One consistent theme here at the Chariot of Reaction is the desacralization of the edifices of the Cathedral. Although allegedly secular, the Cathedral most assuredly uses a 'sacred' status of many of their beliefs and institutions to shield them from direct assault. It is by breaking the legitimacy and loyalties surrounding them that we make them vulnerable to destruction, albeit often more self-destruction than anything we few can muster.
Consider education, probably the central node of the Cathedral. One reason why we advocate and support homeschooling here so much, even, or perhaps ESPECIALLY by elements of the left and far-left, is because homeschooled kids, by the mere fact of their existence, desacralize the public education system in the minds of the population. They undermine that norm, especially when they succeed. There is no more dangerous class to the cathedral than the set of homeschool moms.
Consider the Judiciary, another major node---and one I often liken to a diode or a one-way ratchet. By degrading the esteem that it is held in, mocking it and holding it up to ridicule, we make direct assault on it thinkable (e.g., widespread jury nullification and impeachment for no other reason than we don't like their decisions). The truly beautiful thing is that the Judiciary is helping us along right now. In many of its decisions this year, no matter how they decide unless they can somehow pull a Solomon, their prestige will be badly bruised. I just love hearing Obama talking smack to them about Obamacare.
Consider also the Media. Trayyon continues to pay us dividends long after his bones have been interred. The media's esteem is shrinking rapidly. Hopefully there will be a series of incredibly expensive lawsuits against them over their handling of the case. I know how good reactionary jurors should rule in said cases, don't you?
Consider the once mighty 'anti-racism'----i.e., anti-whiteness. Yes, it still has the power to punish, but it has no moral suasion left in it. Carry on the ridicule and mockery, and where possible, aid the punished.
Consider lastly the civil service bureaucracy. Our worsening balance sheet will eventually give us an opportunity to put paid to them once and for all. When you speak of the 'spoils system', you no longer get regurgitation of the old turn of the 20th century progressive arguments anymore from Joe Public. They know that the system IS the problem. Give them time, and they might even be willing to talk about alternate systems that have historically sucked less.
The Cathedral is rotten, and most of its priests are just going through the genuflections, counting the days before retirement. This decade presents the opportunity to consign it to the ash heap of history.
The Modern Shofar and Western Steel
20 hours ago
31 comments:
I continue to not get the hate for civil servents. I've worked private and public, they didn't seem all that different.
My experience is that civil service hate doesn't get rid of the civil service, but it does make it hard for them to do their job. Which quite contrary to making their job go away just means it gets done but gets done badly.
"Consider education, probably the central node of the Cathedral. One reason why we advocate and support homeschooling here so much, even, or perhaps ESPECIALLY by elements of the left and far-left, is because homeschooled kids, by the mere fact of their existence, desacralize the public education system in the minds of the population. "
This is a point that can't be emphasised too much. Excellent post.
-Reactionary_Konkvistador
Anonymous,
Most of the real power in the US is exercised by the civil service administrators. If you want to change the rules, you have to go through them. Bashing them is just a necessary preliminary to assaulting the civil service acts.
Jehu,
I'd try actually working in the civil service. Bashing them has zero effect on the rules. The rules will be inacted. They will either be inacted well or poorly, but something is going to happen.
I deal with the results of your attitude all the time. Take a project I'm working on. We need to get a database from another agency in order to fulfill a PPACA directive. We need an external hard drive transported from one building to another. Because it has very sensitive data, we are using a secure service that costs $10 for the delivery.
However, the budget proposal only included $20 for transport, while we need the database three times a year. I spent an hour in a meeting discussing this $10 difference and how to handle it (we didn't even figure out an answer). Combined, I figure $1000 in labor went into the meeting. This whole project could get held up over $10, because the local paper watches our budgets like a hawk and they've implemented all sorts of retarded rules to appease angry senoir citizens with no clue that right letters about things that piss them off.
So I know what your thinking. Great. The project won't get done. No, it will. We will still come up with numbers, even if we pull them out of our ass because we don't have the database. We will still use those numbers to impelement giant billion dollar insurance decisions. Because the law tells us to. So its going to happen. It can either happen right, or it can happen wrong. Civil service haters like you that strip budgets and impose all sorts of crazy ass budgetary rules mean it will happen poorly. You won't even save money in the end, we will spend orders of magnitude more fixing the problems caused by the $10 then the $10 itself.
Civil service people are trying to do a job. Let them do it. Getting in the way doesn't stop it, only mucks it up. And mucking it up can even increase the scope of the job, not shrink it. The ironic thing is that, on the whole, the civil service is actually more reactionary then the general public.
