THEORY OF THE END - Part 4: The "Expert" Problem
The fourth part of a series exploring various theories on the end of human civilization.
In the next couple sections, I want to enumerate the various “problems” I have with Francis Fukuyama’s theory of Liberal Democracy as the “end of history.” Some of these issues have been mentioned by Fukuyama himself in his book on the topic, while others have not.
I. The “Expert” Problem
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States federal government employs nearly 3 million individuals in total. A staggering figure, to be sure. For reference, that's over twice the population of the European nation of Estonia, making the federal government’s payroll essentially a nation in itself. Also note that this figure does not include the employees of the countless state and city government offices.
This population is spread out over 15 departments: the Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of the Interior, Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of State, Department of Transportation, Department of the Treasury, Department of Veterans Affairs. Each of these, in turn, has several sub-divisions, including the six divisions of the US military in the case of the Department of Defense.
No one person could possibly comprehend the full scope of this massive organism we call the “federal government,” let alone every single field it has pried its far-reaching tentacles into, therefore how can we expect members of the general public to reliably make decisions regarding its operations? Moreover, fields like economics, statistics, accounting, technology, war, and health have all become so bewilderingly complex and are changing so rapidly that it would be unreasonable to expect a man to know everything required to govern them. Expecting him to know all the fields at once is the height of absurdity.
To state my point in plain terms: efficient governance by the masses is impossible. However, considering the state does indeed govern despite all of this, it stands to reason that it does so through non-democratic means. Enter: “the expert.” While in some cases elected officials do appoint civil servants to manage the leviathan and labyrinthian web of bureaucracy we are currently subjected to, their decision is still limited to a relatively small group of people with sufficient (although certainly not “complete”) knowledge of their respective field.
I am far from the first to notice this seeming contradiction in the democratic system. Professor Kishio Satomi, in his book “Discovery of Japanese Idealism,” wrote about the disparity between the election of lawmakers and appointment of bureaucratic administrators back in 1924:
As a matter of course, democratic political thought expects special knowledge of politics in the people who are in charge of administration, and this thought gives rise to an apology that bureaucratism does not always indicate that the State is not democratic.
But democracy limits the competency of the House of Peers as far as possible. This gives more power to the representatives of the nation and to the nation in general as far as legislation is concerned. So it is obvious that it recognizes the differences of administration, and ignores these differences in regard to legislation.
Of course, this still assumes that legislation is still of a democratic character, which is very much in question. Like all of the other aspects of modern governance, legislation has become a bloated and tangled affair, with the federal government now passing, with alarming regularity, pork-filled bills with pages numbering in the thousands. Are our lawmakers actually sifting through these gargantuan tomes on a regular basis, scrutinizing them with the discerning eye of a wizened sage? I would expect not.
Rather legislation has become a kind of mystical black box, impenetrable to the vast majority of the population and confounding even to those familiar with its inner workings. To map out all of its mechanics, to find out where all of the taxpayer money has gone down to the dollar, would likely take years of intense study. And once this theoretical map has been finished, the mapmaker would survey the field and find it to be entirely different than when he started.
To define this system as a “Democracy” would be like defining a car as “a device with windshield wipers.” Yes, the wipers are there, and may play an important part in the vehicle’s operation, but they do not characterize the machine as a whole. Another imperfect example: it would be strange to call a hamburger a “salad” simply because it happens to include lettuce as a topping (as the popular joke says: “if you want to teach something to an American, you should begin with ‘imagine a burger…’”).
While I do not think that Francis Fukuyama even came close to sufficiently exploring this contradiction inherent to our system, it would be uncharitable of me to claim that he did not imply it at least in passing. Take, for example, these two passages wherein he outlines potential counterarguments to his theory:
In large, modern nation-states, citizenship for the great mass of people is limited to voting for representatives every few years. Government is distant and impersonal in a system where direct participants in the political process are limited to candidates running for office, and perhaps their campaign staffs and those columnists and editorial writers who make politics their profession. This stands in sharp contrast to the small republics of antiquity which demanded the active participation of virtually all citizens in the life of the community, from political decision making to military service…
In a large country like America, the duties of citizenship are minimal, and the smallness of the individual when compared to the largeness of the country made the former feel not like his own master at all, but weak and impotent in the face of events he cannot control. Except on the most abstract and theoretical level, then, what sense does it make to say that the people have become their own masters?
This brings us to the next aspect of the issue: if this system is not overtly Democratic, then is it at least “Liberal?” Sure, one could say that it’s automatically illiberal for the common man to have no say in his government, but if that government keeps itself away from the personal affairs of its citizens, wouldn’t that be enough to warrant the descriptor?
This is an interesting line of inquiry but, as evidenced by the previous chapter’s recounting of the events of 2020, it’s not one that we must concern ourselves with, as it should be sufficiently obvious that the government does not keep itself out of personal affairs. While it may be difficult to compare the American government to a Totalitarian regime, the federal government has encroached more and more on the activities of its citizens, to the point where much of it has been effectively normalized.
The existence of PRISM, a massive government surveillance operation that partnered them with many corporations in order to monitor online activity, may have been shocking when it was leaked to the public in 2013, but nowadays such surveillance is viewed as mundane. As much as it pains me to admit, it seems that the whistleblower, Edward Snowden, had turned himself into a fugitive and fled to Russia all for naught. In the end, the federal government got its way regardless.
Countries of a European persuasion, like Germany and the UK, have been worse in terms of personal liberty, with police officers visiting the houses of people accused of posting “offensive” content online to either give them a stern “talking to” or arrest them. The insistence that their “Liberal Democracies” must be defended with draconian limitations on public speech is mind-numbingly absurd, to say the least.
