Oligarchs vs Administrators
Many like to entertain theories about who is pulling the strings behind the scenes. While interesting to follow, they ignore much of how power is instantiated today. The answers are much more mundane.
With the recent assassination attempt of former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — which, according to Google, may not have even happened —
and the recent removal of President Joe Biden as the presidential candidate for the Democrats, has led to a lot of speculations about who was behind these events, why now, and what did they want to accomplish? There are conspiracies about the “billionaire oligarchs” making power plays behind the scenes. People what to know who is pulling the strings. It is obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that Joe Biden is not running the show, so it begs the question, “who is in charge?”
Once you are immersed in the online right, there is no shortage of villains to be found. People are identified. Certain religious and ethnic groups get pointed to again and again. We like the idea of some master manipulator behind the scenes, pulling the strings. Or it is some conspiracy cooked up by a shadowy organization. The World Economic Forum. The Masons. The Illuminati.
These theories make the things we see much more understandable to us. The idea of powerful people behind the scenes, out of sight, pulling the strings just makes sense. Plus, it give us lots to talk about. And, when the power structures seem stacked against you unfairly, being able to personalize the enemy allows you to focus your anger, gives you someone to blame, someone who can fill the role of the scapegoat. It makes an unjust situation a little more bearable knowing that there is someone responsible for your misery, for the troubles in society.
But there are difficulties with this approach, and we will get into them shortly. First, though, we must acknowledge that men and women with billions of dollars do wield influence. They do try to influence events. And they can make things happen. It is possible that some oligarch tried to get Donald Trump assassinated. Likewise, it is entirely plausible that some mover and shaker picked up the phone, had a conversation with someone, and just like that Joe Biden is done as president.
Rich, powerful people can get things done and make things happen. This is one of the perks of being wealthy and having influence. But there are limits to the direct use of power in this way. Likewise, there are limits to the kind of influence a shadowy organization like the Illuminati could potentially exert. Their influence is not insignificant and if used wisely and applied smartly, it can be done so to great effect. But the limit to this kind of power and manipulation is the problem of scale.
Administrating power at scale over space and time is a problem. It is a problem which has been faced by every government, business and empire as they grow in size and complexity. There comes a point in the size of any organizational entity where you are simply no longer able to exert direct control of everything. In times past, this would mean surrounding yourself with trusted associates who could be relied upon to carry out your will as a leader. This is why the role of ambassador was so important in times past. This is also why “fiduciary duties” are taken very seriously when someone represents your interests in a professional capacity. They are your presence, your representative, there to act not just in your best interests, but at your direct command, even when they as a representative might disagree with you. In the military, the chain of command demands the careful carrying out of orders from top to bottom, especially in the heat of battle. Officers not following their orders as stated was a contributing factor to Napoleon losing the Battle of Waterloo. So, yes, powerful people can wield direct influence. But they are dependent upon their people and they are limited by scale.
Because billionaire oligarchs are fun to talk about and they have been known in the past to take direct action to influence events, discussing the possibility that someone wanted Donald Trump or Joe Biden removed and was able to make that happen is not beyond the realm of possibility. And because these forms of the direct use of power are fairly easy for a wide segment of the population, and the figures who might potentially be wielding the power are identifiable, either as individuals or as a group, we tend to naturally gravitate to them to explain for ourselves what is happening. Everything becomes a conspiracy by shadowy actors or groups. Even if we can’t see them, they must be there. But these explanations run into the same problems that the industrialists and billionaire oligarchs themselves ran into as they began to grow their wealth and power, that of scale. It was in the solving of this problem, though, that they were eventually sidelined as the true power. They haven’t been eliminated, and they will continue to plot and scheme. They will be able to exercise direct action on events. They will be interesting to follow and it will still be fun to make theories about them, but they are not now the main holders and wielders of power.
