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The ‘Soft’ Tyranny of the Modern Bureaucratic State

by Eugyppius
24 June 2023 11:00 AM

There is a pattern, a recurring blindness, in the approach of the administrative state to everyday human life. Let’s consider a few examples of recent political idiocy and the common thread that unites them:

  1. The Scholz Government hopes to convince more Germans to opt for public transit by tinkering with fares and introducing a universal €49 ticket. The offering, which collapses regional ticket schemes into one simple, relatively cheap monthly subscription, is now more than 50 days old, and preliminary data show it’s changed hardly anybody’s habits. The vast majority of the 11 million subscriptions sold so far have gone to longstanding public transit users; less than a tenth have been purchased by new customers. Surveys show that interest is concentrated in the urban centres, while rural populations have no use for the ticket because everybody drives cars there. Calls for improving transit offerings in the countryside are half-hearted and bizarre; the whole concept of public transit requires dense, concentrated populations.
  2. For some years now, the German state has deployed extravagant subsidies to convince consumers to buy electric vehicles. While adoption has been substantial, the dream of 15 million EVs by 2030 remains very far off. Subsidies aren’t enough to counterbalance the substantial cost of the batteries, leaving conventional automobiles with an enormous competitive advantage at the cheaper end. Also too, it seems that the core market for EVs – relatively well-off Germans who take mostly short trips and primarily charge their vehicles at home – will soon be saturated. For those who have longer commutes or must frequently travel long distances, the limited range and insufficient charging network are disqualifying.
  3. I’ve already written about proposed Government legislation to compel all Germans to transition to heat pumps, beginning in 2024. Massive controversy compelled substantial changes in the law, which has been blunted in many respects, but remains worrying. Because not everybody lives in buildings that are suitable for heat pumps, the law in its original form would have required massive renovations across broad sectors of the housing market, effectively wiping out billions of euros in personal wealth. If enacted in its original form, it might well have rendered many prewar buildings basically uninhabitable.
  4. Bizarre proposals to mitigate the dangers of warm summer weather, accompanied by strange state media hysteria about recent warm summer temperatures, are similarly oblivious. The proposals are based on French plans, which foresee imposing bans on school trips and large gatherings in the event of extended heat waves. While rules like these have the potential to destroy ordinary summer activities for millions of people, they won’t save any lives. Summer mortality spikes are confined almost entirely to the old and the sick, not schoolchildren or sports fans.
  5. Lockdowns and mass vaccination also belong in this list. These policies arose from the myopia of public health mandarins, who regarded everyone in their jurisdiction as equally likely to spread SARS-2, equally likely to die from it and equally able to endure months of rolling house arrests and an indefinite marathon of mRNA injections. They were wrong in every respect: the virus was only ever dangerous to a very small segment of the population, there was never any purpose in vaccinating the millions of people who had recovered from SARS-2 infection, and even according to officially accepted, heavily massaged statistics, the vaccines have no measurable upside for any healthy person under 50.

Underlying these policy initiatives and many others is a highly abstract bureaucratic conception of the individual, what I’ll call the Administrative Man. This is how state bureaucrats everywhere approach their subject populations, and it is an unavoidable artefact of routine bureaucratic processes like regulation and taxation. In this conception, everybody is more or less the same, subject to nudging via the same incentives, requiring the same protections from the same risks, and likely to benefit from the same one-size-fits-all solutions. The highly differentiated lives that people actually lead – their vast differences in personal circumstances, wealth, individual preferences, religious beliefs and political opinions – are at best ignored, at worst considered a massive inconvenience. There is an unstated, unconsciously harboured bureaucratic vision of a country made up entirely of Administrative Men as the ideal receptacles of bureaucratic solutions, which are of course always correct, except when the people fail them.

The image of the Administrative Man, while heavily abstracted, is not without some intriguing specific characteristics. These will vary from country to country, but we can derive some of the features of the German Administrative Man from our five examples. He appears to live in cities or at least in towns, not in the countryside. He’s certainly an apartment dweller, and he’s more likely than not to rent. He’s actually somewhat well-off, but not wealthy; he’s older and probably not in the best of health. He leads a fairly withdrawn, local life, with limited interest in public events. All in all, it seems fair to call him a composite figure, combining features of the civil servants most responsible for this vision and of the ageing voters who support the major political parties.

