Walking, Wildfires and Managerial Control
Canada has once again become the global epicentre of managerial tyranny. Its time to do some explaining and pierce through the narratives to understand at a deeper level what is going on.
They are at it again. This time its not about saving you from a deadly virus. No, we are saving forests, homes, the logging industry, and the quality of the air you breathe from the impending threat of forest fires. By the time I write this, it may have rained in the Maritimes and the threat may have passed. But that is irrelevant to what has to be said here. We need to understand the nature of what is happening and why, mostly just so we can keep our wits about us and not be seduced by the narratives that are swirling around. This is not about “culture.” It also isn’t about your “rights” or “freedoms” either. Believe it or not, this is not about the impending threat of forest fires. It is not until you can understand what is actually happening that you will be able to retain your own thoughts and know what is the best course of action personally and politically.
For those that are not aware, last week Nova Scotia banned all hiking, fishing, camping and the use of ATV’s in wooded areas with violators facing fines of up to $25,000. They set up tip line so that you could report your friends and neighbours to the police. The typical reaction of many is to emphasize that this authoritarian and a violation of their “rights” and/or “freedoms.” “I should be free to walk in the woods whenever I want! How dare the government take away my rights in this way!” Or something like that. But this is not really a battle between the rights and freedoms of the autonomous individual vs. an oppressive, draconian, authoritarian state.
Yes, the state is draconian and authoritarian. But the problem is that the atomized individual who wants to champion his personal autonomy and freedom is really the precursor to the the kind of mass society run by a managerial administrative state. Real, well functioning, tightly knit communities must be undermined and broken down in the process of creating the mass society. Members of these communities must be peeled away with promises of greater freedom, choice and personal autonomy. Live where you want, have the friends you want, the career of your choice, marry whom you like, believe what you want and make your own choices. But once they are broken free from the community, they then must form their own identities and thus become vulnerable to the propagandist and the advertiser, who, while giving them the sense of their own personal autonomy, reconstitute them into the new mass society where they are now ready to participate in the mass market and mass democracy and be controlled through propaganda. If you are interested, I go into much greater depth in this piece, part of my eight article series on propaganda:
While places like Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland may retain more vestiges of real organic community than some others in Canada, they are still, by and large these days, very much part of mass society. They participate in the mass economy, in mass politics and are influenced by mass media. Why is it important to mention this? Because one of the arguments being made in support of these bans on hiking in the woods is that it is part of their local culture, as was argued in the Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s national newspapers, a mass media outlet.
The thing about real, living, organic communities is that they don’t generally have to impose heavy handed $25,000 fines in order to get you to do things. If not walking in the woods was the traditional communal response, you wouldn’t need fines to enforce such behavious. It would just be the thing everybody just did. There might be talk in the local coffee shop about how dry everything is. People might wax eloquently about how much they are looking forward to going back into the woods again after it rains some. But everyone would just naturally not go hiking.
But this is not what is happening. Apparently people don’t “just know” that its not ok to walk in the woods when it is dry. [n.b. It’s perfectly fine to walk, camp, fish, and hike in the woods when they are dry. I have been doing so for years. Never started a forest fire. Never got into trouble and needed firefighters to come rescue me. Why? Because I was taught by my grandfather how to conduct myself in the woods] Instead, there has been a series of escalating bureaucratic solutions, imposed uniformly across multiple provincial jurisdictions accompanied by propaganda about people banding together to protect the forests, homes and livelihoods of the people of New Brunswick. People buy into the propaganda because in a mass society where community relationships are frayed to the breaking point, they like the feeling that they are banding together and are part of something larger that ties them together. But it is a simulacrum of community, evoking the feelings of togetherness and an organic connection with other people, but without its reality. Your relationship is with the propagandist who then evokes some sense of connection within you to something larger. But it’s not real. You want it to be real because of the deep alienation mass society creates, but sadly it is not.
Propaganda, though, functions as part of the larger technocratic managerial state. This response by the provincial governments of the Maritime provinces is a textbook managerial response, especially in the post-Covid era. There are two main elements that are important for the reader to grasp in this governmental response. First is the propaganda element, playing on your desire to be connected to a community and doing your part for the greater good of society. Second is the importance of “crisis management” as a the impetus for exerting managerial control over society and its value in training you for obedience to the dictates of the managerial class. The “crisis” creates a perfect condition for managerialism to do what it does.
