Good evening ladies and gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to visit the North and get a glimpse behind the new Iron Curtain…

As it happens, the official theme of this conference is “Freedom and its Discontents: Liberal Democracy at a Crossroads.” That is a timely theme indeed. Because I think it isn’t too extreme to say that, all around the Western world today, democracy is under assault — even that it risks extinction. It risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.

In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.

In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d'état against the democratic process.

In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary,” is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.

One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy.”

In country after country, governments are moving to desparately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.

In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.

In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.

But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.

Today, the Canadian government’s weaponization of the legal system and public institutions, including state-funded media, to impose a quasi-totalitarian progressive ideological regime, censor and jail dissenters, and effectively transform Canada into a one-party state, has, I’m afraid, won your country a real measure of global infamy. Many Canadians here may not be aware of just how your government appears from the outside, but I’m afraid it’s not a good look at all. Unfortunately I must report that when many of us look at Canada what we see is a global leader in progressive authoritarianism, out-of-control migration, growing anarcho-tyranny, foreign subversion, and ideologically-induced economic stagnation.

But then, what we might realistically call the liberal-authoritarian model is, sadly, the new normal in the West, where many hyphenated liberal-democracies seem to have concluded that they must now begin to cast off the democratic half of that historical compact.

It may seem that this hardening of control is a response to the rise of so-called populism, which has swept the Western world. Certainly many authoritarian measures have been justified, without any sense of irony, as necessary to defend “our democracy” (so-called) against the dissatisfaction of the actual demos. And it’s true that fear of populism — which is really fear of genuine democracy — does seem to consistently provoke a spiral of ham-fisted reactions by our increasingly authoritarian states. But the reality is that populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.

***

What really ails our democracies? Not populism, but a regime type inimical to the essence of democracy itself. What we are witnessing around the world is a growing struggle between an entrenched technocratic elite class bent on exercising ever greater control, and common people in revolt against the tightening grip of their distant, opaque, uncaring, and unaccountable form of political regime.

The structure of this regime can be difficult for us to recognize and describe, because it is something relatively new to us, not matching the simple political categories we are taught to think within. It is neither democratic nor autocratic; power rests neither with the people nor with some dictatorial executive. Instead, real power is diffused across faceless bureaucracies, nameless processes, and numberless so-called “non-governmental” institutions, obfuscated by a façade of empty public rituals and the meaningless rhetoric of legalism.

Within the inscrutable depths of this vast leviathan, in which any clear distinction between public and private has broken down, there teem legions of bureaucrats and bankers, multinational executives and transnational activists, academic “experts” and social engineers, consultants and human resources commissars, moralizers and media apparatchiks, lawyers and Young Global Leaders…

Yet, among this unelected and unevictable milieu, no real representatives of the people’s national interests and democratic concerns are to be found. Instead, the common people are generally viewed at best with distaste and at worst with horror. The public is considered to primarily be, in the words of America’s first Progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, “a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.”

What then is this new regime which, in so many countries around the West, has hollowed out democracy and now wears its skin?

Any political philosopher of antiquity would have recognized it immediately as a form of oligarchy: rule by the few, for the few. And indeed, were this China or the Soviet Union, we would easily recognize it as what’s been called a party-state, in which real power resides not in the formal structures of government but in a single, permanent oligarchic ruling class that permeates society and transcends the state.

However, although it is an oligarchy, this is an oligarchy of a uniquely modern kind, constituted by a very specific type of person. For ours is a managerial regime, a system of rule by managers. Today our ruling elites are drawn almost entirely from the professional managerial class, and that makes them a unique breed indeed. Because, fundamentally, the business of managers is not producing or building anything, providing any essential service, waging war, or even making any critical leadership decisions, but rather the constant manipulation and management — that is, surveillance and control — of people, information, money, and ideas.

And, as I’m here to tell you, the story of the managers’ rise to power everywhere, not only in politics but throughout every corner of our societies, is the story of the fall of liberal democracy — and perhaps of something even more precious than that as well.

