Why Every Civilization Ends with Accountants Running the Temples
Towards the end of my compulsory stint in Austria’s public school system — that grey bureaucratic purgatory for the young — I stumbled into George Orwell. It was the early Eighties, and the teachers were feverishly preparing their sermons because the real 1984 was just around the corner. You could smell the hysteria. Everyone was trembling about Big Brother as if the man might actually show up at the local post office.
He never did, of course.
1984 came and went, and the sky didn’t fall. The walls stayed unbugged, the grocery lines short, and the only real shortages were in sense and self-awareness. We exhaled and decided Orwell had simply been too pessimistic. I was fifteen, obsessed with adventure novels and hormonal chaos, and far too busy dreaming of Indiana Jones to realize how wrong that verdict was.
History, however, is a master of irony. The dystopia arrived — just quietly, politely, with HR degrees and quarterly reports instead of boots and rifles.
Orwell’s Inner Party, I would later realize, wasn’t defeated. It was promoted.
The New Inner Party
The true inheritors of Orwell’s nightmare don’t wear uniforms. They wear cardigans, ID badges, and the expressionless smiles of professional compliance. They hold “performance reviews” instead of show trials, and the accused cheerfully participate.
No one needs telescreens when every soul carries one voluntarily. The modern Thought Police are KPIs, HR policies, and the tender ministrations of “feedback culture.”
Say the wrong word on Teams, hesitate to praise the newest diversity initiative, or fail to hit a quarterly target by a hair’s breadth — and watch your professional life vanish with the quiet efficiency of an erased file.
The world Orwell warned of is here, but its cruelty is bureaucratic, not brutal. It doesn’t torture you into submission. It optimizes you.
We thought the fall of the Iron Curtain meant freedom’s triumph. What it really meant was the outsourcing of totalitarianism to the private sector. The old command economies have been replaced by global managerial systems — infinitely more subtle, infinitely more invasive. Instead of commissars, we have consultants. Instead of party doctrine, we have mission statements. And instead of the gulag, we have LinkedIn.
The Rise of the Manager Type
To understand the modern world, you must understand the manager.
Not the man with “manager” in his job title, but the species itself — Homo administrativus.
Economist Carlo Cipolla classified people into four types based on how they help or harm themselves and others. The “bandit,” in his taxonomy, is one who benefits himself while harming the community.
The manager type is the bandit refined to a professional art.
He does not build, invent, or produce. He coordinates, supervises, and extracts. He creates structures that justify his own necessity, often at the cost of the system’s vitality. The bandit-manager drains but does not destroy — he knows the corpse must remain warm if the milking is to continue.
You will find his kind everywhere: in corporate boardrooms, in public administration, in NGOs, in academia.
He is the self-anointed steward of “strategy,” “culture,” and “process.”
He speaks in sacred acronyms — KPI, ROI, ESG — as if reciting corporate liturgy.
His language is a parody of meaning: all action verbs, no action.
Most of these people aren’t psychopaths, at least not clinically. But their moral center has been quietly switched off, like an unused feature in obsolete software. Their ethics are outsourced to slogans; their conscience replaced by compliance. They’ll preach inclusion while firing a thousand workers over Zoom, and call it “restructuring for sustainable growth.”
The Cult of Inflated Saints
Every civilization has its saints. Ours canonizes swindlers.
Jean-Marie Messier, that preening emperor of Vivendi, was one of the great high priests of the managerial age. He called himself J6M — Jean-Marie Messier, Moi-Même, Maître du Monde. Myself, master of the world.
For a time, he was. He inflated a sedate utility company into a gleaming media empire — a colossus of leverage, hype, and PowerPoint ecstasy. Until it all imploded, as it always does. Messier’s empire turned to dust, leaving behind the usual crater of debts and ruined lives. But for a few glorious years, he was worshiped as a genius. The press called him visionary. The markets called him brilliant. He was, in truth, the perfect manager: he produced nothing but illusion, and got rich selling it.
Austria has had its share of saints too. Karl-Heinz Grasser — handsome, charming, hollow — strutted through the corridors of power like Narcissus with a calculator. When a friend first showed me his photo years ago, I called him a “bubblehead.” It wasn’t an insult. It was taxonomy. He was a man inflated by image and hot air, and inevitably he burst.
And then there’s René Benko, Vienna’s golden boy of real estate — the alchemist who turned debt into empire until the transmutation reversed itself. Now he faces the familiar fate of the fallen: scandal, prison, and oblivion. The same crowd that once toasted him now pretends they never knew his name.
These are not aberrations. They are the purest distillations of the managerial creed: gamble big, fail upward, cash out before collapse. The system rewards spectacle, not substance. It lionizes parasites because parasites are predictable.
The Global Infection
The disease is universal. Everywhere, managers are treated as entrepreneurs, as “leaders,” as the chosen few who keep civilization humming. But they are not entrepreneurs — they are custodians of illusion.
A real entrepreneur risks his own skin. He stakes his savings, reputation, and sleep on the outcome. The manager risks nothing but the bonuses of others. When his schemes fail, he departs with a golden parachute and a self-pitying memoir about “lessons learned.”
The managerial class thrives on abstraction. Their tools are reports, frameworks, and strategy decks — none of which feed, house, or heal a soul. They mistake motion for progress, process for purpose.
I once attended a conference in Vienna proudly announcing “Austria’s Five Most Powerful Entrepreneurs.” On stage were: the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the CEO of a national bank, the head of the state oil company, the president of the farmers’ union, and a career bureaucrat in an expensive suit. Not one had ever built anything from scratch. Not one had ever risked a cent of his own money.
Yet these were the supposed titans of innovation.
You see the problem.
The Psychology of the Plague
The manager disease is not just professional; it is spiritual. It devours individuality and replaces it with metrics. To become one of them, you must amputate the parts of yourself that feel shame, doubt, or sincerity. You must learn to smile while lying, to praise mediocrity as “alignment,” to call cowardice “strategic caution.” You must sell your soul not once, but by subscription.
By the time the victim realizes what he has become, it’s too late. The status, the salary, the perks — all these become chains of velvet. Leave, and you lose not just your income but your entire manufactured identity.
No wonder substance abuse runs rampant among executives. You can drink or you can feel, but not both.
And yet, we keep manufacturing these people because we need them. Not functionally — machines and algorithms can already replace half their work — but psychologically. We crave the illusion of leadership. We want someone, anyone, to stand on a stage and tell us the chaos is under control. That’s why the manager always returns, even after every collapse: we summon him like a demon, because responsibility terrifies us.
The Real Tragedy
The tragedy isn’t that the manager class exists. They’ve existed since grain was first tallied and temples built. Bureaucracy is the shadow that follows every structure. The tragedy is that we have begun to worship the shadow and mock the light.
The small entrepreneur — the man running a debt-free sausage stand, producing something tangible and honest — is viewed with suspicion.
The manager of a debt-ridden multinational, steering it into oblivion with borrowed money and buzzwords, is treated like a messiah.
We bow to those who ruin us, because they promise comfort without consequence. We cheer for the architects of our dependency.
And when it all collapses, as it always does, we pretend to be surprised.
Civilization once admired the builder, the craftsman, the thinker. Now it kneels before the manager — the professional caretaker of decline. We traded risk for bureaucracy, courage for compliance, creation for coordination. We built a world where the most useless people decide what “value” means.That, I fear, is the real dystopia Orwell foresaw: a world not ruled by tyrants, but administered by mediocrities who call their cowardice progress.
