Rule Given Over to Lesser Men

Do you think your kids will be able to afford a house in the future? Not a "starter home" two hours from anywhere with a job. An actual house, in an actual community, where they could raise a family and put down roots. The median home price is now five to six times median household income. In cities where the jobs are, it's eight, ten, twelve times. Your grandparents could afford a house on one income. Your parents could, with some strain. Your kids cannot, unless they win the credential lottery and claw their way into the professional-managerial class. At which point they'll be too busy servicing student debt and optimizing their careers to have the three children that would make the house worth owning.

Is there a business in your town worth working for? Not a job. A place. Somewhere that might train your kids into competence, give them a skill, offer them a path to mastery or even ownership. Or has that business been rolled up into a regional chain, then a national portfolio, then "optimized" into a shell that offers shift work and no future?

The answer varies by town, but the trend is clear. Main streets are dying. Not because people don't want local business, but because local business is losing to (or being consolidated by) institutional capital. A hardware store that knows its customers, extends credit to people the owner trusts, carries weird inventory because the owner has good judgment—that store is almost impossible to finance as-is. The big-box store that replaces it is systematized, standardized, repeatable. Its people are interchangeable. Its cash flows can be modeled. So capital flows to the big box, and the hardware store closes, and the community loses something that can't be quantified. It loses an employer with an incentive to actually care about his people. 

These are the stakes. Not an abstraction: a world where your children cannot afford to live, cannot find work that means anything, cannot participate in the kind of rooted, generational, actually-human economy that your grandparents took for granted. The tombs are very beautiful. Your kids will not be able to afford to live in them.

Here's the thing that Tolkien never makes explicit but Faramir's speech implies: the tomb-building wasn't a mistake. It was design. At some point (and you can never identify the exact meeting where it happened, because it didn't happen in a meeting, it happened in ten thousand small decisions that all seemed reasonable at the time) the kings of Gondor looked at the two available uses of resources (houses for the living, tombs for the dead) and concluded that the tombs offered a better return on investment.

Think about it. A house for the living is… messy. People live in houses. They break things, have children who need rooms, grow old, and need things expanded or converted. The living are high-maintenance. They're also, from the perspective of the king who's trying to manage a kingdom, spreading his attention across a thousand competing priorities, unmanageable: every family is different, every household has different needs, and the whole apparatus of housing-the-living requires a kind of ground-level, distributed, impossible-to-centralize knowledge about who needs what and where and why.

Tombs, though. Tombs are elegant. A tomb is a one-time capital expenditure with minimal ongoing maintenance. A tomb doesn't talk back. A tomb doesn't require you to understand the particular needs of the dead person inside it, because dead people are refreshingly consistent in their requirements. And here's the really seductive part: a tomb can be beautiful in a way that most houses, subject to the constant friction of actual habitation, never can be for long. A tomb can be optimized for aesthetics, for legacy, for the projection of values—because it doesn't have to be optimized for living.

The tombs of Gondor, one imagines, were stunning. Marble and mithril, names carved in Elvish script, genealogies etched in stone going back thirty generations. Visitors from lesser kingdoms probably walked through and felt a kind of awe, a sense that this was what civilization meant, this was what a serious people could produce. What the visitors probably didn't see—because you can't see what’s not there—was all the houses that didn't get built. All the sons whose names were never chosen because the fathers were too busy tracing their descent from Elendil. All the children who were never born because their fathers chose sterile artifice over messy life.

The whitewashing, to use Christ's rather more pungent metaphor, was impeccable.

The parallel between Tolkien's Gondor and the modern extraction economy isn't metaphorical. The mechanism is identical: when you optimize a complex system for legibility—for the ability of people at the top to see, measure, and control what's happening—you systematically destroy the ground-level factors that made the system work in the first place. 

James C. Scott wrote the book on this (literally: Seeing Like a State), but the insight is older than Scott, older than Tolkien, older than Christ's denunciation of the Pharisees. It might be the oldest insight in political economy: the map is not the territory, the measure is not the thing measured, and when you start managing the map instead of the territory, you get a lot of beautiful tombs with dead men's bones inside.

The Pharisees were tomb-builders. That's Christ's point, and the usual reading misses something crucial: they were building tombs before Christ showed up. The tomb-building was both the precondition of their fault, as well as the result.

