On The Coming Revolution
By: Dustin Carr
Tags: Freedom, Culture, Society, Revolution, Humanity

Things are not ever returning to normal after COVID-19. Nearly everyone is saying it or thinking it. The powers that be are wondering how to continue to be powers that be, while most humans are clinging to hope that what emerges will be normal enough and generally not involve starvation. There is a lot at stake for how this new normal emerges, and humans appear to be setting themselves up for settling this the same old way, and that is not a good thing. But before battle lines are drawn between red and blue, blue and grey, left and right, black and white, East and West, left and right, or any other combination of opposites, I want to draw my own lines. This is probably going to be the most apolitical call to arms that you have ever read, for political positions are completely irrelevant at this point.

Here’s the thing. I love human beings. I don’t always love being around them, but I do love the art that is the human persona. I especially love and respect capable humans who find remarkable ways to overcome problems, big or small, personal or professional.

This admiration has led me to notice some things. Society has polarized itself in a manner that is not at all obvious to most, and deserves careful consideration, for it seems as though there is a type of human that has found its way into positions of power at all levels in our society, and that type of human is simply inadequate for such a job. They are not at all the capable human being that I describe above.

So I am going to assert that the revolution that leads to a permanently new normal will ultimately come down to what I will call the Capable against the Administrative, resulting in an inversion of these two in terms of the social structures that evolve out of this.

The Capable know how to do things.

The Administrative know how organizations are run. More importantly, The Administrative know how to run organizations in manners that benefit themselves or other members of the Administrative class above all others, often at the expense of the capable.

The Administrative are the ones who come up with new cost cutting measures, while capable are the ones who know how to invent, make, build, or create things that have value.

The Administrative know how to extract that value while convincing the Capable that they are not the reason the value was created.

Yes, my view is jaded and cynical, but I have grown up in this world, in this time. My first job was at a pizza place, where I discretely observed the manager embezzling money. So I carefully hid the evidence so that he could be taken down. And he was, and shortly thereafter I was sexually harassed by the next manager. I could make pizzas 5X faster than either of them, and I was paid less than a fifth of what they made.

I experienced grad school and saw the abuse of hard working 20 somethings in their prime who had been convinced that they were there to “learn” and so their labor was not of value, even though it was the best such labor in the world. Many were the top 0.1% in terms of capability. While their professors were grant writers and administrators whose contributions to the effectiveness of science could be held in question. This situation has worsened over the 20 years since I left graduate school.

Now, I know it seems like the professors should be considered to be part of the capable class. And yet, they have found themselves in service to a much less capable administrative class, which has apparently integrated the professors with minimal resistance. And they did this while the administrative class devised a means to amass great wealth and power by putting an entire generation in debt for something that was essentially free to the previous generations. This required the coordinated effort of The Administrative operating in our Congress, our banking industry, and our academic institutions. I am not suggesting conspiracy, I am saying that the Administrative is always naturally cooperative in situations that result in a win-win-win for multiple powerful parties.

My first job out of grad school was at a massive industrial research lab of much renown, and there I participated in the telecom boom and bust. This was an entirely artificial economic calamity created by lying administrators at Worldcom. I sat in wonder at optical conferences where Enron suddenly shows up as a player in the telecom markets, and nobody knew why. Ultimately the CEO at my company was let go with a payment that was 1000X my salary, and replaced with an ill qualified administrator who was paid even more than that to run the company completely into the ground.

I’ve since been through another round of helping to uncover an embezzling scheme, carried out by a wholly incompetent group of administrators, while a group of extremely capable staff members kept the company afloat with heroic effort. And, oddly enough, this also had to be followed up with another brand of sexual harassment.

So I do have a personal perspective on this. I admit that my youthful vigor wanted to join the administrative party. I wanted to be one of the ones who turned around and received gifts of millions for abject failure while landing my next board of directors position. But deep down, I knew I could never actually be THAT.

