Put the Wet Stuff On the Red Stuff

Imposter syndrome plus impotent rage.

Three years ago — time flies! — I wrote an essay that I hope you’ll revisit by clicking on that link. The headline wouldn’t have been my choice, so ignore it and consider an argument I made well before even the hint of the start of the pandemic. I was writing about “recipe knowledge,” and I asked this question: “Are our credentialing instruments producing people who are capable of practical action?”

Then came the eternal pandemic, and a long series of expert-led interventions that have made us less healthy and less safe. In Los Angeles County, where I live, local governments closed playgrounds, trails, beaches, and outdoor tennis courts, and encouraged people to stay home; incredibly, the National Forest Service closed wilderness trails in the Angeles National Forest to prevent people from getting COVID. (We still hiked on those closed trails, but shhh.) To the eternal amazement of the expert class, a year of telling people to be “safer at home,” to go inside and not come out, to stay off of hiking trails and tennis courts to stay healthy, produced a population that’s fatter, more depressed, more anxious, and less likely to have good outcomes if they’re infected with a virus that produces respiratory illness. If you listened to the experts and obeyed the government, you became less healthy and less safe.

Now we have experimental vaccines that, mystery of mysteries, aren’t reducing case rates in highly vaccinated places, that appear to have negative efficacy, and that sometimes (maybe often, over time) cause severe harm to the people who receive them. And governments all over the world are pushing them harder and harder, implementing compulsory vaccination and severe punishments for people who won’t inject the shit into their bodies.

So: “Are our credentialing instruments producing people who are capable of practical action?”

It was a good question, don’t you think?

So the turn to hard and open rage makes sense.

James Bembridge @TheBembridge

Apparently, you can now be regarded as an anti-vaxxer even if you’re vaccinated.

Or try this one:

This is precisely the fury of people who have been taking actions to end the pandemic for almost two years, without ending the pandemic, in an endless cycle of mitigation that produces escalation over and over. They keep putting more and more water on the fire, and it keeps getting bigger.

They’re enraged because they’re fools, and because they know they’re fools, and because they don’t want to face what they’ve done and who they are. The status of the technocratic managerial elite is founded on the claim that they alone have the tools to manage the operation of human societies; also, they don’t have those tools, and the people who have conceded power and status to them are beginning to see their emptiness.¹ It’s the anger of people who know their project has failed — and there’s a bill out there with their name on it.

What’s most clear, now — and, really, this leaps out at me all day every day — is that the ritual performances the technocratic elite class has evolved to signal their status have wandered out into deep space, and have no connection of any kind to the act of making or managing anything. Read this story. That’s where we are: we’re rusting, and we don’t now how to stop it. We emit symbols about ideas; we gesture at the management of whiteness and climate change, but we can’t manage our real things.

There’s an out-of-favor, unfashionable managerial class that underlies and undergirds the technocratic elite, and those people know how to do things; to the extent that we have food on shelves and gas in our cars, it’s because people who are operational managers but not the technocratic elite — the people who stock shelves at the supermarket, and make sure they have product to stock — still know how to put the wet stuff on the red stuff. But as I’ve suggested recently, we’re doing everything we can to target the makers and the doers for elimination.

The people who “run” our countries and our communities, who issue diktats and casually inform you, from a great height, which members of your family are allowed to come to your home for Thanksgiving dinner:

They’re lost. They know they’re lost. They know you know they’re lost. And they’re really angry that you know it.

But anyway, just do what they tell you. So you can be safe.

1. Pardon my language, but they don’t have the fucking tools. That’s the whole thing.