Anonymous,
You don't get it. Bashing them makes them actually vulnerable to being eliminated at a point in the future. Reducing their efficiency only helps on that score also. Many reactionaries like me actually want to see a return to the spoils system.
"Bashing them makes them actually vulnerable to being eliminated at a point in the future."
False. Kinduv like how they bashed IT civil service, so instead of getting one smart programmer for 200k a year you get 10 dumb programmers at 100k a year to get less production.
"Reducing their efficiency only helps on that score also."
False. It means they hire more people to do the job, at additional cost to you. The job will get done, its the law. The civil service responds to laws passed by the people.
"Many reactionaries like me actually want to see a return to the spoils system."
Because your insane and you hate without thinking.
The best part about the beauracracy is that it doesn't change. If you really think politicians running the show would be an improvement, you are insane.
I respond as well, chez moi:
http://aretae.blogspot.com/2012/04/desacralize-authority.html
Anonymous,
I firmly believe, based on historical experience, that the spoils system would suck a lot less than our present system. Were I a progressive, of course, I'd feel differently. Ideally, I'd like civil servants to have far LESS in the way of protections than most of the rest of the workforce.
Jehu,
I think you really need to think about what motivates people, what incentives cause people to do, and what structures produce productivity.
If you believe fear of being fired is a motivator for highly skilled knowledge workers (the kind of people making the decisions that matter in government) you're really out of touch. There is a line in office space where Peter says, "the only reason I do any work around here is so I can keep my job, but that will only make you work hard enough not to get fired." The result is that Peter, even at his private capitalist company, only does about 15 min of real genuine work a day. That's the kind of productivity you get from threats when you are asking people to do high IQ knowledge work.
My experience in both private and government is very similair in this regard. Fear is a poor motivator. To the extent it even works it motivates people to spend a lot of time on busywork, office politics, CYA, etc. There is little correlation with actual productive work. If anything, I find the enhanced job security of government over private as a great motivator. In private the pointy haired boss can fire you over the most idiotic of things, and you waste time on the dumbest of directives. In government, if you've got any kind of backbone and ability to recognize your posisiton, you can basically ignore any idiotic suggestion your boss makes. You are free to work on what you want, experiment as you may, be productive. You don't have to be, but many people, given freedom, want to be. I think you'll find that at the higher level of government there are plenty of people more motivated then you see in your typical megacorp.
That's why we have this system. A civil servant spends a lot of their time cleaning up politicians messes. Making sure their idiotic bills don't fuck everything up. If you hate government power, you should love civil servents. They are the only thing keeping the government from completely taking over. If you take away that security, you just end up with lots of uneducated hacks implementing every bad whim of politicians poorly.
Hate of civil servents is a big problem in this country. If we had a sane policy, like they do in everyones favorite country Singapore, civil servents would be highly compensated experts in their fields capable of making really smart policy choices and running efficient organizations. But instead we get a lot of penny wise pound foolish bullshit because some dude thinks he's be getting ahead if only the civil service guy earned 30% less then market rate for his education/experience instead of just 20% less.
Anonymous,
Civil servants ARE the government. They have the power, not the politicians. When a new party takes power, they should bring in a raft of cronies and minions to implement their policies. Then they can actually be held accountable for what they do.
Government, and particularly law enforcement, worked a hell of a lot better prior to the civil service act. Check out the stats linked by Moldbug on robbery, for instance, for London and New York then compared to now. Technological improvements, in particular in trauma medicine, have masked somewhat the horrible job that the post-civil service act government has done relative to its precursors.
Accountable? What the fuck do you mean? To an election? That is the most retarded accountability mechanism I've ever heard of. You don't even like democracy, why do you think elections are great ways to determine if the civil service is doing a good job?
Robbery? That's what you've got? Do you have any idea how many variables have changed over the last 100 years that would factor into crime rates? Do you really think cops aren't busting robbers as much because they have civil service protections?
You're embarassing yourself with these arguements.
Anonymous,
I'm not a big fan of democracy, but I prefer it to what we've got. Pre civil service act, if the population didn't like the service it got for the taxes it paid, it traded governments. Power and accountability were at least unified.
On crime, it used to be that rules of engagement were such that order could actually be maintained in big cities. Give a police force, in say, Baltimore, 1890s rules of engagement and 1890s gear and I wager that property values in those areas will skyrocket. The Cathedral is responsible for the rules of engagement that persist, and the civil service bureaucracy is a large part of that edifice. I wager the beat cop would prefer the old ROE as well.
Trading governments does neither accountability nor positive change make.
The civil service beauracracy is not the reason Zimmerman might get charged with a hate crime. The public is. Democracy is. It was demanded by voters. Only civil servants have held up the lynch mob.
