Transnationalism

When I wrote the essay “Kingdom 2037” last year, describing a hypothetical future restored English Monarchy, I paid relatively little attention to international relations. My line was that the realm would follow a cautious foreign policy, maintain armed forces for defence, and resist foreign-backed rebel groups if they appeared within the country.
My unspoken assumption was that the existing “international community” was no longer in force, or at the very least was enormously weakened in comparison to the situation today.
That is an essential assumption. In simple terms, any kind of successful reaction in a significant Western country is currently completely impossible, no matter what happens inside it.
It is not simply that the offending reactionary country will be bombed, although that itself is quite probable. Even without that (in other words, even if the reactionary country has nuclear weapons), it will be subjected to constant pressure through every conduit of international activity.
Every international company that does business there, every NGO, every embassy, every media organisation, will be taking whatever opportunities exist to support rebels and to undermine the sovereign.
It is possible to resist this pressure — all you have to do is limit foreign influence wherever it arises. Foreign business must be done only through local trusted partners. Foreign NGOs are excluded or subject to extremely close surveillance and inspection. 
This can work. It is what Russia does, and China. The problem is that the effort of resisting the international community ends up dominating the state. In Russia, particularly, the decision to exclude foreign commercial competition gives such lopsided power to a handful of domestic industrialists that they become the dominant figures in the state. Rather than being the sovereign who stands above internal disputes and arbitrates them, Putin is inextricable tied to the oil and gas companies. True, he runs them instead of them running him, but, ultimately, what’s the difference?  It doesn’t have to be that way: Russia could grow economically in plenty of other areas, but the power of the resource extraction industry in the absence of meaningful foreign competition means that they cannot let that happen. The alternative paths to prosperity all pass through exposing the country to being taken over by the international community.
In fact, the measures necessary to fend off the international community are very familiar: they have gone by the name of Nazism. All foreigners and foreign influences are subject to intense suspicion — any groups of people who have strong foreign ties, such as immigrants and Jews, are necessarily treated as enemies of the state. Autarky is aimed for as a defence, and in the absence of international trade, collectivisation of industry or corporatism becomes the essential approach to managing the monopoly power of domestic industry. These are the deliberate steps the original German Nazis took — their movement was explicitly, first and foremost, about becoming independent of the international community so that Germany could escape subservience.
When I floated this idea with some actual self-described Nazis, they disagreed: “National Socialism was literally born out of the will to attempt to revert modernization and to revive Germany from its death … as time grew and National Socialism fostered an actual ideology, it began to exist solely for the purpose of the creation of a new man.”  I don’t think it’s a large disagreement, but I wouldn’t want to unfairly misrepresent any Nazis.
Thus, by the way, the endless question of “is Nazism left or right?”. Nazism in my theory intends to be right, but if you take all the steps necessary to fend off the international community, you are not going your own way; you can go only one way — to totalitarianism, which means that the results are barely distinguishable from the progressive totalitarianism of communism. Though I have to say, that “new man” idea does sound more than a little progressive to me.
What this all means is that if the World Order survives, if the Cathedral retains control of the United States and its commercial and military power, then true reaction anywhere in the world is impossible. A disappointing conclusion, but, after all, that is what hegemony means.
It doesn’t bother me that much, because I don’t think the World Order will survive. The strategy I advocate is to prepare for its self-inflicted demise and to cause the next World Order be a reactionary one. The demise might be catastrophic, or it may be a shifting to new powers: though I’m not really keen on Nazism in itself, one thing to be said in its favour is that it is less ideological and less aggressive than liberalism is. If power shifts from the US to a non-Western centre — China, say — they are quite likely to refrain from imposing the same ideological hegemony that the US does currently, at least for a few decades.
Is that shift of power likely?  I do not take the view that China, or any other non-Western power, is presently on a course to simply grow stronger than the West. The power shift would only happen if the West were to seriously cripple itself, gradually or suddenly. There are a number of plausible paths by which that could happen. Even a balance of power would permit much more freedom to other countries than exists under the current Pax Americana. 

