Bennet's Phylactery

Managerial liberalism is defined by its rejection of illegible human bonds. Everything must have a price, so that anyone is free to buy it, and the state can judge the transaction to be transparent and fair.

What we would call “loyalty” or “honor” or “covenant” can only exist in a managerial society as meaningless ideals — the kind of thing that you are free to daydream about at church.

The moment these ideals enter the “real world” of money and power, they can only be understood as “prejudice” or “corruption”: not only a bad thing, but the bad thing — the enemy that the system exists to eradicate.

But the family is an inherently covenantal relationship, and it inherently involves the real world. Human beings will not raise families as a transaction — so a society that cannot honor covenants cannot have families, and very rapidly will cease to be a society at all.

Boomers and spiritual boomers love to pull up charts and graphs that “show” that today’s young people are “objectively” better off. But the charts look that way because we have burned priceless (but invisible and illegible) goods in exchange for the goods that show up in metrics dashboards: Goodhart’s Law, at civilizational scale.