Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on Who, literally, does she think she is?

I realise now that I was very naive to think, as I did for a long time, that the puritan impulse couldn’t survive in a pluralist culture. I’m not sure how the managerial mindset is related to puritanism beyond the fact that they both love putting things (and thus people) into boxes, but the two certainly find it easy to make common cause in promoting authoritarianism. Orwell is certainly relevant here but so is Mill. Without a willingness among the ordinary population (which is to say everyone who doesn’t see themself as a “thought leader”) to tolerate ideas they personally find disagreeable it is all too easy for the managers to appoint themselves priests. (“Don’t worry about the mysteries. You’ll never understand them but we’ve got it for you. We have a direct line to God/Stonewall”.) The totalising impulse, which I think is the puritan impulse in another form, claims that all values can be reduced to one value and thus the work of determining how those values can be put into practice can easily be outsourced. Just find someone/some organisation that “shares your values” as if it didn’t actually work in the opposite way. (Billy Bragg apparently wants that job and seems to imagine that having written a few so-so songs is a suitable qualification but he really should have gotten an MBA or gone into the public service if he wanted to be really successful.)

I have to say I’m scared. It’s almost as if we’ve jumped back a hundred years and the only alternative to one authoritarianism is the other authoritarianism. I just hope that this time we find something less destructive than a World War to demonstrate that the boring rule of law (and agreed norms – I’m looking at you Trump) is preferable to the thrill of being an ideological warrior. (Maybe we could just exile all the flag-wavers to some MMORG. The Metaverse might turn out to have some use after all.)