Anonymous,
Governments in the spoils system era were reasonably accountable. Their abuses were far smaller and they were a lot less proportionately expensive. The Cathedral, specifically, the media and academia is the reason why Zimmerman might get charged with a hate crime. The lynch mob is 100% Cathedral manufactured. Should the case go to trial, it'll be the jurors that likely acquit him.
Anonymous,
Speaking of, you'd probably enjoy working under a 'spoils system' administration, although you'd probably only have a gig there as long as said administration lasted. The amount of pointless impediments in your way would be vastly reduced and there's a good chance that successful initiative on your part would be rewarded. Such impediments tend to accumulate the longer that an institution has been intact as a cohesive group---I see this in the private industry where I work also.
Jehu,
The media is a private market entity. It gives people what they want. They want to hate this man. The hate gives them meaning and purpose. They aren't being driven to hate by puppeters, they are being provided a product they demand. Its very much a symbiotic relationship.
Think like one of those codependent relationships where both feed off the drama and crave it, whether its good for them in the long run or not.
Jehu,
Here's the spoils system in a nutshell:
Politician: I think we should arrest everyone with orange hair.
Civil Servant: That's retarded, I'm not doing it.
Politician: Your fired, now I'll bring in someone that will.
That's what you want?
The very idea that a gig will only last an election highlights how few actual "initiatives" one could accomplish. Good governance doesn't tie in with quarterly statements. It's not about getting some hot product to market this week. It takes decades. As someone in the business of making decisions that have decade long effects the idea of shifting people in and out every few years seems completely counterproductive.
Anonymous,
The media hardly gives the people what they want. That's why it has been so unprofitable in recent years. It is a propaganda organ of the Cathedral, little more. Even Fox, the most conservative of the networks, is only about 50th percentile compared against the population as a reference set (probably the reason why it's the only profitable network).
On the spoils system, I suggest you look at its historical record. It did a fine job compared to the present order. Of course it had its abuses, but they were milder and far less pervasive than the current regime. For a good treatment of the abuses and the nature of the system, I suggest 'Honest Graft' from Tammany Hall---pretty sure I've got a link to it.
Politician: I think we should stop discriminating against White and Asian students in admissions to our flagship schools and for employment
Civil Servant: Yadda Yadda, I'll just change my mechanisms so as to achieve my desired targets for diversity, and I'll try to keep my data more opaque next time
What politicians are pushing for less discrimination against Whites and Asians? Is that a platform I've been hearing about in the news?
Schools want to accept more minorities. In a free market they will do this stuff on their own, they are not being forced to. If anything the government is stoping them from accepting more minorities. They view these people as assets for a number of reasons (i can get into if you want).
Lots of politicians have pushed for that, through initiative and through the courts. There's even a Supreme Court case up on this as well.
Schools want more minorities because they're an arm of the Cathedral, and they want to lower the status of the 'wrong kind of whites'.
Winning on the initiative, legislation, or judicial front often produces nothing precisely because of this entrenched civil service class.
The courts are civil service. If you are trying to force colleges to accept less minorities through the courts you are asking civil servents to overturn the free market. I fact the only credible way to stop college from accepting minorities is through civil servents, because without them colleges will just do what they want.
There has been no legislative bill passed requiring colleges to base their admissions on SATs or any other such metric that would reduce minority college admissions.
You're are making no coherent point here. Blaming the cathedral like its some backroom of cigar smoking evil doers conspiring away is silly.
Anonymous,
The colleges are hardly a free market, and many of the courts are at least indirectly subject to sanction by the public (moreso in some states than others). There have been plenty of attempts to bind the civil service in this regard, although none like you describe since the early 20th century (New York has some high schools like that, where the top N scorers get spots on their exam)---instead they try to prevent minority status from being used as a massive plus factor. Leaving any discretion to the civil servants is an exercise in futility in this case I agree, unless the court gets so frustrated that they mandate that everything in said decisions must be quantified and transparent (not likely).
I think it's a mistake for you to consider all of these institutions as not acting as part of a loosely cohesive entity. I'd liken it more to a consensus than a conspiracy though.
"The colleges are hardly a free market"
What is? Nevertheless, they are entities acting in their best interests, and they believe accepting minorities is in their best interest. The government and civil servents are not forcing them to.
Attempts to turn education into some hyper quantified mess have largely been a failure (see NCLB).
I think you are imagining "white hatred". People do what is in their best interests. Dislike of middle class whites is fostered because they have/had capital that was of use to the cathedral, and because it helped in guiding and controlling cathedral members (who, lets be honest, are mostly outer party). But they didn't really believe it. I would consider the concept of "doublethink" from 1984 here.