The first thing we must understand about managerialism is that results don’t matter. It does not matter if they actually stop the spread of Covid or prevent deaths or whatnot. There is always the imagined unknown hypothetical, “Imagine how bad it would have been had we done nothing?” The threat is so important, so dire, that we must do something. It is this “doing something” that is the key element. Technocratic managerialism is first and foremost about process, not results. It is about the need to do something. It is about imposing restrictions and regulations that are supposed to prevent some dire outcome and not whether they actually produce the intended results. In fact, it is better if they don’t.
Managerialism is an advanced form of what used to be called “magic.” Jacques Ellul says it this way:
“In the spiritual realm, magic displays all the characteristics of a technique. It is a mediator between man and “the higher powers,” just as other techniques mediate between man and matter. It leads to efficacy because it subordinates the power of the gods to men, and it secures a predetermined result. It affirms human power in that it seeks to subordinate the gods to men, just as technique serves to cause nature to obey.”
Managerialism is largely the application of technical thinking applied to all the problems of society. In every instance where society faces some difficulty there is an expectation that the situation can be understood scientifically, broken down, abstracted, analyzed and understood. Once grasped in this way, a plan can then be developed to address the hurdle. But because many of these issues are quite sizable, complex, difficult to understand and then run into basic realities of human nature — i.e. our flawed, sinful selves — an emphasis develops on process over results. In theory the administrators want to solve problems. But the dark secret is that if they do actually eliminate certain problems for good, then there would be no more need for technocratic managers to administer solutions for the greater good of society. That aside, how does one know that one has actually solved the problem? Hence the focus on process.
All of us who have worked in an institutional context know about “good process.” If we focus on the process, doing the analytical work, getting buy-in and input from stakeholders and so forth, that magically a good result will somehow come about. When have you ever heard anyone in any administrative context tell you that they don’t care if the process is a total shit show, as long they get the results. It never happens. It’s always about process over results. Good process leads magically to good results. This is a foundational belief of technocratic managerialism.
“… technique is a cloak for man, a kind of cosmic vestment. In his conflict with matter, in his struggle to survive, man interposes an intermediary agency between himself and his environment, and this agency has a twofold function. Its a means of protection and defense: alone man is too weak to defend himself. It is also a means of assimilation: through technique man is able to utilize to his profit powers that are alien or hostile. He is able to manipulate his surroundings so that they are no longer merely his surroundings but become a factor of equilibrium and profit to him. Thus as a result, man transforms his adversaries into allies.
These characteristics of material technique correspond perfectly to the characteristics of magical technique. There, also, man is in conflict with external forces, with the world of mystery, spiritual powers, and mystical currents. But there, too, man erects a barrier around himself, for he would not know how to defend himself by his own unaided intellect. He uses any means that will serve him both for defense and for adjustment. He turns to his own profit the hostile powers, which are obliged to obey him by virtue of his magical formulas.”
And so all of society must be enlisted to properly enact the spell that will keep the dreaded wildfires at bay. If we don’t get 100% participation, the spell cannot possibly work. The penalties must be harsh, because people need to know how serious it is to anger the gods of protection in this way. But how do we judge success?
“Magical efficiency is not always to be measured by a clear material result such as making the rain fall, but may have to do with some purely spiritual phenomena.”
We saw this with Covid. When it was pointed out how the virus was not as deadly as first thought, the reason for this is attributed to the policies enacted by the administrative state. And even if there are flaws to be found in the policies, this is merely an excuse to go back and re-examine the policies so as to better improve them for next time. Every crisis is a laboratory where the experts can study the effectiveness of their “crisis management” tools. Thus they need the crisis. The dry forests are a good thing, because it allows them to test the current policies. If there is still forest fires, then it will be both an excuse to ratchet up the levels of control and sanction, while also trumpeting the success of the policies because everyone knows that things would have been much worse otherwise. Even if there is a massive burn event, this too would demonstrate the seriousness with which we need to approach this issue, lending credence to ever more restrictive policies and draconian penalties. They are magicians refining their spells to keep the forces of nature at bay, keeping society safe from danger.