***

How did we get here? The story begins with the managerial revolution, a phenomenon that followed on the heels of the industrial revolution. In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale produced by industrialization: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. Soon no major enterprise could function without employing a new kind of person: the manager, who possessed the highly technical and specialized cognitive knowledge, including new techniques of planning and procedure, necessary to make the organizational machine go.

But there’s a funny thing about managers: if left to their own devices they will multiply without end. Managers inside an organization—or a government—have a strong incentive to ensure that it continues to grow larger, more complex, and less efficient, because this means exponentially more managers must be hired to wrestle with that complexity. Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. And as new managers are hired, the relative institutional power of all managers increases. Eventually it is they, not the titular or elected leadership, who effectively control the organization, its decisions, and its strategic direction.

This process doesn’t end at the organization’s edge though. Always and everywhere, managerial power seeks to expand without limit. Even once one organization or a whole sector has been conquered by managers, new, not-yet-managed ground must be found and seized. More and more civilizational space must yield to managerial technique, even if simply to provide new employment for the expanding managerial class.

And should no ready supply of new managerial jobs already exist, it can always be reliably created out of thin air through the magic of social engineering—the top-down restructuring of existing social, moral, and economic forms. Every time any domain that was once the bottom-up business of a family, a church, or a local community is “problematized,” “deconstructed,” and turned over to “expert professionals” to be allegedly “improved” from above, a new member of the professional managerial class gets her wings — and probably a taxpayer-funded grant.

Hence the recent progressive craze for strictly micromanaging behavior and language in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which requires the wholescale restructuring of social norms and the redistribution of wealth, power, and positions. This whole ideological movement, commonly known as “Woke,” is probably best thought of primarily as a massive jobs program for the ever-expanding managerial class.

So it’s really no wonder that we now find managers absolutely everywhere, having taken over absolutely everything, like a particularly aggressive species of invasive fungus. Look at a graph of the growth of employment over the last half century in any sector — from education, to health care, to the military — and you will see the same phenomenon everywhere: an exponential explosion of administrative positions, out of all proportion to the number of people who actually do productive work.

Meanwhile, today, to use this country as an example, one in four Canadians now works for the government. And the public sector as a whole, which is the fastest growing source of employment, now accounts for between 40 to 60% of total national GDP, depending on how you calculate. Such a level of capture is hardly the result of economic demand, but of the managerial doom loop.

But the rise to hegemonic dominance of the managerial elite and their bureaucracies was not just an accidental byproduct of organizational dynamics, or a side-effect of the industrial revolution. It was always also an intentional political and philosophical project.

***

As the Enlightenment’s age of reason reached its apogee, there emerged from it an aristocratic new dream: that in time reason and science could subdue the political — that is, all contentious debate and conflict over the big questions about how we ought to organize and govern societies — and replace it with a universal peace of purely rational “scientific administration,” as Woodrow Wilson liked to call it. In this utopian future the Hobbesian state of nature would finally be conquered by human reason — as enshrined in the state.

Thus there developed a deeply misguided urge, pioneered by early progressive liberals, to try to de-risk and “depoliticize” politics by handing over decision-making to technocratic “experts.” The hope was that these experts could rationally and neutrally administer government and society from the top down, through the same kind of orderly principles and processes of “scientific management” that were first applied to the assembly line.

Doing so would, however, require ensuring the rule of what Hegel once described as the “universal class”: the all-knowing, all-beneficent cadre of expert “civil servants.” Using their superior brains to operate on universal principles derived from pure reason, this class would, he thought, be uniquely equipped to determine and act in the universal interests of society with far more accuracy and objectivity than the ignorant and irrational masses.

Managerialism, what we can say is the de facto belief system of the managerial class, has therefore from the very beginning carried with it a markedly moralistic project of political and social transformation. Especially after the horrors of the two world wars, the West’s managerial elite elevated this project to a central position in their self-conception, coming to see themselves as the saviors and guardians of all humanitarian peace and progress on earth.

As the great social critic Christopher Lasch pointed out in his prophetic 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites, the professional managerial class assumed the mantle of a new priestly class, worshipping proceduralism and their own credentialed expertise, preaching their own necessity, and believing themselves immune to moral corruption by virtue of their own enlightenment. Feeling themselves to bear a moral mandate and a mission to remake the world in their own image, the managerial elite can, in their own eyes, do no wrong.