But do not confuse this with simple grousing about unfulfilled potential. What I am describing is a real problem and a real imbalance, and it threatens the life of humans more than any other. Because capable humans are great and can accomplish anything, but currently they are being ground to dust by the Administrative class. Not in the sense of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, though that is still part of the problem in parts of the world, but in the manner in which those who produce value have that value proportionally extracted from them by those who do not, or more precisely, cannot, produce value. This is the ultimate deprivation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for the things that a person spends time doing is their life at the time they are doing it. When that life force is being systematically diverted for nefarious purposes that will never benefit the aims of the individual who contributed that life force, there is some amount of enslavement happening.

I am not saying the everybody is underpaid or under-appreciated. Like most revolutions, the opposing parties constitute a small fraction of the populace. There are many people who are neither administrative nor capable. But without question, The Capable know better how to get value from these people than The Administrative ever have or will.

Capable humans need administrators assisting them in their efforts. There is no doubt about this. That would be the balanced order of things. For in such an instance, the administrative become capable.

But this is not the current situation. The corrupted systems of the world have been created and established as a means of self-perpetuation that can only be achieved through an administrative class that seeks to reward itself using structures the take value away from The Capable class.

Not everything that the administrative class does in order to amass wealth and power is illegal. It doesn’t have to be, because the administrative class is truly gifted in its ability to manipulate other administrative systems to their own benefit. In particular, the legal system and its close relative the tax system are run by The Administrative class for the benefit of The Administrative class at the expense of The Capable.

Since I am writing this for The Capable class, I will throw in a mathematical concept. If the rate of growth of a value, say x, is proportional to the value of x, we call that an exponential process. It grows without limit. This is the exact situation that we currently find ourselves in with regard to The Administrative. Because of the overt effects that the administrative have on the legal and tax systems, they are able to increase their influence, and as their influence increases, they are able to further manipulate these systems. This is an unstable system. This is a runaway exponential process that favors no living humans in the long run, not even the short-sighted Adminitrative.

The Capable look at the world today and say “I remember a time when things were different, and everyone agreed they should be better, and yet they got worse.” This is not the sort of result that makes sense to a Capable person. A Capable person sees a problem, and then works on it until it gets better.

But in their respective roles, Administrators will see a problem and consider it only in terms of how any sort of movement on the problem, including making it worse, can result in outcomes that benefit the Administrator or his or her comrades.

I can be a little more concrete, and I want to make clear that I am not drawing lines between wealth classes. There are extremely Capable people among the very wealthy, and there are extremely Administrative people among the impoverished.

The capable want to make things that work, or do things that result in positive outcomes, and they have the mindset and the problem solving skills that give them the ability to do this. They are the ones that make this world run. They invent when they need to invent, and they work hard when they need to work hard.

But the administrative is driven by something else. Take, for example, an extremely hard working and talented individual who gets promoted to the first level of management. A capable person within a management team can be a good thing to have, but if her inclinations remain aligned with her former colleagues, she will find her career path ultimately stifled. For instance, supposes she sees that the true value of her organization is being generated by the production staff and that this should put a cap on the administrative salaries or bonuses in the company. In doing so she will have set herself up in opposition to the Administrative, and she won’t be allowed into that club.

In every company that has moved production overseas to save cost, lone voices spoke out in favor of a greater vision, and when these voices were not ignored, they were legally silenced. Because at this point, every company knows that its CEO, Chairman, and board can all be replaced rapidly if choices to cut costs are not made swiftly and decisively. They can even be sued by disgruntled shareholders. The Administrative demeanor is demanded by the systems the Administrative has created.

And at the same time we have the administrative working at the top of our labor unions, bargaining for their own power, and using administrative manipulations to render systems unworkable. When the Administrative clash with the Administrative, then the Administrative always wins, even if the clash would appear to be on behalf of the Capable.