The Subjective

The Enlightenment position is that knowledge should be objective. I think that originated in an analogy with the scientific method: the only conclusions that should be accepted are those which can be independently verified. If I say that a bird cannot live in air in which a candle has burned out, you should be able to put a bird in a jar with a candle and kill it the same way. If you can’t, then my claims are not objective, and are scientifically worthless.

The Enlightenment extended this principle to government. The decision of a government should not be made on the basis of one person’s private judgement; it should be made by a scientific process, and the reasons for making it should be objective facts that others can share.

Democracy requires that principle. Like science, democracy requires that one person’s conclusions can be replicated by another. In some cases the replication may not be contemporaneous with the actual decision, but the principle must still be that “If you knew what I know”, you would reach the same conclusion, and the politican can be judged retrospectively by that standard.

Hayek identified the problem with this approach. The main problem is “Tacit Knowledge”. Tacit knowledge is what you know, but you don’t know that you know. It is knowledge that cannot be shared just by publishing a paper, but only, if at all, by teaching a craft.

A decision that has to be justified objectively cannot rely on tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is, by definition, subjective. A person, who, in whatever environment, is making a decision that is going to be evaluated by others, must deliberately ignore subjective considerations — tacit knowledge — and make what seems to be the best decision without that knowledge.

This process has a catastrophic impact on personal responsibility. If I make a decision not because, based on all my knowledge objective and tacit, I think it is the right one, but rather, because it is the one I can best justify to someone else, then I am no longer responsible for the result of my decision, only for the process (sound familiar?).

If someone is responsible for the results of their decision, rather than for the process of making the decision, then they will naturally make the decision most likely to have the desired result, and they will do so based on all the knowledge they have, objective and tacit.

The practical difference is most obvious in the case of choosing people. Judging other people is an innate skill: it is something our minds have evolved to do particularly well. Indeed, it is plausible that human intelligence is primarily evolved to assess other people, and, conversely, to deceive other people. Our knowledge of each other is therefore almost entirely tacit. Trying to estimate another person’s qualities using only objective criteria is like walking around a house blindfolded.

(This doesn’t mean I’m arguing for primacy of the subjective — I’m not saying we should “trust our feelings” and close our eyes to objective facts. We should also be prepared to suppress our subjective impressions where there is evidence they are unreliable. But that is not the case, particularly where we are doing what we have evolved to do, which is to evaluate the people we know well).

It seems like a small thing, but if you want people to be able to make decisions based on tacit knowledge, you actually have to change everything about the way our society is organised. For two hundred years almost every change has been to remove human judgement and replace it with objective process.

Obviously reversing it starts with abolishing democracy and restoring monarchy, but I don’t think you can really manage without restoring some kind of aristocracy as well — subjective judgements of trust and, to a lesser degree, ability, are going to rely heavily on actual personal contact, and people who are regular contact with each other, on a family basis, are going to develop their own standards of trustworthy behaviour, with a distinct disparity in trust between insiders and outsiders.

How Democracies End (maybe)

I have a theory about Weimar Germany. It’s unencumbered with much in the way of evidence, but I did cover the subject at school, and I can remember bits.

The popular theory, which I’ve alluded to previously, is that the big event was this chap Hitler. He was some supernatural weirdo from Hell, who, like a false prophet, inspired the normal, liberal people of Germany to give up their democratic birthright and follow his dreams of securing lebensraum for the master race, etc, etc.

Then there’s that slightly odd bit where he didn’t actually win the election, but he did fairly well and it sort of counted as near enough, so he was declared Chancellor and allowed to take over everything in sight. It kind of seems like some sort of dodgy conspiracy, but it’s not obvious whose.