These institutions are not accepting minorities because of white hatred. They see them as assets. They gain them access to new markets. They increase their political and cultural influence. They increase their global reach. They make donors and students feel good about themselves. And most importantly they believe that they have important traits for greatness that are worth sacrificing 200 SAT points to get at. From Harvards POV, one Obama is more valuable then every single Asian grind they've ever graduated in their entire history.
Anonymous,
Most of them are publically supported. That makes them not free enterprise in even the way most crony capitalist corporations are. And there is substantial evidence that having 'red state' activities on your application---e.g. FFA, JROTC, etc gets you negative points. Besides, I don't consider the free market holy in any case, especially when Harvard/Yale/Princeton law seems to of late be an absolute requirement for a Supreme Court judge. Have you read Moldbug? If not, perhaps you should skim some of his work so that at least we can be talking on roughly the same page.
When people are assessing the power of the civil service as so massive, I often wonder how they feel about airline deregulation in the late 1970s. Surely the Civil Aeronautics Board had employees? Did they somehow retain the power after Carter's allies in Congress passed the deregulation law?
I know airline deregulation was a rare sort of event, but it doesn't seem like those events were made rarer by the civil service itself. It just seems like politicians aren't all that much into deregulation.
Jehu,
I've read Moldbug. And Foseti. I just don't think your making much of a point here.
Jehu,
You're absolutely right when you say that for the Cathedral to be dislodged from power, it must first be desacralized. However, if you believe that you're seeing any signs that such desacralization is actually taking place, or even that it looks like a plausible outcome of some current trend, this is sheer wishful thinking.
Now, I definitely don't want to be a preacher of despair and nihilism, but the first step towards any realistic hope is to recognize the reality of the present situation. And in reality, you could have found such supposed signs of "desacralization" of the progressivist narrative in the daily news at any point in post-WW2 history, along with conservatives and libertarians of the day naively cheering these supposed signs of the incoming demise of progressivism. Yet it never actually happens, and a simple look at the state of public opinion will show that the teachings of the Cathedral are believed and held sacred with greater fervor than ever, and with perfect uniformity outside of a tiny contrarian fringe. (And contrary to another pattern of wishful thinking common on this fringe, it has not been getting any larger or more influential with the mainstreaming of the internet; on the contrary, there are clear reasons why the internet may even affect it negatively on the net.)
Again, rather than a call to despair, take this comment as a call to serious and positive thinking about what could be done to desacralize the Cathedral, rather than wasting time with self-deception about its demise supposedly being around the corner, when in reality it's only proceeding forward with its long and steady triumphant march.
Vladimir,
I see great signs of encouragement in the rapid growth of homeschooling. This is an ongoing positive feedback cycle undermining the K-12 institution. I also see encouragement in the size of the higher education bubble. If you look at the comment sections of any online version of a mainstream newspaper, you'll see encouragement as well---encouragement you didn't see even 8 years ago.
Lastly, the economy is looking to get really bad. For reaction, that's good. Nothing discredits a system like economic failure.
I think that there are multiple sets of the "sacred" in the current system, and it is perhaps exactly like the multiple gods of the Romans.
First and foremost would seem to be the notion of one-person one-vote and that those in power must seemingly have been legitimized by winning the popular vote. The constitution seems to be less sacred since there is a strong notion of using a modern interpretation and not any originalist position.
The others would seem to be diversity, equality of outcomes, and the evilness of whites and hardworking.
However, perhaps they have more to do with ensuring that TPTB retain power by buying the votes they need. They do this by offering "bribes" to segments of the population. Eg, sinecures for blacks and females in government employment, and expensive toys for the military to keep big and politically connected companies on their side.
Eventually, the cost of those bribes will become so large that something has to give. For example, the military budget will probably be next, since TPTB have discovered that just like the NSDAP in 1933, women seem to be the path to retaining power today (of course, for the NSDAP it was the path to power.)
You can help hasten the day of collapse by forcing the civil service to do more for you. Make more requests, especially FOI requests. Raise objections to plans and so forth so that they have to waste time and money considering your objections. I am sure you can think of more.
The civil service ye shall always have with you ... Civil servants tend to be a naturally conservative element within society who make good neighbors. We need to keep an eye on their gaming their pensions and so forth, but flat out hostility doesn't make much sense.
Jehu said,on 4/5/12,
" Hopefully there will be a series of incredibly expensive lawsuits against them over their handling of the case."
Looks like your words are coming true:http://www.businessinsider.com/george-zimmermans-lawsuit-against-nbc-2012-10
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