I was there and thoroughly enjoyed your speech. Intriguing--and also just a teensy bit terrifying. You sure did trigger some members of the managerial class in the audience, though! I enjoyed that even more than the speech! :)
One of the things I wonder about (and have written about on this platform) is the role of women---and more specifically, the feminization of western culture as women have ascended in the workforce--in promoting managerialism, or what I have described as a system of "gynocratic technoautoritarianism." (I explain this idea further here, if you are interested: https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-real-men-gone-c3b)
(!! With respect!! Borrowing your reply box Pairodocs. For what ever reason my comments box is blocked on every paid Substack subscription I hold and I've long since given up on Substack "help" to remedy the problem.)
What our favorite nom-de-plume is masterfully describing is the utopian idealism/megalomaniac narcissism and the mass "psychic infection" C.G. Jung warned against after witnessing the horrors of the 20th Century. It's a disease. The thanatotic two decade iconoclasm of the oligarchic/woke psyop screaming over the human moral reason our founding fathers fought and died to preserve in our Constitution has to be faced and conquered if the American Republic is to survive. Our Republic, our Constitution and the free citizen are the only engines of survival. "We the People" either accept the power or perish.
It is not metaphor to say that truth is light. Subscription journalism is the opportunity to rebuild the truth/fact based solutions oriented national conversation that will allow the unifying truth/fact based reality the free citizens of our Republic must participate in to regain the spiritual/cultural equilibrium capable of envisioning the prosperous human future the sterility of the psyop denies. Corny? The boarded up, abandoned, drug addled, mentally ill, tent city dwelling land of criminal chaos is filled with the walking wounded. Anyone here can list a hundred water under the bridge psyop violations of the human moral reason our Republic was built upon. It's happening!!
The tombstone proclaims virtue and social concern but the grave of the ideal is a trap filled with the hidden avarice and moral malignancy of the perps the psyop works to protect. The goal for all slavers is and has always been: The creation, and control of uneducated disposable labor and access to all natural resources for exploitation and personal profit without oversight or consequence. It's not something else.
For what it's worth, the youtube combox doesn't work for me if I'm unwittingly logged into my corporate VPN. Maybe stackoverflow is the same? Do you use a VPN?
I don't use a VPN because I don't use my phone or other mobile electronics for internet connection. I have no trouble with Youtube or other sites outside Substack. I've tried reaching Substack help without reply or concern. And, I honestly don't think the "glitch" is on my end.
Subscription journalism is the opportunity America needs to rebuild the healthy national conversation our Republic deserves. Substack is great but I'd prefer the ability to directly support journalists without the involvement of a "middle man". ---Thanks for taking a minute. :)
"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."
I believe defunding of the professional management and administrative state is a valuable and effective remedy. Since these cretins don't produce anything, they are looter leeches feeding off the returns of the productive economy. Let's just cut those MFers off. And we need to ramp up our antitrust actions and include new rules for Wall Street cross ownership and concentration of ownership.
I believe the first step in this process will be the elimination of public sector unions - the next great battle in America which could lead us towards an internal civil rebellion.
"Liberal-democracy" was always an shotgun wedding. It's an oxymoron. Democracy claims law's legitimacy emanates from the will of the people. Liberalism (in the Enlightenment sense) demands law reflect universal principles of rights unimpeachable by even democratic processes. What's amazing is that John Locke married the two ideas at all. When the priest asked for objections, Edmund Burke did stand up and start muttering, but no one listened.
300 years later, the shotgun marriage is ending in a messy divorce, and everyone is picking sides. Pick "democracy" and you're a dangerous populist who cares noting for civil or women's rights. Choose "liberalism" and you fairly rapidly veer toward authoritarianism (ala the EU).
I want to be optimistic, but I think Lyons is correct that most in the West are "infants incapable of self-governance." That begins with a collapse of personal virtue. As Aristotle says, only someone who has mastered personal self-government (virtue) is capable of the collective form (democracy). Certainly we're seeing a turn (esp men) toward harder forms of religion that require real virtue, but without real spiritual revival, that's more likely to give us Nietzschean ubermunschen than virtuous saints.
