Involuntary Noncompliance
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Belated but enthusiastic greetings in the New Year!
In a recent edition of his illuminating Saturday Commentary and Review newsletter…
…the equally illuminating Niccolo Soldo highlighted the mounting costs of American society’s replacement of competency with diversity over the past few generations by turning our attention to a wonderful Harold Robinson essay in Palladium Magazine…
As I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, either we can choose to be ideologues, or we can choose to be competent. But we can’t be both. In the 21st-century battle of ideology versus competency, ideology has emerged the clear winner. As a result, institutions built by or predicated upon competency in the 19th and 20th centuries are now — largely — in rapid decay. Rapid because the growth among institutions built by and predicated upon competency in the 19th and 20th centuries accelerated wildly with the sudden explosion of digital scale in the 21st century. They simply outgrew the human limits of competency.
The management of interdependent massive systems was complex enough in the 19th and 20th centuries. The same task became humanly unmanageable — and thoroughly unaccountable — at digital scale in the 21st century. Of course, only AI can manage such massive institutions at digital scale, precisely why we are so reliant on it today. (That and because we no longer have any faith in our own innate intelligence for obvious reasons.)
In the The Rise of Huxwell I cite the early 21st-century confluence of state-sponsored default addiction and the institutional tyranny of runaway digital scale as, respectively, the compliance and enforcement mechanisms of Huxwell, a totalitarian state amalgam of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984.
The Orwellian component of Huxwell reflects — among other things — the institutional tyranny inherent in the shift from competency based on meritocracy to ideology based on diversity. That shift, per Mr. Robinson’s observations, began with the liberation movements of the 1960s, most notably when institutional America suddenly surrendered to the moral imperative of the civil rights movement: diversity.
Similar institutional surrenders accompanied the feminist, gay, and Earth First movements as well — all for perfectly legitimate moral and ethical reasons. Eventually, however, each institutionalized surrender spawned a massive corresponding industry. Eventually, in the glorious wake of their own unmitigated success, they all abandoned their 60s liberation movement ethics to amass and re-emerge in the 21st century as the woke grievance industry, an immensely profitable enterprise with a singular ideology: power.
A liberal meritocracy predicated on competence — with emphases on individual talent, effort, and responsibility — was very much an Enlightenment legacy. Indeed, the liberating pursuit of Happiness mentioned in the Declaration of Independence still relies today on the competence-based meritocracy that first secures Life and Liberty. Perhaps the emergence of competence-based meritocracy in the Industrial and Post-Industrial decades of the 19th and 20th centuries was a variation of social Darwinism — survival of the fittest at industrial scale.
Of course, survival of the fittest at industrial scale would be nothing new to any casual observer of modern history. Corporations and institutions — like world empires — come and go all the time. As the byproduct of a competent meritocracy driven largely by the voluntary pursuit of happiness, the industrial scale that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries produced massive public works: railroads, ports and airports, the interstate highway system, the NYC subway and water systems, the public health system, the public school system, the entire electrical grid, and the military forces that won two world wars. It produced the cheap oil that fueled cheap food — and everything else.
These things happened often in spite of the political, social, and cultural vicissitudes that punctuated — often violently — the 19th and 20th centuries. They happened nevertheless because competence and meritocracy remained the anchor tenants in the forward march of Enlightenment progress in pursuit of happiness.
Survival of the fittest at digital scale, however, is another thing entirely. Like all other transformative technologies of the 20th century, digital technology relied upon existing frameworks of a competent meritocracy to emerge and succeed. The meteoric rise of Apple Computer in the late 1970s and the rise of Microsoft in the early 80s were institutional phenomena utterly reliant on an intricate network of interdependent, highly competent disciplines and industries: everything from highly skilled investment communities to chip manufacturers, from software engineers to legal counsel and MBA programs that produced well-orchestrated armies of lobbyists and squadrons of aggressive marketers.
At digital scale, however, competent systems — subject to runaway growth and endless optimization loops — inevitably turn brittle and fragile. Eventually they break down, invoking Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad law of reversal en route: when complex systems pushed to extreme betray their teleological intents and suddenly manifest as the opposite. The Great American Open Road of the 1950s suddenly becomes the Great American Parking Lot of the 21st century. The cheap, reliable fossil fuels that created the Great American Middle Class in the 20th century suddenly manifest in the 21st as the impossibly expensive and unreliable clean energy of the Great American Ruling Class. The competence-based meritocracy of the 19th and 20th centuries suddenly emerges as the ideology-based kleptocracy of the 21st century.
Of course, the more massive and interdependent the system(s), the more massive and interdependent the consequence(s) when something goes wrong. Not if. When. The worldwide breakdown of public health services during COVID was just one recent example. More parochial examples include frequent disruptions in air travel and persistent supply chain snafus.