 My theory, grounded on the above, is that by — what are we talking, 1933? — democracy had so completely, utterly, failed that nobody, least of all those actually running it, could stomach it carrying on one year longer. The only question was what to do instead?  There were communists kicking around, but that wasn’t an attractive idea for the ruling class. And there was this Hitler dude, and while he had a bunch of somewhat fruitcake ideas, he seemed to have support, he was serious about changing things, and at least he wasn’t a commie. What else was there?  Even the leading democratic politicians didn’t have any better idea than letting him have a go.

 There was one other option, of course. As I linked to once before, it is claimed that President Hindenburg, in his will, indicated a desire to restore the Hohenzollern monarchy.

An interesting irony of history is that this, had it happened, would surely have been seen by the Allies / International Community as an outrageously aggressive, warlike, and unacceptable development. In comparison, the extension of powers held by a prominent politician, in order to deal with a crisis, seemed far less dangerous.

 It’s a cool story. I fear that if I had learned my O-level history better, or forgotten less of it, I would see some obvious flaw in it, but I really don’t have time these days to relearn it.

Another turnaround

Half Sigma linked to this piece by Eric Posner pointing out that what we think of as the “American” absolutist attitude to free speech is really only half a century old.

I bring it up not to comment on Posner’s argument about the desirability of censorship of hate speech, or Half Sigma’s warning about the likelihood of a liberal-majority supreme court outlawing swathes of HBD and other blogging, but simply, like the sexual habits of 1970s DJs, as an example of how quickly the commonplace can become unthinkable, and the unthinkable commonplace.

Hitchens vs Paddick

I happened to find myself with Wednesday evening free (a few weeks ago), so I coughed up ten quid to see Peter Hitchens debate Brian Paddock over the drug laws at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street.

The subject isn’t one which interests me greatly, but I find Hitchens always worth reading and I work nearby, so I went to see him in action.

The debate centred entirely on cannabis. Hitchens’ thesis, stacked in £17 hardbacks on a table by the door, is that cannabis is much more dangerous than is generally supposed, and is at least comparable in harm to what are recognised as “hard” drugs.

Interestingly, Paddock (a former senior London police officer who has run unsuccessfully for Mayor the last two elections), agreed that cannabis is very dangerous to young people. He implied that the risks of severe psychological damage coming from cannabis use were lower than Hitchens had suggested, but both of them were very reluctant to quantify, both agreeing that accurate statistics of either use of or harm from cannabis are difficult to come by.

Hitchens has a very strong argument on the frequent comparison of drug prohibition with US alcohol prohibition, which is that alcohol prohibition did not ban possession or consumption of alcohol. I confess that that fact had never really registered with me. The argument that flows from that is that if you actually want to stop consumption of alcohol or cannabis, you have to ban it, and mean it, and that current drug policy is repeating the mistake of prohibition.

The weakest point of Hitchens’ argument was not really explored, but he claims, first, that cannabis has been effectively legal for forty years, and, second, that once it has been legal and widespread, it is practically impossible to get rid of it. By that logic, it is already too late.

I threw a question in towards the end, but by that point the questions were being gathered in batches, and neither speaker addressed it. I asked if either of them could explain why, when substances such as tobacco, salt and butter are being more restricted on health grounds year by year, it is even on the agenda that this one product, cannabis, be subject to more relaxed regulation, against the general trend.

There were some right morons in the audience. The first questioner went into a tedious, pointless rehashing of the best-known arguments on the subject, taking almost as long as the seven minutes each speaker was allotted to make their initial case.

 Ultimately, the reason I don’t find the subject so interesting these days is because I rather suspect that a sane and efficient state could ban dangerous drugs effectively, or legalise them, and do better either way than we do. The precise details of how HM Government screws up drug policy just make for another tedious sordid history. Drug prohibition fails because of the astonishing inefficiency of the legal system — a simple arrest, conviction and sentencing for cannabis possession ought to take about one man-hour of police time and maybe three man-hours of lawyers and another three for administrative court staff. I get the impression it is about ten times that level, which makes the whole process unworkable. Alternatively, drugs could be legal if people had to take responsibility for their own welfare, but the toxic state dependency culture turns drugs which can be enjoyed in moderation by people who have serious responsibilities into life-destroying obsessions for those who have nothing else to do. My pet obsession, the infantilising of 15-25-year-olds, makes them  particularly susceptible.

