08-23-2016, 10:16 PM
Quote:The entire process makes America a far more unpleasant place to live or visit than is necessary. The structure of dominance, meanness and cruelty is palpable to the visitor, and distressing; even as it warps the best inhabitant.
It creates a culture of oppressors and victims. Something for which one is not at fault, like being born into a disadvantaged group or poor... or having a handicap ridiculed or denied instead of accommodated, makes one a permanent victim. This of course feeds into economic exploitation (because, as good social-darwinists all recognize, exploitation is the engine of maximal progress), so the elites tell people to quit whining. So be a loser but just quit whining about your plight and the world will less challenge mass conscience.
Quote:I find myself without a real conclusion. Obviously (I hope), this is BAD. Obviously it should change. But it’s hard to change something that people have taken and turned into a moral imperative: Be mean to the weak and poor, who deserve their fates. Kick down, kiss up, because a failure to pucker up can have you thrown out of the charmed circle, and obviously higher-ups want to see you acting like them, imitation being the most sincere form of flattery.
This will last until America faces the sort of calamity that brings down economic elites -- like a war that goes catastrophically wrong or an economic calamity on the scale of the Great Depression. Think of what happened in Germany at the end of the last Crisis Era: the conservative military establishments of the US and Great Britain came to trust German blue-collar workers who got the second-worst shaft in Germany over all other surviving Germans. There just weren't many Jews left. So the victors shore up the labor unions while purging commerce, management, the civil service down to the letter carriers, and academia down to kindergarten teachers.
So how do we rediscover some civil community without some calamity? Such will not be a top-down decision, especially when the economic elites and their political retainers are themselves vicious people. They have fostered the culture of meanness because it enhances and enforces their profits. But should that meanness result in wars for profit we become the Evil Empire against which the rest of the world turns. Should it lead to destructive economics that completely separate toil from reward, then we could have an economic meltdown or a proletarian uprising. (Maybe there will be enough libertarian influence in such a revolution to lead to a revolution like that of the French Revolution of 1789 than like the Russian Revolution of 1917. But that, folks, is wishful thinking).
Assuming that the elites do not turn early and decisively to terror as they did in Germany in 1933 or Chile in 1973, which is a huge assumption, one can easily predict who would be the first to be executed. Those deemed culpable. There will be plenty of accusers.
Quote:It’s all very depressing, all very unnecessary, and all very much in the interests of the people who run your society. Meanness in the chattel means they can rarely get together to challenge the masters, because they hate each other more than they hate the masters.
Blame, blame blame -- of course the people that the elites deem safe to blame. The innocent.
Quote:Kindness is a revolutionary act.
It is also wise.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.