N.S. Lyons: The Growing Impulse Towards Societal Engineering

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]  In certain ways China and the United States—despite being vastly different—are slowly converging, with technocratic managerial regimes playing an increasingly important role in each society, argues N.S. Lyons in his essay “The China Convergence.”

Lyons’ writings can be found on his Substack titled “The Upheaval.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.   

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Nathan Lyons, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Nathan Lyons:
It’s wonderful to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Since I read your essay, The China Convergence, it has troubled me, inspired me, and given me lots to think about. There’s a lot more centralization in society that we’re seeing in the West. We also hear these narratives that the West wanted to change China, but really China changed the West. In The China Convergence, you touch on all these elements. Please tell us about this.

Mr. Lyons:
What I argue in the essay is that both China and the United States are changing, and they’re changing in their own way, at their own pace, and from different directions, but they’re headed in the same direction, towards the same point. They’re converging rather than diverging. And I think that has to do with the system of governance in society that both began to head towards in very different ways. The Chinese Communist Party is very different from the United States, but they have their similarities. I think those similarities are worth discussing.

Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. You note that the U.S. and Western liberal democracies are like China, but it’s not obvious. But as you say, there may be some things to be learned.

Mr. Lyons:
I absolutely agree. We can’t directly compare a liberal democracy like the United States or a country in Europe to China under the Chinese Communist Party that killed millions of its own people during its history so it would be absurd to compare them directly and to try to make a moral equivalence. But that shouldn’t scare us off from discussing some very real similarities that we do see occurring in how they are both approaching their internal and external affairs.

Mr. Jekielek:
Why don’t you trace for me a little bit of this development of what’s called managerialism, right? And this is one of these things where you find some kind of convergence, obviously. But this is something, you know, centuries old, a way of looking at the world, a way of operating. Please explain to us how that works.

Mr. Lyons:
This is a very old process. I would call it a process. A managerial revolution has occurred and has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. There was a big change in society because there’s a revolution in mass and scale and there’s more people. The cities are bigger. The companies are bigger. You start to need managers. You need specialists and experts whose job is a specialized job with special skills and they organize things.

People can just think of a normal middle level manager in a business. They don’t produce anything by hand. They don’t necessarily come up with new ideas. What they do is manage people, information, existing ideas and sort of organizational structures and techniques. This becomes a new class of people in society, the professional managerial class.

This transformed all of society, not just government, although it did, but how companies are run, how schools are run, how everything is run. This has been a great explosion since the Industrial Revolution. The impact of this on our systems of government has been underestimated, because essentially, we have changed who rules. It is either a democracy where the people rule, or else a king rules. A managerial system is fundamentally different. It’s essentially an oligarchy of experts.

We talk about technocracy, but this is what it means. The manager runs these organizations and not the owner, whether that’s the people or the government. Even a CEO in a company has much less power than one might imagine. There’s a number of ideas that emerged out of, let’s say, the Enlightenment period that really led to the emergence of managerialism as what we could describe as an ideology. The materialistic technocratic approach or scientistic approach is the idea that human beings can and should manage everything and control everything, if they have enough knowledge. So if you have enough scientific knowledge you can control nature and you can control the physics of reality.

This is where we get fundamentally this idea that you can not only engineer things, material things, but socially engineer things like a government. So this became an extremely important revolution in the worldview of people from a more traditionalist religious viewpoint that everything had a sort of God-given Telos and you had to stick with that. You didn’t interfere. To this idea that modern man could sort of re-engineer everything. If you can engineer things to be improved, to function the way you want them to, then the logical step is that if you did that well enough, if you had perfect knowledge and perfect engineering, you could create a perfect system, a utopian system.

So this is where we get this idea, which comes to us in a big way in the 20th century, of utopian ideologies. These all flow from the same idea, which is really a managerial idea, that you can engineer your way to a perfect society. There is a direction to history, that utopia is at one end, and we could move in that direction, and we will move in that direction and we will move in that direction if we can perfectly engineer everything.

But that creates a moral implication for society, which is that now there’s a right side of history and a wrong side of history. That if you are moving closer to utopia, that’s good. If you’re not moving, progressing towards utopia, then you’re holding back not only history, let’s call it, but the improvement of life on earth. So that sort of de facto makes you a bad person if you are conserving the current way of living and not progressing.