As the bourgeoisie merchant class grew in power and wealth, as their enterprises expanded, they eventually reached a point where those who owned the businesses could no longer run them by themselves at scale. So they hired men with the skills and abilities to manage things, to do so on their behalf. These men, wielded power in a different way than the business owners. The owners were very much command and control, working through hierarchies. The new specialists were a different breed. They didn’t own things. They were being hired by others. Their value came in their ability to manage complex enterprises at scale. They did so primarily through policy and systemic control. They broke down organizations, work habits, information and materials control. They did time and motion studies. They improved efficiency. They improved quality. They developed consistent outcomes. They standardized things. They developed policies and procedures. They allowed power and money to be accumulated at scales heretofore unimagined. The business owners raked in the money and let the managers manage.
Soon, the lessons learned in business were being applied to the government. Everything began to be centralized, standardized and placed under unified policy frameworks. The one best way to do everything was sought after. In every area of government, the administration of the people’s business would no longer be about politics, rather there would be a profession bureaucracy filled with expert managers whose sole aim would be to find and impose the best practices for everything from farm management, to teaching, to tax collection, to health policy and so forth. Business and government worked hand in hand to build the infrastructure for the modern world. Utilities. Roads. Shipping. Trade. Education. Training. The rules of economic engagement and trade were increasingly standardized. Currency. Taxation. Everything was brought together to build the modern political economy at a scale that is impossible for anyone to grasp on their own. It is a grand network of professional administrators.
Over time, power shifted from those who possessed the money and owned the businesses — which were increasingly not directly owned by anyone anyways, but rather by shareholders — to those who managed the businesses as well as those who managed the affairs of the people on behalf of the elected politicians. This is the essence of James Burnham’s thesis in The Managerial Revolution. His understanding is reinforced by authors like Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society and The Political Illusion or by someone like Sam Francis in Leviathan and Its Enemies. The administrators of our complex society, those men, and now women, who specialize in managing things, developing policies and best practices, in standardizing things, these people, and more importantly, their systems are the true power in much of the world today. The world as we know it cannot run the way it does without these systems or without the expert managers who staff them. Any theory of political power or of why events are happening the way they are today that does not account for the process whereby the entire governing machine operates is not giving you an accurate picture.
Again, billionaire oligarchs and their political operators are not without effect. So too, shadowy secret cabals. But while the effects of these machinations are interesting to watch and good material for podcasts and articles, they ultimately don’t explain where the bulk of real power resides: with the systems, structures and people who administer the complex network that manages this global thing that is the administrative state writ large. It is a decentralized network of government agencies, corporations, non-profits, universities, think tanks, media outlets and, yes, even churches. In order for the modern world to operate at scale, there is a mountain of information that must be taken in and processed, distilled, rationalized and made meaningful for the making of decisions. The scale of this information processing apparatus is truly beyond comprehension. It is not centralized. Powerful and complex computer algorithms aid the process. But in the end, this information has to be turned into a format that enables people to make decisions. Sometimes those decisions come from “on high.” But before the people at the top receive the information they are dealing with, it has often been filtered through multiple systems and experts who have themselves already made decisions about what is important or not. Often there are multiple nodes grappling with competing interpretations of similar input data. Information is used by people within these structures to play their own power games, passing on or withholding information, or giving interpretations which aid themselves or hurt others. We often think of bureaucracies as ponderous and slow, but given the amount of information they take in and process, they are remarkably efficient.
Now that you, a budding billionaire oligarch, have received reports from your trusted advisors, magically arriving in their hands after emerging from some process of collection and filtering — which because you are a billionaire oligarch and these are merely the little people, you pay no real attention to how the information arrives neat and distilled into your hands — you now begin the process of pulling the strings behind the scenes. You issue some orders. Your henchmen in turn give those orders to others. Let’s say that you are trying do something a little more complicated than removing a sitting president. You need to get a particular land management policy enforced in a particular way across twenty states, in over 100 land management bureaus so as to damage a business rival’s ability to compete with you in a certain resource market. How do you accomplish this? You might get legislation enacted. But given the committee process and all the interest groups who will have input into the legislation, you are going to need an army of lobbyists. You will need your own experts who can battle on your behalf. You have the resources. You can put that organization together.
