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“Both, but the American OPA comes first. Make no mistake, the Nazgûl are our biggest threat right now. They’ve had years to turn the continental internet backhaul into conductors for a gigantic geas, and they’ve used it to impose amnesia on their own population’s symbolic occult focus. The presidency was originally modeled on the eighteenth-century British king-emperor’s powers, which can in turn be traced back to the Roman imperial cult—the genius of the emperor, in the original meaning of the word ‘genius,’ referred to his power as a begetter and supervisory spirit, a godlike being. So we’re
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So here’s my take on the OPA. They’re a modern intelligence organization—in other words, a bureaucratic enterprise tasked with providing intelligence to policy makers and executing covert operations in accordance with their orders. All large organizations are either superorganisms whose cells are human bodies, or very slow artificial intelligences that use human beings as gears in the Babbage engines that run their code. Pick a metaphor and stick to it: I prefer the biological one, but it’s a matter of taste. Some of the superorganism’s cells are formed into organs that carry out various vital
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Different countries have different bureaucratic cultures, and different cultures are prone to their own distinctive types of malfunction. In the UK we’re unreasonably prone to regulation by accountancy or, failing that, tradition. Whereas in the US intelligence community, Taylorism and rule-by-MBA run rampant. They’re prone to random reorgs and overstaffing, so wherever they can they try to outsource ancillary work. And their executives counter this by trying to reduce the number of human bodies they employ.1
“You’re too late. We’re all too late. Do you really think disobedience is an option, this late in the game?”
“You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.”
The reason micromanagement is a vice is that it’s a temptation to self-indulgence: it’s too easy to get carried away. Taking on a low-level coordinating role while retaining the full executive authority and fiscal responsibilities of senior rank is like playing a game you’ve mastered on the lowest difficulty level.
are in the US. Go figure. 666 Squadron are able to do this because from the 1950s to the 1980s the RAF’s mission planners regularly gamed how to sneak a four-engined bomber into attack range of the Capitol as a training exercise. Rumor has it that during one Red Flag run in the early ’70s a Vulcan actually dropped a paint can on the White House lawn. They tried to warn their USAF counterparts about the risk of a sneak attack, but got the usual bureaucratic not-invented-here runaround—nobody likes a smart-arse. Besides, the received wisdom was that bombers were obsolete in the direct nuclear
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I had nothing to do with this, it was all the Black Pharaoh’s fault!” A mad god made me do it, then ran away.
The New Management has got something that the OPA lacks: legitimacy. The Prime Minister may be an alien nightmare, but He took control through constitutionally sound means. Granted, these means may have legal historians weeping and clutching their heads for centuries to come, but in the final analysis it was entirely aboveboard and we have only got ourselves to blame for this mess. The Nazgûl, in stark contrast, did not win any elections, were not handed any magic swords by watery tarts, and aren’t even members of the House of Lords.