This is where we get the political idea of progress and therefore progressivism, the idea that we should use power, state power and other power to improve society. And progressivism is a sort of important, very important part of managerialism because it incorporates this idea of constant advancement, permanent revolution, to sort of sweep away the old things, the old institutions, the old traditions. All of these things become the enemy.

And to managerialism, they are the enemy because if you have an established way of life with established institutions, like a church or
a local government, or if people are governing themselves, doing things how they used to be doing it, and you wipe all that away, what you do is create a vacuum into which top-down engineering can be applied, which means you grow management. You take on more.

Mr. Jekielek:
More things come under the umbrella of managerial control. prevent it from doing kind of what you’re describing, which is accumulating
power, because the idea being people will just always tend to do that. Once they get it, it’s hard to give it away. Certainly, every liberal democracy really came from that original animating idea. But you’re saying this vision of the world is happening contemporaneously.

Mr. Lyons:
Yes, you’re exactly right. The American system and others like it were set up in order to try to prevent the concentration of power through checks and balances and therefore keep government limited. But that’s not what we’ve seen happen. There’s been a great expansion of bureaucracy in the government. Government’s gotten a lot bigger.

But power has also moved outward into this managerial blob where power is diffused and accountability is diffused. No one really knows who’s running anything. The founders set up this system that overlooked a key threat, because that threat did not yet exist. Because this Industrial Revolution, this revolution of mass and scale that we saw create managerialism, didn’t yet exist when the founders set up the Constitution.
The real threat to American self-governance, the ideal of the United States, where the people would rule themselves and the government would remain small, didn’t come from a tyrant taking power. Around the 20th century, when Woodrow Wilson appeared on the stage, this progressive vision of politics, this progressive idea that we’ve been discussing, you get this great enthusiasm for depoliticizing politics. How do you do that? You do that by making politics rational and scientific. You establish a scientific system of governance, and Wilson called that scientific administration.

Instead of having these democratic debates or political contests, we’re going to use scientific rational principles to revolutionize the system. We’re not going to need to have these debates anymore. That instinct created this whole thrust towards a larger and larger government. because we essentially began to turn over more and more aspects of what was once part of American self-governance to the state for two reasons.

One is that we have this implicit idea that comes to the fore, that if we turn over governance to experts, to scientific experts, things will just run better and more peacefully and more stably. But also because we’re starting to see this revolution from the top down, to clear away the old ways of doing things and make space for this revolution in governance at the same time, the permanent revolution.

Mr. Jekielek:
You make this point that it makes it so that there’s a correct way to do things.

Mr. Lyons:
That means that if the experts determine it, then all of governance becomes about doing the right thing, the correct thing. In that case, politics is not about debate anymore. It’s about being correct and imposing the correct way on everyone else. And we see that not only in politics, but also in everything as the managerial revolution progresses. You see that in education, whereas once people may have been free to educate their children as they like, you see ideas emerge that, no, we need to have a common way of educating people with the correct ideas and therefore it’s the state’s responsibility to do that.

Or we see this in public health for instance or in any area of scientific expertise it becomes no longer, science becomes no longer a scientific process of determining truth. It turns into how we are going to administer the correct scientific truth through our institutions. This idea of technocratic politics has sort of taken over everything from the United States to Europe and elsewhere. This is the essence of this convergence with China, because China is also a technocratic regime. This is the key idea. They have very different ideas about what’s right, but the idea that there is only one scientific truth and the whole system should organize around that is sort of central to this, what we see happening today.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s take at face value your assertion that there’s an attempt to do the correct scientific thing, right? But that often these days, people would argue is in direct contradiction to what science would tell you if you were to try to look at it objectively, which is indeed supposed to be the goal, right?

Mr. Lyons:
Yes. Science, at its best, is supposed to be a process for determining truth—real truth, not politically correct truth. We talk about the marketplace of ideas, where ideas compete. This is an ideal world, then the best one comes out ahead. But in our managerial system, as it is, that’s not how ideas function.

