First as Technocracy, then as Rage

Things are going to get ugly

What before had been

vile and shabby, but comprehensible,

became swollen and

unrecognisable. Something utterly vicious.

-Raymond Carver, ‘Spell’

Mark my words: overseas observers of life in the UK are about to get ringside seats for a period of seriously bad juju that is about to unfold. There is a breakdown coming in the relationship between the government and the people, and things are going to get hostile. There will be tears; there will be a hard rain. We’re going to have to batten down the hatches and pray we make it through.

The hostility is going to come mostly from one direction: government is going to get angry, and it is going to start soon. It is already apparent to everybody that Starmer’s Labour Party are - to use a good old-fashioned word that Orwell would have loved - prigs. The main message we are getting from them is that they are disappointed in us: for driving cars, for drinking alcohol, for wanting to get good educations for our children, for greedily hoarding wealth to pass onto our descendants, for amassing nest-eggs for retirement, for engaging in filthy habits like smoking, and for voting ‘divisively’ in referenda. To call them dictatorial would be in a way to give them too much credit; it would be much more accurate to simply call them bossy. The image that comes to mind is that of a stuck-up and prissy schoolmaster or schoolmarm in a 1950s children’s novel set in a boarding school; the kind of person who would appear in a Jennings or Billy Bunter book to bluster, red-faced, about somebody having raided the currant bun supply in the tuck-shop. And the new government’s understanding of the word ‘authority’ is that it derives from the power to do the political equivalent of giving class detentions. Collectively personified as a teacher, the new Cabinet would be the type who mistakes surly, resentful silence for respect, and laments very much the demise of the cane.

In a previous post - borrowing from CS Lewis - I used the word ‘unconciliatory’ to describe Sir Keir Starmer, and I increasingly find it the most appropriate one when thinking about the tenor of governance to which we are now subject. Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was artificial and their well of support is ankle-deep; since only one in five of the electorate actually voted for them they were already unpopular at the very point of taking office. Politicians who were not thoroughgoing mediocrities would, finding themselves in such a position, be prudent. They would recognise their priorities to be consolidation, calmness, and concession - their aim would be to lay stable foundations for future governance with quiet competence. But the current crop do not really understand the word ‘prudence’, or like it. So we are patently evidently not going to get that. We are instead going to get a programme of improvement imposed upon us from above: eat your greens, do your press-ups, and do as nanny says (oh, and hand over your pocket money while you’re at it).

This will all unravel very quickly. People will not get with the programme, because people never really do, and certainly not when it has been designed by those they actively mistrust and sense have nothing but disdain for them. And therefore, in short order, as the truth dawns on the government that the people are not on board with its plan of action, the sense of disappointment it feels is going to turn to rage. This will in turn have the inevitable result, as the rage becomes nakedly apparent, that the population will start to kick back - mulishly, and hard.

Nobody will benefit from this, and nobody should welcome it; it will be poisonous. Genuinely extremist politics may very well surface as a result of the strife that will ensue. But the blame for that will squarely be at the government’s feet - the result of a total, systematic failure to deal with the electorate as human beings rather than datapoints, cogs, crankshafts, or sheep.

Adam Smith knew all about the dynamic underlying this kind of breakdown. In a passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, well-known to libertarian thinkers, Smith describes for us a character who he calls the ‘man of system’, who, ‘apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and…enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government’, forgets that there are ‘great interests’ or ‘strong prejudices’ that oppose it. Imagining that he can ‘arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board’, he soon finds that the chess-pieces in fact have wills of their own, and resolutely refuse to stay put in the arrangement he sets out for them. His efforts, then, are very much likely to fail. This can be contrasted with the success of his antipode, the man of ‘humanity and benevolence’, who rather uses ‘reason and persuasion’ to achieve change gradually and in such a way as to go with the grain of the society which he governs.

What often gets overlooked about this passage is Smith’s understanding of the overarching psychology. The important point about the ‘man of system’ is that he is short-tempered and unbending: not only does he have a plan which he wishes to impose on society; he ‘cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it’. And so, as Smith makes clear, the end result is a deterioration into ‘misery’ for society at large. Government wants the population arranged in a certain order on the chess-board and working towards a certain result, but the population wants to play Snakes and Ladders instead. This makes not just for failure of the man of system’s plans in practical terms but for antagonism and anger. Government, the passage implies, comes to lose its temper with the population for its constant ‘deviation’ from the plan, and ultimately to despise those it governs as a consequence. Government therefore in the end purposefully, or through negligence, allows the ‘the highest degree of disorder’ to permeate society, almost (though Smith does not himself say this) as a punishment.

