By Daniel Greenfield
Our technocracy is detached from competence. It's not the technocracy of
engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas
Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without
ever imbibing its substance.
These
are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental
puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't
fix a toaster.
The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love
the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have
no idea what anything costs or how it works.
It's hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A
technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for
anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a
Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who
think that "progress" makes things work, rather than things working
leading to progress.
Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier
designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done
because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything
costs ten times what it should.
If the government can't build a health care website, how is it going to
actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question
that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it
the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at
the problem and then look for programs it doesn't like to squeeze for
extra cash.
The Navy had to be cut to the bone and the Benghazi mission had to make
do without security so that a Canadian company which began employing a
classmate of Michelle Obama's could score over half a billion to build a
broken website. Obama mocked Mitt Romney's criticism of his Navy cuts
by telling him that we don't fight with bayonets and horses anymore.
Bayonets and horses are outdated. In our glorious modernity, we spend
fortunes to build websites that don't work instead.
Modernity has to be built. It has to be constructed brick by bit by
rivet by cable by people who know what they are doing. Modernity without
competence is as worthless as the ObamaCare website which looked pretty
enough to give the illusion of technocratic modernity, but didn't
actually work.
Competence is the real modernity and it has very little to do with the
empty trappings of design that surround it. In some ways the America of a
few generations ago was a far more modern place because it was a more
competent place. For all our nice toys, we look like primitive savages
compared to men who could build skyscrapers and fleets within a year...
and build them well.
Those aren't things we can do anymore. Not because the knowledge and
skills don't exist, but because the culture no longer allows it. We
can't do them for the same reason that Third World countries can't do
what we do. It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, but that the
culture gets in the way.
It's our very hollow modernity that gets in the way of our truly being
modern. We can no longer build big things because the ability to
implement vision on a large scale no longer exists. We can still do
impressive things as individuals, but that's also true of Kenya or
Thailand. And in China, they can carry out grandiose projects, but those
projects have no vision or competence.
We used to be able to combine the two by competently implementing grandiose visions, but our "modern" culture is the roadblock that prevents us from working together to make the great things that we can still envision individually.
Our modernity is style rather than substance. It's Obama grinning. It's
the right font. It's the right joke. It's that sense that X knows what
he's doing because he presents it the right way. There's nothing
particularly modern about that. In most cultures, the illusion of
competence trumps the real thing. It's why so many countries are so
badly broken because they go by appearances, rather than by results.
The idea that we should go by results, rather than by processes, by
outcomes rather than by appearances, was revolutionary. For most of
human history, we were trapped in a cargo cult mode. We did the "right
things" not because they led to the right results, but because we had
decided that they were the right things. There were many competent
people, but they were hamstrung by rigid institutions that made it
impossible to go from Point A to Point B in the shortest possible time.
And
we're right back there today. The entire process of ObamaCare was the
opposite of going from Point A to Point B. It was the least competent
and efficient solution every step of the way. There was no reason to
think that its website would be any better. The process that led to it
being dumped on the American people was completely devoid of any notion
of testing or outcomes. It was the right thing to do because... it was
the right thing to do. It was cargo cult logic all the same. So was its
website.
Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was "good".
Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally
good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps
Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction,
would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything
would work out because it had to.
This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And
it's why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts
of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made
anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in
suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because
they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have
made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo
culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they
thought that their website would work.
Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won't work
because you want them to, they won't work if you go through the motions,
they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make
it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every
step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.
That's modernity. It isn't glamorous. You can see it in black and white
photos of men working on old planes. You can see it in the eyes of the
astronauts who first went to the moon. You can read it in the workings
of the men who built the longest suspension bridges, laid undersea
cables and watched their world change. They were moderns and their time
is done. They have left behind savages with cell phones who make decent
tinkerers, but whose ability to collaborate falls apart in large groups.
The difference between savages and civilized men isn't that savages are
dumb and civilized people are smart. Savages can individually be quite
clever within their parameters and civilized folk can be quite stupid.
It's the ability to extend that intelligence in groups that makes for a
civilization.
Savages cannot work together. They can fantasize, but they can't build
anything bigger than a small group can manage. Savages are warriors, but
not soldiers, they are tinkerers, not engineers, they are inventors,
not scientists, they cannot work together on a large scale and thereby
push past their own limitations as a culture and grow. They may have
individual geniuses, but they cannot pass on what they learn.
We have not yet been reduced to savagery, but our incompetence increases
in large groups to such a staggering extent that it often seems not to
be worth the trouble. Individual geniuses can occasionally carry large
groups on their shoulders, micromanaging them, terrorizing them and
motivating them, the way that tribal chieftains do, but without that
singular personality the whole thing collapses.
The United States government is the ultimate giant unworkable mess. It
is a living cargo cult where everyone marches around following routines
that are supposed to yield great prosperity, but never do. The processes
themselves are broken and make no sense, but the cargo culturers of the
government cannot and will not hear that. They know that the government
will magically make everything work.
Because government is progress. Government is modernity. Government is magic.
The
cargo culters on the islands, who once witnessed the might and power of
the American military during WW2 make American flags and uniforms, they
build airstrips and wooden control towers, and wait for the planes to
land and make them rich. They don't understand why these things should
work, but they do them anyway because that is how they remember it
happening.
Our own cargo culters invoke FDR and JFK, they talk about the New Deal
and the Great Society, they make grand promises and roll out big
programs, and then they wait for it all to work. They don't understand
themselves how or why it would work. But government is magic and the
appearance of a thing is just as good as a real deal.
Build a website and it will work. Pass a law and they will come. Get a degree and you're competent.
There is no need to know how to do a thing. You don't need engineers or
competent men. All you need to do is remember the great dreams of the
past, listen to a few inspirational JFK speeches and then carve a
computer out of wood and wait for free health care to arrive.
In cargo cult America, the food is free, the cell phones are free and
the money can be printed forever because government is magic.
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