Ideas enter the system, and ideas have consequences in terms of power. Let’s say you are a public health bureaucrat and you do an analysis of a dangerous pandemic that’s happening, or at least you say it’s dangerous, because you conclude that this is a dangerous pandemic and something needs to be done. If you assert that idea, then what that means is that public health bureaucrats like you and your colleagues need to be given additional power and resources to deal with this problem. So what you’ve done by accepting this idea is to benefit your whole organization of a managerial institution.

If instead you’re a public health bureaucrat and you say, you know what, this pandemic is not really a problem. I think we can just leave it alone and the situation is not that bad. What you are doing is effectively undermining your entire reason for existence as a public health manager, because you’re not managing the thing that you exist to manage. And so you are undermining not only yourself and your own power, but the power and influence of all of your colleagues and your entire institution, and ultimately the whole managerial system. So what’s happened is that power has corrupted the method for determining which idea is best. I mean, it’s not a marketplace of ideas. Ideas are selected as truth based on the incentives to use that idea instead of another.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of my observations very early in life was that something happens to an organization once it achieves some kind of critical mass. Like self-perpetuation becomes a higher value than the thing that that non-profit, in the case I was looking at non-profits, right, than the value that that non-profit stands for.

Mr. Lyons:
Yes, that’s exactly right. This phenomenon is a product of managerialism. You have to consider the structure of incentives and driving force of that organization that is run by these managers is not necessarily the stated mission of the organization. The bureaucracy takes on a life of its own, and it does things essentially to grow the bureaucracy just infinitely. And we see that everywhere, whether it’s in government bureaucracies or a place like a nonprofit. if you have a nonprofit whose mission is, say, to end homelessness, very quickly the real mission of the staff of the nonprofit become to hire, to gain a larger budget, gain more money and resources, hire more staff, gain more money, and so on, until there’s this doom loop of managerialism that sort of takes over the whole organization.

Mr. Jekielek:
I remember George Washington deciding to step down and that’s described as this unbelievable thing. America is yours and you make the choice to step away. It seems like most of us don’t have that impulse.

Mr. Lyons:
When you have a government bureaucracy or even a charity and the problem is over, what are they going to do? Usually they don’t shut down. They either find a new mission, a reason to exist and perpetuate themselves and keep getting the money coming in, or they don’t really solve the problem and avoid solving the problem so they can keep going. So it’s very rare that an institution will be set up to do something and then do it and then shut down. That’s not how we see things work in our society.

Mr. Jekielek:
This makes sense to me. You can sort of imagine it in a government context, government bureaucratic context, or a nonprofit context. But in a corporate context where there’s the fiduciary responsibility that’s guiding everything, that you’re trying to maximize the profits. It’s not obvious that that would be helpful. In fact, I would suggest that it might be the opposite, right?

Mr. Lyons:
It’s often, in terms of for the shareholders, to maximize profit in a company, it’s not helpful. And that’s why many companies that began as lean, purpose-driven startups end up as these bloated, bureaucratic organizations that can no longer function very well. That happens a lot in the private sector but it’s not just that, in terms of the sort of organizational structure that starts to become overwhelming. This is the owner-agent problem. Business people talk about the structure and mission of the organization. The people running it become captured by different goals than the owners, whether that’s stockholders or the people in the case of the government.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please expand on that for us. Why does that happen?

Mr. Lyons:
Because the mission of a managerial system is always the expansion of managerialism. And this manifests in some very strange ways. Take Bud Light, for example. There’s this great controversy about Bud Light having a marketing campaign that involved transgender influencers. This caused a lot of political controversy, tanking the stock of the company.

You might wonder, why are corporations involving themselves in political messaging that might hurt their sales. They seem to do this a lot now. If you are a corporate executive, you are a member of the managerial elite within society. And so you have certain objectives and incentives driving you. And those aren’t necessarily the objectives of your own organization. You want the normal things; status, money, and the respect of your peers.

To back up a bit, you go to university, just like all your peers. You learn the same ideas as all your peers. You enter into a system in which you can make a PowerPoint in a philanthropic organization. And you can transfer laterally between these organizations because you are of a certain class, a professional manager, and this is what you do. So what becomes important to you is what gives you status within not the specific organization
you are in, but the entire managerial system.

Staying on the right side of the values and the ideas and the politics of your class of people, the managerial elite, is much more important to you than even your success within one organization. If you say the right things, you can always move to another organization just fine. But if you don’t say the right thing, you’re blacklisted essentially from every organization at the managerial level, which is an entire global network of public and private institutions.