Then there is the implementation. How do you ensure that this gets implemented exactly the right way in all 100 offices, in all 20 states effectively so as to prevent your rival from not finding wiggle room to undermine you. How do you ensure that the orders, once passes down are interpreted and implemented consistently. Maybe you can send people out to bribe key players, but that holds certain risks. You are dealing with a distributed network of power application. Sure that order could come from on high and get applied exactly the way you want. But more likely, it will hit a number of these nodes and someone will do with it as they will and things will not come out the other end in the way you intended. You will likely have to fund watchdog groups that will keep a constant eye on key industries for you to ensure that the policies you want in place are in fact being put in place as you need them. Your activists will be working on your behalf make sure things get done the way you want them done.
In order to make this all happen, though, you have effectively set up your own bureaucracy. More likely, you will have to put in place multiple bureaucracies, all of which are aligned with your interests. What you have done at this point is you have become part of the state apparatus. You have built your own set of bureaucracies, staffed with your own experts, all to manage and implement your interests. Chances are this is not a direct hierarchy, but a loose network of organizations that are adjuncts to the broader administrative state apparatus. You, billionaire oligarch that you are, have now become a part of the state writ large. You are but another node, an influential node no doubt, in the administrative network.
So how do you ensure that things get done the way you want. Well, the simplest is the use of hard power. You monitor people closely, watching them all the time, threaten people, jail them, or kill some to send messages to others. This is more or less how it is done in China, and to some extent in Russia and other dictatorial and criminal enterprises. But it is not the only way. Much better, more enduring and less bloody, is the process of ideological alignment. The easiest path is to align yourself ideologically with the broader thrust of the entire system. As I have written elsewhere, the administrative system has a progressive bias itself towards wanting to manage society towards the solving and eliminating all of the problems which it faces. This is its telos, its purpose: the harnessing of resources and people at scale to use science and technology to overcome all of the issues which confront us as human beings. As long as you are aligned with this basic cultural mythos, you will be aligned with the broad general thrust of the system as a whole. Of course, when you are dealing with a category as broad as “human progress” there are many areas for disagreement about how best to accomplish this goal. This is where you as the billionaire oligarch can really go to work.
Likely you are a product of the same education system which is producing the upper level experts and managers. In this way, you all share the same ideological ethos and are roughly aligned. This is the secret sauce that makes the whole thing work. Ideological alignment. When all of the nodes in a distributed power structure like the administrative state are aligned ideologically, you don’t need to have your orders followed exactly. They just need to stay within an acceptable range of outcomes. Rather than using hard power, you play the long game, funding think tanks, activist groups, lobbying firms and so forth. But everyone, yourself the billionaire oligarch included, are all going in same direction. You are part of the system. You are but one player among many, just another node. An important node, but merely one node among thousands of other nodes. And you are as much influenced by the system as you influence it. Opinion, that is, the current interpretation of what it means to be “progressive,” or what it means to be using the power of the administrative system apparatus, changes not from the top down, but mimetically, that is imitatively, across the system horizontally. It works very much like social media. An influencer puts forward an idea. It is picked up by others. It might circulate beneath the collective consciousness of the whole system for a time. It might die away. But it may lay there ready until the right circumstances allow it to come forward. But once it bursts onto the scene and begins to spread, the whole network will simultaneously seem to embrace this new thing as the best way to be progressive and to be saving the world.
Perhaps the most obvious example of how this works was the changes and implementation of policy in response to SARS-CoV-2. Before this virus began to spread widely, the idea of mass quarantines was generally argued against as public policy. Yet, within a matter of weeks, without any legislation being passed, heath agencies at all levels of government from the municipal up to the national all around the globe were suddenly changing course and advising mass lockdowns, social distancing and the wearing of masks. How did this happen so quickly? And who put these people in charge?
The answer to the first question is that when ideas spread mimetically through the dispersed network of administrators, especially when driven by fear, is that changes in the accepted policy can happen quite quickly. And this type of policy was very much in line with the accepted mythos of the administrative network, that of using these systems to save humanity. This is exactly what they were built for and it shows the power of these networks, structures and systems and the people who staff them. The system did what it was supposed to do and worked exactly the way it was supposed to. Irrespective of how you feel about the SARS-CoV-2 policies and their efficacy, you have to admire the ability of the system to react quickly and in a unified manner on a global scale. As to who is in charge? Well, no one, and yet everyone. The expert managers and professionals are in charge. They run the system. This is where true power lies in the modern world.
