What drives ‘politics’ is policy fads among elites, which are driven by fads in theory. Elected representatives are just another avenue for this. Voters know little about policy and still less about theory. What drives theory adoption is the private philanthropic networks.
There’s been attention drawn to the role of think tanks in the adoption of ‘neoliberalism’ but it’s really like that all the time. An endless parade of economic, political, administrative, and managerial theory emanating from academia and think tanks, funded by private interests.
The plutocracy rules through theory-selection.
Control of the international intellectual scene is a incredibly powerful imperial tool. Everybody wants to get featured in the top US journals, attend US conferences, get a position at a US university, etc, despite the fact that none of the theory actually works!
Moreover, even when a country tries to gain ‘intellectual sovereignty’, they end up having to essentially branch off the current intellectual fads. That ends up being their starting point. So they’re stuck with old theory that doesn’t work, while losing international status.
This system of imperial control has one huge weakness: nobody actually needs theory. The whole thing is based on a myth. It can be escaped with minimal material resources. However, rejecting this myth is difficult. It’s a subtle skill, hard to master, hard to communicate.
We can imagine the implausible scenario where each country’s intellectuals discover Wittgenstein and proceed to dispel the endless theory being vomited out by the American empire, freeing humanity from intellectual tyranny. But it’d be a difficult task to bring it about.
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