Losing the Mandate of Heaven

In May of 1989 we first learned about the Mandate of Heaven. You see, Chinese students had occupied Tiananmen Square in downtown Beijing and the demonstrations had led to strikes and even an army mutiny. 

China watchers were saying that the Communist regime had lost the mandate of Heaven, and thus that it was destined to fail, to be replaced by a new democratic government.

Wishful thinking, dare we say. 

For the record, dynasties were said to have lost the Mandate of Heaven when the country suffered a natural disaster, a great flood or a typhoon or some such. It meant that the gods no longer favored the governing regime. It signaled that a dynasty was about to fall.

So, if the current dynasty lost the mandate of Heaven in 1989 that meant that democracy would soon arrive in the Middle Kingdom.

Obviously, the grandees who were running China 1989 did not quite see things the same way. They believed, if I may speculate, that they were seeing a reprise of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, led by bands of unhinged students, called the Red Guards.

Led by Deng Xiaoping, the ruling elite chose to suppress the student rebellion, violently. Their champion, Premier Zhao Ziyang did warn them that they had lost the argument in the Politburo. Soon therefter government authorities, using soldiers from the countryside-- given that the soldiers stationed around Beijing had refused to fire on the students-- to murder those students who had not abandoned their protest.

One suspects that Deng had not taken the Red Guards seriously enough when they first arose in the 1960s. He was not going to make the same mistake twice.

Anyway, New York Times cub reporter, Nicholas Kristoff, covering the events for the newspaper of record, solemnly intoned that the jig was up for Deng and his cronies. The people would naturally rise up against the Communist Party and replace it with a spanking new democratic regime.

Kristoff should have stuck with grape growing.

Consider this an introduction to a highly speculative but certainly intriguing suggestion by blogger Charles Hugh Smith. Writing on his blog, “Of Two Minds” Smith suggests that we, in our democratic splendor, are really being ruled by a technocratic elite, a dynastic group that pretends to dictate our behavior, that imposed its will on the nation during the Covid pandemic, that arrogates all wealth and power to itself. 

The elite rules under the slogan: It’s the science, stupid.

So, Smith asks whether this technocratic elite has lost the Mandate of Heaven. 

In many ways, the current faith in technology as the solution to all problems has a metaphysical component: many people are offended if their belief in the supremacy of technology is questioned.

The current technocratic elite is in a sense the modern equivalent of a priest-class with special powers to conjure technological-managerial marvels that carry the implicit promise of delivering benefits to commoners--bountiful yields, security, etc.

As prosperity and security decline, and technological-managerial marvels (Big Data, AI, etc.) fail to fix what's broken, faith in the priesthood of technological expertise is fading, and the consent of the governed is eroding: the priesthood's incantations and rituals are failing to provide the promised benefits.

The regime can remain in power if it provides for the populace. If it fails to do so, then people will cease to obey its edicts.

There is another factor that causes the ruled to remove the consent of the governed: soaring inequality driven by the elites taking a larger share than the economy/society can sustain.

Put another way: if the ruling elite mismanages affairs while increasing their share of the economy's surplus, the decline falls on the commoners.

If the ruling elite manages to expand the economy by 2% annually but increases their share by 10%, the slice of pie left for the commoners shrinks accordingly.

Once ruling elites make the mistake of believing their own PR (we deserve our authority and power due to our superiority), they lose touch with the day-to-day realities of insecurity experienced by commoners, and this leads to the hubris and magical thinking of "let them eat cake." 

Given that the top 10% in the U.S. own very nearly 90% of all income-producing assets and collect 97% of all income derived from capital, while the wealth and income of the bottom 90% have stagnated or declined, it's self-evident that inequality has reached the collapse / withdrawal of consent of the governed stage.

Smith is referring to cultural phenomena that are far too familiar. Consider the bureaucratic imposition of self-destructive rules for energy production, energy usage and farming. All in the name of the misnamed climate science.

I say misnamed because, as I have had occasion to repeat, there is no such thing as a scientific fact about tomorrow.

In truth, there has been some serious blowback against policies instituted in the name of saving the planet. But, clearly, these policies favor the elites and disparage the rest.

As electric cars sit on dealers’ lots, unwanted and unloved, we might say that this is a sign that the techno elites of the Biden administration are losing the Mandate of Heaven.

Also, in the realm of pseudo-science we have that other piece of arrant nonsense, called gender identity. Someone invented the concept and now it is being used to mutilate and poison children across America.

As you know, it has generated a backlash, though many supposedly medical organizations support it. How much time will it take before the nation wakes up and sics our trial lawyers on the purveyors of gender identity?

And then, just as China had Mao’s Little Red Book, a collection of the thoughts of the Great Helmsman, which was the only book anyone was allowed to read, we censor thought in the name of fighting disinformation. When something is pronounced to be disinformation, or lies, that means the ideas are not allowed to be discussed. Anything that falls outside of the imaginary Red Book must be suppressed.

As happened in China, it was not just about the failure to provide for the people. Before the Cultural Revolution, China suffered a massive famine, in which some 35 million people starved to death. Some people, led by Deng Xiaoping, wanted to introduce capitalist reforms. To suppress the dangerous tendency, Mao called for a Cultural Revolution. Just as happens here when the elites fail, the government took over the national conversation to ensure that no one would  blame Mao’s policies for the catastrophe. 

Elites do not just work to maintain their own power. They insist that no one call them out for their failings. Mind control is the name of the game, because if you can convince everyone to say that a boy is a girl or a girl is a boy, then surely it is true. If too many people come to think otherwise, then the elites will lose the Mandate of Heaven.

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