Introduction
You live in a society dominated by sprawling institutions, experts, and managers who claim to act in the name of reason. Yet you often feel that these systems operate without common sense, justice, or a genuine understanding of human needs. Decisions are made according to narrow technical criteria that leave you powerless and alienated.
John Ralston Saul argues that reason has been transformed from a liberating Enlightenment force into an amoral technocratic dogma. Instead of serving humanism, administrative and structural reason now serves pure power.
The book examines how this ideology took root across society. It analyzes the historical origins of administrative structures, the rise of modern technocrats, and the hijacking of economic life by corporate systems.
- How did the methods of the Inquisition shape modern bureaucracy?
- Why do intellectuals serve power rather than truth?
- How did capitalism become a system of debt and financial speculation?
1. The Theology of Power
From its birth, the Age of Reason suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding. People believed that reason constituted a moral weapon. Instead, it became a self-justifying system of structures most easily controlled by those free of common sense and humanism.
Reason is not a moral force but merely a disinterested administrative method and structure that easily serves those who lust for power.
John Ralston Saul calls this transformation the creation of the Age of Structure. This era of obsession with progress and servility to structure has lasted for four and a half centuries. In this framework, power itself is the primary indicator of social approval.
The Age of Structure
The old system of class was replaced by a caste system of technocrats. These leaders use organization, technology, and information as a new holy trinity. You see them trained in business and public administration schools to find solutions that satisfy the system rather than question it. They operate without personal responsibility, functioning as amoral agents of pure power.
Robert McNamara shaped the Vietnam War and launched the nuclear arms race. He commercialized the arms business and created the financial structure leading to the Third World debt crisis. Yet he emerged as an unblemished leader due to the amoral logic of the technocratic system.
The Technocratic Priesthood
You can observe that political struggles between Left and Right are superficial diversions within a unified rational framework. Capitalism and Socialism are merely methods for dividing ownership and income. They share a core reliance on the cultivation of desire.
Despite their different vocabularies, identical policies implemented by governments labeled as Left or Right produce the same confusion. They merely mask the underlying unity of an amoral rational civilization.
During the 1970s and 1980s, economic policies called of the Left in the United States, Canada, England, and Germany led to right-wing electoral victories. Identical policies called of the Right in France, Spain, Australia, and Italy led to left-wing replacements. These political shifts occur while the American Right has been in power for twenty of the last twenty-four years.
2. The Rise of Reason
The methods of applied reason and administrative efficiency were first developed by the Inquisition long before the Enlightenment. You can trace modern bureaucratic structures back to this thirteenth-century model. To every question there is a known right answer. Process and notaries are essential to record the demonstration of a priori truth while eliminating humanism, relativism, and doubt.
The methods of applied reason, centralized control, and administrative efficiency were first forged by the Inquisition and absolute statecraft.
Pope Gregory issued a bull making heresy the special function of the Dominicans. Traveling Inquisitors wore anonymous black and used secret tribunals to act as moral auditors.
The Inquisitorial Model
Ignatius Loyola created the first complete rational technocracy through the Society of Jesus, utilizing organization, measurement, and psychological control. Loyola adopted Protestant methods of spreading a message and applied them to defend institutional power through a disciplined elite. He substituted doctrine with organizational interests and recognized the power of controlling vocabulary.
Ignatius successfully outmaneuvered a local Inquisitor in Paris in 1535 by bringing a notary public to witness and document the Inquisitor's praise for his book Exercises.
The Pope officially proclaimed the Jesuit order in 1539. Ignatius died in 1556, when the order had 1,000 members. The Jesuit order reached 23,000 members in 1700 before it was temporarily disbanded in 1723. You can see how Ignatius treated progress as a synonym for measurement while operating as a rational technocrat.
To maintain control over institutions and thought, you must follow specific practices:
- Absorb the thought of being a member of a Society instituted to seek the progress of men's souls and Christian doctrine.
- Accomplish ends by reasoning with the public and by teaching.
- Eliminate people infected with error from government and teaching positions.
- Burn heretical books and books by tainted authors.
- Convoke synods to unmask specific errors.
- Forbid calling a heretic an evangelical.
