The Technocracy of Failure

It is apt to describe the contemporary form of Western government as a technocracy. Nominally, we have the trappings of a legislature, executive and judiciary, but these increasingly exist simply to give effect to the ideas of a penumbra of ‘experts’ (academics, civil servants, business leaders, etc. ), and the only authority that is nowadays recognised within elite opinion is that of their own purported expertise.

Anyone in any doubt about this simply needs to look at the current UK government’s attempts to cut illegal immigration; not only is its mandate to do this widely doubted across the chattering classes (despite its having a large Parliamentary majority and having made a clear manifesto commitment to reduce immigration in the round at the last general election), but it simply cannot find a way to coax the apparatus of state into even pretending to try to achieve its objective. A democratic mandate is not believed to be a source of legitimacy - let alone what the law says - and expert opinion sees immigration as an unalloyed good (beneficial for economic growth rates, productivity, and so on). Therefore, illegal immigration will continue. The technocracy wills it, and it will be so.

The greatest trick technocracy ever pulled was convincing the world that it is associated with competence. Technocracy presents itself as government by people who know what they are doing - the ‘adults in the room’, the ‘wise minority in the saddle’ guiding the herd, and so on. In truth, the exact opposite is true: technocracy is always and everywhere doomed to disaster, and our current technocracy is no different. It is a technocracy of failure.

There are two reasons why technocracies fail. The first is epistemological; the second is philosophical.

Epistemology first. Here, there is little that can be added to the first few lines of Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, which are worth reproducing in full:

What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough.
If we possess all the relevant information,
if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and
if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic.

The point, of course, is that those ‘ifs’ are utter phantasms. The first ‘if’ - possession of all the relevant information - is, as David Hume showed long ago, impossible, because by definition that requires a concept of what is ‘relevant’, and what is relevant is not open to the human mind to discover. No matter how much one tries to list comprehensively what is, or is not, the relevant information in a given situation, one will never be able to guarantee that some material variable has not been omitted. Human decision making is in other words always undertaken from a position of uncertainty about what the relevant information is.

(This is true even of the simplest decisions: Should I buy a Mars Bar with the £1 coin in my pocket? I know some of the relevant information: how much the Mars Bar costs, what it is, and how much £1 could buy me in the form of other goods and services. But I don’t know whether I will need the £1 for some reason later on; nor whether it would be ‘better’ across some metric to spend the £1 on something else instead; nor whether there are cheaper Mars Bars on offer at a shop across the road. Now try to list all the relevant information in deciding whether, say, to build HS2.)

The second ‘if’, meanwhile, is reliant on a univerally accepted set of preferences, or a universally acceptable way of prioritising preferences where they conflict. It should be obvious that neither of these things exists, nor can exist - except perhaps in the world of ants or termites - and that it would indeed be highly undesirable if they did (unless life in an ants’ nest is for some reason appealing to you).

And the third ‘if’ follows from the first and second. Complete knowledge of available means is an oxymoron, in the same way that ‘all relevant information’ is impossible to possess and universally accepted preferences do not exist; we can concieve of some available means in any given circumstance, but never all of them - and by definition we cannot know the extent or character of those which we are unknown to us.

As Hayek goes on to put it, then, the ‘problem’ laid out in this paragraph is ‘emphatically not the economic problem which society faces’. Society is not in the position for a rational economic order to become a problem purely of logic, and nor can it ever be. Logic will not help us with economic problems, nor indeed problems of any other kind: problems are not resolvable through the application of logical technique except perhaps in the world of mathematics exercise books. Real-world social problems are not logical in character at all: they are political, and what information is ‘relevant’ to a decision, what preferences ought to be taken into account when making it, and what are the appopriate means of carrying it out, are all questions of politics, not of logic.

This segues us nicely into the philosophical reason why technocracies fail. Real-world social problems are not solvable through logic because real-world social problems are not solvable at all - they are at best made manageable through political processes. As Leo Strauss put it, problems that we encounter in philosophy, and for that matter in the economy, society, and so on, are ‘permanent’ ones: they are features of the human condition, which will always be with us. Should the government try to reduce immigration? That depends on the stances we take regarding the rule of law, economic growth, nationalism, fairness, compassion, and so on and the trade-offs between them, and hence on the underlying values which they represent - values which inherently conflict and which will always vary in importance from person to person. Politics is the means by which we reconcile the conflicting values which inform how we confront our permanent problems, and hence arrive at a stable modus vivendi - not at solutions, but at temporary accomodations which can allow us to live in a state of truce with those who disagree with us, and hence enjoy some security and civility accordingly.

Technocracies fail, then, not just because they inherently and unavoidably make bad decisions based on incomplete information, but because their decisions derive from a set of category errors: that logic or technique are the appropriate methods for solving social or economic problems, and that there are such things in the first place as social or economic problems that can be solved at all. Technocratic decisions are founded on the fantasy that there is no need for politics - that politics can be circumvented or ignored in the name of the application of reason - when the truth of course is precisely the opposite: politics is all we have.

It is no accident, then, that the areas in which our technocracies are most conspicuously failing and where the social fabric is decaying most rapidly are all those in which attempts to abolish politics have been so forceful. We all know which areas these are: the areas where debate and questioning are prohibited; where merely stating preferences and values contrary to those held by the clerisy is considered to be heretical; and where there is typically no representation of differing views among mainstream political parties or politicians. Those areas are the ones in which decision-making is at its most foolish and at its most divorced from reality, and those areas are the ones around which faith in government is at its weakest. It is in precisely these areas that politics might save us; but it is in precisely these areas around which technocracy admits no politics to appear. The result is not just incompetence but immiseration - advancing at considerable speed.