The real problems we see both from the “War on drugs” and from drug abuse flow not primarily from drug policy, but from other failings of the state.

Executions in North Korea

I take this as an encouraging sign

North Korean army minister ‘executed with mortar round’

As a supporter of the principle of absolute monarchy, I do not believe that the problem with North Korea is that it has a hereditary ruler. Indeed, now in the third generation, I would expect to see the benefits of hereditary rule to be starting to show themselves.

So far I have been disappointed. North Korea’s government remains terribly bad. As I have written previously, I attribute this to the fact that, while hereditary, the government does not rest on the principle of hereditary right. Its political formula is built on a form of Marxism, and while the extra stability given to it by its ad-hoc monarchism has served to preserve it well beyond the normal lifespan of Marxist states, it doesn’t confer the full advantages of an explicitly hereditary system.

What I am interested in, when it comes to the guessing-game of looking at the politics of North Korea, is whether the Marxist-politburo “scientific” government or the early-modern Monarchical government has the upper hand. The first is bad, the latter good.

The story that has leaked out of North Korea is that Kim Chol has been executed for unfeelingly carrying on with high living during the mourning period for the late King, Kim Jong-Il, and further, that the young King, Kim Jong-Un, was so outraged that he demanded “no trace be left”. Therefore the unhappy vice-minister was stuck out in a field to be blown up with heavy weaponry.

That is seriously badass — we’re talking Tudor. The vital points are that (a) the offence was against the Royal Line, not the state or the politburo. And (b) the punishment was driven by personal anger, not a scientific principle of government. The Soviet Union was famously practical and humane about executing the deviationists, this is the opposite. Finally, it suggests that, if there is still some kind of internal power struggle going on — perhaps a continuation of some struggle over successsion — those with power are determined to win it absolutely. These three elements all point to better government for North Korea going forward.

Does this mean I want future King William V indulging in such Bond-villan escapades, come the Restoration? In extremis, yes. If senior, trusted members of the administration back the wrong side in a civil war, there is much to be said for going 16th-century on their arses. In peacetime, not so much. A good administration is one where the rule of law can be counted on. Once it is established that the King can rule by personal whim, he has little need to, since he will gain more by running a successful state.

Of course, with North Korea, it is not clear that the best thing would be for the government to improve. If the government failed and collapsed, the natural outcome would be a reunification under the South Korean government, which has an enviable track record over the last half century.

However, South Korea’s government has only one way to go, and that’s down. It is not twenty years since the country stepped onto the democratic conveyor belt, and it is not reasonable to expect the quality of governance that the DJP exercised to continue into the future. That doesn’t mean we should expect rapid decline in the quality of life there — One of the major misunderstood patterns of history is that secure autocracy produces peace and prosperity and, enjoying wealth and freedom, the subjects, associating wealth and freedom with the ruling class, expect that as they have the wealth and freedom of the ruling class, they should gain political power as a natural consequence. The autocrat is replaced or shackled, and the momentum of the former peace and prosperity produces a flourishing of improved life that the new regime first unfairly takes credit for, and then gradually proceeds to destroy.

Those who benefit most from their government are least loyal to it.

So, the story coming out of North Korea is consistent with a hereditary ruler cementing his dominance over rival power centres within the régime. That is by no means the only explanation, so any optimism should be very tentative.

Integrating Theory and Practice

Alan Roebuck has found an essay by Eric Heubeck, “The Integration of Theory and Practice”.

It addresses the most difficult of questions: what to actually do about progressivism, given that conservative democratic politics is self-defeating.

Heubeck’s approach is to fight primarily on the battleground of culture. Traditionalists must find each other, and build informal and formal institutions in order to escape the progressive institutions and break their cultural dominance.