All this structure requires a large tax base to pay salaries as the managers aren't actually doing anything productive - and yet as societies adopt Managerial Bureaucracy, their birth rate plumets. They can try and import tax paying units from less developed nations, but without a filter it seems as though there are more dependents than contributors. So at some point the managerial system metastasizes to the point it collapses. Sure there is a lot of wailing and anarchy at that point, but at least there won't be mandated training and feedback questionnaires.
You never disappoint. I suggested over at Yuri's place earlier that you can't argue people out of their positions because of the power of inertia. And that it would take collapse or religious revival to break enough things loose to change the trajectory. However, since I am more Lenin than Lennon, I always ask What is to be Done. From my time in the belly of the beast (graduate degree and 30 years experience), I note that the Managerial Blob is a coalition. In my time, the dominant factions were financial and legal. With the advent of AI, you would have to add technological. So, can the forces of populism exploit the contradictions between these factions. The logical split would be between legal and the other two. Financial and technological have a unit of analysis of that is the system whereas legal operates on the individual case. Eventually the factions will clash and it is not altogether clear what the alliances will be. Financial and technological have a similar mindset but technological has the potential to decimate the other two if AI reaches its potential. We need some more thinking as to where to insert the wedge.
There’s always been tension between the “democratic” elements in our constitutional republics and the facts of executive and bureaucratic power, but with this talk you drive home why this tension is no longer sustainable. Because the High Doctrine of managerialism finally can find no room for the demos! Its projects and expertise are simply too PRECIOUS to suffer challenge.
Thus we witness the absurdity of managerial elites across the West “defending our Democracy” by … cancelling democracy.
If these elites continue to insist on *all* the planks in the High Doctrine you list, things are not going to end well. Either a slow lurch into totalitarianism, or civil war.
Really these religionists would be wiser to cut some bits from their utopian Scripture. Either cut the doctrinaire progressivism (History only moves One Way: toward Utopia) or cut the doctrinaire universalism (all human cultures are interchangeable Under Our Management) or cut some other elements. If they keep insisting on the whole Scripture, they will end in a kind of holy war—in which *they’re* the obscurantist fanatics to be defeated.
Such an irony for them. Religionists who don't understand they're religionists.
Another banger from Lyons. The warning towards the end - that the battle is largely within ourselves is useful - but I have a somewhat different prognosis.
The human spirit, massively unbalanced by over-ordering, will inevitably rebalance toward chaos. We cannot be trained away from our humanity. It's akin to the physics of nuclear supercriticality: place fissile material in close proximity and compress it beyond a certain point.
In this process the rebalancing cannot be other than an overreaction, an overcorrection. The tighter the imposed order the greater the inevitable explosion and more violent the rebalancing.
The election of Donald Trump, both times, is the primary visible aspect of that rebalancing beginning to express itself. The counterreaction of the machine - the unceasing attempts to reestablish and maintain the physically and metaphysically intolerable order - only drive us faster toward the inevitable supercritical moment.
The techno-fantasists (it is what they are) who have convinced themselves their machines and systems of control will hold are delusional. Mad scientists one and all. "AI" won't stop it. "The SIngularity" isn't coming. We may have forgotten our gods but they haven't forgotten us.
I’m reading the book Secondhand Time, the Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich. One of the interviewee’s mentions mentioned the bureaucratic apparatus is a machine capable of major maneuvering…anything for the sake of survival. Principles? Bureaucrats have no convictions, principles, or any of those metaphysical ideals. The most important thing is holding onto your seat, keeping your palms greased.
This is one of the clearest diagnoses of the managerial regime I’ve read—tracing its philosophical roots, spiritual costs, and political consequences with precision. But now we must ask: what comes next?
(NS, I know you’ve written your thoughts on parts of this in the counter-revolution piece—just adding my two cents.)
The managerial class is not just a parasite. It is a machine—a Leviathan Stack engineered to manipulate perception, atomize loyalty, and administer decline.
We cannot vote it out, because it was never voted in. It is unelected, unevictable, and transnational by design.
That means our response must be equally structural.
We must build a counter-machine.
Not just dissent. Not just elections.
