Can elites selected for conformism midwife a new order?
The answer is no.
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken.
Pauline Kael, 1972
The professional managerial class carries its prefabricated political and cultural views from the campus into their lives and work. Members of the meritocratic elite recognize themselves in one another. They gather in urban and suburban areas on the coasts. They connect through social media, finding affinity groups that reinforce their viewpoints.
James Strock, The New Nationalist, 6/9/25
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Winston Churchill (attributed)
I noted at the end of last week’s post that the new CEO of ANZ (one of Australia’s ‘Big Four’ Banks) was in the process of aggressively rightsizing his workforce.
It was subsequently revealed that 3,500 employees and 1000 contractors would be cut.
I should declare an interest, given I did some freelancing for ANZ back in the day.
As it happens, they were one of my better clients.
The ANZ marketing staff I liaised with were universally lovely, I got to interview some interesting people, and my invoices were always paid on time.
Happy times…
For what it’s worth, I hope all the soon-to-be-unemployed ANZ staff land on their feet. I was a print journalist in a previous life, so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with what they’re now going through.
But I don’t think I’m doing them, or anyone else, any favours by gilding the lily about the AI-driven mass automation that is now upon us.
What just happened
AI wasn’t blamed for the ANZ cuts.
The bank’s CEO insisted they were made to reduce duplication, simplify operations and strengthen non-financial risk management.
That explanation may be technically true, but it raises more questions than it answers.
Was ANZ massively overstaffed before the new CEO was sent in to trim the fat?
Were all of the 3,500 ANZ staff getting jettisoned spending their workdays surfing social media sites? If they weren’t, who or what is now going to complete the tasks they once did?
CEOs have long been incentivised – financially and reputationally – to keep their workforces lean and trim any fat that develops.
If the previous ANZ CEO – who wasn’t shy about restructuring the bank’s operations himself – didn’t jettison the unlucky 3,500, that’s presumably because he believed they were necessary.
He was probably correct about that.
At the time.
But I doubt the current CEO would be swinging the axe quite so vigorously if he weren’t confident AI is now advanced enough to be swapped in for expensive and troublesome human workers.
What happens next
Here’s how I imagine many board meetings – and not only in the finance sector – have been playing out of late.
CEO: Excellent news, we’re automating away 5/10/15 per cent of the current workforce by the end of the quarter!
Board member: What about our competitor, who just fucked off 20/25/30 per cent of their staff? What sort of bleeding-heart softcock are you?
CEO: (*Shuffles feet, clears throat, contemplates possibility of also being imminently replaced with AI*)
Um, yeah… well, I had the OpenAI guy in the other day, and he was telling me that there should be even more powerful AI models arriving soon, which should allow us to cut most of the remaining staff within 12-18 months!
If you want to personalise things – and, inevitably, many soon-to-be-redundant workers will – you can blame individual CEOs, boards, and companies.
But it’s not personal, it’s just business. The higher-ups are just playing their assigned role by minimising labour costs to maximise shareholder returns.
That’s how capitalism has always worked, even before its grim neoliberal turn almost half a century ago.
But what happens to a society when businesses – and, presumably, at some point, government departments – start throwing around the pink slips like confetti?
It’s not likely that many of the unemployed ANZers are going to walk into a job at another bank. They are all heading down much the same employee-ejecting path ANZ is.
Of course, a proportion of ex-ANZers will be able to retrain as, say, plumbers. But that’s not going to be realistic for many of those who’ve just been hurled on the scrapheap.
If I’m right, and I fear I am, this is what things are going to be like from here on in.
Employers retrenching ever more employees. Employees, particularly those of a certain age, facing a jobless future.
What to do?
Ideally, this is the time you want a Great Man or Woman of History to emerge and shepherd their nation through a Great Depression-level crisis, FDR-style.
I hope such a figure will soon emerge.
But I’m not holding my breath, given the limitations of contemporary elites.
Late capitalism’s leadership class
Given the plutocrats are usually too busy making money – Trump being the exception that proves the rule – Anglosphere politicians are typically drawn from the upper ranks of the professional-managerial class.
Show me a politician, and I’ll show you someone very likely to have attended a top-tier university. If they’ve had a real job before entering politics, it was probably as an academic, corporate executive, finance bro, lawyer or management consultant.
Nowadays, the CV usually involves minimal contact with the real world, with many - on both Left and Right – going straight from the elite university to a political staffer position and then into elected office.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of that – some of my best friends, etc.
But the ever-insightful Musa al-Gharbi recently echoed Charlie Munger in pointing out that you get what you incentivise.
More precisely, Anglosphere societies have long been getting the political leaders that elite universities and elite institutions select for.
Mr al-Gharbi has outlined what they select for.
What universities select for in general, and what elite schools select for in particular, are folks who are highly capable (they perform well on standardized tests; they have a lot of accomplishments), conscientious (they make sure to earn good grades and attendance records), and conformist (they ingratiate themselves to authority figures; they avoid disciplinary or criminal offenses).
