Essay Club: Cryptocracy by John Carter
"In the managerial state, power is deliberately opaque."
There are so many great writers on Substack. In last month’s Essay Club we discussed In Praise of the Gods, an essay by Substack local Simon Sarris, which I’ve re-read several times since it was first published. It’s excellent, and I was pleased to see that it resonated with many of you, too.
Today we’ll be discussing Cryptocracy by John Carter, another Substack local who writes over at Postcards from Barsoom. Cryptocracy really caught my attention when it was first published. It’s likely to be more divisive than some of our previous essays, as it’s more explicitly political than anything we’ve covered before, but I encourage you to read it regardless of where you stand politically. It’s a fascinating and well-written essay, and takes less than 20 minutes to read.
John Carter himself is a bit of an enigma. He describes himself as follows:
“Martian Wyrdlord. Blood memory enjoyer. Solarian barbarizer. Atlantean DNA activator. Portal dowser. Filosofictionalist.”
Beyond this, all I can tell you is that Carter is a Canadian scientist and writer (obviously). I suspect this is intentional on Carter’s part—people who write from a non-establishment right-wing perspective often choose to muddy their identities, as writing about these topics often carries a risk of being ‘cancelled’, fired, or even fined or imprisoned, depending on where you live.
Instead of trying to guess at Carter’s identity, then, let’s talk about his work. He writes about a variety of topics related to politics, culture, and current events. His style is direct, provocative, increasingly experimental, and often infused with evocative, techno-futuristic imagery. Cryptocracy has a particularly Lovecraftian vibe—fitting, I think, for an essay on shadowy, all-seeing elites—and is in my opinion one of his best essays. Let’s dig into it.
Cryptocracy (2023)
Carter begins with a question: “Who, if anyone, or what, if anything, is in charge?”
Each political faction has their own answer for this. To progressives, the world is controlled by invisible systems of oppression; to dissident rightists, a small cadre of elites, or perhaps the nodes of a decentralised decision-making apparatus (‘the Cathedral’), are the culprit. What all perspectives have in common, Carter argues, is that:
“they remove the source of agency in public affairs from the visible to the invisible. It is not the politicians that we can see who coordinate the world and provide impetus to policy changes, but hidden puppet masters – human or systemic – who manipulate them from off-stage. If there is a single, unifying theme around which most of the current year’s human species can coalesce across all ideological divides, it is this: the true power is hidden.”
This is a terrifying thought. A power you can see—whether they be a king, president, warlord, or business mogul—is knowable, and to some extent accountable. But an invisible force is unknowable, so cannot be trusted or held to account.
What’s clear to everyone is that those who are supposed to be in power, our elected representatives, aren’t actually the ones in charge. We live in a managerial state in which there is not a single ruler, but “armies of them, faceless bureaucrats and nondescript functionaries who camouflage themselves within the dense undergrowth of corporate org charts”. Try to hold a single person to account for a decision made or rule enforced, and the response we’ve come to expect is “it wasn’t me, I’m just following policy…”, and the true source of the ruling remains obscured. Where a source can be found, it’s usually a “bewildering web of think tanks, policy institutes, committees… none of which is willing to take direct responsibility for the policy”.
Carter presents the COVID lockdowns as an example. Where did the idea of lockdowns, or masking, or contact tracing, or vaccine mandates begin? Nobody knows. I experienced this first hand—when masks and vaccine mandates came for me, all I knew was that my boss ordered it because the state government required it because the federal government recommended it because the WHO wrote a policy paper that suggested ‘The Science’ supported it. Who do I talk to about that? My local MP?
Whether or not you ultimately supported the COVID policies, this should concern you. Especially because, as Carter notes, our whole system is like this. In his words:
“We are governed by a sentient miasma of unaccountable regulatory authorities whose arbitrary powers extend into ever more intimate aspects of our lives like the pseudopodia of some vast smothering organism. Their power is seemingly absolute, yet there is never anyone responsible.”
Carter’s use of imagery throughout this essay is fantastic, by the way. “The pseudopodia of some vast smothering organism”—he effectively unmasks the true, horrific face of a system that, with its veil of cold and sanitised ‘objectivity’, often goes unnoticed. He goes on to note that this is reinforced by the system’s use language:
“The technocratic prose deployed by the expert class is carefully scrubbed of any authorial voice… Third person passive predominates: they never say, “We have decided”, and certainly never say “I have decided”, but always “It has been decided,” as though policies are simply natural phenomena as inevitable as hurricanes, in which human agency plays no role. This reinforces the illusion that things are written, not by all-too-human scientists, but by Science; not by human journalists, but by Journalism; not by human agents, but by the Agency.”
So what do we do about all of this?
Carter suggests that the solution lies in recognising all of this for what it really is—a game of make-believe. Those who rule us pretend to be competent, and they pretend to keep us safe. We, in turn, pretend to believe them. We convince ourselves that our system is better than the alternatives, that it all works, and in doing so we trap ourselves—“They are powerful, and so issue mandates, and we comply; and because we comply, their mandates work, and so they are powerful.”