We need a Quiet War Machine:
• Loyal capital stacks
• Sovereign infrastructure
• Narrative engines
• Lawfare arms
• Political operations
• Parallel institutions rooted in moral order
We are not facing mere ideology.
We are facing a regime of engineered dependency and totalizing control.
If we do not build systems that can survive, multiply, and strike—
we will continue to lose, even with the truth on our side.
“As the world becomes more mimetic it is increasingly more misleading and deceptive….If I were to believe in a world where the only things worth seeking are not to be found, a world where nothing that is available is worth having, I should share actively in its fabrication. My subjective vision and reality would quickly coalesce, bringing about the disappearance of everything worthy of desire and the creation in ever more monstrous quantities of the undesirable and insignificant.” ~~~~ Rene Girard: "Job, The Victim of His People", pp. 64.
I share Lyons’ sense that liberalism has collapsed into hollow proceduralism. What once inspired the fight for human freedom and dignity has become a sanctimonious ghost wandering the halls of its formerly great institutions. A century ago, in Weimar Germany, liberalism’s attempt to float above substantive metaphysical commitments, clinging to neutrality and normativity alone, left it vulnerable to precisely the kind of forceful seizure of sovereignty it sought to foreclose. Lyons is not wrong to resist the triumph of the technocratic elite, whose algorithms and emergency decrees govern a demos increasingly treated not as citizens to be served but as datasets to be managed. His claim that the technocratic managerial state is “anti-Being” suggests a Heideggerian influence—a real insight, though one that perhaps underestimates just how deeply Heidegger himself became entangled in (a right-wing fascist version of) the very totalitarian pathologies Lyons decries (see my exchange with Iain McGilchrist for more on Heidegger’s relevance: substack.com/@footnotes…).
Where Lyons loses me is in the character of his proposed cure. His call for the return of “men with chests”—vital spirits unafraid to wrest control back from the managerial machine—risks re-inscribing precisely the Schmittian logic I caution against in my chapter responding to his criticisms of liberalism (see comment below for a link). In seeking to overcome the despotism of bureaucrats, Lyons invites the charismatic despotism of a demagogic strong man. This is an old temptation: to mistake strength of will for the source of legitimate order. It is not democracy that would be reborn through such a revolt, but, at best, a populist Caesarism dressed up in the rhetoric of democracy.
The intellectual figures Lyons invokes further darken his remedy. To call Ernst Jünger simply an “anti-Nazi philosopher” smooths over too much. Jünger in the 1920s was a central figure in the Conservative Revolutionary movement, dreaming not of expanding democracy but of a new mythos of the warrior-worker bound by blood and soil. His vision, no less than Heidegger’s, helped fertilize the ground from which Nazi totalitarianism sprang. Unlike Heidegger, at least Jünger had the good sense not to join the Nazi party and to later criticize its brutality (he may have even conspired to assassinate Hitler, so I’m not denying Lyons invocation but adding missing context). That Lyons draws on these figures without acknowledging their ambivalent if not complicit relation to the totalitarianism he opposes should give us pause.
What is needed is not a return to strong men, but a renewal of strong relations: an ecology of participation rooted in a cosmology that honors not only the uniqueness of each human person but the intrinsic value of the democracy of fellow creatures with whom we share this earth. As I suggest in the chapter linked below, the answer is not to reassert sovereignty through the violent will of a strong man, but to deepen the fabric of mutual responsibility. Liberal democracy need not be entirely abandoned, but it must be re-enchanted: freed from the spell of procedural nihilism and grounded again in a living cosmology where value is natural, where freedom is relational, and where politics is not reduced to the brutality of the friend/enemy division but elevated to the cultivation of the networks of mutuality that will allow us to coexist and flourish together on this fragile planet for many generations to come. Otherwise, Lyons’ revolt against managerialism may simply replace the empty throne of liberalism with another crowned strongman, trading technocratic oligarchy for charismatic monarchy, leaving the demos once again spectators to their own fate.
You sound pretty pie in the sky to me. I agree with N.S. Lyons that we need a return to strong men. Strong relations will come from men being strong. And I thank God there are still some strong men left in this world.
