never ultimately achieve.
40:09
Well, no, they don't want to be without a job, do they? It's self-perpetuating.
40:15
Exactly. You got it.
40:18
They're never without a job. It's self-perpetuating, and you never have to really
40:22
accomplish the end goal.
40:25
And when it's self-perpetuating and you can always show incremental progress
40:30
and you can always show that success is just around the corner,
40:34
what do you always need, Lynn?
40:36
You need the managers. You need more managers? More what else?
40:41
Well, you have to have growth.
40:44
In that sense. That means more what? More money. More money,
40:49
exactly. You're always asking for more money.
40:51
And if you have a staff of people, you're always asking for more what?
40:56
More staff, right? Yeah. So you're in a position to constantly need more workers
41:03
for yourself, more staff for yourself, more people.
41:07
In other words, the situation you're in is going to grow under liberal projects.
41:15
It's not going to grow under projects that are certain and that are solved.
41:20
In fact, if you solve something, somebody's going to ask you,
41:23
well, why do you need all these people anymore since your project has been solved?
41:27
That's right. Exactly.
41:30
And any group of people, when you have a group of people being paid by the government
41:37
or by the public or by someone else, it's not coming out of their pocket.
41:42
So they measure their success by growth in staff.
41:46
Hey, I got a bigger staff than you do, and so on. And then they get to be head
41:50
of that staff or higher up or whatever, manager of the manager or manager of
41:55
the manager of the manager and so on.
41:57
They'll think of titles and so on and it gets bigger and bigger and more complex
42:02
and pretty soon only certain people know even what's going on.
42:05
Oh, that's very true. And nothing can be done unless it's...
42:11
No, I can, looking back, I can't look back much further than the John Kennedy's
42:19
administration when they brought in the, what did they call it?
42:24
The dream, not the dream team, the experts.
42:28
Yeah, all the experts they brought in from industry. Yeah, into government.
42:32
Into government, exactly.
42:34
And they tried to, you know, started running the government under this managerial type of thing.
42:42
As far as I can see it. Exactly. And they started measuring right away, didn't they?
42:46
Oh, yeah. In the Vietnam War, what did they do? They started measuring by body
42:49
counts. Right. Measuring and so forth.
42:52
And they could go on forever, as long as there was enough bodies.
42:57
Oh, right. And then what happened? It trickled down to the point where they made up the body count.
43:04
Got to have so many today. It's got to be more than yesterday.
43:09
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. At the time, we didn't understand what was going on. No.
43:14
Reading this now, you can look back and see exactly what was going on and why it was being lost.
43:19
Why the Vietnam War was being lost, because it was never intended,
43:22
because these people might not
43:24
even realize in their operations that they really never intended to win.
43:30
I mean, even if they did intend to win in a certain way, personally,
43:36
each one, they didn't operate that together.
43:39
They didn't operate that way. But if the war ended.
43:43
They'd be without a job. Exactly. I mean, so they operated like they always
43:48
operate as a managerial class on things that they constantly can keep on measuring
43:54
but never run out of measurements for. Right.
43:59
So here it goes. It says, the campaign against climate change is an obvious example.
44:05
Progress can be shown in cutting emissions or accumulating carbon credits,
44:10
planting forests, trading offsets without ever resolving the supposed problem.
44:16
The reason you can't really resolve the supposed problem, because carbon on
44:20
the earth is really not the problem they say it is in the first place.
44:26
Because the earth's atmosphere will only hold so much carbon. It gets saturated.
44:31
It's like water will only hold so much salt. You know, take a glass of water
44:34
and start putting salt in it. At first, the water stays clear.
44:38
The salt is dissolved completely, and the water is clear, and you don't see
44:43
anything at the bottom of the glass.
44:45
But if you keep adding salt, eventually the water gets cloudy,
44:49
and then after getting cloudy, you see salt at the bottom of the glass.
44:52
The salt precipitates out because the water won't hold anymore.
44:56
Well, the earth's atmosphere is the same way with respect to carbon.
45:00
After so much carbon gets into the air, it won't hold anymore.
45:04
So the carbon precipitates back out into the ocean or elsewhere and is absorbed
45:09
by the earth and eventually goes down, you know, into the, into the earth and
45:13
so forth into the, yeah, to the.
