All essays published before July 2022 are considered obsolete. Kindly wait for the upcoming book.
Pareto as well as Gaetano Mosca recognized that an elite or ruling class composed of only one or a few dominant social forces is likely to represent a danger to social and political groups outside the elite… The elite of the soft managerial regime closely resembles the kind of contracted, monolithic social force that Mosca discussed. Unlike the aristocratic and bourgeois elites of the past, the soft managerial elite bases its social dominance almost entirely on the single social force of modern managerial and technical skills.
Samuel Francis, Leviathan and its Enemies, Chapter 9
In previous articles, we discussed how the Professional-Managerial class dominates society as the elite. This caste usurped capital-owners and traditional elites to dominate society. Their Establishment relies on credentialism and oversocialization to present legitimacy – thus, college degrees and state licensure are necessary tools to ascend.
A quick look at colleges now paints a grim picture. Professors have grown too powerful compared to students, with schoolwork and grading ultimately the professor’s call. Tuition refunds need effort to take, often through bureaucratic red-tape ridden work. Little choice may pop up in choosing professors, and information is scarce barring connections with those who have taken them. On the production side, seniority and tenure matter more than merit and skill in faculty pecking order. No real meritocracy exists, only brahmins lording over the department, and jannisaries fighting for the former’s scraps. Above everything, colleges and universities cater to the professional-managerial elite’s production more than deductive inquiry. Hence, “novel” knowledge from p-value hacking, faulty statistics, shoehorned assumptions, and inertia from received knowledge matters more than critiquing assumptions, reviewing papers, deduction, and objective analysis, except for Pure Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science which still see important developments. Much worse, the university’s resources are strained between catering to the professional-managerial class and promoting deductive inquiry.
This shift to the professional-managerial class’s interests has brought about Elite Overproduction, seen most pressingly in the college degree oversupply and professional jobs’ decreasing wages. The Philippines failed to escape this spiral downwards, and we shall trace how this situation happened.
A Substantial Change
The European universities began as fraternities and associations for theoretical learning. Initially, this meant medicine, law, and theology – unlike their modern professional and managerial (modern seminaries train would-be priests in both administration and academic theology) counterparts, biological, political, and theological theory pervaded these institutions. Later on, mathematics, mechanics (physics), and other fields entered the university’s purview. Their main similarity was focusing on deductive inquiry, something lost today. Even up to the 19th century, deductive inquiry pervaded all disciplines, with induction and empiricism serving to inform what assumptions and axioms to deduce from. Faraday was famous for his experimentation, but this served only as basis to develop theory – induction informing deduction. Empiricism cannot be pursued for its own sake, since man as rational animal obtains sense objects and phantasms from reality to apply subtraction (or abstraction according to Saint Thomas) and discern universals. Falsifiable hypotheses are useful in so far as they concern thinking about material reality, but beyond that, deduction, logic, and philosophy take precedence. Hence one easily refutes scientific realism, the philosophical view that scientific models accurately and objectively describe concrete reality, by pointing to two mutually contradictory models that both accurately describe reality. In nuclear physics, the shell and liquid-drop models of atomic nuclei suffice. Both contradict each other, yet have the exact same predictions regarding reality.
After World War 2, however, the university’s purpose slowly began changing. Managerialism’s rise needed a class of capable professionals, managers, and bureaucrats who had dedication and a showing of theoretical knowledge. The GI bill also subsidized numerous veterans who wanted a better life. The Boomer Truth regime codified the university’s new purpose in catering to the professional-managerial class. Hence engineering no longer relies on prudence, thinking, or originality, only applying codes, standards, and regulations. Hence Physics has stagnated for half a century, with old ways dying hard and pointless theorizing like String Theory taking over. The professional-managerial obsession with standards and best practices over prudence and thinking had also infected nominally theoretical portions of the university. We see that social science and biology students apply statistics without checking their assumptions or running diagnostics on data and results. We see that received ways matter more than originality. More pressing, journal articles have exploded in number, with only a few being of any use or contributing anything useful. Publish or perish is the game, and nonsensical results that can be justified on ad-hoc assumptions or pleading to novelty matter more than contributing anything useful to theory. This operations research method of performing basic research has captured the so-called academe, another sign of the Managerial Establishment’s stranglehold. You will see the Industrial Engineer and the empiricist academic using the same tools and running the same methods. What divides them, however, is that the former does so to help his company profit. The latter goes aimlessly, hoping for some new result that he can p-value hack.
The Managerial University
The academe’s fall coincides with the university catering more to the Professional-Managerial class. Useless degrees, like Business Administration, Marketing, Accountancy, and so on have captured part of the university’s resources and brought strain in management. Even once theory-heavy fields, like Medicine and Law, now discuss best methods, regulations, and standards over both theory and practice. Medical residency and legal internship should have been a professor’s purview, with him explaining his craft to a few students. In their audacity, however, universities now outsource this important practice. The classroom serves to dispense wanton bits of theory to keep the face of holistic, technically competent graduates. However, the fact that practicums are needed demolish the point of classes, for students should have taken their practicum under a professor instead of wasting time and sometimes even money.