The practical starting point he puts forward is the study group, for determined traditionalists, and the book club, to broaden the reach of the movement and increase its base.

I’m not certain about the whole book club thing, but the ideas behind it certainly make sense. Ideas become respectable when you can actually see people practicing them. And as I’ve said before, reactionary ideas currently suffer more from lack of respectability than from lack of persuasiveness.

The difficult thing is how much to compromise to build the start of a movement. There are a reasonable number of people around who oppose multiculturalism, widespread promotion of promiscuity, large-scale benefits culture. There are very few who oppose the democracy and egalitarianism that produced them. Trying to organise with the first group will create a merely conservative organisation, not a genuinely reactionary one. But there aren’t enough of us to create reactionary organisations — just a few hundred that can be identified at this point, scattered across the Anglosphere.

For the Heubeck strategy to be workable, we need a larger base to build on. We don’t need anything like the numbers required for actual political work, but we need sufficient density that supporters can interact with each other. If a town of 100,000 has 10 people who can form a study group, the strategy is up and running.

I seem pessimistic about this — if I’m over-pessimistic, that’s because of another problem: many of the people we do have aren’t exactly clubbable. Possibly I’m over-generalising from my personal situation, but the movement as it exists on the internet seems to consist primarily of Angry Young Men and Computer Nerds. As one of the latter, reaching out to form a group of people to meet regularly and build social connections with is slightly outside my core compentence.

However, Heubeck wrote his article while Mencius Moldbug was still developing a WAP browser. The internet does now give us at least the capability to connect in spite of our pitifully low density (and our inferior social skills), though I don’t believe that can replace the sort of activity Heubeck proposed. The point of the social catalysis is to become visible and relevant to the people around us, a living demonstration that the existing culture is not the only way to think and live.

The thing that would make this work would be if I were missing something: if the real movement is not the nerdy ex-libertarian bloggers, but some other, larger section which we can join up with. That could be, but I don’t know who they are, at least in England. The churches are if anything the hard core of progressivism. The BNP/EDL type nationalists do not seem to exhibit anything in the way of real conservatism, and are so persecuted that allying with them is strategic suicide anyway.

The somewhat contradictory* connection between the reactionary worldview and the more thoughtful element of the Game/PUA community is promising in terms of bringing leadership skills into scope.

The biggest obstacle is that the enemy understands the strategy, having practiced it so succesfully itself. Any open advocacy of traditional thought, however mild and however limited the context, will be attacked. Employers, venues will be put under pressure. But that’s the reason this is so necessary: right now, speaking out against changing a currently in-force law is enough to get you suspended from a job. The reason why it’s possible for the progressive establishment to sack people for supporting a law that it isn’t currently possible for them to change is that their dominance of the culture is accepted even where it isn’t liked.

The biggest reason for optimism is that rejection of democracy, in particular, is gaining ground rapidly. We might not quite have the critical mass yet to start adopting the Heubeck strategy, but we could be ready quite soon.

* The contradiction is defined in a tweet by Heartiste, who is largely responsible for the connection between the two groups: “Like Obama, I carry a duality. I intellectually know paleo right policies are better for the nation, yet I prefer to live liberally”

Jimmy Savile

There’s a lot of mystified chatter around these days along the lines of, “How did Jimmy Savile get away with it”. There are some fun theories (David Icke is on form there), but the truth is at once boringly prosaic and shocking.
In the 1960s and 70s, being into teenage girls wasn’t a big deal.
It wasn’t exactly respectable, but DJs weren’t respectable anyway. It wasn’t legal, but neither was drink-driving, and everybody in those days did that.
Being into teenage boys was a bit worse, but that’s because homosexuality was not well-regarded. Stories about choirmasters or scoutmasters or latin masters who were a bit too friendly with their charges were common jokes. Not shocking, “alternative” jokes, but boring, mother-in-law, Benny Hill, variety show jokes.
I think messing about with pre-pubescent girls or boys was another matter, but Hugo Rifkind’s story, from Savile’s autobiography, where he keeps a runaway remand school girl home overnight, was not the sort of thing someone with a reputation for being a bit rough and wild anyway would be shy of admitting.
This is another example of those changes in attitude that are so severe and sudden that the culture just blanks out that things were ever different, leaving odd inexplicable anomalies like Jimmy Savile, the friendly childrens’ entertainer and sex-case. 