Of course, it just so happens that the core beliefs they hold and champion all benefit their material interests. For while the ideology of liberal managerialism may present itself in the lofty language of moral values, philosophical principles, and social goods, it also conveniently serves to rationalize and justify the continual expansion of managerial power into all areas of state, economy, and culture. It also just happens to elevate the professional managerial class to a position of comfortable moral superiority over the rest of society — and in particular over the working classes.

But what are these essential beliefs of this managerial clerisy, conscious or subconscious?

They include technocratic scientism, the belief that everything, including society and human nature, can and should be fully understood and controlled through scientific and technical means. That everything consists of systems, which operate, as in a machine, on the basis of scientific laws that can be rationally derived through reason. And that those with superior scientific and technical knowledge are thus the ones best placed to understand the cause and effect governing society, and therefore to manage it.

Next, clearly a hedonistic materialism, the belief that this world is all there is, and that complete human happiness and well-being fundamentally is achievable through the fulfillment of a sufficient number of material needs and psychological desires alone.

And a utopian progressivism, the belief that a perfect society is possible through the perfect application of scientific and technical knowledge. That the machine can ultimately be optimized to run flawlessly. This state of perfection is taken to be the telos, or pre-destined end point, of human development. This creates the idea of progress, or of moving closer to this final end. History then has a teleology: it bends towards utopia. Therefore the future is necessarily always better than the past, as it is closer to utopia. History thus takes on moral valence; top-down change is progress; progress is moral; to “go backwards” is immoral.

Consequently, managerialism is inherently progressive. This progressive ideology then enshrines a strand of liberationism, the belief that individuals and society are held back from progress by the rules, restraints, relational bonds, historical communities, inherited traditions, and limiting institutions of the past, all of which are the chains of a false authority from which we must be liberated so as to move forwards to utopia.

Old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits must all be dismantled in order to ameliorate human problems, as old systems and ways of life are necessarily ignorant, flawed, and oppressive. Newer — and therefore presumably superior — scientific knowledge is assumed able to re-design, from the ground up, new systems and ways of life that will function more efficiently and morally.

This leads, in turn, to a homogenizing cosmopolitan universalism: The belief that: a) all human beings are fundamentally interchangeable units and members of a single universal community; b) that the systemic “best practices” discovered by scientific management are universally applicable in all places and for all people in all times, and that therefore the same optimal system should rationally prevail everywhere; c) that, while perhaps quaint and entertaining, any non-superficial particularity or diversity of place, culture, custom, nation, or government structure anywhere is evidence of an inefficient failure to successfully converge on the ideal managerial system; and d) that any form of localism or particularism is therefore not only inefficient and backwards but an obstacle to human progress, and so also both dangerous and immoral. Progress will always naturally entail consolidation and homogenization.

Finally, we can identify a strong urge toward abstraction and dematerialization: a belief that it is the world that ought to conform to abstract theory, not theory that must conform to the world. After all, a world of pure theory or digital datasets is a world subject to effortless change and infinite control…

Indeed, overall, at the heart of managerialism is the compulsion to control. It is the firm belief that all things need to be, must be, measured, calculated, and progressively brought under rational control — that they must be managed.

It is the idea that the world must be guided by hand, even taken apart and remade if necessary, in order to impose rational order on it, to smooth out its rough edges — to make it run with the predictable motions of a machine. And that, if there are flaws and miseries in the world, this is evidence of a insufficiency of power over it by those with the right expert knowledge — with the right technique, the right techne — to control it. Thus technocracy (rule by expert technique) is the inevitable political conclusion of this way of seeing the world — of this metaphysics, we might even say.

Moreover, we can see at once that in this worldview the existence of sovereign nations cannot be permitted to continue, given that national borders — or for that matter boundaries and distinctions of any kind — impose a constraint on the rational expansion of managerial control to the whole world.

