#094 - Lorenzo Warby - Crushing Dissent: How The Rise Of The ’Unaccountable Class’ Ruined Everything

Lorenzo Warby, is a writer of the Substack Lorenzo from Oz and a regular contributor to Helen Dale’s Not on Your Team, but Always Fair, a Substack-recommended publication.

In this episode, Lorenzo and I think out loud about the idea of institutional capture, how Western institutions have been overtaken by fashionable ideologies, and how this has led to the rise of unaccountable classes within bureaucracies. We discuss how these unaccountable elites influence policy and norms across both politics and private institutions, what Lorenzo means by the “feminisation of institutions,” and why governance and accountability have been so badly weakened.

We also explore the role of dissent, why it is so often suppressed, and how this undermines the possibility of reform. Lorenzo points to Australian political structures as examples of how accountability can be done better, and we reflect on what lessons they might hold for Western societies more broadly.

This is Lorenzo’s fourth appearance on the show, and as ever it’s a wide-ranging discussion full of diversions, references, and tangents that ultimately connect to a bigger picture of how we arrived at our current political and institutional malaise.

Follow Lorenzo on X: @lorenzofrom

You can find Lorenzo’s work here:

• Substack - Lorenzo from Oz
• Substack - Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

You can listen to our previous conversations here:

• #029: Forget The War Of The Sexes, Men & Women Were Made To Complement Each Other
• #040: Why Our Genes & Cultures Undermine Our Quest For Equality
• #068 - Why Economists' Predictions Go Wrong, The Roman Empire Fell, And Why You Should Never Give Bureaucrats Moral Projects

You can follow and subscribe to Thinking Class on:

• X/Twitter
• YouTube
• Substack

You can watch the full show on YouTube or you can watch/listen to it on Substack