And this is where we approach some of these similarities with China, where we have in an explicit communist system what would be called the party line or the explicit guidance of things you’re supposed to say or not say. And you have to stay on the right side of the party in order to operate in any area of life. We have accidentally, or by coincidence, stumbled into a very similar situation in the West.

Mr. Jekielek:
Does the term political correctness originally come from Lenin?

Mr. Lyons:
Yes, political correctness is from the Soviet Union. It literally meant being politically correct, being on the right side of the party line. Correct is a very important word in a Marxist system, like in Russia or China, the Soviet Union or China. You want to be correct. That means you are on the right side of politics, the right side of history even. And if you’re not correct, then that’s a problem.

Mr. Jekielek:
What that correct thing changes, and sometimes in quite significant ways. In a top-down system like the Soviet Union or Communist China, the leadership tells you what that is, and it’s pretty clear. But in these emerging system of soft compliance, how do you know what is the correct thing as it changes? Because change is actually an important part of how that system works.

Mr. Lyons:
This is a really important point. You don’t know what’s correct, because what is correct doesn’t mean the truth. It means saying the right thing. It’s not about the content. It’s about loyalty, because what you’re doing is signaling your ideological loyalty to the system. Isaiah Berlin was talking about Russia and said that the most important knack any citizen could have in a communist system was the ability to follow the party line wherever it was moving, even in such a system where you didn’t really know what it was.

You had to pay close attention to make sure that you knew what on any given day what the correct thing to say was. That is how the party line functions. It’s a measure of loyalty to the system and so the fact that it changes is only helps do that because if you just happen to be saying the right thing ideologically one day, and the next day it’s completely opposite. If you stick with what you said before, because you’re a true believer in whatever that is, you’re no longer loyal to the system. It’s your loyalty to power that really matters. So you’re expected to change your view overnight.

In a soft managerialism system like ours, it’s not explicitly controlled from a centralized body like the Chinese Communist Party. The party line is emergent from the system. We could even say it’s a hive mind like Twitter. Who knows how real what is really how these ideas bubble up out of the collective unconscious? But you’ll see, you know, someone is canceled for something one day that they wouldn’t have been a week before and they wouldn’t have been a week later.

But what’s important, if you want to remain on the right side of this de facto party line, is that you, in the moment, you say the right thing and you enforce that with others. There’s a whole network of organizations that work together not in coordination directly, but because of these managerial incentives, work together in a de facto synchronicity because they all have the same interests. It’s very important for people, if they’re watching and they wonder, the media always seems to say the same thing at the same time, the mainstream media.

They seem to go along with whatever the government is saying, or they all jump on the same thing at once. And there must be a conspiracy that the media are working together in a sort of conspiratorial way. I think the great advantage of managerialism as an idea is that it can explain this behavior without any explicit conspiracy by anyone, although those may exist.

But that’s not the key driver of what we see when, say, the universities and the media and the government all move in the same way at the same time. That’s happening because those organizations are all run by the same class of managerial elites. They all think the same, they all have the same incentives, and they all receive the same information, the same stimulus to act.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell us about your background.

Mr. Lyons:
I’m now primarily a writer, but my background was in the study of China and the Chinese Communist Party and U.S.-China relations. I worked in a number of think tanks and consultancies and other positions for a long time in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Jekielek:
What made you step out of that?

Mr. Lyons:
About 2020, 2021, I worked in this space for a long time, and the great topic on everyone’s lips was strategic competition with China. But when we discussed strategic long-term strategic competition the only thing anyone in Washington wanted to talk about was the things they were familiar with like diplomatic strategy, you know military security, or economy like trade and tariffs and so on, which are all important.

But what I found was that what we are not talking about ever were some of these other issues that are very relevant to long-term strategic competition. When you think of it as this competition between systems. So things like education or our culture, ideological problems, questions, political problems, like internal political problems. All these things that sort of were raging debates elsewhere, like the culture war, no one wanted to apply these deeper questions to this area of sort of sheltered international affairs.

Whereas, those issues and many more are inseparable from the U.S.-China strategic competition, as a competition of civilizations or systems. When we talk about things like debates over censorship in our system, or even things like health or education, those are really fundamental to who is going to come out ahead, let’s say, in the world. And so I grew frustrated and bored, I would say, with keeping too limited to the debate. I wanted to write about some other things that were going on in the world that apply to this geopolitical situation.

