From
The Ordeal of Change by Eric Hoffer, published in 1963. Amazing how pertinent Hoffer is half a century on. Across the OECD we are seeing a decline in innovation and social energy. The great middle class is fighting their political elite. In France, Britain, the US, and others, voters are turfing out the comfortable global elite and bringing in outsiders, sometimes of questionable intent, capability, or stability, whose primary attribute is that they are outsiders.
I ascribe much of this to the fact that the globalized governing elite have been so steeped in the doctrines of social justice, multiculturalism, postmodernism and critical theory - ideologies which are 1) ungrounded in reality, 2) destructive, and 3) antithetical to middle class bourgeois values, the bedrock of stability and prosperity. A governing elite enamored of credentials over accomplishments and whose staggering (and misplaced) self-regard was so surgically, and presciently, dissected by Thomas Sowell in 1996 in
The Vision of the Annoitned: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
Eric Hoffer, had a different diagnosis which I do not dismiss. He is probably correct as well.
From
The Ordeal of Change.
Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status . . . The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes . . . Obviously, a high ratio between the supervisory and the productive force spells economic inefficiency. Yet where social stability is an overriding need the economic waste involved in providing suitable positions for the educated might be an element of social efficiency.
I recall in the 1970s being struck by the volume of graduating students from the universities of Egypt. Something in the tens or hundreds of thousands each year. Under the siren song of Marxism and Socialism, however,
Nasser and
Sadat pursued a path of centrally planned development. Those thousands of university graduates were guaranteed positions in the government. Positions without responsibility, value or real compensation. "A mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status."
In the West, we have a well-founded respect for education which has become synonymous over the years with a college degree even though we retain a recognition that education and university are not the same thing. A college degree is supposed to be a certification of some minimum standard of education but it has, in may places, devolved to simply a certification of attendance. To the extent where that is true, attending college becomes one more mechanism for assuring a social class position rather than a means towards an education.
In the US after World War II and the GI Bill and then later in other OECD countries such as Canada, Australia, Britain in the 90s, there have been subsequent waves of expansion of university systems under the presumption that the more people who attend university, the more educated they will become and the more productive might the individuals become, justifying the social investment in human capital.
And morally, this has been very well intended. We do want to give as many people as possible as much opportunity to make the most of their talents , interests and capabilities as possible. Too often though, that is not what has happened. University degrees remain as out of reach for the broader population as ever. More and more people attend university but there appears to some maximum attainment level of 25-35% who have the attributes to complete university. And of that 35%, it appears that only about 10-15% actually gain education rather than just certification. The outcome is that we have some 20-25% who attend university and obtain a degree but who do not have any improvement in their capabilities, knowledge, or talent. Much like those Egyptians back in the 1970s.
Hoffer's hypothesis is that these 20% become an army of scribes clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. Their aspiration for a position in society exceeds their capacity to earn such a position, just as Nasser and Sadat were unable to develop real, productive jobs for their graduates.
It has often been stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability. . . For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them. This requires, first, an abundance of opportunities for purposeful action and self-advancement. Secondly, a wide diffusion of technical and social skills so that people will be able to work and manage their affairs with a minimum of tutelage. The scribe mentality is best neutralized by canalizing energies into purposeful and useful pursuits, and by raising the cultural level of the whole population so as to blur the dividing line between the educated and the uneducated . . . We do not know enough to suit a social pattern to the realization of all the creative potentialities inherent in a population. But we do know that a scribe-dominated society is not optimal for the full unfolding of the creative mind.
Our prosperity has enabled us to put more and more people through the process of higher education even though only a fraction gain from that process. We are producing a surplus of entitled (anointed) certificate holders seeking the compensation and status of their desires without the ability to earn it. "There is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others."
Sure sounds like what we have in the US and across the OECD. And there is an unmistakable sense that the middle class electorate are tired of the moral preening and kabuki dance of politics where the certifiably anointed go through the motions of making things better but actually making things worse. And most reprehensibly, inserting themselves and getting in the way of those with real values, abilities, and capabilities who produce the goods and services we need.
While I think that the evil corruption of social justice, multiculturalism, postmodernism and critical theory, manifested in concerns with identity (reincarnated racism and sectarianism), inequality (reincarnated socialism), hate speech and hurt feelings (reincarnated censorship and thought repression), etc. remains the primary driver, Hoffer offers a complementary causation. We have over-invested, not in education but in credentialization. People who have gone through the motions of getting an education but are actually only a surfeit of certified scribes hungering after riches, power and control over others. People, by their circumscribed cognition but unbounded appetites, are especially susceptible to the siren song of postmodernism and social justice.
Hoffer echoes that earlier observer, Alexis de Tocqueville in
Democracy in America.
After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.
Some additional thoughts, admonitions and warnings from Hoffer. The whole book is worth reading.
It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor. There may even be a certain antagonism between love of humanity and love of neighbor; a low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.
[snip]
To the intellectual the struggle for freedom is more vital than the actuality of a free society. He would rather "work, fight, talk, for liberty than have it." The fact is that up to now the free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning — from minding other people's business — and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
The intellectual craves a social order in which uncommon people perform uncommon tasks every day. He wants a society throbbing with dedication, reverence, and worship. He sees it as scandalous that the discoveries of science and the feats of heroes should have as their denouement the comfort and affluence of common folk.
[snip]
The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe's golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes. And since the tempo of the production of the literate is continually increasing, the prospect is of ever-swelling bureaucracies.
[snip]
It has been often stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability. For not only are the untalented more numerous but, since they cannot transmute their grievances into a creative effort, their disaffection will be more pronounced and explosive. Thus the most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them. For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them. This requires, first, an abundance of opportunities for purposeful action and self advancement. Secondly, a wide diffusion of technical and social skills so that people will be able to work and manage their affairs with a minimum of tutelage. The scribe mentality is best neutralized by canalizing energies into purposeful and useful pursuits, and by raising the cultural level of the whole population so as to blur the dividing line between the educated and the uneducated. If such an arrangement lacks provisions for the encouragement of the talented it yet has the merit of not interfering with them.
[snip]
One should see the dominant role of the weak in shaping man's fate not as a perversion of natural instincts and vital impulses, but as the starting point of the deviation which led man to break away from, and rise above, nature — not as degeneration but as the generation of a new order of creation.
The corruption inherent in absolute power derives from the fact that such power is never free from the tendency to turn man into a thing, and press him back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen. For the impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
[snip]
The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements. Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs often show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They become responsive to grandiose schemes, and will display unequaled steadfastness, formidable energies and a special fitness in the performance of tasks which would stump superior people. It seems paradoxical that defeat in dealing with the possible should embolden people to attempt the impossible, but a familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals that what seems a path of daring is actually an easy way out: It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. For when we fail in attaining the possible the blame is solely ours, but when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task.
By weak, he is alluding to the scribes. And think of all those scribes in Washington, legislating a redesign of 15% of the American economy under the rubric of the Affordable Care Act. A task far beyond their meager means and which failed dramatically but because their end was noble and because their reach was far beyond their grasp, such failure is justifiable to the tribe of scribes regardless of the pain and distress they have inflicted on their fellow citizens.
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