The Jesuit Technocracy
Cardinal Richelieu successfully married rational technocracy to the nation-state, establishing centralization, absolute monarchy, and the systematic use of fear and secrecy. Richelieu lived from 1585 to 1642. He centralized power, restructured education, built a network of secret police and spies, and utilized rewards and punishments where fear based on esteem and reverence drives public duty.
At the Etats-Generaux in 1614, Richelieu proposed fixing precise meeting hours and enforcing absolute secrecy for all deliberations.
In 1627, Richelieu introduced his thirteen-point proposal for a Rational Reorganization of Government. You can see how this established the permanent framework of the modern nation-state.
3. Voltaire's Children
Modern technocrats operate as intellectual mercenaries who hire themselves out to organizations to exercise abstract power without moral common sense.
John Ralston Saul calls these figures technocrats or condottieri. While eighteenth-century elites faced criticism from Voltaire for their ignorance, they still viewed society as an organic whole. Contemporary technocrats are intensely trained in narrow bands of knowledge, treating power as a specialized skill divorced from morality and civilization.
Doctors whose annual reading is limited to a few formula thrillers and whose focus shrinks to a single organ earn several hundred thousand dollars a year. Literature professors champion deconstructionism to render texts inaccessible.
Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced Scientific Management in 1895 when he spoke to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This system replaced class struggle and humanism with a rational structure designed to produce a conflict-free utopia through the subjection of workers to machines and managers. Taylor proposed organizing factories through a scientific system where employees receive cash benefits in exchange for unquestioning adherence. Future deans of the Harvard Business School visited Taylor in 1908 and created their program based on these antidemocratic premises.
The Soviet Union imported American Taylorist advisers for its first Five-Year Plan. Two-thirds of Soviet industry was built by Americans, and Albert Speer used similar principles to run wartime production and forced labor.
The Harvard Business School and ENA
Business school education trains managers to tame unruly reality through an abstract methodology that eliminates imagination, moral balance, and social responsibility in favor of pure competitiveness. By 1924, there were six hundred students at Harvard using casebooks in one hundred colleges. Seventy-one percent of Harvard MBA graduates go into nonmanufacturing, and eighty percent do not work in line functions or actually manage. Using the case method, business schools begin with a predetermined solution and force messy real-world problems into abstract frameworks. Harvard Business School courses on comparative ideology treat ideology not as a set of beliefs, but as an indispensable management tool connected to economic performance.
Ignatius Loyola established an autocratic, highly centralized intellectual army in 1539. This system introduced the total abnegation of individual will and judgment as the core of modern professional training. Jesuit training involved a twenty-four-month novitiate designed to dismantle a young man's will:
- dismantle a young man's will into its component parts to isolate undesirable elements;
- purify what is adaptable and useful;
- cement the components back together with the structure, rules, and habits of the organization.
The official Ratio Studiorum study plan was finalized in 1599. Within forty years, the modern method linked inextricably to nationalism, and the Society of Jesus operated through depersonalization, accountings of the conscience, and the despotism of the soul until its disbandment from 1773 to 1814.
State administrative institutions like France's ENA produce multipurpose, empty elites who apply standardized administrative methods to every sector while displacing democratic participation. A brief attempt to create a bureaucratic training center occurred under the Second Republic in 1848, followed by the creation of l’Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques by Monsieur Boutiny in 1871. Four thousand Enarques control the French civil service, though the annual graduating class size at ENA dropped from 160 to 90.
Simon Nora described moving directly from the Resistance to ENA. He felt that blowing up trains and attending the school were identical because both proved they knew better than others what was good for the country.
4. The Hijacking of Capitalism
Modern big business is run by corporate managers and speculators who rely on financial engineering and debt rather than personal risk-taking.
Public debate treats terms like capitalism and free enterprise as a natural part of democracy. The people fervently arguing for them are actually corporate managers, financial speculators, and service providers. They rely on abstract financial manipulation, stock options, and contracts guaranteeing them rich settlements rather than risking personal capital.
Ross Johnson became the star of a generalized, irresponsible American corporate managerial style during the 1980s.