Deep,and depressing. I think all societies have self-sorted into the managed and the managers, the plebs and the elites, usually in a state of permanent tension. Thinking of the time before, what was different? Our elites were smaller and easier to identify. They had to show concern for the managed, so the relationship was to some extent transactional. The medieval peasant offered his service in return for security. Over time, this became a matter of habit and good order, where a society could almost regulate itself. In war, we all pulled together and every English church and public school still has its roll call of the dead sons of landowners and factory owners. This harmonious order - imperfect as it was - failed. The devastation of two world wars created a new flux. With the loss of religious faith and the sharing of public and private morality, our rulers would need something else to maintain social order and their own privilege. We now live in this new state, fading towards to Utopia.
Will need the next instalment to see if you can advise any solutions or even antidotes. Maybe, to echo Paul Kingsnorth, all we can do is just very simple. Pray.
Insightful and ignorant at the same time . In America with American democracy we elected a President with no fear of accountability and infallible belief in himself. Winning by 1.47% of the vote, he calls it a mandate to do as he pleases. The majority by 1.47%, less than the 1.85% who voted for any one else please, acts as if the Constitution is an obstacle to the will of less than 50% of the citizens who voted for President Trump. We are becoming not a nation governed by laws but by retribution. We have a government afraid of immigrants, women, and free trade; a people who believe we need to hide behind walls of isolation. We need to restrict the flow of everything to our shores by force or by tariffs. And to take what we want without thought for the impact on other people. Yes Woke is a cancer. Our cure drink plutonium.
I'm curious if you've ever read "The Shield of Achilles" and, if so, your take. Its argument about the structure and evolution of the state overlap with much of your writing and it predicts, in 2002, the transition from the nation state to the "market state." Being over 20 years old, its analysis and predictions can be tested more than many arguments of the same kind.
I was there and thoroughly enjoyed your speech. Intriguing--and also just a teensy bit terrifying. You sure did trigger some members of the managerial class in the audience, though! I enjoyed that even more than the speech! :)
One of the things I wonder about (and have written about on this platform) is the role of women---and more specifically, the feminization of western culture as women have ascended in the workforce--in promoting managerialism, or what I have described as a system of "gynocratic technoautoritarianism." (I explain this idea further here, if you are interested: https://pairodocs.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-real-men-gone-c3b)
...see "The Twilight of the Feminized Society" over at Unherd.
Yes, we do have to face up to the gendered nature of the current excessive managerialism.
I couldn't find this reference...do you have the exact title and author?
...its a podcast interview, at the Unherd website.
(!! With respect!! Borrowing your reply box Pairodocs. For what ever reason my comments box is blocked on every paid Substack subscription I hold and I've long since given up on Substack "help" to remedy the problem.)
What our favorite nom-de-plume is masterfully describing is the utopian idealism/megalomaniac narcissism and the mass "psychic infection" C.G. Jung warned against after witnessing the horrors of the 20th Century. It's a disease. The thanatotic two decade iconoclasm of the oligarchic/woke psyop screaming over the human moral reason our founding fathers fought and died to preserve in our Constitution has to be faced and conquered if the American Republic is to survive. Our Republic, our Constitution and the free citizen are the only engines of survival. "We the People" either accept the power or perish.
It is not metaphor to say that truth is light. Subscription journalism is the opportunity to rebuild the truth/fact based solutions oriented national conversation that will allow the unifying truth/fact based reality the free citizens of our Republic must participate in to regain the spiritual/cultural equilibrium capable of envisioning the prosperous human future the sterility of the psyop denies. Corny? The boarded up, abandoned, drug addled, mentally ill, tent city dwelling land of criminal chaos is filled with the walking wounded. Anyone here can list a hundred water under the bridge psyop violations of the human moral reason our Republic was built upon. It's happening!!
The tombstone proclaims virtue and social concern but the grave of the ideal is a trap filled with the hidden avarice and moral malignancy of the perps the psyop works to protect. The goal for all slavers is and has always been: The creation, and control of uneducated disposable labor and access to all natural resources for exploitation and personal profit without oversight or consequence. It's not something else.
For what it's worth, the youtube combox doesn't work for me if I'm unwittingly logged into my corporate VPN. Maybe stackoverflow is the same? Do you use a VPN?