It should be obvious, then, why managerialism is utterly incompatible with national democracy, and our regimes so obviously hostile to it. Democracy is inherently a bottom-up phenomenon. The will of the common man emerges from below, bubbling up organically from the particularities of the demos (the people) to set the direction of the nation; it is not planned or formulated from above. At its worst this democratic process can be chaotic, fickle, even dangerous. But at its best it produces a brilliant form of spontaneous order, an effortless alignment of the nation to the common good — and to common sense — through the wisdom of the crowd.

Either way it is always a bit irrational, a bit mysterious. It cannot be calculated or codified. To embrace it as a basis for governance and allow it to function properly requires a radical kind of trust: something like what the ancient Chinese sages called wu wei — the virtue of non-action, of letting go of the compulsion to grasp at control and allowing things to flow along their proper course on their own accord. Only through such a laissez-faire trust in people and their ability to produce spontaneous order on their own, through self-governance, can democracy truly function.

But of course our managerial elites cannot ever accept this. They hate and fear the idea of ever leaving anything to operate outside their surveillance, understanding, and control. Worst of all, the demos consists of human beings — who, unlike machines, are by nature inherently messy: inscrutable, willful, unpredictable, unsafe, unmanageable… To the technocrat, the mystery of the human soul is a dark well of utmost horror.

***

Which brings us to the greater threat of managerialism: not just to democracy but to our very humanity.

We already live in what can be described at best as “managed democracies,” in which our leaders attempt to actively control the public and political outcomes, primarily through the manipulation of information and narrative (hence the growing turn to mass censorship and propaganda). The common people — non-experts — are considered incapable of judging and making their own decisions freely, subject as they might be to “misinformation” and irrational emotions like “hate” and national sentiment.

But managerialism threatens to proceed — is already proceeding — much farther than merely attempting to control the political sphere. Because it sees the ultimate problem to manage as being human nature itself, managerialism is as much an anthropological project as a political one.

That project is to fit man to his machines: to automate him, to eliminate as much contingency as possible from his behavior by refashioning him into an automaton, maximally reliable and maximally pliable to rational control. It is to reduce him as much as possible to homo economicus, to a generic global unit, or to mere “undifferentiated human material” as the philosopher Renaud Camus puts it: a “smooth” and “spreadable” post-humanity. In this way is the demos to be made safe for the kabuki theater of globalized managerial “democracy.”

Alexis de Tocqueville long ago warned that Western democracy was threatened by a new form of “despotism that… has no precedent in the world and lacks a name.” He would, he said, have to “call it administrative despotism for lack of anything better.” This new administrative despotism would, he foresaw, come to rule over the public as an “immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.” Its power would be “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.” Like a twisted mother, it would seek, he said, “to keep them in perpetual childhood,” ultimately aiming “to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.”

Today the regime of convenience and despotic care he described is in full bloom, presenting the infantilization and automatization of Man as “liberation.” But as C.S. Lewis warned us, “the power of Man to make himself what he pleases” really means “the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

And unfortunately today that power only continues to grow. It is not hard for us to envision a future of total surveillance and automated control. Of behavioral nudge units and social credit systems. Of gene-engineering and state-backed eugenics and euthanasia. It’s not hard to envision because we’re much of the way there already. Smothering administrative despotism today marches hand-in-hand with technological mechanization.

“We are now brought face to face,” the philosopher Leo Strauss warned us decades ago, “with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to ‘the conquest of nature’ and in particular of human nature, what no earlier tyranny ever became: perpetual and universal.” And now here we are.

Yet it is here that we can see the challenge of managerialism for what it truly is. In viewing nature, Man, and society all as raw material that, through technical genius, it can break down and reconfigure as it pleases, managerialism reveals itself to be truly totalitarian. Indeed, the infinite desire for control — the “total” in totalitarian — is the very essence of managerialism.

Yet, despite its totalizing ambition, managerialism reflects something else as well, something different: an empty, deeply chilling nihilism. In its fear and hatred of Man as he is, as a created being in a created world, managerialism is in a true sense anti-human. Even, we might say, anti-Being.

It is no wonder that some of our elites today speak openly of replacing humanity. First, of replacing human self-governance with rule by the ultimate manager: algorithmic artificial intelligence — a cold, all-knowing calculator that appears to know no irrationality, no bias, no emotion, no humanity. And then, of replacing Man entirely with his machine, completing our own abolition in the name of a sterile new silicon genesis.