This is a system in which all the players participate. A billionaire oligarch like George Soros wields influence by using his wealth to fund research, activist groups and organizations, lobby groups, and even political campaigns, all which are aligned with his particular understanding of the progressive agenda. His influence is the cumulative effect of all these groups working in a semi-independent fashion, some of whom may never know where the money is coming from, relying on their broad ideological alignment to instantiate an agenda which is aligned with his interests. An oligarch could hire a team of mercenaries to have someone killed or over throw a government. But a mid to upper level staffer within an intelligence or counter-intelligence agency likely has the same ability. Additionally, it is very probable that their actions will be protected by the agency in question. We see this right now with the investigations into the assassination attempt on former President Trump. It was also seen during Trump’s presidency. Administrative state agencies acted on their own to thwart his ability to govern effectively. We labeled this the “deep state.” There is nothing really “deep” about it. This is just how the administrative state operates. This dispersed network operating in government, business, non-profits, media, universities, think tanks and, yes, even churches is the governing power.
But what about the oversight of politicians? It is important to understand that politicians do not represent the people. They represent factions of experts within the grand administrative system, that is, people or groups who are looking to influence the system in one way or another. Why can’t they exercise oversight? Well, for the same reason that billionaire oligarchs are limited in how much they can influence the system directly. First of all, they spend most of their time getting elected and staying in office. If one were to want to exert oversight, you would have to dedicate yourself to the task entirely. But you can’t do it alone. You would need your own experts, people who understand the intricacies of policy and the workings of the system. Your team needs to be organized. What you end up putting together is your own bureaucracy to fight the bureaucracy of the administrative state. And as your group exerts influence, it begins to be pulled into the orbit of the system, becoming a part of the system writ large.
The other challenge that politicians have is that they are often not policy experts. So they have experts and specialists who put together position papers for them. This is true also for the billionaire oligarch. So what happens in practice is that the politicians are presenting the plans of policy experts to the people. The people, in theory, then vote on the politician or party who has the best plan. Since these plans are all prepared by experts, the voting process is the way that the experts legitimize their power. The politicians are the public face of the experts to the people. In this way, the administrative state gains legitimacy for its actions. We saw this at work clearly during SARS-CoV-2 when all of sudden these experts, rather than working behind the scenes, were suddenly behind the microphone and in front of the camera. People wondered who put them in charge, when the truth is that they have been firmly in charge for about a hundred years.
The reality of how we are governed is not unlike a Jackson Pollock painting. It is a globe spanning distributed power network. There are numerous players all at work constantly trying to influence the system. Some of them are billionaire oligarchs. Some are likely from a certain religious ethnic group favourite among conspiracy theorists. But it is just as likely that some mid to high level lifetime bureaucrat who occupied key nodes in the network during several health crisis might have more influence and power than your run of the mill oligarch. Who knows, that mid-level intelligence spook very well might have more ability to effect change on the system than a tech mogul.
A key thing to understand is that this system is not a neutral vessel that is then filled with the content, the power ambitions of “the players.” The system itself was built within a certain ideological frame so as to instantiate that set of ideas, that is, broadly speaking, the idea of “Human Progress.” All of its parts, whether it is a manufacturing business looking to produce wealth and prosperity, or it is an environmental agency looking to hold this same business accountable for its polluting, both are working, in a back and forth, push and pull, towards the realization of human progress. The managerial system is itself a technology and thus participates in the broader societal ethos of technological and scientific progress. All of these players are part of a grand societal dance which is mediated through the governing mechanisms of the administrative state writ large, each exerting what influence they can, yet none having control of the whole which operates through broad ideological agreement maintained by propaganda. Jacques Ellul makes the argument that it is in fact propaganda, that is, “The Narrative” which is our true leader. But even The Narrative is formed and distributed mimetically in the same manner that all policy is shaped and implemented. At once no one is in charge, and at the same time everyone who makes up the system is in charge. The administrative system is the true power of our era.