The reader must understand that as long as technocratic managerialism is the predominant medium of governance in our society, these kinds of responses are not going away. They have, in truth, been building over time, slowly being refined such that they are becoming now a primary means of governing society as it confronts a growing number of problems. If no problems can be found organically, they will be manufactured. Many of the problems that exist today are the result of the previous plans and policies of the administrative state. This does not discredit them, but shows the urgency for them to “get it right” the next time.
So what should we do in response?
The first thing we should be doing is resisting the simplistic reaction that this an issue of personal liberty and autonomy vs state overreach. As we discussed above, the atomized individual who insists on his own personal autonomy is the exact kind of person that the administrative state wants and needs. In fact, such a person is a necessary precursor for mass society and the administrative state. Thus, the real opposition should be thought of in terms of small tightly knit communities, ideally with deep unchosen bonds. In lieu of those unchosen bonds, that deep connection can be forged through something akin to proper Christian formation called “discipleship” or “catechesis.” You might also compare it to the kind of formation process that would happen to a sports team during fall camp or during boot camp in the military. The key opposition is not the individual vs. the state, but, rather, the community vs. the state.
Tight knit communities form a bulwark against propaganda and massification. They also supply support in resistance: materially, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Communities provide a buffer against propaganda. Why is it that churches often resisted Covid mandates? Because the integrity of the community allowed its members to retain their own thoughts, leading to them question the things they were being told by the state, allowing them to form their own thoughts in response. This is your first act of resistance: retain your own thoughts. The best way to do that is to be part of a real world organic community. Online “communities” tend to be oriented to the isolated individual and are generally re-integrating him into some counter propaganda to that of the state media machine. He does not really retain his thoughts. He just has the simulacrum of free thought.
Perhaps you are thinking that this might be your call to get involved in party politics at the local, provincial or federal level. Or maybe become part of some activist group or lobbying firm or some such. This is not a terrible idea, but the problem with this is that you become a co-opted part of the system in the process. As Carl Schmitt notes in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, the bourgeoisie ideal is the peaceful agreement, the prosperous business arrangement that benefits everyone. All of the talking and negotiating that comes with democratic institutions becomes a monstrosity of cowardly intellectualism, he argues. In the struggle against the ruling administrative elite, the malformed stepchild of the bourgeoisie, there is no greater danger, says Schmitt, than in participation in parliamentary business. Engaging the system to bring about change and reform ordinarily ends with the wearing down of your enthusiasm, killing all of the instincts that produce a moral decision to act.
“For the proletariat, the only danger is that it might lose its weapons through parliamentary democracy and allow itself to be paralyzed.”
Parallelism may not be sexy, but building and strengthening real community, especially within the churches is vital for what lies in front of us.
The problem that we face when talking about working towards a circulation of elites, replacing our current crop of terrible administrative state managers, is that unlike the leadership classes of the past, this current one derives a significant part of its power from the structures of power themselves. In the past, when the administration of the affairs of the people was very person dependent, you could replace the people and bring in something new even if the structures remained somewhat the same. The systems of administrative management today are different in that they are designed to be person invariant, to eliminate the variability of quality and morality of the person from the problem of governance. This means that merely pushing aside one batch of managers to shuffle in a new batch will not change the overall character of the way things are done. All technocratic management is technocratic management.
What this means is that the system of managerialism must be overthrown along with the managers. This would mean the end of modernity as we know it. I am no revolutionary, in large part because I do not believe that anyone can promise you that if you sweep aside the current order, that some better, utopian future will emerge in the aftermath.
And this leads to my final point. I agree wholeheartedly with my friend
that those of us who write about the current political moment need to be very careful about what we say and take responsibility for the actions we advocate.
Too many would goad you into doing something rash. You need to assess your willingness for risk tolerance. Can you endure a $25,000 fine? Will there be protection and cover for you? On the right there are very little protections for you. Few soft landings. More likely they will make an example of you like they did the Coutts Four. Is that what you want? Be judicious and careful. Strengthen community. Strengthen your own position. But don’t advocate anything that you are not willing to back up yourself. Don’t push others to do something rash and pay a price they cannot afford to pay. While we wait and prepare for the right time, the best thing you can do is to do all in your power to retain your own thoughts, build and strengthen community, and make your own position more resilient and robust.
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