Even more Meritocracy

I carelessly ventured into the issue of meritocracy versus static class hierarchies, but the volume of relevant comment and even current events since has been more than I can cope with.

I learned, for instance (from Felix Salmon), that the term “meritocracy” itself is only 50 years old, and was coined by a critic, the Labour politician Michael Young (Baron Young of Dartington). Judging by an old Guardian article I found, his criticisms are not identical to mine, but there is considerable overlap.

chris dillow pointed out that even an ideal free market is only a rough approximation to meritocracy, quoting Hayek: “the return to people’s efforts do not correspond to recognizable merit.”

Separately, a post at conservativetimes made the point that historical aristocracies did not see themselves in opposition to merit, rather, the aristocrats believed that they were the best people.

By “merit” in this context, we generally understand skill, knowledge, hard work. In those terms, the theory that hereditary aristocrats are the most meritorious is not very convincing. Advantages in education and upbringing can give them an edge in ability, but not necessarily a large one. The meritocratic claim, that you will get more of whatever qualities you are looking for by opening access for the widest possible population, is much more reasonable.

Since the term “meritocracy” post-dates aristocracies, they clearly didn’t think of themselves exactly that way in any case. The term they used for their exclusive quality was “nobility”. Does that get us any closer to understanding them? What does it mean to be noble? This needs looking into.

However, defining nobility to embrace a broader element of virtue, the case is still weak. Even if aristocrats are on average more virtuous, itself a highly dubious proposition, there are surely many lesser-born among the most virtuous. I still think it makes sense to assume that the distinguishing quality of an aristocrat is loyalty to the existing order.

Spandrell commented that there is very much solidarity among the ruling elite, at least in Mediterranean societies. It may be that I underestimated this even for Britain, perhaps because my context at the time was the hyper-competitive environment of electoral politics. Capitalists and civil servants perhaps exhibit more cohesiveness. This needs looking into.

On a related note, Bryan Caplan wrote a very good blog post, addressing the obvious and important question, “Why is democracy tolerable?”. He cites research that finds, that where the opinions of the rich and the rest differ, policy overwhelmingly tends to follow the opinions of the rich. That could be a point in favour of Spandrell’s “upper class solidarity” argument, though the rich having more power than the poor is not in contradiction with either meritocracy or aristocracy/oligarchy.

Helen Rittlemeyer’s post addresses the mechanisms of the changes in the Western ruling classes. The point is that, while the ruling class always admitted some new blood, the result was that the incomers learned and adopted the culture and values of the existing rulers. In recent decades, the flow of “meritocratic” new blood has been sufficient to swamp the old culture. There is an obvious parallel there to the conventional wisdom around mass immigration; that there is a maximum rate that allows for integration of newcomers into a society.

Of course, all this brings us to the major news story of last week: the incident of the Government Chief Whip being rude to a policeman. While it’s impossible not to at least raise an eyebrow at the media weight the affair has received, I must admit that it is more interesting to me than goings-on in Syria and Libya or the latest bickerings over the Spanish bailout.

Philip Blond’s argument chimes with Rittlemeyer’s, that Mitchell represents the “new” ruling class who have the power of the old one without the culture. Of course, Mitchell’s position has some relevance: if the popular view of the Chief Whip’s role is accurate, then getting people to do what he tells them by bullying them, swearing at them, belittling them and threatening them is not Mitchell’s hobby, it is his job. The incident is more akin to a Formula One driver speeding on the motorway out of habit than to a footballer partying with underage girls out of an exaggerated sense of entitlement and self-importance, though it has qualities of both.

