Authoritarianism and Mediocre Elites

During the early 2010s, I worked in close quarters with a number of the tech barons and noticed that, in addition to their authoritarian sympathies, most were criminally mediocre. The techlash hadn’t started yet, Elizabeth Holmes was touted as an uncomplicated success story, and no one had heard of FTX or Sam Bankman-Fried. The tech bosses of Silicon Valley were considered “the good rich” in comparison to the financial manipulators of New York and the influence peddlers of Washington.

I published a couple hundred thousand words on what I saw, mostly expanding the Iron Triangle theory that grew out of a cartoon by Hugh MacLeod, as well as Venkatesh Rao’s analysis of The Office in its context. To put it briefly, executives do not work for companies—instead, companies work for executives. In order to leave institutions running smoothly while robbing them, the people up top need a “clueless” middle layer that provides indirection and obfuscation. This leads to an increasingly rank-bound culture in which people are promoted, punished, or fired for reasons of loyalty and reputation preservation, instead of on merit. As the clueless middle spreads, executives will try to scare people into working harder using forced ranking and surveillance, but these techniques reward political behavior, not excellence, and the firm’s performance continues to deteriorate while its top bosses blame everyone but themselves.

Recently, Amanda Taub wrote an essay for the New York Times, “Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.” I hate to link to the New York Times, and I don’t know how she got something so incisive published in a neoliberal venue that venerates the saying of nothing, but her work is not NYT slop. In fact, it’s not slop at all. It’s well-researched and well-written. Go read it.

She refers to analysis done by Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel of factors predictive of misconduct and atrocity during Argentina’s 1974–83 Dirty War:

Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

This isn’t new. Noli Me Tángere, by José Rizal, presents the corrupt clerics overseeing the Philippines as intellectual and theological incompetents who were unable to achieve authority in Spain and therefore went abroad to attain it. The Nazis found support in universities from mediocrities who were glad to see a third of their competitors removed. British expats living the high life in Hong Kong in the 1980s and ‘90s were called FILTH: Failed In London, Try Hong(-k)ong. Israel’s illegal settlements tend to be full of uneducated people who were unable to thrive in Tel Aviv and Haifa, where attitudes are more moderate. Opportunism and desperation, far more often than ideology, drive adherence to colonialist, extractive, and authoritarian movements. If anything, ideology tends to build later, in the rationalization phase.

Political scientist Erica Frantz, who studies authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, confirms it:

Initially, elected would-be autocrats often appoint “loyal losers” to important positions to rubber-stamp their power grabs, Ms. Frantz said. “The leader knows that people are going to be more likely to be loyal if they don’t have many other career options, so when I say losers, I kind of mean it literally,” she said.

Despots are excellent readers of human weakness. Randall Flagg, in The Stand, knew exactly who Lloyd was, he knew exactly who Trashcan Man was, and he knew exactly who Harold Lauder was. They create a culture that is individually humiliating, collectively permissive, and slavishly obedient upward—consider Project Mayhem, which replaces vacuous conformity with empty violence—out of everyone else’s discards.

And yet I’ll make the entire social picture darker with an observation. Yes, it is career-pressured mediocrities who staff these insurgencies, whether in companies or governments, in their incipient stages. Those blessed by primary career ladders seldom need to use shaky secondary ones. The credentialed, the vouched-as-excellent, are seldom found in the rallies. When such a coup is underway, however, they stand by and let it happen. It’s what they were trained to do.

It seems to be the case, just as reliably, that the “career-favored” prove morally mediocre under the slightest burden. Institutional support and time launder reputations; the character of the favored does not improve on what it was when the moral compromise that secured favor occurred.

And what happens to the excellent? That story is unpleasant; mercifully, it is not very long.