45:16
Depths and so on, and eventually it'll come back up on the other side again
45:20
in volcanic action and so forth. And there's a cycle.
45:23
And the carbon, you know, can only get so much in the air in the first place.
45:28
And our carbon hasn't actually, you know, reached that point.
45:32
It's already, there's as much carbon in the air as there ever is going to be.
45:36
And so this whole thing is nonsense.
45:39
I mean, the more you work on it, and the more you can show that you're making
45:43
incremental progress, But you
45:45
never really make the progress to actually change the climate that much.
45:49
And you can fool around experimenting and doing things like this forever.
45:52
And so climate change is perfect for the managerial society to work on.
45:57
And so they take to it, you know, sort of like a beaver takes to a dam or a tree.
46:03
Yeah, it's a self-perpetuating thing. Right.
46:07
So progress can be shown in cutting emissions or accumulating carbon credits,
46:12
planning forests, trading offsets, without ever resolving the supposed problem.
46:17
Each success justifies the deeper commitment of resources to the managerial project.
46:23
That means, you know, more goods, more money, more staff, more everything.
46:27
And this is what we have been doing for years. Have we made any real progress? No.
46:33
Not really. More bureaucrats to set the goals, more technocrats to measure them,
46:38
and the public is constantly reassured.
46:40
And if you talk to people and try to tell them different, they'll tell you,
46:44
follow the science or ask the people that know.
46:47
And when somebody says something like, follow the science, you know they don't
46:51
know what they're talking about.
46:52
I mean, they're nice people and so forth, and they think they do.
46:55
But there's no such thing as the science.
46:58
There never was. You know, science goes every direction, every which way.
47:04
Scientists and real science challenge each other on every little thing and all
47:07
the time, everywhere. There's no such thing as the science.
47:11
You never know what a discovery might prove. It might prove the guy that thinks
47:15
he's right is wrong. and the guy that everybody thinks is wrong is right and
47:18
so forth, and then it might change again tomorrow.
47:21
So there's no such thing as the science. Right. But you get all of these from
47:26
the managerial society.
47:27
They filter all these things into society for people to use.
47:31
Hey, follow the science.
47:33
Follow the people that know, as if these people know.
47:36
Well, that's what you go to an education for. Exactly. So you know that.
47:40
Exactly. They're the expertise. They're the experts. Yeah, right. Right. So.
47:45
There's another self-perpetuating. So they can always show progress in more
47:49
funding, hiring, and training.
47:51
But as the summer of Floyd demonstrated, the work of anti-racism,
47:55
for example, that's a great thing to work on because it's never done.
47:59
You can always show that there's racism. You can cure racism entirely,
48:03
and you can still go around saying there's still too much racism.
48:06
And how are you going to prove otherwise?
48:08
You can interpret everything as racism. Aren't we doing that? Yeah.
48:13
Likewise, gay and trans issues fit squarely within the managerial mandate.
48:18
They are projects of personal liberation, first from social strictures,
48:23
that is, gay marriage, then from nature itself, transsexuality.
48:28
Ultimately, the goal is to liberate mankind from, in the words of the United
48:32
States Declaration of Independence, the laws of nature and of nature's God.
48:38
Silicon Valley promises transhumanism. And the World Economic Forum of Yuval
48:43
Harari asks, why should we die at all?
48:46
I mean, here's another project they can work on, making us live forever.
48:50
But if we lived forever, everybody couldn't fit on this earth,
48:54
right? Remember the movie we saw, the science fiction movie, In Time?
48:58
It would mean you got to have some kind of a rigged system where a bunch of
49:01
people die so that a few people can live forever because you just couldn't have
49:06
everybody living forever.
49:07
Otherwise the world would be so full of people you couldn't support them all.
49:11
So, I mean, all of those kinds of things are projects that you can work on forever,
49:15
spend money on forever, and everybody will be behind them.
49:19
And if you go against them, can you imagine going against a project to make people live longer?
49:27
Oh, are you some kind of a cruel guy and everything, not spending money to help people live longer?
49:32
You know, again, see how easily it is to support the liberal projects?
49:37
They're always stated in such a way that they sound so good that anybody would
49:42
be, you know, a cruel person, you know, some kind of a, you know,
49:48
backwards person and so forth to oppose them.
49:50
So they're perfect. That's why they're liberal.
49:53
That's why the managerial society picks liberal projects, because they all sound so good.