Our states are some of the most powerful and overextended in history; no system has been so well positioned to impose its vision of politics and culture on its subjects ever before. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the political mechanics of the rainbow revolution, but the all-consuming interesting of Western politicians in ethnic and sexual diversity surely admits of other interpretations as well. You could say that there is an eagerness to confine human variation to those areas of least concern to the institutional apparatus, and thus to ‘celebrate’, or actively promote, all those diversities which are of least consequence to the administrative ideal. Modern states actually want highly uniform, undifferentiated populations, and they hope to confine personal expression to sexual, ethnic and consumerist spheres. The Administrative Man may be straight or gay, he may be from any continent – these details hardly matter for the regulators.

The Administrative Man is not real, and no amount of bureaucratic intervention can ever bring him into being. What’s more, the state itself seems only intermittently conscious of and profoundly uninterested in the distance between its abstract administrative model of humanity and the reality of human variation. Ours aren’t the hard authoritarian regimes of the Warsaw Pact countries, which sought to beat their subjects into a uniform mass via economic deprivation and overt repression. They’re rather soft authoritarian systems, which operate via sophisticated messaging campaigns and realigning incentives – approaches which are always limited from the beginning by the deep inaccuracies of the administrative vision.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.

Tags: BureaucratisationClimate changeDemocracyLockdownSafetyismWoke Gobbledegook

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20 Comments
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varmint
varmint
1 year ago

“First comes the Nudge, then comes the PUSH”. The bureaucrat decides what you need and at first they explain why you should agree with them. They give incentive, like a subsidy or a Free Boiler (for Hydrogen eg). They have advertising campaigns, leaflets, indoctrination in schools etc etc etc. But then when all of that means their agenda is not occurring at the pace they want, next comes the PUSH. You won’t be allowed to choose eg not to have a Smart Meter, and you will be FORCED in law to have one. We are already committed in law to achieve the absurd NET ZERO by any means possible, whether that is getting rid of petrol and diesel, stopping coal and gas, taxing flights and meat and on and on. ————In the past no one had to be coerced into giving up a horse and cart and getting an automobile. No one had to be coerced into getting rid of a filing cabinet and getting a computer. The advantages of doing these things were obvious. They saved time and money. As someone once said “The best government is the one that governs least”. ——Today we have governments that govern the most and therefore what we now have is the worst government”. ——-The governments that think they know best how to spend your money

120
0
Lockdown Sceptic
Lockdown Sceptic
1 year ago
Reply to  varmint

First Governments nudge then push you

How many politicians could start a successful business from scratch? None. But they would know where to stick a rainbow flag.

Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field 
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE

Last edited 1 year ago by Lockdown Sceptic
13
0
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago

I get a feeling that one reason people aren’t fighting back harder against all this technocratic tyranny is that they’ve developed an apocalyptic mindset: I think people genuinely – on some level – believe our civilisation will collapse shortly and vast numbers of people are simply going to die.

Whether it’s our councils no longer maintaining public grassland areas (using the environment as an excuse) or an increasingly panicked-looking state clamping down hard on fiscal freedom and freedom of speech, everything looks like it’s run down and falling apart. It’s like civilisation is holding it’s breath waiting for the axe to fall.

Just wait until July/August when untended grassland catches fire all over the country and they try to blame ‘manmade climate change’ and not ‘manmade consequences of laziness’.

Mad Max here we come!!

Last edited 1 year ago by DomH75
86
0
DHJ
DHJ
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

It would help explain the accelerated interest in going to the moon in the near future (e.g. by 2030). An endeavour for humanity to be proud of intended to benefit the few?

14
0
nige.oldfart
nige.oldfart
1 year ago
Reply to  DHJ

The interest will be all the greater with the potential fall of the enthusiasm of submarine excursions due to recent events.

13
0
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago
Reply to  DHJ

Our idiot former Prime Minister, writing in the Mail, was talking about the people on that tragic submarine being pioneers, risking it all to expand human knowledge; just proving he’s lost all grip on reality. These were tourists, not so much visiting an undersea graveyard as invading the graves.

I can get with commercial manned space exploration and exploitation: it should have been our priority since the 1960s. Every ill in our society comes from the navel-gazing that happens when a society stops looking outwards: most of our societal problems were sorted decades ago, especially in the West, only for fascist left wing academics to create new problems (micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation and the like) to sow new divisions.