The Managerial University has even forced professional-managerial ideals and roles onto on-paper theoretical subjects. In the Philippines, all bachelor-degree candidates need to take a practicum/internship course, even those taking History, Mathematics, Political Science, or whatever else theoretical field. Social science majors will take them as stewards in some government museum or library. Mathematics majors, who should be in labs like Santa Fe, or the RAND Corporation, or the Institute of Advanced Study, have to contact some Manila corporation to do their practicum. In America at least, Mathematics majors can join a research internship out of their own free will. In the Philippines, being a professor’s research assistant is a no-go for practicums. Even worse, universities now offer increasingly specialized degrees and programs. Biotechnology, biochemistry, biophysics, these should all be electives in a biology program. We will not be surprised if Mathematics further splinters into programs dedicated to Real Analysis, Complex Analysis, and so on. This development parallels the professional-managerial need for increasingly specialized roles and titles to be one cut above the rest, one position others fail to fulfill.
The professional-managerial class enticed many young people with promised wealth. However, supply and demand would see these credentials lose value over time. The college degree oversupply problem had once “prestigious” engineers, doctors, lawyers, among other professions see falling wages. In the Philippines, an entry-level engineer makes much less than what his forefathers earned. Some universities even offer BS-MS (combined bachelor’s and master’s) engineering programs to help students stand above other job candidates, all for the price of another year’s worth of tuition. Some universities even offer a straight medical school option, making six years of studies instead of eight. This oversupply problem has definitely made even a small impact if these changes have occurred. Indeed, some have noticed that the demand in working-class jobs (requiring little to no theoretical knowledge) has mismatched with the oversupply in college degrees, with one example in China:
The excess of college-educated workers has created a structural mismatch in the labor market leading to an oversupply of college graduates and a shortage of vocational and technical school graduates. It can be observed that the oversupply of college graduates has lasted about a decade. The supply of college graduates from educational system has exceeded labor demand from corporate side since 2006, exceeding the oversupply vocational and technical school graduates in 2009, and remained negative through the present. In contrast, as indicated by positive demand-supply gap, demand for vocational and technical school graduates has grown rapidly and entered a labor shortage period in 2011.
Yifan Hu, Oversupply of College Graduates? Structural Mismatch!
Managerialism has conquered the faculty and administration too. Office politics not unlike a corporate setting has set into faculties and departments. Red tape and bureaucracy dominate as department managers wish to blanket apply best practices and regulations to fields that rely on originality and prudence.
Indeed, these inefficiencies in the university make us believe that competition is due. Already, think tanks provide an alternative in producing basic research. University strain from professional-managerial catering may also incentivize think tanks to capture the teaching market in theoretical, deductive fields. The academe will see division later on, as useless fields get culled and alternative outlets increase their influence. This last point becomes relevant in the next section.
War in the Academe: Brahmins vs Optimates
Now we return to Yarvin’s BDH-OV conflict, which we touched upon in my Occupational Classes article. Yarvin himself admits that his notion of castes is rather antiquated – his notion of Optimates has in fact become his notion of Brahmins. The trust fund kid stereotype reflects this well. As such, we have used his caste system in conjunction with my Occupational Classes system to explain the Left-Right divide. No one would seriously consider culturally right Mises Institute staff to be either Optimates or Vaisyas by Yarvin’s standards – hence, we see our system as more realistic.
We may also point to Aaron Renn’s article on the Dissident Right to provide another example:
You can further group these into four buckets. The first two groups (paleocons and neoreactionaries) are political theorists and analysts. The next three groups (the alt-right, the neo-pagans, and the hard Trumpists) are about genuinely hard right politics. The manosphere and the celebrities are less political and more focused on self-improvement. And the dissident left is its own animal. The celebrities and dissident left are also basically mainstream or semi-mainstream influencers.
Except for the alt-right being a glow-op by a trust fund kid supporting intervention in Ukraine, we see a neat division between theorists and political actors – aristocrats and plebs. Paleoconservatives, Neoreactionaries, and my own addition of Paleolibertarians have been crafting theory and strategy for political actors to follow and implement. Nick Fuentes, while showing a blunt and abrasive persona, has also taught his audience the basics of political theory: Westphalian sovereignty, decentralization, the economic calculation problem, and so on. Some of his points (ie., his blanket distaste for race mixing, founded on certain assumptions about identity) can be argued against, but we are not in the business of purity spiraling. They have done excellent work in bringing right-wing thought in digestible form to a wide audience, and anyone interested in the long-term should applaud that.