Mr. Jekielek:
To build on that, I recently had John Lenczowski on the show. You actually criticized the Reagan-Clinton years a bit in your piece. One of the things that made the Reagan administration different was John Lenczowski in his role as his NSC, Soviet Affairs Advisor, ideological warfare and public diplomacy played a huge part in what happened during those years and arguably the collapse of the Soviet Union. For some reason, these two things are not really considered much.

Mr. Lyons:
The Chinese Communist Party today sees themselves as in an ideological war with the United States. They take that ideology extremely seriously. They see Western liberalism as determined to destroy them ideologically. It’s central to their vision of the world. Whereas, it’s not for us. We in the United States or the broader West have trained ourselves not to think of ourselves as ideological actors.

And this goes back to the idea of depoliticization and progress and utopia. We think of our system, progressive liberalism, as the natural endpoint of history. Therefore, it’s not an ideology. It’s just rationally correct.

Ideologies are only these crazy belief systems that are outside the liberal truth, so we avoid thinking of it in those terms. But the Chinese certainly see liberalism as a concrete, discreet ideology. And I’m using liberalism here because it’s easy to use, but it’s not really quite what I’m trying to describe because I think our system is a little different. Let’s say managerial liberalism. That would be a good qualifier.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s exactly what I was thinking as you were saying that. But that strikes me as putting us at a huge disadvantage. Would you agree with that?

Mr. Lyons:
It does put us at a disadvantage. In part, for example, because the competition is not just a competition directly between the West and China, but it’s a global competition. You know, we’re competing for allies and partners and trading partners and the affections of the world, just like the first Cold War. When we underestimate how ideologically we can act and appear, oftentimes that fails to resonate with others. The Chinese are very antagonistic to progressive NGOs that spread progressive ideas in their country. They’ve cracked down hard on those and they’re no longer in China.

But we sort of deploy those NGOs around the world to advance progressive ideas in a way that strikes us, or at least the American government, as such a natural thing to do everywhere. But that tends to alienate a lot of people around the world who don’t share our sort of ideological presuppositions. Because we can’t see these progressive liberal ideas as an ideology, it’s very difficult for the government and broader society to understand why anyone would be opposed to these ideas spreading everywhere.

Mr. Jekielek:
Often you hear this narrative that one really in China really believes in communism anymore. They’re not communist. How do you respond to that?

Mr. Lyons:
I understand why people make that argument and it’s half correct. If you think about what communism is supposed to be, issuing in this glorious workers’ utopia of equality. It is one of the most unequal countries on earth economically today. It’s spent the last few decades essentially getting rich, so it’s true that that is not particularly communist.

On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party is definitely a Marxist-Leninist regime, and it takes those ideas very seriously. Moreover, the basic ideas that govern the Chinese system are a managerial system. Those ideas flow through Marx from this idea that you can control the society from the top down and control everything in society and manage it at a broad level. Fundamentally, the current Chinese system is very much still that way.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve read a number of analysts, and they’re kind of persuading me to this view that the communist utopia, true egalitarianism across society, that in a way isn’t actually the real purpose of that system in the first place. It’s just window dressing for something else. I don’t know how you see that.

Mr. Lyons:
Yes, I think that’s true. Now, obviously, among communists, let’s say communist revolutionaries in Russia or China, there were some true believers who really believed that. There were others who said that what the revolution was really about was about power and taking control and establishing a new oligarchy to rule the country. Broadly speaking, those are the people who won out. We have to take seriously the important tenets of communist ideology in terms of their desire to fundamentally revolutionize society and destroy the old ways and traditions and institutions of society and replace it with a new vision that is constructed from the top down, even to change the people themselves into a new communist man.

Mr. Jekielek:
That kind of revolutionary zeal was very real and still exists. I want to talk about the United Front Work Department. Typically, we think of it today as this massive influence operation, tens of billions of dollars a year, into influencing all sorts of entities outside of China to kind of follow, especially Chinese diasporas, to follow the Chinese regime’s bidding. But it’s more than that.

