The Managerial Personality
Published on 16 October 2024
The managerial class is the first class which people self-select into. Managers and skilled professionals are both drawn from the same social stratum and so it is largely a matter of preference whether one joins one or the other. It’s worth considering what might determine that choice.
Skilled professionals are, as the name suggests, skilled. If one is good at acquiring skills, one is more likely to choose that path. Moreover in many professions one’s level of skill is fairly evident and determines ones status within the occupation. Naturally if you’re intelligent and hard-working, you’re going to choose an occupation which makes best use of those qualities.
Conversely, the managerial class requires no hard-skills and relies principally on navigating office politics. Hard work is seldom much of an advantage, and intelligence might even be a demerit insofar as managers typically don’t like competing with other managers who are more intelligent than themselves. This might explain why those widely perceived as mediocre, such as Stalin, typically rise to the top in bureaucratic systems.
While professionals are rewarded for competence, managers and administrators are rewarded for unscrupulousness. Activities include self-promotion, social manipulation, ruthlessly undermining competitors in office politics, and various underhanded schemes to increase their power in the bureaucracy (e.g. create a process so that line workers need your sign-off to do their jobs). They also lack the satisfaction of knowing they contributed to society, i.e. a nurse surely derives some contentment from helping people in a way that a hospital administrator isn’t (there is plenty of evidence that the growth of administrators in the healthcare sector, like all other sectors, is largely responsible for declines in productivity).
Thus, to put it crudely, people choose to become managers because they already lack intelligence, work ethic, moral scruples and are avaricious for power. But in addition to selection effects, occupations also mould the mindset of those who work in them.
In most organisations there is a rough division between those who decide what to do, i.e. managers and administrators, versus those who decide how best to do those things, i.e. professionals with relevant expertise. This results in two very different worldviews. What to do is essentially a normative question. How to do it is a technical question.
For professionals to be good at solving problems, they need to accurately model the world around them. They’re interested in questions like: ‘will this bridge be structurally sound?’ or ‘what diagnosis would explain all of these symptoms?’. The managerial class do not operate in this world of facts because they have little bearing on their decision making. To take an example from politics: someone especially well-informed about the absence of WMDs in Iraq would have seriously hurt their career by opposing the war. The fact they would have been subsequently vindicated makes no difference.
Instead, the managerial class think ideologically. Indeed they struggle to even understand why anyone would make merely factual claims. To give two examples (I choose political examples because people are familiar with them): in the infamous Cathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson, she was unable to parse factual statements without first attaching some sort of ideological valence to them. JP is a boomer-academic, naturally his inclination is to lay out the facts before making value-claims, a practice wholly incomprehensible to over-socialised ideologues. Or to provide another, near identical, example. David Shor made the empirical claim that race riots swung voters towards the Republicans. This was merely a descriptive statement, Shor himself was pro-BLM, but as a highly-skilled professional Shor wants to get his facts right. Naturally he was cancelled by those cognitively-incapable of treating a statement of fact as a statement of fact.
This also has consequences for attitudes towards speech in general. Free speech is valuable insofar as it allows hitherto unknown or discounted facts to come to the fore. For a class which has no interest in concrete reality, such speech can provide no value. It can still be useful for the managerial class to know which beliefs have been vouchsafed as ideologically sound, for which purpose regime-appointed fact-checkers exist. Such officially designated arbiters of fact are absurd to all but the managerial class.
Another virtue of sorts for the managerial class is an absence of principles. Principles, like facts, get in the way of adopting the most advantageous ideological line at any given moment of time. Self-consistency is equally a weakness. This all leads to the widely observed phenomenon where the managerial class can reverse their positions, all in unison, with great alacrity. One day only the most deranged conspiracy theorists entertain the proposition that Covid might have originated in a Wuhan lab, the next day it’s an officially-sanctioned belief and we have to pretend that it always was so.