Indeed, it seems many of the most important decisions regarding our societies, for instance war, immigration, and the aforementioned surveillance state, are decided for us rather than by us, making a mockery of the countries’ designation as “Liberal Democracies” and thus jeopardizing their claims to legitimacy. Any attempt to point out these issues or complain about them is also met with hostility, if not from the government itself (as is the case with the European examples I gave above), then from the government’s propaganda apparatuses.
In Franco Berardi’s 2009 work “After the Future,” he describes the modern “Liberal” state of affairs as follows:
It’s a strange word – “liberalism” – with which we identify the ideology prevalent in the posthuman transition to digital slavery. Liberty is its foundational myth, but the liberty of whom?... In neoliberal rhetoric, the juridical person is free to express oneself, to choose representatives, and be entrepreneurial at the level of politics and the economy. All this is very interesting, only that the person has disappeared, what is left is like an inert object, irrelevant and useless. The person is free, sure. But his time is enslaved. His liberty is a juridical fiction to which nothing in concrete daily life corresponds.
Yet while the power wielded by the typical citizen of the modern Liberal Democracy is slim, it is undeniably there. We can still go out and cast our ballot for a limited selection of candidates and thus shift the overall tone of our country’s legislation efforts. And, if everything eventually goes to shit, we have the option of rebelling and committing violence (this is not something which most will come right out and say in polite company, but politics is first and foremost a matter of who wields violence over who). This poses a problem to the state which, as a whole, would prefer to remain permanent and enact its plans into the foreseeable future.
In order to rectify this, the state creates consensus through various means. It can use direct messaging; propaganda from the departments themselves, but this is typically ineffective as most people distrust government messaging by now. Instead, consensus is more often generated via a wide loosely-connected set of institutions that are technically non-governmental, but are usually still connected to the state in some way, e.g. universities, non-profits, think tanks, and news media organizations.
Collectively, these have been dubbed “The Cathedral” by blogger Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug.” This term, in its most basic sense, means “academia and journalism,” but there’s more nuance to it than what appears on the surface. Yarvin states on his Substack blog Gray Mirror:
The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.
Most notably, this pseudo-structure is synoptic: it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together.
He goes on to point out that this means the institutions are selecting for some common denominator. But what exactly is it? “... there is a market for dominant ideas,” Yarvin says.
A dominant idea is an idea that validates the use of power… A dominant idea is an idea that tends to benefit you and your friends. A dominant idea will be especially popular with your friends and former students in the civil service, because it gives them more work and more power.
As far as the cathedral is concerned, this spells not only dominance for the government and the many “experts” who fill its ranks, but also for the market, from which it derives much of its funding. It’s not controversial at this point to say that large corporations have far more say in how the government works than the average civilian. In fact, this may be one of the few truisms that the politically unengaged may repeat if you asked them for an opinion on their governmental entities.
The joint effort between the government and corporate America to maximize economic growth has been named “Neoliberalism” by many on both the political left and right. In “After the Future,” Berardi explains Neoliberalism like this:
What neoliberalism supported in the long run was not the free market, but monopoly. While the market was idealized as a free space where knowledge, expertise and creativity meet, reality showed that the big groups of command operate in a way that far from being libertarian, introduce technological automatisms, imposing themselves with the power of the media or money, and finally shamelessly robbing the mass of shareholders and cognitive laborers.
This “monopoly” does not merely extend to a particular industry, but rather the whole of existence as corporations have increasingly more sway over the economy, government, and the minds of the citizens. In this sense, it is not only government overreach that impinges on the liberty of modern man, but also our economic institutions, which demand more and more compliance and physical/mental labor from the average worker/consumer (we will explore this topic more in the next chapter).
That is not to say that the citizen is a passive actor in all of this. I believe the powerlessness of the average man has gradually taken hold over the public consciousness and has led to some strange events and behaviors over the past decade. For instance, the January 6th, 2021 riot at the United States Capitol Building after the supposed triumph of Joseph Biden in the previous year’s presidential election reflected the public’s growing distrust of America’s electoral system and “experts.” Even the narrow choice given to us by America’s so-called Democracy was increasingly seen as a sham, and the riot was an expression of this.
There have been wins, however. Donald Trump’s subsequent re-election in 2024 can be viewed as a rebellion against the power dynamic and tyranny of the American bureaucracy outlined in this chapter, as he campaigned specifically on the prospect of firing many of the unelected bureaucrats using the slogan “drain the swamp.” Although how much Mr. Trump will be able to change during his second term in office still remains to be seen. It feels to me that the direction of such a massive body is not so easily shifted, but perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised.
Another effect that this disenfranchisement has had on the psyche of the public has been the intensification around political discussion, as well as the politicization of everything in one’s personal life. Many have become deranged in their political preoccupation, to a nearly mystical degree, decorating their houses and cars with stickers listing off political causes as if they were magical totems and amulets.
Ironically, many of the causes are not existential ones, rather they increasingly involve (at least from the view of the past) petty identities carved out in the shallow niches allowed by our societal order, whether they be LGBTQIA+, black ethno-narcissists, or pornography enthusiasts. We have even seen the not-insignificant resurgence of the (as Francis Fukuyama has pointed out) thoroughly disgraced “theory” of Communism, which we will discuss later.
Given all we have discussed so far, it’s clear that the label of “Liberal Democracy” no longer fits just right. Like a child growing out of his previous wardrobe, that particular shirt is now far too uncomfortable to wear. Instead, what we’re witnessing is the evolution of something different, and perhaps altogether stranger.
But before we go into detail there, I want to outline a few more issues with Fukuyama’s theory, starting with the problem of “equality.”
I hope to see you all in Part 5. Thank you very much for reading
To be continued…