Pre-Softened

Rings of gentle but rising pressure are the grip. Brooks said so himself.

David Brooks, defending institutions against Edward Snowden in 2013, called them “gently gradated authoritative structures.” He meant it as praise. Read the phrase twice. That is not civilization. That is a conveyor belt, and he is describing how it works.

In June 2013, a few days after the first Snowden disclosures, David Brooks wrote a New York Times column called “The Solitary Leaker.” The column is worth rereading now, thirteen years on, for a reason Brooks did not intend. It is the clearest statement available from a respectable mainstream source of how the managerial class understands its own function.

Brooks’s ostensible argument was that Snowden was a product of atomization. Estranged from his mother. Cold to his Hawaii neighbors. No church, no embedded community, no institutional loyalties that took. Brooks strung these observations together and produced a phrase he clearly thought was unremarkable and which is, in fact, the most important sentence he has written in twenty-five years of writing sentences.

He said Snowden had been raised outside a proper series of “gently gradated authoritative structures.” He listed them in order: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation, world.

Read the list again.

What the list actually is

Those are not coequal peer institutions. They are a graduated series, scaling in scope and in coercive power. Family is the softest ring. World is the hardest. Each applies slightly more pressure than the last. Each one trains the individual in submission to a slightly larger authority before the next one gets to him.

Brooks calls this civilization. It is a training gradient. By the time the individual reaches the state, he has been acclimated to compliance by six smaller authorities in descending order of intimacy. He does not confront the state raw. He confronts it after a lifetime of being pre-softened.

That is the function. Not the side effect. The function.

Why Snowden is Brooks’s nightmare

Snowden’s sin in the column is not the leak itself. The leak is proof of a prior failure. No family taught him the right deference. No neighborhood knit him into reciprocal obligation. No church disciplined his conscience into the appropriate shape. No employer commanded his loyalty. He worked for Booz Allen and the Agency and did not identify with either. He was, in the column’s horrified conclusion, a man shaped by no mediating structures at all.

The man shaped by no mediating structures is the one who looks at the state directly. Who sees it as what it is, rather than as what the preceding six rings would have trained him to see it as. Who concludes, from the evidence in front of him, that the surveillance apparatus was doing something worth exposing, and acts on that conclusion without first consulting the rings about whether acting was permitted.

Brooks does not argue that Snowden was wrong about the surveillance apparatus. The column concedes the procedures “could be abused” and moves on. The complaint is not that Snowden was wrong. The complaint is that Snowden acted without asking.

Any institution

Brooks followed the column with a PBS appearance in which he dropped the ornamental language and said what he actually meant. The gist: any institution that employs you acquires, by virtue of employing you, the right to dictate what you do about its conduct, and your role is to submit or be branded a traitor.

Any institution. A company. A faculty. Not just the state. Any hierarchy that happens to contain you acquires moral authority over your conduct that overrides your individual judgment. The institution defines the scope of its own legitimate decisions. You operate within whatever scope it claims.

This is the managerial class stating its ethics out loud.

The framework does not survive five minutes of pressure. It would have condemned the Pentagon Papers. It would have condemned every abolitionist who helped a slave escape in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. It would have condemned the German resistance to the Reich. It would have condemned every Catholic who sheltered Jews against the Vichy state’s explicit instructions. Brooks engaged none of these cases because the framework is not actually about adjudicating particular cases. It is about establishing a prior that institutional continuity outweighs any specific institutional fact.

The prior is the point.

What the rings are actually for

Here is what Brooks accidentally admitted.

The state cannot discipline the individual directly without looking like a state. If the first authority in a person’s life is the police, he grows up seeing authority as coercion, and the authority loses the one thing it cannot buy, which is the appearance of being natural. So the state does not discipline him directly. It disciplines him through prior rings that do not look like the state.

Family teaches obedience before the individual can articulate why. Neighborhood teaches him to read social consequences before he can read law. Religious institutions teach that disobedience carries cosmic weight. Schools teach that hierarchies are natural and that position within them is meritocratic. Employers teach that withholding labor has costs. Professional associations teach that credentials are contingent on collegiality. By the time any of this reaches the actual machinery of state coercion, the individual has been rehearsing obedience for twenty-five years.