49:59
Earlier phases of managerialism, although not explicitly leftists,
50:05
always gravitated toward projects that enlarged the scope of technocratic control.
50:10
The Cold War, the War on Poverty, and who could be opposed to the Cold War against the Soviet Union?
50:17
The War on Poverty, who could be opposed to a War on Poverty?
50:20
The Great Society, remember that, the welfare state?
50:24
War itself has become the managerial enterprise par excellence.
50:29
Serving the ultimate universal yet unattainable goal of security. You can never be secure.
50:35
You can go on and on forever trying to be secure. It's also a way to depopulize population.
50:44
Can't get the word out. It's also a way of controlling the number of people we have.
50:51
And you can't deny that's what they partially want to do.
50:57
Security against bad guys, as we saw after 9-11.
51:01
Against bad germs, as we saw in the response to COVID.
51:04
And look what they did in COVID, you know, 19, how much control they exerted over us.
51:09
That was all managerial. Well, people were saying, listen to the science. Exactly.
51:16
Each crisis becomes a new rationale for expert rule.
51:20
ESG represents the merger of these tenancies. It is a vast public-private partnership.
51:26
Dedicated to solving every social problem as it arises.
51:30
It is, in effect, a guaranteed employment plan for the front row kids.
51:37
ESG is the perpetual motion machine of the managerial elite.
51:41
There will always be managers in a functional sense, agents,
51:45
just as there will always be elites, those who rule.
51:48
But we have reached the point where it is impossible to imagine the managerial
51:53
elite as anything but leptis in orientation.
51:57
ESG is its class code. Were that code to change, the class itself would cease
52:02
to exist, so they will defend it to the death.
52:05
There be right-wing managerialism? You might imagine a technocratic police state,
52:10
a law-and-order bureaucracy with surveillance and guns, but pretty soon you
52:14
are imagining a tyranny, not managerialism.
52:17
That is because right-wing managerialism is incoherent.
52:21
Light-wing rule is justified not by problem-solving, but by hierarchy and transcendence,
52:28
by a moral order that commands allegiance, not by a class of experts promising
52:33
to make life incrementally better forever.
52:37
Historically, that moral order has found its expression in monarchy,
52:42
the single ruler, who as steward and friend of his people stood for authority ordained by God.
52:48
The American founders shared that vision, though they doubted that any one man could embody it.
52:54
They therefore designed a system that allowed communities to orient themselves
52:58
toward God as they understood him.
53:00
As the moral compass of successive generations drifted from that orientation,
53:06
they charted their course for perpetual social improvement instead,
53:10
and managerialism became America's substitute for religion.
53:15
In other words, when you don't have a real religion, you have a substitute,
53:21
a false religion, and that's what we have, and it's managerialism,
53:24
and it's leftism, and it's liberalism, and that's what we have instead.
53:28
And if you want to oppose it, you need to stop and get your feet back on the
53:32
ground and start understanding that you have to look back to God.
53:38
And if it cannot be claimed by
53:42
the right, then only the left can circulate within the managerial regime.
53:46
ESG thus serves as both creed and barrier, ensuring the sclerosis of our elite.
53:52
In other words, our society will get worse and worse and worse.
53:56
Nothing can go on like this forever because we will get top-heavy and eventually
54:01
topple over. Too much resources, too much will be used in this endless attempt
54:08
to make a utopia on Earth.
54:11
Nor will any of the familiar remedies cure it. The prototypical leftist situation,
54:16
more government intervention, merely expands managerial power through the administrative state.
54:22
But so too does the typical libertarian solution of getting government out of
54:28
business, for that solution only implies unfettered managerial power in the corporate form.
54:34
Nationalization and deregulation alike have been instruments of managerial consolidation,
54:39
And that's what conservatives have to understand, that they can't look at corporations
54:45
today as somehow beneficent and on their side.
54:50
And of course, they can't look at big government bureaucracies that way either.
54:54
We have to use different tactics, and hopefully we have an administration that
54:59
is starting to see that, and maybe other people that are starting to see that,
55:03
especially these articles in this magazine.
55:05
At any rate, we're going to have to stop here. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
55:11
Do our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
55:14
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray.
55:17
And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God,
55:21
thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruinous souls.
55:27
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic
55:32
Spirit Radio. If you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
55:38
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