I hope we see lunar bases, lunar factories and lunar space ports to set us on journeys to the other planets. It’s an outward-looking adventure. And, if we’d get our minds of this Net Zero crap, we have an unlimited supply of gas we could scoop in vast ships from the atmospheres of the gas giants to power the Earth forever.

21
-4
Jon Garvey
Jon Garvey
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Can you give us a cost-benefit analysis on transporting natural gas from Jupiter? It doesn’t seem to work for replacing Russian pipelines with US liquified gas, which is somewhat closer than the gas giants.

16
-1
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago
Reply to  Jon Garvey

While I understand the sarcasm, Jon, my point is that the human race is being sold a crock that we have finite resources and that the planet is dying. There’s enough out there to fuel us forever, when the time comes.

25
-1
varmint
varmint
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Dom75———–You are mostly correct. The greatest resource on earth is ——-Humans. But modern environmentalism which is actually old fashioned environmentalism hijacked for political purposes is —–Anti Human. ————–Humans will find solutions to all problems if left free to do so. But manufactured crisis are rather more difficult to solve and is like farting against the wind.

4
0
nige.oldfart
nige.oldfart
1 year ago
Reply to  varmint

Absolutely. All the technologies being used in this net zero/ death of civilisation agenda is old hat. If had been cost effective or had any operational efficiency it would have been used in the past. Any new technology would have to fit their agenda and also their tax and regulatory systems, and more importantly be paid for by the tax payer (inc green levies) in subsidies.

3
0
FerdIII
FerdIII
1 year ago
Reply to  DHJ

Hate to break it to you, but we never went and never will. Something called radiation. Another thing call rocket power and fuel.

But it does distract the peasants from real issues.

2
-1
stewart
stewart
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

I think it’s a realisation that there is little one can do against the awesome power the state has accumulated.

Our only weapon is our own personal non compliance with whatever indignities they try to inflict on us.

It will all collapse under the weight of its inconsistencies and absurdities or not. And there’s not a whole lot anything most of us can do except refuse to comply as much as possible.

46
0
JohnK
JohnK
1 year ago
Reply to  stewart

An hour or so ago, Neil Oliver on GBN made the same point, with a bit of history as to what happened with private tenement rent price inflation during WW1 in Glasgow. In effect, the tenants (mainly women with their husbands being at war) got together and refused to pay extra, and the following political changes there.

23
0
ELH
ELH
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Sensible Environmentalism—Patrick Moore | UKColumn

I’ve only watched the first half so far but he points out that “doomsters” are ever present. e.g.the Crusade in 1097 onwards.

“manmade climate change” or man/arsonists?

4
0
nige.oldfart
nige.oldfart
1 year ago

An excellent read, thank you. The administrative man views the world as if painted by numbers, not an association of individual brush strokes, but fails to understand the function of either.

36
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago

*Warning* Contender for Most Warped Thing You’ll See All Day award incoming…

https://twitter.com/DrLoupis/status/1672564471443881986?cxt=HHwWhIDQhc6hkrYuAAAA

8
0
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

And there is a clip three down which is rather brutal.

4
0
RTSC
RTSC
1 year ago

” we can derive some of the features of the German Administrative Man from our five examples. He appears to live in cities or at least in towns, not in the countryside. He’s certainly an apartment dweller, and he’s more likely than not to rent. He’s actually somewhat well-off, but not wealthy; he’s older and probably not in the best of health. He leads a fairly withdrawn, local life, with limited interest in public events.”

That’s exactly what Schwab and the WEF are trying to create with their 15 minute ghettos; building back better (for them) and denying ownership of anything to the “peasants” they intend to control.

4
0
rachel.c
rachel.c
1 year ago

Sad but beautiful description. I was a Whitehall civil servant once and thought I was doing my bit to improve the world. When I left in the mid noughties I had come to realise how incompetent, self-serving and deluded most of those who got to the top were. As others have said, all we can do is resist, develop grass-roots institutions (particularly for wellness and learning) where we can and watch the overbloated state implode.

4
0
The Real Engineer
The Real Engineer
1 year ago

Interesting that these Germans haven’t realised that their ideas don’t work, with the U turn on Coal. How muich will it take to do the same here, because Germany is (was) in a similar position the the UK with power availability. Plan are afoot for power cuts regularly this winter. They will kill thousands, but that appears not to matter.

1
0

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