All of the above are examples of what happens when competency surrenders to ideology. Also examples of what recovering addicts sometimes refer to as unmanageable complexity. It’s what happens whenever the incessant demands of our addictions outstrip our day-to-day ability to satisfy them. In essence, our lives become unmanageably complex as the functional demands of our addictions challenge and — left unchecked — overwhelm our ability to manage anything and everything else in our lives.
It’s what happens when our consumer society finally succeeds in its primary mission to convert us all into addicts. At that point in time, competency — like a cohesive narrative — ceases to matter, and all that remains is the sheer power of scale. That’s what happened in the early 21st century with the rise of Huxwell. And that’s when the ideologues stepped in to take over.
Unmanageable complexity eventually resolves in unrelenting bureaucracy: kafkaesque, self-aware, and hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Bureaucracy by fiat is the undeniable calling card of institutional decay, and one of the primary reasons why the quality of life has been in such marked decline across all meaningful metrics — spiritual, social, emotional, and physical — since the early 21st century. The same time digital scale first began to institutionalize every function of our day-to-day lives.
Fade out, fade in: For proof we need look no further than the apps on our smartphones; each and every one of them represents an institutional relationship that demands increasing measures of our time and attention, an institutional relationship that likely didn't even exist a decade ago. Contrary to the institutional sales pitch that precedes each of the downloads, the apps on our phones don’t empower us. We empower them.
Ideology fills the void left behind by the surrender of competence to the bureaucratic fiat of unmanageable complexity. In the process, once-competent institutional managers are replaced by incompetent ideological hacks whose primary function is no longer to produce a better product or service, no longer to help their constituencies in the pursuit of happiness, but to wield institutional power with absolute fidelity to the ideology of those that hired them. Where competency was once rewarded with more accountability, the ideology of institutional power in the absence of competency redefines accountability as a personal threat, something to be avoided at all costs.
Virtually all of our major institutions — public and private alike — have effectively sacrificed competency for ideology in recent years. Unfortunately, institutional ideology at digital scale is innately fascist. Turns out fascism is the natural social bias of all electronic technology. The inherent functional bias of digital technology is therefore to accelerate the institutional consolidation of power and wealth among those institutions — again, public and private alike — already far too powerful and far too wealthy. The same too-big-to-fail government agencies, corporations, and NGOs that — not surprisingly — steal, parse, and broker the most personal data.
Thus is the institutional ideology of digital scale inherently singular and incestuous: it’s all about power. Thus is the entire woke agenda of the 21st century all about power — and the inevitable class war that follows.
Which leads us to involuntary noncompliance. It began in the late 20th century as medical industry vernacular to describe a curious phenomenon among senior citizens: the failure to comply with the polypharmaceutical prescriptions of their many doctors. The older folks tried to comply, but the prescriptions and pharmaceuticals were simply too many and too complex.
We find the same involuntary noncompliance syndrome at work nowadays with bi-weekly publication of newly anointed pronoun style guides as hitherto undiscovered intersectional victim groups emerge from the murky depths of social media umbrage like some new subspecies of prehistoric coelacanth. Absent the requisite degree in ichthyology or evolutionary biology, how is one to comply?
Likewise, we find the identical mechanism of involuntary noncompliance at work with the 70,000-page federal tax code. Subtract the 69,999 pages authored by and devoted to the massive special interests who pay less income tax than you, and we wind up with the deceptively EZ1040 Form — the surest, quickest way to overpay your taxes. Absent the institutional army of tax accountants you foolishly refused to hire, who knew?
As the involuntary stepchild of unmanageable complexity, involuntary noncompliance becomes the blanket invitation to whatever Orwellian enforcement mechanisms may follow the replacement of competence-based meritocrats with mediocre ideologues — all of whom are interchangeably insecure, narcissistic, and scared to death that their own trespasses of decades past will be dragged ashore with the next wave of coelacanth carcasses.
Reminds me of the time my father, an old-school journalist to the end, called me one day late in his life to complain about the new desktop computer my brothers and I installed to replace his seventy-pound 1938 Underwood standard office typewriter. “The same error message keeps popping up on the screen,” he told me.
“What does the error message say?” I asked.
“You have committed an unspeakable act,” he replied.
A generation later, involuntary noncompliance is now mandatory. But my father died a lucky man, blissfully unable to remember his final — and most grievous — unspeakable act: He never bought in…
I once read an anecdote of a question a grandson asked of his grandfather. "Grandpa, when will the world end?" His grandfather replied, "When anything can be known in less than 30 seconds".
Yes, your father was truly a lucky man, may he rest in peace.