Although students and faculty at these schools often put on a show of nonconformance, it’s important to remember at all times that… They’re people who learned the “correct” hoops to jump through, and jumped through them all with flying colors and in a highly-conspicuous way.
Most of them were born on third base (or mere inches from the home plate). Few know genuine loss, risk, privation or hardship – nor are they willing to subject themselves to these things –– “radical” airs notwithstanding. “Disobedience” is often carefully planned and executed to help make sure they preserve or enhance their standing with elite gatekeepers and within elite institutions.
Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with being highly capable or conscientious.
There’s also nothing wrong with being at the pointy end of the IQ bell curve, which most people who study or work at elite institutions are.
The fly in the ointment – as regularly demonstrated during the High Woke Era (2014-2024) – is the conformity part of the equation.
Like everything, conformity has its upsides and downsides.
For example, it’s probably best to have your nation’s military and police force be made up of status-quo-supporting rule-followers, rather than anti-authoritarian, free-thinking bohemians.
But is it a good idea to have a bunch of brown-nosing girly swots addicted to receiving approval running the joint when your society is facing what’s increasingly looking like a serious and possibly existential crisis?
Can you think of any significant Anglosphere political figure who rose to meet the moment – an Attlee, Churchill, Keating, Lange, Mackenzie King, Thatcher or Reagan – being worried about being disinvited to dinner parties for expressing an unorthodox opinion?
Can you imagine them nodding along approvingly as an authority figure informed them that women can now have penises and men can now get pregnant?
The price of PMC status-seeking
I don’t imagine anybody will soon forget that Anglosphere elites just spent a decade making themselves look ridiculous to around 80 per cent of the population in an attempt to curry favour with the remaining 20 per cent – the kind of people they attended elite universities with, then worked alongside at elite institutions.
Those who live in a special world. Those who don’t know anyone who would vote for a populist. Those who find such deplorable individuals entirely beyond their ken.
I suppose an argument could be mounted that conscientious but conformist incumbent elites were well-suited to the relatively well-ordered world of the last 45 years.
But there’s a growing consensus, from Left to Right, that they are utterly incapable of navigating the disorderly world we’re heading into.
They are simply not trained or temperamentally inclined to tell hard truths, take risks, or jeopardise their social standing by pointing out the emperor has no clothes.
I struggle to think of any great leaders of men who’ve thus far emerged from the professional-managerial class.
Great statesmen and stateswomen, such as those listed above, typically come from the lower or upper rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
Probably because those at the top and bottom of a society are far less cringe-inducingly conformist than those in the middle of it.
Profiles in courage and conformism
As it happens, I finished writing this post late Wednesday evening. When I woke up early Thursday morning, my feeds were flooded by news of Charlie Kirk’s tragic death.
I don’t want to politicise this tragedy. Plenty on both the Left and Right were hard at that before the body was even cold.
But I will point out that while Kirk was conscientious and hyper-capable, he wasn’t a conformist. A staunch Conservative, yes. A conformist, no.
He wasn’t a coward either. Indeed, his bravery ended up costing him his life.
He had what, until not so long ago, would have been considered a typical, middle-class American upbringing, growing up the son of an architect and homemaker in a pleasant but not exclusive suburb of Chicago.
He could have gone to university, but chose not to. Whenever anyone expressed surprise that he hadn’t gone to university, he’d remark he chose entrepreneurship over indoctrination.
I used to think that was a glib line. Nowadays, I’m not so sure.
As it happens, his career as a political activist took flight after he got an article published at 18 – Liberal bias starts in high school economics textbooks. Maybe, if he’d been born just a little bit later, he would have been content to debate politics on Substack. Instead, he chose to enter the dragon’s lair of university campuses.
Now let me tell you about a figure who is, in many ways, the antithesis of Kirk.
Unless you’re American or a political nerd, you probably hadn’t heard of Charlie Kirk until yesterday.
But you probably have heard of celebrity journalist/author/self-help guru Malcolm Gladwell. He’s the guy behind bestsellers such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers and has his finger in other revenue-generating pies.
If anybody was financially secure enough to arch an eyebrow at the identity-politics insanity that transpired over the last 10 years or so, it was surely Gladwell.
I lost most of the respect I had for Gladwell after his disastrous Munk debate in 2022. Sure, he was in the difficult position of arguing people should “trust mainstream media”. Nonetheless, the smugly self-satisfied condescension he displayed towards Douglas Murray and Matt Tabbibi (courageous men, in the Kirk mould) was stomach-churning.
I lost any remaining respect for Gladwell when, shortly before Kirk’s death, he confessed he’d pretended the emperor was decked out in all his finery.
He did that by going along with the (then highly fashionable) belief that there was no issue with trans women competing in women’s sports.
Only now there’s little social cost attached to acknowledging there are issues with trans women competing in women’s sports, Gladwell has confessed he never really believed the fashionable pieties he once mouthed.
He was “cowed” and “objective in a dishonest way”, you see.
I’m reminded of the Shakespeare line – Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
The world needs far more valiant Kirks – on both the Left and Right – and far fewer gutless Gladwells.