10-05-2021, 08:16 PM
(10-05-2021, 01:37 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(10-05-2021, 07:52 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The car culture and perhaps even the single-family home must go. The economic elites of our society decided that fossil-fuel use was a good alternative to social equity and vibrant communities. The fossil-fuel business never pretended that the fuels had no cost, but they sought to compel us to ignore the consequences.
And how about extreme corporate power to complete the trifecta?
That's up to the People. It people keep believing that the rich-and-powerful are the only people who know what they are doing and are entirely benign, then they will fall for plutocratic slogans and policies.
Even if there are some good super-rich people, many are self-serving characters on par with the pigs in Animal Farm, and such people seem to be the majority of the people capable of buying the electoral process. The difference between the analogues to Orwell's pigs and ours is that our pigs do not claim to stand for any form of social equity. Maybe Orwell overplays the hypocrisy; in my experience the only hypocrites are either saints (how often do you meet a Francis of Assisi?) or an evil person proud of his own wickedness who does little to hide his evil character. think of the prolific criminal (he was a serial killer), Alton Coleman. Coleman was not a successful businessman like John Gacy who cultivated an image as a civic leader; Ted Bundy posed as a harmless fellow before doing his rapes and murders. Hypocrisy is the norm in anyone who either tries to downplay his wickedness (most criminals), or among more ordinary people who have ideals that they cannot attain.
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.