The Torah wasn't originally a compliance checklist. It was living tradition. "Choose life," Deuteronomy says, "that you and your children may live." The law was for something—practical wisdom, accumulated judgment about how to live rightly. It required interpretation. Application. The kind of contextual knowledge that can't be reduced to rules, because the point was formation: becoming a certain kind of person.

What the Pharisees did was entomb the Torah itself. They took something meant to be inhabited and turned it into something to be observed. A catalog of commandments. A "fence around the Torah." Additional rules to prevent you from even getting close to breaking the real rules. An interpretive apparatus that made righteousness auditable.

Christ's critique isn't "you should have followed me instead of Moses." It's "you killed Moses while claiming to honor him." The tombstone says Here Lies the Law. The inscription is beautiful. And at its heart... dead men's bones.

This is always how tomb-building works. The tomb-builders don't reject the thing they're killing. They preserve it. The PE guys don't say "we're here to gut your company." They say "we're here to professionalize operations and capture institutional knowledge." The consultants don't say "we're going to make your employees fungible." They say "we're documenting your processes to allow for efficiencies at scale."

The whitewash is always a story about preservation. And underneath... dead men's bones.

So. Back to business.

The whitewash is magnificent. Genuinely. Beautiful HQs, ever-diversifying benefits, corporate fun. It is, like the Pharisees' whitewash, not exactly a lie. Like the all-hands meetings where leadership thanks everyone for their hard work and talks about how "we're all in this together," even though—and everyone in the room knows this—the quarterly results were slightly below forecast, which means layoffs are coming, which means the "together" part has an expiration date that leadership knows and the employees don't.

This is the whitewash. So what’s inside the tomb?

What's inside the tomb: the quarterly earnings cycle—not customer feedback—is the only loop that matters. The systematic replacement of judgment with process, of craft with compliance, of institutional knowledge with documentation nobody reads. The slow strangulation of everything that made the company actually good at something, because being good at something involves individuals excelling, and excellence is illegible. Process is legible. And when the private equity guys show up (and they will show up), they won't evaluate whether your people are excellent, but they will evaluate whether you have processes.

What's inside the tomb: a language that treats humans like inventory. "Headcount" used to be a noun—an awkward, bureaucratic noun, but still a noun. Now it's a verb. We're going to headcount Marketing by 15%. As if the department were a hedge you trim, a portfolio you rebalance, a number you bring into compliance. The syntax does the work: no one is fired, no family panics, no mortgage payment becomes a math problem. A thing is simply "headcounted." And once you can speak that way—once the sentence is clean enough to say out loud in a meeting without shame—you can build tombs all day and never have to look the living in the eye.

What's inside the tomb: the private equity model as the purest expression of modern extraction—not because every deal is evil, but because the incentives reward one conversion above all others: turning non-fungible human reality into fungible financial output. You find a company that works—and "works" here means it has accumulated, over decades, a set of relationships and craft knowledge that cannot be swapped out without impact—then you buy it and begin the conversion. You standardize. You "professionalize." You identify the people who hold irreplaceable knowledge and you call them "key-man risk." Then you replace them.

None of that knowledge survives the optimization. And in the short term—which is the only term that matters, because PE funds have a five-to-seven-year timeline and then they're out—the optimization looks like success. Margins improve. EBITDA goes up. The company becomes, briefly, more profitable.

Then the PE guys exit, and the new owners discover that the thing they bought is a tomb. The knowledge is gone. The relationships are gone. The people who actually knew how to do the work have been "rightsized" into early retirement. What remains is a set of processes that documented the outputs of competence without capturing the source of competence. And the source, once destroyed, does not regenerate.

The consulting-industrial complex is the handmaiden of this process. A company hires McKinsey or Bain because it has a problem it doesn't fully understand, and the consultants make it legible—which means understandable, which means a deck. The deck is always good. The recommendations are logical, evidence-based, actionable. What the consultants cannot see—what the entire epistemic apparatus of consulting is designed not to see—is the illegible stuff. The Thursday lunches where trust gets built. The shift supervisor who can hear when a machine is about to fail. These don't show up in the data, so they don't exist, so they get optimized out. Six months later the wheels come off and everyone's confused because they followed the recommendations. But the consultants are long gone, working another engagement, because consultants are paid for recommendations, not outcomes. The feedback loop that would tell them their recommendations were wrong doesn't exist.

But what’s the alternative? How can the forces of big capital be overcome? And… doesn't this author sell process documentation?

I have a vision for that alternative. You can read it in Part 2, here.