The main reason for this is that there is an arm of the administrative that extends into, and mostly claims, the legal system and its participants, lawyers and judges. Lawyers make money whenever there is a legal action. Those who are very good at winning legal actions make more money. So they may be considered capable. But the Administrative creeps into this due to this thing called common law. There are really good lawyers who operate in order to write common law into existence through their expert manipulations of the legal system. This means they pursue and win cases that establish the legal precedences that their Administrative colleagues can use to advance their own agendas. Note that this is is a legal process that sidesteps all aspects of democracy, and yet it defines much of the law in many nations.

There are lawyers who specialize in helping white collar criminals, and these lawyers are many times more effective than the ones who attempt to prosecute white collar criminals. White collar crime by the Administrative offers big payoffs. It is nearly always a winning proposition. The bigger the crime, the bigger the win, usually.

The Administrative are deeply involved in our medical system. In fact, the notion of a for-profit insurance company is Administrative at its core. Capable people may agree to a co-operative method of underwriting risk amongst a group or a community, but the notion of actively giving hard earned money to people who are going to end up with much more money than you just so that you don’t have to fear the unknown would usually be considered a cult scam. There is no reason whatsoever that it has to be this way, except for the intention on the part of the The Administrative to make sure this system remains in place.

And insurance companies have used administrative manipulations to establish their hold on the entire legal system. We don’t have many discussions in the United States about health care costs. We only discuss health insurance.

What could happen if the Capable just took over this system right now. What if they did something crazy like burned all of the common law and shut down all of the insurance companies. They could make it so that every person was responsible for their own health outcomes, as opposed to the doctors who took care of them. In other words, they could get rid of medical malpractice lawsuits as a viable means of controlling the quality of our healthcare system. Instead, we could rely on public rating systems and transparency into all hospital operations using technologies that are already prevalent in our society. By then, we will have eliminated more than 90% of the overhead of our current medical system. This is the point where we can then start to talk about who pays for it, and also how to establish effective deterrents to medical malpractice that do not result in an economic instability that serves the Administrative class. The Capable may come to the conclusion that everyone could actually pay for much of their own, as the above changes would also motivate the rise of true health, not just medicine, but actual understanding of health and optimum conditions for human life.

This process will reveal that the administrative have been in charge of generating a food supply for our country that is responsible for a very large fraction of our health problems. The capable would see this and recognize that we only need to educate people while developing ways to give them what they crave without the use of chemicals that are literally guaranteed, for example, to bring about morbid obesity in particular gene types, or diabetes in others.

In very little time, we could reduce our total healthcare costs to be pennies on the dollar to what they are now, even with a free market system and no insurers. At this point, the problem becomes much more tractable for capable people to solve.

We also can’t leave out the other key administrative arm that makes these things work: public relations. Capable people rely upon truth and integrity. The administrative are not so bound, and when they feel the need to stretch truth “legally” in a manner that can bend the psyche of the populace, they turn to PR. There are certainly capable people at PR firms, but the administrative is the power behind the calculations that say spending $100M in order to convince a population of a falsehood that will result in people paying $10B is always a good choice to make. This even happens in medicine, where companies have literally launched campaigns to excessively demonize necessary nutrients that our bodies produce, all so they can sell billions of dollars of rather harmful medicines.

One thing is clear at this point, and that is the capable do have to rise up and assert themselves as the leaders and the decision makers that result in the outcomes that will make tomorrow a thriving world. Politics is irrelevant. This government that we currently have is irrelevant. The next moment is the only thing that is truly real, and it is time for these structures to topple, and for a new structure to be built in its place. And I beseech The Capable, the hard working, the quiet ones who have long held this world together, to no longer tolerate any aspect of the Administrative. Human beings are better than this, and you, Capable one, have to climb out of the hole that you’ve let be defined for you by the Administrative and actually realize that you are the one with the power and the strength to bring about a golden age of humanity and the earth at large.