Mass education of populations, originally developed as a means of improving the military readiness of the population in an era of mass conscription, has developed into a tool for the preparation of mass bureaucratic labor forces. Because mass conscription has lost its military relevance and has lost the political support of Western elites, education has turned into a sort of vestigial bureaucracy mostly dedicated towards its own survival and expansion.

The modern education system developed as a response to the military and political innovations of Napoleon. In America, their character was also shaped by the desire of Protestant denominations to exercise social control over the burgeoning Catholic population.

Today, most mass education advocates downplay the original institutional motives. Instead, they talk about education being a combination of a way for children to become ‘fully-formed’ individuals, prepare them for the labor market, and make them into good citizens. On the left, it’s openly considered a means of inculcating right political thinking. The standards that educational institutions hold students to are bureaucratic standards rather than other standards. The chief expectation is that it will prepare people for a life of either paperwork or academia rather than manual or artisan work — especially as courses like home economics and shop class have fallen out of fashion and lost status.

Standard education is also a force for increasing labor fungibility — which is to say that one laborer of a certain academic class can be substituted for another, rather than different laborers being so specialized that it be reflected in their surname, as was the case before the era of mass mobilization.

What’s important about developing a bureaucrat is creating the correct emotional temperament. It doesn’t have much to do with cultivating excellence, because the presence of excellence tends to be disruptive to any bureaucratic setting, as excellence tends to be unpredictable and challenging to account for. Adult bureaucrats tend to complain a lot about ‘stress,’ in part because they have been trained from an early age to respond to distress resulting from verbal disapproval by authorities and peers. This takes a lot of repetitive operant conditioning, which is one of the top reasons why school curricula tend to be so repetitive and pointless on the surface. The purpose isn’t to create good calculators or a labor force aware of trigonometry, but to create a mass of people who are docile, predictable, and easily frightened into compliance.

The long term consequence of this has been an overproduction in clerk-like personalities. Because the state mandates that everyone go through clerk training, you wind up with a homogenous population marked by the character traits that have been historically associated with clerks — bad physical health, obedience to authority, intense respect for arbitrary rules, a weak aesthetic sensibility, an obsession with official approval, and androgyny.

Rather than a more diverse society in which people tend to judge one another based on their character or their ability to fulfill a given social role, everyone tends to be graded on how much of an ideal bureaucrat they are. This has become more pronounced as implicit pacifism has become the dominant way of life for most Western elites after World War II and especially after the antiwar eruption of the 1970s and 80s, which made mass military preparedness a low priority. As military pursuits have become more professionalized, the American republic has come to lean on first a ‘professional’ military, and now increasingly mercenary forces, which suggests that the popular republic is on the way out as a political form.

In a super-bureaucratic society, anyone who is not a bureaucrat tends to be regarded as a bad or unclean person without dignity and deserving of pity. This is one of the reasons why American thinkers tend to pathologize any mode of production or way of life that doesn’t involve a life of desk work. And even modes of life that don’t involve desk work need to be brought under the rule and regulation of desk-workers — physical space must be brought under ‘code,’ while mental work can be left relatively free — Peter Thiel says that this is the reason for the divergence in the rate of innovation between the ‘world of bits’ and the ‘world of atoms.’

The world of atoms is a dangerous, conflict-ridden world — it creates intolerable levels of anxiety for a hothouse bureaucrat-people who have been protected from physical discomfort and exertion from an early age. The physical world is dirty, unpredictable, and dangerous when compared to the climate-controlled office or classroom.

Everywhere that this mass education model has been in place for significant amounts of time, there is an oversupply in aimless bureaucrat-people without bureaucracies to stuff them into. Europe in particular suffers from ‘mass youth unemployment,’ especially among the educated, which is because they have been educated to fill slots in imaginary bureaucracies which both don’t exist and are uneconomical where they do exist. Because educational bureaucracies have watered down their own standards over the years to be able to accommodate the entire population, many of these aimless bureaucrats are also unsuited for any pursuit that requires much real expertise. Further, their mentalities have been shaped to expect a didactic, predictable, safe, office-existence in which people tell them what they need to ‘learn,’ and then they complete an assignment graded by a light hand.

In the third world and near-third-world, the problem is even more acute, as their economies aren’t even developed enough to support substantial bureaucracies, but their labor forces have been trained for an economy that doesn’t exist based on the faith that the supply of bureaucrats creates its own demand.

Vox Day has a good post today about how mainstream publishing has become a negative sum game.

He’s mostly writing about science fiction, which I don’t read nearly as much as I used to during childhood, but it’s also applicable to the broader publishing industry. Vox touches on the demographic issue, but I’d like to go into a bit more detail here.

Anglo culture, like German culture, is hyper-literate. To the extent that both of those cultures are failing to reproduce themselves effectively has clear impacts on the demand for the written word. Mexicans love Telemundo more than they like PBS. A website like Buzzfeed is the Telemundo version of the New York Times. A shrinking and aging demographic is less capable of supporting growth in discretionary industries.

Highly literate culture that produces newspapers, literary magazines, and novels is as North European as tacos and empenadas are for South Americans. When a people diminishes, we should also expect the diminishment of their cultural expressions, both domestically and internationally. Liberals will often lament the decline in, say, newspaper readership, without connecting that decline to the decline in the consumer base who actually wants to participate in that kind of culture.

These cultural expressions are a way that a given population talks to itself, understands itself, and coordinates. As that population becomes less coherent and willing to sustain itself, its cultural expressions must also shrink.

Yet addressing this directly is very hard for people with a more liberal mentality. This is one of the reasons why you’ll see so many prospective writers waste years of their lives and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing MFAs and going to novel-writing workshops, in the hopes that more certificates and training programs will cure a fundamental lack of demand for the products.

More-educated novelists don’t solve the problem of a demographic crunch in the types of people who are apt to buy those novels.

Only White people — and the occasional affirmative action hire — would even think of buying an MFA’s novel. It’s just not a major art form outside a rather limited cultural bubble. There’s a reason why Africans are so absent from the long list of great authors — novel-writing was useless for Africans for most of their historical existance, as issues of bare survival were more important to them, and they never really had the level of development to support that sort of cultural expression, and aren’t likely to anytime soon, either.

Further, with higher education teaching the native stock that their culture is evil and degenerate — instead encouraging people to consume other cultural forms from the third world — any demand that might have been generated for distinctly Anglo-American culture gets dissipated. It becomes more important to be politically correct than it does to be conversant in the Western tradition and some of its newer speculative offshoots.

Liberals often profess to care a great deal about culture — they will often spend more of their lives shaping the culture than expanding the raw human material that makes that culture relevant — while simultaneously undermining the carrying capacity of the societies that they enjoy political dominance over.

You can’t promote literacy and literate culture while also suppressing the fertility of the populations which have a track record of running that kind of culture.

We could also say that this sort of over-reach is perhaps a result of excessive literacy and abstraction. Having developed advanced forms of cultural expression and communication of accurate knowledge, those expressions came to be more important than the reality which they were supposed to express, which has lead to our current predicament.