Mr. Lyons:
Yes, the United Front is a lot more than overseas influence operations. That’s what we are familiar with, because it is what affects us. But inside China, the United Front is a huge network. It was this idea created first by Lenin and then adopted by Mao. In Soviet Russia, the original idea was, we were going to try to align as many political parties and fellow travelers as we could, they could, in order to defeat their enemies, first in the Russian Civil War and then later. They accepted the nationalists and the liberals and the trade unions and so on, and they put them all together into a united front. That was the idea.

In China today, the United Front is still very much present as sort of a communist, a core communist idea of the Communist Party, which is to unite all of the organizations of society that you can into a whole of society network. Included in the United Front are sort of every organization and institution that has been co-opted by the Chinese Communist Party through cells of party members that are present in the organization. And this isn’t just government organizations. It’s every major corporation in China. Even things like the Chinese triads, the Chinese gangsters, have been brought into the United Front in order to be useful whenever they’re useful, as we see in Hong Kong, for example.

The United Front is essentially the gigantic network of Chinese Communist Party institutions of control beyond the state. It’s very important to understand China as a party state. There’s the state and there’s the party. These are a parallel system of separate positions. So the people are appointed to positions in the government, but they’re all Chinese Communist Party members. And many people have a corresponding position in the party and in the state, but sometimes they are only in the party and not in the state, and they still wield tremendous power, or whatever power is relevant to their position.

The point is that there is a shadow state, which is the party, which is in fact controlling your position in society even more than the state position. The United Front helps put this into practice. If you have Chinese Communist Party members running a private corporation, those members of the party are loyal to the party. And so the party is de facto controlling the interests of the corporation, even if they do not issue direct orders to do this.

As in any managerial system, in order to get ahead as a good member of the Chinese Communist Party or even just a non-member citizen of China you have to take into account what the party wants what you should be doing as a party member and not just the interests of your organization and so the the sort of web of the party manages to control even the most far-flung organizations that officially have no connection to the party at all.

Mr. Jekielek:
You also make a fascinating distinction in the essay about the distinction between rule of law and rule by law. And I think I’d like to get you to comment on that a little bit.

Mr. Lyons:
Rule of law, if you think about it, is quite interesting and an odd idea that is unique to the Western world. The idea is that law itself rules. There’s no one above the law. No matter how powerful your position within the government, even if you’re the president, you are ruled by law. In China, they do not have rule of law and they say this explicitly. The little people have to follow the laws, but the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership are not subject to the law, because they can’t be. They are the top power and there’s nothing above them, so the law cannot be above them. So law is just a tool to be used for control.

Whereas, in the West, traditionally, we’ve had this odd idea that the law is on top. And I think for very deep reasons, going into Christian theology, essentially about there’s a higher power that sort of holds the people accountable to the law. Whereas the Chinese Communist Party, officially atheistic, the hard managerial regime in China cannot accept having anything above them because that would prevent them from controlling society. When the party says, we need the law to change for us or for you, then the law just changes on the fly to accommodate the interests of power. Unfortunately, in other places around the world, including in the West, increasingly we see similar development where law is used as a tool to achieve the goals of power, but is not held as essentially a sacred thing that is above anyone.

In a managerial system, nothing can be allowed to be above control, because that is sort of the central directive of managerialism, is to control things more and more, and to control more and more things. For the good of society, of course. to control any eternal things. And this is why I think that managerialism is very inherently hostile to, say, religion, because a religion posits that certain things are beyond the world and beyond change and beyond control. There’s a higher authority, whether that authority is the law or God or whatever authority that is transcendent. A managerial system cannot allow that because that means there’s a portion of the world of society that is off limits from managerial control. It cannot be reorganized by the permanent revolution and taken over by managerial technique and improved and incorporated into the sort of managerial project of utopia.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned this idea of permanent revolution in The China Convergence.

Mr. Lyons:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain that for us.

Mr. Lyons:
For many people, it might be confusing to talk about a regime, a government that is a revolutionary regime. Because if you think about it, it’s kind of odd. Doesn’t the government want stability? But in fact, not only in China, but elsewhere, I think we often see revolutionary regimes. And what that means is they initiate and maintain a process of continual revolution, in Mao’s terminology, in order to achieve their objectives of, usually it’s consolidating power, but other objectives as well.

