02-10-2021, 01:42 AM
(02-09-2021, 02:15 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: "The parallels between Mizrahi voters in Israel and Trump voters in the United States are impossible to miss, Professor Mizrachi said.
Both see themselves as their countries’ most patriotic citizens, and demonize the left and its allies in the news media, academia and other liberal redoubts as traitorous enemies. Both, he said, feel disdained by those elites, who dismiss their views as racist, ignorant or unwittingly self-defeating.
“You keep ridiculing us and presenting us as undemocratic and dangerous,” he said, articulating the non-liberal view. “But we are the people. Who are you?’” "
quote above is from the article about Israel quoted a page prior.
It is such an ironic, and deliberate, mis-perception on the part of the anti-liberals. They call the media, academia and Hollywood "the elite," and say they are not the people, while their own votes keep in power the real elite, the corporate and wealthy bosses, who are the only ones who really benefit from their conservative Partys' neo-liberal slogans of blaming welfare and ethnic groups and opposing taxes and regulations that help them and themselves.
It is very harmful to the intelligence of the people and the nation for so many of them to think that using your brains, learning stuff and being informed makes you a member of the elite. Wrong. ALL citizens have the ability to be informed and to think critically about what's happening in the country. If they would do that, they would be liberals again like they used to be.
Indeed. The more widespread that learning is, the less a cause it is for any perception of elitism, and the less likely that people will have the chance to abuse mass ignorance. It was a longstanding assumption that education was for purposes other than vocational advancement -- like improving the person so that if one had moral challenges one would do right. Of course it is possible to succeed in some milieus if one is ill-educated, as some mobsters have shown. Their success depends upon cold-hearted brutality as necessary for achieving one's ends. Ideally from a good education one got a firm moral compass, a willingness to look to the long term as the test, and a recognition of higher purposes in life than personal indulgence and gain. To be sure, many jobs require that one act in the here-and-now, and anyone looking ten years into the future and wanting anything more than more of the same (which is ideal for an extended career as a laborer or servant, and the System needs more of this sort of person than any other kind), and for such jobs a high-quality education would cause one to chafe.
The essence of freedom would seem to be competition among the elites. Competition among the masses
Furthermore, widespread education makes people able to judge injustice for what it is (which explains why the struggle for civil rights for blacks took off when education went beyond primary education) and better able to understand scams and demagoguery for what they are. An aside -- the people who initiate 419 schemes use deliberate misspellings and grammatical errors to avoid drawing the attention of people wise enough to recognize those scams for what they are.
I doubt that he was original on this idea, but the "Waterfront Philosopher" Eric Hoffer suggested that tyranny of some kind arises from the concentration of power in some privilege, whether in wealth, business opportunities, education, or access to the political system. Where only a few have land and land ownership is the sole source of income, the proprietors become lords and invariably abuse the helpless serfs or even slaves. Where few people have the opportunity to own a business, a few tycoons or bureaucratic elites dominate the economy and treat workers badly. Where education is a rarity, those few with education get the dubious right to exploit the ignorance and helplessness of the masses. Where political power goes to one cadre that determines who can join and participate, one has the horrid one-Party dictatorships. Freedom comes from the dispersal of property, education, and opportunity (whether political or economic).
Competition among potential elites is the source of real freedom. Elites can exploit the masses by compelling those other than themselves to scrap for everything necessary or vital to life in a race to the bottom in which life for most people reduces to the physiological needs. Such indicates that a society offers life as a privilege, liberty as "freedom for me but not for thee", and drudgery as a sordid substitute for the pursuit of happiness.
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.