But what if we collectively decided to stop complying? What if we instead reminded ourselves that people got by without heavy-handed managerial control for thousands of years? In Carter’s words:
“I suspect we could do away with almost all of it and barely notice. Well, that’s not true. We would notice the difference very quickly, and for the better.
That’s the first shift in mindset that we need: from the idea that the cryptocracy is a necessary evil, to the idea that it is evil, and not necessary at all.
Following that, it’s simple: ignore them.”
Ignore them. Simple as that. If no one’s willing to take ownership for all of this, then no one’s actually responsible for it. In other words, no one is in charge. Ignore them.
Those brave few who walk away first will likely face severe consequences. Indeed, many already have. But for those who walk away next, the path has been made a little easier. If what we all truly want is change, we need only follow their footsteps, and trust that others will be close behind. Carter concludes:
“Use disobedience to claw back whatever personal agency and responsibility you can in your own life, train yourself not to take these people seriously, encourage others to do the same, and if enough people do this, eventually it will become so prohibitively expensive to manage the population that the strangling vines of this parasitic organism we call the managerial state can be hacked back to something manageable.”
So what did I make of all of this? I’m generally pretty sympathetic to Carter’s perspective. I think his diagnosis is accurate—in the past, power was explicitly held by a monarch, local lord, or oligarchic elite, but is now deliberately obscured to the benefit of those at the top. The sower is never seen, but the benefits continue to be reaped. We can all feel it. Carter’s solution, however, is harder to accept. I have no doubt that there are a few heroic souls out there willing to take a stand, but one of the things that makes our managerial regime so powerful is how effectively it pacifies us. Most Westerners now live very safe, comfortable lives; even when COVID mandates had us forcibly confined to our homes, many people were perfectly content to sit around bingeing Netflix. As long as fast food and cheap entertainment remain easily accessible, I suspect the Cryptocracy will go on relatively unchallenged.
Carter is pointing in the right direction, but I think there’s a piece missing. It’s what Johann Kurtz refers to as a Little Cataclysm—an “existentially threatening but non-violent event… the pivotal moment at which all the supports that underpin the continuation of our present mode of existence are cut”. Without discomfort and a real need for something better, nothing will be done, for the simple reason that it doesn’t yet seem absolutely necessary.
There are signs that such an event might be on the horizon, but we’re not there yet.
Questions and Housekeeping
Thanks for reading! I thought this was an excellent essay, I hope you enjoyed it too. Here a few a questions to ponder:
What did you think of this essay, generally?
How do you explain the existence of the Cryptocracy? Is this an emergent phenomenon, or something that’s intentionally maintained by a shadowy elite?
Do you agree with Kurtz that a ‘Little Cataclysm’ is needed before true change can occur? If so, what might this look like?
I host Essay Club to generate interesting conversations, so if you have thoughts of your own, or if you have any suggestions for future Essay Club essays, please share them in the comments. And of course, if you enjoyed this, please like, share, comment, and…
The next Essay Club will be on the 18th of May. Our last couple of essays have been written by Substack locals, so I think it’s time to cover another classic. Given my interest in psychology and myths, Carl Jung has been conspicuously absent from my Substack so far, so next month we’ll discuss Jung’s fascinating (and somewhat controversial) essay, Wotan (1936). See you then!
This was so well written and such a great analysis of John Carter's essay. Thanks for pointing me to it - gonna be next on my list to read.
Interesting article and quite astute in identifying the maze that is modern and science driven society.
I agree that we live in a world in which individuals are infantilised and therefore everyone needs a manual or guide to make any decisions. We are in a heuristic trap, where there's so much information we have left common sense at the door which lead to unhelpful policies or restrictions. Ultimately though, I am uncomfortable with the libertarian sentiment of the piece.
I dont know much about libertarianism but I do know its much more popular in North America than in Europe. In the US the state itself is seen as a necessary evil or even just evil. An ideological position that I find misguided as the state does a lot more for individuals than it is given credit for. We live in an ever increasingly complex mesh of civilisation due to a) number of people and b) the level of comfort and "freedom" we aspire to. People's freedom now includes to travel, purchase, and self actualize economically as they choose. But this process relies on an ever increasing amount of variables; more energy, more tools, more technology, more food etc etc.
This is why we have a complex system, our lives are intermingled and we need heuristic models to make decisions otherwise we would be in a state of decision paralysis.
I wasn't a big fan of lockdowns but lockdowns weren't issued because of "science" as if its an ephemeral entity. It was chosen because thousands of scientists seeped in a century of knowledge thought this was the best way to contain a novel virus. Did politics and powerful Interest about this? Yes of course. But you can't simply ignore things because you don't agree with them. Millions of people died of covid and millions more could have.