They do that, as Mao said, by creating chaos, essentially. Chaos is good because when there’s an emergency, a chaotic period, things are scrambled. You can undo the status quo of the past and destroy it and replace it with a new thing, a new order. So out of chaos comes a new order. And that’s fundamentally what a revolution is. You break things in order to build new things on the ashes.

Mr. Jekielek:
We live in a quite complex world. I find myself thinking, what to do now?

Mr. Lyons:
It’s a big question, and I’m not sure I have a complete answer because if we’re trying to discuss, say, what is to be done about managerialism, how could this system and all its problems be improved? One of the things you run into very quickly is that you need managers. You need technology, but managers have their own incentives to create more managers and do this whole doom loop. So what is needed is for managers to be kept in control in their proper place. There has to be authority over the managers that exists, that transcends managerial control. In the system of government, there is an executive authority that can keep managerial bureaucracy under wraps.

But ultimately there have to be spheres of life, spheres of society in which managerialism is essentially excluded from taking over. The great enemy of managerialism is self-governing institutions that exist between
the regime and the individual. This was the great point of many political philosophers of history, like Alexis de Tocqueville and Aristotle, who said that you need these middle institutions to exist between the state and the people, and they push back against control. Because self-governance is essentially the opposite of managerialism. It is people organizing themselves from the bottom up rather than the top down. It is organically based on their local reality rather than an abstract plan from the top.

Managerialism is inherently opposed to these self-governing institutions, whether that’s local governance or the ultimate and self-governing institution, the family. It even tries to break up the family because it gets in the way of managerial control. Those institutions need to be strengthened. But the only way you can strengthen those institutions is to have a framework of viewing the world that pre-exists managerialism and is a higher authority than it. The simplest example is religious in nature and puts its principles ahead of managerial ambition. That helps shield the organization from managerial control and lets it serve as one of these buffering institutions in society.

Mr. Jekielek:
Aren’t religions themselves subject to this managerial ethos that we live in?

Mr. Lyons:
Absolutely. It’s very difficult for a church to deal with managerialism. Because if you are a church and you’re growing your membership and you have a big church now, it’s very tempting to not only take on managers to help you manage that size and complexity, but also managerial techniques. Even well-meaning religious institutions are subverted into managerial institutions with managerial priorities. It becomes for them about growing their religious organization and making it more efficient. That managerial idea has replaced the actual mission they started with.

Mr. Jekielek:
This managerial ethos is almost everywhere now.

Mr. Lyons:
Managerialism is global now. Managerialism has gone beyond the nation state. In Canada, Trudeau has talked about a post-national country. I think that’s sort of a common theme now, this idea of globalism. But what globalism is, is of this idea of transferring power of governance from the nation-state, from the sovereign nation-state to a higher level, a supranational authority, whether that’s the EU or the United Nations, or even just international agreements and institutions.

This is about moving managerial control to a higher level across the entire world and you can think of the nation state as one of these self-governing bodies that was in the way of increasing managerial control. And so today there’s hostility to the very idea of a nation. The ideas that we valued about democracy and The local self-governance of our nations and states and towns and so on are being subsumed by this idea of overwhelming control.

Mr. Jekielek:
Nathan, I find you to be a very positive, optimistic person. With this picture that you’re painting, for a lot of people, it could be hard for them to see a way out. How do you keep yourself positive?

Mr. Lyons:
I would say that I often feel very pessimistic, but there is a core optimism or hope that I have, because this idea of a totalitarian managerial regime is not going to work. The problem with managerialism is that it layers all these complexities on top of each other, like trying to build this Tower of Babel of total control. But that’s not how humans work. And the more they try to control things, the more unstable the tower gets, and eventually it’s going to collapse.

And in this context, I would say that that means that these attempts to create really totalizing systems of control, they won’t last forever. I think that there has to be a sort of devolution of control back to a more self-governing level, just really in order to function. I think we are seeing tremendous inefficiencies in our countries and our civilization as a consequence of sort of the buildup of managerialism, and that we eventually we’re going to get back to a much more realistic and healthier
style of governing not only our countries, but our societies as a whole, which is a more free method of approaching life in the world.

Mr. Jekielek:
Nathan Lyons, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show .

Mr. Lyons:
Thank you. It was great to be here.