Thanks for the heads-up Pete.
I don't use a VPN because I don't use my phone or other mobile electronics for internet connection. I have no trouble with Youtube or other sites outside Substack. I've tried reaching Substack help without reply or concern. And, I honestly don't think the "glitch" is on my end.
Subscription journalism is the opportunity America needs to rebuild the healthy national conversation our Republic deserves. Substack is great but I'd prefer the ability to directly support journalists without the involvement of a "middle man". ---Thanks for taking a minute. :)
Pleasure meeting you two there!
Likewise Sage!! I hope our paths cross again sometime. I have a feeling they might.
I'd enjoy that very much!
Beautiful. Impactful. Healing. Prescriptive.
"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."
I believe defunding of the professional management and administrative state is a valuable and effective remedy. Since these cretins don't produce anything, they are looter leeches feeding off the returns of the productive economy. Let's just cut those MFers off. And we need to ramp up our antitrust actions and include new rules for Wall Street cross ownership and concentration of ownership.
I believe the first step in this process will be the elimination of public sector unions - the next great battle in America which could lead us towards an internal civil rebellion.
"Liberal-democracy" was always an shotgun wedding. It's an oxymoron. Democracy claims law's legitimacy emanates from the will of the people. Liberalism (in the Enlightenment sense) demands law reflect universal principles of rights unimpeachable by even democratic processes. What's amazing is that John Locke married the two ideas at all. When the priest asked for objections, Edmund Burke did stand up and start muttering, but no one listened.
300 years later, the shotgun marriage is ending in a messy divorce, and everyone is picking sides. Pick "democracy" and you're a dangerous populist who cares noting for civil or women's rights. Choose "liberalism" and you fairly rapidly veer toward authoritarianism (ala the EU).
I want to be optimistic, but I think Lyons is correct that most in the West are "infants incapable of self-governance." That begins with a collapse of personal virtue. As Aristotle says, only someone who has mastered personal self-government (virtue) is capable of the collective form (democracy). Certainly we're seeing a turn (esp men) toward harder forms of religion that require real virtue, but without real spiritual revival, that's more likely to give us Nietzschean ubermunschen than virtuous saints.
All this structure requires a large tax base to pay salaries as the managers aren't actually doing anything productive - and yet as societies adopt Managerial Bureaucracy, their birth rate plumets. They can try and import tax paying units from less developed nations, but without a filter it seems as though there are more dependents than contributors. So at some point the managerial system metastasizes to the point it collapses. Sure there is a lot of wailing and anarchy at that point, but at least there won't be mandated training and feedback questionnaires.
You never disappoint. I suggested over at Yuri's place earlier that you can't argue people out of their positions because of the power of inertia. And that it would take collapse or religious revival to break enough things loose to change the trajectory. However, since I am more Lenin than Lennon, I always ask What is to be Done. From my time in the belly of the beast (graduate degree and 30 years experience), I note that the Managerial Blob is a coalition. In my time, the dominant factions were financial and legal. With the advent of AI, you would have to add technological. So, can the forces of populism exploit the contradictions between these factions. The logical split would be between legal and the other two. Financial and technological have a unit of analysis of that is the system whereas legal operates on the individual case. Eventually the factions will clash and it is not altogether clear what the alliances will be. Financial and technological have a similar mindset but technological has the potential to decimate the other two if AI reaches its potential. We need some more thinking as to where to insert the wedge.
There’s always been tension between the “democratic” elements in our constitutional republics and the facts of executive and bureaucratic power, but with this talk you drive home why this tension is no longer sustainable. Because the High Doctrine of managerialism finally can find no room for the demos! Its projects and expertise are simply too PRECIOUS to suffer challenge.
Thus we witness the absurdity of managerial elites across the West “defending our Democracy” by … cancelling democracy.
If these elites continue to insist on *all* the planks in the High Doctrine you list, things are not going to end well. Either a slow lurch into totalitarianism, or civil war.