For Rittlemeyer’s take to be applicable, it does not matter whether Mitchell himself is “old blood” or a meritocratic climber. The claim is not that that the ruling class contains incomers who do not have the old mores, it is that the old mores have been destroyed by the culture (or lack of culture) of the incomers, and now not even the old blood still retain them. (Blond contrasts Mitchell with Boris Johnson as an example of the old-style elite, but Johnson is self-consciously eccentric, and not necessarily a good example of any wider body).

Meritocracy and other bad ideas

Referring to my 2037 piece, I said:

when it comes to any kind of power, loyalty is more important than exceptional ability. That’s not to say that incompetence is OK, but if your system of government depends on having people of exceptional ability, then it’s broken. Instead take the most competent people from the pool of those brought up to privilege and loyalty, and if they’re not good enough to, say, run a car company, the solution is not to have a government car company… The motto of the civil service should be “Good Enough for Government Work”

Commenter newt0311 objected that “real power always ends up with the exceptional”, and that if the elite is no longer composed of the exceptional, the civilisation dies. My immediate response was that the elite might need the best people, but the government doesn’t.

That’s what I had in mind when I wrote “good enough for government work”; that the middle management of the state administration should not be sucking up top talent that would contribute more to the common good in the productive sector. That’s only half the argument, though; my initial point was that the most senior people had to be trustworthy, and it is better to compromise on ability than bring in people who cannot be counted on to be loyal.

The loyalty factor does not necessarily go away outside the government itself. I wrote that “If you have real power, you will be expected to positively show loyalty”, and that includes those outside the state.

(In itself, that is admittedly a questionable idea: the problem is that market competition could be corrupted by participants attempting to get their competitors into trouble. I think that’s a small risk compared to the massive rent-seeking that goes on under democracy, but it’s a worry).

So, is newt0311 right; does civilisation require that exception people be in control?  I don’t see it. If the elite systematically excluded those of exceptional ability, that would leave a superior “shadow elite” with an argument for, and the ability to, replace the ruling elite. That would be a bad situation. I’m not arguing for excluding the exceptional, nor for ignoring the value of ability. I am only claiming that there are other important factors to balance it.

To put my case in the simplest form, the single hardest thing for civilisation to achieve is to coordinate people effectively. Doing so does require individuals of great ability, but more than that, it requires trust. That, as I wrote before, is the solution to the “lobotomised by activity” problem that we see in both Nick Clegg and Barack Obama. Thus I advocate that the elite select first on the basis of insiders — people who have a stake in the system and can be trusted, and then choose for ability within that.

(An aside: “being from a good family”, which is more or less what I mean by “insider”, is not in itself a sufficient guarantee of loyalty. For more sensitive positions, more evidence than that will be needed. But it’s a good start, and it also provides a way to get other evidence: the employer will know people who know the candidate, and be much better able to gauge their character than in a meritocratic system.)

Our current form of government is effectively the opposite. We are ruled by people of exceptional ability, in the public and private sectors; every position is open to anyone, and the winners are those who have beaten their rivals in the most demanding contest. However, they then represent themselves, with varying degrees of credibility, as ordinary people. Also, because they have all come through highly selective processes, they have no connections to each other, and are still competing and fighting each other at the highest level of government.

This leads to the “arrogance and recklessness” problem I discussed some time ago: not only is each individual selected for ability over reliability, but they are in a peer group that is immersed in the idea that second-best is a disgrace. That produces the “champion or bust” attitude that has caused so many of our recent disasters. A soupçon of meritocracy is a manageable thing when added into a culture of in-group loyalty. When meritocracy becomes the culture, it is time to head for the bunker.

(The other problem, of course, is what their exceptional ability actually is. They’re not necessarily the best people for doing their jobs; they are the best at getting their jobs. But the premise of the discussion is that ability is ability; these are exceptional people.)