***

How do we escape this inhuman, totalitarian future? It’s true that many around the world are already in political revolt against managerialism, pitting a reassertion of democratic power against the oligarchic, with us Americans leading the way. And that battle is surely an important one.

But I think there’s a much deeper war that we must wage as well.

In truth, we the people must first ask how much of the degradation of our present age is our own responsibility, the result of our own nihilism and weakness. The foundation of democracy is self-governance: the ability and desire of a people to rule themselves, make their own decisions, self-organize, and act with vital energy and bold agency without needing to be told what to do. This is the precise opposite of managerialism, whose ideal subject is, as Tocqueville intuited, dependent, needy, consumptive, comfort-seeking, and easily frightened; a blank slate, malleable and easily manipulated — in other words, an infant incapable of self-governance.

Unfortunately, I think we must accept that too many of us in West today are far more like the latter than the former. We are a mere shadow of our forefathers, who founded our nations with a strong hand and an iron will. We must accept that, in our weakness as a people, we have not only allowed the proliferation of bureaucratic control over our lives, but have practically demanded it.

Nonetheless, in recognizing the harsh reality of our timidity, we can glimpse a passage out of managerial control.

Managerialism is fundamentally an ideology of fear. Its endless compulsion to control the world is born out of a deep fear of uncertainty and anxiety about what could happen if anything were allowed to unfold beyond the reach of managerial hands. And every managerial regime feeds on fear. The more objects of anxiety and terror it identifies, the more its powers of control seem justified in growing to confront them, a fearful public duly yielding up more and more decision-making capacity to the “expert” guardians who promise to protect them. Yet people’s sense of helplessness merely grows in proportion to their surrender to the machine in the name of certainty and security, and this helplessness only accentuates their fear.

The German war hero and anti-Nazi philosopher Ernst Jünger, who experienced totalitarianism first hand, concluded that its emergence was the product of a societal dynamic arching between two poles: at one end, the managerial Leviathan’s hunger for “imperial expansion and perfect security;” at the other, “the individual, suffering and defenseless, and in an equally perfect state of insecurity.” The desperate search for perfect security produced catastrophe.

Our collective retreat into mechanistic thinking and our subsequent surrender to total control is the product of our own cowardice and passivity. Confident and vital peoples do not submit to the temptations of totalitarian false certainty. Hence why Jünger insisted that the emergence of widespread atomization and fear in society was “a clearer omen of downfall” for a nation “than any physical danger.”

More than anything else, it is the dull stupidity of fear that truly ails our democracies today. We must be bolder. But how? The source of our fear is the same as it’s always been: fear of ill-fortune, destruction, death… So why have we grown so newly timid in the modern day?

Perhaps because modern Scientific Man has unilaterally disarmed himself. In exchange for the promise of autonomy, he liberated himself from his own inner strength, internalizing the technological in its place. He fashioned himself into a cold calculator and a scoffer of values, but now knows neither strong loves nor higher vision; neither a burning passion for lasting worldly glory nor a confident faith in the immortality of his soul… only the constant anxiety of a herd animal.

As Jünger concluded, “The panic so widely observable today is the expression of an emaciated spirit, of a passive nihilism that provokes its active counterpart.” When man handed over his divine soul he handed over his own power, and his humanity along with it. In treating ourselves as mere natural fact, we became mere raw material to be manipulated; parts to be fashioned for and by a machine.

To fully reclaim our true sovereignty — and our democratic liberty — we thus have no choice but to first recover our soul, and with it our courage and our humanity. And so, as Jünger wrote, in our frightened, managerial age, Man has been “initiated into his theological trial whether he realizes it or not.” Only by passing through this trial may we hope to emerge from mere functionality, to once more become Men with Chests. “Victory [over tyranny] comes when the assault of the ignoble is beaten back in one’s own breast,” Jünger proclaimed, and I believe this to be so. Only in victory in this battle can we hope to rise up from our fetal position as the Last Men at the end of History, cast off the heavy yoke of managerial oppression, and save humanity from ourselves.

Only then might we all hope to remain “glorious and free.”

Thank you, and goodnight.

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