Really these religionists would be wiser to cut some bits from their utopian Scripture. Either cut the doctrinaire progressivism (History only moves One Way: toward Utopia) or cut the doctrinaire universalism (all human cultures are interchangeable Under Our Management) or cut some other elements. If they keep insisting on the whole Scripture, they will end in a kind of holy war—in which *they’re* the obscurantist fanatics to be defeated.
Such an irony for them. Religionists who don't understand they're religionists.
Another banger from Lyons. The warning towards the end - that the battle is largely within ourselves is useful - but I have a somewhat different prognosis.
The human spirit, massively unbalanced by over-ordering, will inevitably rebalance toward chaos. We cannot be trained away from our humanity. It's akin to the physics of nuclear supercriticality: place fissile material in close proximity and compress it beyond a certain point.
In this process the rebalancing cannot be other than an overreaction, an overcorrection. The tighter the imposed order the greater the inevitable explosion and more violent the rebalancing.
The election of Donald Trump, both times, is the primary visible aspect of that rebalancing beginning to express itself. The counterreaction of the machine - the unceasing attempts to reestablish and maintain the physically and metaphysically intolerable order - only drive us faster toward the inevitable supercritical moment.
The techno-fantasists (it is what they are) who have convinced themselves their machines and systems of control will hold are delusional. Mad scientists one and all. "AI" won't stop it. "The SIngularity" isn't coming. We may have forgotten our gods but they haven't forgotten us.
I’m reading the book Secondhand Time, the Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich. One of the interviewee’s mentions mentioned the bureaucratic apparatus is a machine capable of major maneuvering…anything for the sake of survival. Principles? Bureaucrats have no convictions, principles, or any of those metaphysical ideals. The most important thing is holding onto your seat, keeping your palms greased.
This is Technocracy.
https://principlesvstribes.substack.com/p/on-technocracy
This is one of the clearest diagnoses of the managerial regime I’ve read—tracing its philosophical roots, spiritual costs, and political consequences with precision. But now we must ask: what comes next?
(NS, I know you’ve written your thoughts on parts of this in the counter-revolution piece—just adding my two cents.)
The managerial class is not just a parasite. It is a machine—a Leviathan Stack engineered to manipulate perception, atomize loyalty, and administer decline.
We cannot vote it out, because it was never voted in. It is unelected, unevictable, and transnational by design.
That means our response must be equally structural.
We must build a counter-machine.
Not just dissent. Not just elections.
We need a Quiet War Machine:
• Loyal capital stacks
• Sovereign infrastructure
• Narrative engines
• Lawfare arms
• Political operations
• Parallel institutions rooted in moral order
We are not facing mere ideology.
We are facing a regime of engineered dependency and totalizing control.
If we do not build systems that can survive, multiply, and strike—
we will continue to lose, even with the truth on our side.
They have the Leviathan Stack.
We must build the Quiet War Machine.
“As the world becomes more mimetic it is increasingly more misleading and deceptive….If I were to believe in a world where the only things worth seeking are not to be found, a world where nothing that is available is worth having, I should share actively in its fabrication. My subjective vision and reality would quickly coalesce, bringing about the disappearance of everything worthy of desire and the creation in ever more monstrous quantities of the undesirable and insignificant.” ~~~~ Rene Girard: "Job, The Victim of His People", pp. 64.
Forth, Eorlingas!
I share Lyons’ sense that liberalism has collapsed into hollow proceduralism. What once inspired the fight for human freedom and dignity has become a sanctimonious ghost wandering the halls of its formerly great institutions. A century ago, in Weimar Germany, liberalism’s attempt to float above substantive metaphysical commitments, clinging to neutrality and normativity alone, left it vulnerable to precisely the kind of forceful seizure of sovereignty it sought to foreclose. Lyons is not wrong to resist the triumph of the technocratic elite, whose algorithms and emergency decrees govern a demos increasingly treated not as citizens to be served but as datasets to be managed. His claim that the technocratic managerial state is “anti-Being” suggests a Heideggerian influence—a real insight, though one that perhaps underestimates just how deeply Heidegger himself became entangled in (a right-wing fascist version of) the very totalitarian pathologies Lyons decries (see my exchange with Iain McGilchrist for more on Heidegger’s relevance: substack.com/@footnotes…).