True capitalism is the ownership and dynamic use of the means of production, requiring periodic reinvestment, whereas modern finance relies on speculation and profit motives divorced from production. Capital is an abstraction that must be rendered concrete through the ownership of property or factories. Trading commodities or relying purely on profit is speculation, not capitalism. Modern managers have superseded ownership with administration and bureaucracy.
Casino Society
Large corporations simulate growth through massive mergers, acquisitions, and leveraged buyouts financed by dangerous levels of debt rather than investment in production. Instead of investing in research and long-term production, management loads companies down with debt to finance takeovers of other firms. This financial paper manipulation mirrors the speculative busts of past centuries and severely strains corporate cash flows.
American corporate debt reached $2.2 trillion, absorbing 32 percent of the total corporate cash flow, while worldwide merger-acquisition transactions reached $375.9 billion in 1988 involving 5,634 deals.
Third World Labor Arbitrage
Western technocrats maintain corporate competitiveness by abandoning industrial production in the West and exploiting low social and safety standards in developing nations or border zones. Faced with high costs, modern managers shift heavy manufacturing to regions with minimal safety regulations, suppressed unions, and extremely low wages, thus undermining the Western social consensus while praising competition as a moral imperative.
American steel lost 435,000 employees in 1979 compared to 169,000 employees ten years later.
In 1986 in Korea, 1,660 workers were killed on the job and 141,809 were injured under harsh labor conditions, while the Maquiladora zone functions at mid-nineteenth-century levels along the Mexican border.
True reform requires altering civilization from a system of certainties and answers to one that finds satisfaction in doubt and methodical citizen participation. Values are established through methodical participation rather than fleeting victory over single issues. Societies must stop relying on grandiose ultimatums and revive common sense, humanity, and sensibility instead of crushing them between abstraction and expertise.
The Athenian pause brought forward Solon to shake off burdens, demonstrating that public evil enters every man's house if not addressed.
You must apply these steps to reform the system:
- reestablish the division between policy and administration;
- end the cult of the Hero;
- widen the meaning of knowledge;
- end the alliance between barbarism and technocracy;
- denigrate self-interest, meaningless power, cynicism, and rhetoric;
- change our elites.
Conclusion
Specialized technical systems have replaced moral direction across modern society, leaving citizens ruled by self-referential administrative structures that serve only power. You can reclaim democratic responsibility by rejecting technocratic specialization and relying on your own common sense.
To counter the dominance of Voltaire's bastards, you must follow these practical rules:
- Reject the claim that only experts can understand public issues, and insist on clear language in all public affairs.
- Value human common sense and ethical judgment above technical efficiency and administrative expertise.
- Hold institutions and managers personally accountable for the moral consequences of their decisions.
- Participate actively in public debate instead of surrendering authority to unelected corporate and bureaucratic structures.
- Judge policies by their actual human outcomes rather than their internal systemic logic.
10 Key Ideas
- Reason has been transformed from a liberating Enlightenment force into an amoral technocratic dogma that serves pure power rather than humanism.
- Political struggles between Left and Right are superficial diversions within a unified rational framework reliant on administrative efficiency.
- Modern bureaucratic structures trace their origins back to the thirteenth-century Inquisition and absolute statecraft.
- Ignatius Loyola created the first complete rational technocracy through the Society of Jesus by utilizing organization and psychological control.
- Contemporary technocrats are intensely trained in narrow bands of knowledge, treating power as a specialized skill divorced from morality and civilization.
- Scientific Management replaced class struggle and humanism with a rational structure designed to produce a conflict-free utopia through the subjection of workers to machines and managers.
- Business school education trains managers to tame unruly reality through an abstract methodology that eliminates imagination, moral balance, and social responsibility in favor of pure competitiveness.
- State administrative institutions like France's ENA produce multipurpose, empty elites who apply standardized administrative methods to every sector while displacing democratic participation.
- Modern finance relies on speculation, massive mergers, and dangerous levels of debt rather than true capitalism based on the ownership and dynamic use of the means of production.
- Western technocrats maintain corporate competitiveness by abandoning industrial production in the West and exploiting low social and safety standards in developing nations or border zones.