The main object of members of the managerial class is to hold only opinions which will further their own careers. It is precisely their acumen in choosing the safest beliefs upon which their position in society rests. To compete in the bureaucracy means forever being engaged in a popularity contest (or more accurately a Keynesian beauty contest). The whiplash speed in which the managerial class changes their beliefs resembles that of the bull and bear runs in the stock-market because they’re ultimately driven by the same mechanism, people second-guessing what others believe and choosing their own beliefs accordingly.
This instils the single most characteristic trait of the managerial class: their obsessive drive for conformity. The borg-like homogeneity of the managerial class is a wonder to behold. Moreover they impose conformity on everyone else as well, because as managers they cannot benefit from any form of division. This drive for consensus creates a suffocating atmosphere even for those outside the class, who quickly find themselves shunned like a leper if they deviate from ideological orthodoxy.
Group-think is an emergent phenomenon. A manager who has no care for the truth won’t do much damage in an organisation which is otherwise staffed with people who do. But as you add more managers and administrators who are socially-oriented rather than fact-oriented, the sense-making faculty of the organisation as a whole becomes impaired. Before long, a company might have some completely nonsensical plan to ‘rebuild everything on the blockchain’ or some similar absurdity because every single person involved in decision-making is unmoored from observable reality. This will prove fatal long before the parasitic load of the managerial class (i.e. their wages etc.) alone would kill the host organism.
The same too occurs at the societal level. As the managerial class has become ever-more dominant, mainstream culture becomes a dizzying and confusing away of competing narratives. Epistemic post-modernism is the fruit of managerial dominance.
In this environment, politics devolves to politicians choosing which narratives to believe based off ideological predilection. The modern politician juggles competing interest groups just as a manager might choose which team or project to allocate more funding to. Here the managerial class has reconceived politics so that it is a natural vocation for managers. This form of government lends itself well to identitarian politics, as minorities form natural constituencies whose role is somewhat isomorphic to the various divisions that make up an organisation.
While the managerial class is strong as a class, individuals within it often have a very precarious existence. A highly skilled professional has skills and credentials to fall-back on, the typical administrator or manager is often in a station far above what they would be entitled to based off any objective criteria. Their authority rests on ephemeral org-charts and the like. As a result, the managerial class themselves are extremely deferential to authority and officialdom, whence their own power derives. It’s often a drive to ascend corporate hierarchies which led them to choose to be a member of the managerial class in the first place.
They are extremely averse to meritocracy, which is unsurprisingly given their own dearth of merit. In recent times they’ve attacked merit-based systems as being anathema to diversity, but their opposition does not stem from a love of diversity. In many countries, the war on merit long predates diversity considerations. The term meritocracy was coined in 1958 as a pejorative. In most countries the attacks on meritocratic elements such as the civil service exam, or ability tracking in schools, had nothing to do with race.
The fight over using SAT in American college admissions can be seen as a fight between the two worldviews I’ve been elucidating. On one side, you have professionals who want psychometric tests designed by professionals to be used to identify ability in an objective and impartial manner. On the other, you have admittance officers to be given wide discretion in choosing between applications. Being of the managerial class, their natural instinct is to choose applicants based off the ideological content of essays they’ve submitted, thereby assaying the candidate’s ability to navigate a world in which the managerial class are dominant.
The managerial class equally abhors efficiency and mechanisms which promote efficiency. They almost exclusively thrive in large bureaucratic organisations. Their growth in power as a class is almost wholly explicable by the decline of small businesses, yeoman farmers etc. and the rise of large multinational corporations and the growing share of activity that takes place within the state sector. Not only does the managerial class oppose the efficiency of markets, they prefer the most inefficient forms of state capitalism. E.g. they want a government with weak executive power, but a sprawling labyrinth of departments, statutory bodies, quasi-judicial commissions, public-private partnerships, consultancies and charities. The more convoluted the apparatus, the less accountability for each component, the more opportunities for employment for the new nomenklatura.