Where Lyons loses me is in the character of his proposed cure. His call for the return of “men with chests”—vital spirits unafraid to wrest control back from the managerial machine—risks re-inscribing precisely the Schmittian logic I caution against in my chapter responding to his criticisms of liberalism (see comment below for a link). In seeking to overcome the despotism of bureaucrats, Lyons invites the charismatic despotism of a demagogic strong man. This is an old temptation: to mistake strength of will for the source of legitimate order. It is not democracy that would be reborn through such a revolt, but, at best, a populist Caesarism dressed up in the rhetoric of democracy.
The intellectual figures Lyons invokes further darken his remedy. To call Ernst Jünger simply an “anti-Nazi philosopher” smooths over too much. Jünger in the 1920s was a central figure in the Conservative Revolutionary movement, dreaming not of expanding democracy but of a new mythos of the warrior-worker bound by blood and soil. His vision, no less than Heidegger’s, helped fertilize the ground from which Nazi totalitarianism sprang. Unlike Heidegger, at least Jünger had the good sense not to join the Nazi party and to later criticize its brutality (he may have even conspired to assassinate Hitler, so I’m not denying Lyons invocation but adding missing context). That Lyons draws on these figures without acknowledging their ambivalent if not complicit relation to the totalitarianism he opposes should give us pause.
What is needed is not a return to strong men, but a renewal of strong relations: an ecology of participation rooted in a cosmology that honors not only the uniqueness of each human person but the intrinsic value of the democracy of fellow creatures with whom we share this earth. As I suggest in the chapter linked below, the answer is not to reassert sovereignty through the violent will of a strong man, but to deepen the fabric of mutual responsibility. Liberal democracy need not be entirely abandoned, but it must be re-enchanted: freed from the spell of procedural nihilism and grounded again in a living cosmology where value is natural, where freedom is relational, and where politics is not reduced to the brutality of the friend/enemy division but elevated to the cultivation of the networks of mutuality that will allow us to coexist and flourish together on this fragile planet for many generations to come. Otherwise, Lyons’ revolt against managerialism may simply replace the empty throne of liberalism with another crowned strongman, trading technocratic oligarchy for charismatic monarchy, leaving the demos once again spectators to their own fate.
You sound pretty pie in the sky to me. I agree with N.S. Lyons that we need a return to strong men. Strong relations will come from men being strong. And I thank God there are still some strong men left in this world.
Deep,and depressing. I think all societies have self-sorted into the managed and the managers, the plebs and the elites, usually in a state of permanent tension. Thinking of the time before, what was different? Our elites were smaller and easier to identify. They had to show concern for the managed, so the relationship was to some extent transactional. The medieval peasant offered his service in return for security. Over time, this became a matter of habit and good order, where a society could almost regulate itself. In war, we all pulled together and every English church and public school still has its roll call of the dead sons of landowners and factory owners. This harmonious order - imperfect as it was - failed. The devastation of two world wars created a new flux. With the loss of religious faith and the sharing of public and private morality, our rulers would need something else to maintain social order and their own privilege. We now live in this new state, fading towards to Utopia.
Will need the next instalment to see if you can advise any solutions or even antidotes. Maybe, to echo Paul Kingsnorth, all we can do is just very simple. Pray.
Insightful and ignorant at the same time . In America with American democracy we elected a President with no fear of accountability and infallible belief in himself. Winning by 1.47% of the vote, he calls it a mandate to do as he pleases. The majority by 1.47%, less than the 1.85% who voted for any one else please, acts as if the Constitution is an obstacle to the will of less than 50% of the citizens who voted for President Trump. We are becoming not a nation governed by laws but by retribution. We have a government afraid of immigrants, women, and free trade; a people who believe we need to hide behind walls of isolation. We need to restrict the flow of everything to our shores by force or by tariffs. And to take what we want without thought for the impact on other people. Yes Woke is a cancer. Our cure drink plutonium.
I'm curious if you've ever read "The Shield of Achilles" and, if so, your take. Its argument about the structure and evolution of the state overlap with much of your writing and it predicts, in 2002, the transition from the nation state to the "market state." Being over 20 years old, its analysis and predictions can be tested more than many arguments of the same kind.