A more pressing difference between Brahmins and Optimates exists. In our previous article regarding entropy, we pointed out how women and cholerics focus on accidents, while men focus on substances – entropic nature seeks stability, dynamic nature seeks completeness. We find a similar theme in the academe. Leftists academics prefer induction and empiricism – whether personal, subjective experience, or formless, aimless statistical meandering masquerading as science. Right-wing academics prefer deduction and rationality – analysis and deduction, critiquing assumptions and axioms. Hence Marxian analysis tries to shoehorn reality into their materialist dialectical framework, while Austrian analysis uses the human action axiom – human action goes towards some end (“purposeful behavior”), with consumption, production, and exchange being means toward that end (utility/satisfaction given preferences).
The Mises Institute is relevant in another way – they have recently launched an online graduate program in Austrian Economics, staffed by known faculty across America. This is simply one early example of a trend that we see starting soon: think tanks replacing the university in relevance. The RAND Corporation has a graduate program in public administration, which places focus on quantitative methods, deductive inquiry, and historical literature. More importantly, there is large emphasis on practical training on the job, with faculty supervising students in public administration efforts. Since the University has betrayed its original purpose, competition is ripe, and think tanks will be the way to go.
Elite Overproduction and Cultural Revolution in the Philippines
Indeed, the Philippines provides an important case study for the Managerial Revolution’s effects on the university and the academe. In the 1970s, as part of Democratic Revolution from the Center, Marcos established the Philippine Regulatory Commission (PRC) to oversee licensing for professionals nationwide. The PRC requires professionals for many fields to have a college degree before even thinking of taking an qualification exam. These exams have become a cult symbol, with parents and well-wishers breaking down in tears after seeing their child on the passers’ list. Lawyers, doctors, and engineers form the trinity of stable, secure, and prestigious jobs. These days, however, wages have started falling exactly because of these promises, supply now reaching into surplus.
Cultural Revolution has been taking place since universities became the go-to key for success in Manila. Academic Agent calls atomized individualism revolving around success through the university as the Boomer Truth Regime. The Boomer Truth Regime crystalized in Martial Law, as baby boomers filled universities and got better lives for themselves. They sincerely believed in Marcos’s promise, and support his son to win with only hope and sincerity instead of pragmatism. Their degeneracy was subtle, yet formed the basis of modern societal degradation as Martial Law and Democratic Revolution from the Center let them practice it. Generation X was the last to witness Managerialism’s fruits, and focus more to keep stable living then achievement. Degeneracy was a passing fad, nothing more than youth’s flames for their Zoomer children needed to live. Millennials saw the Boomers and envied, spreading social liberalism and degeneracy where they set foot as rebellion. They support Marcos’s rival for her openly degenerate policies and distaste for boomers. Zoomers, now, see polarization beset them. One side continues the millennials march leftwards, spreading degeneracy and entropy in millennial mold. The other side is a mish-mash of vaguely right-wing travelers, espousing some sort of social conservatism yet are all over the place. Most importantly, however, the Boomer Truth Regime has not lost even one step in marching through time. The PRC and CHED’s stranglehold over jobs and teaching remains. The local Managerial Establishment may grow only more powerful, even if other places’ Managerial Establishments see their fair share of enemies.
Now social liberalism and atomized individualism gain currency through university curricula and social capital. As per our suggestion last section, think tanks and alternative outlets pose the biggest potential to pose a threat. Archotropism means that Dissident Right-wingers must build new institutions and new organizations to attract peripheral populaces from the Establishment. Thus we discuss what must be done.
Epilogue: What Must Be Done
Those still young must act on the world for what it has become – not rely on idealized conceptions of what should be done. Formerly secure jobs have become meaningless not just in purpose, but in matter – low wages, long working hours, and oligopsonistic labor markets, among other factors. The academe must reclaim its rightful place as the real brokers of knowledge, and the working class its rightful place as brokers of technique. These castes should present fertile ground for up and comers. There is no middle ground when it comes to human capital – inherit a long line of technical craftsmanship and improve upon it whether in concrete or abstract reality. Do not settle for mediocrity with the professional-managerial elite. Midwits would call the word “fallow” deep and complicated just because it sounds deep and complicated for them. Never mind that it has long been in farmers’ and peasants’ vocabulary for centuries till now, yet midwits will think that farmers and peasants a thousand years ago would get confused at the word just because midwits do.
Pampanga has a burgeoning middle class, with poverty claiming 11% of Kapampangans. In time, new institutions must focus on this 11% as a powerbase. Show them how Manila’s actions have disfavored their hard work, show them how subsidies and welfare keep them poor. For now, however, recruitment from the middle and upper middle classes is top priority. Truly holistic men, both theoreticians and men of action, need to come up and stand together against Manila’s stranglehold. CHED and the PRC need to be contested, LGUs competed with, and the Kapampangan lands subtly influenced and taken over. New think tanks should serve as alternatives to Establishment power bases in urban centers, fighting and counter-signalling the Establishment itself, not just their representatives. New publishing presses should spread cheap copies of important texts and resources. To illustrate, Holy Angel University should be dead in 15 years once younger people realize that alternatives exist. This is what must be done – start fighting the Establishment by fighting its priests.
Great blog.