Power Versus Information

is just institutions vs people

Perceptive observation leads to a good question:

I’ll propose an answer, but first let’s head over there from what will seem like another direction.

I’m working my way through the Tucker Carlson interview with Andrew Tate, though it’s taking me a while to watch the whole thing because of how long they talked, pausing only to shave and bury their dead. There are several recurring themes that hit close to home, including the recurring discussion about how rarely reality struggles to the surface of mainstream public discourse; see, for example, Tate’s description (around 43:20) of governments passing laws not to solve problems but to fix “the person who’s talking about the problems.” (He’s right.)

But the thing that interests me is the way that theme brushes up against another of Tate’s favorites, the theme of “masculine excellence” and the richness of a life devoted to competition and winning. What strikes me at this moment is that an entire culture of fierce competitors have climbed ladders to nowhere, rising as empty people in ruined systems.

Consider the case of the sharp-elbowed Wharton MBA who rose to prominence as a marketing executive, shaping the future of major national brands before taking the lead on the nation’s top-selling beer, Bud Light, which she set out to free from its knuckledragging frat boy loser customer base by shrewdly aligning the brand with sexy young influencers like Dylan Mulvaney.

Consider the case of the medical doctor who fought the wars of internal politics for decades, rose to the top of the federal bureaucracy, stood at the side of presidents, built shrines to himself, charted the nation’s path in a time of crisis, drew the largest paycheck in the government in addition to a little something extra from the pharmaceutical industry, and semi-retired with great wealth.

Consider the case of another medical doctor, a major figure in national media, a trusted voice in the corridors of power, who holds two heavy fistfuls of academic titles and credentials:

Positions

Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine

Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, United States

Professor

Departments of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, Texas United States

Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics

Texas Children's Hospital
Houston, Texas United States

Co-Director

Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development
Houston, Texas United States

Founding Editor in Chief

PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases

University Professor

Baylor University
Houston, Texas United States

Fellow in Disease and Poverty

James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy
Rice University
Houston, Texas United States

Health Policy Scholar

Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy
Baylor College of Medicine

Faculty-Senior Fellow

Hagler Institute for Advanced Study & Scowcroft Institute of Intl Affairs
Texas A&M University

….still with me? That went on for a while. Okay, now:

Here he is, an alpha at the top of his game:

Theodore Roosevelt sneered at the critic and the observer, celebrating the bold warrior who spent his life doing battle in the arena, besting his enemies and rising to the very pinnacle of power, standing on the mountaintop in the glory of victory. So.

It’s an interesting moment to be alive, watching the emptiness of major institutions in the era of late empire and the obvious hollowing of revered symbols. Pipe down, everyone, the vice-president is sharing her hard-earned wisdom.

But there’s an answer:

Institutions are garbage, but people aren’t. The answer is to make something that’s yours, with your own hands, and to sink or swim on what you’ve built, because the ladder at Globalcorp leads to a postmodern version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, a room you never leave, and the other person in the room is from HR, and she has your copy of White Fragility right here WHERE ARE YOU GOING I TOLD YOU THE DOOR IS LOCKED.

So. Walter Kirn’s question: free thought and free speech pose a greater threat than ever before. Why?

This week, at a meeting of European environmental ministers, Spanish minister Teresa Ribera arrived on a bicycle to symbolize her commitment to reducing her carbon footprint — flanked by her bicycling aides, all virtuously pedaling to the meeting.

But to be more specific, Ribera rode in a caravan of cars to the neighborhood in suburban Madrid where the meeting was taking place, then stopped a hundred yards from the meeting to take bikes out of the trunk and finish the journey on them, with the cars following her in, right behind her. This is a familiar maneuver.

Go back to what I said a few paragraphs back: What strikes me at this moment is that an entire culture of fierce competitors have climbed ladders to nowhere, rising as empty people in ruined systems. Alleged leaders are wholly useless symbol-performers, doing nothing but doing it with a keen eye to the way the nothing will show up on social media. The technocratic managerial elite are on TikTok, insert own paragraph on implications here.

But through all of that amazing emptiness, it’s getting easier and easier to see. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Catholic members of Congress who issued a statement proudly declaring that their fierce support of abortion on demand at all stages of pregnancy precisely aligns with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It took less than ten seconds for me to find that catechism — full text, not a representation or description — and to Command-F “abortion” to see if, tough question here, that was true.

This week, as I’ve been saying, Democrats in the California Assembly killed a bill in committee that would have classified the sex trafficking of children as a serious felony under the state’s Three Strikes law. From my dining room table in suburban Los Angeles, I could instantly pull up the text of the bill, the committee staff analysis, and full video of the committee hearing. (Assembly Democrats blocked a Republican maneuver this morning to bring the bill directly to the floor for a vote, by the way, but sent it back to committee — where chagrined Democrats voted to pass it.)

And on and on and on. A decade ago, I wrote extensively, over a period of several years, about a legal battle over a request from police in Belfast for the US Department of Justice to subpoena oral history interviews with former members of the Provisional IRA, which were archived at a university in suburban Boston. On a normal day, I could sit in Los Angeles and instantly retrieve new legal memoranda filed in courts in Belfast and Boston, then discuss them with, sometimes simultaneously, researchers and interview subjects in Belfast and Dublin, journalists in New York, academics and lawyers in Boston, and hey, there’s an anthropologist in New Zealand who writes about research ethics in the study of paramilitary organizations, let’s loop him in. I routinely communicated with people in so many time zones that we began to schedule meetings by Greenwich Mean Time, and just let everybody figure what that meant for them locally. Then I broke news that appeared on the streets in Dublin, sitting in my bathrobe in the San Fernando Valley.

So institutions are hollowing, institutional leaders are empty symbol performers, and you can click a few buttons from wherever you are in the world to dig down deep underneath them and study the foundation of their choices. You can get a Chromebook for a hundred bucks, and McDonald’s has free wifi — there’s the complete toolkit for examining global power. At exactly the moment that global power is embodied by the form of an utterly worthless senior government minister taking a bike out of her car to pretend to ride to a ministerial summit, to symbolize her policy views like a not-terribly-bright adolescent on Twitter.

The emptiness and the transparency are colliding. And yes, it’s causing panic. It should.