Thread by @Tinkzorg

One thing @GhostOfGord has helped to really clarify for me is how close our social situation is to the dysfunctional army situation in France in the ancien regime, in the leadup to the French Revolution. And bureaucrats may have replaced capitalists as the #1 enemy. Why? A 🧵.

One of the reasons the French army was so unreliable for king Louis XVI during the early days of the Revolution has to do with its dysfunctionality. That dysfunctionality had a couple of causes, but one of them was that the army in fact had TWO jobs.

The first job was to win wars, as armies are often expected to do. The second job was to serve as a dumping ground for increasingly precarious provincial nobles, some of which were just as poor as the peasantry at this point. But they were nobles, and they needed protection.

As such, advancement in the French army for commoners was heavily restricted. No matter how talented you were, good luck rising above the rank of captain. This was a cause of huge frustration, but it couldn't really be "fixed"; if it was, then what would the nobles do?

The dream of basically creating a dedicated, ultra-skilled warrior cast out of the provincial nobility, like the german junkers, never really came to pass. So instead what you had was a jobs program for people who often weren't particularly competent.

A similar logic obtains in western societies today. If you graduate magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in underwater basket weaving, that is your proof of nobility. It is not considered strange for you to then be given the task of managing a national logistics system.

If you graduated from Harvard, that just means you can do stuff like that, right? Meanwhile, what the *hell* would happen to America if some doofus veteran rail and logistics worker or longtime operator got to manage or regulate the rail industry?

Yeah maybe someone with five decades in the industry has the knowledge in some sort of petty technical sense, and maybe he should be an advisor to the basket weaver from Harvard, but put him in charge? Let the *commoner* run things? Madness!

De facto if not de jure, the ever expanding layers of bureaucracy, HR, and middle management serve as a dumping ground for the modern "petty nobility", people with degrees in quite literally whatever the fuck, who then need some semi-important job befitting of their station.

But this is at this point causing huge inefficiencies and breakdowns in the machines that keep us all fed, clothed, and prevent us from freezing in the winter or drowning in raw sewage. The petty nobles, just like their french equivalents, cannot handle the job.

The solution to a lot of social and economic malaise in the US and the west in general is very likely to do what the french did: get rid of this covert but widespread welfarist function of our bureaucracies.

After a few initial hiccups, the French army of Napoleon - an army that promoted many of its leaders from the ranks based on ability, rather than having a piece of paper that said you deserved a generalship - whipped pretty much the rest of Europe single handedly.

Will our various industries - such as trucking, which is clearly in crisis in the US - really do so much worse, if there's less credentialed basket weavers coming up with new regulation,from the POV of someone who has never driven a truck in their life? I doubt it!

At this point, if you do what the left does - which is to say "let's take some money from Jeff Bezos, then you, the worker, and the email jobs guy who makes your life hell can divvy up the take", you are likely to going to run into a real issue.

The email job guy is, in many cases, easily more hated than the distant capitalist. And, in a very real sense, far more overtly parasitical. If you talk about billionaires, but remain silent about the caste of "email worker" parasites, you are not likely to gain much trust.

As such, people need to acknowledge that these bureaucrats and middle managers aren't just some irrelevant background color in our society, they are a real class with real force and their own interests. And people are increasingly sick of them. Moreover, they fail at their jobs!