The rings are not independent centers of value pluralism. They are, in the theory Brooks articulates, a graduated training apparatus whose function is to produce an individual pre-adapted to compliance. The state gets the benefit. The individual pays the cost. The credentialed professionals who staff the rings collect the salary.

This is the con, this is the grift. Not that the state is coercive. Every state is coercive. The con is that the state has successfully externalized its coercion into institutions that do not look coercive, and has recruited the professionals who staff those institutions into believing that what they are doing is community-building.

The conveyor belt

“Gently gradated authoritative structures” is a conveyor belt. The individual enters at the family end and exits, if all goes well, as a person who will not give you a Snowden problem. He will not leak. He will not refuse an oath. He will not confront the machine directly, because each preceding ring taught him that direct confrontation is not how things are done.

Things are done by raising concerns with your supervisor, who raises them with HR, who raises them with compliance, who raises them with the inspector general’s office, who files a report, which is reviewed by a committee whose composition is selected by the general counsel, who reports to a board that has already been briefed by the general counsel, and the outcome is that your concern has been duly noted and filed.

The Snowden problem, from the managerial-class view, is not that the NSA was doing anything in particular. It is that a person got all the way to the inside of the surveillance apparatus while remaining insufficiently pre-softened to believe that the correct response to what he saw was to file a concern through channels.

Brooks’s diagnosis of the failure mode was correct. His prescription was more rings.

Grip requires dependency

The rings only work on people who need the rings. The family ring works on a person who cares what family thinks. The neighborhood ring works on a person who cares about neighborhood standing. The religious ring works on a believer. The employer ring works on someone who needs the job. The professional-association ring works on someone who needs the credential. The prestige-media ring works on someone who cares about being well-regarded by the right people in the right cities.

Remove the dependencies and the rings have no grip.

Brooks diagnosed atomization as the cause of Snowden. The actual cause, at least for the actors the apparatus is most exercised about, is not alienation. It is the substitution of other sources of meaning, income, and status for the apparatus-mediated ones. Independent income. Independent audiences. Independent communities that are not the credentialed professional ones. Independent belief systems that do not rank Brooks’s list in Brooks’s order.

Snowden was not atomized in any ordinary sense. He had a partner, who later quite literally followed him to the end of the world. He had colleagues. He had a salary. He had political views. He had ethics, morality, and a sense of right and wrong. What he lacked was the specific kind of dependency Brooks requires. He did not care enough about what the mediating institutions of civil society thought of him to let them tune him. He ranked his own conscience above the institutional graduated series. Brooks could not process this as anything other than pathology, because the framework has no category for an individual judgment that outranks the rings.

The refusers are everywhere in Brooks’s columns. He does not call them refusers. He calls them atomized, anomic, libertarian, Ron Paul donors, solitary, deracinated, untethered. The vocabulary varies. The diagnostic category is constant. A person whose relationship to the rings has broken, who is therefore not tunable, and who therefore appears to Brooks as a problem requiring more rings, rather than as a person who has seen something the rings exist to keep him from seeing.

What Brooks was actually defending

The 2013 column reads now as a confession. Brooks was asked, in effect, to explain what was wrong with Snowden. He gave an honest answer. What was wrong was that the mediating institutions had failed to produce in Snowden the correct subordination to the apparatus Snowden worked for. Brooks said this out loud because he believed it, and because in 2013 it was still respectable to believe it openly.

It is less respectable now.

The apparatus’s claim to be neutral civilizational infrastructure has taken sustained damage over the past dozen years. The surveillance state Snowden exposed turned out to be worse than the initial disclosures suggested. The mediating institutions Brooks praised became increasingly obvious about enforcing ideological conformity rather than “community” in any older sense. The conveyor belt has visibly failed to produce the orderly compliance it was supposed to and is instead producing an accelerating outflow of people who have looked at the rings, recognized what they are, and refused to be tuned by them.

Brooks has noticed the outflow. His response has been to write more columns about how to fix the rings.

The possibility that the rings themselves are the problem has not, as of this writing, occurred to him.

Read against itself

The Brooks Snowden column is a valuable document for a reason its author would not endorse. It names the mechanism. It names the order of the mechanism. It names the failure mode. It even names the diagnostic for the failure mode, which is the solitary individual who sees the state directly and acts.

Read it as Brooks wrote it and you get a lament for civic decline. Read it with the valuations inverted and you get an operations manual.

The rings are the grip.

Brooks said so himself.