Smith’s ‘man of system’ passage is important because it clarifies for us that technocracy, which we tend to think of as dry and depersonalised, is actually intensely emotional and given to many insecurities and anxieties, and much control-freakery. The technocrat governs through the application of purported expertise, and therefore - importantly - by definition always walks a knife-edge of legitimacy. If one is to derive one’s claim to govern solely on the basis that one is an expert, or can marshall expertise, then it follows that any challenge to that expertise is an existential threat. The technocrat always therefore endeavours to insulate himself from precisely such challenges, so that his position remains secure. But, believing that his plans and schemes are perfect, he strives to make sure they are implemented faithfully and competently - he can ‘suffer no deviation’ from them because a deviation may go awry and destabilise his claim to expert rule. Deviations are therefore despised: the technocrat always seeks to nip them in the bud if he can, and squash them where they have already begun.

The path from technocracy to rage is therefore an easy one to travel down. It is notable that the ‘man of humanity and benevolence’, who sits in opposition to the ‘man of system’ in Smith’s schema, governs through ‘reason and persuasion’. The implication is that the ‘man of system’ deploys neither. One does not reason with, or persuade, algorithms or automata. One simply operationalises them to achieve whatever outcome one desires. And, therefore, when they go wrong, one very rapidly gets angry: a machine which is not functioning correctly is not a disagreement to be negotiated but an affront - the result of bad design or a failure to follow instructions. If one is in the habit, then, of thinking of human beings as essentially akin to machines or tools - either instruments through which one’s plans are realised, or pieces of engineering to be repaired, upgraded, and set into motion in coordination with others - then one similarly finds oneself attributing their ‘failures’ to design flaws, malfunctions or software bugs rather than disagreement or free will.

We are all familiar with the rage of the technocrat in this sense, because we have all been in the position to find ourselves getting angry with a recalcitrant and uncooperative gadget or device. ‘Stupid thing,’ we mutter to ourselves, in a deranged fashion, as we fiddle with the offending item. ‘Why is it not working?’ We sometimes have to forcefully restrain ourselves from flinging the rebellious object across the room. I have a vivid memory from my school days of an art teacher, trying to cajole the mouse on a Commodore Amiga to move its pointer around a screen, suddenly losing control and hissing ferociously through his teeth, ‘Up YOURS!’ at the thing in his hand, as though it had just dealt him a terrible and grievous insult (luckily for him, there were only three of us in the classroom at the time). The famous incident from Fawlty Towers, in which Basil subjects his broken-down car to a ‘damn good thrashing’, is only a notch or two above what each of us, in our darkest moments, has done or said to an innocent inanimate object that has irked us.

Purposive government, of the kind which Labour embodies, is therefore always liable to slip into petty vindictiveness and irritability. A government with purposes to be realised is one that chiefly sees the population as comprising not fully formed human beings, but instruments for achievement of the purpose in question. And its mode of relating to those it governs is therefore that of a lever-puller, button-pusher, or text-inputter; it does not compute them as fellow people with hopes and desires of their own. It naturally follows that when things go wrong, the fault must lie with the instruments - and, since instruments cannot be reasoned with or persuaded (never mind having opinions of their own that might be worth listening to), the obvious tendency is for government to slip into Basil Fawlty, ‘I’ll count to three!’ mode. The ruler begins to get red in the face and start swearing. His response is not conciliatory because there is no conciliation with a malfunctioning or unresponsive machine. There is only blind indignation.

Regular readers will at this stage not be surprised to find me making reference to the observations of Iain McGilchrist. In The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist, in painstaking detail, lays out for us the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain - deriving from the essential cleavage between the right hemisphere, which attends to the organism’s surroundings, and the left, which focuses on discrete objects for the purposes of grabbing and manipulating them. I have written much more extensively about McGilchrist’s work elsewhere, but for our current purposes it suffices to note that, while many emotions tend to be experienced in the right side of the brain, anger is much more a left hemisphere phenomenon:

What is striking is that anger, irritability, and disgust stand out as the exceptions to right hemisphere dominance, fairly dependably lateralising to the left hemisphere.

This, you will have noticed, nicely confirms what we already intuit: that there is a close kinship between the technical manipulation of objects and the emotion of rage. The left hemisphere, whose job is to identify individual items with quick and dirty heuristics, and then take hold of them and make use of them (as food, as weapons, as tools, etc.), has absolutely no patience with, or time for, reasoning or persuasion. It wants to find, figure out, get, and instrumentalise. And it hates to encounter resistance and has no capacity to understand or accept it. Anger is therefore always its instinctive response when things do not work out exactly as planned. It deploys rage because it literally knows no alternative.

The pattern, then, is obvious, and what lies in store for us is plain. We have a confluence of extremely unenviable circumstances: a highly technocratic government crewed by people of astonishing intellectual narrowness and superficiality, who are already strongly disliked by the population and for whom the feeling is entirely mutual, and a host of structural problems too long to even begin to list that have been kicked into the long grass by successive governments for a generation or more. We are going to get half-baked plans imposed upon us half-cocked, and when we fail to comply, we are going to find opprobrium being heaped on our heads, and ‘damn good thrashings’ to follow shortly after. This is a recipe for an extremely unpalatable and indigestible dish and we should worry very much about what will come out of the oven, politically, at the end of the current Parliament. The population will have no alternative but to spit out what they have been fed - and ‘the highest degree of disorder’, to go back to Smith, may very well follow. And then what?