Realities are greater than ideas

How the world works usually matters more than what we’re trying to accomplish.

We see that in politics, with democracy as an obvious example. It wants the people to rule. But the people can’t possibly rule, certainly not in an immensely complex global society dominated by huge organizations with worldwide interests. How can they collectively know enough or find enough unity to make coherent decisions and see them through?

So they don’t. Even so, claims of democracy justify what’s done, so how things really work becomes disconnected from how they are said to work. What is called “democratic politics” thus becomes a matter of manipulating opinion and procedures. Our rulers rely on popular consent, but they can almost always secure it for their goals because the people are fragmented and individually powerless, and governing elites do their best to control the choices on offer and how they are presented.

Technological ways of doing things provide other examples of the subversion of intentions by realities. These methods attempt to use comprehensive rational organization to achieve exactly defined goals. That approach has conquered much of inanimate nature, but attempts to apply it to human society run into trouble.

Thus, liberalism wants equal freedom. Technocratic liberalism responds by trying to control all human interactions so that nobody can oppress anyone else. If people are committing microaggressions, it sets bureaucrats to go after them. The result is comprehensive tyranny.

Inclusiveness wants to bring us closer together. When made technocratic, it replaces particular connections such as family ties, which don’t include everyone, with bureaucratic or contractual arrangements that do. The result is that people think family should include whatever anyone calls family, and it shouldn’t be allowed to affect anything. Family and other natural, traditional, and informal ties lose definition and function, and people become disconnected.

The socialist impulse, recently in eclipse but now back in full force, wants to provide everyone with an environment that supports his well-being and development. In a technocracy that means comprehensive social control so that everything humanly important for anyone is effectively looked after. But the crudeness of bureaucratic ways of knowing and acting means that such a regime ends in poverty and universal dysfunction.

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